JBReefer

Russia is not a superpower, they just think they are.

They'll probably be put back together by Colombia, who's in pretty good shape these days.

The US will probably see another batch of very conservative Hispanics like we saw with Cuba. The Venezuelans I've met lately don't exactly love socialism.

Totally agree. It's ads and the attention economy. They thrive on controversy - it's the psychological version of the banner ads in the 90s, but 10,000x more effective.

Culture (like shit) runs downhill.

Mr. Musk seems like he's becoming increasingly erratic and controlling, and there's a record of him being unable to take criticism. This is a pretty intense form of criticism.

I think this is the biggest part, and less the "sleep in your car while you commute for 5 hours each way!" which sounds fucking terrible.

Imagine the amount of space and time saved by having 1 enormous lot on the outskirt of town, like an airport. You walk around your dense urban area, call your car, 10 minutes it's there, it drops you off, and parks itself. No circling the block, no terrible big box concrete hellscapes, just Park Slope without the frustration.

Cheap, too. Building parking in NYC costs ~$100k a spot https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/us/12parking.html

Isn't Bitcoin the most unequal distribution of wealth we know about? Every analysis I've seen says that Bitcoin makes Russia look downright egalitarian.

http://www.blocklink.info/distributions.html

According to State Farm, completely rebuilding my apartment is would be 1/7th of what I paid for it, and that's with NYC union labor.

There's a reason that crackhouses in Vancouver cost $1 million, and it's not because they're made of gold. You need to build density to reduce the share of land cost per dwelling, anything else is a gimmick.

Agree. I think the hunt for ever-newer computing tech is misplaced (blockchain lol) but CRISPR might actually cure cancer. That's way more important than Yet Another Logistics Company at this point.

I think we're at a standstill for most PC/mobile/the sort of tech most of us work with.

Electric cars and the explosion of renewables are going to change _everything_, faster than people think.

Doing a quarter mile in a Model S is fucking AWESOME.

App developers have options - iOS is a small chunk of the market. Handset makers don’t, because of broken ip laws.

To me, "manufacturing consent" is scarier. Fox News is ridiculous and everyone - _especially Fox News_ - knows it.

The Washington Post is as you claim, which feels dangerous. The same with the Times (and the Journal on any non-free market health policy) in the modern era - there's a lot that's left out: important context is intentionally omitted to shape the narrative or to produce an angle, which is much more malicious.

Fox News/HuffPo/Breitbart/TPM don't scare me because they're somewhere between junkfood and supermarket tabloids. It's the people who lie when they appear to tell the truth - like WSJ coverage of any single payer country - that freak me out.

It works OK, but there's two situations where it can go bad:

1. (Uncommon) People take off during crunch time

2. (Very common IME) People take off en masse during lulls, leaving a skeleton crew to handle blowups.

3. No vacation payout during layoffs

If you do 1 just to get out of work, you're a crappy coworker. People do 2, to be team players, but it can result in large waves of low staffing. 3 is a natural result, which is a major financial downside - the upside, of course, is that you can take much more vacation, and many do.

Even with the above, I like it. You can take mental health days and deal with family issues without that feeling of "begging for forgiveness"

Car companies don't build cars, they build factories - the cars are just a side effect. Designing the car is (comparatively) easy - building them at scale and turning a profit is a miracle.

I'm sure Tesla knows that, the fans seem not to.

Can you explain stereotypes of the Guardian? The article is pretty over the top, but as an American I am not intimately familiar with them like, say, the Journal.

Fundamentally, creating policy based on racial capacity cannot end in a moral place. Every single time governments/societies start down that path, it ends poorly.

Frankly, who gives a shit. It seems better to me to live in a world that's .000005% less efficiently allocated than it is to live in the caste system that always emerges from that path.

Equity financing is taxable, debt is not.

It has some weird results.

Cars have huge costs besides just production - amortized R&D, depreciation/damage to the tooling, union benefits, rework, shipping, amortized cost of future recalls per vehicle, interest on debt payments.

Also, it's one of, if not the most competitive market on the planet. There's a large number of incredibly well funded entrants, with competition in every segment. It's as close to a truly efficient market as you can get, and it's getting more efficient as Chinese and Indian brands mature.

This is one of the most negative articles I've ever read, about something that has produced a truly remarkable standard of living for an ever-growing number of people.

Remember when people were proud of making things, and understood that nothing would ever be perfect?

That's a popular, but untrue, idea. There is a ton of research into new antibiotics, and new classes of antibiotics. We just didn't need to until recently.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/14/first-new-ant...

https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/ten-new-antibiotics-60091...

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43032602

I'm saying that it's something you don't give up if you don't have to - I own my apartment now. Thanks for assuming, though.

As someone that had a good one, you do anything you can to hold onto them. 1% yearly increases in a gentrifying neighborhood is awesome

It looks from the outside that the whole of the Bay Area has realized it can cover its awful behavior by _claiming_ to be progressive.

You don't need to care about privacy, just claim to; you don't need to care about poor people when you can claim it's the right wing (who don't exist in SF)'s fault; you can claim to care about diversity and continue to hire only white men from Stanford etc.

Weird world.

There is a lot to be said about seeing great art in a less crowded context. One of the best days of my life was when I went to Member Only Hours at MoMA, and I walked alone, in silence.

I live near the Met, and too many tour buses show up, discharge huge groups of people who hustle and shove from one famous piece to the other - ignoring the art that isn't in text books. It's not a checklist, it's a really incredible place. All people should be entitled to see "Self Portrait with Straw Hat" but man, maybe they should look at the pieces next to in, instead of running downstairs to check off the next box.

In my opinion, this will be a good thing - fundamentally, the land belongs to the people of the city of New York, and the free rent for that much acreage of Central Park on Fifth Avenue is an incalculable subsidy. It should at least _try_ to be more pleasant for the citizens of the city.

Second this - I worked remote for 3 years, and it's a unique skill set. I don't think I could do it again, until I have kids at least - the loneliness and "you're never working, or done working" thing gets weird. I'd need to know someone has already worked through all of that.

I would love a feature phone with Facebook Messenger, rudimentary Google Maps, and no other features.

Honestly, if there's one that works I'd buy it tonight.

The Dutch more or less invented the Western economic model.

I feel like you hear the "The Bay is over, the bubble popped, the culture became oppressive" story every year and every year it doesn't seem to go anywhere.

Now, I would never take a job there, but so many of my cohort have and continue to that I don't think the end really is nigh.

This kind of thing is why people are saying npm is easier...

Honestly, why don't we do that? Seems easier on everything than huge amounts of airborne poison, and radiation will _certainly_ kill anything in high enough doses.

DuckDuckGo is really good - maybe where Google was a year ago but without the user tracking. Also, bangs are awesome.

It really freaks me out that no one ever talks about Bezos owning the Washington Post. Shouldn't that be a huge deal?

I realize this is more aimed at DNAInfo style sites being shutdown, and based on the rest of the content has an agenda, but man, that's a big issue that's never mentioned.