jdpedrie

Speaking as a partisan of Detroit, who has never heard an ICP song, I must intervene to mention that Faygo is never “soda”. It’s “pop”, thank you very much.

The hyphenation is probably the result of an editor determined to adhere precisely to The Atlantic's style guide.

> But was it worth $12k for less than 40 hours of total work? I don't think so.

First, I agree that the fees charged are exorbitant. However, for many smaller realtors, they may not have much inventory at any given time. So, just like a freelance programmer, the buyer is paying for their work and for their downtime between jobs.

> If you invest $50.000 in a car you may have an incentive to not use a low quality battery pack for example.

And if you have a phone which is worth the investment, you'll likely pay more for the better replacement part. Maybe take it to the Apple store rather than the shady kiosk on the corner.

Likewise, there are a range of quality/price options for replacement auto parts. If I'm working on a car that cost me $1800 and is on its last legs, the aftermarket part for half the price of OEM is fine, even if it's only expected to last half as long.

People are perfectly capable of making those judgements calls and weighing the tradeoffs, as proven by the market for both phone parts and auto parts.

The battery itself /may/ be something of an exception. I'd imagine as they become more commoditized that concern will become less applicable.

I don’t have a lot to say, other than I love this book. It’s difficult to articulate why. But I make a point to read it every couple of years, and I recommend it often to others. It’s funny and sad and contains some beautiful reflections on faith and doubt and history and human nature.

There are many local (and at least one national) papers using this exact same site. Both the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press (my local papers) use it, along with USA Today. It's maddening.

PHP's package manager makes it really easy to pull in components a la carte. Similar to OP, I rarely use a large framework like Symfony or Laravel. I have a base application I wrote which I like, and I layer components I trust and whose API fits my preferences as I require them.

Additionally, the PSR project has standardized a lot of APIs (HTTP request/response, logging, cache to name a few), which means if a package conforms to PSR, you get interop out of the box and can quickly swap implementations if needed.

Rapid economic growth and massive technological advancement is also a relatively new thing. Wonder if that's coincidental?

"Deep Fakes" in general seem to be already covered by existing libel laws, though that has some problems. Libel is generally a civil matter, and is extremely difficult to prosecute.

There is precedent, even in the US, for criminal libel laws[0]. Perhaps following that path (combined with continued work on detection and defeat of the technology) would be preferable. Since libel and defamation are well-defined and have a long history of jurisprudence, many of the constitutional and legal issues which would have to be answered in opening a new avenue of speech restriction could be contained within the existing contexts.

I'd even think leaving it in the civil arena would make sense until it became a problem worthy of criminalization. Legislating a matter before it arises is almost never a good idea, from either a prudential or principled standpoint.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

This seems like a bit of CYA on the part of the drafters for the inevitable court challenge. "We did consider the constitutional issues, we promise!"

Without specifics, that line is meaningless.

edit: This speaks to a larger problem with how our representatives work these days. They're supposed to respect the limits placed on their power and they're supposed to guard the powers they are given jealously. Instead, they trip over each other to run away from their lawful authority, and when they finally decide to "do something", limits are dismissed with a wave of the hand.

It doesn't take much more than a google search to find substantiation for the claim.

https://www.politifact.com/global-news/statements/2016/mar/2...

Globalization in the manner it has happened has lately struck me as akin to drinking from a firehose. While it's led to an increased standard of living (in the form of wages in the third world and lowered prices in the first), the speed at which it happened caused displacement far faster than the cultures could adapt.

If your industry disappears over 30 years, it's easy enough to stop hiring new people and draw down as the old retire. If it dies in five years, the dislocation is immense and it becomes nearly impossible to cope. The same problem of rapid change plays itself out in the developing world in different forms; rapid urbanization, pollution, dislocation from traditional ways of life.

If, as the article suggests, globalization has indeed slowed, perhaps the breathing space that slowdown provides will in the long run be a good thing. Deal with the problems we've created before doubling down on the instigating issue.

As a layman (though I worked in the mortgage industry, it was as a software developer fairly distant from underwriting), I've long considered it an unfortunate development that manual underwriting had fallen by the wayside. Now, as a self-employed developer, I've seen how difficult it is to obtain a refinance mortgage without a W2.

That said, the example used in the article seems frightening. A $600,000 mortgage on a part time student income where the borrower is forced to rent rooms to make the payments? However unfortunate the normal underwriting standards are for some portion of the population, it seems that lenders continue to take whatever rope they are given and insist on hanging themselves with it.

"Monopoly" literally means there is only one player in the market, or that one player has a hugely dominant position.

If the suggested "Cartel" doesn't work, there's also "Oligopoly"[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly

There is no contradiction in wanting a small federal government and being in favor of local governments making rules to better the daily life of citizens, or accomplish any other goal. It’s well in line with the concept of subsidiarity, a hallmark of most strands of conservatism.

Brave is built on Chromium[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

I think this is an insightful point. Lawyers are largely trained in reading and applying precedent. That said, one would think a responsible company would have received best and worst case guidance from a team of attorneys who could have easily expected this as a possible and perhaps probable outcome.

In other words, "this hasn't been tested in court" doesn't excuse them from apparently not bothering to get an opinion from the regulators who have the potential to greatly embarrass them after a high-profile product launch.

Rome at the end of the Republic may have technically been republican (if oligarchic republicanism counts), but it was neither democratic nor liberal. Liberalism didn’t exist in name or form for another 1800 years.

One must be extremely careful and judicious drawing straight line comparisons from Ancient Rome to today. And as usual, the correct answer when confronted by a discussion along these lines, the correct answer is “it’s more complicated”.

Site's down for me. Archive link: http://archive.is/w4oWL

I just finished reading American Caesar[0], a great biography of Douglas MacArthur. I highly recommend it as the story of a fascinating and brilliant man who is too little remembered today. I especially enjoyed and respected MacArthur's place in the rebuilding of Japan; his almost absolute power gave him space to override the more vengeful elements within the United States to implement an extremely conciliatory post-war settlement. I don't think it's unfair to call him the founder of the modern Japanese nation, both in terms of governance and political economy. Though not covered in the book, the distinctions between MacArthur's Japan and Weimar Germany are especially stark, and it is sobering to consider what may have happened had the Japanese fallen into the malaise which in Germany gave rise to the Stabbed In The Back myth[1].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/American-Caesar-Douglas-MacArthur-188...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth

I live outside of Detroit. All your points and criticisms are valid. When I visit the coasts, I often tell people who ask that it was nice to spend some time in a "real" city. The true "big city" core of Detroit is quite small, and whenever I'm in Chicago or even Cleveland I'm reminded of that fact.

That said, the experience in the downtown/midtown core of Detroit has improved drastically since the bankruptcy. It feels incredibly vibrant. When I started working there in 2012, the city felt completely empty after about 5:30. Today, downtown is buzzing seemingly all night.

Even if you live within walking distance of your office, though, you still need a car to get groceries though, and as much as it sucks, I don't see how that changes anytime soon (or within my lifetime).

> denounces escalation

> escalates further.

Oh man, JotForm is O.G. SAAS for me. I used to use it all the time back around 2011. Thanks for making my work back then so much less tedious!

> At the same time, if you look at Sears's peers, most of them are still alive and kicking, if not thriving. E.g. Target, Wal-Mart, Macy's, Kohl's, JC Penney, Best Buy etc.

That seems like confirmation bias to me. I could write a much longer list of national retail chains gone out of business over the last decade and a half. Circuit City, Mervyn's, A&P, Borders, CompUSA, Toys R Us, Marshall Fields, the list goes on.

That's a bad comparison. Generally, shrinking the size of a packaged good is a way to compensate for inflation without sticker shock, a huge problem in a very price-sensitive market like groceries. The chief the government measures inflation, in fact, is the Consumer Price Index, which measures the cost of a "basket" of consumer goods. [0]

The cost of flying, on the other hand, has fallen dramatically since deregulation. [1]

[0] https://www.bls.gov/CPI/ [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-air...

I think tech can be effective when its used to make on the ground activism better. It's a truism in political science that face to face politicking and door knocking wins elections. If you can improve the effectiveness of that sort of activism through technology, I don't see why it wouldn't be useful. Of course, that introduces risks as well; it would be simple to end up only talking to people who were probably going to swing towards you anyways, and ending up in yet another echo chamber.

I didn't mean in my original comment that technology is entirely useless. More that it's a distant second to the things that have always worked in politics, and that "our tech is worse than theirs" is the refuge of a losing party looking to cast blame for their losses.

In the wake of Obama's 2008 and 2012 elections, there was a ton of angst in Republican circles as they woke up to the seemingly insurmountable gap between the innovation of the Obama campaign and the pre-internet tactics of the GOP. Added to the early rumblings against the perceived unfriendliness of the large social networks, this resulted in a huge scattershot investment in a lot of poorly conceived and equally poorly executed projects run by PACs and by the party organization. Romney's election-day tech disasters come to mind as an obvious example. Some sort of oral history from the people involved at the time would be really fascinating.

Anyways, the shoe seems to be on the other foot today, as the Democrats appear to have convinced themselves that they're behind the eight ball on tech matters (a position I find silly, considering the massive advantage they have in potential recruits and sympathetic developers).

Despite all the changes wrought by technology, politics is still played more or less as it has always been. Charismatic politicians (Obama, Trump) carry their party, hiding its weaknesses and exposing the weaknesses of their opponents. "Social networking" is an extremely poor avenue for political organizing (as distinguished perhaps from political rabble-rousing). Politics is still a game of people and personality, and investments in internet technology can only perhaps have an impact at the margins.

"To the benefit of the people" and "does violence to the rule of law" are not mutually exclusive, at least in the short term.

Neither are enough. Until I can drive across the continent as conveniently as I could in the ICE car I have today, I'll be extremely reluctant to purchase an electric vehicle.

That seems like a strange way to look at it. If we grant that part of the appeal of a Rolex is that it is out of reach of most people, $1700, adjusted for inflation, was out of reach 50 years ago. Today, a luxury good of that price is well within reach for a middle-to-upper-middle class person who cares to save for a little while. If Rolex raised their price that much to keep it too expensive for the middle class, that seems to imply a greatly increased standard of living for everyone.