hraedon

"Working" is a pretty generous description of a policy that, at a cost of 3-4% of GDP, has raised the fertility rate from its low of 1.23 in 2011 to about 1.55 today. That 1.5ish TFR is pretty stable, too: there's been almost no improvement since 2016.

No country has figured this out, and if getting to (just!) replacement rate requires healthcare-like expenditures as a % of GDP, it is genuinely unclear to me how we do that on a global scale.

This is the theory that people (on HN and elsewhere) have used to argue that Apple's App Store represents a monopoly that should be broken up. It makes no more sense here than it does in that context.

This is true of the switch, but there are versions of both the PS5 and Xbox Series that don't have the ability to play physical media.

Do they skate because users can pay more to get a version of the hardware that has that capability?

This is what I mean! "You, as someone who isn't an Apple customer, can't use this one service" is not evil, for fuck's sake.

Apple restricting a free service to Apple's own users is not even remotely the same as Microsoft's various forms of skullduggery and I don't know how you can make the comparison seriously.

It has never been easier to switch platforms, and the gulf between iOS and Android has never been shallower. Android users not having access to one also-ran messaging service is not some sort of fundamental injustice, and Apple is not a villain for building features that they think will appeal to their customers. It's sort of their whole business!

Not providing every differentiating feature to Android users, primarily

This is such an insane take to me. Apple hasn't done anything but provide a feature that some subset of their customers in a single digit number of markets finds compelling.

Do you really think that teenagers in America wouldn't be bullying the outgroup—to the extent that they actually are frequently ostracizing their peers over this, which is not at all clear—over something else if all the bubbles were blue?

If I want to "interoperate" with friends and family who use Android, I have zero issues doing so. SMS works fine, and the default experience being "bad" is really completely unrelated to any sort of antitrust concern. If we want more features, they're an App download away.

Apple offers a product that has seen significant success in a small number of markets versus android, including the US. Dressing up what is ultimately the normal bump and tumble of competition in a market as antitrust because they're winning enough in the market(s) you care about is silly.

The relevant example here is that Apple supports the lowest common denominator standard: SMS. iMessage is what makes the experience "magical" on iPhones.

The total failure of any open messaging standard to capture the market seems to imply to me that control is actually pretty important to the experience of using the service!

This is a silly argument: Microsoft's bundling of IE resulted in real damage to another company (Netscape) that had a viable and independent competitor product. Beeper doesn't have an independent product: they have a hacky workaround that Apple fixed.

What Microsoft did with IE isn't really analogous to Apple refusing to let another company free ride on their infrastructure. This isn't even as egregious as patching iTunes to break the Palm Pre sync was, and the legality of that action seems pretty settled by now.

The colors functionally denote the features available in the chat. In group chats, having a single non-iMessage user devolves the features available to the group chat to the SMS level. You also lose E2E and high res pictures and video.

The different colors of bubbles are a consequence of iMessage's origin as a protocol that supplanted SMS/MMS messaging while allowing the older protocols as seamless fallbacks; WhatsApp, Signal et al never had a requirement like that, and consequently never had to deal with different feature sets among their users (at least, not to the same extent).

I mean, Musk said that years ago on a podcast (and has maintained that position since): "I think the most profound thing is that if you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset – not a depreciating asset." (1)

It is obviously false, but his case was that all Teslas would be working as robotaxis for their owners. "Insane lie or megalomania?" is the defense, as ever.

1: https://electrek.co/2019/04/12/tesla-vehicles-appreciating-a...

The current subscription price is $1.50 a month or $10 a year, so presuming the same profit the cost would have to jump to a bit more than $5 a month or $53 a year. Apollo also had a lifetime tier that would have to go away, because it was priced without knowing that future costs would be so much higher.

This also entails getting rid of the free tier and imposing usage limits on the remaining subscribers since a few people could easily blow out the average and drive up costs.

There are definitely people willing to pay those costs (I count myself as one of them, as well), but the lack of apps like Apollo being successful at that price point probably means that it is not a sustainable business.

Assuming away all of the constraints that led to this situation in the first place does make solving the problem easier, for sure

I mean, are they wrong? Elon promised coast-to-coast summoning in 2016 with a time horizon of two years! there were supposed to be a million telsa robotaxis by the end of 2020!

Like, putting aside everything else, it had to have been very obvious internally that neither of those goals were plausible in that timeframe without miracles happening.

Coal plants aren't profitable to run if they're required to retrofit for carbon capture, not many new coal plants are going to be built in countries that care about climate change (so requiring CCS on new builds has minimal utility), and there are a lot of political obstacles to shutting existing plants down or mandating these sorts of improvements.

Given those constraints, centralized capture is at least a plausible option that doesn't involve starting big fights with entrenched interests in coal-reliant states. Is it more efficient or more likely to work than direct capture? No. It is, however, politically possible and worth exploring.

It isn't an attitudinal problem, it is the logical outcome of our political systems. In political science it is known as Duverger's law: single ballot, winner take all systems inevitably tend toward a two party equilibrium.

Changing this requires states to adopt alternative systems, which can sometimes mean amending state constitutions. It isn't easy or straightforward, and the general sense is that there are better things to spend that effort on.

A judge imposing any penalties or restrictions on Google over Google allegedly—and maximally—scraping data from a third-party site for use as part of Bard's training corpus would be outrageous.

The median in April 2020 was supposedly around $75 (1), but it of course wildly varies from host to host. The common perception is that they significantly increased during and after the pandemic, but that as far as I know isn't reflected in more recent data (2).

A lot of the objections around the cleaning fee are that hosts often have long lists of chores they expect guests to do in addition to a large cleaning fee, and sometimes those chores are not spelled out until you check in.

1: https://bnbfacts.com/airbnb-cleaning-fee-how-much-hosts-char... 2: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/airbnb-has-a-plan-...

I think we have already waited long enough with Twitter to conclude that the emperor, in this case, has no clothes.

Twitter isn't like SpaceX or Tesla: there aren't enormous government contracts, subsidies, or climate credits to prop up its finances. There is no plausible replacement for the advertising revenue his style of leadership is actively alienating, and there is a real risk that his strategy is exposing Twitter to enormous FTC sanctions given that they are already under a consent decree.

It is much more likely that he's deeply in over his head and floundering than it is that he has a master plan he can only execute by taking a blowtorch to Twitter's current business structure. How much worse does it have to get before that theory is validated?

Twitter needs to generate roughly a billion dollars a year in additional cashflow just to service the debt Musk saddled it with. They already weren’t profitable, but let’s say that they were breakeven and that ad revenue would be sufficient to cover non-debt costs.

There’s absolutely no way that 100,000,000+ people are going to sign up for twitter blue; they would be exceptionally fortunate to get a tenth of that figure. His other ideas are chickenfeed, so how does he get to an extra billion in revenue? How does he do that when he seems to be actively antagonizing twitter’s only meaningful source of revenue?

An adult is going to have very few instances where they are forced to spend hours of time around their abuser(s) relative to a child in school. "Training" someone to deal with being regularly bullied just means adding abuse from another direction, to me.

Because "solving it" can look radically different depending on the definition or group trying to do the "solving." Platforms enforcing their terms of service to ban, say, holocaust deniers, is not what I consider "cancel culture," but a lot of people on the right would disagree.

Similarly, I think that David Shor was unfairly maligned and fired over hugely disingenuous misreadings of his work, but how do you solve that in any meaningful way? I don't think we should make "twitter user" a protected class, but I fail to see how else you can realistically prevent businesses from responding (read: caving in) to bad PR.

Did you suffer any sort of consequence for your responses beyond being deprived of the ability to continue accessing their Facebook page?

If not, you're really straining even the most generous definition of "cancel culture" beyond the point of even minimal usefulness.

One of his cited examples of actual "cancel culture" is the shouting down of Ilya Shapiro, an act he characterizes as "fascist and contemptible," and two others are either cancelings within social justice spaces or involve circular firing squads on the left. To me, this is maybe an indication that he is operating on principle more than politics.

That's a pretty tendentious view of both Popehat's expressed opinion and the NYTime's article.

Popehat is pretty clearly against what he defines as "cancel culture," and the NYTimes article is primarily about journalists and elite opinion writers not liking backtalk from their readers.

Even if the war ended right now, Ukraine has hundreds of thousands of refugees to move and shelter, huge amounts of destroyed infrastructure to repair and work around, most of their army expended, and a lot of civilian losses. They also won't get Crimea back, and they probably can't hold onto the separatist regions either.

Provided that the world continues to rally around Ukraine and gets critical supplies to the population centers they may avoid grievous additional losses, but Ukraine is unavoidably much worse off than it was pre-invasion.

Responding to huge events that were unfolding in eastern Europe? I get that the Euromaidan protests are inconvenient to Russian propaganda efforts, but why is it at all sinister that a U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs was present at a protest? Why is it suspicious that the US' Ambassador was present at protests that were protesting what amounted to Putin vetoing a very popular effort to deepen ties between Ukraine and the EU?

None of that, of course, is responsive to the original question of why Ukraine wasn't a friend in 2014 (in your narrative, this follows a coup and the installation of a friendly, western regime) but seems to be a friend now. Why Russia was able/allowed to annex Crimea with minimal international outcry is obvious—he either had or successfully fabricated a plausible enough claim—but doesn't fit in with the idea that all rules of conduct are applied only against enemies and not to friends.

The point is that international affairs are complicated enough to make any principled stand difficult, and the world should be commended for rallying behind the idea that unprovoked wars of conquest are enough to get you excluded from global society. The sanctions are going to cause a lot of pain in the countries leveling them, so it is an even less straightforward calculus.

Russia was able to invade Ukraine and annex a big chunk of its territory in 2014, and the idea that Ukraine was less our "friend" then than it is now doesn't hold water to me. What was different about the 2014 invasion if it is strictly realpolitik friends and enemies?

Ukraine has more reason than most countries to want to be a part of NATO, given that Russia invaded it in 2014 and seized territory. This war, to the extent it was provoked by anything other than Putin's hubris, was because Ukraine wants to join the EU, not because it was going to try and join NATO. Ukraine wanting its fortunes to look more like Poland's and less like Russia's is not a crime punishable by invasion, no matter what apologists blaming NATO expansion think.

In any case, Russia has existed for decades with NATO countries on its borders and not suffered an invasion. These countries have a lot of reason to fear that Russia does indeed seek to "reintegrate" them into an imperial state, given that Putin just confirmed that he seeks to do exactly that to Ukraine. The best way Russia can discourage its neighbors from joining NATO is by not giving them huge, existential reasons for doing so.