wskinner

Road wear and tear increases as the fourth power of axle load. Are you counting the spending on bus stops, bus parking, dedicated bus lanes, and more on the other side of the ledger?

Yes. The impossible to disable system services (photoanalysisd and friends) are an abomination of software design.

California has the most progressive taxation scheme of any state. Dividends and capital gains are taxed as income. I’m curious what you would consider “sufficient” taxation - the top marginal combined rate for a Californian is over 50%.

Taking muni or bart involved walking, waiting, more waiting, and then more walking

Exactly.

Uber makes a lot of money these days. The price is not suppressed. And yet... it is more popular than ever. Prices were artificially low for awhile in order to bootstrap the market, and that worked, and now that the market has been established, prices are at a level that is sustainable. Your whole premise is wrong.

Higher energy consumption translates to higher standards of living and better outcomes for everyone.

Amazon’s capex is not funded by venture capital. It is funded by people buying things from Amazon or services from AWS.

Uber hasn’t raised from VCs in years, and their business is far bigger than it was back when they were losing money.

The idea that SF residents choose to use Uber rather than BART because Uber is cheaper is simply wrong - Uber is much more expensive than BART, and with some notable exceptions for shared rides, that was true during the VC funded growth period as well.

People are generally responsive to incentives. In this case, the GDPR required:

1. Consent to be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous and as easy to withdraw as to give 2. High penalties for failure to comply (€20 million or 4 % of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher)

Compliance is tricky and mistakes are costly. A pop-up banner is the easiest off-the-shelf solution, and most site operators care about focusing on their actual business rather than compliance, so it's not surprising that they took this easy path.

If your model of the world or "image of humanity" can't predict an outcome like this, then maybe it's wrong.

The mistake the EU made was to not foresee the madness used to make these decisions.

It's not madness, it's a totally predictable response, and all web users pay the price for the EC's lack of foresight every day. That they didn't foresee it should cause us to question their ability to foresee the downstream effects of all their other planned regulations.

Why do the data only go back to October 2024? It would be great to be able to see the longer term trends.

The scholarly debate is over how large and how lasting the effect is, not whether any evidence exists.

There are over 40,000 _fatal_ car crashes per year in the US, and a few orders of magnitude more non-fatal crashes. Most of them do not make the news.

There is a natural garbage collection mechanism for corporations that become too inefficient. Inefficient government agencies can last much longer.

If that is true, then what stops port operators from raising prices from their present level and pocketing the free money? In reality, demand curves slope down and the surplus from efficiency improvements is split between buyers and sellers. And with the lower costs that result from efficiency improvements, ports will be able to move more goods per unit of time. Even with the unrealistic assumption that the surplus is entirely captured by the port operators, buyers and sellers of goods will benefit from the increased volume.

It is, and it does. US ports are far less efficient than the more automated ports in Asia and Europe.

Everyone buys stuff.

the benefits of the automation goes solely to investors and owners

Totally false. The benefits go to anyone who buys or sells goods that pass through the ports.

X is not Meta.

The 4% rule of thumb is intended to include sequence-of-returns risk. See e.g. https://firecalc.com/, a tool commonly used to aid these decisions.

"Enough" is a function of how much you have and how much you need. 25x annual spend is a common heuristic for the required net worth before you can safely retire. And the older you are, the less margin of safety you need. 4% of $1.3 million is $52k, which is enough to live quite comfortably in many places.

There is a big difference between Europeans in Europe and Europeans in the US - Europeans in the US readily point this out. The idea that Europeans are somehow genetically less suited to building tech companies is an obvious strawman. The reality is that Europeans in America are, like all immigrants, heavily self-selected.

The article also does not mention the huge difference in compensation for technology talent between the US and Europe. As long as that gap exists, top European talent will continue leaking across the Atlantic.

If you as a shareholder receive a dividend of X% of the share price, you owe tax on it. But if the company buys back stock and as a result the share price increases by X%, you do not owe tax on that unrealized gain until you choose to sell your stock. That’s good for investors.

I share your sense of wonder at everyday objects. The essay “I,Pencil” captures this rather poignantly.

https://cdn.mises.org/I%20Pencil.pdf

Sure we do. We can investigate the living preferences of people with the means to choose between multiple options.

What about people who don’t want to live near train tracks? Or people who currently live on land that would be seized if train tracks were to be built? Not everyone wants to live in a city.

Whoa! In my undergraduate computer science program at a top US public university, each course was graded to a curve that determined the number of grades in each range. If memory serves, 27% of the class received A or A-. I knew grade inflation at private schools was real, but am still surprised to see 70% of Yale kids getting As in CS. At that point, they might as well just assign pass / fail grades.

In the United States, laws come from Congress.

Part of her agenda is strengthening the merger review process. Merger review is intrinsically hard, because authorities essentially have to try and figure out what the effect will be if the merger is allowed or denied. There is no crystal ball for this, and there are rarely 'right' answers. Yet the merger regime has been very favourable to large firms over the past few decades, and there's a reasonable consensus in the antitrust community that it should be strengthened. A tighter merger process might make startup exits through acquisition less common, but it should also make it easier for startups to grow organically into large companies. In terms of creating a bottom-up and more pluralistic Silicon Valley, that seems like a win to me.

Serious question: what is the "antitrust community"?

Can you shed some light on the theory that making mergers more difficult would either a) make it easier for startups to grow organically or b) benefit society in general?

If the upside from working at or creating a startup is due to some combination of IPO or acquisition (this is of course a simplified model), and acquisitions are made more difficult, why do you assume that IPOs would become more likely or more lucrative? Once upside is removed from the startup ecosystem, how will potential employees and founders respond at the margin? I'm struggling to see an equilibrium here that involves more rather than less money and work poured into startups.

I don't know where you live, but my anecdata from being homeschooled starting ~20 years ago in the Bay Area contradicts this. I was part of a group of more than 50 homeschooled children of various ages. Our parents all had their own reasons for homeschooling us, but to my knowledge, none of them did it because they thought the public schools were too secular and teaching "sinful" science.

We were aware of families homeschooling for religious reasons, but not in the Bay Area.

In a city like San Francisco, building self-driving cars is easier than building "safer, more pedestrian friendly infrastructure". Those changes would take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars, and will not address the fundamental social problem: people prefer to travel in a clean, quiet car by themselves. San Francisco does not have the political will to make its public transit effective, let alone clean, quiet, and safe.

It’s not at all clear to me that a hypothetical scenario where the driver moved the car after running over the person would have a better outcome than waiting for first responders to jack up the car (see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37753867).

You claim “ There are few vehicle-pedestrian crashes where the offending vehicle parked on top of the vehicle and wouldn't be moved” - what is your evidence for that? 2.3 million people are injured in car accidents in the United States per year.

Finally, it is plausible that AVs will have a higher frequency of certain very specific failure modes relative to human drivers, while having dramatically lower overall frequency of accidents where people are injured. This type of reporting obscures that.