del82

Alas, the billionaires pay almost no property taxes on those condos:

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/05/why-billionaires-dont...

Interestingly, Strong Towns published an article a bit more than a week ago about why mandating ground-floor retail is also not the best way to go:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/8/mixed-up-priori...

> Credit rating is an instrument of control used by banks and credit card organizations to force us into debt we don't want.

Wait, how is that?

> Meaning you make concessions to either where you live or where you work. Isn't that a sign that it's not completely your choice?

Well yes, I mean there are many things about my job and my life that aren't completely my choice if by that we mean I have to make prioritization decisions and tradeoffs. Not being forced to work from any specific location eliminates one of the constraints, sure.

The point was more about the idea that commute time should be compensated for those whose employers to require them to come to an office. That's not obvious to me. Suppose, for example, I chose to live 2 hours away from my office. Should I be compensated for the 4 hours per day I spend commuting?

It's interesting to view commute time as the employer's time rather than employee's time, and therefore as time that should be compensated. I'd always thought of it as the employee's time, and the employee's decision about where to live and how to commute, etc. As an employee I'd factor in the commute when making decisions about a job.

Playing with this idea a bit: do you view the clothes that someone (only) wears to a traditional in-person office as rightfully the responsibility of the employer? Lunch?

Causation goes the other way: Reagan's prioritization of tax cuts over public education led to tuition increases, which lead to an increased demand for loans to pay the higher tuition.

One quick question: why does it matter that the large corporations in which power is concentrated are geographically clustered? Would the situation be better if ceteris paribus the corporations were more geographically distributed?

One question I have about Apple is: why should they want to build cars? Or anything else, really, except phones and computers and possibly other personal electronics? Why shouldn't they stick with what they're good at, invest their cash in that business when they can, and when they can't then either return it to shareholders or hire a portfolio manager or ten to invest it elsewhere?

People often criticize Twitter for trying to be Facebook instead of just being Twitter. Why shouldn't Apple just be Apple?

Do laws against fraud violate freedom of speech?

You're absolutely right that from a dietary perspective, and painting with a very broad brush, Chinese people in general eat healthier than Americans. My spouse certainly eats healthier than I do, though I've been a bit of a bad influence.

My point was about food safety, not nutrition. To some extent I can control how healthily my children eat by choosing what to feed them. But while in the US we can be fairly confident that the food and drugs they get are safe, that is less true in China, due in part to some recent food safety scandals like [0]. When we travel to China, there are certain things (like infant formula) that we bring with us rather than buy there. We also bring things like vitamins to my in-laws because they ask us to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

I agree, but it would take more than political reform to make China an attractive landing spot. Pollution and food safety are also big problems, for example, to the extent that my spouse (who is Chinese) and I have discussed and rejected the idea of raising our children in China, independent of qualms about the political system.

Can you explain specifically how the ACLU is a left-leaning political organization, rather than an apolitical nonprofit?

Ah yes, that makes good sense. And that helps answer the question I asked in response to pacbard's comment: Even if only one person fully understands all of the complex stuff that's happening "under the hood" of the spreadsheet, many people can contribute. Thanks!

That makes sense. But then I guess my question becomes: at what point are you spending so much time and effort learning advanced features of spreadsheets that you could have become proficient in one of the tools with a higher ceiling?

I mean, you have to look at, validate, and clean your data no matter how you chose to analyze it. Any tool, whether it uses a "real" programming language or not, is going to need to support that to be useful at all, and unless your data is "fits in one or two screens of a spreadsheet" scale, I don't see how they would be better in this regard.

Honest question: for what sorts of problems and requirements are complex spreadsheet analyses the right tool? As opposed to, say, using the data analysis and visualization capabilities of something like R or Python?

I genuinely don't understand the drive to make all these sacrifices just to make the computer a couple millimeters thinner. Are there people who look at the previous generation of MBP and said "that's too thick"? If so, why?

Just to add another view here: I'm currently a Data Scientist at Capital One and enjoy it quite a bit. I've found management to be open, supportive, and invested in my and my coworkers' success and development. They also allow and encourage people to change teams within the company, so if you find yourself in a situation that's not working out, you can move to another team.

I've also not seen anybody leave the company on bad terms. Of course I'm sure that happens, and I'm sure there are bad managers here as everywhere. I'm sorry that you had such a negative experience.

It's already required in some industries, e.g. those that extend credit.

https://consumercomplianceoutlook.org/2013/second-quarter/ad...

The Omega Tau podcast on container shipping is fascinating, as well: http://omegataupodcast.net/2014/04/146-container-shipping/

And if property taxes go up on my landlord, my rent goes up to cover it.

The Omega Tau Podcast is great: http://omegataupodcast.net/

I've found that produce picked yesterday at the farm up the street tends to last longer than produce that's been trucked from the other side of the US, not to mention the difference in the amount of energy it took to get it to me.

> Users are given a choice whether or not to use the product.

What did this choice look like? Were users prompted to remove the cert if they didn't want it?