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ahoy

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AI is largely unpopular outside of the tech & business worlds. Most laypeople see it as falling on a spectrum between unwanted and annoying (google getting worse, AI chatbots proliferating in every app and site) to actively harmful (jobs being replaced by ai).

The fact that comments agreeing with this sentiment get downvoted here isn't a huge surprise, hn is firmly inside the tech/business world.

The first point is true of most employment, unless you're one of the ~10% of US employees with a union contract. Your paycheck is always subject to the whims of your employer.

I don't have a great solution for the 2nd issue you pose though. Raising the pay of elected officials is often politically unpopular, but you're certainly right that one makes more in the private sector than as a junior congressperson.

Because you have to live in a society with those other people. Because that's going to be YOU in the future. Because it's going to be your kids, your cousins, your neighbors.

The NYC police budget has increased every year since the "defund the police" movement. In fact, our cop mayor is slashing the budgets of almost every city office except the NYPD.

"Crime" is not at the core of this change. You'd know those things if you lived here, but you don't. You're just repeating what you read in the WSJ opinion section.

I moved here about 10 years ago in my mid 20s. It's certainly more expensive and annoying to find housing here than other places I've lived, but it's more than balanced out by needing to own an automobile. The average cost of car ownership in the US is in the $10k-12k range. I certainly don't spent an extra thousand dollars on rent here vs say, any other place I might reasonably move. So I figure I'm still coming out ahead.

I can't speak to the bedbugs problem, I've been lucky I suppose.

I don't want more labels. I don't want to have to be an "informed consumer" when im buying cookware in order to know whats going to give me cancer. Those products shouldn't exist.

DC already has an enormous police:population ratio. If more policing were the answer, surely DC would be on the forefront of using police to stop traffic violations.

Police cannot effectively solve this issue. This requires engineering. DC's super wide, straight streets tell drivers "its safe to go really fast here, you have a ton of space". That's where the problem starts, and thats where the solution has to start.

Stop signs basically dont work anywhere. If you want people to drive slowly, you have to build streets that make them do so.

If anyone is interested in this stuff, the youtube channel NotJustBikes talks a lot about this and related topics. Here's a short video on how "traffic calming" infrastructure gets drivers to slow down, and we all know that stop signs just dont.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tGOBOw9s-QM

I don't think analyzing this issue from the perspective of individual interactions is useful. Even in safe, walkable cities, some pedestrians will be reckless. Even in Phoenix AZ, some drivers will be courteous toward walkers.

All that disappears in the aggregate though, and we're left with the fact that the built environment is the main factor dictating how we interact on our streets. We build wide roads and build huge dangerous vehicles to go very fast on them. That's the issue.

Kaczynski was essentially a blackpilled fascist. He spends the huge bulk of his manifesto ranting against leftism. I think its fine to attack the ideas as well.

Most rats are too big for the average cat to prey on. Mice sure. Rats get quite large.

Imagine trying to fight a medium sized dog. You'd probably win, but after 2 or 3 encounters like that you'd probably get hurt. That's a bad proposition when there's smaller, easier prey. And just like, human garbage full of food too.

I don't think its "a shame" at at all. The obvious and most important issue here is that the debt collection industry is evil and immoral. Those "worst abuses" aren't outliers, they're standard practice. "Abuses" are how you make money in that industry.

It's not good for anyone. It's bad for customers, who feel squeezed at every little transaction. It's bad for employees, whose income depends on customers giving into that squeeze.

An acquaintance of mine runs a coffee shop in Brooklyn. She pays her staff a higher hourly wage, doesn't accept tips, and prices things accordingly. It's a much better system, and it should be the law