bs7280

First - I can not comprehend how you could possibly have a charitable interpretation on the war point and how it might have a net positive. I'm not trying to be condescending or anything, I would like to hear a single positive for being able to make BTC bets on killing people.

Second - even if you are not one of the millions of Americans that give a shit about sports, there is still a massive fraud implications just by the existence of crypto prediction markets. All it takes is one bad call to changed the outcome of game. The Superbowl last year had over $1 billion wagered on it.

Again - Its not the money I care about, its what people are willing to do to make it.

You are not wrong, and I should clarify I also have a big problem with the current state of legal insider trading of elected officials, but this polymarket problem is much more extreme. You can get a guaranteed 100-1 payout by blowing up some random people on the other side of the planet. Way worse than making even 2-5x on a leveraged futures bet with insider info. In that example, the victim is usually just other rich people.

I mentioned this on a different post - the biggest problem with prediction markets is not the gambling or dumb people losing money. Its the fact that it gives very powerful people a vehicle to make lobsided bets on outcomes they control.

A small example of this would be NFL / NBA Refs fixing playoff games with a bad call or two. This actually happened 20 years ago, an NBA ref went to prison over being bribed just $2000 per game.

The much worse example is the fact that you can make 100-1 odds on whether the US airstrikes Iran today... or How many times Pam Bondi says the word "China" in a press conference.

Simon Willison just posted about using claude in fly.io's dev sandboxes. I have not tried it yet but it looks promising.

https://simonw.substack.com/p/first-impressions-of-claude-co...

This is like saying "lets just get rid of all the guns" to solve gun violence and gun crime in the USA. The cat is out of the bag and no one can put it back. We live in a different world now and we have to figure it out.

You are right to call this out, and is why the legislation for this idea will require a lot of thought. But the important part of this idea is that only the "big" landlords will have a significant increase in cost.

In order for the economy to function there has to be ~ SOME ~ landlords. In my experience the random people that rent out their second property are usually good landlords, whereas the massive players treat people poorly. If this tax were implemented well, the latter group would be taxed more forcing them to stay honest. The small landlords would have a competitive pricing advantage over the big players, which should go a long ways to keep rents fair.

From what I understand this is a big problem on the west coast (and I agree with what you are saying).

This thread is interesting, as we are all naturally biased towards problems in our own area, and I'm learning some interesting nuances affecting other parts of the country. I live in Chicago / Midwest that has more land and residential high-rises, but our tax problem is a nightmare.

I mentioned this in another comment but - this thread is interesting as it shows the differences in housing policies / issues in different parts of the country. I'm from the Midwest / Chicago where we have a lot more land to work with so the policies are slightly different.

That being said, it sounds like a land value tax might be a better approach to my first suggestion. Regardless, this would not effect people that truly "own and live in their only house"

I fit the description of someone who has the cash to make a down payment, but if I were to buy the property I currently rent, I would be paying $1000 more a month.

This is a good point, and I was curious to see exact numbers on the invest vs be a landlord opportunity cost.

The rich person gets to rent the house, while the "newly weds" are living in it. And most importantly - the house itself will appreciate in value at a rate near 5%

Assuming they both buy a $500k house w/ a 20% down payment and a 5% loan. Realistically the young couple would get a worse rate but lets say they both get 5%. Monthly payment is $2,522.29 w/ taxes and insurance lets call it $3000 a month.

The newly weds are just eating that entire cost every month for 30 years, whereas the Rich landlord rents it out. After a quick and dirty Zillow search lets assume $3500 a month rent to start, so he's making $500 a month profit on an asset thats already increasing in value 5% ish per year.

So, with these assumptions: - Home cost increases 2% a year - Rental price increases 3% a year - Home value increases 5% a year

Total rental profit is $537k Final home value is $1.56 M Total Loan cost: $873k

Bringing the landlords return on 100k to be $1.224M in profit over 30 years (Final sell price - total loan cost + rental profit assuming they stuff it under a mattress). Whereas $100k at a 5% yearly return will be ~$430k

disclaimer: Im not the best with Excel and ive never actually bought property so im sure there are flaws in my math.

Where I live, condo's do not increase in value much due to HOA fees and taxes.

I just plugged in some numbers using (estimated) purchase price, taxes, HOA for the unit I'm in now, and it would cost me a little over $1M over 30 years to own a $300,000 1br apt.

That is a good point, and this tax would need to be well thought out. I specifically would increase the tax rate the more properties an entity owns (Not a lawyer so IDK how to treat one guy owning 10 companies as 1 entity the right way). That way smaller local landlord's can still exist (and keep rental prices competitive), but massive orgs will be forced to sell properties. The idea is to create a disincentive for hoarding properties in supply constraint markets.

I propose two changes to (try) and broadly solve this: - Additional property tax if you do not live in your home fulltime. This includes vacation homes. - First time, US Citizen, non-corporate homebuyers can get a loan at the federal interest rate.

If I were to try and buy the condo I rent, due to interest rates, taxes, and HOA's I would be paying $1000 more per month. At the end of my mortgage I would given the entire cost of the property to a bank in the form of interest payments.

Rich investors and companies effectively get to buy homes at a discount vs average joes.

Off topic of my original comment but I live in Chicago and have seen some of the most batshit insane drivers / behavior on the road you could imagine. People smoking are often the least of my worries (not to say its ok).

I've noticed that a lot of people most skeptical of AI coding tools are biased by their experience working exclusively at some of the top software engineering organizations in the world. As someone who has never worked at a company anywhere close to FAANG, I have worked with both people and organization's that are horrifyingly incompetent. A lot of software organization paradigms are designed to play defense against poorly written software.

I feel similar about self driving cars - they don't have to be perfect when half the people on the road are either high, watching reels while driving, or both.

Check out Yabai WM if you still have a macOS laptop

Illinois has very strong anti facial recognition / biometric law. Theres been a lot of class action lawsuits recently. I got like $300 from the facebook settlement alone.

So this loophole wouldn't work either fortunately

my iPhone saves my login credentials when I delete/reinstall it, so I delete instagram every Sunday or Monday then reinstall on Friday/Saturday, because I don't have the self control to actually limit myself with the screentime functionality.

What value does this provide that I can't get by versioning my data in partitioned parquet files on s3?

Earlier this year I was part of technical screening interviews but in two interviews we noticed the interviewee being given the answers during the call. They would wear airpods but have their teams device set to the laptop speaker / mic. Someone on our side heard the second voice coming from the airpods and we killed the interview.

We can try to detect / avoid it in the future but ultimately my takeaway is to avoid generic question lists for remote technical interviews, and instead try to hammer into one of their projects.

I believe Switzerland has nationalized their railroad network, much like the US has nationalized our road network. Its supposed to take a loss so that the rest of the economy benefits.

I think the true value of this isn't replacing trains during the long haul portion, but rather the "last mile". The logistical infrastructure for getting freight from train depot to other depots is about as efficient as it can get BUT getting that freight to its final destination is still inefficient. A 2 mile long train needs to tediously be loaded onto trucks, which will all burn gasoline to get to where-ever they need to go.

In Switzerland a lot of factories and warehouses have train lines built into the infrastructure to try to solve this issue, but its not always feasible to a) build that infrastructure out, especially in the US, and b) use a train to transport a few containers to its destination.

If these electric train cars could be built to interface with normal train cars, they could still take advantage of the biggest efficiency of freight trains, while also helping solve the last mile problem by splitting off from the train to get closer to their final destination.

In large cities you could lay more tracks specifically for these cars to get closer to major industry areas. Land rights are an issue but you could lay track in roads. Chicago has some remnants of street running trains, but the biggest issue is a train that's ~200 yards long is a lot more disruptive to traffic than something that's the size of a semi truck.

I presume the costs to convert enough of our existing rail networks to support electric trains (in the US) would be extremely high, especially considering so much of the freight rail network is owned by a few companies.

Freight rail seems like a great use case for large scale wireless charging in certain areas... have "rest stops" every X miles on key lines where trains can automatically charge up in the middle of a haul.

Im sure they could also take advantage of induction braking on the downhill section of mountain passes.

This is great! But I did notice that when clicking in Chicago, it flows from the Chicago River into Lake Michigan, which is inaccurate. But to be fair, we did reverse the flow of the river around 100 years ago, which makes it one hell of an edge case. The subcontinental divide technically goes right up to the lock between Lake Michigan and the river.