ethanbond

Also necessary in NYC which I don’t really feel is low-trust in general.

BYD is for sure a legitimately remarkable company and to some degree I’m thankful for the competition. But I am highly, highly skeptical (and you should be too) of pretty much any number coming out of China. You should be especially skeptical of a company that can make such valuable contributions to the CCP’s hybrid warfare doctrine.

BYD can degrade the US manufacturing base; degrade consumer sentiment (as seen above); put millions of mobile sensors on US/EU roads; etc. It is absolute naivety to think that’s a company that will ever need to truly stand on its own two feet.

It's not just possible but quite sensible to support these particular protestors' particular claims without necessarily supporting all possible vetos of all possible construction projects OR supporting fully arbitrary selections of "protestable projects."

Now you're making shit up about "they believe the protestors can do no wrong" to shore up your ridiculous dichotomy that even you don't actually believe.

If I care about my privacy, I much prefer the world where Apple just restricts APIs/integrations that are harmful to it than that they have to employ armies of lawyers and auditors to go after TOS violations after the fact.

Uhh yeah, I don't think anyone should be able to veto anyone's construction project. I do think that people should be able to veto (or at least protest) construction projects like ones that pipe toxic chemicals through their drinking water.

I mean, you can say that's "only in cases you support" dismissively, but I call it "dependent upon the facts of the situation."

I think the “does it pipe toxic spill-prone chemicals through your drinking water supply” question is at least relevant to the legitimacy of someone’s stake in the situation.

That’s fine, but that’s not why they said they’re pulling their money.

I'd have thought the Ideologically Pure folks over in Texas would invest/divest solely and exclusively on the basis of whether it's a good place to get returns? Even accepting their excuse that ESG investing is suffocating their oil and gas-dependent "long term financial health," that's ultimately just saying they think the government needs to more strongly place its thumb on the scales.

Yeah basically the reason is that people are imagining their current built environment, which (especially in the US) is often solely and exclusively designed for automobiles, and imagine it without cars. It’d be a legitimate nightmare.

What we need is gradual but rather aggressive pressure against cars that allow cities to adapt their services and layout. Congestion taxes and getting rid of parking are really great first steps.

In the US cars are also a big symbolic thing due to children being pretty much totally incapable of living independent lives until they’re 16 and get a car (or their friends do), also due to aforementioned built environment.

So? Does it matter much for some reason? That doesn’t seem like a compatibility issue.

Sorry is "real estate agents need their cut" an argument against moving, or an argument for reducing the power of real estate agents, who are pretty much useless for 99% of residential transactions anyway?

Causing landlords and speculators to actually put units to market does increase supply, without the added complexity (and cost and time lag) of having to build it first.

Land Value Tax achieves more with less compliance overhead and no loopholes (hiding land is hard).

Absolutely. In Churchill’s prose: https://www.landvaluetax.org/history/winston-churchill-said-...

Landlordism is an absolute scourge.

They do sell sparkling products, including IMO the best-tasting flavored sparkling waters on the market.

Agreed flat water out of a can is… not my favorite.

Okay so your theory is that managers know who would be good to promote, but they literally pretend not to and simply choose someone they’d like to hang out with instead?

That seems excessively cynical (and self-excusing). The reality is it’s incredibly hard to measure engineering work even in the best case scenario, never mind something as abstract as software and in as opaque an environment as a modern remote/hybrid workplace.

Seems more likely they’re relying on bad heuristics because it’s hard to do much else?

That’s a nice maxim and all but in actual reality, the vast majority of people on the vast majority of topics have to use heuristics to build (and disconfirm) their beliefs. The people who are actually close enough to a topic to even be able to judge an idea “on the merits” are few and far between. If you want people to have an accurate model of reality, you have to care about maintaining heuristics that at least somewhat track with the consensus (or the lack thereof) of the underlying group of people who actually have a chance of knowing things from first principles and direct experience.

Deliberately sampling an “unbiased” subset of an actually biased underlying population is not just allowing the heuristic to stray from reality, it’s deliberately destroying that heuristic and deliberately misleading people. In imaginary “everyone can/should judge on own merits”-land, that’s perfectly fine. In reality, where almost no one can actually judge almost anything of substance on its merits, you are actively sabotaging truth-seeking.

The way that fringe scientist gets to declare s/he is right is by convincing their peers of it, not by convincing the public in a format that violates the heuristics the public has to rely on. Of course everyone should always be open to this possibility, most of all their peers (and to your point they often aren’t!)

Selecting from a biased population into an “unbiased” sample is itself also political. Like having one fringe scientist on stage with one mainstream scientist, giving the illusion that their ideas have equal acceptance among their peers.

Exactly, which is why the whole “fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders” is a totally meaningless/unenforceable/zero-information idea. Shareholders have many many different interests on different time horizons so business operators naturally and necessarily have broad discretion in how they satisfy their fiduciary duties.

The ideology has existed since shareholders have. Dodge v Ford Motor is the nucleation point for it going mainstream. But it took a generation of lawyers and business leaders getting trained as if a Michigan court decision is gospel for that view to become dogmatic (Milton Friedman’s essay being the nail in the proverbial coffin decades later). And it has never reached actual legal obligation to maximize profits, which is the extreme view you hear a lot of today.

Well I hope they kill fewer people en route to their own self-destruction than Boeing has (and likely will).

People digging into Boeing's specific history are likely doing themselves a huge disservice. It's too easy to say, "Oh well I won't acquire a company like McDonnell Douglas!" But that's not the issue. The issue is a culture (nationally/globally) of financialization. You're vulnerable to it even if you don't acquire MDA, or if you don't acquire anyone at all.

The fundamental issue is simple: Mistaking side-effects of the system for the goals of the system. The goal of a company shouldn't be to make number-on-spreadsheet go up. The goal is to produce excess value, capture some amount of it, and pass the rest onto your customers. The amount that you capture will affect the spreadsheet, but the real goal of the organization must be to produce that excess value and pass on a meaningful portion of it to your customers!

The whole meme that companies exist to maximize shareholder value is just that: a meme, and a recent one at that. Boeing is the natural outcome of believing it like a zealot.

The AirPods are really the first mass-market augmented reality device. It's so well done that no one even thinks about them that way. That's how it'll need to be with visual augmentation, but there's no reason I've seen that we won't get there eventually. I'm bullish on Apple being the first major player here in part because they already are, by a huge, huge margin, the biggest player in augmented reality.

Apple is IMO the only company that seems capable of simultaneously tackling the form factor, outside-viewer perception factor (AirPods are fully socialized, as you mention), inside-viewer perception factor (AirPods on transparency really do feel 99.9% fully "transparent")

And it’s a problem for democratic societies in nearly all cases, so that’s why it’s being called out here.

Race: Famously irrelevant to the whole tribal lands/indigenous rights topic

Table elements are pretty much completely absent from modern web dev though?

Now define “something suspect”

Same boat! Lost 60lb over 2 years or so, was definitely challenging, but have been able to keep it off after reverting to a more standard diet.

Your “partly because” is way too dismissive. Low carb diets work because they radically change your perception of satiation.

This article is aimed towards people building muscle which is very obviously very hard to do with a low carb diet, and is not actually descriptive of most people doing low carb diets (who are generally on such a diet to lose weight).