There are so many things wrong with that.
1,835 karma · joined March 29, 2017
Canada did this with a housing accelerator fund, for municipalities. Did not amount to much of anything. It's not clear if provinces can override but there's no political will for it. Without reading the numbers for Australia, I expect reform has been modest.
> Less immigrants makes the house situation better but not does not solve the problem.
You contradict yourself in the same sentence. The same result can be achieved whether improving elasticity or reducing the immigration rate. "the problem" is the affordability, not the elasticity. That is your just preferred vector.
Even if zoning is improved, you can't defy the laws of physics; housing will still be relatively inelastic, whereas immigration rate can be much higher.
Australia's population growth rate was less than 1% last year, basically on par with US. Canada's was 3%. Incomparable. No amount of zoning reform will be enough to handle that sustainably.
This is overstated. The alarm was sounded on this 2 decades ago for several east Asian countries, but they're not on fire. They're fine. Old people die.
If the fertility rate mattered that much, they'd have scrambled to make any number of policy changes including better work-life balance (see: Japan, SK, China), or plain ol' immigration, but they don't because it simply does not matter. All the efforts have been completely half-assed (like tax benefits, cash).
And yet, many workers do make higher wages. Why do you think that is?
I'm all for the YIMBY and zoning reform push, but a) that's decided on the municipal level, b) change is slow, c) immigration rates can drastically change in very little time, if the feds decide. In Canada feds wanted to have their cake and eat it too: the population grew by over 3% in a year, but infrastructure at the provincial level (e.g. healthcare) didn't budge, and housing isn't building much faster than it was before.
If we understand that the key factor behind housing affordability is inelasticity of supply, then it should be easy to intuit that other things can be inelastic: policy and the law. By contrast, immigration rate might as well be a push of a button. It's not responsible to jack up the rate first and keep it that way just because it's not "the-thing-that-ought-to-change".
There are of course other externalities with high immigration rates (for contrast, US immigration rate is not that high), and the downsides to low immigration are overstated. Older generations won't live forever, but what I generally see is a call for unnecessary wealth transfer from young generation to old. Boomers are the wealthiest demographic already. We don't need to give them more freebies.
Their copyright takedown system has been around for many years and wasn't contingent on AI. It's a "take-down now, ask questions later" policy to please the RIAA and other lobby groups. Illegal/abuse material doesn't profit big business, their interest is in not having it around.
You deliberately conflated moderation & appeal process from the outset. You can have 100% AI handling of suspect uploads (for which the volume is much larger) with a smaller staff handling appeals (for which the volume is smaller), mixed with AI.
Frankly if your hypothetical upload is still rejected after that, it 99% likely violates their terms of use, in which case there's nothing to say.
> it is cheaper
A lot of things are "cheaper" in one dimension irrespective of AI, doesn't mean they'll be employed if customers dislike it.
> the money saved by removing support staff makes perfect sense and the two things are related to each other like identical twins are related to each other.
It does not make sense to have zero staff in as part of managing an appeal process (precisely to deal with edge cases and fallibility of AI), and it does not make sense to have no appeal process.
You're jumping to conclusions. That is the entire point of my response.
> What does a company have to gain by supplying the staff needed to listen to the appeals when the AI does a decent enough job 98% of the time?
AI isn't there yet, notwithstanding, if they did a good job 98% of the time then who cares? No one.
I already addressed this and you're talking over it. Why are you making the assumption that AI == no appeal and zero staff? That makes zero sense, one has nothing to do with the other. The human element comes in for appeal process.
Why would that be?
Currently content is flagged and moderators decide whether to take it down. Using AI, it's easy conceive a process where some uploaded content is preflagged requiring an appeal (otherwise it's the same as before, a pair of human eyes automatically looking at uploaded material).
Uploaders trying to publish rule-breaking content would not bother with an appeal that would reject them anyway.
Of course realistically it's just a marginally expanded oligopoly, but 4 players is better than 3 as competition is concerned.
Quebecor has been branching out Canada-wide at least and they're not just a MVNO.
I've used TekSavvy for nearly a decade and they've been great, but be sure to use another DNS provider. Performance is terrible even if they do use CIRA, ostensibly.
> You're targeting something that is three levels of abstraction away from what you actually care about. My position is that it makes more sense to target what you're actually after: calories.
It's not abstracted away as healthy eating is concerned. Overconsumption is downstream.
You haven't elucidated how you'd merely target calories through policy, but leaving that aside, a) by default people do not count calories nor would they as a measure to protect against weight-gain, b) it's redundant given a whole-foods diet, no one becomes obese from too much broccoli, chicken breast and lentils, c) for those looking to lose weight, mere calorie counting absent leveraging satiating foods and eschewing junk is woefully ineffective in practice, because of lack of sustainability. Dieters typically do lose some weight, then gain it back. Not only is it difficult to adhere to, it's difficult to eyeball calories on a plate, particularly when they're processed foods, such that they'd have to weigh everything on a scale indefinitely.
Encouraging healthier eating patterns solves several problems at once. It protects against overconsumption, and against disease, which would lessen a burden on the healthcare system. That seems quite pragmatic to me. What's at stake is certain corporations stand to make less money, and corn farmers sell less.
Whether through change in diet patterns or "just eating less" as you might posit, if on the national scale people did end up consuming fewer calories and lose weight, then they'd more than likely consume less sugar/HFCS. The end result is still that a healthier populace == selling less corn. We can't discount any and all policy on the conceit that inconveniencing corn farmers is not acceptable.
To transition, yes. This is an upfront cost that can be alleviated, food does not need to cost more after-the-fact. Trump haphazardly paid off farmers in his previous tenure, it happens.
> Similarly, I think making HFCS more expensive isn't likely to make foods less calorically dense. What it will do is make them more expensive as manufacturers put use more expensive alternatives.
That is the point, I think. Those particular foods are calorie-dense.
> so it doesn't make sense to point to that production level as a reason to get rid of subsidies.
Unless you think production levels would fall to pathetic levels on the global stage, and that this production-level is essential, I don't see why not.
> I find the idea that the proposed solution to obesity is to make food more expensive not very palatable (ha).
Specific foods, to be clear. Packaged products with added sugar would be affected. Meat does not have to be if the new policies account for it.
> it's calories and not HFCS that is the largest contributor to the obesity problem
non-satiating (nil fiber + protein) caloric-dense foods facilitate higher calorie consumption. Sugar is not the only vehicle for this, but it's part of the equation. Sugary drinks deliver lots of calories for very little satiety, for example. Other vectors are flour + fat + salt, fried foods.
I agree that "just get rid of subsidies" can be overly simplistic, but it belongs in the conversation. The point is that cheap and highly-available highly-promoted junk food creates a perverse incentive for consumers to eat more of it at the expense of their health. It's everywhere, including school cafeterias.
Any large-scale national solution invariably entails some kind of deterrence. Either junk food costs more, or is less available, or healthier alternatives are actively promoted and cheaper ($$$, I would throw education in this category too). Pick your poison.
Ostensibly, cutting spending would be more popular with voters in general than increasing taxes and spending. Also, falling tobacco smoking rates are a major success story which can be attributed primarily to sin tax (high prices), eliminating advertisement, and educating the masses.
Key word being "immediately". That's right, but substitutions do exist. Hence, growing pains.
> A large part of corn production is used for feedstock. That means there would be systemic issues in the production of meat if it had major disruptions. That's another reason why you can't just swap corn for meat production.
Globally, soybeans are more often used, and these can (and do) grow in the US. Notwithstanding, you can just keep growing corn without subsidy - meat prices would go up. That could be politically contentious, but less total meat consumption could lead to better health outcomes.
> subsidies sometimes trade efficiency for stability
Leaving aside the question of balance, pros and cons:
Farmer stability is not inherently contingent on corn subsidy. Even if we wanted to keep subsidies as a constant, you can subsidize something else.
> part of the national security element is fuel (ethanol)
This doesn't require subsidy. The US produces more than half of the world's ethanol fuel. Notwithstanding that, fossil fuel extraction has also grown through fracking. I don't see the security angle at all.
Today it's just a case of entrenched interests: large key midwestern farmers would stand to lose money, whether you have a tax or reduce subsidies. They stand to gain more by not mitigating obesity rates.
Mind you they could diversify away from corn. If consumers eat whole grains or meat instead of sugar, that's still money for farmers. But it would entail growing pains.
I've jumped through all those hoops to get hired. It would be nice if the years and proof of experience on paper were enough - that's how I'd like to be hired - but it's not enough, apparently.
The returns probably manifest at a senior level, where job security is already a non-issue and one has the privileges and power to make this knowledge actionable. This could be why the readers find it redundant and stick to coasting. I'd like to finish reading the Algorithm Design Manual, SICP and others, but it won't get me my next job, because I won't even be in the same room as someone who cares without jumping through other hoops first. It gets shuffled at the bottom of the pile. On top of it is: networking, building bs, contributing to bs, overengineering a bs blog where I'll write bs. I just want to work my 9-5, man (and do it well), but in my case it's a liability not to.
Pink lady's texture is not great and I find it too sweet.
I believe the "minimalism" movement has been far more impactful in the long-run despite fewer adoptees, just by being a trend that capitalized on the benefits in its messaging. Those who optimize for minimalism consume less, but constantly.
For example, "shelf-stable packaged foods with a large flour component, wherein the flour component is stripped of all fiber, with added fat, salt, and sometimes sugar". You can also include candy, soft-drinks and juice.
That doesn't tell you something is "ultra-processed", but it identifies more meaningful factors. These are typically non-satiating snack foods, very low in protein and fiber, but very savory with added salt and fat. The combination of refined flour, salt and fat seems to be of particular note (and sugar regardless).