ambrozk

How did you get into this? Did you learn the tech with a job in mind, or did you just learn the tech and then jobs started appearing?

If you're wondering what PR buys you, it's a constant stream of articles like this one. There's no new information to report, but Commonwealth Fusion Systems is in the news again!

Suburbs don't have to be structured around cars! You can have lots of trees, lots of grass, be removed from bustle, and still be able to get around by car. The problem is that zoning rules have essentially regulated these sorts of suburbs out of existence. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

The public doesn't trust politicians, the government, or its official experts. Facebook is a public forum, and the public uses it to express their mistrust. Politicians then pretend that Facebook is the reason no one trusts them, because shooting the messenger is easier than admitting that they don't have much authority any more.

Are there major problems with Facebook? Absolutely. But the motivation behind attacks like the one leveled by this journalist is transparently to deflect blame off our incompetent political establishment and onto an easy scapegoat. The truth is that if politicians want people to trust them, they're going to have to figure out how to convince those people. Making Facebook or Twitter delete your enemies' posts hasn't worked in the past and it won't work in the future. This is a free society. You don't get to replace the public's opinions just because you declared those opinions "misinformation." Maybe in China, but it just doesn't work that way here.

I cannot tell you that this has never happened to you, but I can inform you that the person you are responding to did not say a single word about either black people or intelligence.

They're a private company who is free to do what they want, and the people complaining are private individuals who are free to do what they want. There's no assault on anyone's liberty in either direction. Companies can freely modify their products, and customers are free to be pissed off when they do. In this case, people feel that YT is removing dislikes to prevent PR damage to brands and individuals who post unpopular videos on their website. They think Google is prioritizing its profits at the expense of their product. Let them complain.

To me, there is obviously a tension between the right of individuals to take calculated risks and the responsibility of the society to protect its members from harm. I don't think it's reasonable to say that individuals have an absolute right to take any risks they please, irrespective of the wishes of their society, because the society will end up bailing them out when the outcomes of their risky behavior get bad enough. Mountain-claimbing is actually a great example: if you get yourself caught in a ravine, there are crews of highly trained, well-equipped rangers who will fly in and spend enormous sums of money, as well as put their own lives in danger, to save your life. All this despite the fact that the risk was taken without consulting them at all. Because of this, mountain rangers have every right to mark certain dangerous trails closed to the public. It is a reasonable infringement on personal liberty, given that they're on the hook for other people's risky decisions.

Yeah, there's a logical inconsistency. So what? Just because our society has so far failed to ban two addictive, harmful drugs, does not mean we must legalize every other addictive, harmful drug.

What you say is true, but there's something missing, which is that a working-class person who was extremely fashionable by the standards of their own class would, if transplanted into the world of penthousees in SOHO, figure out quite quickly how to tastefully decorate their house, how to dress to impress, and so on. And the same would be true of the penhouse asthete if transplanted into a working-class milieu. Some people are just better than other people at figuring out aesethic systems.

In what world is a city deriving its charter from the state "dystopian?" Californian municipalities are wholly creatures of California state law. They derive their authority from the constitution of California, which grants them the power to enforce only "regulations not in conflict with general laws." If the California legislature wants to pass a law saying, "No more single-family zoning," the municipalities don't have a special constitutional right to ignore that, any more than they have the right to pass a law saying their residents can't sell a house to a disabled person, or that their citizens don't have to pay state tax.

There are some matters which are of enough interest to the entire state of California that the state narrowly prescribes how local institutions may interact with those resources. One existing example is the issue of water, which, as a scarce resource, is heavily regulated by article X of California's constitution [1]. Among other restrictions, article X straightforwardly makes water distribution a state concern: "The use of all water now appropriated... is hereby declared to be a public use, and subject to the regulation and control of the State." The consequence: if a city wants to pass its own particular water regulation, and the state of California disagrees, the city is out of luck.

Another issue the state might have a compelling interst in is the issue of housing. Like water, housing is a human necessity, and a scarce resource. This is especially true in the Bay Area, which is not contained in a single municipality, and which is thus subject to the rule of a number of governments whose competing and parochial interests naturally restrict housing supply in the entire region. Specifically, every locality wants to house the Bay Area's jobs, but it would prefer that neighboring localities house the Bay Area's people. The state of California is the only legal actor capable of fairly adjudicating this issue in such a way as to further the interests of residents of the entire region. This is why it would be perfectly legitimate for California to write laws forcing Bay Area cities to abandon overly restrictive zoning regulations.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...

> Cities and their existing residents have a right

Palo Alto is a charter city. As such, it has special rights only insofar as those rights are delegated to it by the state of California. California has every right, legally and morally, to change the current arrangement. As things stand today, Palo Alto enormously benefits from economic growth caused, not primarily by its residents and policies, but by the residents and policies of other portions of the state of California. As such, the residents of California have every right to tell the residents of Palo Alto that they must rezone to allow denser housing. The state has the upper hand both legally and morally.

Palo Alto is happy to see the economic benefits of increased commerce to the Bay Area, but it doesn't feel any responsibility to aid in housing the many thousands of new workers that increased commerce requires. A tiny minority of wealthy homeowners benefit at the expense of a great mass of residents. This is not a tenable situation long-term. Small municipalities in the Bay Area cannot internalize the benefits of economic growth while externalizing the costs indefinitely.

I have worked with people in such a development center, and the quality of their work is very noticeably worse than that of their equivalents in the US.

In that comment you say Murray's translation is "meticulous but annoyingly archaized". Do you know a translation which is non-euphemistic and meticulous, but also not archaized?

Also, what should I read if I like the poetry of Pope, but I want the poetry to be grittier and truer to the tone of the original, (i.e. I'm fine with changes to the content for the sake of poetics, so long as they don't hide or transfigure the original's emotional content).

The Communist Party was viewed much more favorably among people who didn't have to live under it. It was especially alluring to those persecuted by fascists before and during WWII. You didn't have to like all the CP's politics to notice that they were the most committed resistance fighters around.

Ironically, I people who grew up in the Soviet Union are the least able to understand what the communist movement meant to those outside the borders of the USSR. They're too poisoned by the reality of its day-to-day control over their lives. They can't understand that to a left-wing Jew in the Wehrmacht's gunsights, local communists looked like the only ones willing to fight the Germans to the death. To a black man in 1940's America, communists were the ones willing to stand up to the racist power structure on your behalf.

History is complicated.

The article claims that "trans women in 2021 are among the most at-risk groups in US history". I looked into this and can find no corroboration. GLAAD compiles a list of trans people killed each year and, even if they're only catching half of all cases, then the US trans murder rate is still less than the US murder rate.

In summary, we need to pay this guy more?