I think the overwhelm is kind of the point. If you want a well-balanced video game, where everything is optimized to help you learn the ropes and to get you into a flow state, the classic versions of SimCity provide exactly that. But this game's implementation of a full-fledged city builder is quickly drowned out by the fact that it's shoving resident petitions and requests for variances in your face every 20 seconds. It's an attempt to put the player into the shoes of an actual city planner, mayor, or city councilor that is drowning in interruptions and paperwork.
Public space is precious, but I’d just like to make it clear for the casual HN reader that suggesting “Singapore-style” punishment for antisocial behavior implies a pro-caning stance. Caning is a violent, abhorrent, and cruel practice that violates the fundamental human rights of the convicted person. It leaves the victim of state violence with permanent scars and long-lasting trauma. Time and again it has been shown that capital punishment is not any more effective at preventing recidivism than rehabilitation or compulsory community service.
If you want positive, lasting change, you have to start at the start, modeling positive social and emotional programs in public schools and community programs. Our society is only as healthy as the core beliefs that are willingly held and practiced by its population. Raw state power through fear and intimidation does not change people’s minds as much as widespread belief about what is inherently right and wrong.
I’d categorize it as ballistic flight. While it was able to control its pitch, yaw, and roll in midair, it did not have sufficient upward propulsive thrust to balance out or exceed the force of gravity while airborne. So it wasn’t the propulsive kind of flight, where altitude can be readily adjusted in the sense that we would expect from an “flying car”.
And let’s keep in mind this is 100% vaporware; the cars sold to actual buyers may differ significantly in their design and capabilities from what was demonstrated here. It is possible that the COPVs in the car on display took up the entire passenger compartment.
Assuming financial liability is an option, but because the risk profile of having an agent making purchases for a cardholder will never be zero, the companies making these guarantees will simply price the risk in to the cost of service. It’s the same basic mechanic at work with credit card reward points, the brands are all fighting each other for a share of customer debt so they slowly increase the rewards rates to one-up each other, and make up the cost on the back end by increasing merchant fees. It’s a dumb, unnecessary price war that ultimately increases the cost to the consumer and drives up the profits of the businesses providing risk/cost-burdened services.
People rightly complain about the prices when it comes to chains like McDonald’s. They built their brand on fast, cheap food. But right now, the average cost of a Big Mac in the US $5.79, which is quite high given the raw ingredient cost of the sandwich components, around a 107% markup [1]. And that’s for a burger reconstituted from freeze-dried ingredients shipped in cardboard boxes. And the dining room experience is truly atrocious. It just doesn’t add up.
A burger made of fresh, never frozen ingredients from In N Out or Five Guys only carries a 50-80% markup [1], and those stores are properly staffed and consequently offer a much more pleasant dining room experience.
I suppose my point is that it is possible to deliver a good customer experience and still maintain a healthy operating margin. What McDonald’s is doing to make the whole experience worse is not a necessity to keep the business alive, it is a choice to maximize profits at the expense of the brand’s long-term reputation.
I don’t see how this is complicated, it’s simply a technique. The creator of the video has no stated agenda, and it’s on the viewer to decide whether or not they want to learn and apply this method. Lots of people find joy in solving the little things in life that would otherwise cause them frustration. One of the top comments on the video is a nurse saying they’d been tying their scrubs with bunny ears for 30 years and always had to keep adjusting them. Certainly it isn’t overly complicated for them.
Possibly AI, possibly younger folks (18-24). “Mental health incident” is only one step removed from algospeak like “unalived”, “seggs”, and “neurospicy”. A detached, memetic phrase that has been implanted into the lexicon by a toxic brew of algorithmic social media moderation and heavy exposure to LLM conversational patterns.
> versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with
I disagree with this take quite a bit. Yes, software could be better, but Apple TV+ has given dozens of shows the budget and freedom to produce some truly generation-defining art. Ted Lasso, Severance, and For All Mankind are huge stand-outs in their scope, depth, and ambition. For instance, the latter is produced by Sony, yet you see nearly zero product placement, which has been a hallmark of the studio for over a decade now. Putting gobs of money into storytelling yields purer, and therefore more compelling, narratives that will hold up well over time and represent the best of what we are capable of. At the same time, Apple TV+ as a subscription service is also a very convenient way for Apple to weather any ups and downs in the physical product categories.
I don’t understand your point. You’re saying that online predictive markets are bad, but perverse incentives are bad in general, so there must be worse things out there. While that may be true, the scale and reach of these betting sites is massive, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of daily users with tens of millions of dollars on the line daily. The fact that a small number of people cheer for bad things to happen is no excuse for a betting apparatus that has captured a significant chunk of the global population.
Satellites. Are. Fragile. People really don’t seem to intuitively understand this. Earth based assets are orders of magnitude more difficult to attack simply by virtue of being able to be placed inside of fortified structures anchored to, or inside of, the ground. The cost to deploy hardened buildings at scale is peanuts compared to orbiting constellations.
Has it occurred to anyone that you can put computers underground? In this apocalyptic scenario you are describing, how do you expect the ground based command and control infrastructure to survive? Satellites are 100% reliant on ground based operations. That is a hard requirement. And if you put the command and control underground, might as well just skip the whole space based plan and just put the data underground.
This rule only applies to a single adult + child pair, and not the entire traveling party. For instance, if you have a party of 1 child and 2 adults, the airline is well within its rights to charge seat selection fees to the second adult. It’s incredibly frustrating that I have to pay an extra $40-$50, per journey, to United to sit next to my wife and child. And that’s with the current “consumer friendly” rules in place.
I feel like our planet’s long-term academic health would dramatically improve if something resembling the following statement was posted on the wall of every K-12 and college classroom:
ChatGPT is not a primary source.
Wikipedia is not a primary source.
Google Search is not a primary source.
Microsoft Encarta is not a primary source.
The Encyclopedia Brittanica is not a primary source.
Information aggregators are not primary sources. Identifiable people are primary sources.
Creepy is subjective of course, but it’s pretty high on the list for the most isolated and/or inconveniently-located platform in the country. The only access is via a narrow footbridge leading to a 486-step staircase that goes 70m underground (230ft). Unlike most other 50+ meter deep train stations, there are no elevators and no escalators. The only way in or out of the station is via those stairs, which makes platform-to-street time a non-trivial part of the overall journey.
This is the real answer, not the pat “no one builds new used cars” nonsense. It is entirely possible to build new, no-frills apartments that are 100% habitable and to code. But because of all the regulatory boxes one needs to check — namely all the fees spent, and time spent waiting for seemingly endless approvals — it is simply not possible to rent out bottom-dollar builds at a low market rate. The same logic applies for single family homes sold for purchase. The startup costs are just too damn high.
They’re horrible in crashes in the North American region. That’s because the average vehicle size in North America is much, much bigger than the vehicles in the Kei trucks’ region of origin. And streets in North America are, on average, much, much wider and permit higher speed traffic than those in Japan. The cars themselves aren’t inherently unsafe; if you keep them mostly on private property and only take them out on low-speed public roads with light duty vehicles, they’re still operating in an appropriate context. Also pretty appropriate in historic city centers where the roads aren’t too fast and the trucks and full size SUVs aren’t too numerous. But yeah, take one out on the interstate boxed between two semi trucks, an F-350, and a Suburban and you’re going to be in real danger.
What’s interesting to me is that in this horribly corrupt state of affairs we find ourselves in, there are thousands upon thousands of smaller businesses that are not able to seek redress the way a megacorp like Apple or Nvidia can. Your run-of-the-mill office furniture importer doesn’t have the same ability to book up a dinner and pay the requisite multi-million dollar lobbying fee as a Silicon Valley magnate. In the before times, these folks would form interest groups and lobby Congress as a unified front, but at the moment it seems as though that doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t take imagination to see a highly noncompetitive, post-capitalist future where only the goods from megacorps are exempted, and the goods from medium sized businesses are taxed to oblivion, destroying any semblance of free markets.
In my view the author is putting the cart before the horse here. His primary argument seems to be that people already think in bullet points, so the fluff around them is unnecessary and can be excised without destroying the original message. But that fluff is there for many reasons. It adds context, it allows us to commingle our meaningful and valid emotions alongside our facts, and ultimately, it lets us tell a human story.
The way in which we create and consume information has a direct effect on our experience of the world, and I think there is a deeper point to be made here about how the way we use communication technology. The endless firehose of information is drowning our brains to the point that we are compelled to find a way to cope. But I would argue that the way to do that is to rate limit receipt of messages so that only the quality stuff gets through, rather than letting everything through and destroy every human aspect of them in the process. It’s Twitter’s 140 character limit argument from last decade all over again; the medium becomes the message, so we must be careful what mediums we use.
I’m gonna be straight with you. I used to think this way — that living small was a form of protest against the ills of society. But life is too short. For many of us, that cardiac arrest, car accident, or pandemic-related terminal illness is right around the corner. Don’t say no to things that bring meaning, joy, purpose, and expansion to your life. You only have one life to live.
The coup started well before January 20th. And likely with the blessing of VC funds like Y Combinator…watch this post, it’s a proverbial canary in the coal mine.
Zero power? Explain that to USAID, Treasury, OPM, and GSA. Actors working on behalf of digital services (i.e. DOGE) are commandeering IT systems and sending out ultimatums to the workforce about complying with their orders at risk of being punished with administrative leave for insubordination. It is a highly unlawful operation that goes far beyond the consult and advise mission you’re alluding to.
Giving up the power to do the one thing you are constitutionally permitted to do, just because it doesn’t work for one particularly teflon-coated individual, is incredibly short-sighted.
Yes the reality of the situation is bleak. But to give up on impeachment would cede even more power to the executive branch.
The reason why our courts, which are historically apolitical, tried to convict him is because he committed a nearly uncountable number of crimes. And he broke even more norms.
Our biggest failure as a nation was not convicting him sooner and more decisively.
Eh, I get all that, but Narita is still quite useful as a transfer hub for passengers traveling between North America and East Asia. Haneda’s gate capacity is also a limiting factor, Narita is a necessary companion airport to soak up excess passenger demand.
It’s an interesting business model to be sure. They source from pretty much anywhere people tend to lose things. Theme park with more items lost than found? Theater with a bin full of abandoned gloves and coats? Unclaimed Baggage will pay you for it.
I would imagine a battery replacement would be more cost effective than swapping to a brand new drive system. The $5k estimate appears to be completely hypothetical, presumably based on bill of materials alone.
The single use plastic bag bans are a drop in the bucket compared to overall plastic waste generation. In my view, plastic grocery bags have become a popular point of regulation because they are notorious for accumulating in public spaces, notably parking lots, parks, and other places that city leaders are pressured to keep clean. So long as plastic items end up in waste receptacles, it’s out of sight, out of mind.
I’m seriously impressed at how much effort was put into developing aesthetically interesting ITTS screens for so many DCC releases. Some of them are genuinely good examples of artistic expression within a limited medium, and it’s a shame they were never seen by consumers despite being there the whole time. Seems likely that a machine capable of ITTS output was in the pipeline, perhaps even on the verge of going into production, but was canned due to soft sales of the DCC format. If DCC had come out a few years earlier, perhaps, it might have been more popular as it was quite capable, even though it was always destined to be a transitional medium.