7,234 karma · joined July 15, 2008
This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.
You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.
In big systems you can't always just do whatever you want!
It took them ~14 years to lose that $34 billion. Some projections suggest that OpenAI has lost a third of that in a single quarter. Even the most optimistic projections indicate that they're losing that much every 2-3 years. There's talk that they might lose ~$150B before profitability.
These are just numbers on a page to regular people, but $34 billion and $150 billion are very different numbers.
Who is this "we?"
There's a kind of circular complaint built into all such endeavors that goes like, "we can do this, but unfortunately we as a group don't want to, but we could definitely do it if we wanted, but sadly we currently have the wrong opinions, but we can definitely do it, if only we weren't inclined not to, but we should and we will, as soon as we all come around to the truth."
Your "we" doesn't seem to want to do what you want them to do, which is why communists so often end up thinking that the real problem is the existing populace and maybe what they really need is to be re-educated or even replaced.
It's kind of darkly funny that NIMBY ever came to refer to housing in the first place. The term was originally meant to apply to stuff exactly like this -- i.e. genuinely noxious uses that most people nevertheless agree are necessary somewhere. Almost everybody is a NIMBY in this sense.
Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.
But the naïveté and confusion on display in the post are extremely not relatable. What do you think a company is? What do you think a job is? What is it that you think you're doing there? And what is it that you believe you are owed?
On this front, this person talks like an alien -- or, more condescendingly, a child. I can't relate to it at all, nor do I think it's polite or kind to play along and pretend that their worldview is understandable.
Maybe -- maybe -- you could say something like, "look, these companies lie to their employees. They tell them that they're family, that they should bring their whole selves to work, that they are changing the world, that they matter to the company as an individual. You can't blame them for believing it."
But I do. Those are such ridiculous lies that I somehow have more contempt for anybody who believes them than I do the liars, who I view mostly to be playing out a kind of benign social fiction that's transparently fake to everybody involved.
The bar is set very high precisely because we know where things go when it's not.
This specific case wouldn't clear a low bar, much less a high one. I, too, have been turned off by Musk's behavior over the last year, but the idea that this case has nothing to do with that is risible.
Obviously you can write a law that says anything you want, but as an aesthetic matter, this strikes me as pretty ridiculous. A company makes up a thing called a "blue checkmark" and then, what, it has to mean the same thing for the rest of all time? It's not like the new Twitter lied about what was happening. They said plainly that they were changing the checkmark system to mean something new. Why would anybody cheer a government stepping in to say, "no, sorry, you can't do that?"
It's worse than that in that it's just plainly wrong. I learn about useful products via advertising all the time -- so often, in fact, that I'm sort of bewildered that anybody could claim otherwise. We must be experiencing the world quite differently.
It couldn't be more fine. It does everything I need it to do.
There is very little free agency in American sports fandom. People are (for the most part) fans of the team local to where they grew up. (This kind of bums me out as someone raising kids in New England, which is not where I'm from, and so not whose teams I root for.)
True, but, interestingly, we can travel thousands of miles within the United States and in so doing observe that different US states have wildly different outcomes while living under the same federal government and very similar state governments.
Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Minnesota live under the same Constitution, the same federal government, and with very similar state governments -- and yet we see that they have very different outcomes on a variety of measures.
Norway and Louisiana have very different crime rates, but so do New Hampshire and Louisiana. This tells us, at a minimum, that the form of government isn't likely to be the primary factor.
If that's high school, then it's useless, both as a signal, but also just because, you know, nobody is learning anything. You pretty much have to have some other place for smart people to demonstrate that they're smart.
That's correct. We should have a lot more people in prison than we do. We are far too soft on repeat offenders and we've allowed courts to deem unconstitutional practices that literally nobody at the founding would have thought were questionable.
When you talk to people about "mass incarceration" in the abstract, they think it's bad. But when you show them what the modal prisoner and the modal prison sentence is actually like, they think it's too soft. Opposition to "tough on crime" policies is based on the myth (the lie?) that most US prisoners are innocent or, if not innocent, guilty only of harmless crimes like drug possession -- that the system is racist and unfair.
But that's not what the data show.
What the data show -- again -- is that the modal prisoner did the crime, and many others besides, and that they are very likely to commit more crimes once released.
Criminal justice is not a mysterious science. You identify repeat offenders and then you execute or otherwise permanently incapacitate them. This works because a large share of all crime is committed by repeat offenders.
But of course that's probably not what you mean when you say that our solution to crime isn't working well.
They almost never clarify. What they do is produce silly arguments like this one.
The typical US prisoner 1) did their crime; 2) did many other crimes besides the one they're in prison for; 3) is very likely to commit additional crimes upon their release.
Small, homogenous European countries have absolutely no idea how to solve our crime problem and their criticisms reflect an irritating combination of ignorance and arrogance.
This is entirely arbitrary and knowing whether a particular place is technically part of "the city" doesn't really tell you anything about it. As you might expect, this causes a ton of unnecessary confusion.
[0] Part of Kansas City proper: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9B9rhVzAtSykLhUs5
[1] "St. Louis" but not part of St. Louis proper: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xXM7A2fQYY2Kh3vY6
People generally seem to struggle with the fact that it's the land, not the house that's on top of it, that's valuable in desirable metro areas, but this reality suggests something really quite lucky, which is that eliminating land-use restrictions probably won't tank single-family housing prices, even as it lowers rents.
Incumbents get richer, because looser zoning rules mean the land is more valuable. Renters and those who otherwise couldn't afford to be incumbents get cheaper rent. It's a fortuitous win-win.
The state of US case law -- IANAL, this is a layman's understanding -- is that plaintiffs only have to show that there exists "disparate impact," which is to say that outcomes were not exactly the same for Asians/whites and blacks.
Two things can be true: 1) Google did not intend to discriminate, did not institute any policy designed to discriminate, did not in actual fact discriminate against non-Asian/white employees; and 2) they could still be held liable for hiring results that look like discrimination in a single-variable analysis.
So, yes, I think there are indeed situations in which they'd pay out settlements knowing full well they've done nothing morally or ethically dubious.
There are things they would care about, but they don't care about those things.
And they don't care about privacy in the abstract.
People get blocked for all kinds of reasons, most of them relatively innocent.
We should just simply allow a free market in housing and housing construction. That's the obvious solution on the table and the one we should try before we bother revisiting eccentric tax schemes from the 19th Century.
> because land value always goes up
Tell that to the people who left urban St. Louis and Detroit and Cleveland in droves over the last 75 years. Their land didn't just go down in value; it went to less than zero. You'd literally have to pay somebody to take it and it's a huge burden on those municipalities.
The problem with Georgism is that, yes, land is different than other things in that you can't make more of it, but it's also the same as most things in most ways that matter.