spaced-out

Some of us like to jump out of moving vehicles and do a cool roll or flip like in an action movie! This is yet another use case the Silicon Valley technocrats didn't consider...

The value of the land is a function of the amount of money one could make off the land, which is a function of the overall economy. A coffee shop next to lots of office buildings can sell lots of overpriced coffee which affects the value of the land it occupies. If the economy gets bad the coffee shop will likely not make as much money, so the taxes off the land will be less as well.

If you give away the land to someone else, but still own the building on it, the person you gave the land to would have to pay land value tax and they would pass that onto you in rent.

I don't see anything at all that contradicts the idea of the Shire as an idyllic anarchic/collectivist society.

Sam is Frodo's servant. Anarchic societies don't have masters and servants. Then the natural question you should ask is why? Frodo is not a noble and Sam is not a slave, so the only reasonable explanation for why Sam is the servant is because Frodo's family is wealthy and Sam is in their employ.

We do know Shakespeare was a real person because he did a lot more in his life than just have his name appear on some plays.

The court telling an artist they're not allowed to sell their videos to the highest bidder seems like a greater infringement on their freedom. What if no one wants to pay for this person's videos except for an AI company? You're basically telling them they're not allowed to profit off of their work.

The Viet Cong were able to pay those poor men too, but the vast majority of them chose to fight for and to be paid by the south.

If this is true why couldn't the South beat the North, or at least defend itself on its own? After the US left the South Vietnamese folded pretty quickly.

I feel exactly the same way. The Dispossessed was both one of the best and one of the most boring books I've ever read. There are a lot of things I appreciate about it and I'm glad I read it, but damn was it a slog to get through.

You could say that about nearly any good thing in life. Your current job/relationship may be holding you back from an even better one. Those leftovers you grabbed out of the fridge are occupying the space that could be taken by an even better meal. Every minute you spend watching a TV show you've already seen or a videogame you've already played is taking away time from your finite lifespan you could be spending on new, novel experiences.

If there's a better platform for giving you what you want, I'm sure you'd leave Reddit and never look back. If this platform you're imaging doesn't exist, how do you know it even could ever exist?

Why did you "help" (in other words make a post/comment) that person on Reddit? Because you enjoy it, you enjoyed reading posts and comments by strangers, replying to them, and seeing your comments accumulate upvotes and other comments. Reddit gave you that experience for free.

I've yet to read a clear explanation of how "surveillance capitalism" is any different than regular capitalism with computers. As long as people are trying to make money they're going to try and crunch data to do it better. The only way I see to effect a real change in how companies collect and use data is with regulation.

I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population.

When you say professional taxi drivers, do you mean people who drive for Uber/Lyft? Because that's who these companies are looking to replace.

I disagree. Some people will drunk drive no matter the legal consequences, or in my case, I once rear-ended someone because I was drowsy but kept driving because I wanted to get home (fortunately no one was hurt, and yes, the accident was completely my fault). The comparison should be against the general population of human drivers because that's the reality on the road.

Why would someone drive drunk if they can just let their car drive them home while they snooze in the back?

Making something illegal doesn't stop some people from doing it, so it's something that should be considered when looking at the overall safety of human drivers. One benefit of robots driving is that they won't get drunk, get distracted because they had a stressful day, get drowsy but still try to make it home, speed because they're late for an appointment, etc...

Why? Allow enough humans to drive and inevitably some of them will start doing so drunk. It's in our collective nature.

How about we invest in making our cities more pedestrian, bike, and public transportation friendly?

There are tons of companies that would love to help (get paid to) build out public transit infrastructure in cities. You think any major city would have trouble attracting bids to build tram systems, subways, or even buy more busses?

Look at your local leaders, how many of them are pro-public transit? How many of them have a long history of blocking projects because they want to "preserve neighborhood character" or some other lame excuse?

Keeping autonomous vehicles on the road will result in thousands of edge cases, and without a clear safety benefit (as opposed to Level 1 systems) its better to stop everything and reconsider.

True, but I bet either a Cruise or a Waymo would have stopped rather than hit that woman crossing the street, and they definitely would not have fled the scene like the human driver did.

more pedestrian friendly infrastructure and use the boring technology that already exists to get people where they want to go. the future is on buses and trains and bikes and pedestrian friendly 15 minute communities

This is a political problem though, it's not something businesses can solve.

That's not hard for me to imagine. Now that I think about it, it should probably be standard for autonomous cars -- if there's an accident or something unexpected it should pull over, unless it can't reach the side of the road without hitting something or someone is trapped under the car.

but because they don't have the credit score for anything within city limits

That's because there's not enough housing in the city limits.

Space and access to sunlight are also components of quality of life and you have neither in very dense housing.

That's not true, adding a few more sky scrapers increases the amount of space for people and does not impact the amount of sunlight people can enjoy.

Cities can also do things like add more rail lines, so people can commute from further away -- which also increases the amount of space for people.

I guess it depends on the listing, but I once booked a place that was billed as a nice romantic getaway in a beach town on AirBnB, and when we got there the room didn't look anything like the picture, many of the sheets and towels did not match and were low quality, and many of the small pillows, rugs, decorative curtains, and other furnishings shown in the ad were not there.

Yes I insisted on and got a full refund -- they were advertising a boutique, romantic getaway, not a cheap motel near the beach.

Hotels aren't selling a boutique experience.

If your urban planning is going to prioritize giving tourists scenic views rather than building affordable homes for the people that live and work in the city, then you shouldn't be surprised if the city turns into an giant museum/resort where only the wealthy can afford a decent QoL (because they're the only ones who can financially compete with the tourists).

I talked to someone who was renting out their basement apartment on AirBnB for a few months before a remodel was scheduled. They had one tenant try to file complaints about everything, down to the color of the bedding not matching the photos posted online. “Property not as described in listing”.

This doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Maybe the listing should match what they were actually offering to rent?

so the new houses with floor to ceiling windows turn into unlivable greenhouses in the summer.

I find this hard to believe. I live in a place with tall (not quite floor to ceiling) windows and hot summers and having such large windows gives the house way more ventilation, not less.

Looking at the residential complex in the article, Risørholmen, it looks like the "ugly" modern houses have rooftop gardens are large windows while the traditional houses have only a few small windows. Sure, the red tiled roofs look nice, but I wonder if this is a case of aesthetics taking precedent over functionality.

People aren't "projecting" demand, the demand is being driven by the market. Downtown apartments (in good condition) are expensive because they are in high demand while office space is getting harder and harder to fill.

If you own a bunch of downtown commercial real estate, you don't need to be a business guru to see that you could be making a lot more money if you could rent that space out as apartments.

The US Supreme Court has already said no, see the case of LinkedIn vs. HiQ.

https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-...

No. The US Supreme Court has ruled that a website cannot use TOS to prevent other companies from scraping publicly available data, even if they're doing so to directly harm the people who posted that data (citation below).

Basically, a company called HiQ was scraping public LinkedIn data to sell a service where they would inform companies if their employees were looking for a job on LinkedIn -- because LinkedIn will hide info from your employer for obvious reasons. LinkedIn sent cease-and-desist, then later sued by lost.

https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-...