flagrant_taco

> As a developer I hate "precise" and "complete" requirements. Usually these extremely detailed roadmaps are just fairy tales.

Requirements and roadmaps are very different in my opinion. Requirements say what the product needs to do, scaling and/or response time targets, systems or needs to integrate with, etc. Roadmaps are either a high level plan for where the project goes in the future or a list of seemingly arbitrary deadlines.

Both have their place, but in my experience the right balance has been precise and complete specs with a high level, flexible roadmap.

Is it any different in your opinion when $1T is created and deposited into bank accounts rather than minted and released as coins?

> the money isn't printed. It's debt, which is different. The debt is expected to be repaid, with interest

One person's debt is another person's money. Our economic system is built on an expectation of contistent growth, deflation is not an option and those in charge will do everything they can to avoid it.

When the government creates new money it's technically debt, but debt they will never get back and clear off the books. Doing so would reduce the money supply and either cause deflation or reduce GDP, neither are acceptable for the system. They tried quantitative tightening policies to remove some of the debt/money created after the housing crisis, even a small amount of QT hit hard and they very quickly abandoned the idea of allowing those debts to be paid back (or ought back and removed).

Sure, more people should have the opportunity to gone school their children and hunting, fishing, and foraging is a great way to feed your family with less environmental impact. Knowing how to set a bone is great in an emergency, but I wouldn't recommend leaning only on that if you have other options. Alcohol does work for pain, though be careful with moonshine as poorly stilled liquor can have nasty side effects.

I'm honestly not sure if the logical error is on me there. If a majority of people honestly believe that humans are causing serious harm to the planet and still set a high bar for a certain level of lifestyle, environmental impact be damned, I think that's the error.

As far as shipping goes, it can definitely be comparably affordable to ship in products. Though you still have to factor in costs of everything from making and maintaining those vehicles, the oil and gas that moves them, and the costs on the area that actually produced the products.

My point isn't that everything should be magically fixed with more rural living or a perfect balance of density in cities. I'm simply trying to raise the other side to point out that things aren't simple or clean enough to actually run the math on whether dense cities are better or worse at reducing impact on the environment. There are simply too many factors and hidden costs along the way to calculate accurately.

There is a lot of room between being entirely self sufficient and minimizing impact. Simply "needing" less goes a very long way to reducing impact.

Suburbs may very well be the worst of both worlds, being more spread out but still not spread out enough to be fairly self sufficient.

That really does entirely depend on the size and style of the SFH, location on the land, lifestyle, etc.

Single family homes are often easier to power off-grid with solar if that's on the table, though again with regards to externalities the solar power equipment likely sends those costs to multiple countries on the other side of the planet.

Oh it's definitely not simple, I don't mean to input that.

Your examples only really touch on one relevant example though, sewage. Sewage isn't really an issue in rural areas, off grid seltic systems process waste on site and more compelling systems can even compost human waste with very little effort. Modern central sewage system only exist because of dense cities, they weren't needed before that.

High speed internet is purely a convenience and really shouldn't be a concern if there's any meaningful environmental impact from it. Police and fire similarly are conveniences that may turn into necessities in highs density areas. I live in a rural area where police may show up tomorrow if I call them now and our fire is mostly volunteer.

I've never heard of anyone having real issues from either. Volunteer fire still respond quickly enough and it's amazing how much less import policing is when people are more spread out and the expectation of turning to police for every problem isn't the norm.

Wanting to live somewhere and reducing climate impact are different though. If you build a city full of dense housing, where does all the food and water come from? Or the electricity, furniture, and clothing?

Costs can be externalized, but at the environment level they still exist even if outside the city of consumers. It's also often the case that externalizing those costs adds even more impact as the product has to be shipped in and the waste shipped back out.

Duplication often leads to resilience in a system, and can lower the infrastructure required since the centralized resources aren't being shipped across the country.

Optimizing for profit in urban land use excludes the production of raw materials almost entirely. Meaning that raw materials have to be grown or raised elsewhere, transported into the city, and the waste has to be removed afterward.

Wouldn't it be more beneficial purely from an environmental angle to produce more food and resources in the urban areas to minimize external costs? And if so, wouldn't the current system disincentivize this in favor of higher profit per square foot businesses, regardless of the environmental impact?

How do those small urban footprints survive though? They bring in outside resources, external zing the impact elsewhere and adding in the cost of transporting goods into and waste out of the urban centers.

There isn't a magic answer to it, but simply saying dense areas use less footprint for shelter ignores all the other necessities and conveniences consumed by the people living there.

Property taxes that factor in existing improvements doesn't leave the owner as far behind chasing potential value that they are already being taxed for. When your tax burden is a factor of expected market value of the land plus permanent improvements they're taxing you on what you already have. When it's based on an expected optimal value of the lad they're taxing you on what *they* think your land *should* be worth if fully developed.

Assuming that higher density is always better ignores the externalities required to maintain such a system. Higher density cities require more outside inputs brought in from outside the city. Those inputs strip resources from other lands, require input to process the raw materials, and require fuel and vehicles to transport the goods into the city frequently. The city's waste must be transported and processed somewhere, again adding impacts to the environment even if those impacts aren't directly felt within city limits.

If the goal is to minimize impact, cities would only be as large and as dense as they can reasonably be self sufficient. That doesn't preclude trade between cities, states, and countries, but it does mean the city isn't entirely dependent on a constant churn of bringing in resources from elsewhere and shipping out waste.

Not at all, they could simply report the real cost difference in the basket as well as the adjusted cost. Every year we don't see a matrix of GDP compared to both the real and nominal GDP of all previous years. We see those two numbers compared to last year and it's left to basic mathematics to do longer term comparisons.

Part of the challenge is with how frequently they decide to change the basket of goods. If the basket was largely stable over time we would have a pretty good estimate simply by aggregating annual data, especially if they focus on staple consumables that don't change drastically over time.

CPI plays a huge role in our everyday lives though. From cost of living raises to entitlement programs, it all moves based on inflation numbers and the CPI. The Fed even considers these numbers when watching the economy and deciding on fiscal policy, setting the Fed Funds Rate and impacting interest rates across the board.

Hah, yes rational markets and all that

Land value taxes are generally set arbitrarily high. Localities are incentivized to set values as high as they can attempt to justify. They end up modeling what they think could be the most profitable or valuable development on the land then tax you as if that were already done.

Eventually the land ends up in the hands of the few willing and able to abuse the land to that level, prioritizing profit above all else.

This argument has often confused me when so many people are concerned with global warming. Why should a city incentive land owners to develop and commoditize their land?

If we want to reduce human impacts on the planet, why not incentive the opposite and incentive leaving the land natural?

Land value taxes prioritize GDP and profit above all else. Isn't that how we got into this mess in the first place?

You don't need a pickup truck if those are your deciding factors.

The F-150 Lightning is pretty useless as a truck, with the largest battery storing as much energy as 4 gallons of gas[1]. If you want a truck get a gas or diesel truck, if you want fast and electric you have better options that don't waste electricity hauling around a heavier vehicle and unused truck bed.

[1] https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/ford-f150-lightning-elect...

The most successful scams actually do go into excruciating detail to appear methodical, that's how you get people to buy in.

While I do agree with many of the points you raised, for me those point to the uselessness of the CPI as a matric. If the dataset is so complex you can only boil it down so far before too much context is lost. The CPI is an attempt to create a single number of off the entire economy, a task that is impossible made only more clear by complaints over the obvious and egregious tradeoffs made.

Statistics can be useful, it can also be a pointless game of manipulating so much data that you can make it say whatever you want. I think you'd be hard pressed to find an average American that would feel like prices have only gone up by ~4-5% over the last few years.

If they listed both that would make sense, that's commonplace when listing net vs gross revenue, nominal vs real GDP, etc

The Consumer Price Index is a scam at this point, as far as I can tell.

They regularly modify the list of items in the cart, meaning the data isn't reliable over time.

They also include caveats where they can modify the Scritsmier price differences. For example, they attention to adjust the new price to account for what they consider to be added value. Say a product is 15% more expensive one year after a new model is released. When calculated the CPI, they can decide that the new model added 10% more value or benefit to the user, meaning the price only rose by 5%.

I wish I could find the study now, but around 2013 someone compared the CPI listed price increase of magazines to the actual change in the price listed on the cover over something like 20 years. The true value change was around 130% but the CPI had adjusted for value 30%.

Most people seem to be feeling this now when they notice that process have risen much higher than the claimed 4 or 5%.

It wasn't totally clear to me in the article whether the mist is entirely made up of sea water. It mentions how small the most important particles are, but is that an effect of the missing process or an additive mixed in while atomizing the sea water?

There isn't any real browser competition when the only difference is in what the UI around the actual web browser is. The browser experience is what actually renders the web page, not the menu system around it.

We wouldn't need standards at all if everyone used the same browser engine. Whoever owns the engine, likely Google, would make the engine however they choose and could change core fundamentals of how the web itself works.

Many devs were up in arms when a GitHub issue raised the idea of effectively DRMing the internet. Google can bake that right into chromium if they want to, and if they were the only browser engine they could easily get away with closed sourcing chromium and only shipping binaries so the feature can't be disabled or removed.

Web standards in that world would be an internal discussion at Google, likely driven entirely by their business needs. There's no browser competition there, the open web would be completely dead.

I was just assuming you were talking about managers not independent contributors. The "you" would be the person with the authority to fire though, as a working programmer would have absolutely no power to fire anyone saying there are no problems.

That's a pretty big caricature of anarchists. I'd expect an anarchist to say something to the effect of businesses creating insulin if there's enough market demand for it.

You seem to assume that businesses, markets, and innovation are tied to governments and couldn't exist without the powerful hand of authority making them exist. Governments can help all of these things, but they can also hurt them, and government absolutely didn't invent any of them.

The Chop wasn't any real attempt at anarchy. It was a protest that took a weird turn and a city that let it happen. There was absolutely no plan or expectation that it'd be anything other than a stunt trying to make a point. You don't cut off a handful of blocks in a landlocked and largely residential area and call it a government free zone while being completely dependent on the government-controlled area around you.

That sounds like a lovely version of capitalism, but the one I've experienced is anything but optimized. There can be incentives to keeping around unproductive jobs, the size and stability of an org can often be used as a basic sign of health.

See: AT&T

Teams can actually function well and have no problems for periods of time. I those cases you would almost certainly break that by firing the manager.

I think everyone would agree that yes-people are useless for a team, but if you find yourself surrounded by them you have to ask why. Either you hired poorly, or more likely the way you treat you team and/or company creates a culture of fear and dishonesty.

What you're describing is the opposite of the whole point of specifications. The aim wasn't to circle around a single implementation, it was to define feature specifications that would allow multiple vendors to build cross-compatable web browsers.

What would be the point of open specifications if there was only a single implementation?

I think we're just thinking about very stiffener goals for the web. I'm not interested in a version of the web that is driven by one browser or company, even if it can technically be modified or tweaked as long as you don't diverge see enough to break upstream compatibility.