1,071 karma · joined March 5, 2012
401(k)s by design can't extract funding as future liabilities. Are there proposals for ways to do this for pensions? I know there are pushes to "fully-fund" them, but the temptation to use overly optimistic projections seems like it will never really go away.
Keeping track of which cell tower your phone is closest to is fundamental to cellular technology. You can't make or receive calls unless Verizon, T-Mobile, or whichever carrier you have knows which cell to communicate with you through. Regardless of whether Google is tracking this, your carrier certainly is, and with a warrant (or a national security letter), law enforcement can definitely access this data. If you're worried about hackers, I can guarantee you Google protects this data more securely than your carrier does.
Also, a major reason costs of construction and maintenance on public transportation are so high is that they have to do it in a way that minimizes the disruption to car traffic. Yes roads are cheaper to build than subways, but if they could shut down a whole street and build light rail at surface grade it would be a lot cheaper (which is why streetcars and cablecars were ubiquitous a century ago). Or if they could shut down 4th street for a year, the Central Subway would be done already.
Obviously it's too late for any change to the electoral college to affect this election. But we could know this in the future. You make what you measure and we're measuring the wrong thing.
Agreed. For most of us who wish to change or abolish the electoral college, the fact that people feel (mostly accurately) that their vote doesn't matter, and therefore don't participate in the electoral process, is the primary problem we would like to address.
This seems good though.
In fact one of the explicitly listed common bad behaviors is abusing their position with the company:
> the use of authoritative language, sometimes using their authority as a Riot employee to intimidate or threaten others
There's no reason to think this shouldn't be a fireable offense, especially if there's a pattern of this kind of behavior.
Deciding what housing can be built should not be like a game of Scattergories, where we all just argue about whether or not something is okay after the fact.
Because the way it stands, only projects with high rate of return will be built--ie luxury housing. A 10% rate of return on investment might be okay for a project that takes one year, but if it drags on to 4 years, that's barely beating inflation. Time is money, and our process makes our housing more expensive.
There will be an environmental impact, but it will be from hundreds of millions of humans not getting malaria and climbing their way out of property, not from the lack of mosquitoes in the ecosystem. It's still a significant problem, but our current solution of "let all the poor people die" is not a good one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax
Errata: I'll need a research team and a year and a half.
On a macro level, society benefits from globalization, but on a micro level, there are often very high personal costs. If you have spent all of your life developing skills in one area, and that suddenly falls apart, it's going to be very difficult to drop everything and start over.
As a society, we have the capability to use some of the gains to smooth out the costs for the people that lose out here, whether it's through basic income and welfare, or education and retraining.