celtain

Housing density becomes a problem above a certain level if everyone expects to use a car. Parking and traffic become annoying if not crippling, so communities widely support and enact bans on denser residential development.

Restricting supply like this can be fine if demand doesn't grow, but it can be a huge problem for housing affordability if your local economy is booming.

How does a patriarchal culture contribute to lower fertility rates? If anything I would expect the opposite effect.

I often see drivers arguing that not only is it ok to speed, but that drivers who obey the speed limit are actually doing something wrong!

I don't think I've ever heard of a cyclist getting mad at another cyclist for stopping at a red light. The propensity to violate traffic laws seems to be higher among drivers than cyclists.

>A helmet requirement is wholly incompatible with the role of cycling in NL. You hop on a bike anywhere, regardless of what you're wearing.

I don't really understand this. I keep my helmet clipped to my handlebars, so if I have my bike, I have my helmet. Is it really so much of an inconvenience?

I'm sympathetic to the overall anti-helmet-requirement position, even seemingly trivial concerns like "it messes up my hair" sound legitimate to me. The convenience argument in particular just never made much sense to me though.

I don't know about policy consequences, but one political hurdle is that this would be attacked as "welfare for the rich" or something along those lines, since new construction is generally more expensive than existing units.

There was never a scientific consensus that there was a coming ice age. There were already more papers being published about global warming than about global cooling throughout the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

You need someone with vision who enforces strict adherence to that vision. I'm not convinced you have to be a jerk to do that though.

Well, that's part of the solution. The other part of the solution is on the supply side: finding ways to reduce prices through improved productivity, trade, removing unnecessary regulations, fostering competitive markets, etc.

Putting people in prison is a means to an end, not a goal itself. If anything, preventing violence without locking anyone up is even better than preventing it by keeping potential perpetrators under armed guard.

Maybe on a longer time horizon it won't work as well, but it's already been 20 years since 9/11.

Most of the usecases mentioned in this thread wouldn't suffer if the in-app browser had to be invoked with a whitelist of approved domains/urls. Perhaps apps could request permission to run an unrestricted in-app browser, and that could be used to facilitate parental controls.

As an aside, is giving parents the option to disable in-app browsers removing a capability or adding one?

We have seen unemployment fall slightly below 2019 levels, but the more significant result of greater demand stimulation would have been reaching those levels of unemployment much faster, rather than taking a decade to recover from the great recession.

I'm far from a frequent user of either, but Instagram and especially WhatsApp don't seem to have suffered terribly under Facebook. Instagram has obviously changed, but it would have changed as an independent app too. What's particularly "Facebooky" about its evolution?

WhatsApp feels exactly the same to me. Do I just have a short memory?

"Break the ice" was coined by Shakespeare, but the vast majority of people who use the phrase probably didn't read that play.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who have used the "press F" meme without knowing the original context too.

Isn't this exactly why you should use stacked PRs? That's what it looks like when I break a big piece of work into smaller pieces.

What's the alternative anyway? If you don't want me writing 2500 lines of code in one area, would you rather I write 10 250 line PRs in 10 different parts of the codebase instead? Is that supposed to be easier to review?

Or is the rule just "don't write a lot of code in any short period of time"?

>Unless you have zero access to point sources, point source capture will always be more "Environmentally Friendly" than atmospheric carbon capture.

Ideally we'll get to a point where every CO2 point source either stops being a point source, already has a mechanism for capturing the emissions, or can't economically accommodate carbon capture for some other reason (airplanes, probably).

At that point we might still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere. We'd have to figure out some way to get it out, whether that's by manufacturing hydrocarbons, planting trees, something else, or all of the above.

The government should tax/regulate things that have negative externalities, and the greater the externality, the harsher the restrictions should be.

Subsidizing smaller cars is a bad idea because they still have negative externalities, just less so. The government shouldn't be favoring driving a small car over walking, but that's exactly what a small (or electric) car subsidy does.

The reason we subsidize EVs instead of taxing gas-powered cars is because the latter is politically unpopular, not because the former is a better designed policy.

I know some libertarians are more extreme than others, but I thought it was generally still agreed that the government has a role to play in stopping people from killing other people.

I don't disagree that schools are completely artificial environments. However what matters is that they're able to teach skills that are necessary in most real-world environments.

It's unsurprising that a teacher-student ratio around 1:1 could yield incredible academic results. If that so often comes at the cost of skills necessary to operate in the vast majority of real world environments though, it's kind of useless.

I don't understand why we need to specifically sanction tax havens. Unless rich people are making money in the tax havens themselves (in which case they're not just tax havens), we can just levy all the taxes we want before the money leaves our own borders.

I'm not trying to criticize you, car dependence isn't your fault, but it would be nice if somebody with "incredibly bad eyes" wasn't forced to operate a piece of heavy machinery just to get around in the first place.

If regular people are allowed to share media with the world, and some kinds of content remain illegal, content moderation will need to exist.

Unless you're suggesting that we return to an era in which the only way to publish content is with the approval of someone like a newspaper editor or book publisher, these jobs will need to be done.

It's definitely not as common as deja vu.

The first of my friends to switch companies recently may have had another reason, but the rest switched when they heard how much he was making at his new job.

It's pretty easy for a childless adult who works downtown and can afford to live in one of the more central neighborhoods of Seattle, and still workable in certain neighborhoods further out that have walkable amenities and good transit connections. If you're willing and able to get occasional rental cars/ride shares then it's absolutely trivial.

It's not easy for a lot of other people though. Rent in those neighborhoods is too expensive for most, and while you can take kids around by transit or by bike (and I certainly encourage people to do that when it's convenient), you'd have to be a pretty dedicated urbanist to do that for all your trips.

You can upload your own music to YouTube music, and the music I had previously uploaded to Google music was migrated over at some point (but I think there were manual steps involved, which may no longer be available).

That's certainly an interesting perspective. To help me understand your viewpoint, do you think unimproved land should be free in general?

If a parking spot is paved, does it become more reasonable to charge for it?

Parking isn't "naturally free". You're using a scarce resource, land, which typically isn't given away for free in a capitalist system.

Parking spots are often small enough, used for short enough periods of time, or in places with low enough land prices that it's not worth charging for them, but people often continue to insist that parking should be free even when those descriptions no longer apply.

I think you overestimate the share of Americans who live in rural communities. If the only people driving into developed areas were coming from that far afield, managing traffic and parking would be trivial problems.

I generally prefer to walk by a lane of parked cars than walk so close to a lane of moving car traffic.

An extra-wide sidewalk with trees and other decoration or a well-protected bike lane can provide a similar benefit, but parking isn't the worst option.