14 karma · joined April 1, 2016
I don't expect that you'd be nodding agreeably. But I do think one with a bit more perspective might engage in a more productive manner.
"A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important issue."
And, this is exactly why I keep "losing my password" for my HN account, so that I have to take a break from participating. I didn't need to look to Wikipedia know what a Red Herring is. And it's a waste of my time spelling it out for others when they could figure it out themselves.
So, it works like this:
You said: "If you believe getting old, and sick, and miserable, and then dying, is good or natural or the way it is supposed to be, then I respectfully disagree with you."
But the person you were replying to said:"If you consider aging and death in old age as a negative, perhaps you should reconsider your philosophy, instead of chasing immortality."
their comment.. If P, perhaps Q. P = "you consider aging and death in old age as a negative" Q = "you should reconsider your philosophy" & "[not] chasing immortality"
and your comment... "If P, then Q." P = "you believe getting old, and sick, and miserable, and then dying, is good or natural or the way it is supposed to be" Q = "I respectfully disagree with you"
so, the "P"s are at issue, as both "Q"s can roughly be translated into, "no", "false"
P[1] = "you consider aging and death in old age as a negative" compared to... P[2] = "you believe getting old, and sick, and miserable, and then dying, is good or natural or the way it is supposed to be"
Not the same.
The original comment simply said, it's not necessarily bad. You said, "you're" arguing it is good, or natural, or the way it's supposed to be.
Again, red herring: "A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important issue."
You're misstatement of the original comment so distorts the issue that we're now arguing about whether "death is natural and inevitable" or "death is good". That is not what the original issue was. So, to reply to your comment, is to be distracted from a relevant or important issue. One would have been misled to go down that path.
logic 101. but hey, you have more karma points than me. so, what does logic really have against that.
As to, you not being able to make sense out of my other comments. That's not necessarily my fault.
Pass.
also, lets not forget what happened to south america when the chicago school of economics prescribed its bitter medicine. they're still recovering/reeling both economically and culturally.
so, i shudder when i read that some of the most influential and active corporations, those determining the way of our society/culture and economy, are adding all these PhDs from a discipline whose track record is absolutely crap from both a social/cultural and an economic angle. (full disclosure i have a b.s. in economics, so, yes, i understand some of what an economist does)
the suits are taking over.
so when your comment begins: "Every time an existential post is made here, I have to remind people:"
I read that as a global claim (global claims are almost never true) and arrogant (in that you "have to remind people", "thank you for reminding us! what would we do without you!")
also, your argument, red herring. the commenter didn't say, let's all be happy that old age is crap. at all. that was you. you said that. why? idk.
Either way, life philosophies that would reflect such a claim don't have comment length "arguments" that would be convincing to anyone on any level. Some things do not lend themselves to logic. Some things require more than a few paragraphs and an argument. And sometimes, those things, are best served by parsimony, rather than loquacious debate.
I wasn't meaning to imply that Mathematica has no value or has little value. It's indeed awesome both productivity wise and for just enjoying the exercise of doing math.
I was trying, and doing a poor job, to give reasons why pencil and paper has value. Not to the exclusion of Mathematica or more so than Mathematica. Just, that it still has tons of value. And that, maybe that is what these open source projects are trying to recreate that Mathematica has not yet captured.
The value of maths is 1) it's "open-source", 2) it's free to use, 3) if you want to switch from one module to another (say, number theory to category theory) you are able to do so using the same tools (pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician), and so long as the two "modules" are inter-operable it flows so beautifully. If they are not, then you get to try to figure out ways to make them so.
That, imho, is why I think all these open source packages keep popping up. Math itself is the ultimate "open source". And in doing math one is not limited to command line interface, left-to-right, line-by-line tools. Compare the experience of writing out a derivative in LaTeX vs on paper. LaTeX is an exercise in causing pain and frustration to oneself. On paper, it feels as though you're writing music.
There may be a few other differences you are not considering.
If this was 20 years ago, headline would read: "The FBI Director Puts Electric Tape Over His Blinking VCR Clock"
+
>Right now, the market wants to build - we should let it. )
vs
( >I would be much, much more apt to lay the blame for the current housing crisis at the feet of misguided zoning and NIMBYism [and I'm going to leave this alone, since it's basically trolling (often dressed up in pseudo-leftist rhetoric)]
&
>If the state wants to step in and build more housing too, great, but first it should get out of the way.) =(?) ( >We need to build more houses, for anyone, as quickly as possible and as much as possible if we want to shift the curve of rental pricing.) & ( >I agree that tiny houses are a feel-good distraction.)
I'm first going to say, my initial response was semi-simplistic/not point-by-point, because your comment doesn't exactly unpack or follow too neatly. But, since you've taking my comment apart seemingly point by painful-point, I simply want to go back to point out that your argument is inconsistent.
Do you think that the "market" is omniscient and will not error? No, it is just a bunch of people and companies doing business within economic, business, and political environments. So before you go writing off government from being able to contribute anything to the solution, remember that all those houses that weren't built where people want to live in them...
>The problem is that there's a massive disconnect between where houses exist and where they're demanded.
...yeah, the market made that cluster fuuuu possible in coordination with our government.
so my mother is a partner at the largest private developer in the state and my dad recently wrapped working as city manager for one of the fastest growing towns in the state. zoning, private vs public land use, eminent domain, affordable housing are conversations i'm familiar with. i was on the board of habitat for humanity in a smallish town during my first years out of college, even.
i'll leave it with this. it's a mess of issues. that's clearly not a "thesis" level argument, i just say it to mean, it's not nimbyism. it's not simply zoning. housing is central to being human. it is where we return and reset daily, and by virtue of that it is intertwined with our personal, professional, and political lives. cheap housing won't fix it. smaller houses won't fix it. more housing won't fix it.
if you ran a race, every day, restarting every day, and every day you lost that race, just in a different way, and then someone said, "sprint faster when you start", you'd probably say something like "eff you, clearly there are other things going on besides my start". because you can fix your start, but three days ago you lost because of your pacing. and a week ago you lost because of endurance. and a month ago you lost because of shin splints... well, maybe, you think, maybe you're running the wrong race. or maybe you're not supposed to race. or, who the eff knows.
that's what i mean. yeah. it's a mess of issues. but that doesn't mean we need to solve each issue. maybe we need to back up and, get some perspective, and re-frame the problem.
In 2010, during the Great Recession, he said: ...After a few years of such imbalances, the country unsurprisingly ended up with far too many houses. There were three ways to cure this overhang: (1) blow up a lot of houses, a tactic similar to the destruction of autos that occurred with the ‘cash-for-clunkers’ program; (2) speed up household formations by, say, encouraging teenagers to cohabitate, a program not likely to suffer from a lack of volunteers or; (3) reduce new housing starts to a number far below the rate of household formations.
So, unless you're arguing that between 2010 and now either we blew up a lot of houses or Buffett doesn't know what he is talking about, then I still don't an argument for tiny houses as compelling.
The macro economic issues (massive capital accumulation by the 1%, stagnant wages for the majority of workers, etc) are more in play than NIMBYism and zoning. I'd be interested whether or not you're active in zoning issues in your community or how it is that you came to the conclusion that zoning boards everywhere are responsible for unfordable housing.
Taxes are at the heart of politics. Without taxes to raise revenue most governments would have no realistic power source.
Property tax, as already implemented many places in the U.S.A., already accomplish the l.v.t. to a lesser degree. And many people have a HUGE problem with it. The argument goes as thus: The government (in the U.S.A) does not have the right to unlawfully take my property. I paid for my property, so it is mine. Thus, the government can't take my property because I did nothing.
Basically, if you are a property owner you must have the resources to pay property tax or you will not be a property owner for long. If you are not a property owner it is getting progressively more difficult to stay in the city limits if you do not have a lease or rent an apartment, effectively making it illegal to be homeless.
If you are homeless, because of the U.S. Patriot Act, it is nearly impossible to get a bank account or a drivers license unless you register with a recognized homeless shelter. I volunteered at a homeless shelter for a few years; they aren't great places to hang around, even if you're desperate. And, get this, in some states if you own an R.V. and live in it legally and full time, you don't have a "physical" address. So guess what, you're homeless. In these states you actually have to lie on your drivers license application in order to get a drivers license or a bank account stating that your personal mailbox (like a post office box but private) is your "physical address". And when you do this (lie about your physical address) you're committing a felony. We're talking about retired people, full-time political consultants chasing campaigns, and people that just like to travel.
Perhaps the "free-market" is not the optimal distribution system for housing. Said another way, perhaps the manner in which we meet our most basic needs of shelter, security, and stability should not be left to the free market.
A corollary then might be, perhaps if social and political frameworks had priority over (but not to the exclusion of) economic frameworks runaway real-estate prices might not so inevitably lead to the unnecessary but unyielding march of the unwilding of our environment (when there are massive tracts of dilapidated real-estate crying out for redevelopment), gentrification of communities and the concomitant loss the cultures of those pushed out into either the diaspora or relocated into projects, and the hand-to-mouth existence that many of us experience, even full-time and well paid persons.
$600 houses are a red-herring to the real issues, not a solution to anything.
Google didn't acquire Nest to out of an altruistic desire to assist Nest to grow faster to fulfill their mission. Nest was acquired because Google was lazy and saw an opportunity to grow Google's revenue and data-base while at the same time getting a foothold in the nascent but exponentially growing IoT sector, instead of having to build something themselves and compete with Nest.
When I hear about the piles of cash that companies like Google and Apple are sitting on I often shudder to think of all the other "Nest" like companies out there that will be snatched up in the middle of a growth spurt like an organism infected with a virus that injects its own DNA in order to hijack the host organism's biological mechanisms in order to fulfill its own goal of self replication, often killing its host in the process.
Nest was born from Apple culture. The founders left Apple after having worked on the iPod and set out to build another beautiful product. They wanted to build something. And the culture that informed them to make this decision, to take this path, was essential in the manner in which it played out. Acquisitions such as this, that aren't merely hands-off capital injections, by definition change the culture, goals, and products of the company acquired.
So, companies, like Google and Apple, that have massive, massive stock-piles of cash have the luxury to, as a side-effect, at will, change the culture, goals, and products of just about any nascent company, and they most often do so for the purposes of furthering their bottom line, expanding their user base, and growing their data-base.
Everyone else (read: everyone that is not one of these handful of companies like Google and Apple) pays the price by losing out on all the beautiful things companies like Nest could have born into the world.
Because it's not just about products. Products are, in addition to being attempts to solve engineering problems, a piece of our culture, of our social technologies, of our shared experiences. Nest wasn't trying to "solve" thermostats. They wanted to improve the experience of being in your home, for many of us our most sacred or private space.
You can't "solve" everything, because not everything is a "problem".
People buy vases and then put them in the middle of a room with nothing to fill them, because they like the way it makes the space feel. There was no "vase" problem. And there is no "awkward silence between friends in a car ride" problem. That awkward silence is a miracle of a good relationship, when two people know, without saying anything, that something is being left unsaid, and that one of them has the chance to be brave and kind enough to, for the benefit of their friendship, make the unspoken spoken. But Spotify would like to suggest you play their "awkward silence" play-list.
Independent companies creating products they themselves want, and that they are not trying to push onto others, but that they'd love to share with the world, need to resist the urge to take that capital infusion or accept a buyout so they can have access to the network and infrastructure of some grand suitor. It's a deal with the devil almost every time.
All these services that Google has or will eventually shut down were at one time at the "go/no go" stage. When Google was still a start-up that "go/no go" decision might be based off of resources or a particular group of programmers passion. Now a mature company, this decision is generally made based on calculations as to how a particular project will fit into the overall portfolio and impact the bottom line.
Some projects, no matter how much a passionate group of programmers might lobby, may never get off the ground because there isn't a sufficient argument in terms of the larger picture. But, and here I finally get to my point, some projects are surely proposed purely to protect the bottom line from competitors or to hedge against changes in the marketplace; i.e. Google+ was purely to protect against the trend of Facebook becoming a growing percentage of a user's on-line experience and walling off content to Google's search engine.
Another example, still unfolding, is that of their Nest acquisition. And this is where the real damage gets done. Google sees the growth of the IOT market, and so acquires Nest so as to get a foothold into that market.
Now both Google+ and Nest are dying horrible, slow, shot in the stomach movie deaths, and everyone is forced to watch. What could have been accomplished by the engineers working on these projects if their primary goal was to serve a remote master, the bottom line of Alphabet? Perhaps, if these two products where not born out of a proxy war to buttress the revenue of Google Search, perhaps we all could have seen great things born out of their endeavors.
Instead, having served their purpose, the fiscal responsibility due to the shareholders of Alphabet having been fulfilled, the Alphabet PR machine gently asks that we look away, and look to their next amazing product.