Pyxl101

Most cities have historically not regulated transportation providers where the customer contracts with the provider ahead of time, or they are regulated in a different class and much more leniently than taxis. "Black car" aka livery and limousine services have existed long before Uber, and were not breaking the law in cities where they operated.

Most cities consider taxis to be vehicles that can be hailed by riders at the curb, where the trip is not pre-arranged and the customer has no prior business relationship with the transportation provider. Although Uber now has the ability to book actual taxis in some cities, this is not the category in which Uber historically operated.

Uber was able to grow quickly in part because it tapped into the large established base of private car services. These services existed in cities all over the world, but there was no unified interface to book cars with them. That's the niche that Uber filled. If you talk to many drivers today, they work for these companies (or own their own small company) and use Uber to fill their downtime.

For more information on this, see: "How does Uber overcome taxi medallion regulations?" on Quora: https://www.quora.com/How-does-Uber-overcome-taxi-medallion-...

> Before Uber and ride sharing, not all cars with personal driver for hires were taxis. You also had livery cars (such as limousine or black cabs) and various other systems. In cities that enforce a medallion system, taxis have more rights than livery cars; specifically, they are authorized to respond to street hails, ie to pick a passenger that waves at them from the street. Livery cars only can take a pre-arranged trip. As the number of medallions is limited, the right to take street hails is exclusive to taxis.

> Uber can be used to book taxis in certain markets but the vast majority of Uber trips are not taxi rides. Originally, the Uber service was what is Uber Black today, bringing business to livery cars. The cars were already licensed, insured and authorized to operate. They weren’t allowed to pick up a person on the street (still aren’t) but if a trip was booked to the app, it’s considered pre-arranged. So this didn’t change much from a legal perspective.

> In enacting the ECPA, Congress concluded that customers may not retain a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in information sent to network providers. . . [I]f the contents of an unopened message are kept beyond six months or stored on behalf of the customer after the e-mail has been received or opened, it should be treated the same as a business record in the hands of a third party, such as an accountant or attorney. In that case, the government may subpoena the records from the third party without running afoul of either the Fourth or Fifth Amendment.

(I'm not a farmer. I have no idea what the impact of this practice would be. However, as a naive person I definitely would strongly prefer to reserve the medicinal powers of antibiotics for humans or individually-sick animals, not huge animal populations.)

Livestock should only get antibiotics if they come down with an infection and are diagnosed and treated by a veterinarian. If a bunch of the livestock would get sick without preemptive antibiotics then I probably don't think that method of farming should be legal, and I would be glad to pay whatever higher prices would be necessary to abolish it.

If everyone uses tabs for indentation, then you can configure your editor to display that as 2 characters width, while the people who prefer 4 or 8 can do the same. No one needs to argue about how many columns of indentation there will be (1/2/4/8) since it’s specified in text semantically and displayed individually. No one needs to be die-hard N-space-ists since everyone can have their way simultaneously. Even code that wasn’t written by people who prefer your 2-column indent style (if they would otherwise be using spaces) will look that way to you. Everyone wins!

(Whether visual alignment of this sort is desirable is a different question. If you want it then spaces are appropriate.)

Libc is the C standard library, and there are multiple implementations of it, e.g. glibc and musl. Clang does not include an implementation of libc, though it does have an implementation of the C++ standard library called libc++: https://libcxx.llvm.org/

It's not immediately clear to me why an LLVM implementation of the C++ standard library would be desirable while an implementation of the C standard library would be undesirable.

Asking "How will this project compare to <existing implementation>?" seems quite reasonable to me. In fact, I would expect the person making the proposal to address this question as part of the proposal. It is not desirable to reinvent the wheel without good reason.

It's totally fine if the reason is something like: we want to use a different license, or a different development process, or a different coding style, or whatever. Whatever the actual motivations are, clarifying them up front will be good for everyone.

Sure. As a voter, if my region was experiencing a shortage of public sector workers, and that shortage was affecting my quality of life, or the life of people that I care about, then I would certainly be willing to vote in favor of a pay raise.

> The logic of the market is to drive wages to the bottom and replace workers when they break.

No, this is not true. Markets exhibit emergent behavior. They don't have any logic per se, although we can reason about how we expect them to behave. If markets have any "logic", then their logic is to reach an equilibrium price.

This does not necessarily mean that wages are driven to the bottom. What happens to wages is a function of supply and demand. If very few people are capable of performing a job in some area, and that job is in high demand, then the result of supply/demand dynamics will be a very high wage. On the other hand, if lots of people are capable of performing a job, and/or the job is in low demand, then the result might be a low wage.

It is certainly the case that everyone wants to pay the lowest price that they can for acceptable quality goods and services. Who wants to pay more at the grocery store, or the dentist, or the doctor's office? The cost of labor is a dominant cost in the price of all goods and services that we consume. The fact that automation is replacing labor in many industries has directly lead to the phenomenally low prices for many goods in the modern world.

For example, before the Industrial Revolution, clothing was exceptionally expensive. Clothing required a massive amount of human labor, and so a single shirt might have cost the equivalent of $3,500 modern dollars. As a result of this, poor people could afford very little clothing - resulting the trope of peasants wearing rags to tatters. Most of our fabrics and clothing are produced by machines now, and so the cost of clothing has come down by orders of magnitude. The result is now that even fairly poor people across the globe can afford adequate clothing.

https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-...

Automation in most cases results in an increase of quality, not a reduction in quality. For another perspective on this, examine how the cost of lighting has decreased over time: https://ourworldindata.org/light#price-of-light-over-the-lon...

It is a good thing for everyone that the costs of goods and services comes down over time (or equivalently: the quality of goods and services increases while the price remains steady). This directly leads to a better quality of life for everyone -- this is exactly the way in which economic growth leads to an improved standard of living: the same dollar can buy more than it could before, either a greater amount of goods, or goods of greater quality.

Cities have high property prices because they are extremely desirable. Lots of people would like to live there, but there is limited land, and not everyone can afford to live there. There must be a way of determining who has the right to occupy the scarce resource that is land, and the market is the solution to that problem in most countries.

Although not everyone might be able to afford to buy property in the most desirable cities on earth, such as Berlin, most people can certainly afford to buy property somewhere else. For example, a house that costs $1 million in San Francisco might cost $20k-$50k in Detroit. The further you move away from cities, the cheaper property gets.

I think it is reasonable that not everyone can afford to buy property in literally the most desirable, high-demand places in the world, like Berlin or London. People can still afford to buy property elsewhere.

If people who are doing some job cannot afford to live in a city, then they will move away or find a different job. This will cause a shortage of people performing the job.

If there is a shortage of people doing the job, and the results of that job are sufficiently valued, then employers will be forced to raise wages until they can attract the number of employees required.

For example, if a city has a shortage of police offers, then they can solve that shortage by paying police officers a higher wage. If the city cannot recruit police without a higher wage, then the city will need to allocate more funds to police compensation so that they can pay a higher wage. If the city doesn't have the funds, then they may need to take the issue to the voters, who can approve some form of appropriation like a new tax to pay for it.

Alternatively, perhaps the voters will not approve a tax, and the city will not pay a higher wage for police, and there will be a police shortage. That's the voters' decision. The city will experience the consequence of the police shortage, whatever that may be. Later, the voters may change their mind and decide to approve the tax.

My point is that the fact of there being a labor shortage will cause a correction naturally via market forces.

No one is obligated to rent a property from someone else. You rent if you believe it's in your interest to rent, instead of buy. Why stop two consenting people from entering into rental agreements, both of whom believe it's in their interest?

Some people prefer to rent: they don't want to be obligated to live somewhere for 10 to 30 years. They prefer to be free of commitments and loans (and/or don't have enough cash to buy). I wanted to live somewhere for a medium period of time (a few years) with no significant commitment or risk, then move on. I had just moved to the city and wasn't sure where I would ultimately want to live long-term. Landlords can also rent properties to people who have far worse credit and far fewer assets than would be required to buy the same property. I was able to rent a property much nicer than I could have afforded to buy at the time, since I had income but little wealth and credit. (The landlord in that case is taking on unsecured risk that I will default on our contract.)

Landlords also provide useful services to their tenants: they are responsible for all upkeep associated with the property. When I rented, I was glad not to have to deal with any of that. Landlord takes care of all the yard, or common spaces in an apartment, and if something breaks I just call the landlord. If you own appliances and real estate yourself, then you are potentially on the hook for significant costs if something breaks. Maybe the refrigerator breaks and you need to buy a new one: the landlord needs to budget or purchase insurance for that, while a renter does not. Landlords also assume liability for their property: if e.g. asbestos is found on the land, they may be responsible for paying for the cleanup.

Property owners are forced to tie up their assets in the real estate. Renters don't have to. Let's say that I have $1 million in cash, and I want to live somewhere. I don't necessarily want to have to invest all of my cash in real estate - not even a down payment on a mortgage. Renting might be a preferable alternative so that I can use my cash for other higher-value investments or to fund a business.

Lastly, landlords assume risk. If they can't find a tenant for their property, then it sits idle and they take a loss. When you own property, you can lose a significant amount of money if the property depreciates, as happened during the last recession. When you're renting, your risk is capped - you owe the rent but that's it.

Renting isn't wealth extraction. Like staying in a hotel, it's commerce, an exchange of money (rent) for services (temporary right to occupy a property). If you want to buy a property from its current owner, instead of renting it from them in a landlord-tenant relationship, then make them an offer, and if you both agree then you can do that instead.

Also, related: I read an article in WaPo about the only rare earths mine in the United States:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/2019/06/07/8...

> This is Mountain Pass, the only mine in the United States that harvests rare-earth elements, the raw ingredients used to produce high-tech products such as smartphones, wind turbines, electric vehicles and fighter jets.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-netflix-replaced-its-5-s...

Not all states are "nation-states". A "nation" (⋆) is specifically a group of people who are culturally homogeneous, and a "nation-state" (⋆⋆) is a sovereign state that is also culturally homogeneous. In most of these discussions we are talking simply about sovereign states, not nation-states specifically.

Someone else pointed this out onetime in another HN comment, and now "can't unsee".

(⋆) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation (⋆⋆) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state

https://ourworldindata.org/homicides

If that is not how immunity works, then how can the government force anyone to testify? The government does not know what (unrelated) crimes I may have to confess to in order to give truthful testimony on the matter in question.

It seems that this is the case, based on Griffin v California: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/380/609.html

> Comment to the jury by a prosecutor in a state criminal trial upon a defendant's failure to testify as to matters which he can reasonably be expected to deny or explain because of facts within his knowledge or by the court that the defendant's silence under those circumstances evidences guilt violates the Self-Incrimination Clause of the Fifth Amendment of the Federal Constitution

I'm not an expert on this, but I believe there are ways to set up business accounts where money can't be taken out in that way, at least not by the standard electronic means. You can also manage accounts in such a way as that there's no money to take out, although that does not necessarily prevent the account from going into the negative. Checking accounts can go into significant negative balances if the bank chooses to allow it.

That would be pretty bulky and costly to include in an aircraft cockpit, but I wonder if it would solve the G-force problem.

I'm not sure if this would actually be better, though. 7 Gs of acceleration would be experienced as 7 bar pressure, equivalent to water pressure at 60 meters underwater, which is quite deep. Rapid changes in pressure between 1 bar and let's say 7 bar would probably be more uncomfortable to experience than regular G-forces.

The US has lots of boring drones, but perhaps there is a secret drone fighter program. It would surprise me somewhat if the US weren't working on something like this, perhaps with a goal of keeping it secret until it needs to be deployed operationally. Plenty of military technologies have been kept secret for decades, such as the SR-71 and the spy satellites on which the Hubble Space Telescope was based. On that note, did you know that the Hubble was basically an extra spy satellite donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the US had a fleet of them pointed downwards toward earth? For more on this, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen

So, consider: what kind of reconnaissance satellites does the US have today, that resulted in the retirement of the "Crystal" series? (Obviously something digital) Did the US's investment in supersonic spycraft end with the SR-71? If the US were going to design such a craft today, would it have a pilot or would it be autonomous?

On the other hand, if this were a top secret US technology, then I suspect all of the people who observed these phenomena would simply have been sworn to secrecy. I doubt it would be treated as a UFO and I doubt these officers would be speaking publicly about it. Unless this is all some kind of cover for the program. Who knows!

Note that "nation-state" has a particular meaning, and I think the word you're looking for here is just "state" or "sovereign state". Nation-states are sovereign states that are particularly culturally homogeneous.

> nation-state. noun. a sovereign state whose citizens or subjects are relatively homogeneous in factors such as language or common descent.

I'm not trying to make a comment about individuals, only about trends that we might see in the population at large.

The topic further up was whether differences in job participation can be explained by reasons other than discrimination - the answer is that, yes, they can be explained by other factors such as biological trends in interest differences. One needs to control for these factors before drawing conclusions about discrimination.