ZoomerCretin

Being friendless has a higher negative impact on lifespan than smoking. It's not a big stretch to link phone use to the huge increase in depression, anxiety, and poor social skills. And just like smoking, phone use in public isn't limited to the person using it. You can't exactly have a conversation with someone who is on their phone. I find myself pulling my phone out whenever my companions also do so.

If this seems a bit heavy-handed, it's because damaging and addictive habits require collective action to stop. No one walks down the street in San Francisco and tries to convince heroin addicts to stop for other peoples' good. No one tries to tell drunks and alcoholics to stop overdoing it.

They are definitely early, and possibly the first place to do this, but they will surely not be the last. Our youth have been ruined by cheap, omnipresent, and never ending social media content. This is a step in the right direction to make public spaces social again.

For an $1,100/month apartment in NYC, a $15k fee is worth it, even if you have to take out debt for it.

IronPython3 seems to be in pretty active development. Unfortunately, there are a lot of features that still need to be added.

Agreed, it's important to combat age discrimination against the young.

Hiring for entry-level engineers is so broken that "hey engineers fresh out of college are frequently good people to hire" is now novel and contrarian advice. Even before the pandemic, fresh graduates from non-target schools were sending out hundreds of applications to get their first job.

Meanwhile, on tech Twitter, you have people loudly saying the opposite: That there do not exist diamonds in the rough, that the job market is perfectly efficient, and any effort spent trying to find these diamonds is wasted: https://twitter.com/thdxr/status/1754614624446501347

>And this is how you again discriminate based on race in a post-Affirmative Action world. The weight they assign to each context is completely arbitrary and tuned to achieve whatever objectives they have.

This would be far more disastrous if spots at colleges were scarce, but they overwhelmingly are not. There are over 15 million undergraduate students in the United States, and we are undergoing a demographic collapse (https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...). In 2 years, the children of the baby bust (2008-2009) will start applying and enrolling in college, and because there are fewer of them, they will have an easier time getting into the college of their choice.

>95% of us do not attend Ivy League schools. Removing any and all affirmative action would help, at best, five thousand students? This is a manufactured issue. No one is denied a college education because of affirmative action. Any time spent arguing against it is wasted.

Like the 10 previous AI-related Google announcements, this sounds great, but is unlikely to ever materialize.

vBulletin just had a major release 5 months ago. It's not abandoned, and it's certainly superior to the UI of Discourse, especially to a community which is very familiar with vBulletin.

> there was a project to be a vB->Discourse converter

God, why? I can't be the only person to find Discourse inferior to vBulletin.

Except housing prices _did_ go down in areas that adopted zoning reform that allows for more apartments to be built at lower prices.

They have to make a profit. If I recall correctly, Apple Music pays artists more and is cheaper, which is only possible because they take a loss. That's anticompetitive behavior, especially considering they charge their competitor Spotify an additional 30%.

Apple Music is available on the Google Play store. It does not pay Google their 30%, because they have a link in their app allowing users to pay Apple directly.

They will go down if we adopt California-style zoning reform, or enact other policies that allow the supply of housing to increase.

Germany's plight is entirely owed to their own political malfeasance in shutting down their nuclear power plants. With them, they would have managed just fine without Russian oil and natural gas.

Monero is always clean, too.

It's not that simple. We rebuilt our cities around the car. Without changing our cities, there is no substitution for cars.

We need to rebuild our cities. Eliminating cars and adding sidewalks isn't enough; without density, you have nowhere to walk to, and transit doesn't scale.

> How do we even fix car-dependency in the US?

Car-dependency is a city planning issue, first and foremost. We destroyed the cores of our cities, demolishing block after block of buildings to raise interstates and parking lots.

You will never eliminate car-dependency in rural areas, and you can at best remove the need for it in suburbs with mixed-use zoning (i.e. corner stores and cafes), better funded public transit, and sidewalks.

Cities should first stop expanding interstates and look to remove them entirely. There is absolutely no need to have an interstate through urban cores. Next, you need to redesign streets to make the car part narrower and the sidewalks wider. And you need to repeal zoning ordinances that ban anything but single family homes on 80% of urban residential land. It's ridiculous that there exist single family homes within walking distance of the downtown of cities with a population in the millions when under a properly zoned system, there would be mid-rises.

Rural areas will never be free from car-dependency. Suburbs need light modifications to mixed-use zoning policies and transit, as well as infeasibly high taxes. Urban areas, where walkability should be most feasible, have to remove highways through cores, repeal oppressive zoning laws, and prioritize walkability.

The actual policies are rather straightforward. There are plenty of countries that planned around the automobile and later reverted this mistake, so there exist many playbooks for achieving this worthy goal. Unfortunately, the problem is political rather than technical: too many people are invested in the automobile for a lot of good reasons, and too many people are invested in the current land use regime which make automobiles necessary.

Loans and bonds are typically at fixed rates and have months or years-long terms. As you reissue bonds and take out new loans, your overall interest rate on debt approaches the much higher market rate. It doesn't happen immediately.

Expecting interest rates to drop later this year is big for the stock market, which runs on expectations, but doesn't matter to people borrowing money and issuing debt before then, since you cannot attract lenders at rates below the US treasury yield.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the most important improvement from eliminating parking minimums:

https://www.planetizen.com/news/2023/11/126192-parking-refor...

Parking spaces are outrageously expensive. By allowing housing to be built without far more parking than is needed, the cost of rent is lower by several hundred dollars (read: $200-$1000) a month because of how expensive land is, and how much land/space is required for cars.

This is a chicken-and-egg situation. We can't get rid of parking until we have good public transit! We can't have good public transit because all the parking mandates reduce density so much that you can't live without a car!

If you bite the bullet and remove parking, better public transit will come. If you never remove parking, you will never have better transit.

By another measure, removing parking mandates is a very immediate success because it lowers rents by several hundred dollars a month: https://www.planetizen.com/news/2023/11/126192-parking-refor...

Outright social media ban for under-18s. Or barring that, under-13s, and find a way to minimize harms for 13-18 year olds.

What caused this? Or does anyone know?

The law is working exactly as intended. The copyright lobby is very powerful. If you look at the legislation being proposed since 2010, it has primarily been to strengthen the DMCA. Though Google, Reddit, Meta, Wikipedia, etc. were successful in organizing opposition to these bills, they have no incentive to lobby for the repeal of the DMCA.

Why can't they simply pay to license the patent to put their product back on shelves while litigation continues?

This is a very nice-sounding fantasy. Too many people profit from the status quo to do such a thing. Lawyers and judges would not dare issue a ruling or enact any law harming their and their friends' profession.

How would it change anything? You still need to challenge the false DMCA in court, and prove it is false. Bad actors will continue targeting people too poor to fight back.

I'm surprised to see so much Ruby used in a video game. Excluding libraries and gems, there exist 627 *.rb files!

Granted, it is all for utilities and automation external to the game itself, but it's definitely not a common language in 2023.

They filed a lawsuit against the engineers behind the reverse engineering of GTA III/VC who published their work on GitHub. To strengthen their own legal position and to combat the obvious argument that "You abandoned this and had no intention to profit further from it", Rockstar/Take-Two paid for the quickest, dirtiest, shoddiest port that was put out within a month of their lawsuit being filed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto:_The_Trilogy_...

> from the POV of management, a leak of the source might prevent a future re-release, which cuts into future potential profits!

In the aftermath of the backlash from their shoddy legal engineering project, they decided to not remaster other games: https://kotaku.com/gta-iv-remastered-red-dead-redemption-can...

>OK, but we passed a constitutional amendment saying the opposite

Which amendment is that? The 21st repealing prohibition did not make any value statements on whether prohibition was ever good policy, it merely repeals the amendment banning alcohol.

> and the so-called "War on Drugs" operates in defiance of the spirit of that amendment.

There is no "spirit of [the] amendment". It repealed a ban on alcohol. Alcohol was undeniably an extreme social ill before prohibition.

>The same way Google already does with YouTube channels.

In theory this sounds nice, but in practice it has a very pro-western bias.

For example:

Under BBC videos, the warning is "BBC is a British public broadcast service."

Under NPR videos, the warning is "NPR is an American public broadcast service."

Under CGTN videos, the warning is "CGTN is funded in whole or in part by the Chinese government."

The BBC and NPR are also "funded in whole in part by the [UK/US] government", yet it comes with a much nicer warning.