tomato-sauce

I had a similar experience using Organic Maps for hiking. I was hiking on a forested hill near an urban center. Both Google and Apple Maps only had a couple of the biggest trails while organic maps showed an extensive network. This was really helpful for exploring but I ended up having to take a pretty long detour to get back since the trail I had planned to take didn’t exist. I also encountered a trail marked on the map that had obviously been closed for years and was extremely overgrown. I really like the app but I wouldn’t trust the data for backcountry navigation at all.

The Overwatch example does not really make sense. The author assumes that if people are frustrated by frequently losing, it would be logical to put in effort to improve their skills. But their win rate should remain mostly constant as their skills improve since at the same time they would be moving up the ranking and would face better players. So there is not a strong incentive for the average player to put large effort into improving in the rankings.

In real world activities (eg programming) your skill level is often directly tied to strong incentives such as income. I don't think it is reasonable to think that it would be as easy to move up in the "rankings" all the way up to 95% percentile.

I’m surprised anyone has heard of Forest Knolls! I grew up there. It definitely used to be weird and relatively affordable for the middle class but not really any more. Last year someone bought a house in the neighborhood for $1.3 m. It was worth $350k when my parents moved to the area about 25 years ago. The new owners have a pair of new Porsches in the driveway. Maybe that counts as middle class in the Bay Area these days but it’s still not obtainable for the vast majority of Americans.

Thanks for pointing this out. I don’t know enough about kratom to have an opinion on how it should be regulated. I will add a comment though. Just because I am fundamentally opposed to America regulating drug use outside of its territory.

It feels like in the last few years I have been constantly hearing about new research showing “fun” drugs as cures to a wide array of medical conditions. There’s marijuana for chronic pain, mushrooms for depression, mdma for ptsd, and now ketamine. They are often talked about as if they have little or no harmful side effects. I’m glad we are moving away from the incredibly destructive drug policies that have been in place for so long but I fear the pendulum may be swinging too far the other way. The opioid epidemic was largely caused by the idea of them being non addictive being heavy pushed by the pharmaceuticals industry. Are we going to see similar harms from these drugs a few years after they gain more popularity? So far the evidence doesn’t show anything near this level of harm. I’m just skeptical of anything that seems too good to be true.

I don’t think people are saying the only solution is open borders. More immigration is just the most obvious answer. It is possible in today’s world without relying on future technological developments. But when talking about UBI, people don’t look to immigration as a solution since they would need to be payed the same benefits as anyone else (unless this was some sort of two tiered society). UBI proponents then look towards automation as a solution.