dbatten

"Whole Foods did not respond to several requests for comment on this story."

You can just as easily paint this in a pragmatic light, rather than a sinister one. "We're going to clear some forest here where it's in our way, and to compensate, we're going to plant some additional forests elsewhere where they're more convenient" is very different from "we're going to spin up a forest-planting project so nobody notices we're cutting down trees elsewhere."

Interesting... looks like a lot of countries with parliamentary systems use proportional instead of geographic representation... but not the UK or Canada. Today I learned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Li...

Is it? I'm admittedly fairly ignorant on how other countries run their election systems, but... geographic representation seems uncommon (lots of parliamentary systems) and sophisticated solutions to drawing districts within countries that have geographic representation would have to be even more rare.

Data Scientist with a Master of Public Administration degree here (don't ask). My proposal for solving this has always been to frame it as an optimization problem.

You have a certain number of census tracts (essentially, neighborhoods) with known populations and geographic areas. You know you need to divide the state into X congressional districts.

You should simply assign census tracts to districts such that 1) you end up with X districts, 2) each district's total population is within a Y% tolerance of state population / X, 3) you minimize the average of the lengths of the district borders (to force maximum geographic compactness).

Given available data from the Census, some mucking around in PostGIS or ESRI, and a state-of-the-art commercial solver like Gurobi, there's absolutely no reason this couldn't be done.

It'd also be trivial to add on requirements for balancing demographics or political affiliation within certain tolerances as well.

Swinging back on this, because I find this stuff interesting.

I don't necessarily disagree with anything you say here. But I'm still not sure it gets at the crux of my question.

If local control of land use systematically creates problems for people that don't have the privilege of living in the jurisdiction in question, maybe it's time to put control of land use or certain aspects of land use in the hands of regional counsels of government (much like Metropolitan Planning Organizations plan for transportation needs at a metro-area level, rather than a city level). I think that lets you start solving not only the problem in question in the article, but all sorts of other problems that you address. (Maybe this could work at the State level too, but I think that's too broad. People in San Jose certainly have some interest in San Francisco land use... but do people in Sacramento? Not much.)

But that's very different from leaving land use in the hands of city governments, then overriding them on individual issues when you don't like what they're doing. Right?

I think part of my thinking on this is shaped from living in NC, and watching the insanity that was HB2 (which you likely heard of, if you're up on the news). Basically, Charlotte raises minimum wage and adds some protections for LGBT folks, state legislatures doesn't like it, and so passes a law preventing local governments from being able to set the minimum wage in their area, or grant rights/protections beyond what's granted by the state. The fallout was absolute insanity for, like, a year.

All of that to say - if you want State government overriding local government rights, you have to be prepared for the day when the State legislature is doing something you don't like, and the local government is doing something you do. Right?

In the end, like I said before, I think this policy is good, but I think there's better ways to go about it. Regional counsels of government having more authority over land use seems like a great start to me. Actually, I'd be interested to know if somebody's proposed that.

Overall, this seems like a good policy to me.

However, I'm not sure I like the means used to achieve it. Do we really want to set a precedent where the state government comes in and overrides local regulations about things like zoning which are usually purely the responsibility of the local governments?

I'm not necessarily saying I don't like this either... just thinking through the implications of living in a federal system. You want people to have maximum voice in the things that affect the places where they live, but you also don't want those people to abuse the privilege with NIMBY policies.

While undoubtedly tragedies in their own right, Ukraine, Iraq, etc. are tiny conflicts in comparison to major industrialized economies making total war on each other in the years before nukes existed.

By the most liberal estimates, the Iraq war killed 1 million. World War 2 killed 70 million easy.

I'd personally suggest some low white noise for this purpose. Used all the time in offices already.

It's amazing that Google invests so many resources in making a feature like this so awesome, but then they don't have the sense to realize that nobody wants trees rendered as awful looking 3d blobs when they switch to satellite view. Just show me the freaking photo. (I know, lite mode, but the default Google has chosen is atrocious.)

People (myself included) seem to have an inordinate fascination with tunnels. I mean, there's a fascination with things that are dilapidated/old, and a fascination with places you're not allowed to go. But tunnels in particular take it to an even higher level.

I wonder what it is about us that makes that the case?

What makes this really stupid is that Mozilla is compromising user trust for what is undoubtedly a tiny payment from Mr. Robot. At least Google and friends are the wealthiest companies the world has ever seen as a result of their data shenanigans...

Really? I can't speak for the country as a whole, but in my area (Raleigh/Durham, NC) the major healthcare providers have been battling each other for years over when, where, and what types of new hospitals they can open. These laws have been and continue to be central to the fight.

Just a few days ago: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article188329569.h...

Historically that's kind of true, but we also count Japan, South Korea, and several Arabic-speaking countries (e.g., Kuwait) among our closest allies...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_non-NATO_ally

Serious question: what is HTBQ+?

Googling doesn't seem to turn anything up.

What happens when you refuse to do any repairs/upkeep and the house goes to pot over 10 years? What happens when you don't maintain insurance coverage and you burn it down? Etc.

I agree with almost all of your examples... except for 3d. While almost everybody I know would say they prefer seeing a movie on a big screen (even though the phone/tablet is sometimes more convenient), I don't know _anybody_ that prefers 3d movies. They're utter garbage.

I think the argument is stronger than that. It's not that tax avoidance is morally justified, it's that corporations have a fiduciary responsibility as stewards of their shareholders' investment to maximize the return on that investment (within the bounds of what the law allows). That includes reducing costs and, yes, that includes reducing tax burden.

Tax avoidance within the bounds of the law is not just morally justified - it's morally required.

(For the record, I think tax avoidance is a major problem, especially because large corporations end up being the only ones who can afford the accountants, lawyers, and international subsidiaries to facilitate it. Small business ends up getting shafted. But the way to solve it isn't to whine about Apple doing what Apple is supposed to do. The fix is to reform the tax code.)

These "articles" with embedded scroll-hijacking garbage have got to stop.

I really wanted to read about slot machines but I'm not suffering through that.

Does this need to be a new hn flag? This is the second of these today.

Does HN have any domain experts that can comment on how reliable this research is?

I got super excited about the Queen Nefertiti / King Tut secret chamber theory a year or two back (which used similar methods, it seemed), and was really disappointed when it turned out to be all wrong...

Your description makes it seem more nefarious than it is.

This guy runs a blog about companies that he thinks are over-valued, and he shorts their stock. He's transparent about all of this. His readers / investors / the public know that he's likely short these stocks and that he makes a business of both using this investment strategy and blogging about it. They follow his advice at their own risk, with all of the information fully available.

There's a HUGE difference between that and getting into a position that you don't disclose, manipulating a media outlet into running coverage that appears objective but which is actually designed to do nothing but help your position, and then cashing out.

Serious question: Is this even actually a thing that happens?

I mean, obviously, it stands to reason that the right actor with the right investment portfolio and control of the right media outlets could pull something like this off, but it seems that there are very, very few people/companies in that position.

In fact, the Jeff Bezos / WaPo / Amazon nexus is perhaps the only example I can think of where this sort of thing is even possible, let alone carried out.

Do you have examples? I'd genuinely love to learn.

I really wish the Census would publish more normalized data sources. For example, the American Community Survey summary file is effectively a giant table with thousands of rows (representing different geographies) and thousands of columns (representing different statistics that have been calculated for those geographies). The columns just have an ID and a name that tells you what's in there, but it will be something like "median income for black or african american women with a master's degree." If you want that data point, you basically have to go searching through a bunch of docs (or one of their horrendous online interfaces) to find out the ID of the column.

Instead, I'd love to have a set of tables... in each one, you'd have a geography column and then, using my above example, a race column, a gender column, an educational attainment column and a median income column. Then you could easily load that data to a database and run a SELECT query over the information to get what you need.

Heck, I'd even settle for metadata that was good enough to enable me to construct this stuff myself. For example, for each column ID, tell me what variables were used to construct it and what their values were equal to. Unfortunately I've contacted the Census Bureau and they've told me such a thing doesn't exist.

This list seems very Western. Are there Eastern developments that should be added?

You mean, with a coupon book good for 2 free credit reports... except with ridiculous fine print that will prevent 99% of people from using said coupons...

This is the genius of small-claims court. Equifax has to either send a representative (which would cost them more than $1000), or they lose by default. You don't actually have to prove anything.

This happened to me with Expedia. They advertised a lower rate on a different room at the hotel I was looking at... Didn't catch until after I checked out that the advertisement was for a different day than my search results. (Because obviously I'm just as happy to stay at a random hotel just off the interstate in rural Ohio a week after my trip as during it?)

Thankfully, Expedia has good customer service and fixed things for me, even though it was not a cancelable reservation.

The thornier ethical/political problems surround the embryos that are discarded... A living organism with human parents is, at least in some sense, a human. To "discard" one on the basis of a disability while giving another a chance to live can be construed as a philosophical cousin to some of the most dangerous forms of discrimination.

Especially in America, where the right to life movement still holds a lot of political and religious/cultural sway, this will be an especially hard sell...

The uncomfortable conclusion I've come to recently: the world (and especially the US) has come to terms with a nuclear-armed North Korea being the least bad option in this whole ordeal. Sure, we still need to pass sanctions and throw around words like "unacceptable" a lot for PR purposes. But we've ultimately accepted that there's nothing we can do to stop Kim from getting nukes that doesn't involve laying waste to most of the Korean peninsula, a massive refugee crisis, and the potential that the conflict will already go nuclear.

I see the logic if you have to live in, say, the New York City region... But the fact is, you don't.

I live in a suburb of a moderate-sized southern city and work as a data scientist at a technology company just outside of downtown. The pay is good, the commute is 15 minutes one-way (pretty much 100% of the time, too), the cost of living is phenomenal, and I'm within walking distance of all the shopping, eating, mountain biking, hiking, and boating I could want to do in an average week.

I have no idea why folks seem to think NYC and the Bay Area are the only places you can possibly live...