015UUZn8aEvW

This wasn't something that flew under the radar. They had done a lot of due diligence on it and were about to start an extremely expensive and complicated project to fix it.

I suspect that some of the delay was due to the amount of work it took to get the huge special assessment lined up. It's likely that some of the residents who were killed had been fighting the condo association to avoid paying so much.

Here's a long letter that the condo board recently wrote to the unit owners about the concrete repair work.

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/miamiletter0628...

Modular home manufacturing has been around for many decades. It certainly has a role to play, but if it were that much better it would have put the traditional contractors out of work long ago.

The main problem is transportation. You can make every box the size of a standard shipping container, and thus greatly reduce your home design options and size of rooms while still spending plenty on shipping. Or you can make bigger boxes, which gives you more design flexibility but still a lot less than stick building does. And with the bigger boxes you need special highway permits, escort vehicles, etc.

And then, when you have everything on site, there's still a lot to be done. Tree clearing, grading, excavation, concrete work, paving, utility lines, on-site assembly of the boxes (using an expensive crane)...

When you've added it all up, modular isn't the obvious improvement that it seems to be at first glance.

You only need holes in certain places and they can be drilled in seconds. Electricians use specialized right angle drills called "hole hawgs" to drill them.

Platform framing is done in the north too.

>you don't have large firms that can exploit economies of scale.

There are also diseconomies of scale in residential construction, partly for reasons described in the original post. Having many layers of management is inefficient when you're dealing with work that involves a lot of customization and homeowner input.

>Despite being around for decades, most contractors still use copper.

No, they don't. Pex is ubiquitous in single-family and smaller multifamily construction now. Copper is used in larger and nonresidential projects where the plumbing codes require it. The idea that professional plumbers and homebuilders haven't heard the news yet that Pex is cheaper is silly.

Great essay. This is a much more sophisticated analysis of construction efficiency than you typically find; most of them basically imply that construction is inefficient because contractors are dumb.

One minor comment: balloon framing is not a synonym for light wood framing, it's a (mostly archaic) version of it. Balloon framing features long exterior wall studs that extend up multiple stories, as opposed to modern "platform framing", in which the studs stop at each floor.

Because it was done by the government, not just by Google. Yes, Google played a major role and yes, the tech companies do a lot of deeply concerning things on their own. But I was still taken aback that actual government software was installed on my phone without my knowledge or permission. It's a really bad precedent to set.

The fact that Google and the government worked hand in glove to do this doesn't make it less disturbing. Arguably it's more disturbing.

I emailed massnotifyhelp@mass.gov to ask why the app was on my phone, and I got the following response:

Hi [my name],

In order for MassNotify to be available to users in their phone’s settings, an update was made by Google that resulted in some users seeing MassNotify appear in their app list in the Google Play Store. Apologies if this caused any confusion.

The appearance of MassNotify in the app list does not mean that MassNotify is enabled on your phone. The presence of the app merely means that MassNotify has been made available as an option in your phone's settings if you wish to enable it. For more information about this, please see this help center article from Google: https://support.google.com/android/answer/10775533

You can see whether MassNotify is active by going to Settings -> Google -> COVID-19 Exposure Notifications. The “Use Exposure Notifications” toggle at the top of the page will show you whether MassNotify is active or not. From this screen, you can also enable or disable MassNotify at any time.

If you have any further questions about this, or anything else related to MassNotify, please don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll be happy to help.

Regards,

[name]

MassNotify Help Desk Team

www.mass.gov/massnotify

For information about MA COVID-19 resources visit www.mass.gov/isolate

I'm a MA resident and this app was on my (Android) phone...until a few minutes ago when I read about it on Hacker News, found it, and deleted it.

I have no memory of ever opting into the program you describe, and it isn't the type of thing I would normally do. It's possible I guess.

In any case, the way they did this is creepy. There was no icon for the app; I had to look in Settings/Apps & Notifications to find it. And neither the official state press releases nor the few local news stories about it mention that the app was installed without notice. They use vague, lawyerly language about how it can be "enabled".

It's not a question of what people "mind" or "don't mind", it's a question of what level of risk people will accept in order to live a normal life. Hiding away from people may reduce risk in a lot of ways, but most people find it unacceptable.

Before COVID, I was under the impression that most Americans found "Give me liberty or give me death" an admirable sentiment. But it turns out that I was mistaken about that.

Because it would give people a better intuitive sense of how bad COVID is in a larger civilizational/historical context.

Over the past 12+ months, people have accepted enormous infringements on freedoms in their everyday lives. Many of the public health measures that we take as a matter of course in the "new normal" - lockdowns, social distancing, extended closing of churches, etc.- are things that would have been almost unthinkable as recently as January of 2020.

If you look far enough back, to some point in the twentieth century, you'll find a time at which the baseline infectious disease risk in everyday life was higher than it has been in the COVID-era US. But people at that time went to crowded theaters, ate in restaurants, packed together in churches and schools, and so on. Restricting these things could have decreased their all-cause mortality, but they clearly found that option unacceptable.

Note that this isn't an issue of whether people "believe in science" or "believe in data". It's an issue of risk tolerance. People a few generations ago understood the Germ Theory of Disease perfectly well, and they knew that they could reduce the spread of infectious disease by implementing the kinds of measures we've implemented for COVID. And yet they didn't implement these measures, except in very minor and temporary ways. We've become far more risk-averse than they were. And the question of whether that's a good thing is not an empirical question.

I'd like to see a version of this analysis that incorporates all-cause mortality from a much larger time period; say the past fifty years rather than the past five.

"the indigenous people over whose heads it would take place, the Saami of northern Scandinavia."

It's never been clear to me why the Saami are "indigenous" but average Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians aren't.

Does anyone else find it at all creepy that the words "disinformation" and "misinformation" went from unusual to ubiquitous virtually overnight?

How many violent attacks have resulted from activity on Facebook?

In three years, the slippery slope has gone from deplatforming a tiny handful of online Nazis to deplatforming the President and an app with 10 million users.

No it won't, because they aren't going to apply the standard consistently. It will be used against specific sites for political reasons.

the world wide web?

It's remarkable how little discussion there is about where SARS-CoV-2 actually came from. Yes, there is some. But it's a tiny fraction of the overall amount of digital ink that has been spilled over this during the past year.

The potential cost of a new virus is so enormous that measures reducing the probability of its occurrence, even marginally, are ridiculously cheap bargains even if they're expensive in absolute terms. But we need to know what really happened in order to take the right measures.

I admit that I do find the lab-escape hypothesis plausible. I'm not certain of it, but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that points in that direction. Perhaps one reason this hypothesis hasn't been publicized more is that those most qualified to assess it aren't eager to learn that some of the research they do is insanely dangerous, and that members of their profession may have committed a screwup of world-historical proportions.

"Rather, prejudiced people take one look at you, see your gray hair, and make assumptions about you""

Often, I suspect, it isn't even about making conscious assumptions. People just have positive and negative subconscious reactions to certain physical traits.

It's striking that you virtually never hear any discussion of "height discrimination", which I put in scare quotes because it barely seems to a recognized concept in the world of work (although it is somewhat recognized in the dating world). Yet there's lots of evidence that tall people have systematic advantages in life. They're seen as leaders, more likely to become CEOs, more like to be elected to political office, etc.

First as tragedy, then as farce.

It's ironic that Emily Bazelon, the author of this essay, is the granddaughter of the late influential federal judge David Bazelon. Judge Bazelon was a well-known progressive and a well-known free speech proponent. Although his granddaughter shares his broadly progressive worldview, her position on this issue is different.

The evolution from David to Emily reflects that of the US left as a whole. Most people like to praise free speech as a theory. In practice, it is a tool for those who don't occupy the commanding heights of a culture to push back against those who do. When the New Left was ascendant in the 1960s and 1970s, promotion of free speech was an important component of its rise to cultural power. Now that its intellectual descendants occupy the commanding heights, they view it as a threat rather than an asset.

I didn't get an MBA from HBS, but I did cross-register into a class there while getting a different degree. The classroom experience there is sui generis, and it definitely couldn't be translated into an online format without diminishing its value. It's not just a matter of transmitting and absorbing information. If I were an incoming MBA student, I'd defer a year rather than going online.

It's even more than that. The classroom experience is absolutely central to the program.

Agreed. Carrying out a DDos attack is illegal, so these services are protecting sites against illegal activity. If we want to uphold the rule of law, protecting against illegal activity should be acceptable regardless of the contents of a website.

A physical comparison would be a security system for a business's property. The security company shouldn't be able to disable the system for a company simply because they don't like the politics of the people operating it. Doing that would essentially be facilitating a crime.

Maybe you could, but would you want to?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBvIweCIgwk

Yes, but only if it's a common practice. Doesn't work if you're an early adopter.

Someone I know well, who owns an engineering company, used to be a big proponent of this but has soured on it.

It absolutely is possible for people to learn complex technical skills (like mechanical or software engineering) in a professional setting. The problem is that the trainees are mostly dead weight for an extended period of time. The employers who hire them need confidence that the trainees will remain with them for long enough to provide a payoff for the initial investment. If the trainees can just leave whenever they feel like it (my friend's experience), the whole thing is a waste of time and money.

I'd be interested to know how this is handled in countries where apprenticeships are more common. There must be some combination of legal and cultural restraints on trainees bailing after the employers have invested in them.

I know the local pay scale pretty well. He was out of work for a while, and he definitely would have taken a salary equivalent to what I was making.

I'm a grad student at an elite American university. Several weeks ago, some other students and I attended a recruiting presentation put on by a large multinational company I won't name. The woman who gave the presentation services her company's contract with a tech company, that, let's just say, has a big share of the search engine market.

She emphasized that she was looking for diversity, because, as she said, "the type of people on the other side of the table from us are different than they used to be, and they don't want to be dealing with a bunch of 65-year-old white guys. So those aren't the type of people we're looking for." That's pretty much a direct quote.

I was at a small company before I went to grad school. The company began working with a guy in his sixties who'd been laid off for a while and couldn't find work, even though he had a ton of experience. We brought him in on a contract basis, and his role gradually expanded as it became clear that he had both excellent technical knowledge and great people skills. He became a mentor to me and helped me out a ton. He's objectively better at our profession than I am in multiple dimensions, but right now I could find a new job ten times more easily than he could.

I'd like to start a business in 3 or 4 years, and I'm seriously considering going out of my way to target people like him. It'll be my competitive advantage.