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This is already the case in Seattle. It's hard to tell if the law was originally created with any good intention or if it was just NIMBYism from the start.

Regardless, the net result has been 100% NIMBY warriors using it to block as much infill and urbanization as possible. We've got "Tree Action" organizations that jump in and use the law to block low income apartment buildings and construction of sidewalks leading to transit stations. Random example: https://www.treeactionseattle.org/campaigns/first-ave-shade-...

I really recommend the book "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande. It helped me process the drawn out and unpleasant death of my grandfather and look at end of life care in a different light. There's an important difference between extending life and providing quality of life that a lot of patients and doctors both misunderstand.

The book is written from the author's own experience as a doctor but also includes his experience with his own father's death from cancer.

The US actually has a legal structure for employees to have beneficial (+ tax advantaged) ownership of their companies, the ESOP (employee stock ownership plan). It's a legal structure where a trust buys the company from the original owners on behalf of the employees and then allocates a percentage of those shares to the employees each year.

There's no requirement that this be a 100% ownership arrangement, but there are a surprising number of companies in the US where that's the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_compani...

Since it's basically a leveraged buyout of the company by the employees, it provides a much more ethical succession option (IMHO) for privately held companies with founders who want to step down but do not want to sell to private equity. I wish more people were aware of it as an option.

How much of China's military command is a crony boys club full of people who never had to militarily prove anything?

Have you even glanced at the current leadership of the US military?

Seattle actually happens to have some absolutely great examples of local journalism as well as some extremely bad examples of corporate owned "news" factories.

https://westseattleblog.com/ is run by a single person (formerly a husband and wife team) and she attends huge numbers of local events and city meetings providing hyper-local coverage on things that are happening in the area.

... you don't think the highway construction firms are continually keeping the wheels greased to make sure the funding keeps flowing to them?

"Big light rail" must really be putting in some huge donations considering the lightning fast pace of expansion and astronomical number of new rail lines in the US.

Every time I think about EVs, I become filled with dread thinking about what will happen if an area loses power for an extended period of time

A mid-size EV battery can easily store 60kWh of energy. That's enough to power a domestic refrigerator for ~12 days (assuming 200w average power usage, which is on the higher end).

I lost power for about a day last year and was very happy to be able to keep my fridge and some emergency lighting powered from an EV battery.

Can you source that? Diesel is only 13% more energy dense than gasoline [1] so the difference between the two fuels isn't huge.

I suspect that modern (last five years) turbocharged gasoline engines are probably approaching diesel thermal efficiency, but I don't think that it's correct to say that they generally surpass it. The gasoline Ford EcoBoost is 33% thermally efficient while a BMW N47 turbo-diesel is 42% thermally efficient, as an example [2].

[1] https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/properties [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-specific_fuel_consumptio...

The Toyota community has been far down that road with the DCM module in the new gen cars and found that the car still managed to get updates out to Toyota even with 50 ohm terminating resistors in the antenna connectors: https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/simpler-solution-for-dis... (see the posts by user "Disgruntled Scientist").

Unfortunately simply cutting power to the telematics module also disables the in-car microphone for handfree calling. Fully disabling telematics involves making a bypass harness that re-routes the microphone and speaker signals past the disabled DCM module.

So we had to derive from them derived streams that didn't show temporal dependencies any longer, at least not as strongly

Could you expand on that (or at least point me towards some keywords to read up on)?

I think I understand conceptually what this means (network latency increases at noon CDT each day because YouTube load increases during the lunch hour, as an example) but I'm wondering how you normalize data streams for temporal dependencies with unknown frequencies (nominal change #1 happens each Sunday, while nominal change #2 happens each day at noon).

Not always: https://www.live5news.com/2025/01/23/pastor-charged-with-vio...

Wouldn't want to endanger the homeless by letting them sleep under a church roof without the the state's approval, much safer to keep them sleeping on the side of the highway and arrest the pastor /s.

Given that steam turbine efficiency depends on the temperature delta between steam input and condenser, unlikely unless you're somehow going to adapt Nvidia GPUs to run with cooling loop water at 250C+.

Something or someone really, really wants you to be comfortable with violence.

Instagram started serving me violent content out of the blue recently. My reels feed went from mostly hiking and skiing videos to POV videos from Ukrainian and Russian grenade drones and accelerationist "joke" videos normalizing the idea of war with China.

It was like a switch had flipped with how suddenly the app was like "let's warp this guy's sense of normalcy".

Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population

Is it though? Not passing judgement either way, but the most common economic rationale for immigration generally seems to be that it's a source of cheap labor.

That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.

If the surplus economic value created by immigrants who are employed is generally not returned to them in the form of high wages, then yeah, they're not going to be paying it to the government as taxes.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that a lot of people in this thread seem to be conflating per-person net economic benefit and net tax payments. The first can be significantly positive while the second is negative.

Something very strange happened in the last 20 years.

Tech companies discovered that the most profitable position to be in was global middleman, at a scale previously impossible before everything was connected by the internet. They undercut a given market until all the alternatives become financially non-viable and then start hoovering up all the margins from both sides (producer and consumer) of the deal.

As someone who works in US manufacturing, the situation is much more dire and I think the "low quality / high quality" back-and-forth is burying the lede.

It's not just that China has reached some kind of quality parity with North America. There are now significant market segments that the US functionally cannot manufacture because we completely ceded the institutional knowledge and infrastructure in favor of financialization and outsourcing of the US economy.

My specific area of expertise is robotic / computer controlled manufacturing equipment and a lot of the components (high precision servos, sensors and other motion components) are functionally impossible to source domestically. There are still some boutique manufacturers making things in low efficiency / low volume in the USA but touring the manufacturing campuses of Chinese suppliers has been shocking in the last five years. The sheer scale of efficient, automated assembly they are capable of operating at makes a big-three automotive assembly line look like a dirt-floored shack with men knocking things together with rocks.

They are laser focused on lights-out manufacturing at extreme volume in ways I have never seen in the US. Entire production lines of high complexity electronics that are completely vertically integrated (everything from the injection molding for the plastic enclosure to the PCB manufactured on one campus) with human hands touching them for the first time as they leave the automated quality control line to be boxed up.

I don't think American people fully comprehend the brain and skill drain that has already taken place.

It would take years to make a single new bus route in any city, I don't think I've ever even seen that happen.

This is simply not true. Madison, WI just finished a massive revamp of their entire bus system where many existing routes were re-aligned or replaced with rapid transit routes with dedicated lanes. Despite massive amounts of naysaying from local conservatives the project has been a massive success and has resulted in a huge bump in ridership [1].

The whole thing happened because the city elected a mayor [2] who was laser focused on making transit happen and just kept working on it.

I think US politics has a major incentive alignment problem - if your local politician's genuine personal success metric is "improved transit" then you're likely to end up with improved transit. If success is "got re-elected", "got more corporate donations" or "used mayorship as a stepping stone to national politics" then you're likely to end up with a milquetoast compromiser who never does anything of substance because they don't want to be accountable for anything.

[1] https://www.channel3000.com/news/madison-metro-sees-brt-wind...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Rhodes-Conway

If literally a single person in this entire comment section had read the linked article they would have seen that the parent comment's (bad faith) point is directly addressed.

Of course, if TikTok is removed, many children will just move to TikTok’s competitors: Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. This is why it’s so important for countries to follow Australia’s lead: raise the age for opening social media accounts to 16 and require the companies to enforce it.

The American right wing simply just doesn't have the cultural cachet in major institutions such as academia, Hollywood, publishing houses, and generally in major US cities to enforce their cancellation attempts.

The part of this you should be worried about is that they've realized they now have enough hard power to use violence against ideological enemies instead of rhetoric.

They're being completely open that they plan to extend this treatment to native born U.S. citizens too [1].

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-ja...

Universal tariffs with no exception don't even incentivize domestic manufacturing when it cuts local manufacturers off from an outside market that's bigger than the domestic one.

My company manufactures equipment in North America, with the most expensive input coming domestically from Ohio. Guess what though? Retaliatory tariffs from the global community means that the most rational course of action is now to move that manufacturing *out of the US* so that we can sell to the global market without penalty.

Sorry Ohio, but Mexico is currently *not* engaged in a trade war with Canada and half the EU so the rational decision for a company who wants to sell in those markets is to divest from the US.

Can you point to a single public school in the US that does this? Not being snarky, I would love to have one to show as an example.

My public school had a kitchen ... that it used to heat up pre-packaged deep fried chicken and pizza from Sysco. Sometimes we would get some withered celery on the plate as well.

Wow, what a cool piece of Madison history. I spent a lot of afternoons at Boulders in the mid-2010s but never knew that it had a predecessor like that.

What is the general view on Enver Hoxha by today's Albanian population?

voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda

Who is even saying this is not true? The United States government is more aware than maybe anyone else that influencing human opinion and action is a statistical problem once you have enough scale.

Just look at the history of the USIA [1] and its successor the USICA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agen...

This is basically how every discussion around building more transit in Seattle goes. The town hall meetings feel like an episode of Parks and Rec.

we may see a socioeconomic pressure towards remaining pivot-ready by constantly broadening one's capabilities...

If this isn't already a line out of a dystopic speculative fiction short story someone should crib it for that purpose.

For your example about single payer, with that scheme costs will likely be much lower but on the flip side, we also would not get immediate access to care (that is you can't attend a doctors appt within 72 hrs of scheduling)

I am curious, why is this accepted as a "given" of single payer health care? I know it's a a problem in Canada and Britain, but those systems seem to be victims of something between neglect and outright political sabotage.

As a side note, my partner is currently about half way through a two month wait to see her GP in the good old US of A (on United Health Care). I would love to only have to wait a few days.

I don't think you're off base by saying that people have a level of social responsibility to the people they live around. I think that can be argued perfectly logically.

What I'm not sure I agree with is that it translates to a responsibility to stay. Isn't someone who emigrates permanently away from their local community breaking the same social contract as someone who chooses medically assisted dying? Should that be prevented for the same reasons?

I can see the position that MAID is genuinely abdicating a true responsibility in some extreme cases, like a parent with minor children.

Not the op but I guess the idea is that questions of life and death should not primarily be economical questions.

Sure, but as an American life and death is already an economical question *above all else*. The quality of medical care that I receive is already directly linked to how much money is in my bank account and how much my employer is willing to pay for a medical plan.

End of life care in the US is designed with the primary goal of vacuuming every asset out of you and then letting you die once it's gone. It seems unethical to say "sorry, you don't get to opt out of this. Everyone's got to go through the whole process."

OTOH, it's interesting that you and the parent comment are basically saying "We, as a country, are failing our pensioners so badly that death has become the more appealing option for many of them. Therefore, we must trap them here with us until we improve the conditions that lead to them making that bargain (which we will never do)"

Taking away someone's right to assisted dying because you live in a society that has made death preferable to living for many seems like a totally orthogonal leap of logic. That doesn't reduce net suffering one iota.