fennecfoxen

I suspect that if the developer/landlord is out to capture all the value possible (as he is directly incentivized to do) having multiple floors just isn't going to be nearly enough.

Aaaaand we're back to the "serves-them-right" lowkey spiteful angle. I don't know, if I were a member in good standing of some Institution(TM) that is supposed to look out for me and work for my interests, and my government decided one day to throw me under the bus, I'd prefer the Institution(TM) didn't try its utmost to pitch in and throw me under the bus too. I hope you never face a similar problem in your life.

Opinion: High density planned communities that try to take care of almost everything, like you describe, are a at serious risk of being insipid, mediocre, uninspiring, and worse. I think it’s something about the incentive structure, probably, but this is largely an empirical opinion; in my experience it’s just far better to live with a diversity of landlords in the area. New York has a great set of examples: A neighborhood like SoHo or Hell’s Kitchen or the Lower East Side is a magnet. An overproduced condo/office/retailplex like Hudson Yards, without much competition next door, is dull and insipid and soulless. A big complex like Rockefeller Center is actually kind of okay — because it’s embedded in a neighborhood where everyone has a dozen dozen places in a five minute walk they could go to instead. The D terminal at LaGuardia where everything is seamlessly integrated as a managed OTG Experience? The worst crime against commercial aviation in America in the past twenty years. Buy a hamburger there, I dare you.

> Should one live in a high tax high social safety net country while paying tax to a low tax low social safety net country or not paying tax at all?

My friend, if these systems were just about aligning the incentives for workers and benefits and taxes, and otherwise tried to be understanding about human foibles, then people wouldn't point to immigration systems around the world as a Kafkaesque nightmare.

Just to pick an example — chosen for my familiarity, wholly outside of and unrelated to Brexit — the UK's Windrush scandal involved the bureaucracy actively destroying old records of immigration from British overseas possessions (particularly the Caribbean), then deciding years later to go after people who had been living in the country for decades — demanding they supply exhaustive documentation of their legal immigration, and their life and activities in the intervening time. Rest assured that this was a fully adversarial process! They did not offer to help anyone so affected gather these documents, or to make their case.

And later, in another unrelated scandal, the Home Office decided to react to an English-examination cheating scandal by analyzing everyone's examination results with some opaque computerized process, using the results to declare something like 97% of them as invalid cheaters — and sending nastygrams to about 9,700 university students, calling them dirty cheaters and demanding they leave country. Many of them did, and they forcibly removed others. Notably, they did not ask for them to re-sit the exam. They did not care about the lives ruined.

Of course the matter of the .eu domain is absolutely nothing compared to the daily nightmare that is "visas," but the same devotion to rules and insensitivity to the costs of policy runs through the matter. They could have grandfathered in existing domains, at least a little bit longer. I know that if I had a website and I had to move domains, I would want to run web and email forwarding for more than one year. If they wanted to be particular about just having the forwarding, they could have audited the sites to make sure that they were just redirects, and charged for the privilege. They didn't. There's no sane reason that couldn't happen except to preserve The Rules — but these rules simply are not a valuable end in and of themselves, despite the laud and honor they have received in this thread.

> Think of it as like a visa.

Yes! A visa! Thank you! The strident heart and soul of the inhuman, inhumane, soulless bureaucracy. It is exactly like that.

This isn't exactly something to be lauded or celebrated! Have you ever dealt with having a visa? Have you ever been impacted by the uncertainty and confusion of the nation you are living in, changing its rules about your visa? Do you have any concept at all of the economic and the humanitarian impact of the bureaucracy's machinations around and involving visas? Even aside from the worst of that, have you ever abandoned a job and friends and the life you were trying to build somewhere, because someone changed the rules about visas? I liked that job, sir.

Oh, let me tell you about visas! I will tell you about them all day long. But, ah — I think it was a more flattering to the decision-makers when we were just talking about the cost of broken URLs and email addresses.

I used to have an email address with a three-letter username @eh.net, which was actually surprisingly annoying to use. If you ever gave the address to someone they'd be very confused at how short it is.

A domain name is intended to represent something. It shows up in identifiers and addresses such as the Uniform Resource Locator and email addresses. It's better for basically-everyone-in-the-world if that representation and those addresses have a measure of stability.

If it's not actively "spiteful" to impair stability, when the only cost is an ever-so-modest impact to brand purity, then at the very least it's a short-sighted way to cause a deadweight economic loss to humanity.

I guess that's just what rule-by-bureaucracy does, though, including EU bureaucracy: every day, they make decisions that affect people, always bringing the greatest possible reverence for the rules, and paying as little regard as possible to the price of the consequences of their decisions, which are fundamentally someone else's problem.

It’s more that a system should not allow a single fraud to shape its understanding and its policy. Assume fraud exists.

WiFi? Eh. As an ever-so-modest upgrade to the cheap DIY, a Zwave or Zigbee system might be a better choice to integrate with a variety of other things (like thermostats and temperature/humidity sensors.)

Brain neurons going into sleep mode eject some of the cell contents and shrink, which apparently also helps flush waste because the cerebrospinal fluid can flow better.

The word “gender” comes from a Latin root involving “birth” and shows up in English in such verbs as “engender” which literally means “to beget offspring” (and idiomatically means “to cause”).

If you were person speaking English before about 2000 or so, maybe a bit later, and you were neither a gender studies researcher or in touch with that discipline directly, the words would literally both mean the same thing and basically it’d be a question of which the scientific field in question used more.

That's new — but those are still $5000 models "designed for professional fleet use", a little on the steep side. I'd give it a little longer for that to percolate downmarket towards the likes of the Navimow which is around the €1500 level.

Existing lawn robots still mostly rely on a buried cable to form a boundary-line. The next generation vision/lidar/gps systems are clearly in development but not commercially available in the US (the Segway NaviMow is available in Europe).

That's actual-devops. Grandparent poster has worked at firms which have abandoned all its lessons and just use it to mean something like "regular old ops teams, but they use software". So he's using the term like all the big companies do, basically.

This is also where you will find things like a "CI/CD" team that doesn't do continuous delivery: they just build Jenkins pipelines, and run them as part of the manual cluster bringup every 2-4 weeks. Or "RESTful" to mean "APIs which use JSON and HTTP verbs" regardless of any hypermedia. And let's not even get started on "agile"...

Ancient Rome, famed for its commerce, had a variety of capitalist features, though with significantly less productive use of invested capital, as one would expect of a pre-industrial society. Most people, however, would consider Roman slavery with people-as-property to be an abrogation of property-rights-in-the-self rather than just enforcement.

Whitewashing the Civil War as grandparent post did was in error, but don’t let the evils of slavery blind you to the leadership’s more immediate, stated war goal: to preserve the Union. Freeing slaves was an ancillary matter at best.

If the actual explicit bona fide war goal was freeing the slaves, Reconstruction would have been a lot less oppressive and its Jim Crow regimes would have faced more obstacles.

To expand on this (and hopefully not mangle your original idea), the key feature that makes a capitalist economy efficient is the use of a price mechanism to distribute the hard problems of decision-making to people who are reasonably well-informed and well-incentivized to make good decisions. These decisions will benefit society as a whole when (A) property rights exist and are enforced, (B) there are low barriers to entry, (C) transaction costs are low.

(There will be failures otherwise. Pollution ends up under A, monopolies under B, and a whole host of modern stupidities ends up under C — e.g. just for instance, no one at a minimum wage job is going to afford a lawyer to negotiate their employment contract: transaction costs are too high; the bigcorp employer, by contrast, only has to draw up the contract once. Instant structural unfairness follows.)

Orchestrating both information and incentives like this is really really hard. It's hard enough at a mid-sized project at a mid-sized company, where management spends hours and hours hammering on the idea of "alignment". At the scale of the global economy it's utterly intractable.

Not original poster, but

Economics is about making decisions when your decisions have trade-offs because you have limited resources. Everything has a price, but the prices aren't always measured in a nice money-based price tag for your convenience, they're ultimately measured by the next-best alternatives. Decisions and policies don't just have consequences, they have second-order effects and third-order effects and you need to chase those down too, because excluding anything makes you understand the costs wrong (e.g. add highway lanes to relieve congestion -> now there is more traffic, because of "induced demand", not sure that was a good idea -> but why was there even induced demand? where are those trips coming from and what was the cost of the previous configuration? is this a housing-policy thing now??). You also learn to worry a lot about how decisions are actually made by self-interested decision-makers, rather than by abstractions-seeking-the-greater-good, and you examine what the decision-makers' incentives are....

Whereas a work like Das Kapital tells you very little about how to think this way. It's not intended to; it's more about the relative influence of various actors within a political-economic system, while raising tough questions about the meaning of private property.

Borne, as in, 'carried', derivative of the verb 'to bear'

If that’s a regressive tax on the poor, then so are “groceries” and “housing”.

You know what Florida has besides taxes? User fees. You can take a brand-new highway here and it'll be a toll road, which means you're the one paying for it, not unrelated taxpayers around the state. You can even finance the construction with private-public partnerships tied to the specific project's success. And because people pay for this infrastructure, it discourages frivolous uses, like the induced demand of overbuilding in the exurbs.

[UI confusion led me to think this was a reply in a nyc specific comment chain. It’s still relevant but less perfectly so.]

You land-tax to make sure the most efficient buildings end up using the land. But the construction industry in towns like SF and NYC is mostly constrained by what you can get approved, which comes down to connections and what politician-pleasing giveaways you have to tack on.

And expensive downtown Manhattan land has lots of potential competition, but with transportation infrastructure costs running $2 billion a mile (!!!!!)

“a significant episode during which economic output falls”

We have a money-based economy. Not in the same sense as oil-based, but a lot of economic activity takes place because someone borrows money, uses it to buy something big, and then repays the lender over time. This is true of homes and renovations. This is true of college degrees. This is true of many automobiles and major appliances. This is true of major government infrastructure projects. This is not directly true of factories and shipping companies and and startups, but even these compete for their funding with everything else that seeks funding.

The price of money up front is a big deal.

> If you call it one, they will use it as cause for even more layoffs and price hikes

Let’s go back to the Carter administration standard, then: The US economy is in a banana. Let’s hope it’s not a serious one.

i don't get this perspective

> Brexit, Trump, and the social and economic decline, perceived or real, that led to them are the most obvious events that signaled our latest attempts to kick apart Eden.

like okay, those legit aren't great, but don't we face substantially bigger threats from, oh, IDK, Putin's Russia and what may yet be an ascendant China?? Maybe the way we approach these matters, as if sleepwalking, has as much to do with destruction we suffer as any overt impulses towards destruction.

(Also, the people kicking Eden apart usually aren't the most-comfortable ones, but the resentful ones a few rungs down.)

Indeed, there are a lot of engineering challenges related to the distance. Solar power is much, much dimmer at 900 AU -- that's like 20x Pluto distance -- so you'll need to bring something like an RTG. But your RTG will decay while the spacecraft travels (Voyager's RTG has already lost 30% of capacity). Once there you'll need a lot of power to transmit data the back with any sort of speed or reliability. All of this is on top of the usual telescope-reliability concerns; in many ways it would make the James Webb telescope mission look straightforward.

This is one of the reasons for papers such as this one: exploring what meaningful solutions to these problems, and meaningful mission profiles, would actually look like in practice.

You know what else isn't happy-times? When Wikipedia editors are trying to maintain things one way or another, and someone disagrees with what they've done, so they go off and write an article about how these terrible trolls have so heinously decided to efface such a luminary of accomplishment, et cetera.

Look! I'm going to promote a rather dull controversy to an online magazine and the front page of Hacker News! I'm 100% confident that this process will effect justice and result in only 100% positive and desirable contributions to Wikipedia! cough

p4d.24xlarge is only $33/hr! And you get 400 Gbe so it should be quick to load.

It sounds like you were just going to end up with a mediocre, compromised system anyway. "Light rail" is still bringing us things like the Santa Clara VTA system at best, and the Virginia Beach "Tide" at its worst. Likewise cities with "real" subways include such luminaries as Atlanta and Miami. Have you tried to take the metro system in Miami?