dionidium

We almost certainly have opposing ideological views, but something I said a lot during this era (that I'm happy to see you hinting at) was that if you come into office as a progressive prosecutor without any plan to deal with the people in your office or in law enforcement who aren't on board, then that's really the more immediate failure. You can't just say, "I would have been successful if not for my detractors," because the detractors are a totally predictable obstacle for which you need a plan.

In big systems you can't always just do whatever you want!

How did Uber somewhat break even? They lost $34b before making a profit.

It took them ~14 years to lose that $34 billion. Some projections suggest that OpenAI has lost a third of that in a single quarter. Even the most optimistic projections indicate that they're losing that much every 2-3 years. There's talk that they might lose ~$150B before profitability.

These are just numbers on a page to regular people, but $34 billion and $150 billion are very different numbers.

We can produce enough food for everyone on earth to eat,

Who is this "we?"

There's a kind of circular complaint built into all such endeavors that goes like, "we can do this, but unfortunately we as a group don't want to, but we could definitely do it if we wanted, but sadly we currently have the wrong opinions, but we can definitely do it, if only we weren't inclined not to, but we should and we will, as soon as we all come around to the truth."

Your "we" doesn't seem to want to do what you want them to do, which is why communists so often end up thinking that the real problem is the existing populace and maybe what they really need is to be re-educated or even replaced.

That’s a rare case where I support NIMBY.

It's kind of darkly funny that NIMBY ever came to refer to housing in the first place. The term was originally meant to apply to stuff exactly like this -- i.e. genuinely noxious uses that most people nevertheless agree are necessary somewhere. Almost everybody is a NIMBY in this sense.

Yeah, that's how I knew that he was born 13 years after the establishment of the city's modern borders and that your original claim is incorrect (and, incidentally, not corroborated by the result of your quick google search, which doesn't even attempt to suggest that he had anything to do with the city's "ring suburb design").

A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design

Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.

I am of two minds about this. As a matter of human disappointment, I totally get it. They liked working there. Now they don't. It's not their choice. And it sucks. This is extremely relatable.

But the naïveté and confusion on display in the post are extremely not relatable. What do you think a company is? What do you think a job is? What is it that you think you're doing there? And what is it that you believe you are owed?

On this front, this person talks like an alien -- or, more condescendingly, a child. I can't relate to it at all, nor do I think it's polite or kind to play along and pretend that their worldview is understandable.

Maybe -- maybe -- you could say something like, "look, these companies lie to their employees. They tell them that they're family, that they should bring their whole selves to work, that they are changing the world, that they matter to the company as an individual. You can't blame them for believing it."

But I do. Those are such ridiculous lies that I somehow have more contempt for anybody who believes them than I do the liars, who I view mostly to be playing out a kind of benign social fiction that's transparently fake to everybody involved.

In the United States we have a long, foundational legal tradition in support of Free Speech and free enterprise for this very reason.

The bar is set very high precisely because we know where things go when it's not.

This specific case wouldn't clear a low bar, much less a high one. I, too, have been turned off by Musk's behavior over the last year, but the idea that this case has nothing to do with that is risible.

Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said.

Obviously you can write a law that says anything you want, but as an aesthetic matter, this strikes me as pretty ridiculous. A company makes up a thing called a "blue checkmark" and then, what, it has to mean the same thing for the rest of all time? It's not like the new Twitter lied about what was happening. They said plainly that they were changing the checkmark system to mean something new. Why would anybody cheer a government stepping in to say, "no, sorry, you can't do that?"

"In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.

It's worse than that in that it's just plainly wrong. I learn about useful products via advertising all the time -- so often, in fact, that I'm sort of bewildered that anybody could claim otherwise. We must be experiencing the world quite differently.

My primary computer, the one I'm typing on right now, is a 13-year old 2012 Mac Mini.

It couldn't be more fine. It does everything I need it to do.

I genuinely can't understand the thought process of a Yankees fan.

There is very little free agency in American sports fandom. People are (for the most part) fans of the team local to where they grew up. (This kind of bums me out as someone raising kids in New England, which is not where I'm from, and so not whose teams I root for.)

We have the advantage that we can take good ideas from each other, because people can travel easily and observe that certain things work well.

True, but, interestingly, we can travel thousands of miles within the United States and in so doing observe that different US states have wildly different outcomes while living under the same federal government and very similar state governments.

Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Minnesota live under the same Constitution, the same federal government, and with very similar state governments -- and yet we see that they have very different outcomes on a variety of measures.

Norway and Louisiana have very different crime rates, but so do New Hampshire and Louisiana. This tells us, at a minimum, that the form of government isn't likely to be the primary factor.

In order to rethink Bachelor Degrees, one must first rethink high school. It is routine in the US to see schools where 1) <=5% of the student body is proficient in math; but also 2) the school has a 90% graduation rate.

If that's high school, then it's useless, both as a signal, but also just because, you know, nobody is learning anything. You pretty much have to have some other place for smart people to demonstrate that they're smart.

Your solution to crime isn’t working very well

That's correct. We should have a lot more people in prison than we do. We are far too soft on repeat offenders and we've allowed courts to deem unconstitutional practices that literally nobody at the founding would have thought were questionable.

When you talk to people about "mass incarceration" in the abstract, they think it's bad. But when you show them what the modal prisoner and the modal prison sentence is actually like, they think it's too soft. Opposition to "tough on crime" policies is based on the myth (the lie?) that most US prisoners are innocent or, if not innocent, guilty only of harmless crimes like drug possession -- that the system is racist and unfair.

But that's not what the data show.

What the data show -- again -- is that the modal prisoner did the crime, and many others besides, and that they are very likely to commit more crimes once released.

Criminal justice is not a mysterious science. You identify repeat offenders and then you execute or otherwise permanently incapacitate them. This works because a large share of all crime is committed by repeat offenders.

But of course that's probably not what you mean when you say that our solution to crime isn't working well.

What this back-and-forth, and this thread more generally, demonstrates is that these words are not very useful.

They almost never clarify. What they do is produce silly arguments like this one.

You'll save yourself a lot of time and confusion by accepting that neither side is jealous of the other. I don't want the lifestyle Europe is selling.

What you're describing is called "agreement." I'm very plainly arguing that if the distinction between "city" and "suburb" is to mean anything at all, then it can't just be about what's within municipal boundaries and what isn't.

Speaking only for myself, I think Europeans, in general (and most people in this thread) have no real sense for how violent the US really is, how much more crime we have than Europe, how many of our violent offenders serve no serious time, or how many times the modal US prisoner has been previously arrested or convicted of a crime.

The typical US prisoner 1) did their crime; 2) did many other crimes besides the one they're in prison for; 3) is very likely to commit additional crimes upon their release.

Small, homogenous European countries have absolutely no idea how to solve our crime problem and their criticisms reflect an irritating combination of ignorance and arrogance.

Some US cities incorporated their lower-density "streetcar suburbs" over the years and other US cities didn't. This is why "Kansas City" proper has literal farmland [0] within its city limits, while "St. Louis" proper [1] on the other side of the state doesn't even include most of the skyscraper development that's occurred there within the last 40 years.

This is entirely arbitrary and knowing whether a particular place is technically part of "the city" doesn't really tell you anything about it. As you might expect, this causes a ton of unnecessary confusion.

[0] Part of Kansas City proper: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9B9rhVzAtSykLhUs5

[1] "St. Louis" but not part of St. Louis proper: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xXM7A2fQYY2Kh3vY6

You're right that people in practice use the word "suburb" to talk about all these different things, but that just reinforces that the word isn't very useful. Oak Park and Naperville are both "suburbs," but this reveals nothing to us. In fact, it mostly obfuscates.

This emphasis on single-family homes in their data sources affects the generalizability of their conclusions about the impact of supply constraints across different types of housing markets, especially in dense urban areas where multi-family units and rentals are more prevalent.

People generally seem to struggle with the fact that it's the land, not the house that's on top of it, that's valuable in desirable metro areas, but this reality suggests something really quite lucky, which is that eliminating land-use restrictions probably won't tank single-family housing prices, even as it lowers rents.

Incumbents get richer, because looser zoning rules mean the land is more valuable. Renters and those who otherwise couldn't afford to be incumbents get cheaper rent. It's a fortuitous win-win.

Got any evidence for that? Is Google in the habit of paying out giant HR-related settlements for something other than protecting good ol' boys like Andy Rubin?

The state of US case law -- IANAL, this is a layman's understanding -- is that plaintiffs only have to show that there exists "disparate impact," which is to say that outcomes were not exactly the same for Asians/whites and blacks.

Two things can be true: 1) Google did not intend to discriminate, did not institute any policy designed to discriminate, did not in actual fact discriminate against non-Asian/white employees; and 2) they could still be held liable for hiring results that look like discrimination in a single-variable analysis.

So, yes, I think there are indeed situations in which they'd pay out settlements knowing full well they've done nothing morally or ethically dubious.

What I think is hard for a lot of tech people to understand is that people don't care about privacy in the abstract. "Your data is being read and stored" isn't interesting to most people unless they know what it's being used for. And, often, to the surprise of the kind of person reading this, they are totally fine with how their data is being used. They don't care that the government is listening in for anti-terror activities. They don't care that corporations are aggregating their data to sell ads. They don't think it's a big deal.

There are things they would care about, but they don't care about those things.

And they don't care about privacy in the abstract.

The way we increase the chances that everybody reading this will behave appropriately if they're ever in this situation is by strongly condemning those who did not.

"The blocker or the person who behaved in such a way that they got blocked?"

People get blocked for all kinds of reasons, most of them relatively innocent.

Birth rates fall when societies get richer, not when they get poorer. Additionally, rates are falling all the same in the states with the most generous welfare policies.

It also doesn't suggest anything we should be doing instead

We should just simply allow a free market in housing and housing construction. That's the obvious solution on the table and the one we should try before we bother revisiting eccentric tax schemes from the 19th Century.

Rents are "unearned" in the same way all appreciation is unearned. You spend your money on something, anybody else could also have spent that money on it, but the person who does spend the money on it enjoys the appreciation, if any, because they pay the opportunity cost.

because land value always goes up

Tell that to the people who left urban St. Louis and Detroit and Cleveland in droves over the last 75 years. Their land didn't just go down in value; it went to less than zero. You'd literally have to pay somebody to take it and it's a huge burden on those municipalities.

The problem with Georgism is that, yes, land is different than other things in that you can't make more of it, but it's also the same as most things in most ways that matter.

https://icq.im/605080