dnissley

On iPhones you can't install software except through the app store

That's why you need to get rich before moving to Europe

Can't use that one here: "AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'"

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/aws_ceo_entry_level_j...

On top of that the ACA prevents new physician owned hospitals from being established and placed restrictions on expansions of existing ones

There are many EU citizens who don't hold your opinion. Are they allowed to do business with the these entities on their own terms? Why can't you just de-google and de-apple and de-meta and let other people make their own decisions?

He also lacked the authority to realize the full vision, being only a guest of Trump. Hence the inevitable conflict when it came to the big beautiful bill.

It's popular now to level these accusations at text that contains emdashes.

"Car" typically means "passenger vehicle" in common parlance, at least in the US. A lot of truck sales like you point to are fleet sales for work vehicles, so this person is probably pointing more towards non-fleet sales, where the RAV4 is indeed the top seller.

I would disagree for a different definition of optics. As someone else who replied to me mentioned, the top selling vehicle in the US is the Toyota RAV4. Based on the many people I personally know who own them, this is a vehicle that says "I'm doing just fine thanks" even when that is very much not the case.

In most HCOL cities it's cheaper to rent than to buy

The car market right now makes no sense to me. Interest rates are high, prices are high (inflation + tariffs), unemployment is rising, inventory is low, and yet car sales are booming? What gives? People panic buying before tariffs have a bigger impact?

Funny, I use a variation of the eigenprompt to give my chatgpt even more personality:

https://x.com/eigenrobot/status/1782957877856018514

I keep seeing accusations of tantrums. Can a company say no without it being a tantrum?

I use steelmanning to connect across cultural divides. This way I don't end up writing off half the country as deplorables. If I simply wrote them off in this way it would be contributing to the decay of our social fabric. So instead I intend to mend the social fabric by attempting to understand the emotional place that these deplorable ideas come from, which by themselves are often quite reasonable. Isolation is often how people end up with these ideas, so it's important to connect to them, and ultimately to love them.

That goes for both sides of our political system, and beyond to the rural urban divide, the gender divide, the racial divide, the class divide, etc.

I think I found out about by reading rationalist stuff. E.g. Less wrong and slatestarcodex.

I disagree that the measures you're suggesting will move the needle on fertility, since they will be enjoyed by singles, dinks, and families alike.

If you want more children you have to reward mothers directly and significantly in line with their potential earnings. Not a paltry few thousand dollars, but more than enough to offset the price of daycare in hcol cities. I want to mimic social security but for families, and that means concentrated benefits (that directly incentivize voting turnout and interest group formation).

At the same time I want our country to continue to be competitive globally when it comes to business, and not turn into whatever Europe has become. We can't just add this as a line item to our budget. We are not that rich and we have financial problems that are looming.

I think we agree, but in case I wasn't clear I will restate this more plainly: patching over the problem of fertility with immigration is toxic to the social fabric of a nation.

It is what I consider steelmanning.

Not of the conspiracy itself (I'm not interested in that, since the literal version isn't even well agreed upon by most of its believers) but of the observable pressures that make the conspiracy attractive.

I think I could convince an average believer in the great replacement theory (who would be a casual believer that doesn't know many of the specific details you've listed at length of the "official" version) that my restatement of the issue is what they're actually concerned about. In fact, I have had productive conversations with right wingers who express such a casual belief in this theory by telling them what I've written here in the comment you're replying to.

Here's an attempt to steelman just one of the things you bring up: the great replacement theory.

The United States, like many developed nations, is experiencing a fertility crisis: it doesn't produce enough families and resulting children to sustain it's current population.

The US could take steps to address the underlying problems that result in declining fertility for it's current population, but it's unlikely to do so for several reasons that all boil down to political realities where the people that are most incentivized to vote (retired people who earn social security) would probably bear the brunt of the (significant) costs of such solutions. See the idea of "concentrated benefits, diffuse costs".

So instead the US uses immigration to fill the gap left by declining fertility rates (an option not equally available to all developed countries), resulting in young US citizens continuing to struggle to form families, and producing a fraying of the social fabric that such an inability to form families is likely to have on a society.

So you can see why some people would be duped into such a conspiracy theory, which purports to explain what people are seeing with their very eyes.

It of course has a technical/historical definition but it's not used in that principled way by most people.

Just like "neoliberal" this is a kind of buzzword that generates a particular emotional reaction for those on the left. Meaning people being labeled with them are not just bad but really bad.

how would you steelman his position?

No one is proposing a list that is tailored to the HN audience? That people should try to like? Here's a start:

- Ads

- Regulations

- Trump

- The EU

- Social Media

- Musk

- AI

- Venture Capital

- Unions

- Peter Thiel

- China

- Cryptocurrency

- The United States

- Zuck

- Taxes

- Big Tech

- Recommendation Algorithms

- Billionaires

- Google Search

IMO it's a good sign if you can think of something to appreciate in all of these things, even if you can't bring yourself to like them. To appreciate them is to understand them at a deeper level, since it's all too easy to hate things you don't understand.

So long as the in office folks are split between different offices in groupings of 1-2 you're fine

In a world where we couldn't arrest criminals, only keep track of them in a log book, yeah that's probably exactly what we'd do

Older boomers benefited but were not the culprits as you say, so I don't think you can call it a "boomer selfishness moment" is all.

We live in a remote world where a hiring process like this is less of an option in most cases

How's your diet? Do you get plenty of vegetables? Cruciferous especially. Do you avoid fried foods? Alcohol? Caffeine? Sugar? Consuming enough high quality protein?

How's your sleep? Do you avoid eating within a couple hours of bedtime? Are you waking up to pee in the night?

boomers were just coming of age politically when prop 13 passed in 1978. the main culprits were actually the silent generation and older greatest gen homeowners—think postwar suburbanites who had bought in cheap and were now watching their property taxes spike in a period of wild inflation + ballooning home values. boomers were still mostly renters or too young to own, especially in california’s pricey metros.

NE seems relatively affordable?

Expecting starter homes to be a category of real estate that is newly built seems naive. Starter homes are some combination of older, smaller, bad location which makes them more affordable. Why wouldn't real estate developers satisfy the demand at the high end before moving down market? Seems like the easiest way to turn a profit to me. Rational actors etc

This discussion is in the context of how creative scenes like those of 60s NYC develop.

We were discussing "one crucial factor in the city’s creative energy: cheap rents".

Apparently we now need to discuss another crucial factor notably absent in small towns: "density of and proximity to other creative types"

Who shows up to the public comment meetings to register their complaints about new housing being built? Who empowered those meetings to exist in the first place? Who created the laws about needing an environmental review for a building being built in the middle of an existing city?

It was everyday people. Not the 1%.