cc439

Well I'm stupid, I'll delete the comment until I can find a good source.

>In only his lifetime Sweden went from having an infant mortality rate similar to that of the poorest countries today, to being one of the world leaders.

This simply isn't true. Between 1900 and 1905, Sweden's infant mortality rate was merely 2.3 per 1,000 live births [1] which is basically the same as they currently report (2.6 per 1,000 [2]) according to the CIA world factbook. Compare that with Lesotho's rate of 46.1 per 1,000 [2] and it's plain to aee that comparison is completely unfounded. Today's poorest countries have rates in the 60-80 range despite the best efforts of the Western world to share the basic knowledge which caused such a precipitous decline in infant mortality post-1850 with those nations.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448444/

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_...

While eminent domain is the overarching legal means through which all properties are seized, there is plenty of sketchiness to be found in the process of declaring a property "blight" so that it can be seized. My city has done a good job of condemning blighted properties in terms of having 0 public scandals surrounding their decisions, but there's still a tinge of corruption surrounding every old mill that is declared to be blight only for the original structure to be converted to luxury flats with only minor modification and landscaping. "Blight" to me means a property and any structures on that property being so unfit for use that it will require significant rehabilitation (think major ddmolition and environmental cleanup) to return it to a bare-ground state before it can be used for anything else. Seizing a propery, giving it away for nothing/practically nothing, and then watching a developer flip it for a massive profit reeks of corruption when the same developers happen to be the winners over and over.

There's also the issue of slightly sketchy property tax reassessments that are a hallmark of many neighborhood revitalization projects. There is almost always a law stipulating the maximum year-over-year rate increases but slap the maximum rate on a stubborn holdout for enough years in a row and that 15% maximum annual reassessment increase (the maximum in my city) can turn even the least valuable property imaginable into an unaffordable anchor around the owners neck within a few years.

>With 200/300 you could buy a modest graphic card that could last 3 years playing top titles.

As someone who has fallen out of the arms race thanks to the perfectly serviceable GTX970 I bought just a hair over years ago for ~$300, I am frankly appalled by the lack of value in the GPU market today. At the time, that $300-350 card was decidedly high end in that it was the best 1080p gaming card on the market with the 980/980Ti only making sense for those playing st higher resolution. There still isn't anything on the market worth upgrading for (~30-50% faster in the same price bracket) 4 years later and that is not a good thing for the PC gaming market in the long term.

The idea that one has to spend $300 to play games above medium settings at the resolutions found on midrange monitors is crazy to me. I got by with $100-175 cards (HD4850, HD5770, HD6950) for years before making the plunge into the high end for use in VR but I feel like cards that market is no longer viable in the same way those were.

Machine shops are very loud (plus you'd be wearing ear protection) and a lathe/mill that vibrates noticeably is either broken or incapable of performing the very task its designed for.

There are untold numbers of pipeline explosions that either stay confined to local reporting or are forgotten almost immediately after they happen. Here's a severe one that happened down the street from me several years ago that never made national news (Link 1). Then you have the explosions that sent suburban Massachusetts into a complete state of emergency, damaging 131 homes, injuring 21, and killing 1 person (Link 2). That event is severe enough IMO that it should have sparked a national debate on the state of our critical utilities as it paralyzed everyone living near one of America's major cities (these were the suburbs many people in Boston commute from or have family/friends in) for several days and led to massive heating crisis due to paranoia of another distaster just a few weeks ago (Link 3). Gas explosions are lethal, and apparently, surprisingly common despite being a weekly/monthly occurence as far back as I can remember.

Link 1: https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/2014/01/11/enka-exp... (search for pictures, it was a massive fountain of flames for several hours)

Link 2: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/12/regulator-ties-pipeline-work...

Link 3: https://www.wpri.com/news/local-news/east-bay/national-grid-...

Most TPM systems work by comparing the difference in wheel speed using the ABS sensors though (lower pressure = lower diameter = higher wheel speed than the other 3 wheels = low air pressure warning).

This: "I've also noticed the quality of the places I've found on AirBnB has gone down."

Is the direct result of people listening to your own own advice: "Don't rent out your home if you don't want the risk of people damaging it!"

I rented my home a handful of times when I knew I would be out of town on the weekend. The first renters were great, the next 2 caused a combined $1,200 in damage that Airbnb refused to cover. Refunding me the cost of dry cleaning my comforter that was left with blood stains(!) instead of the cost to replace it was bullshit but that was all they'd offer. There was also no real recourse for one of the guests having at least a dozen people over for a midnight afterparty. I was still finding cigarette butts and trash out of my backyard landscaping for months after that final rental. There's just not enough money in Airbnb rentals for people who only have their own property to rent and don't desparately need that extra income, this the noticeable decline in quality. You're not the only person I've heard say that Airbnbs are becoming more like cheap motels than nice hotels.

I'd argue that CL actually has a fantastic UI, it presents all the information you need, and nothing you don't, in a format that is quick to read. The only feature it's missing (or was missing the last time I needed it) is a map based list of housing for rent so you can simply filter out 90% of the listings that you'd never consider based on location anyways. That and a "prevent all Craigslist stereotypes from responding to my listing" button.

Good call with Hamilton. Although I haven't seen it and have 0 interest in seeing it, I'm not only aware of it but relatively familiar with its premise as is practically everyone in the US. That definitely fits my definition of a mass cultural phenomenon.

I will argue that Hamilton debuted almost 4 years ago now which is a long time ago in cultural terms. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic but I feel like there were at least 3 or 4 mass cultural phenomenons popping into existence each year back in the 80's and 90's.

Here's a question: what mass media hit has taken hold in anywhere near to the same form that GoT has in the past 5 years? From my perspective, new noteworthy cultural touchstones like GoT and the Marvel Universe have ceased to exist since roughly 2012. GoT will end in a few months and while the Marvel Universe will continue, it operates on a certain inertia that has built since before the current status quo came into being. What show or other form of video IP will take their place? As of this moment, I see nothing currently on air or on the horizon.

You and I are on much the same page, I just omitted much of that from my post to make it a more universal rejection of this trend. Your analysis is correct in that it is rapidly accelerating this process but even if it was removed, the inherent truth that there will no longer be a single mass culture to market mass media to rings true. They are boxed in no matter what direction they head in.

You'd think there would be a breaking point somewhere around "we could pay 25% less and still attract top talent to relocate to literally anywhere in the Western world". The cost of living in the SF bubble has long since passed the point of being insulting and the salaries being commanded by those who are driving the continued growth could go so far in other major metro areas that most employees would think they're living like kings even with such a paycut.

How do you even recruit someone living that far away for a (relatively) low paying, low skill job? 2 hours get's you almost the entire way across the state I live in, people living that far away have often never even visited my city once in their lives. Why would someone who lives as far away as San Jose (apparently just 1hr 30min from SF) be tuned in to the local job boards in SF when there are plenty of job opportunities in their back yard?

I can understand why people with valuable skillsets are willing to balance the cost of commuting from their dream homestead to their place of work but I can't see how this system works for those on the bottom rungs of the societal ladder.

That sounds ridiculous until you realize that no one is going to pay ~$100 per head every time they go out to eat on a regular basis except for those who have become so wealthy that they have lost all touch with the value of a dollar. I make the rough eauivalent of $175k in San Francisco dollars and if I had to face those prices for a dinner at a mid-range restaurant I simply would not eat out. Restaurants are a luxury that can be easily subsituted with home cooked meals by practically anyone except a Jetset/Road Warrior traveling businessman.

My takeaway from the article is that all "middle class luxury" businesses are slowly being priced out of SF, which is a non-issue for everyone living outside of that bubble but should be of enormous concern to those banking on the future success of the area. Eventually no one will want to move there for a price employers can afford to pay. In the grander scope of things, I'm actually supportive of the concept of fast food and cheap dine-out businesses going under because the habits people form around them are killing us as a people.

I'm honestly surprised at how much investment tech giants are pouring into 1st party tv/movie production and also by the consensus that these ventures are virtually guaranteed to succeed. From what I've observed over the past decade, the future of our cultural landscape is going to be that of increasing fragmentation to the point that there will no longer be a single, dominant culture for mass media enterprises to appeal to.

The high production value of traditional HollyWood productions are only sustainable due to their mass cultural appeal. The problem is that mass culture is in fact, losing mass. These tech giants appear to have misread the signs of this pending sea change and interpret behaviors such as cord-cutting among younger generations to mean they are merely moving their consumption online and that their consumption habits remain otherwise unchanged. One only has to look at the popularity of services like YouTube and Twitch with Gen Z to see that this is in fact not the case. Younger millenials and Gen Z as a whole have completely changed their consumption habits to prefer niche content made by individual creators (or at most a small group) on the cheap. While YouTube stars like PewDiePie cannot be said to be "niche" due to the simple fact that his content captures more eyeballs per year than literally anything else by an enormous margin, the content itself isn't exactly something that appeals to a universal audience in the way that a traditional HollyWood Blockbuster or hit TV show might. Ironically, while Google was the tech giant best positioned to capture the future (at least in terms of how I see it developing), they've severly damaged the future potential of YouTube by playing games with the monwtization and promotion of popular channels while also making it impossible for new creators to make money before they've built their channel into a relative behemoth.

While Apple, Amazon, Disney, et al are throwing massive amounts of capital trying to capture a slice of the streaming service market, they appear to have missed signs of cultural change which will likely cause that market to stagnate over the coming decade. I can't say that trying to create a YouTube competitor is a better idea at this point in time either as that market just isn't large or stable enough at this point in time to say there is even space for a second major servicd for small content creators. I can say the future of entertainment is going to look a lot more like YouTube, where the attention of tens of millions of eyeballs are spread over tens of thousands of channels, rather than a handful of sources for traditional mass media productions.

>So who are the non-competes really for then?

They're for assuaging the corporate leadership that they are actually effective at managing that pesky turnover problem they've been having in a manner that doesn't require them to increase pay or improve working conditions. That and people who carry a "book of business" (the sales team) and those with critical expertise in certain, niche knowledge domains.

The larger the employer, the more bureacracy is involved in the hiring process. Any non-conformance to the standardized process comes with a risk of complete process failure once a corporation reaches a certain size and begins to silo off certain functional groups. I've found myself in many situations where a customer or employee requested something perfectly reasonable to settle a dispute, only for me to find there is literally no way to resolve the issue as there is no mechanism with which to do so or the individual who can move the levers is seperated by so many layers of management/org chart spaghetti that no one has a clue who to reach out to. There's always the hope that someone close to the process is willing to put their neck on the line and break procedure in a way that risks reprimand or their career but that's a fleeting chance more often than not.

Personally, I see the "Escape Room" boom as something akin to the "Fondue Party" craze in the 70's. It's a fun social outing... once. Eventually there won't be enough new customers to sustain the business model and they will disappear almost as quickly as they arrived.

I'm sure there are better example, particularly ones from the entertainment industry booms of the 1920's and 1950's but I just can't think of any off the top of my head.

>I'd love to return the glass to the brewery for cleaning and reuse

This is one of the few cases where glass "recycling" makes sense. Unfortunately, glass is stupid cheap in terms of base material and production process so the only way to make recycling glass products worthwhile is to put the used product right back into service in its whole form (after cleaning of course). I'll try to find the study I'm thinking of but from what I recall, glass recycling isn't just uneconomical to recycle, it often winds up requiring more energy to recycle than it does to obtain the base materials and create a new container. Contamination knocks down the efficiency and the logistics of collecting and sorting glass are far less efficient than the bulk mining and transport of silica into a centralized production plant.

A possible solution to this, IMO, is to force bottling operations to standardize on a handful of containers in different sizes, colors/opaqueness, and closure type. This could also work hand in hand with a ban on plastic bottles for common products like juice, soda, etc. Marketing departments would hate it but the centralized redistribution of reusable containers that are useful to every bottling operation would finally make glass recycling a rational concept.

>Growth is driven by other factors, like when a brilliant but insufferable physicist moves back home to be close to his mother [2], and is a function of individual(.)

This is true in the short term as the individuals already exist and their prior experience is already locked in. The long term problem is that of failure to create a new generation of high performing individuals, either through a collapse in birthrates (already underway for at least 1 full generation) or a failure to entice high potential individuals to participate in meaningful endeavors (arguably happening right now). Humans have a defined lifespan and their life trajectory is largely determined by outside factors even if their potential isn't.

I wasn't aware that California eliminated the cash bail shstem last year but my cursory review of its replacement leaves me thinking its lacking in its ability to both accurately identify those who pose a risk to society or a general flight risk. Replacing a system that allows anyone granted the right of bail to obtain it (via bail bonds) with enforcement carried out via the threat of physical apprehension with one that tries to predict the risk before release leaves enormous room for error/gaps/all-other-flaws.

It sounds good on paper but how does it account for a citizen of "good" character per the algorithm being charged with a major felony or violent crime? If they are innocent, there is a meaningful likelihood they are denied release, thus ruining their life. If they are guilty, there is a meaningful likelihood they aren't reputable enough to ignore the chance to cut off their ankle bracelet and go underground.

Are there any systems that allow for something akin to "bail" (as in a way to be releaswd from custody while awaiting trial while also holding the individual accountable to return) that rely on things asids from cash or trust in an "algorithm"? I'm currently doing some reading on the subject so don't jump down my throat, I'm just skeptical of any other system's ability to balance availability with accountability for those with few to no assets.

Reason #1 sort of invalidates Reason #2. If Google is reasonably confident that they have an unmatchable (in the short term) advantage in interpreting and monetizing your data and can also generate additional revenue by selling it to firms that can't extract the same value from it, what incentive is stopping them? If competitors start to catch up in the areas jn which they have the clear advantage, they can simply shut off the faucet and the revenue generated by selling information jn the here and now helps fund initiatives to keep them ahead in the first place.

The transience bit is going to become a huge problem over the next decade. I've personally had 3 phone numbers since college (an out-of-state # doesn't mesh well with my career and I've moved several times) and at least one of the individuals who picked up one of my old numbers is the kind of person who has potential for serious run-ins with the law. My mother called my old # once and I guess it was auctioned to company that has a big market in prepaid "burner" phones. In the era of "Big Data" I can't even begin to imagine the sort of hilarious comedy (sarcasm) that can result from the two of us being linked together by what has become a primary source of personal identification.

It's a scummy business but without it bail bonds wouldn't exist, or at least be as widely available as they are today. Maybe there are better systems for ensuring compliance with orders to appesr in court than that of Bail but as long as the concept of Bail exists, private Bail Bonds will have to be a necessary part of the system lest lower/no-income individuals find themselves with no recourse.

>Was Sears too 'friendly' with their suppliers?

Funny enough, I've heard anecdotal evidence that the complete opposite was true. This comes from work I've done with a company that engineers, tests, and certifies tools under a dozen different brand names, one of which was Craftsman back when Sears owned that name outright. Whether it was official policy or not, Sears' practice was to rotate their buyers every ~3 years specifically to address the issue of buyers getting too chummy with the suppliers in their assigned sector. Unfortunately, this led to the issue of buyers being unable to develop subject-matter expertise in any one area and a broader problem where any compwtencies that were developed were often useless in their new assignment. According to those I've talked to who were around in the 80's and 90's when Sears' was starting to get pressured by other specialized Big Box retailers, whoever rotated into the position would have 0 experience with power tools or outdoor power equipment as they had spent their previous rotation buying anything from linens for the home goods group to clothing, or even flowers and plants for the gardenjng department.

The final product that wound up in consumer's hands was typically of competitive quality (hence the continued reputation of the Craftsman brand even today among the older generations) but the speed with which Sears' could expect new products to be developed and the costs involved was greatly hampered. This eventually led to Sears' losing the competitive edge in providing superior house-brand goods for the same price as the competition. Sears' had the market share and clout to get suppliers like the one I've worked with to justify the lower margins that come with designing/making a higher quality product to sell for the sams price. Once the whole buying process became incredibly time intensive due to a lack of expertise on the buying end the margins once spent on increased quality were instead swallowed up by plain old inefficiency. The end result was Sears buying a similar quality of product to what these suppliers were offering to the competition but without a cost advantage. Consumers noted the fact that a Craftsman chainsaw was no longer superior to the "X" brand this supplier provided to a store like Home Depot, except the Home Depot one was $15 less, thus began the death spiral ending in today's news.

Everyone is jumping over themselves to counter everyone else's memories and theories on "how Amazon became successful" so I hate to add to the ruckus but there is one factor everyone seems to be forgetting that is crucially important in my opinion. That factor was Amazon's approach to customer service, a factor that predates their earning the moniker of "The Everything Store" and was a necessary atep toward success as they first had to get people comfortable with buying things online.

There were several popular books written on the subject of Amazon's customer service model (or ones that used them as a key example to their thesis) that were written long before Amazon ever offered prime and even before they really started taking off. The Amazon of the mid-00's was a major player, but still small enough that they had to differentiate themselves from competitors (at the time) like Ebay and Newegg. Outside of selling media (books, CDs, DVDs, games etc), Amazon's inventory was still mostly limited to the kinds of goods one could also find on those sites (clothing, accessories, electronics) which had them stuck competing on price. What eventually began separating Amazon from the pack was the fact that they would go to extraordinary lengths to take care of the customer. Their return policies were why I stopped shopping exclusively on price well before Prime became a thing as the confidence that I could teturn an item in reasonable condition (as in I could still return something after discovering a flaw after opening it) for free (in almost all reasonable circumstances) and without having to do anything more than print a label and drop the box back by a UPS pickup location was a gamechanger in building my confidence in online retail. It was to the point that making s return with Amazon was easier than making a return to a store and thar was the edge they needed to convince consumers fo choose Amazon over not only other online retailers, but ohysical stores as well.

The rise of 2 day Prime shipping undoubtedly fueled their exponential growth and made Amazon what it is today. However, I doubt they would have ever had the ability to build the infrastructure needed to make Prime work if it wasn't for the initial wave of consumers becoming loyal customers due to their reputation for customer service.

>Who financed the utopian bullshit?

That's not a question you can answer on the mainstream open internet these days.

FAA certified mechanics and inspectors are held personally liable regardless of who they are working for and what they are working on.

That's a great article even if the results were a little inconclusive due to unanticipated uncontrolled factors (bullet length). I'm just happy to see someone showing how the worlds of firearms and hobbyist hacking can fit together.

It's unfortunate that everything related to firearms is now viewed as political. There are just so many interesting things unique to thos subject matter that inquisitive and mechanically inclined people, like those on HN, are missing out on.