1,448 karma · joined June 3, 2014
In a nutshell: because a profound ideological shift has occurred in the last 40 years, which dictates that nearly all aspects of public life should ultimately be privatized -- real effectiveness, hidden costs (and nefarious side effects) be damned.
Even my HS teachers (who designed their entire curriculum -- front to back) were hip to this. They said "Yeah, we know some students have photocopies of midterms from previous years. But we mix up our questions enough that we're not too worried about it. Plus, a student who would waste his or her time with rote memorization just isn't going to understand the material conceptually, and will certainly bomb the essay questions."
(What? You're not letting your teachers design their own curricula? Or they're not able to? Then you have a much worse problem on your hands than students trading answers to multiple-guess exams).
Supposed argument (1) is definitely a straw man. What environmentalists generally warn of is not that we will "run out" of fossil fuels -- there always seem to be more reserves out there, deeper and deeper in the ground somewhere -- but that the environmental costs of extracting them are becoming ever greater, and are ultimately unsustainable.
Argument (2) I don't know much about, so I'll pass. But is clearly of lesser importance.
And (3) is standard pseudo-scientific libertarian denialism. It may help to understand the first source the author cities (Patrick Michaels) does paid advocacy work for the energy industry on climate change issues, for example:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cato_Institute#Ca...
It doesn't "trap" anyone; that's just hyperbole.
The main effect is that it gives a significant number of people a chance to stay in the city in a profoundly deteriorating market for middle-class housing stock (driven, in NYC's case, to no small degree by external factors such foreign investment, and radical and -- in the view of many -- essentially undemocratic "pro-building" changes to the local zoning laws).
this is one of the ways that ghettos come in to existence.
Perhaps. But given the vastly greater forces at play (racism/classism; the collapse of inner-city manufacturing base; and deliberate wholesale razing of neighborhoods in NYC, Boston and elsewhere; mistaken notions about the wonderful community-building effects moving people out of quirky single-family housing and into massive high-rise development projects; and just the inevitable effect of multi-lane freeways in high-density urban areas, generally) it seems you'd have a hard time pinning it as one of the major factors.
An enforcement in issue. In NYC the laws are actually aggressively pro-tenant on the issue of deliberate neglect; if you don't keep the basic services working (or keep the building reasonably free of infestations, for example), the tenant can use that to delay any attempted eviction processes (justified or otherwise) quite substantially. The smarter landlords in NYC all know this, and hence generally resort to buy-outs as a tool for vacating tenants. Overt harassment-by-neglect does happen, but is quite rare.
It also reduces tenant mobility.
To some extent, it reduces mobility within the local market (and this effect can be quite significant, in some markets). But in an unregulated environment, a great many of these people simply would not be able to continue renting in the local market, at all. So it's a tradeoff, basically.
Rent control also directly causes Ellis Act evictions, IMO.
A non-sequitur; there's no reason one needs to have something like the Ellis Act in order to have rent control. NYC's market (famously) does not, for example; and profit-driven conversions of the sort you mention are generally illegal, and easily blocked in landlord-tenant court.
In other words, the Ellis Act causes Ellis Act evictions; not "rent control."
Fascinating. In that this episode represents an only slightly exaggerated instance of a pattern of such profoundly dysfunctional and self-blocking behavior in the community that has become so widely entrenched that it is beyond epidemic proportions; it has practically become the new norm.
Unit cost of the MQ-1 Predator: $4.03M
Program cost, as of 2011: $2.38B
But if you feel the need to attack someone you'll most likely never see or meet as being "smug" for tangentially pointing out this fact (ironically backed by exultations of your own vastly superior experience in both technology remote environments) -- instead of minding whatever work someone is presumably paying you to be doing at this time, as we speak -- well, do what you need to do, I guess.
That's when the fun begins.
Until of course tricky weather or something else happens, and suddenly, they don't.
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/26/137646147/the-gps-a-fatally-mi...
Yup. And I've always suspect that this cant was ultimately something of a foil, and that the actual messages it's intended to send are of a rather different sort. To wit:
Internal: Hoo-ray for you! You made it through the gauntlet! Aren't you just swell and awesome!
External: You know you have to invest in us / buy our products because we only hire the top 0.001 percent! And we have a rigorously testing process (as verified by the magic of survivorship bias) to prove it!
The whole point of due process is that the pesky "if" part needs to be proven. Otherwise your argument is entirely circular.
Which she can safely take as a sign that she should be very, very glad not to have "passed" that MS interview. It may or may not have been a very useful question to ask, but the interviewer's response indicates that he had clearly let the task assigned to him go to his head, and was basically on power trip, by that point.
The question that turned me into a babbling buffoon was “have you made any friends since moving to NYC?”
Also not an appropriate question to ask, and indicates a lack of respect for basic personal boundaries on the part of the interviewer.
This is a pretty ridiculous statement to make. You might want to look up any generally accepted definition of 'communism' (as opposed to Western European-style socialism) at some point. (Hint: it doesn't simply mean the idea that it might be advantageous for the government to own certain major industries).
She believed in a small state, in individual enterprise, etc.
"A small state and individual enterprise", indeed:
Thatcher was a fierce Cold Warrior, and when it came to Chile never mustered quite the appropriate amount of compassion for the people Pinochet killed in the name of anti-Communism. She preferred talking about his much-vaunted “Chilean economic miracle.”
And kill he did. Pinochet’s soldiers rounded up thousands in the capital’s sports stadiums and, then and there, suspects were marched into the locker rooms and corridors and bleachers and tortured and shot dead. Hundreds died in such a fashion. One was the revered Chilean singer Víctor Jara, who was beaten, his hands and ribs broken, and then machine-gunned, his body dumped like trash on a back street of the capital—along with many others. The killing went on even after Pinochet and his military had a firm hold on power; it was just carried out with greater secrecy, in military barracks, in police buildings, and in the countryside. Critics and opponents of the new regime were murdered in other countries, too. In 1976, Pinochet’s intelligence agency planned and carried out a car bombing in Washington, D.C., that murdered Allende’s exiled former Ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, as well as Ronni Moffitt, his American aide. Britain regarded Pinochet’s killing spree as unseemly, and sanctioned his regime by refusing to supply it with weapons—that is, until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister.
In 1980, the year after Thatcher took office, she lifted the arms embargo against Pinochet; he was soon buying armaments from the United Kingdom. In 1982, during Britain’s Falklands War against Argentina, Pinochet helped Thatcher’s government with intelligence on Argentina. Thereafter, the relationship became downright cozy, so much so that the Pinochets and his family began making an annual private pilgrimage to London.
"Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady." -- The New Yorker, April 9 2013
Whoever did the dirty work, he implied, would have done so only with President Vladimir Putin's blessing.
"Who gave the order to kill Nemtsov? Who knows,” Kasparov said. ”But this was done not far from the Kremlin and it would have been done by Putin's cronies. Who ordered it? I don't care. Putin must be held responsible for the murder of Boris."
Kasparov’s remark gets to the heart of the larger significance of Nemtsov’s killing. We don't yet know who ordered and carried out the hit or why. But the specifics don't matter as much as the signal it sends -- and what it portends.
"The message is this," Kasparov said. "We have no allergy to blood and anyone can be killed."
Putin's 'Hybrid' State Terror
The article doesn't claim that it does. That's why the title was specifically constructed to use the phrase "association between" (rather than "causes" or "is caused by.")
What kind of person can financially afford, or make time for, 4 to 7 sauna visits per week?
The kind that has access to a sauna in their own home. Which is quite common in Finland, apparently: "There are five million inhabitants and over three million saunas in Finland - an average of one per household."[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Police_Department#Cont...
In NYC's case, it also leads to 1.5-2 million people being able to live in the city who otherwise (at market rates) simply would not be able to, period. To flatly assert that it "simply leads" to a shortage in stock (with no other significant effects) -- or that unregulated housing markets don't also have crippling shortages -- is just... weird.
After all - why would you build apartments or rent out existing rooms if you're not going to make money off of it?
This is, of course, completely illogical: just because some apartments are rent-stabilized, that doesn't mean that all of them are, or even a majority of them are. And of course owners will still rent their stabilized apartments -- they may forego some of the niceties of higher-end maintenance, but they'll still rent them.
And in any case, the reality is that while developers in NYC are occasionally forced to build a small portion "affordable" units[1], it doesn't ding their profit margins very much, and they're falling over each other to create new stock, just the same. (Hint: city planners have long been aware that there's an incentive tradeoff that comes with requiring a certain proportion affordable units to be built; that's why they keep this proportion very low, so as to not impact the developer's incentives, very much).
[1] Most of which generally aren't actually affordable to actual low-income residents (due to on some quirks about how "mean income" is defined), but that's another matter.
It is for those who already live there.
Except when you're working for an occupying military force, you're not really "living" in the country you're occupying. Unless you're native, you're living on a military base -- i.e. with the occupiers, and not with the locals.
Which is one of many, many reasons why these kinds of military operations tend not to work so well.
Right -- but there are ways the child can attain that understanding without its parents perpetually lording over them, deciding how they spend every minute of the day.