bobthepanda

Fundamentally, anything going to a second or third party puts you at risk of being ensnared by mandatory reporting laws, whether that is a human or a corporate entity. Loose lips sink ships.

I mean really, we do know what a solution to this is; the EU caps interchange fees, without much harm to the fraud settlement part of the network. Just the crazy points programs like Amex Platinum go away.

If it worked with apple pay debit, that would be a nice compromise. I wonder what the fees are there.

There is already a deep recession in the creative industry in LA, film jobs are down by a third since 2022. They’re not negotiating from a position of strength

I mean, this is also just kind of how mandatory reporting works.

If you tell a teacher, a therapist or a priest that you are going to kill somebody, in many states they do actually have to report that and can be held liable for the resulting crime if they do not.

Every time we have a mass shooting in the US it inevitably comes up that they wrote it down or told somebody and then the next logical question becomes “how could we have stopped a mass casualty event?”

I mean we are talking about the successor state to the one that botched the Chernobyl response, it's not hard to imagine a repeat

I think also it is the mythos of the individual hacker. You never see anyone threatening to quit and join a furniture factory. And most dissatisfaction comes from the compromises you have to make for business reasons; everyone has the tech debt they don’t like that they were forced to walk away from.

Even doing a webapp it is fairly important, I have seen a lot of horribly optimized DOM tree traversal tank things.

No, out of 2007 we had stuff like negative interest rates and MMT and helicopter money.

Well also at some point QE would have to unwind, and no one had ever attempted an unwinding of such loose balance sheets before

Normal economic policy hasn’t really been true since the 2007 financial crisis. Rates were kept at historically low rates because growth was anemic and everyone had seen Japan fail to pump up its economy. To some degree there was also thinking that countries in this situation should provoke inflation to get the growth flywheel growing again; at least the fixes to inflation are known vs deflation.

Well, it turns out that we did it with the COVID economic shocks, and for a while there was talk of a “soft landing” but that’s all but disappeared from the conversation.

also, the part that is making lenders and such nervous is that they like to be paid on time on a schedule, and it's unclear how they will keep doing so without growing an increasingly large amount of debt.

One of these companies wanted an IPO valuing them at over $50B. To put in perspective what kind of crazy number that is, the entirety of Visa raised a valuation of $34B; and this company's parent, Softbank, had an IPO valuation of $64B.

This just doesn't pass the smell test.

I mean really we need to address the root cause which is that OpenAI, even with what is by all accounts massively negligent, will face little to no repercussions from the event; definitely not under current regulators, and probably not anything satisfactory through the legal system.

Compare this to, say, Boeing and the 737MAX fiasco; from the outside looking in, Silicon Valley has been pretty cavalier about liability and negligence, and the rest of the US is fast losing patience with that fact.

Generally speaking, there aren’t enough.

If you wanted to find a shelter bed for every single person on the street in a major city like San Francisco right now, that’s not possible. And that’s just the physical space, not even the medical staff or caseworkers you would want to handle those. And you need those in jail too, because corrections officers can’t and don’t want to manage mental health episodes.

Californian jails were at 200%+ capacity as recently as ten years ago until courts ordered that constituted cruel and inhumane punishment. Now most counties are around max capacity.

In some states like Washington, mental health is so under capacity that even the willing do not have spaces to be admitted into, even accounting for the people whose insurance would pay for something like that.

Well yes, and also we don’t currently operate enough beds to put people into on account of those high costs.

I say this because this country has a history of dismantling systems and then not paying for replacements.

We did it with state institutions, which were supposed to be replaced by community mental health centers but that never happened. And then we did it with jail overcrowding reduction, where we didn’t set up adequate recidivism reduction programs.

Before the recent pivot to tough on crime, a lot of sentencing reform was started by Republican led states, simply because jail costs a lot of money.

The problem is to stop spending money we need to spend some money to set up something like a mental institution.

Prison, which was being used for that purpose, costs California $127k a year https://www.lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost

Just the bed at a Californian state hospital for mental health treatment costs at minimum $150k+ a year. https://www.dsh.ca.gov/Hospitals/

And both systems are already overcapacity

The problem is that we’ve wound up in an unhappy place due to the weird perverse incentives of ideology. Taking homeless people off the street, whether to a hospital or jail, costs a lot of money; so we lack something to do in a climate where a good chunk of the populace is rabidly against paying more money for anything.

The problem is that a core group of modernists kept doggedly insisting on it after it was proven to not work.

For example, we know now that pedestrian skyways only work in limited contexts and have plenty of downsides; or that a large, concrete windswept plaza is pretty to look at but pretty antisocial and unusable space, and yet you still see this kind of thing in the latest from say Zaha Hadid et al.

It’s why a next wave of architects and planners have coined terms like “bird-shit architecture” that only looks good completely devoid of context and landed from the sky.

Modernist architecture certainly has its fair share of misfires, particularly where the postwar architects were attempting social engineering to be “cleaner” or more “rational.” The schools were often teaching ideals based in no empirical evidence.

Also there is survivorship bias.

The olden times were no stranger to slapdash, poor quality construction, but most of it has been demolished either due to having low perceived value or due to not lasting as long and people not doing the necessary lifecycle replacements.

But how would you enforce that, particularly against bad actors in countries that care less about enforcing laws and norms?

Spam calls are still a massive scourge even with Caller ID, SHAKE/STIR, and not for lack of trying.

This is also solvable through regulation though.

For example, NYC now requires all sold e bikes to be UL certified because of too many apartment lithium battery fires.

IIRC this dilemma was one of the things that was driving the Google antitrust case that unfortunately will not result in divorcing search from ads.

Tbh as someone who does not drive or own a car regularly, I get by renting those U Haul vans (not trucks). It’s not expensive and it’s a hell of a lot more useful than a truck for doing the random heavy odd job.

I think people have now become extremely wary of VC, startup and Silicon Valley because at some point there was a boiling frog shift from helping people and enabling new things to viciously eating anyone not participating.

The vast majority of pickups are not actually used for workmen like purposes.

In fact, as carmakers have started pivoting more towards selling them to affluent suburban households, the usable cargo volume has decreased over time despite increasing size.

it also could be one of those things where in this specific context or dialect of English, plasma was generalized away from the term strictly being a technology to a generic term for that general shape and form factor.

after all none of us have used floppies to save for over a decade or two at this point.

Even that is a bit of an advanced step.

We didn’t have paved roads or railroads until relatively recently, and so a good chunk of goods were being damaged on rickety horse drawn wagons on bumpy, muddy dirt roads.