eesmith

This was a tangent starting with "I find the RealID opposition baffling." at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983452 .

I oppose Real ID because I don't understand the problem it's trying to solve, and it seems expensive and cumbersome for at least some.

Real ID is a US-only issue, so I interpreted "If you are worried that your tenant might happen to be an illegal migrant" in the US context.

In the US case, quoting https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination :

National origin discrimination involves treating workers (applicants or employees) unfavorably or favorably because they are from a particular country or part of the world, because of ethnicity or accent, or because they appear to be of a certain ethnic background (even if they are not).

National origin discrimination can include preferring foreign workers, including workers with a particular visa status, over American workers.

National origin discrimination also can involve treating people unfavorably because they are married to (or associated with) a person of a certain national origin.

In where you live, and where you used to live, a business can refuse service to a minority group? To indigenous people? What about to someone whose boyfriend is a member of a minority group?

You write 'exercising their basic rights of liking and disliking whoever they want (and consequently making or not making commercial agreements with them)'.

The "consequently" is doing some heavy lifting. In the US you have the basic rights of liking and disliking whoever you want. This is part of the freedom of assembly, which is the US way of saying the freedom of association.

Commercial agreements for services available to the public, however, are interpreted under different rules than private agreements. In the US you are free, under the law, to run a private club which refuses black people, Jewish people, women, and so one. These all exist.

However, if your club is open to the public, then you cannot discriminate on race, religion, or sex.

(Technically the US had federal civil rights laws, which under our federal system only apply to businesses large enough to nominally be involved in interstate commerce. However, state laws essentially extend this to everyone, with a few carve-outs for, for example, a women looking for a housemate and insisting they be another woman.)

Do you live in one of the handful of countries which are not signatory to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination? Quoting from https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/cerd.pdf

"In compliance with the fundamental obligations laid down in article 2 of this Convention, States Parties undertake to prohibit and to eliminate racial discrimination in all its forms and to guarantee the right of everyone, without distinction as to race, colour, or national or ethnic origin, to equality before the law, notably in the enjoyment of the following rights: ... The right to housing .. The right of access to any place or service intended for use by the general public, such as transport hotels, restaurants, cafes, theatres and parks."

Almost every third-world country is signatory, so it can't be some broad "third-world brain" viewpoint.

There is a tautological issue here - before Real ID everyone had to accept state-issued ids because that's what people had.

How does Real ID guarantee (1), (3), or (4) better than the state-issued non-Real IDs?

Places are not required to accept all Real IDs as proof of age. A bar, for example, may reject out-of-state ids for proof of age for those who look under 25.

Real ID does not prove citizenship (2). Non-citizen residents may have Real ID.

If a Canadian claims to be a snowbird tourist and wants to rent your guest house for five months, and you are worried that he might happen to be an illegal migrant and would risk being deported instead of paying rent next month, how does Real ID help?

He has no Real ID, only Canadian ID.

Note also that the Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination based on national origin. Landlords must provide equal opportunities regardless of nationality or immigration status.

Your proposed scenario seems like it breaks anti-discrimination law.

Even better, if that person shows you a valid tribal id from a federally recognized tribe, but which is not Real ID compliant, will you rent to him? The feds consider it a valid alternative to Real ID.

That still doesn't tell me what problem it is supposed to solve.

From that link, 'All this keeps the game interesting and fun, taking weeks and sometimes months to complete'.

Some people in the US take longer than that to get Real ID. Like, elderly black people born in the Jim Crow era where birth records simply weren't kept for them. https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/florida-woman-says-she-ca... , or a missing 50-year-old marriage record - https://local12.com/news/nation-world/elderly-womans-real-id... .

Are you proving your age for a store or a concert venue for alcohol reasons? Don't people age out once they look over 25? Or do venues check for other reasons?

I've read about the big backlash when a national ID scheme for the UK is proposed, so I presume the benefits aren't all that high.

Like, when you check into a hotel, do you have to show ID? https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowTopic-g186216-i15-k1095345... tells me that it's uncommon. While in the US, I nearly always have to show ID for an overnight room.

Or, in many place in the US, everyone is IDed for alcohol, even if you are 70 years old, which annoys a lot of people who are clearly old enough to drink. Even better, since US privacy laws are so poor, these ID checks also gather demographic information, identify 'high-value customers', and collaborate with other places to ban people -- rather like the facial recognition systems you all have in the UK.

Maybe Brits want to avoid normalizing more id checks?

It is called "TSA ConfirmID". https://www.tsa.gov/tsaconfirm-id

"If you are unable to provide the required acceptable ID, such as a passport or REAL ID, you can pay a $45 fee to use TSA ConfirmID. TSA will then attempt to verify your identity so you can go through security; however, there is no guarantee TSA can do so."

From https://thepointsguy.com/news/tsa-security-with-confirmid/ :

"TSA agents pull you aside for secondary screenings and to verify your identity. ... After looking me up in his system, [the supervisor] asked me a series of questions only I could answer (previous addresses and that sort of thing)."

The major European exception being the UK, which doesn't issue identity cards and somehow manages. (Apparently Andorra doesn't either.)

You might consider it part of the Anglosphere mentality as Canada, the US, Australia, the Bahamas, and New Zealand don't have national ID.

I've never understood the problem that RealID is supposed to solve.

How is it TSA can accept a Veteran Health Identification Card or photo identification card issued by a federally recognized tribe, and the passports from every country in the world, but not a state-issued ID which is not REAL ID-compliant?

I’m a strong supporter of the concept that people should pass an evaluation and get a permit to have a child.

Of course that, like literacy tests for voting, will never be gamed.

Okay, so how do you get from 'market-rate housing' to 'luxury apartments'?

FWIW, I'm saving up for an apartment.

As I understand it, the Vienna model has city-owned housing ("government agency"), but also has housing cooperatives and nonprofit housing - the latter two are not government owned, and still have a housing queue. I take it you are fine with the latter?

Just, I imagine, like you are okay with wanting to buy in a new housing project, only to have the developer say that all the lots are bid, but you can do on the wait list in case someone drops out?

If you rent, do you want agency in your living situation, or whatever the landlord deems appropriate for the property?

How disastrous would it seem if your sibling and spouse died, leaving 2 kids (8 and 10), which is too many for your small loft, so you need to move somewhere, but you can't afford to move? Wouldn't you like the government to help you have some agency?

Bear in mind that those conclusions are for a different student population -- country of course, but also age range:

Czech schools: "The new measure, which has been at the center of heated debates in recent months, will apply in kindergartens and elementary schools, most likely from September 2027. ... It doesn't apply, however, to secondary schools, universities or vocational schools."

The Stanford study was based on "more than 43,000 middle and high schools nationwide".

Also, while half of the authors are Stanford research associates, the other half are at other institutions. The publication is a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

And from the preregistration, "Our measure of treatment (i.e., whether a given school has a true phone ban at a particular point in time) is based on organizing sales and shipping data from Yondr (i.e., a company that sells lockable phone pouches)", a company they partnered with for the study.

How .. odd. Is sales data for a single company really the right way to tell if a school has a true phone ban?

The headline is "Socialists should embrace luxury apartments."

Do you think socialists should embrace higher prices for everyone over longer times for everyone?

Even without an explicit wait list, I've been saving money for years and still don't have enough for a down payment to own in the neighborhood I prefer. The price growth seems to match my savings.

And unlike a wait list, I don't have a rough ETA on when I'll have enough money.

It's not like there's only a single price vs. wait list time trade-off. I could live in the suburbs, where it's certainly cheaper, but where commute time increases and local options are reduced.

I think that finding reasonable housing quickly, where you can wait two years until moving into your desired housing area, sounds embraceable.

I don't feel like paying with my money, I don't feel like paying by giving up my privacy, and I don't feel like paying by training Google reCAPTCHA or giving it my attention.

When you say "reconstructing from having read it elsewhere", does that mean you also didn't read the linked-to FT piece?

The "but it’s a single pool" cannot be a correct summary as there are multiple levels of luxury apartments.

Someone with $20 million is rich, and someone with $20 billion is rich, but these are very different levels of rich.

The general argument about the hedonic treadmill is the expectations rise with wealth, but the happiness and pleasure do not. The person with $20 million looks at what a person with $100 million can get, and wants more. This drives the need for ever-more luxury apartments.

There is of course some limit, as $30/hour isn't enough for a luxury apartment. But the affordable apartments get further away, or replaced with luxury apartments, and their middle manager bosses, who want their bonuses, are incentivized to use wage theft, poor working conditions, job insecurity, etc. to extract more profits while minimizing costs. Thus we have the opinion "there are no ethical billionaires", which implies there should be an upper bound to what is acceptable luxury.

rekabis specifically called out the Vienna model, which doesn't follow the same 'easier sell for developers' logic you referred to, because it uses different market incentives, including limited-profit housing associations, to build housing.

I didn't, as I am not a subscriber. My views are similar to rekabis. Could you perhaps summarize the evidence?

I mean, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism sounds fun and all, but at what cost to the environment? Is it warmed-over trickle-down economics? Why are the progressive taxes on those people so low that they can afford a luxury apartment, and how did they make that money in the first place?

Just how deluxe is "luxury"? Is an extra 25% of living space per person (and a room of one's one) sufficient luxury? Because what I've seen, "luxury" is a never-ending hedonic treadmill as rich people judge their luxury by what even richer people can afford.

Lastly, the FT is the newspaper for the already-well-off, with summer homes in France and fancy kitchens, who likely want comfort that the luxury they have is justified.

I fundamentally do not understand your advocacy.

You started with:

'Am I the only person who thinks its odd that my government (US) thinks its can tell me what time to get up and go to bed?'

How do you have the timezones you want without the government (federal, state, county, tribal, or whatever) still involved in telling you when to go to bed?

You write 'Permanent DST screws things up for the cities that are southwest of me' but you have not explained how that screwing up is all that worth complaining about or changing, when we know of places like Reykjavík which are far more screwed up, with seemingly little concern.

FWIW, that's existed for a while. Source at https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/third_party... with downloadable binary at https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/sqlite3 .

  % curl -LO 'https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/sqlite3'
    % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  100 4845k  100 4845k    0     0  1384k      0  0:00:03  0:00:03 --:--:-- 1384k
  % chmod +x sqlite3
  % file sqlite3
  sqlite3: DOS/MBR boot sector; partition 1 : ID=0x7f, active, start-CHS (0x0,0,1), end-CHS (0x3ff,255,63), startsector 0, 4294967295 sectors
  % ./sqlite3
  SQLite version 3.40.0 2022-11-16 12:10:08
  Enter ".help" for usage hints.
  Connected to a transient in-memory database.
  Use ".open FILENAME" to reopen on a persistent database.
  sqlite>:

Also unaddressed is how the military will square a program that screens troops for low testosterone with the FDA's stance that testosterone replacement therapy is approved only for men with a diagnosed medical condition affecting hormone production.

Everyone who defended the right of soldiers to skip the COVID vaccine should be even more supportive of the right to skip required testosterone injections which have no medical support or proven operational benefit, right?

Alas, my comment is made with weary sarcasm.

I've re-read it 5 times. I do not see what I am supposed to be seeing.

Am I the only person who thinks its odd

No. Many people have complained. In the TV show "The Bob Newhart Show" we find that Bob Hartley thinks that talking about the then-recent timezone standardization to be a safe topic with his father-in-law, but the latter finds it very odd and irritating.

that my government (US)

Time standardization started without governments. Would you rather follow local sun time and railroad time and radio/TV station time, all different? Which time do you follow if you want to call your aunt 150 miles west of you?

that my government (US) thinks its can tell me what time

How are they preventing you from keeping your own time? How are they preventing people from following the Jewish calendar?

OTOH, if you have jury duty at 9am next Monday, you better be there on government time. But note that when I last served on duty, the county was huge, and some people took an hour to drive in. Their home could well be many minutes off court house time. So how do they determine the right time to be there?

time to get up and go to bed?

The government has never told me what time to get up or go to sleep. I was never in the military or other organization where the government had that much power over me.

Before timezones, "noon" was the point where the sun was the highest in the sky.

Which ended up being a problem once fast long distance travel became commonplace. So how do you solve that problem?

It seems we should

Yes, you've expressed an opinion. I responded by pointing out the known consequences should everyone followed it, based on historical practices.

with a little more flexibility for rural areas so they can stay on the same time as their closest major population center.

I also pointed out how that can happen in a timezone system, by changing ones listed hours of work/school/etc.

Iceland is on UTC+00:00 year-round (Greenwich Mean Time), to stay in synch with much of western Europe, even though that's at least an hour behind local solar time.

So plenty of people disagree with your opinion, and changing their opinion would be hard.

If everyone follows the same clock, like, now is 12:30pm, across the entire world, then while everyone could also work 9-5, we know that most people like to be awake during daylight and asleep at night, so the local working hours might be 2-10.

We can get an idea of the issues in China, which has a single national timezone instead of 4 or 5 geographical time zones. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China

Beijing Time users in Xinjiang usually schedule their daily activities two hours later than those who live in eastern China. As such, stores and offices in Xinjiang are commonly open from 10:00 to 19:00 Beijing Time, which equals 08:00 to 17:00 in Ürümqi Time.[17] This is known as the work/rest time in Xinjiang.

Thus, "9-5" would get a name like "work time", or the existing name of "day shift" would have increased popularity.

You can get up or go to bed whenever you wish.

You can say today's date is 27 Messidor Year CCXXXIV if you wish.

The problem is when you want to coordinate events between people following different time conventions.

Timezones as we know it started off as a railroad company invention. Does the London/Birmingham train follow London time or Birmingham time? Does the stop in Rugby use Rugby time?

DST in the US used to be a regional choice until 1966. Coordination became an issue.

"The lack of standardization led to a patchwork where some areas observed DST while adjacent areas did not, and it was not unheard of to have to reset a clock several times during a short trip (e.g., bus drivers operating on West Virginia Route 2 between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio, had to reset their watches seven times over 35 miles)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_time_in_the_United_...

with a little more flexibility for rural areas so they can stay on the same time as their closest major population center.

We can do that already. I remember when most of Indiana didn't follow DST. Businesses in Danville, Illinois, near the border followed Indiana time by changing the listed hours of operation during summer.

Speaking of Indiana, 'Attitudes began to change in the 1990s, as Indiana's time zone situation was seen as impeding the state's economic growth. Interstate travel and commerce were difficult as people wondered, "what time is it in Indiana?"' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana

Having 12:00 noon be when the sun is highest makes these issues reappear.

Do you not consider Roman Catholicism to be part of the European heritage? I sure do.

A lot of Latino Americans and indigenous people are Roman Catholics, so part of European heritage.

I don't understand why you mention "never had blood .. ties" when at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842245 you reject the relevancy of blood ties. Wouldn't your argument make more sense as just "never had ethnic ties with Europe.

As a reminder, Obama, African-American son of a white woman, once visited Moneygall, where an Irish ancestor lived, and said "My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas."

Lastly, I see you switched from "blood or ethic ties" to "heritage". Could you elaborate on what that means? Must I be Greek inherit some of the intellectual heritage of Ancient Greece? How is my claim to the traditional European liberal arts education heritage any stronger or weaker than that of W. E. B. Du Bois?

The Hawaiian Kingdom lasted from 1795 to 1893.

The title refers to the secrecy related to its founding, not any present-day secrecy. From the text:

"It started as sort of secret colony," said Deborah-Jean Hoffman, a board member at the New Sweden Centre, which promotes the Delaware Valley's colonial history. "The Swedes weren't flag-planting like the French or the Spanish. The idea was to create an under-the-radar colony where the Dutch wouldn't see them."

When someone says "China blew up its own future" as at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47850045 and presents an argument based on decreasing birth rates as a consequence of previous policies, of course that's a prediction about the future written in past perfect tense.

When The Atlantic has an article with subtitle "How X blew up its own platform with a new location feature", linked at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46042350 , that's again a prediction about the future written in past perfect tense.

Same for "OpenAI is highly overvalued and DeepSeek just blew up their business model, says NYU's Gary Marcus", from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856656

When The Verge writes "A judge just blew up Apple’s control of the App Store", linked at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43851672, that's yet another prediction about the future written in the past perfect tense -- and it's specifically a prediction about the consequences of a court decision!

Another court one, also from The Verge, "A court just blew up internet law because it thinks YouTube isn’t a website", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368999

Nor, clearly, does making the "blew up" claim necessarily mean those stated claims are inevitable.

You are of course free to object that such claims are inappropriate unless proven in a court of law or by the fullness of time, but I find that sort of highly non-standard interpretation both contrary to easily found existing practice, and tiresome quibbling.

Most countries in North and South America have unconditional birthright citizenship for persons born in the country.

I take it you are not British? The British Empire had birthright citizenship, and up until 1948 (except for Ireland) citizens of all Commonwealth countries were simply British subjects.

Afterward it was possible to be, for example, a Canadian citizen, but it was still the case that "Prior to the [the British Nationality Act 1981] coming into force, any person born in the United Kingdom or a colony (with limited exceptions such as children of diplomats and enemy aliens) was entitled to [Citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies] status" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Nationality_Act_1981

I don't disagree with the linked-to analysis.

I don't know what your point is. There is no need for the US Supreme Court, in its decision to endow the President with "unitary executive" power, to elaborate all of the things they blew up to get there.

It's not like West Virginia v. EPA elaborated all the emissions regulations which were blown up by the "major questions doctrine."

I think "noyb will also file a lawsuit in the coming weeks", from the person/group who brought us Shrems I and Shrems II, counts enough as "Shrems III could be in the works". Don't you?

The linked article does not present their legal analysis and call for action as established fact.

For the skimmer, the advocacy group was founded by Maximilian Schrems, whose legal cases first got the European Court of Justice to overturn the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles (which described how a US company could legally store private data on EU citizens), and then got the ECJ to overturn EU–US Privacy Shield, which replaced the Safe Harbor principles.

These decisions are known as Schrems I and Schrems II after the founder of this advocacy group.

The newest version of that data transfer framework is called the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework. The European Commission deemed it sufficient, in no small part because they considered it (and more specifically the Data Protection Review Court, an extrajudicial executive branch tribunal) sufficiently independent of the president.

However, in January 2025, Trump fired the Democrat members of the review court, leaving it unable to reach quorum to make decisions, which highlighted it wasn't all that independent. Now it's clearly not independent.

I don't see how a Schrems III is not in the works.

From "Your use of AI is directly harming the environment I live in" at https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/your-use-of-ai-harms-th... by the Icelandic citizen Baldur Bjarnason:

"Iceland doesn’t have that much excess power generation. Already our power companies have to occasionally limit power delivery to heavy users.

Increasing power generation that much requires tough choices: we’d have to ruin the environment some way. We just don’t have that many locations left for hydroelectric or geothermal power plants. Most locations that remain are popular tourist sites – destroying them would be bad for the economy – important ecosystems, or would require improvements to the grid that nobody seems to be willing to pay for. Even if we shut down some of the aluminium smelters, reusing that power elsewhere would be problematic. The Kárahnjúkar power plant is in the middle of nowhere and was purpose-built to serve the aluminium industry. When it generates excess power – which happens – that power is usually wasted because the grid can’t shift it from the region where most of the smelting takes place to the regions that have most of the population.

However, data centres in Iceland are both located near populated areas and are almost exclusively used for “AI” or crypto. You can’t buy regular hosting in these centres for love or money. If you buy hosting in Iceland, odds are that the rack is in a building in Reykjavík somewhere, not in a data centre

And those data centres use more power than Icelandic households combined.

Instead of putting limits to “AI” and cryptocoin mining, the official plan is currently to destroy big parts of places like Þjórsárdalur valley, one of the most green and vibrant ecosystems in Iceland."

Must be those pesky EU rules which prevent putting sovereign EU data centers in non-EU countries. /s

In the 1990s he said he was very pro-choice. That's changed.

In some more fundamental sense, you are right - he hasn't changed that much. Doonesbury, 16 September 1987 characterized him as "I'm just a billionaire developer exercising trial balloons! If I were running [for President] though, it'd be as an original, as a beloved archetype - the American Landlord!" https://readingdoonesbury.com/2018/06/01/selling-reagan-to-b...

You couldn't have read Doonesbury at the time without knowing that a lot of people didn't like Trump, but did things for him because of his money.

Certainly some people did like him. Some of those trial balloons went over really well with racists, like the malicious Central Park 5 ad. ("even a fool can become a multi-millionaire." and 'Trump "was the fire starter" in 1989, as "common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty."' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case ).

As one of the examples of how we know a lot of people didn't like the short fingered vulgarian, here's a 50 second piece featured in "Alive from Off Center" in 1991, starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY7pKQ-Imco&t=559 and ending with the assertion that names like Donald Trump ("a man who can buy his cake and eat it too") "are just fancy names for irrelevance".

IMO what changed is the economic insecurity as the New Deal and Great Society were torn down from the rise of neoliberal thought in the 1970s, funded by rich reactionaries who want to return to a pre-New Deal America, and embraced by both major parties who are more beholden to rich donors than the electorate. As President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." That continues to be used to redirect anger towards minorities, instead of at the rich people, and Trump, as you point out, has for decades been a master at picking that pocket.

I think it left out an even more important part - this is a temporary change for one year (until 1 July 2028), after which normal customs duties will apply for all products, with no de minimus exception. https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/news/guidance-and-lega... .

It looks like this decision was made in 2015 - https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025...

Is something bad if it kills a hobby? Like, getting glow fuel now for an R/C plane is pretty hard because shipping requires ground transport and possible hazmat fees, while it used to be you could easily get a bottle from a local hobby store .. which have mostly died off due to people buying things more cheaply online. If that's bad, what should we do?

Or do we realize that hobbies shift, and that perhaps having battery-powered R/C planes is an acceptable substitute, and let the glow plug hobby die out?

And do we apply that more broadly to say that if a 4.60€ USB cable is too much for a hobby, then perhaps switching to another related hobby would be a okay substitute?