Addiction to any given substance is highly variable from person to person, and there's a lot of data to back that up.
I recall a friend describing their struggle to quit caffeine, which I mocked at first, until I realized it sounded exactly like my brutal struggle to quit nicotine. Yet, plenty of people quit cigarettes effortlessly. Nicotine is one of the most variable, but caffeine, alcohol and cocaine vary widely too. I imagine we'd find this is the case for most substances if we had the data. In a sane world, we'd give every kid their addiction predisposition profile when they turn 13.
In terms of access to drugs, the differences between countries is incoherent, not really a "good vs bad" situation. A lot of it has to do with the different ways nations fumble their endless (yet fruitless) attempts to limit abuse and recreational use.
But in terms of cost, the US system is bad. If we as a nation want to invest in drug development, we should do so. Instead we ask grandma and grandpa and the chronically ill to flip the bill. Hard to think of a worse approach.
I save my shopping list for Puerto Vallarta where I'll buy a small amount of benzos instead of battling it out with a US doctor for a prescription. But don't try that in Guadalajara - it's in the same state but the restrictions are far stricter.
And if you're a fan of Benadryl (diphenhydramine), don't expect to buy it in Latin America. It virtually doesn't exist.
It's about growth potential. Boeing has all the excitement of a utility company, just with bigger publicity problems. SpaceX has the potential to forge whole new industries. If you're bullish on space tourism or asteroid mining, SpaceX is the best bet on the table right now.
China will match Starlink in ~5 years and will push adoption hard through it's Belt and Road initiative, just as it has with it's (admittedly superior) GPS system. Starlink may become the de facto option in the Western world, but it won't have a chance at a global monopoly.
China is currently building TWO competing starlink-type systems. Given the trajectory of China in recent years, I no longer say "nobody is anywhere close to competing with..." about pretty much anything.
Even NYC is having a soundstage boom. It's not just about cutting costs, it's also about being free to go where the talent and resources are, instead of being chained to LA.
Nearly everyone we know has lived their entire lives in a world obsessed with reducing trade barriers, and grew up with a minimal general education on economics or geopolitics. So to assume anything more then a small subset of the population could talk coherently for 5 minutes on the topic of tariffs is, to me, absurd. Just look at how the general public responded to a surge in inflation after a couple decades of abnormally low rates. It's like asking someone if the Fed should raise or lower interest rates. It's not that people shouldn't have opinions on these things, just that most people don't care and among those who do, few have more than a TV-news level of understanding.
This is an important distinction. Most "rent control" laws are intended to be "rent stabilization" not outright price fixing. Their goal is to prevent insane swings in rent happening too quickly, which disrupts families and local economies (and even infrastructure development).
But the worst/most aggressively laws are always used as the examples, skewing the conversation to edge cases and ignoring the fact that these laws can and do take hundreds of different forms.
> Rent control is not a great solution long term since it reduces the incentive to build more
It is exceptionally rare for new construction to be subject to rent control laws, unless they utilize special tax breaks or government subsidies. It does nothing more than slightly inconvenience the investor class, who usually aren't thinking past 15-20 years anyway, when rent control laws might theoretically impact their investment.
Desirable metros seem to have very sticky prices. San Francisco, where I lived for 15 years, turned into a grotesque caricature of what it once was, but prices barely budged (and for most of that transition, they surged wildly). Sure, it's no longer the single most expensive rental market in the country, but it's still one of the highest despite quality of life degrading massively and even a big decline in population.
The question actually asks "...worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime".
The value of college to me was mostly social and intellectual, not economic. It's an irreplicable experience. There's certainly some logic to skipping that experience, but I couldn't recommend it.
It kind of makes sense. We don't go out into the world thinking "ok, time to meet more my moms!". We can't treat anyone else like our mom, and vice versa. The mother-child relationship is probably the most important and influential for most people, but it's a complete anomaly. Friends are not an anomaly, their pretty typical, and since Mom and Dad are not friends, a young child has learned very little firsthand about friendship until it happens. Then they have some experiences with those friends and those experiences become better predictors of future attachment style than the dynamic with the mother. This makes sense because in the realm of friends, these are their formative experiences. Mom may have had an impact (and does according to the study), but the bigger influence on how you deal with future friends is in how you experienced your formative friends.
My schools were good, just an middle class CA suburb, but still good, especially our high school. And we had moderately impressive facilities and equipment that we could certainly not recreate at home. And of the roughly 30 teachers I had in high school, maybe 5 or 6 were really impressive - mostly in advanced classes - and they made all the difference. They were very smart, some of them overeducated, and they represented an entirely different type of adult in my life that I desperately needed, given the ultra-hierarchical nature of most family units.
That's probably true in a lot of cases for K-5. But I don't think any two people could teach a child with the same robustness as a the ~15 teachers most kids have during middle school/junior high, let alone provide things like labs, workshops, extracurriculars, etc. With high school that gap goes from big to enormous.
True, but to prevent those restaurants from hiring children, feeding us poison, and dodging all taxes the market must be regulated. And we're back to the same discussion we've been having for 150 years - how do we best regulate markets.
When we asked Google whether it developed this feature with or without Apple’s involvement, Moriconi confirmed it was not a collab. “We accomplished this through our own implementation,” he tells The Verge. “Our implementation was thoroughly vetted by our own privacy and security teams, and we also engaged a third party security firm to pentest the solution.” Google didn’t exactly answer our question when we asked how the company anticipated Apple responding to the development; Moriconi only says that “…we always welcome collaboration opportunities to address interoperability issues between iOS and Android.”
> often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener
Police shouldn't be able to pull someone over for an air freshener or tinted windows. They can send a fix-it ticket without wasting the time and resources, and without causing the inconvenience or diversions in traffic. And, as a private citizen, I strongly prefer the police have the minimal necessary powers to detain me.
The US and Brazil have an informal defense treaty that will almost certainly outlast the next 3 years of lame duck Trump. Plus, they have a presidential election next year.
I don't know what to say about India. If nothing else, no sane US President would alienate India too much because they're an irreplaceable strategic partner and bulwark against Chinese expansion.
I'm talking about disease prevention, maternal mortality, infant mortality, access to clean water, anesthetic(!!) and access to things like reading glasses and hearing aids and oh, I don't know, refrigeration.
What does your precious Harvard and US Treasury Department have to say about that?
Key quote:
"Pozsar’s argument: the moment Western nations froze Russian foreign exchange reserves, the assumed risk-free nature of these dollar holdings changed fundamentally. What had been viewed as having negligible credit risk suddenly carried confiscation risk. For any country potentially facing future sanctions, the calculus of holding large dollar reserve positions shifted."
My only critique here is that Russia is an outlier, along with China, because they both hold large dollar reserves and have a contentious relationship with the US. You have to go pretty far down the list to find another nation that is likely to face US sanctions - and those nations, like Libya and Iran, are already heavily sanctioned!
He mentions Prison Architect 2, which like Kerbal switched studios for the sequel and ended up an unfinished mess that's objectively worse than the original. Meanwhile, Rimworld is raking in the cash (presumably) by continuing to make popular DLCs for a 12-year-old game! But it sounds like they wanted to go big, and I kind of get it since graphics matter a lot more for a city builder than a lot of other simulation games.
A few autonomous taxis in each of the 1000 most sparsely populated counties would dramatically improve the quality of life for those people, particularly for the elderly. No bus line in the world can do that - not in places like Idaho or Western Kansas. I think they should be government funded as soon as it's feasible.
People who live in snowy/icy areas will simply never have autonomous driving. Does that settle it? Or do we have to keep pointing out obvious limitations to cutting edge technology?