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Tiktaalik

7,619 karma · joined April 3, 2009

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Tiktaalik··on The Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2B into the Midterms
What other countries do is cap the max an individual can donate at like $1500 or something. Works fine.

I don't know why this wouldn't be reasonable for the USA.

Tiktaalik··on I went to Mexico to test-drive the cars Americans can’t buy
We're headed to a sort of inverse Cold War where one side is driving BMWs and the other is terrible Ladas. This time, the USA is the one with the walls up protecting the lousy ICE product.
Tiktaalik··on Lula wins election after final votes tallied
No electoral method is perfect and there are problems with Instant runoff ranked ballots. Look up "Favourite Betrayal" as a problem where ranking your most favourite incorrectly can accidentally result in your least favourite winning.

Of course just because there are technically flaws, doesn't mean it's not an improvement over the status quo.

Instant Runoff Ranked ballots are particularly well suited for electing a single position like a Mayor or President. Given that it's still a majoritarian system like First Pass the Post, it's a much more questionable system to use for other things like electing a parliament.

Tiktaalik··on Butlerian Jihad
Yep. They were concerned about working conditions. For any tech worker that has ever moaned about return to office: Congrats you're a luddite.
Tiktaalik··on Waymo in Toronto
- frees up people to do more important things than drive you around.

- can play your own weird free jazz via Spotify.

- obeys traffic rules

Tiktaalik··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
They used to do this in the early games industry in Japan lol.
Tiktaalik··on Publishers Killed the Paperback, Then Blamed Readers
Wild note here that Costco stopped selling books ?!?!

I remember going shopping with my Mom at Costco and the book section was like the highlight!

Tiktaalik··on Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search
This would be a plausible explanation tho I've been told that cats don't move their tail that way when they're in heat. It doesn't go up but rather sideways.

So maybe it's that but maybe it's something else.

Tiktaalik··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
you get rich assholes that have an ability to casually leave so aren't really invested in the country.
Tiktaalik··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
yeah a misguided fixed pie scarcity mindset
Tiktaalik··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
My ancestors were dirt farmers with absolutely nothing despite their health and work ethic that moved here in the 1930s. Do we think Canada is better than then?

We really, really under value the impact of low income, low education immigrants imo.

Eg. The railway that created this country was built by low income Chinese workers that probably didn't even speak English.

Canada doesn't exist without the effort of low income, low education people.

Tiktaalik··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
People criticize everything all the time. Why wouldn't people?

I mean should we shut down hacker news? the whole point is discussing.

Tiktaalik··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
yea really. The reality is that people who want to move to Japan, learn Japanese, devote their life to this are probably very interested in Japanese culture. There is no risk to Japanese culture from these people.

It's absolutely more likely that the very wealthy that aren't taking as many risks in moving to Japan are not going to care about Japanese culture.

Tiktaalik··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
you're on a discussion forum. The point is to discuss things. Why are you being such a scold about what we're allowed to talk about.
Tiktaalik··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
Carbon tax was great for me. I made money. Maybe you should have used less carbon.
Tiktaalik··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
It's deeply weird how little interest there seems to be the inquiry of why Georgism failed in the past despite being an enormously popular political movement. It was tried. And abandoned. Investigating that history would yield a lot more compelling information than musing about the hypotheticals of what would happen if it was implemented now.
Tiktaalik··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
Well I'm speaking from first hand experience knowing working people who live in such situations. Their existence is so precarious that a change in housing situation is indeed existential. So even if there are some disingenuous tenancy orgs out there, it doesn't change the reality that this is a real problem.

> They are nearly 100% funded by wealth foundations that have exactly the same motivations as Marc Andreesen, and the people carrying out the wishes of the wealthy foundations are merely woke-washing really bad behavior.These "tenant" groups fight the types of change that would redevelop wealthy areas, precisely because of their funding sources, and they do it just as hard if not harder than stopping housing going up in other areas.

Certainly not the case in my jurisdiction of Vancouver, where such political groups (eg. COPE) have explicitly advocated for apartment development in the wealthiest areas of the city. Maybe this is the case somewhere but a big [citation needed] here. If there are somewhere tenant advocacy orgs that aren't in favour of turning low density detached homes into apartments for workers that's certainly not one I recognize.

> If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!

Yes this is the point of my last comment. The solution is to increase the amount of people who have their forever home. The most equitable way to do that is to "destroy" the forever homes of the very rich for whom that is really no big disruptive deal, not to destroy the forever homes of the poor for whom it would be incredibly existentially disruptive. It is not "greedy" for people to want to keep their toehold on their long term home. To be clear the stakes here are not simply moving somewhere else but being priced out of the city entirely.

Tiktaalik··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
Tenant advocates recognize that eviction is an existential threat to their way of life and so understandably they are fighting for their short term future. I disagree with their efforts in the long term, but I understand why they'd do what they're doing.

In contrast when you have enormously wealthy people like Marc Andreessen fighting against higher density zoning there is no such excuse and it's pure greed. Nothing could actually be an existential disruption to the wealthy in the same way. There is no reason to listen to the rich like Andreessen at all.

The equitable thing would be to focus on redeveloping wealthy homeowner areas and limit redevelopment in areas occupied by poor renters, but somehow that option never seems to be on the table. Only the reverse.

Tiktaalik··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
This is a solved problem in other jurisdictions. Effectively you can just allow seniors to defer their property taxes at low interest rates and it becomes a liability on the house when it is transferred on death.
Tiktaalik··on The first new cat species discovered in 100 years
wait where in Canada do they don't do pspspsps?

(is there a francophone different one?)

Tiktaalik··on Why Are There Statues of Beavers on Top of This Oxford Street Shop?
That's a good question. The British were definitely engaging in a very, very lucrative trade in sea otter pelts from the NW Coast of British Columbia, trading direct to Macau, and the Boston Men/USA got in on that as well over time.

Plausibly some agency (Hudson Bay company?) had a monopoly on beaver trade and this did not apply to sea otter, or maybe the story isn't quite right or there were other economic reasons why beavers to Asia as a concept wasn't exploited.

Tiktaalik··on Introduction to Data-Oriented Design [pdf]
As I recall the reason for managing blocks of data this way was memory cache efficiency.
Tiktaalik··on Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040
First Nations have treaties with Canada with constitutionally protected land use rights that have implications beyond tiny reserves. Rights to hunt and fish can be implicated by heavy industrial land use which compels a duty to consult. Doesn't mean that First Nations can veto a project, but also doesn't mean that all this can be ignored.

All of this is more complex in British Columbia where in many places treaties were never signed and so the land is unceded and under unresolved land claim.

Tiktaalik··on Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
There's also the tooling. Game teams have artists and designers where baroque command line incantations are headwinds to their workflow pace.

For the longest time Git tools were really poor. In recent years there's a few ok ones, like Git Fork, though I wouldn't know if those tools scale to the level of a AAA team size repo and not fall over.

Tiktaalik··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
You generally see this sort of thing in the games industry when a publisher gives a developer a bunch of money to make a game but then the developer screws up and runs out of money. Publisher buys them to try to recoup their investment.

Is Cursor dying?

Tiktaalik··on How to earn a billion dollars
It isn’t just rent seeking, it is regulation to try to compensate for the negative externalities of a private ride hail system (ie. Induced traffic).

Part of the origin story of taxi regulation is the fact that in the early 20th century unregulated cabs caused an explosion in traffic congestion. People complained and so the amount of cabs was limited. An example of the tragedy of the commons.

I expect that eventually we will see the same thing with Waymo etc but we’ll see.

Tiktaalik··on Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22
I think there's a huge bias toward this "easy money" yea. I mean the Canadian government is in a bind with these tariff issues and what do they reflexively reach for? Pump more oil and gas. It's the easy fast, simple solution to problems and so every government returns to this well to the detriment of other industries that don't receive the same attention.
Tiktaalik··on Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22
The wild thing is that Canada is absolutely not alone in having this sort of insanely restrictive land use regulatory environment, as you hear similar stories from the UK (see: Clarkson's Farm) and even the USA (see: restrictive SF zoning). So the question for me is how the USA and other countries with similar regulatory regimes do well in spite of these things.

With the USA a possible answer is that the scale and diversity of the market adds more competition (ie. low regulatory areas) that Canada doesn't have.

Or it's possible that all these countries have awful zoning but while this is awful the factors that make tech a success in the USA are unrelated and dominate this (eg. unmatched wealth and financing)

Tiktaalik··on Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22
Describes Canada too!
Tiktaalik··on Meta Reassigns 7k Employees to Focus on A.I
They should just return cash to shareholders if they can't think of anything better to do, but I guess Zuck has too many shares and no one can force him to do this and so we have to watch him light money on fire as he chases some gimmick that will take Meta to the next level.
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