wokky

It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient...

Driving is subsidised in about a zillion different ways in the US; it's already hideously, ruinously expensive, we just don't realize it. You wouldn't have to artificially raise the price of driving to make it less appealing, you'd only have to make the actual costs more transparent.

The phrase "economic health" looks odder to me the longer I ponder it.

"The economy" isn't a living creature, so the phrase is a metaphor, and different people are likely to have very different ways of interpreting it, according to their own interests and concerns. A hedge fund manager, a real estate magnate, and an unemployed single parent will have very different ideas about what is important for "economic health."

You could probably do worse than to start with actual human health, though. Even if your goal is something narrow, like the opportunity to personally accumulate money through speculation, a high average level of human health is a great foundation for that kind of growth.

Of course, if you accept all that, the news is again very ominous.

The stock market is not the economy.

Any study like this will have the interesting caveat that the presence of smartphones at a formal, traditional family gathering might itself produce effects. That is: maybe family gatherings are getting shorter because so many people would rather play with their phones than listen to Uncle Joe's story about high school football. Again.

How could a researcher using smartphone location data control for that?

Will the new signals work when all the track is underwater, I wonder.

"The decline in the rate from 2016 to 2017 was the largest single-year decline since 2010," the CDC said ... Historically, the number of babies born in the U.S. has gradually risen since a sharp decline in the early 1970s.

Particularly given the parallels, I'm surprised there's so little talk of the political climate in connection with these episodes.

I expected this to happen.

...estimates that the annualized cost of land, construction, maintenance, and operations per parking space in the U.S. comes out to $600 [PDF].

I've heard it said, although I can't find a cite right now, that the construction of an underground parking complex may cost $40,000 per space. You can see how that sort of thing would push the average up a lot.

You can also adjust "annualized costs" a lot by changing assumptions about useful lifetime. In practice, many American suburban parking lots are maintained very poorly and probably come out very cheap per space.

The PDF linked from the article does show more detail than the $600/year figure. While some categories cost a little less than $600/year, several categories cost a lot more, so the average gets up there even though the expensive kinds are rarer.

Just using newegg.com is borderline impossible with just a few tabs open unless you have 4 non-SMT threads.

I have four Newegg tabs, one Amazon tab, one Verge tab, and one Engadget tab open in Firefox. CPU utilization is 3% on this ancient i3 laptop.

Maybe your experience isn't typical. That's all I'm suggesting.

This has never happened.

You know he's been a public loudmouth for ~30 years, right? Consider the encyclopedic familiarity with his massive corpus of blabbering you claim when you make a flat statement like this.

I could point out a bunch of his statements and attitudes, none of which would be news to you. The issue is: You haven't recognized those statements for what they are. They apply to classes of Other, so you haven't recognized them as being applicable to full-fledged equals, to human citizens.

When the president says something like "you have to treat [women] like shit" or when he claims that women are untrustworthy because they're all gold-digging bimbos, he's dissing half the nation as fundamentally deplorable.

When the president says things like "laziness is a trait in blacks," he's dissing ~40 million Americans - virtually all of whom are natural citizens, and who are consistently over-represented in the armed forces - as fundamentally less valuable as human beings.

The fact that he's also being a sexist/racist asshole at the same time shouldn't let him off the hook for statements like these. The fact that you haven't already recognized these attitudes (and many others like them) as fundamentally anti-patriotic attacks on your fellow citizens - that's on you.

I don't often see this sort of pride in America. Normally the flavors I do observe are hyper-nationalistic and filled with bravado...

I'd go even further: our current presidential administration spends a lot of energy telling us that America sucks because the people in it suck, the government they built sucks, and the ideals they aspire to suck, and that the solution is to deal out cruelty to the right kinds of people.

I don't understand how anyone can listen to that bilge and interpret it as any kind of patriotism at all, but they do. The hyper-nationalism and bravado are a natural result of an underlying emotional condition apparently shared by about a quarter of the populace: an inability to feel pride in anything but the capacity to dominate.

This is why a few sentences by Warren Buffet feel like such a breath of fresh air. It wasn't always like this, Buffet's far more constructive and positive sentiment is perfectly normal.

I clearly said that some speech will be denied a platform...

What does it mean to you when you say that something has been "denied a platform?" It seems to me that the very notion depends on the assumption that ideas have some sort of natural right to an audience and outside support.

But your unpopular ideas do not entitle you to special outside help. You may have to build a platform for your unpopular idea, as was the case for so many once-unpopular ideas in history. That's what it means to be unpopular. It might be a lot of work. Nobody owes your idea a donation of that work.

The notion that some ideas are "denied a platform" today is both inaccurate and incoherent. No one has the right, the authority, or the power to "deny a platform" to a particular idea in general.

When you accept this, you accept that "censorship" is unavoidable.

Your scare quotes indicate that when you say "censorship" you mean "the right to choose which points of view I/we will legitimize," I guess? Or "not censorship at all as it turns out?"

Dissenting views need to be given a platform, even if they make some students uncomfortable.

Should newspapers be forced to print my letters to the editor, even if they are a bunch of fevered ravings, because my incoherent hate-screeds need to be given a platform?

If you want to promote unpopular points of view, you may have to build your own platform. And 2017 is actually the best time in history for this very thing, and people who do no-kidding advocate genocide seem to have no trouble banding together and making their arguments available to anyone who's interested.

Imagine if all those IP cameras, routers, NAT boxes and what-have-you had been designed with one simple policy: the internet port doesn't work until the user sets a password.

Even very lame passwords might be expected to reduce the effectiveness of this attack approach by an order of magnitude or two.

I don't think asking the question is silly, but bear in mind that the internal heat of the planet is escaping whether we tap into some of it or not.

He's actually pointing out that, technical considerations aside, there is a set of market conditions currently prevailing that looks unsustainable on its face, and at some point, like when pressure builds up along a fault line and then gives way, there will be a big shift.

Fair enough. But why wouldn't the change be something like: Intel buys ailing server businesses cheap, keeps them going with even less margin than before, just to keep x86 flowing into the market? That would end the "unsustainable" situation but wouldn't really shake up the market much.