davidf18

I have no idea where you are getting your data. Zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status create artificial scarcity of land resulting in higher housing costs. These both create market failures in housing.

In Japan for 20 years there have been federal laws overriding local law that restricts zoning density. The result: in Tokyo they have been building 140,000 housing units per year compared with 20,000 in NYC and 90,000 for all of California. The cost of housing as not increased at all in the past 20 years because these market failures (in this case also called "rent-seeking") in real estate are not allowed to occur in Japan.

We need similar laws in the US as Japan.

Prior to the oil embargo of 1973, the cost of a barrel of oil in today's dollars was about $23.

In 1973, OPEC created an artificial scarcity, "economic rents", in oil transferring and over the past five decades "robbed consumers" of trillions of dollars of wealth transferred to oil rich nations such as those in the Middle East.

These "economic rents" not only harmed consumers but they helped certain oil rich nations such as Russia and Iran to invade other nations.

The hope is that with US fracking and oil export, the days of more than $50 per barrel oil is over.

It is estimated that the Arabs spent $1 trillion of wealth to combat Israel. Imagine, if instead of attempting to destroy Israel they had partnered with it investing in the "Startup Nation?" Had that happened, the Middle East may have been a very wealthy region for all of it's citizens.

Historian Paul Johnson wrote an article in Commentary in 2005 called "The Anti-Semitic Disease" along these lines. [1]

[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Anti-Semitic-Disea...

James Bennet, the Op-Ed Editor who had hired both Weiss and Stephens is Jewish. His brother is Colorado Senator Bennet. Their mother was in the Warsaw Ghetto and was sent out as a child by her parents just before the Nazis shipped the entire ghetto to the camps. She has an on-line oral history in the holocaust museum.

Both Stephens and Weiss are not only Jewish, but pro-Israel. Weiss had even written an entire recent book about anti-Semitism [1]. Many in the far left support the anti-Semitic Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement against the only Jewish country in the world. China invaded Tibet, puts 3 million Muslims in camps, taking their DNA and facial recognition but no China BDS.

Bennet had also been Jerusalem Bureau Chief for NYT for 3 years and thus would be knowledgeable about the situation there. He may have stopped inaccuracies printed about Israel in his role.

Bennet was the likely candidate to be elevated to Exec Editor when the current one retired in a couple of years. I believe a lot of the staff didn't like Bennet because of Jewish/Israel stance and the idea of him being the Exec Editor frightened/angered them.

I believe that an external inspector general type figure should evaluate the entire situation. Weiss's complaints are consistent with a toxic work environment that nobody should have to deal with. She said the source of some of the harassment she experienced was on an internal slack channel and thus easy to investigate.

Readers of HN are analytical enough to realize that when something obvious isn't mentioned it may well be the underlying cause.

[1] Weiss: How to Fight Anti-Semitism https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07P51KC9Z/

Ebert newspaper articles from 1962 are in the medium article. Discusses helping high school students using PLATO in 1962!

I live and work in Manhattan and there is a great deal of traffic congestion that could be fixed by removing parking spaces on streets that have 1. dedicated bus lanes. 2. bike lanes.

14th St has removed all parking and auto traffic and the crosstown buses are very frequent even on a weekend and convenient.

A lot of traffic can be blocked by delivery trucks that are double parked on streets which have parking on both sides.

One reason is that the trucks are too wide for the city streets. There should be a mandated by law maximum width on delivery trucks for NYC that are no wider than an SUV or other wide car. Instead of making the trucks wide, make them long and narrow.

That way, even if the delivery trucks like Fedex, UPS, Freshdirect, etc are double parked, they don't block the entire street.

I'm on a yearly upgrade plan and now have the 11 Pro Max. The extra battery life is very helpful.

But, if you are taking lots of pictures or about 15 mins of video, the battery seems to drain quickly, by about 45% as I was doing today.

The fast charge with the 18 W adapter is also very helpful.

Patents are very important for wealth creation. Investors need returns on their investment, otherwise they will not make investments in the research and development necessary to develop the product.

Without the limited time monopoly created by patents, investment cannot be recuperated and there will be no funds available for creating and productizing innovation.

"When the plane pancaked onto the runway, more than 10,000 pounds of kerosene came out all at once from the ruptured right wing and turned to mist."

I wonder why they didn't "dump the fuel" just before the crash to have avoided the fire. I thought this was standard operating procedure to dump fuel before crash landings.

I had read about the crash awhile ago and as I recall many people that died died of smoke inhalation from the fire and not the impact itself.

My undergraduate degree is in both EE with a CS minor from Illinois/Urbana and EE is significantly more difficult than the CS.

This afternoon I met someone in lunch line that had just graduated in CS who said they tried to do EE but couldn't do it. I've seen others when I was in school drop out of EE to do CS.

Two years ago, in 2017, Microsoft distributed the security update to fix this problem. The issue has nothing to do with the NSA and everything to do with the City of Baltimore failing to keep their capital equipment, in this case computers, up-to-date applying security and other updates.

The article also discuses healthcare systems hacked by other exploits. This again was not caused by the computer virus, but by the fact that Microsoft vendor issued security updates were not applied to the systems.

Often there are security upgrades in hardware as well as software which means that the computer hardware needs to be upgraded as well.

As is the case with most of these security hacks, it is the failure of the agency to budget appropriately for equipment maintenance and having competent leadership that actually understands the importance of budgeting for and implementing security upgrades including upgrading to the latest version of the OS, in this case, Windows 10.

The 737-MAX with the larger engines turned the statically stable airframe into one that must use computers (eg MCAS) to make it dynamically stable which is a technique used on modern fighter jets but to my knowledge has never been applied to a passenger aircraft.

In this plane which is not "fly-by-wire" the pilots are part of the safety loop and are given a certain short amount of time to respond to an emergency.

Troubling to me is the footnote in the manual which there are times where the manual wheels for the trim require 80 lbs or 100 lbs or more of force. This amount of force would potentially preclude female pilots on these planes to handle these sorts of emergencies.

> "Evidence is that the vast majority of immigrant labor, both skilled and unskilled, are net positives economically."

Since this is a forum with a lot of engineers I would expect people to do their research instead of simply making statements.

Exporting labor to cheaper countries (primarily China and Mexico) and importing cheap labor (through both legal and illegal immigration from low-income countries such as Mexico) and STEM imports through H1-B Visa abuses depresses wages for the working class in the former situation and among highly skilled professionals in the later.

There is a term for this: global labor arbitrage

Of course, there is a number of working class jobs replaced by automation, but in spite of automation, global labor arbitrage still exists as an independent phenomena to depress wages.

In 2001 China joined the World Trade Org (WTO) but "did not play by the rules." with the result that many Americans in working class jobs lost those jobs or ended up receiving depressed wage rates.

NAFTA has been an issue with Mexico.

The H1-B Visa abuse has been substantial with a number of organizations importing H1-B Visa labor to replace Americans (e.g. Disney, Southern CA Edison, UC San Francisco,...).

Trump has been working to stop illegal immigration as well as stemming H1-B Visa abuse. A result is that there are "labor shortages" resulting in a rising wage rate.

Another major factor impacting wage growth has been the increasing costs of healthcare which is generally paid for by employers. Higher benefits costs result in lower wages.

BTW, there are some companies that complain that they can't find workers but generally that is because 1) they are not offering market level wages and 2) they are not located in a place where people want to live.

Generally, these firms, if they are willing to locate where people want to live and if they offer market wages, they will be able to find employees.

Please ask your office mate to put everything from images to code to data on-line in the spirit of open and reproducible science. That way others can check the conclusions and the statistical methods, etc.

The H1-B Visa was abused, intended only for cases where there are absolutely no Americans with the qualifications that can fill that job.

A number of politicians are effectively "bribed" by large firms to attempt to increase the H1-B Visa quota (see Gang of Eight Immigration). My own state sen Schumer, has a daughter that works for Facebook and it is no secret that Facebook wants to increase the number of H1-B Visas.

Fixing immigration is comparatively easy. 1. Get rid of H1-B Visa abuse. The reality is that there should be few H1-B Visas given out because there are in fact Americans that can do most of the jobs. H1-B Visas should only be given out at salaries 1.5 times those of Americans, to incentivize the hiring of Americans and minimizing H1-B Visa abuse.

2. Force the implementation of eVerify with massive fines for employers that don't use it.

3. Obama broke the law by not having Congress pass the DACA legislation. It appears that Congress doesn't want to pass it so they should return to their native countries.

Remember, in all of these programs of Visa abuse, or the hiring of illegal aliens, takes jobs (and in the case of DACA) university spots from US Citizens and those who are living here legally.

Thus, the system is not broken. Just enforce existing laws such as eVerify with massive fines for abuse, get rid of H1-B Visa abuse, get rid of H4 Visas which Congress never passed in the first place, get rid of DACA, have them apply and wait in line like everyone else that wants to live here.

Millennials, compared to older generations, have to pay more of their income towards housing, have higher student loan debt to manage, are getting married later and are starting families later as they feel they don't have the financial resources.

Moreover, thanks to automation and globalization, good paying jobs in many disciplines can be harder to come by -- perhaps greatest in the working class.

They feel they have to work harder than older generations to keep up and that is because they do.

The reasons for the higher cost of housing and of education has to do with the older generations using politics to take created wealth for themselves and not to help younger generations has been done in the past.

For example, in NYC, DC, Boston, Seattle, SF, LA, London, there are zoning laws that restrict zoning density creating an artificial scarcity in housing while benefiting primarily wealthy landlords.

States are paying smaller and smaller proportions of public university budgets with the remainder having to be made up of student loans.

Special interests stopped a bill in committee in the Senate of California that would have allowed construction of 5 stories buildings near mass transit stops.

Japan realizes the harm of zoning density restrictions and thus has federal laws overriding any local laws. The result: in 2014, there were 140,000 housing units were built in Tokyo vs. less than 90,000 for all of California.

Ultimately, Millennials need to focus and prioritize these issues in order to have a future -- becoming politically involved to help lower housing costs and university education.

Specifically, both Democrats and Republicans are focused on so many issues instead of focusing on what is important: Fixing local zoning laws so that there is affordable housing for Millennials and taxpayer money contributing proportions of public university education that had been spent in the past.

The current system is a check that prevents individual states from dominating legislation in Congress. Why would anyone want that except for the very populous states?

The top 6 states (California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois & Pennsylvania effectively tied) have almost half the population and thus could dominate Congress without input from the other 44 states.

The author comes from Pennsylvania, and so this article should be seen as nothing but self-serving.

But a poll of equal number of citizens from each state would never approve such a measure.

Two things helped to destroy the empire. First, it was the attempt of the Soviets to keep up with Reagan's Star Wars. They lacked the resources.

But also, Congressional Representative Charlie Wilson, single-handedly helped to get appropriations (matched by Saudi Arabia) to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan with CIA funding of the Mujahideen in the Soviet–Afghan War [1]. This was the Soviet Vietnam.

Tom Hanks starred as Charlie Wilson in the 2007 movie, Charlie Wilson's War[2].

The movie was based on the 2003 book, "Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History"[3]

Both the film and the book are worth watching/reading. Truly an incredible story.

Public facing Charlie Wilson was a playboy. Privately behind he scenes he was on two Congressional subcommittees that doled out black-ops funding to the CIA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Afghan_War

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson%27s_War_(film)

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Wilsons-War-Extraordinary-Ope...

Walking 30 minutes per day 5 days per week and losing 15 lbs (for an adult male) lessens the likelihood of a pre-diabetic person becoming diabetic by 60%.

In NYC where I live which has subways with stations that mostly do not have escalators people are constantly walking and walking up and down stairs as part of their daily activity.

During the hours long rush-hours it is also much faster taking subways than automobiles (e.g 15 mins instead of 45 mins).

Cities can be designed as NYC so that there is plenty of walking and stair climbing as part of the daily activity.

There are also plenty of Citibikes (cheap rentable bicycles) and bike lanes.

I live in Manhattan and the cost of rents and housing has been increasing primarily through rent-seeking behavior which limits housing density creating an artificial scarcity in land leading to a high cost of living. Simply fixing the zoning density restrictions would reduce the rent-seeking or "market failure" and would lower the cost of living in NYC. See Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser's work for more details.

Build Big, Bill http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....

There is a NY State mandated minimum wage law that has been hurting many stores and has increased the cost of food in grocery stores, for instance.

It was mandated to $11 / hr to $13 (today, I think) to $15.

Thus, the real issue is the market failures in housing caused by politicians who limit the zoning density. The State, addressing the high cost of housing not by fixing the rent-seeking instead decided to increase minimum wage to a level that many independent establishments can no longer afford to stay in business.

The history is that France gave the Israelis the Dimona Reactor originally as payback for helping the French and British with the Suez Canal nationalized by Egypt. The next French PM said he was giving Israel the technology to prevent another Holocaust.

Although the Arab nations have tried repeatedly to destroy Israel they are not afraid of Israel using the bomb against them. Nor can they conquer Israel because Israel has the bomb. Hence it provides an excuse to never start another war with Israel.

The Saudis and other Sunni Arab countries are terrified of a nuclear Shia Iran and would build their own bomb if Iran had one. As one might imagine, the Saudis are very supportive of Israel's efforts against Iran.

The article has a Mad Men -like quality to it. Ivy-elites white males running the business, women related to research roles. Amazon has a series which reflect the news business, based on Newsweek, from the 1960s.

Good Girls Revolt https://www.amazon.com/Good-Girls-Revolt/dp/B017AOY4WS

I wonder how many of those Googler's who objected to the development of weapon systems have served in combat positions fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan?

I'm guessing not many which is a reason why it is important for firms such as Google to prioritize the hiring of combat vets (besides the fact that they risked their lives to serve our country).

For those who have not served in combat or lost a friend or relative that served in combat, saving lives with drone technology is too abstract.

The drones are very effective at killing terrorists and technology which improves the effectiveness of killing terrorists and enemy combatants (and thus saving American lives) is a good thing.

In Israel, both men and women alike are drafted and the women can serve in combat positions if they desire. Men serve on one month reserve duty until they are 40. Some of these men have been educated as engineers and they understand first-hand the importance of developing technology to save the lives of combat soldiers.

This is something firms like Google are missing: there seems to be little empathy for US military soldiers who are risking their lives defending our nation and developing of technologies to save their lives.

I live in NYC. For a couple of years I'd be reading NYTimes articles about the system is having problems from overcrowding, yet you'd see articles that more people took subways in the 1950's - 1960's.

Within the past few months there was a NYTimes article that stated that after an accident in the mid 1990s (?) that they slowed the system down. Thus, the problem wasn't overcrowding, but slowing the system down.

The system has been underfunded for maintenance. When the city went broke in the 1970s (?), the financing was transferred to the state from the city. NY State taxes the city but does not returned the taxed funds to the city for the MTA. Transferring management of the MTA back to the city would help with holding the Mayor accountable, something to think about if they want to be re-elected.

Unable to edit my comment so adding this: http://www.machinedesign.com/news/politics-engineers

"Engineers tend to view themselves as much less liberal and slightly more conservative than the general public, according to a recent survey of over 1,200 readers of MACHINE DESIGN and Electronic Design magazines. The same survey also found that engineers say they are more likely to be Republican (42.1%) or Independent (33.7%) voters, as opposed to Democrats (14.5%)."

SV is very liberal, yet typically engineers (eg. EE, Mechanical, Civil, Aero, Industrial, Chemical, ...) are conservative. I wonder how many people with real engineering degrees (disclosure my BS is EE with CS minor from top school) are SV liberal.

The reason why there are homeless in SF and other US cities is because of rent-seeking: a market failure which creates artificial scarcity in housing through zoning density restrictions, overuse of historic landmark status, and overregulation.

It is emotionally convenient (esp. for main-stream media) to blame President Trump for everything, but it is typically local city councils, usually Democratic and not Republican, that is responsible for the rent-seeking. The results are housing scarcity, the high costs of housing, renters paying much more they would in an efficient market, and landlords getting far more money than they would get in an efficient market.

Japan fixed this problem by having federal laws that overrode local laws that supported rent-seeking to disallow zoning density restrictions. The results: in 2014, 140,000 housing units built in Tokyo vs 20,000 in NYC and less than 90,000 in all of California.

The lesson: don't blame President Trump. Seek out and destroy rent-seeking market inefficiencies. Let the market do its thing and you'll see far more affordable housing. Japan has already demonstrated this fact.

Vasectomy is generally reversible. And even if not, the man can have children using IVF.

Author states 1 in 5 women under 30 regret their decision. This is evidence enough not to perform an irreversible sterilization procedure. Instead using IUD are quite reliable causing a reversible former of sterilization.

It is important to have specialist physical input when writing these articles.

Curiously, they left out the 8088, the processor chosen by IBM to be used in the IBM PC. It was designed in Israel having the 16-bit instruction architecture of the 8086, but with an 8-bit data bus, thus being able to use the cheaper, established chips used by the 8080. This effectively gave IBM an 16-bit machine to compete against Apple II 8-bit 6502 but at prices more consistent with an 8-bit processor.

e-cigs are not the answer: See FDA [1].

An intervention that has proved effective for saving lives from tobacco use is MPOWER from the World Health Organization. Raise the cost of tobacco through taxes, ban smoking in public places, hard-hitting, scary, anti-smoking ads, doctors talking to their patients about quitting, nicotine replacement therapy, telephone counseling support. In NYC the age for purchase is 21 as it is nationwide for alcohol. In NYC, the minimum cost per pack is $13.

[1] https://blogs.fda.gov/fdavoice/index.php/2016/08/protecting-...

> "as the new system only works on post-2000s trains."

Actually, it isn't even all post-2000s trains. The CBTC [2] train controls aren't even on all of the post-2000s trains. In fact besides the 'L' train which has already been converted, only the 7 line has all of its cars as CBTC [1].

This is really bad news, because ideally, the very, very crowded 4,5,6 lines mentioned in the NYT article should be the lines to have the signals computerized, but the 4, 5 trains are relatively "new" having been put in service in 1999-2003 or so. Some of the trains in service are > 50 years old.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_rolling_s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications-based_train_con...