Empact

Perhaps most importantly, unlike cash, it can't be printed, and unlike gold, its supply is not responsive to price.

You have a mistaken conception of the free market. The voluntary action we do in upholding our families and communities is foundational to the economy - voluntary action is the space in which economic liberty occurs.

It doesn’t reduce efficiency because the volunteers are the judge of worth and their’s is the only opinion that matters. The cost of providing services can be quite low when the labor is volunteered, so the cost to benefit tilts heavily in the direction of net benefit, i.e. efficiency in producing positive outcomes at a particular cost.

Is there any particular basis for this statement, or do you prefer to leave it unsubstantiated?

The context: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-006...

There are a few concerns about the electoral college, but I don’t consider it broken in any meaningful sense. After all, the Constitution has survived over 200 years with it in place, which makes it the longest-serving constitution in force today. We cannot say for sure that it would have survived so long under any proposed alternative.

The first issue I would aim to address is the variance in voting power from district to district. In Wyoming, voters have a significantly lower constituent to elector ratio, ie greater voting power, than those in e.g. California.

This issue is a recent development due to the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the number of reps in the House. As the population has grown, the distance between the average population vs the minimum population of a district has increased.

The remedy is to simply uncap the size of the house and increase the number of representatives. This would quantize the population over a greater number of electors thus reducing the remainder, resulting in relatively more equivalent voter power.

As an added benefit, it would increase the amount of access each voter has to their Representative in the House, and make it practically more difficult to corrupt a majority of the House members.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UncapTheHouse/comments/lklp4h/the_u...

https://thirty-thousand.org/

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/435-representatives/

Anyone looking for a solution to physician quality or availability can find it through direct primary care / concierge care. Personally I pay $60/month to have unlimited access to my physician in Austin.

The physician, in turn, rather than having 40% overhead, has no overhead from billing or insurance. They have simple monthly cashflow that they can allocate to cover rent and wages for their practice. This means that the physician can choose how many patients they have relative to their expenses, and decide how much time they have available on average for each patient.

The result is great for the patient, great for the provider, and the sort of thing that will help increase availability of doctors, and their satisfaction with their work.

You can find more on this from https://www.dpcare.org. Here's a map of direct primary care practices: https://mapper.dpcfrontier.com.

There are various ways to hide an airtag on a bike. Consequences are the way to deter thieves.

The question is not whether any particular person can benefit from university education - the answer is that there is a possibility of benefit for any person. That does not mean that every person should attend university.

The question we should be considering is, given that university education comes at substantial expense, and that the number of students our university system can accommodate is necessarily limited: what students are justified in going to university, by their ultimate social and personal benefit?

I would argue that sending unintelligent people through university is counter-productive: it undermines the quality of conversation and culture of the university by allowing mid-wits to shift the conversation. It undermines the standards that professors apply to their students by making it intractable to fail much of their class. It lowers the bar, even for the capable students. Thus it diminishes the education, most tragically, for the capable students who might otherwise take us to greater heights of understanding.

About 44% of the population goes through college.[1] If this population was the top 44% by IQ, then the minimum IQ would be 102.[2]

Instead the average IQ is 102, meaning many college students are below average in intelligence. We’re populating our universities with students of less academic potential than you would expect given the number enrolled.

[1] https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/percentage-of-americ...

[2] https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/IQtable.aspx

> What part of the Constitution are we ignoring?

Drone strikes on foreign targets are most analogous to the historical practice of issuing “letters of marque and reprisal,” which allowed private actors (privateers) to act on behalf of the state to take out pirates.

Issuing such letters is an enumerated power of Congress, not the Presidency. So if the President does so unilaterally, they are acting outside their Constitutional authority.

The risks of abuse to military power are real and significant, which is why the power was placed in the body closest to the people - so that such actions would be consistent with the public will.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...

This community is a good resource for that: http://reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/

In the Rails world, the gem strong_migrations can be used to detect these: https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations

The docs include a handy articulation of fixes.

Indeed, in the US we too have a history of creating “states of exception” to the same effect, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vig...

Don’t the many zero setback cities invalidate your setback argument? They’re not drowning in stormwater - clearly it can be managed in a number of ways.

Why not admit to yourself that you just like exclusionary land use regulations, and are comfortable with the impacts on the cost of living, increased commutes, etc.?

It’s not your neighborhood under threat, it’s your status quo.

Fun fact: the vast majority of the NYC system was built between 1904 and 1940 when there were several competing subway companies. Since the subway companies were unified in 1940, essentially no new lines have been built.

The NYC Subway is a relic from a foregone age, from a time when we built things and wasn’t mired in bureaucracy and carbrained thinking.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City...

As someone who likes to pick up incidental litter along my way, my practices on this front are:

* I make a point of not picking up everything I see, rather just do an incremental bit at each opportunity

* I set a basic standard for when I should: if I literally see litter and a trashcan along the path I’m traveling - the goal being to minimize the cost / maximize the value of the effort.

Even with such minimal practices I probably pick up more litter than 90+% of people. :P

There’s a documentary “The Singing Revolution,” which covers how this festival related to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/4njksFKyycY?si=vrULaKl20rVx9L9g

Another automatic option for achieving these air quality goals is to use an HRV/ERV for continuous fresh air in the house, as they do in Passive House construction. Doing heat exchange between the outgoing and incoming air makes it a very energy efficient system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_ventilation https://www.zehnderamerica.com/heat-recovery-ventilator/

Are we making a good trade-off if that protection means preventing lifesaving treatments from reaching the market for decades or more? Does the risk the part might not work somehow justify the loss of life due to the absence of a lifesaving treatment?

Wouldn’t we learn a lot more about the effects of these experimental treatments if we allowed the willing to take them voluntarily?

Is there a reason other than fear to think that CRNAs are ineffective at their jobs?

Have you seen evidence that less discrimination at work leads to higher fertility?

Nuclear power is the most significant opportunity for clean energy. If we implement it fully, as e.g. France has, I don’t see a reason we can’t achieve abundant clean energy.

A great example of why to support "Right to Try" laws. Every terminal patient could choose to contribute to our understanding of treatment while also possibly improving their outcome. Through self-experimentation we could dramatically increase the pace of progress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-try_law

It's not just to cut costs, it also means they can remotely update the interface as new features are introduced or new designs implemented.

The boom gets started with an expansion of credit. The fed sets rates low, are you starting to get it? That new money is confused for real loanable funds, but it’s just inflation that’s driving the ones who invest in new projects, like housing construction. The boom plants the seeds for its future destruction. The savings aren’t real, consumption’s up too! And the grasping for resources reveals there’s too few. https://youtu.be/d0nERTFo-Sk?si=mcHcwlGi-TPaf5q-

The claim being that to back a loan with new “printed” money is necessarily inflationary.

Loans backed with saved/invested funds are non-inflationary, because the saver gives up their ability to consume with those funds, in proportion with the consumption the borrower takes on.

Isn't the title itself editorialized, care of our propagandizing media?

They may appreciate that competition between the operators is a mechanism to support efficiency and progress in infrastructure. Each rail operator wants people visiting their malls, building near their stations, and in working towards that, they improve their systems.

Notably the system was almost entirely built by these private companies, and basically no progress occurred after the unification.

Instead, the system has decayed.

A demonstration of how competition fuels progress in infrastructure.

This article convinced me to give CNN another chance, after being disgusted with it under Zucker.

IMO the USA does need an honest, unbiased news organization. If CNN can be it, then more power to them.

Some years back I had a sobering realization: there is no outer limit for how inefficient a government program can be.