DataGata

Eventually you will get so far away from something that you cannot resolve it even at the plank distance.

Doctors shouldn't ever get sued. The idea of an "individual doctor" is such a 19th century concept. They're gears in a machine- the hospitals. An ideal hospital would never get sued because it performs very well. Instead, hospitals try to never get sued but do not perform very well, because it's cheaper to avoid litigation than it is to improve performance. Improving performance could be incentivized by open transparency, pricing, and competition but they have a local monopoly, so there's no point.

It's a ridiculous legacy system.

If you run a small business and have a SB card, spending just $100k can get you more than $1k in rewards a year. $1k is still probably not worth the IRS tracking down, but getting on the IRS being too busy to tackle your tax fraud is still tax fraud.

Down the drain? I might buy the water sucking down air, but down the drain?

But was it a jpeg? A gif? What type of image file?

The great thing is that it works in Kerbal Space Program, so you can plan out missions that use it in the game.

Chicago has 13 cameras per person. According to this data, that puts it second highest in the US (after Atlanta).

Of the two recessions you lived through, both were expected. Many people decried the tech boom. Many people thought there were warning signs pre-2008. The problem was that nobody knew the depth of the 2008 recession.

[1]https://money.cnn.com/2007/02/26/news/economy/greenspan/inde... [2]https://thinkprogress.org/alan-greenspan-warns-of-coming-rec... [3]http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article297.html

Why will public chargers be slow? We should assume that those who provide public charging services (the gas stations of the future) will be trying to optimize throughput + convenience store sales.

DC fast chargers currently get you 40 miles in ten minutes[1] (that sucks!) so your extra 20 miles gets you an extra 5 minute wait. Presumably that wait can be "limited" by getting your shopping done or grabbing a bite to eat while you do it.

[1]https://pluginamerica.org/understanding-electric-vehicle-cha...

Is that a political problem? Surely, a person who lives in rural NZ might think, "Oh, my tax dollars are being used to help those in Auckland; I'm being shafted", but if NZ is anything like the United States, urban centers are the producers of tax units and rural areas consume tax units.

One of the surprising facts in the article is this:

>Global fire activity was lowest on record.

The author explain why this is true a few sentences later- the change is being

>driven primarily by the conversion of frequently burning savannas to agricultural areas.

I wonder if this is one of those "humans accidentally geoengineering a few more years of habitability into the planet" things, like the global chilling effect that our pollutants have when they're highly reflective of light. Only, in this case, by preventing fires we're keeping more carbon locked into plants. (This is obviously a gross simplification, but this could be a possibility, right?)

The Strong Towns line is a pretty simple one, and this article simply reiterates on it: Nobody does ROI calculations on infrastructure costs and it will catch up with you sooner or later.

It might be compared to technical debt for the HN crowd: you build fast and break things for a couple of decades (post-WW2) and then suddenly you find yourself with an unimaginably complex, catatonic system that can't pay for itself. The interest payments overwhelm the rest of the system.

However! That doesn't actually answer the question about why _new_ infrastructure costs so much (surely a new subway line doesn't actually care if half the roads are ten years behind their maintenance schedule).

For context, the original article [1] was in September of 2009, a year after the financial crisis hit its climax. The period was also a period where "salt water economics" and "fresh water economics" had their peak conflicts (after many decades of a peaceful truce).

The different view points are not exactly amicable because they quickly devolve into ideological fights.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.htm...

The hukou system is fascinating- I literally turned to a Chinese coworker to ask about it. He is dealing with visa issues in the US, and explained if he wanted to go live in the Chinese city of his family, he'd have essentially a new set of "visa" issues there!

If John von Neumann only lived another ten years, I'm curious what else would've been accomplished!

The idea of NASA becoming smart enough that it reroutes its plans around administrations is a nice idea. It's pretty hopeful. It also seems wrong: if it were true, NASA would've gotten us somewhere by now.

What do you mean by "7 times the return"? In productivity increases via. technology? In just the fiscal multiplier effect? In keeping decrepit, middle-of-nowhere NASA departments up and running?

We could ban semis passing at all, that'd be fine with me.