erispoe

100 years ago most households had one 'breadwinner', and this breadwinner had a job for life. With the advent of the 2 working adults households, and increase in job mobility, having access to a large pool of potential employment is crucial for many.

If I live in San Francisco or New Work, my spouse can easily get a job. If I want to change jobs, I can easily do so without putting my life upside down. This what a large, diverse job market does. Plus a lot of people value urban amenities (i.e. the ability to walk 2minutes to your favorite café...)

Just because you say it's "socially untenable forced immigration" does not make it so. You have no evidence that it is, indeed, untenable. Rants from your "expat friends" are not evidence, they are anecdotes.

Germany has been accepting much more immigrant refugees than other European countries, out of moral duty but also out of economic interest. Germany has had pro-immigration programs for years before that, especially after the great recession, because the country has a deficit of young working-age people to contribute to their economy.

Some refugees have committed crimes and offenses, as it is likely to happen from any large group of people. I have yet to see any evidence that they do it in higher proportion that european-born population.

You can take any anecdote and turn it into fear-mongering. Before we had refugees, romani people were the target of choice, before that, south-europeans. Nationalists have always found a convenient scapegoat.

And by the way, there is no evidence that immigration, even mass choc-wave immigration, has adverse effects on the economy of a country.

Have you looked at their programs? They're not proposing any crackdown on immigration.

It is true that populist parties are on the rise. However, both in France and in Germany, favorites for this year election are on the center-left (Emmanuel Macron and Martin Schultz, respectively) and very firmly in favor of more EU integration. The rise of nationalist parties doesn't necessarily mean that people are becoming more nationalist overall.

You're summarizing the debate between "originalism" and "pragmatism" theories of judicial interpretation. The former looks at what people supposedly intended and confines the meaning of the text to that. It's the weapon of choice of conservative justices (because of course, the Founding Fathers couldn't intend to give marriage equality). The latter looks at what the text does, in today's context. It's the approach preferred by progressives because it accounts for how the effects of a text can change with time (and society).

In general I would agree with you, you oughta look at what a legislation does in practice. But here, because there is a sense of urgency (sending a gay refugee back to Somalia, for instance, is akin to signing their death warrant) and because the executive order hasn't been around for a while, I think it's ok to refer to what the administration intended the order to do. Because we don't have a lot of field evidence. As we see concrete evidence for the effects of a legislation, I think you're right and the weight of what it was theoretically intended should decrease pretty quickly (and it usually does).

The administration also didn't present to the court any sort of evidence supporting the claim that it would prevent terrorism.

Yet it was sold as a Muslim ban by the administration, which is a major reason for San Francisco's federal appeal court to suspend it. The fact that it's not an effective Muslim ban is a different question.

Does anybody really believe that, though? It's something different to say that we have large reserves of productivity to feed both economic and demographic growth for the foreseeable future, taking into account the natural slowdowns that advanced development bring (demographic transition...) and to to say that resources are literally infinite. I dont think anyone believes the latter, and it's a little of a strawman argument.

Context matters. It matters to be on the morally wrong side when society is at a decision point. By and large, we don't judge romans because they practiced slavery. We judge people who have chosen to defend slavery when it was not a moral consensus anymore and on the verge of abolition. Plenty of slave owners have their names on university buildings, but they never went to war to defend it.

These are people with double citizenship.

In that case there's plenty of competition to take Zenefit's business.

Do you have a source for your claim of "low quality of treatment"?

The key here is "who is supported by the dominant political party". The tea party gained so much clout because they got organized to contest internal elections and primaries inside the GOP.

It's much more efficient to leverage the existing party infrastructure than to run as a solo independent or try to create a 3rd party.

Party elections (for instance, county committee elections) draw much less turnout and can be swayed much more easily by an organized group.

I wouldn't project your preferences onto everyone. For instance, I vastly prefer being able to do stuff on my phone, even standing in a crowded bus, to driving behind the wheel not being able to do anything.

You're right. I mixed up my stats. Most of the new households come in these cities without owning a car.

Sources: http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/08/15/car-free-households-are... https://ggwash.org/view/35905/88-of-new-dc-households-are-ca... http://www.betterinstitutions.com/blog/2013/07/almost-all-of...

No. Because increased density goes with less reliance on individual cars. The majority of people (by far) in NY or SF don't have a car already. Traffic is not bad in the densest cities of the western world, because we have much more efficient ways of moving people around: public transit.

But you also need density to sustain public transit. So you have sour spot where there's not enough density to have good public transit, but enough to create bad traffic.

Edit: see below, it's actually the majority of new households that don't have a car in many large American cities, except for NYC, in majority car-free.

That's a possibility. I'm not sure it's true. Both Uber and Lyft have good waiting times right now. The hypothesis that they will replace privately owned cars supposes that the market will grow immensely.

Waiting time is a function of: number of cars, size of the city, number of customers (to ignore congestion for now...) To have a good start as a new entrant, it's just a property of the size of the city. Then, you need to grow your fleet with your number of customers to keep waiting time constant. That number of cars to start with, the barrier to entry, is a tiny portion of what you need to add to keep up with demand.

If you don't have to compete with drivers, with autonomous cars, it's not that hard to meet and start a price war.

Again, I don't see how Uber will avoid being squeezed out of their margins the way airlines are. It's not cheap to start an airline, yet many people have done it. And all you need is 3 competitors to drive prices, and margins, down.

Yes but how much are you ready to pay to divide your waiting time from 3min to 1min?

Airlines used to collude on price, too.

Network effects don't accumulate to a natural monopoly in this case. Yes you need a fleet large enough to get to a sweet price / waiting time optimum, but each new car in your fleet has a diminishing marginal effect.

You could say exactly the same for airlines: there's network effect. Each new plane allows your to fly more rotations, have more frequent lines, open new routes... The reality is that most people take decisions based on price.

We know most people are pretty bad at valuing their time, and even so, waiting a minute more for a cheaper service is something people will do for sure. As long as you're below an acceptable waiting time for your car, you can compete on price.

I'm curious about how Uber will avoid being a commodity just like airlines are.

That will the Supreme Court to decide. Its decision is expected on Jan 24.

The Brexit referendum is not legally binding. Parliament will have to vote on Brexit, too.

I feel the general consensus is that France is good at startup creation, but lacks the infrastructure, particularly capital, to support their growth. Many of the promising ones end up getting bought by an established player, often a semi-public company stemming from an administration, like Orange (former national telecom). In other words, good entrepreneurship, but no chance of disrupting anything.

edit: typos

Populations in Africa are also genetically more diverse than the rest of the world combined.

Sitting might be a requirement for you, and it's fine, but should also be willing to pay the price for it, i.e. live in a suburb that can accommodate your preferences. You cannot live in a dense city rich in amenities and expect to be sitting all the time, it just doesn't work geometrically. In many cities (granted, not San Francisco), people happily stand in public transit for the dozens of minutes they have to spend there, and have satisfied with their experience. Go to Zürich for instance, you'll see bankers riding the S-Bahn when they could afford a car.

The median income is $4000 in Switzerland. What matters is that they have less income inequality and a good welfare safety net. When you let people with mental illness become homeless because everyone should fend for themselves, of course they're gonna occupy and piss where they can. When you help them become productive members of society, they don't. That's quite simple and has nothing to do with ethnicity like you're trying to imply.

Switzerland has some "fend for yourself" dimension where stuff like health insurance or childcare is largely private (and expensive), but they have a super strong safety net too. You are never being let down to the point that you have no choice but to be homeless.

Jarrett Walker, the writer of that blog post, makes actually the same point in another post. In public transit there is a trade-off between maximizing ridership by focusing on great service on a limited number of lines, or maximizing social service by multiplying lines that go everywhere but do not offer convenient service for commuters.

Walker has long been an advocate of making that trade-off apparent so taxpayers know what they're getting, and of re-balancing networks in favor of maximizing ridership. It means fewer lines, serving dense parts of cities, and running frequently.

Edit: the ridership/coverage tradeoff http://humantransit.org/basics/the-transit-ridership-recipe#...

It's not a question of private vs public. It's a question of space efficiency. A single rail line can transport 20 times more than a freeway lane (i.e. without street lights) Rail transit is vastly more space efficient than individual vehicles, autonomous or not.

Japan has private rail transit for instance. Property rights in the US would make it very difficult for a private operator to actually build rail transit. Japan's private system also works because transit operators are also real estate developers and can cash in on the land they serve.

San Francisco is 3 times less dense as Paris. It's still a dense city by North-American standards, but it's not dense by comparaison to most big metropolitan areas in the world.

You would need a lot less rail cars than that. Rails cars move the weights between the low and the high point, but they are re-used multiple times in a cycle, going back and forth constantly.

It wouldn't be very efficient to have a mobile piece of tech sitting idle for 99% of the time.

The main constraint would be to make the maximum use of cheap technology that is standard today. 100t freight cars are pretty standard.