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The increase in supply he advocates for is a viable solution because it is sensitive to different things.

Small, local development gets built and becomes profitable based on demand of the local housing market, but almost all housing today is built by large developers. These large developers are responding to the demand not for housing, but for the mortgage itself. Thanks to nationalized mortgage securitization the buyers the market cares about are those buying these securities: banks, pension funds, insurance companies, etc. When prices fall these securities become less attractive financial products, which decreases the demand for large development.

Chuck advocates for local building, which can ignore this macro-level demand and instead respond to the actual local demand for shelter.

Oh is there a reason you couldn't use IndexedDB to store the puzzles?

The fact that people are generally uncritical of this growth claim is just stunning. You have to believe that this is as big as smartphones while ignoring all of the differences with this cycle of hype.

They absolutely are tracking revenues/profits on CNBC, what are you talking about?

Nope, eating nothing but potatoes for the rest of your life is a fantastic way to ensure that you end up with severe macro/micronutrient deficiencies, which will be a very effective way of generating disease, including cancer.

That's a Blaise Pascal quote actually.

You're basically just describing fee-less digital currency. The problem is that achieving the fee-less part by using a blockchain makes some extremely undesirable tradeoffs. To name a few:

  -Money laundering becomes impossible to prevent when no entity has control over identity verification of the users. 
  
  -All transactions are public, so normal users who won't be trying to lie about their identity lose all financial privacy.
  
  -Undoing transactions due to fraud or simple error becomes extremely cumbersome and ultimately requires re-centralization of authority that crypto supposedly was created to avoid.

Digital fiat transactions operating in the current financial system are the best of all worlds, and unsurprisingly they are already extremely common.

I think the article makes a pretty good case for bloat being bad for low-end users actually. His analysis demonstrates how many websites become genuinely unusable on cheaper devices, not just to techie standards, but for anyone trying to actually interact with the page at all.

Umm, no I would not describe Ray Kurzweil's predictions as "disturbingly on target". Dan Luu checked everything and came up with 7% accuracy: https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/.

The correlation they saw was after controlling for potentially confounding variables, like income level, housing stock, density, and demographics, as explained in this article: https://caseytrees.org/2023/09/mythbusting-trees-and-crime/.

So of course it's not proof of causation, but reverse causation(nice neighborhoods lead to more trees planted) seems unlikely to explain the effect.

Jonathan Haidt has researched this topic extensively and concluded that it was both, or rather that it was the replacement of play-based childhood with screen-based childhood. Particularly social media's effect on young girls was very strong, but boys have been negatively impacted too.

It just comes mostly from other vehicles, or are 42,000+ people also being killed each year while taking public transit?

Odds are word of mouth is not going to be kind to this though. I can see pre-order statistics being overly optimistic.

With the ubiquity of SUVs at this point I can't imagine that many of them are being sold to men wanting to feel more "Rugged". I would think the vast majority are bought by those who want the additional space and safety of these cars, like families. It's going to be very difficult to convince consumers to drive cars smaller cars they see as less safe without some significant costs imposed on larger cars.

That's exactly it. I'm not sure what about software in particular makes people think that it can exist without funding. People have no problem paying for a physical product, but virtual products are hard to justify for some reason.

It seems inevitable for online discussions of a topic this large to be completely unproductive. It's broad enough that everyone's favorite societal ill can be blamed, yet virtually no one reads Haidt's research explaining why other explanations are insufficient.

There's been a significant increase in anxiety and depression among adolescents since ~2012. It's not just business as usual, and it's significant enough that the same increase is visible in hospital admissions for self-harm. Social Media seems to be the only explanation that fits the timing and scale of the issue:

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/13-explanations-mental-...