I don't mean to say "he made a Rick and Morty reference, Serious Adults don't make Rick and Morty references". That'd be dumb. I mean that he points to a robot in Rick and Morty that was sad about being programmed to pass butter, and attempts to infer from this that real robots would refuse to intelligently pursue arbitrary goals, and therefore that the orthogonality thesis is false. He's treating a thing that happened in fiction as though it was a real thing that happened somewhere that we should treat as evidence. That doesn't work.
The important thing about congestion pricing is that it makes mass transit competitive. There are buses you can take out of San Francisco into Oakland/Berkeley/El Cerrito right now, but they have to wait in the same traffic as everyone else, they suffer huge delays, and they're a miserable experience. With congestion pricing, those buses can move faster. With congestion pricing, you don't have buses with 50 people on them waiting behind a line of cars and SUVs each carrying a single driver.
The solution to this problem is to upzone that land so that more people can live there. If more people wind up living close to their jobs, that's a good thing. Commutes are bad for workers and bad for society.
This is not a new idea, it's called congestion pricing, and it's already in use in London.
No matter what we do, a road is a limited resource. Only so many vehicles can use it per hour. We allocate that resource to those most willing to pay for it, but right now that payment doesn't take the form of money, it takes the form of time, frustration, of the amount of pain drivers are willing to endure to use the road. The trouble with this sort of payment is that it's not a transfer, it's just a loss. The time and energy these drivers use to get through the traffic jam is simply destroyed. In short: a traffic jam is a bread line. By measuring willingness to pay in dollars rather than in hours, we avoid that loss. The money collected can be used. It can be used to maintain the roads, to build transit, or simply redistributed to users in the form of tax cuts.
The specific issue under discussion has little to nothing to do with user experience though. It wouldn't change the iOS user experience if an iOS dev environment was available for Linux, or if you could test your iOS code on a jenkins server running on an ec2 instance.
I think this might understate the problems Spotify has. Their earnings reports are public and they are, as the author says, at the mercy of the record labels. If Spotify has an unusually profitable quarter, the labels are simply going to take that as a sign that they set their fees too low, and they're going to rectify that mistake. It doesn't matter what costs they cut, it doesn't matter how they increase their profits, the labels are going to see themselves as entitled to that surplus.
If you passed a law that car manufacturers could only sell 1000 cars per year, you can bet those would be some really fancy, expensive cars. Just let them sell cars and they start doing market segmentation and producing budget cars all on their own. Same with homes.
This seems like a distraction. We don't need green cement, we need laws that allow us to shape cement into tall buildings so people can live near where they work.
I mostly agree with this, but the digression about carbon pricing in the middle makes absolutely no sense. As long as you auction a fixed pool of carbon credits, the prices will go up the more people are willing to spend to pollute. This is basically the simplest, most straightforward way to force capitalism to produce the amount of carbon you want.
Oh, I totally agree, rent control makes it hard to move and that's terrible, we should have many more market renters and we should build enough to keep market rates reasonable. I'm just saying the political coalition isn't really there.
Worth noting that this is a case study about one child. I'm not saying the science is bad or that you should blow cannabis smoke in your baby's face, but if the headline made you think there's an epidemic of babies dying due to exposure to cannabis, that's not the case.
I don't really get it. I have a Keybase account. It's attested on my social media accounts (including on HN). It includes a private key on my personal laptop and one on my phone. I haven't extended it to my work laptop because I don't want my company IT having access to a key that I've gone and told all my friends they can trust. So I'm confused about how this is supposed to work.
I have an 11-month-old and any given time I put him in a carseat it's 50-50 whether he'll holler until we get there. I take BART now even more than I used to.
I would really like to have a computer for use at work where my IT department could feel like they had assurance that it was secure/virus free/malware free but from which I could sign into my personal accounts without feeling like I'm opening them to my IT department. Right now I just carry two laptops in my bag and it's really annoying. Wondering if Chrome Enterprise will enable this sort of thing.