anewaccount2021

A future rural home will have off-grid power (solar + power wall), off-grid internet (starlink) and off-grid water is already solved. Why again do I need to be packed and stacked?

And why do we keep talking about urban life as aspirational? Many of those currently leaving SF and NYC are wealthy enough to move on a whim. These aren't flights of desperation. Why are wealthy people leaving?

the suburbs fell? suburban home prices are up 15% just from last year. homes overbid with multiple cash offers in most metro regions. meanwhile look at the exodus from NYC.

the defining story of human geography in the last year is a movement from cities to suburbs

despite that, "people want dense cities" is an evergreen meme on HN

nix is to system management what haskell is to programming...something that intermediate developers will quickly decide solves all problems, but in reality only solves some of its own problems and creates too many other problems. the advocacy for nix is a carbon copy of haskell advocacy from years ago...intermediate devs who repeat the same hype but don't actually put the tool to serious use

the nix language just doesn't need to exist at all. you have to wonder just how bug-ridden a PL with almost no users is...this is what is holding your system together!

using nix with scripting languages is beyond painful, just look up the gymnastics required. losing your sanity is fully transactional!

you can brick a system with a legit nix config, I've done it

you have to reinvent most basic management tools and you can't use cloud services as they are all docker-based and will almost certainly never offer nix support.

etc etc

want rollback? just reinstall debian from scratch, its about the same time commitment.

just as with haskell, nothing can stop the nix hype machine and you just have to wait for the brigade to fail on its own and silently move on

I agree that once EVs break the $30k price barrier + time for market adoption, we will indeed see disincentives for owning an ICE car...but there will be enough time to get some years out of driving an ICE car bought at a bargain from some high-earner who can't handle the negative signal it sends to peers.

An interesting side-effect will be a potential market for crazy-cheap used ICE luxury cars. Once all of the high-earners demand EVs, the market will be flooded with lightly-used luxury ICE vehicles. A year-old Bentley for $30k? The day might come as long as you are willing to be one of the ICE dinosaurs!

Its merely an observation that we must all take responsibility for our national policies, which have created the need for companies like Palantir.

The 2014 pivot date is a little earlier than I would have though but the trend is there nonetheless. If you are thinking of leaving the Bay Area and having some massive housing windfall somewhere else, act quickly. Austin and Miami in particular are appreciating like crazy and you might find yourself in a slightly cheaper, but still unattainable, housing market. By 2022-23 I predict a stalemate as folks from the Bay Area realize these new tech centers are basically unaffordable.

As stated in the post, there are read replicas. Assuming their workload is primarily reads, this buys them a decent amount of redundancy.

Massive unemployment and the social pressures of lockdown.

In fairness, the article is quick to point out one thing - the murder rate is a neighborhood statistic, not a national statistic. No one in Alaska is impacted by murder rates in Chicago. Most of the people in Chicago are not impacted by the murder rates from the worst neighborhoods. What is the core socioeconomic issue in these neighborhoods? Systemic, hopeless poverty. I'd absolutely forgo my stimulus money if the Federal Government pledged to rebuild, from the ground up, America's most odious ghettos.

You should care less about the murder rate by nation and more by city or neighborhood. Chicago and Detroit are thousands of miles away from where I live - what relevance is the murder rates in those cities to me? Someone living in Alaska would have to cover a quarter of the surface of the globe to reach Key West Florida...why would they feel impacted by the crime rate there?

Go look at a heat map of per-capita gun homicides in the US. This is not a "national" problem. Communicating this has been very challenging for people who live in Chicago in particular - everyone thinks the entire city is a killzone, when in fact there are perfectly safe neighborhoods, and other neighborhoods that are a warzone. But if you were to only see the citywide statistics for Chicago murders, you wouldn't even leave the airport.

Since gun ownership and the number of guns have both been rising continuously for years, you can correlate them to anything you like. Since the number of guns was over three hundred million when the murder rate was lower, we can also correlate a large number of guns in circulation to lower murder rates. Or rising rates, or dropping rates. No matter where the trend moves, as long as there are over three hundred million guns in the US, guns are basically as available as milk and gasoline and effectively a constant. Or do you honestly believe going from three hundred million guns to three hundred and one million guns is worthy of measure for correlation?

All of this is irrelevant in any case. 99.95% of guns are benign in the US. This isn't conjecture - its a clear ratio of total guns in circulation vs gun homicides. A law-abiding owner of a gun should be as concerned by a gun used in a murder as a chef would be concerned about someone being stabbed with a pearing knife.

If you want a more realistic answer, I would suggest both economic desperation (unemployment, inequality, need) and pressures due to a new and unnatural mode of living enforced on the population (lockdown). Or if you want to get political, all of the cities in the infographic are blue cities that moved to lax policing policies in 2020.

I agree with your suggestion of general inflation - everything from corn to oil is inflating....but crypto is in a class all its own and is basically digital tulips (except tulips have greater intrinsic value).

As future devaluations for the dollar are basically guaranteed, it makes sense for the Treasury and Fed to nullify any alternatives that would interfere with their policies. No one who really matters has their net worth tied up in crypto (yet) - the entire market can be vaporized with no meaningful political fallout. The government cannot abide some future where Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Goldman Sachs has a majority of their assets outside of fiat currency - this would represent an existential threat to the model of governance.

All they need to do is make it illegal to complete an enforceable contract with crypto. In other words, you can sit and stare at your coinbase account all day, but you can't ever legally get hard currency to spend it, and you can never pay for services or products with it. All of this is trivial for world governments.

And the underground economy is a rounding error, if BTC is relegated to the dark web, it will lose 99% of its value.

Because governments own gold.

The US is about to embark on a substantial weakening of the dollar even more dramatic than 2020. They're preemptively heading off the tech elites who think they're immune to it because of their alternative "currency". I mean, storming the Capitol will be punished with scorn, but storming the Federal Reserve earns you a death sentence. That makes sense - the Federal Reserve is the real center of American power.

This is just the beginning, and every major government in the world will be on board. In the end, fiat currencies are the foundation and core of every industrialized nation. There can be no alternatives. There's just no way bitcoin will be allowed to become an accepted medium for exchange. Janet Yellen is trying to provide early warning, although I doubt many will bother acting on it.

edit: welcome bitcoin bagholders/downvoters!

No, zero chance. There is no way you will get states to agree to forever nullify their electoral influence. If you really want perpetual one-party rule, granting DC and PR statehood are also unlikely but far more realistic than abolishing the electoral college, which will literally only happen when the US itself is dissolved.

You've been watching too much Star Trek.

Zero chance, if only because the resulting chaos would put the assets of the wealthy at risk.

This is such an HN comment. For 95% of the people alive right now, it matters very much where they live and what nationality they are. See: every migrant crisis. Or people who have a bank account insured by their government. Or anyone on any kind of social security. etc etc etc

The 0.1% can get in their jet and go to New Zealand, or buy a Swiss passport with BTC...so sure, place is irrelevant to them. Not so for everyone else.

Come on. There were at least two Presidents prior to the Civil War who basically shrugged off slavery, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Get some perspective.

And before you hang every covid death on Trump, please list for me the leaders of populous democracies that haven't been completely pwned by covid. Germany is currently showing higher deaths per million than the US, so don't bother naming Angela Merkel.

Stop delivering packages for two weeks, blame the govt...you'll find out very quickly that brown boxes are a real vector of power

the US is becoming a risky place to host your infra.

you can be deplatformed on a whim, as a result of petty internal ideological resistance anywhere in your supply chain. no infrastructure partner will go to bat for you, they'd rather forgo your money in favor of passing a regime's purity test

you might also be subject to sweeping legislation that allows the US govt to act against you if you are not politically aligned

if this continues, the US will be an unfavorable jurisdiction for infrastructure. its just easier to find a less charged environment where you have clarity

Why stop at Bitcoin? Corn futures, oil prices, all rising

What do they have in common? Priced in increasingly worthless USD

Cheap debt keeps companies on a ventilator.

Bailouts where cheap money isn't enough.

Regulatory capture.

Societal aversion to change.

Innovation replaced by Too Big To Fail. Tesla can't replace Ford and GM because Ford and GM have enough debt to take out a bank.

An actual market economy will produce innovation. America isn't one.

The same people demanding a Patriot Act 2.0 are now apparently chastising Parler for treating US IT as a potential point-of-failure? Maybe this is the market reaction to deplatformning? Russia-as-a-data-haven. Tell me how thats worse than US-based infra, where your business can be turned off on the whims of new grads on a company internal mailing list.

These science advisors have no good options...they either rubber-stamp the status quo, or they get ridiculed and marginalized for trying to push an agenda of rapid change.

For example, a climate advisor who insists eliminating ICE is the only solution. Then the auto unions freak out, blast Dems, and days later the science advisor suddenly decides to resign.

I don't understand his claims of "working to make SF better"...basically everything wrong with SF is the result of policies formed by elected officials, all of whom would be re-elected tomorrow. Is he saying he wants to undermine the democratic process? This is the city people voted for, who is he to say otherwise?

Nothing has reverted, they are creating a permanent green zone around the Capitol right now.

pseudo intellectual drivel. at what point do people finally realize that "thought pieces" on substack just don't mean shit in the real world?

this is what Lenin would have derided as "bourgeoise intellectualism"...sitting in your herman miller chair, sipping craft bourbon, writing postmodern pablum on your M1 macbook....wow feel the winds of change