bronbron

I'm not really talking about kids getting addicted. Not sure why you thought I was. I think we've done a pretty good job of regulating legal substances for minors.

> And being gay should be discouraged because it spreads AIDS.

Wow! That's incredibly homophobic. Unprotected sex spreads AIDS. Being gay has nothing to do with it. If you didn't get the memo, in the 21st century we don't fear 'the gays spreading evil diseases' anymore.

> That you're trying to argue against the facts - prohibition is a failed policy that makes drug use more dangerous than treating it as a social health issue -

I wasn't arguing for prohibition. Where did I argue for prohibition? Did I say the word 'prohibition' anywhere? In fact, you touched on exactly my point:

> The simple fact is that drug use doesn't require any risks to the public that we don't allow already for other substances,

We very greatly vary in our regulation of those substances. And of everything, for that matter. Alcohol's sold in corner stores, Percocet is only (legally) available through a pharmacy with a prescription. Owning a concealed firearm requires a permit. If we're going to legalize 'harder' drugs, where should they fall on that spectrum?

Should we allow people to buy heroin at the corner store? Maybe! Should advertisers be allowed to buy huge billboards advertising their brand of crack? Possibly. We should evaluate what's going to provide the most overall utility for us as a society. If the answer is to legalize cocaine but disallow advertising of it, then that's what we should do.

We don't know where that maximum utility is though, because it's taboo to talk about. People immediately see the word 'drugs' and froth at the mouth and go off on tangents either about personal choice and cartels or conversely they go off about 'think of the children!'.

> seems awfully reminiscent of people who don't like gays inventing reasons they're dangerous.

Actually, you're the one who did that in this conversation :).

> I don't know. What I do know is that we should let people use/do what they want to their bodies. Will this have negative effects? Sure, they might, they might not. Personal choice trumps any sort of wide/vague societal benefits, otherwise society is just a bunch of tyrants. As long as what individuals do doesn't physically harm anyone, then they should be allowed to do it.

Eh, I dunno. I can see both sides of it. I worry that heroin is basically an advertiser's wet dream and you'd see all sorts of shady shit encouraging addiction. On the other hand we've already semi-successfully navigated those waters with tobacco. But then, I don't see people on the street in the bronx willing to blow someone for a cigarette. Maybe that's because it's legal. I dunno. Seems like something we should investigate before making policy decisions.

There're a lot of factors to be considered and "personal choice trumps all" is just as silly of an axiom as the opposite. There's a plethora of disallowed personal choices that the vast majority of people would agree are net positives for society, if only because "doesn't harm anyone else" is a very gray area.

You just supposed that to be true without really explaining WHY you think that's true.

> What's more, it's already happening right now

No it's not. The birth rate in the US has been steadily declining over the last century. Unemployment rates over the last 80 years oscillate around 6-7% pretty consistently.

So... why do you think that?

> Because we don't want to support a permanent underclass of parasites?

Why do you think that would happen?

I think there are two issues:

1) Evaluation inflation/simplification. Happens with grades, happens with reviews. 4 stars becomes the new 'adequate'. If you're under 4 stars, you're bad. Everyone subconsciously knows this, hence the thinking 'if I don't give them a 5 star review they might get fired.'

A more meaningful, diverse group of metrics is likely the answer to this. Get rid of 'overall' ratings. Rate drivers on their friendliness, safety, timeliness, etc. Uber can decide on some algorithm for determining when to let drivers go, and users feel less bad about negative reviews: 'Well, I gave him a 2 on safety but he was really friendly so at least I gave him a 5 on that."

2) Not enough separation between reviews and individuals. If I leave a review on amazon, I don't want that being tied to my account. At all. I don't want to see the seller's replies to my reviews. If someone finds out my amazon account name, they should not be able to tie individual reviews back to me. Batch reviews up in groups of 5, randomize them, and post them all at once. Don't let there be any possibility of tying reviews back to individuals. The fear of someone seeing a mean review I wrote and forever thinking I'm an asshole is a serious barrier to negative feedback (barring extraordinary circumstances).

> It doesn’t count if some foreign scientists already did a bunch of studies. It doesn’t count if millions of Russians have been using the drug for decades and are by and large still alive.

Um, no, it doesn't. What's the FDA going to do if they have additional questions or want additional studies done?

The FDA doesn't approve these drugs for the exact same reason the author doesn't prescribe them.

Lament the situation, sure, but pointing fingers at the FDA seems dumb.

> In most cases current residents do not have a tie to the original culture or history.

> living through race riots does not have any relevance whatsoever.

Oooook then. I'll let you think about these two statements side-by-side for a few. Get back to me when you have.

> A lot of the gentrifying neighborhoods in NYC have histories that go much too far back to be attributed to the current residents

That's kind of a silly argument (Harlem's 50+ year residents were most certainly in Harlem during the race riots), but regardless that wasn't really my point anyway.

The incoming community always brings their culture with them, with very little incentive to preserve the existing culture. They have no reason to keep a Murry's around - they want a Whole Foods. The Russian Orthodox cathedral looks cool, sure, but a new luxury high-rise could be built in that spot instead.

> IMO, current residents have no more of a right to live somewhere than any newcomer.

That's also not really the point. It's not about who has a right to live where. It's about making sure we collectively don't tread over artifacts without taking a step back and evaluating what we're doing as a society. By the time we decide something has historical value and should be preserved, it might be way too late.

> people fixing up a run down neighborhood

Whoa there, let's not put words in people's mouths. Gentrification has benefits and drawbacks, like everything else.

First, and foremost, the neighborhoods aren't always run down. The Missions and the Williamsburgs of the world aren't the only places undergoing gentrification. Sometimes they're just neighborhoods largely populated by immigrants (Greenpoint in Brooklyn), or traditional working-class neighborhoods (Potrero Hill in SF). Being populated by immigrants or working-class folks doesn't make a neighborhood run-down.

Second, what does it mean to "fix up" a neighborhood? I'd argue it's really just replacing the historic culture with the culture of the new residents (which is usually rich, mostly white people). Sure, one nice effect is a huge reduction in crime, but you're also often replacing historic establishments with rich people tropes (e.g. Murry's -> Whole Foods). Harlem will probably be a really safe place to be in 20 years, but isn't it going to be a little bit of a shame when the Apollo gets replaced with a coffee shop?

Fellow new yorker here, I'll contribute my 2c:

The hypertrophic city is undoubtedly going to have advantages that suburbs and traditional cities don't (he touched on some of the disadvantages, so I won't repeat them here). The sheer scale ends up being a good thing and a bad thing.

As a random example, if you're really into wingsuit flying you can easily find a sizable group of people who are similarly interested (and then you can arrange trips, etc.) That's much harder (sometimes even just impossible) to do at smaller scales (traditional cities) or smaller densities (the suburbs). Finding a good social cohort obviously has a noticeable impact on quality of life.

I also heavily disagree with his assessment that mass transit discourages walking. The very nature of mass transit is that one must walk to specified stations, and it wouldn't shock me to learn that New Yorkers walk a few miles every day even with arguably the best mass transit system in America. Cities with mass transit systems regularly appear on lists of America's fittest cities (e.g. Seattle, SF).

It seems silly to be arguing that traditional cities are a panacea to all problems when they obviously carry their own drawbacks.

I'm glad when people post things like this. Obviously I take it with a grain of salt, but it's beneficial data nonetheless.

I'm glad as a consumer, because I use Grooveshark semi-regularly and I would be pretty upset to lose my saved playlists and tracks. This makes me worry for their future. I'm certainly now going to migrate that data elsewhere.

I'm glad as someone in tech, because I imagine this employee is not the only disgruntled employee. Especially if they really are astroturfing Glassdoor. To me, that's a really serious red flag and I would definitely not apply to or recommend Grooveshark to anyone I know seeking employment.

Sure, but this article isn't really about that group.

Regardless of being a super responsible person saving/investing your money wisely while living at home, if you're unable to obtain fruitful employment by your early 30s then something has gone seriously awry, either internal or external to that person.

> thus can take jobs which focus on experience rather than salary and they can save money for entrepreneurial activity

Yeah, but the tone of the article is that they're not doing that. They're working menial or frustrating jobs that they're not sticking around very long at. And very likely not saving much money from.

Whether that's self-imposed or a reality of external factors is a source of debate, but the outlook's the same either way: bleak.

Compounding that problem, however, I would imagine that parents with "boomerang children" are inclined to keep working longer (because they're essentially supporting a dependent again).

It's kind of a vicious cycle.

> I'm surprised its not getting traction faster.

There are so many novel, cool "JS replacements" that it's easy to feel some paralysis about the whole matter. Do you go with Dart? TypeScript? Clojure? Or do you stick with regular JS and start learning a new framework (e.g. Angular)?

They're not necessarily mutually exclusive, but I think a good majority of web developers are waiting to see what unfolds before committing one way or the other.

I don't think that's always true - there are certainly movies that are "so bad they're good" (and thus become the fodder of MST3K/RiffTrax). But, there are movies that are just straight-up bad and can never be redeemed even by the likes of MST3K. For example, the Paris Hilton movie the author briefly discusses.

There are certainly films that are "so bad they're good", but then there are just bad films.

If anything, I think it's easier in the city. I don't really have to worry about walking back to my original location - wherever I end up, I can probably hop on public transportation and get back home.

> size (employee wise) of a family,

Sure, but what's that - like 10 people? Yeah I'll agree then you don't need processes.

It's very, very unlikely that he would fire someone on a whim. He has the ability, but it's very unlikely that he would exercise that ability.

> The comparison was meant to highlight that people who share culture have less process.

Yeah, I guess I’ll need a different example to really believe you. I think if cultivating relationships aren't a possibility (and they aren't, logistically, in large enough companies), we naturally (and justifiably) result to explicit processes in order to accomplish things between different groups of people. I don't think culture has anything to do with it.

Excellent point! I actually wasn't even thinking about religion. I was thinking more broad (e.g. Dowries), but you're absolutely right there are tons of explicit processes as well.

You actually brought up an interesting point that I was going to address: Netflix also has a legendary policy of expedient, rapid termination (see: The presentation that circulates around every so often).

The caveat to my statement was that you can keep that kind of culture at scale if you're brutal about either ensuring people are good cultural fits, whether that's by stringent hiring processes or swift termination.

Not that I think Netflix necessarily has the wrong approach here - it's a tradeoff to avoid having these explicit processes. But it's food for thought, nonetheless.

I think you're inadvertently proving my point, though: The family members have less process because they know each other pretty intimately. And while you can have those kinds of relationships in a company that's composed of 5 people, it's really hard to do that in a company of 5000.

Interesting! I didn't know there were different distinctions.

Still, I think your source really just proves my point: by no means is anyone earning 120K a year "solidly middle class". By pretty much all of the definitions you listed, 120K a year would either be "upper middle class", or "the rich" (e.g. find me a homeowner in SF who doesn't have >1 million in home equity).

Sure, I'm not discounting that. I live in NYC, and the cost of living is certainly an adjustment to your wealth. That said, I think it would still be disingenuous to consider anyone making $120K a year middle class.

> Ever notice how families or tribes don’t require much process? That is because there is such a strong trust and culture that it supersedes any process. In organizations (or even in a society) where culture is weak, you need an abundance of heavy, precise rules and processes.

I think it's disingenuous to say tribes and families don't "require much process." The processes are just more implicit than explicit. When you ask your parents for a new toy and they evaluate whether to say 'yes', that's a process - just an informal one. The only reason that's really possible is because the relationships are much more intimate and fewer.

When you start to scale into numbers where it's just infeasible for "everyone to know everyone" then formal processes have to take the place of those informal ones. I can't evaluate Jim's request for 10 additional storage disks informally because I don't know the first thing about Jim.

Coordinating lots of people is really hard. I would guess Airbnb is getting about the size where keeping the culture intact will require a sizable time commitment from the top level. Airbnb keeping that same culture at 20,000 employees would probably be a sociological feat all on its own.

While this seems like a really cool idea, I have a feeling that this is the sort of feature that everyone will enable at first, and then one single bad event will cause them to disable it forever.

I'm sure everyone has told a "white lie" at some point (e.g. "Sorry, I can't really hang out tonight because I'm not feeling well" == "I want to go see a movie by myself"), and anything that might hinder your ability to do that is likely to be disabled permanently the first time it causes an issue (or even in anticipation of it causing an issue).

> They are solidly middle class

Not really. If you earn $120k a year (just over 6 figures) you're in the top 10% of income earners in the US. The fact that you think they're 'middle class' (and relatively speaking, I don't think you're wrong) is indicative of how bad the wealth gap has gotten.

> this is not how we settle political disputes in a civil society

Um.. what? We don't settle political disputes in a civil society by boycotting entities who choose to associate with actors we believe are immoral?

That's silly. I don't think it gets much more civil than this.

That's true of pretty much any knowledge you don't gather first-hand, though.

It's not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. I don't have any first-hand knowledge that black holes exist, but there's a great deal of evidence that pushes me into the "95% sure they exist" column.

Similarly if multiple people tell me someone is an asshole, that pushes my needle on the spectrum to "66% sure this person is an asshole."

You can, and should, maintain skepticism about any conclusions you draw. But that doesn't mean you can't draw conclusions at all until you verify the information yourself and are 99% sure of something.