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lisplist

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The market is often either wrong or distorted by existing government policies. For some things, subsidies need to be involved to create a new industry where there isn't one. For others, subsidies are a waste of money leading to graft and excess. If I were the one with the credit card, I'd be betting big on hydroponics/vertical farms, medium to high density housing, and high speed rail.

Despite plenty of demand, high density housing still isn't getting built nearly as fast as it should. High building costs, zoning laws, and the ability to just suburban sprawl to infinity mostly prevents this.

Pretty much all vertical farming startups have gone bankrupt. There are endless benefits to vertical farms, but we don't do it because existing farms are cheap in comparison to the necessary investment to make this viable.

We don't build high speed rail because it's a multi-decade long project involving massive logistics, training programs, lots of land rights issues, and the fact that for short to medium distance trips people would probably still prefer to drive since once you get to your target destination, there's still no way to get around without a vehicle.

We spend billions every year in gas subsidies. We spend billions every year in food subsidies. For energy independence and the carbon reduction alone, this is a worthwhile investment even if the upfront costs are substantial.

Maybe slightly unrelated, but I've done a lot of road trips throughout the US, and there is so much land that is used unproductively, it's really incredible. Land that could be used for energy, food, or housing, just sitting empty or with abandoned structures.

Imagine if we just paid people to coat their properties in solar panels - throw them on your roof, lawn, wherever you have the space. We could drive energy prices down to nothing. We could pay people to install ADUs. The resources are there, but the imagination and commitment are not.

Instead, I'm looking at a $40k+ solar install for my very small house and a breakeven on investment in maybe 10 years for a house I probably won't live in by then.

I switched to DDG about a year ago and it works fine for me. For some queries, Google still surfaces better results, but DDG is good enough that I don't really miss it.

The only Google service I haven't been able to replace is YouTube - no real alternative. I still use Google Maps as well, but could probably switch to Apple maps without missing much. For hiking trails, Apple Maps has often been superior. I briefly tried OpenStreetMaps years ago, but the lack of traffic data and the fact that it gave me bad directions made it untenable.

The only problem I've found with Forgejo is a lack of fine grained permissions and also the lack of an API for pulling action invocations. The actions log api endpoints are present in gitea from what I can tell.

Tbf there are some (mostly rich) people that believe wealth inequality isn’t a problem as long as the standard of living keeps going up for everyone. But that falls apart once you consider monopolization generally leads to rent seeking and not better services

Tangent, but I think the practice of shrinkflation should be made illegal altogether (although not sure how you would enforce it). If you need to increase prices, fine, but it's a complete waste of packaging materials to just give less of something for the same price in the same package, not to mention the environmental harm.

Thank you all for your responses!

I realize I’m being a bit hyperbolic and it’s really hard to predict where things will be in a decade, but I’m pretty early in my career and am just concerned what my prospects will look like as this stuff evolves.

It feels like I’ve got two paths:

A) Keep learning and hope it’s enough to keep up

B) Quit now and focus on learning skills that are difficult to automate in order to get a head start on the transition away from dev work