LargeWu

Abundance YIMBYism in housing decreases gentrification. Gentrification happens when the only housing that is affordable is in low-income neighborhoods. If there is plenty of housing supply throughout a city, the demand for those low-income neighborhoods is lower.

Nothing in the Abundance agenda states that direct public housing is bad, per se. The argument is that what we need is more housing, and the only realistic way for that to happen is to make housing easier and cheaper to build, typically by easing zoning restrictions and other things like parking minimums that drive up costs.

Fair enough, "used to" is probably not the right qualifier. Still, those guys back in the 30's had to be pretty inventive to make some of the stuff they did with very limited technology. Not to disparage people working with practical effects today.

There used to be real craft, based on the physical world, in creating that movie magic. It took a lot of knowledge about different stuff - materials, photography - to create this.

I guess my point of view is, truly game-changing pharmaceuticals should be shared with the world. And there's precedent for that. Jonas Salk did not patent the polio vaccine he discovered, and the world is a better place for it.

Boner pills? Sure, go nuts on patenting those. But HIV prevention? No, it's immoral to patent this.

I think there's a case to be made for incentive programs for development of key drugs, akin to the way Operation Warp Speed operated for the COVID vaccines. Provide up-front cash for initial research and large guaranteed returns if a drug is approved; in exchange, the drugs become public domain.

Or, just fund government research endeavors with no profit motive. If we can have a JPL for aerospace engineering, why not for pharmaceuticals?

Forget the economic aspect of it, what about the emotional and mental cost something like Downs Syndrome imparts, for both parents? I can't imagine any parent hoping they will have a child that will be utterly dependent on them for their entire lives. It's not at all to say they do not love their children as they are, but nobody seeks to become a parent hoping their child will have severe developmental disabilities. While some may choose not to terminate the pregnancy, I think most parents would think twice before conceiving if they knew with reasonable certainty before the fact.

A complicating factor when talking about rationality and propensity towards either left- or right-wing authoritarian impulses is brain structure, according to a recently publish study.

"Young adults who scored higher on right-wing authoritarianism had less gray matter volume in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in social reasoning. Meanwhile, those who endorsed more extreme forms of left-wing authoritarianism showed reduced cortical thickness in the right anterior insula, a brain area tied to empathy and emotion regulation."

Not only is it tribalism, it's also individuals fundamental anatomy. This seems like a very challenging problem if the people you are hoping to convince are hardwired against your message.

https://www.psypost.org/authoritarian-attitudes-linked-to-al... (layperson's summary)

https://www.ibroneuroscience.org/article/S0306-4522(25)00304... (actual study)

Is making ~8 products a year for 5 years perceived as a viable way to be successful?

On my consumer grade Dewalt, the blade guard, riving knife, and kickback guard are all separate components, so I guess I was considering them separately. I still don't trust the kickback guard fully either, so attempt to stand off to the side if possible if I'm worried about kickback.

The author's assertion was that LVT disincentivizes one from using the land productively, and used oil specifically as an example. This example is basically completely divorced from the realities of oil extraction. Nevermind that nobody is building wells in the middle of cities, where LVT matters.

So, that argument seems to rely on a contrived, unrealistic example. I can't see how LVT disincentivizes productive use of lands.

That's assuming you actually own the mineral rights, which are not necessarily the same as the land ownership itself. These are quite often separated and held by different entities. In practice, the extraction of oil under a parcel of land has almost no relation to what the land is being used for.

This is basically Mastodon, but I think the mass appeal of that is limited given its distributed nature.

Yeah, the price is certainly a deterrent. My kids are tweens/early teens, almost aging out, and while they still like making things with cardboard, not sure I can justify that kind of investment for what is really a relatively simple tool. I mean, my 3D printer barely cost more than that, and that's a high-tech precision machine.

The guard on my table saw mostly serves as a reminder to keep my fingers away from it. I don't expect it would actually prevent any sort of injury.

Typically because there are entrenched financial interests incentivized not to change.

The country with the highest adoption of EV's in the world is Norway. If they can deal with the cold, so can the US.

I have an EV in Minnesota and it's great. Battery life does take a pretty big hit in winter but that's fine based on how I use it. The real problem is lack of charging infrastructure, not the range.

I believe they believe that, on its face.

I also believe that idealistic people will go to great lengths to convince themselves that their desired outcome is, in fact, the moral one. It starts by saying things like, "Well, what is harm, actually..." and then constructing a definition that supports the conclusions they've already arrived at.

I'm quite sure Sam Bankman-Fried did not believe he was harming anybody when he lost/stole/defrauded his investors and depositors' money.

It's also not a very big leap from "My purpose is to do whatever is the greatest good" to "It doesn't matter if I hurt people as long as the overall net result is good (by some arbitrary standard)"

In the same breath, those photographers will complain about all the "amateurs" devaluing their services.

Because we're rapidly descending into a fascist oligarchy, and this is a prime example of how that happens. Rapacious billionaires getting their hooks into the armed forces under the watch of a transactional wanna-be dictator, what could go wrong?

It might not be stolen valor, but you just KNOW these guys are going to play up their veteran status, the Honor and Sacrifice of these Great Men, (the article is already an example of this) when really this is just a trojan horse to enrich themselves and their companies. They're not even full time positions.

This is it.

Maybe a few years ago at <$megacorp> where I work, Oracle requires, as part of their licensing, the ability to scan every machine owned by the company to make sure there is no unlicensed use of any of their software. If any offending installations were found, they would charge the company the cost of the license for every machine. So, thousands of users times $thousands per license.

Even if you had a license for a Java runtime for, say, your Oracle database instance, if that was found to be used for another purpose you'd get hit. Again, for every machine in the entire company, not just the offending one.

Needless to say, there was a huge firedrill to root out any rogue installs.

Just jumping right in as a Lt Col? Is there a lot of precedent for that? I know that the armed forces have worked with a lot of scientists before, like in the Manhattan Project, but my understanding is that most of them remained civilians.

Not sure if this is true any more, but they used to make a majority of their revenue by suing their own customers.

Around here, having a lock doesn't guarantee anything. Bike thieves think nothing of cutting the lock with a cordless angle grinder in broad daylight. Or they'll super glue the locks and come back at night. Nice bike, junk bike, it doesn't really matter. Even being in a locked building.

My biggest reservation about e-bikes is that if you ride it regularly for your transportation, it WILL get stolen, it's only a matter of time. I have a hard time putting thousands of dollars into a bike knowing I'm likely to lose that investment.

> there's just not enough people around to form groups of people that are different.

That's certainly part of it, although I think the bigger factor is that people who are different just leave. Small towns are conformist because of survivorship bias.

Have you ever seen teenage boys? A lot of them are basically quasi-feral owing to the newly elevated levels of testosterone unleashed on their brains which are still a long way from being fully baked.

I don't know that "girls" remains the gold standard so much as girls are more able to conform to broader behavioral expectations. This is not to say teenage girls are immune from hormonal-driven behavior issues, but it manifests in different ways. I have a 13-yo daughter and let me tell you it's no walk in the park. But it's absolutely not a surprise to me that boys account for the majority of problematic behavior.

Feels the the homogenization of culture driven by social media and online communities. Somebody makes a chicken, and it gets a good reaction, so everybody starts making chickens. At first it's organic but it turns into clout chasing. Pretty soon the chickens will start to disappear and something else will take their place.

They're also the kids that are least likely to improve despite any number of things that might happen in the school, including basically unlimited educational funding.

The solution to improving the outcomes for these kids doesn't start at school, it has to start at home.