ComradeTaco

If your company believes you can telecommute, it's not a small step for them to eventually believe that you can be outsourced more inexpensively.

The first reason is that contemporary trends in architecture tend to favor more utilitarian designs.

The second reason is that public projects have a real problem trying to control labor costs during projects. The most artistic and aesthetically pleasing works of craftsman ship taking time and money public projects can't support right now.

Right, inequality isn't inherently a bad thing, its when it get so extreme that it impedes class mobility and shrinks the middle class. We have to strike a really careful of regulations and freedom to create a desirable society.

The US has allowed complete unbridled capitalism during the gilded age. Quoting Wikpedia "From 1860 to 1900, the wealthiest 2% of American households owned more than a third of the nation's wealth, while the top 10% owned roughly three fourths of it.[61] The bottom 40% had no wealth at all.[59] In terms of property, the wealthiest 1% owned 51%, while the bottom 44% claimed 1.1%"

So pure, unregulated capitalism, lead to wealth inequality far, far more extreme than our current situation.

58 Peter R. Shergold (1982). Working-Class Life: The "American Standard" in Comparative Perspective, 1899–1913. University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 5–7, 222, 224. ISBN 978-0822976981.

59 Steve Fraser (2015). The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. Little, Brown and Company. p. 66. ISBN 0316185434.

High inflation benefits those who have high debts and little savings. Low inflation benefits wealthy people with minimal debt and large savings.

The federal reserve driving limited inflation has occurred for around 100 years, and the time in America with the least income inequality fell squarely in the middle during the 1950s and 1960s.

The Federal Reserve and it's monterary policies aren't the issue.

I think part of the problem is that the price of more inelastic things in our society is driven by that top 5%. The housing market is especially dominated by that demographic, but so is healthcare and college. And since all of those things are priced for the wealthy first and then marginally discounted for middle class needs, they've become completely unaffordable.

It's also worth considering that the American government has massively subsidized the airline industry. Trillions of dollars in defense spending for aircraft has propped up Boeing and its predecessors during hard times. That spending massively advanced civilian aircraft. Training pilots is another massive cost, which is mitigated by former American military pilots.

At the very least states should have a threshhold of X number of miles driven without an accident, x number of miles without a fatality, out of tens to hundreds of millions of miles of testing.

Move fast and break things works fine when the at risk subject is someone's vacation photos from 2015 rather than a kid in a crosswalk.

All my evidence is anecdotal, and I have no means of confirming it on my own.

When I first looked over this post, there were 3-4 comments, all seemingly pro-russia. I see some points being made that are remarkably similar to official Russian positions on issues. Its really similar to when I see a post about China. A whole bunch of users surface abruptly with lots of comments favorable to China. Both of these countries have large, well documented operations to comment extensively on Western media sources. And I'm sure that many HN users like Russia and like China. But it's hard to shake the feeling that there is some astroturfing going on.

Trolls from the Internet Research Agency (the troll farm) have handles tumblr, facebook, reddit, as stated by those who previously worked at the Agency. I do not think it is unreasonable to assume, given HN's popularity and how intensive Russian efforts have been in regards to social media, that some accounts are maintained to manipulate opinions, just like any other social media site.

It's infinitely harder to have a reasonable discussion when there's a troll factory pumping out bad faith arguments in great volume. [1]https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/03/15/594062887/...

Russian-American relations have worsened not because of russophobia, but rather because of several high profile and geopolitically relevant events. The first of these was the invasion of Crimea and the funneling of arms to Ukrainian Separatists engaging in a civil war. These actions are a direct violation of the Budapest Memorandum signed by Russia and the US. Essentially, Ukraine agreed to destroy the nuclear weapons leftover from the USSR in exchange for total respect in regards to territorial integrity.[1] Furthermore, a Russian BUK system, staffed by these separatists downed the civilian airliner Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing 298 innocent people.[2]. Furthermore, Russian hackers hacked the emails of both major political parties, and has, literally, a 3 story office complex staffed with internet trolls intent on misleading the American public via social media for the last several years[4]. Finally, you have the most recent incident where Russia attempted to murder not only a former spy in the U.K., but also his daughter, and about twenty other bar patrons, neighbors and first responders. The poisoned used was a nerve gas developed in Russia and exclusively available in Russia.[5]

Clearly, these are meaningful events in the context of American-Russia relations as well as NATO-Russia relations, you can't just handwave them away by saying it's one parties political problem.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit... [3]https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-ha... [4]https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/03/15/594062887/... [5]https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/14/europe/theresa-may-reprisals-...

The electrodes are made of graphite and the lining of the furnace is lined with a ceramic material. Both have melting points higher than the molten steel.

The largest single difference is that the newer trainsets can take different voltage/current combinations from overhead wires. This is important because different regions in Europe use different electrification systems, regions that can now be reached because of new trainsets.

Donald Trump.

"I'll tell you the whole history of it," Giuliani said, as transcribed by The Washington Post. "So when (Trump) first announced it, he said, 'Muslim ban.' He called me up. He said, 'Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.'"

[1]http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/06/politics/trump-muslim-ban-trav...

I believe that it's completely reasonable for governments to invest massively into public infrastructure to facilitate the success of Amazon HQ. Things like new transit lines, complete streets, public parks etc. It should be a catalyst to invest into parts of the city that have seen substantial urban decay.

It irks me however when huge tax credits are handed out to already profitable companies to move in. It's just giving free services at the expense of everyone else.

Doable as long as nobody gets sick and requires the attention of a doctor.

The Democrats observed the regular order of the Senate, hosted 5 bipartisan meetings and finished the bill so it could actually be analyzed and read before being passed [1]. The republicans didn't bother with any bipartisan meetings and passed it within the same week of finishing writing it. And they broke the regular order of the senate to do it.

In any case, the two year period between 2009 and 2010 was spent almost entirely on the economy. Which given how strong the Obama-era recovery was, seems to be have been time well spent.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/10/us/republican...

Definitely too early to draw conclusions.

Preschool the US is pretty expensive, about $500 a month. It would seem if you could pay for preschool with $22 a month, then the purchasing power is quite substantial.

I believe that this is not a replacement for existing income streams but a supplement that puts these recipients above subsistence.

This is very much a handout however.

While technically correct, your comment is misleading because the seat legally belonged to the Republicans and he was chosen by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Obama could have rejected the nomination but anyone that the Republicans have a say in will be anti-net neutrality.

Pai is fulfilling exactly what he was appointed to do, which is make the wealthy even wealthier.

Trump's administration is built to enrich 3 groups. 1. Himself 2. His family 3. Other Very Wealthy People

If the political willpower existed for building metros at Chinese speeds in North America then I would volunteer first to be the person swapping out the drill heads.

Unfortunately infrastructure is a slow moving game and we have to settle for less on this continent.

Many of those who have high incomes would prefer to build equity rather than hand it to landowners. However incomes only rose only modestly above inflation while real estate prices have doubled and even tripled in many places.

We're really in trouble as a society if essentials like education, healthcare and housing continue to eat an increasingly large portion of consumer income.

Trump appointed Ajit Pai to the FCC whose doing his best to gut net neutrality for big communications. You have Pruitt whose dropping regulations for his big oil pals. You have Steven Mnuchin whose goal is destroy Dodd-Frank so financial firms can get too big to fail.

This administration is the most nakedly oligarchic and monopolistic since Harding was president. To peddle this idea that Trump will be a savior to the small business owner and the working man is nothing short of a lie.

Some of the frats at my alma mater charge $5k a year. I would imagine being able to pay 20k or more might self select to some already well-off kids.

I never wrote that MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Yale are better than Olin. What I did say was that you should compare apples to apples, compare average start up rate for majors at Olin to the same majors at MIT, Yale, Stanford and Harvard.

Right now most startups are tech heavy. If you have a school with exclusively engineering and technology majors, you're much more likely to have a higher startup rate then a full university.

It is absolutely selection bias. Compare averages by major for each school, not the total population for each school. To compare a college that produces almost exclusively engineering majors to a university that offers everything from constitutional law to communications is absurd.

Don't forget the steady reduction of benefits in addition to a base pay. I've spent time at fortune 500 engineering firms where the annual deductible for health insurance was $8,000.

An additional on flooding:

When Rainfall * Area >= SoilAbsorption(See note) + WetlandAbsorption + ArtificialDrainage the end result is flooding.

Essentially the left hand side of the inequality has been slightly increasing because of climate change, but we're chipping away constantly at the right side of the equation in three ways.

(1) More and more soils in American metro areas have been covered by impervious surfaces for development. (2) More wetlands are being destroyed for development. (3) Artificial drainage is being under-built. Drainage is generally built for 1 in 100 year events but the rate of urbanization is increasing the magnitude of flooding. (Drainage is only a problem for the developer that hasn't sold what they're building.)

Note: Soil has a finite capacity for water infiltration.

I believe personally that the Hyperloop is vaporware that will exist only seasonally on the cover of Popular Mechanics. If somones actually produces even a semi-functional hyperloop testbed maybe I'll sing a different tune.