JoeJonathan

Pardon my myopia, but what’s an example of Republican-proposed legislation or reform aimed at protecting Americans from exposure to potentially harmful waste products? I genuinely don’t know.

I hadn’t visited in a few years and was shocked to see how ubiquitous Pix has become! People use it to pay at stores and restaurants. And even before Pix, domestic bank transfers were already instantaneous.

Or because it’s actually a huge scam.

Kevin Roose made some version of it on the Hard Fork podcast.

The Dutch East India Company is often considered integral to the history of capitalism, if not the start of capitalism itself, and was granted a 21-year monopoly on trade by the Dutch government.

How would that work in a real estate market? How could you convince landlords to lower prices?

Was your doctor reluctant to prescribe it for occasional use? As I understand it, providers typically expect you take ADHD meds daily.

I ask because my attention issues are task-dependent, but doctors tend to view even the suggestion of occasional use as a red flag for recreational abuse.

But is the underlying logic behind earning to give actually sound? Because it sounds to me like ideological cover for plain old earning. It also strikes me as deliberately blind to the ethical externalities of working certain high paying jobs.

Ah yes, these companies 100% want to reduce remote work due to productivity issues and not because they want to exert power over there employees. Because, as we all know, there's absolutely no way to measure productivity than by counting how many hours they spend at a physical location.

Elon?

I’m glad you pointed out that Reddit gets a free pass. Aside from the fact that r/TheDonald flourished there, r/all regularly shows videos of people dying and men smacking women (r/pussypassdenied). There’s also a weird, self-congratulatory sense of community that leads to mob politics and pile ons in a way distinct from Facebook and Twitter. I think it means something that people identify as redditors, and not, say, as tweeters.

Not sure if the technology will get there, but I can see AR being much more useful. I don’t want to cut myself off from the outside world, but I’d love to be able to put on a pair of glasses that allow me to use a giant monitor without needing an actual monitor. Or a home theater. For me, something as simple (though it’s probably technically complex) as a high resolution screen coupled with AirPods for watching movies would be a killer app. And if I could use those same glasses to work or bs on the internet (on a plane, in a cafe, on a bus), I’d be all in… and I’m willing to bet everyone else would be as well.

I suspect this is what Apple is trying to do.

The thing is, speaking as a total non expert here, people have been taking about VR since the 90s, and it’s always kind of sucked. It’ll get much better over the next decade, of course. But even then, how many people want to sensorially sever themselves from the outside world? Lots of people who Meta thinks might use VR for work have, you know, other human bodies to take care of.

Blows my mind that just as everyone was crazy to return to normal life, Meta was like, hey wouldn’t it be great if we could do more of that?

California has some of the most stringent labor laws in the country, and labor attorneys have told me judges tend to not look favorably upon contracts that are in direct violation of those laws… especially when those contracts are drafted by high powered legal teams.

Right, there’s no archaeological evidence of some ancient Scandinavian migration because… they were so eager to get to Oklahoma?

You really have to be committed to some weird Viking romanticism (and to hate those gross Southern European Catholics) to buy something like this.

I find it hugely frustrating, but it's not that complicated. Ever since prop 13 passed in 1978, homeowners' property tax has been pegged to the purchase price rather than the assessed value, creating a huge disincentive to sell. In a place like LA, most or all of the habitable land has been developed. The lots that are undeveloped (at least those in my neighborhood) are sketchy—steep grades and sandy soil, which will eventually crumble either due to a megastorm or earthquake. No one wants to sell to developers, and why would they? They live in nice houses that get more valuable every year, in a nice part of the country with nice weather. Beyond that, they oppose every housing development imaginable, usually by arguing that "luxury condos" are replacing "rare green spaces." (There's a whole "Save Poppy Peak" campaign near me, which is infuriating, because it's a bunch of people with $1.5 million+ houses who don't want apartments to get in the way of their view.)

There are all sorts of obvious political fixes to this (repeal prop 13, end single-family zoning, incentivize building mixed-use, mixed-income residences, whatever), but I can't imagine any passing any time soon. Homeowners have all the power, fight all these changes tooth and nail (often through lawsuits against developers on environmental protection grounds) at the local level.

Agreed on all counts, but that doesn't make the problem of politics any less real. People problems are always the hardest to solve, especially when deeply problematic policies like Prop 13 are written into the state constitution.

In what way is building more housing simple? If it were that straightforward, California (which has much more space and money) would have done it, and Californians wouldn't be moving to Portugal.

It's not like universities are just lining their pockets. I'm a humanities professor at a small liberal arts college with a high tuition, and we struggle to pay professors fair wages (when compared to peer institutions, which doesn't even account for differences in cost of living, and we're in an HCOL city).

I do not fully understand the economics of higher education—they're complex and often opaque—but a few things to keep in mind:

1. Tuition seems absurd, but very few students pay the sticker price. At my institution, average cost after aid is 39% of average cost before aid, and less than some of the private K-12 schools in this city. 2. "These institutions" are not a monolith. See above—especially when it comes to prestigious schools, many students aren't paying close to sticker price. 3. Families and students expect much more from colleges than they did a few decades ago, both in terms of facilities and staffing. I don't know if anyone's done a study of student wellness center staff sizes, but I wouldn't be surprised if they doubled over the past two years. 4. The sciences (and things like conservatories) are particularly expensive because of equipment/lab costs. Someone has to pay for all this. I think more should come from the corporate America (not sure how), which benefits greatly from these programs, but I'd venture to guess most comes from tuition and government grants.

Even if all these "key indicators" were accurate, how do they are they indicative of a lack of "a counterculture?" This article might as well be titled, "14 warning signs of social decadence," "14 warning signs of corporate dominance," or whatever else. Making some claim and substantiating it with a list of arbitrary observations is not a coherent way to make an argument.

What is a counterculture? Isn't alt/indie music marginalized by definition? Why would the (dubious) assertion that joke telling has become dangerous be indicative of no counterculture? What's an example of a period/place with a vibrant counterculture? Can any of these "warning signs" be present in such a period/place?

What the author seems to be arguing is that pop culture has become boring and repetitive. For a more interesting take on why this might be the case, see Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Past--he argues that a set of structural conditions (such as no cheap rent) has led to media industries recycling safe, nostalgic content.

What do you mean by frustrating? In my memory of 2008, there was a real sense of panic, far beyond anything we're seeing right now. Before it was evident things had gone really wrong, plenty of people had a sense that something had to give—housing was going crazy, and I remember making $37k and qualifying for mortgages on NYC apartments—but inflation was <3% and unemployment was low.

While I think we're headed for a whole new kind of disaster (albeit one I can't predict—unlike 2008, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with financing of housing, but I can't see how these prices are sustainable), I'm not sure it'll be 2008-level doom. The frustration, I think, comes from a real sense of the toll of inflation coupled with annoyance, sometimes unarticulated, that we could have put the breaks on by raising interest rates more aggressively long ago, circa 2015-2016, when the stock market started going crazy.

But the reason we find them convenient is that, at least in most of the US, cities are built for cars. Before cars became common, Los Angeles was zoned for higher density and had trolleys that extended all the way into the city's NE reaches. Same goes for São Paulo, the largest city in the Americas. In the case of SP—which is still way serviceable via public transit than LA—an urban planner/mayor built a series of radial avenues & encouraged people to move out of the city center to its new peripheries. That, plus other "improvements," cut the population density of the center by at least 50%, and exacerbated patterns of residential segregation that began after abolition.

This is all to say that cars aren't solely a matter of personal choice. Car culture was been imposed on us by urban planners with tremendous power. For more on this, even in NYC, see the introduction to Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Robert Moses.

Apologies here, but could someone ELI5: what's the appeal of a stablecoin? If I want to hold something in an asset pegged to the dollar, why not just hold dollars?

As others have pointed out, and as a few media outlets have increasingly covered, there's a big difference between sticker price and net price. A minority of students at private universities pay full sticker price, and if I had to guess, I'd say most are wealthy foreign students (who are effectively subsidizing domestic students' education).

Colleges—as well as sites like US News—should figure out a way to more effectively communicate average cost, or a typical cost range, after non-loan student aid.

Student loans are another issue entirely. I agree with other commenters that universal student loan forgiveness isn't a long term solution to the student debt problem, and I think we should focus on expanding and simplifying programs like PSLF (Public Service Loan Forgiveness). That said, I don't find the rational-choice argument ("I ran the numbers and determined X, and did Y") persuasive. Few 18-year-olds have an expansive enough understanding of the world to accurately assess student loan burden against potential future earnings.

Finally, we forgive and renegotiate all kinds of debt all the time. Why can't we do the same for student loans? Why are student loan interest rates set a decade in advance by Congress? The system makes no sense.

Would they really jettison retail after investing so much in building distribution centers/delivery operations all over the country?

95 million homes total, or available homes? Seems like it would make a difference. That said, I suspect you're right that AirBnB is less responsible for driving up housing prices than, say, the fact that the pace of homebuilding hasn't recovered since 2008.

These threads are so boring.

You mean you don't want to watch Love is Blind, Love is Blind Japan, Love is Blind Brazil, Love is Blind Season 2, Queer Eye seasons 1-5, Queer Eye Germany...??

> For most of american history, "arranged" marriages were the norm

Were they? First-wave feminists made serious headway in challenging marriage norms as early as the 1850s/60s. The language of "soulmate" comes from this period, and was Spiritualist way of rationalizing divorce from your partner for someone you truly loved.