maxsilver

It's tricky too, because a lot of "low density suburban wastelands" was already significantly phased out over a decade ago, in a lot of the US anyway.

People hear "suburbs" and imagine a single-family home on 1 to 2+ acre lots -- something that looks like this -> https://st2.depositphotos.com/1658611/5485/i/950/depositphot... . And while that definitely still happens, it's really limited to the exurbs in the US these days, it's not representative of newer suburbs anymore.

The primary style of suburban development built since say 2010 in the US, has really been more like 5 single-family homes on 1 acre, or 10 townhouses on 1 acre, or equivalent. Something that looks like this -> https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/modern-suburbs-17207940.jpg or this -> https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/0... -- which is anywhere from 5x to 20x higher density per acre.

I don't think people want to fudge the different interaction styles together. I think they just want to have both experiences out of the same hardware.

I carry an M1 MacBook Air, and a iPad Air 5th-gen. They both have identical fanless M1 Apple ARM silicon, both have identical ram (8GB) and identical storage (256gb), it's practically the same device. I even also carry the iPad Magic Keyboard. I have to carry two sets of everything, just because Apple artificially prevents any of their own software from working on any of their own hardware.

It makes perfect sense to me that, when in tablet/touchscreen interaction, I get a traditional iPad experience.

It makes zero sense, that when I attach the $300 traditional keyboard/trackpad to that iPad Air, I get thrown into a weird iPad-kinda-pretending-to-be-a-laptop-but-failing mode, where you "kinda" have a mouse cursor, and "kinda" have windows (but only 2 or 3!) and you can "kinda" resize them, and you can "kinda" have an external display (but despite being huge, you still can't have more than 3 windows!).

macOS already works great, "iPad Stage Manager" feels like a bunch of people trying desperately to justify breaking macOS conventions and UI/UX, mostly for no good reason.

There's no reason I couldn't be put into normal macOS, and even have my existing iPad apps still running (the software portion of this already works on macOS today, iPad apps run on macOS right now! You just cant experience this on any of the devices that have touchscreens -- you can't do this on the devices that would most benefit from it.)

And assuming an income correlation is the same as affordability, is also being willfully ignorant…

That's a huge logical fallacy.

It's like telling Americans, "Bill Gates has less operations than poor people, and countries with the best healthcare in the world, their people also have less operations, so no, medical operations in America are not too expensive". You've wildly mixed up cause and effect, and are comparing non-like things.

The people in America who want to have children are routinely priced out of having children, "kids are too expensive" is absolutely true. The existence of rich people in America who do not want children despite their wealth, in no way disproves this.

> Adding new housing units at any price point lowers housing costs in the area;

This isn't really true in housing. Housing is not a market commodity, it's not priced primarily via supply or demand. Housing is priced based on comparables, quite literally, what is the most expensive thing that sold recently, and how close do we compare to that.

In this way, building a fancy new condo building will literally raise prices, even if the number of people remain constant, and even if it "increases the number of the units in the area", because now pricing comparables will get to take the new condo's higher pricing into effect, and things like comparables and federal interest rates have a much higher effect on sales price than traditional supply or demand.

To be clear, this is NOT an anti-build argument, we need more housing, the only way to get more is to build it. We just need to be mindful of the real-world consequences of it, new luxury condo construction creates a form of financial "pollution" into that area, and all nearby housing stock will absorb that pollution in higher prices.

This is something anyone who cares about affordable housing needs to understand, and plan for.

It can (FirstNet's lower 700mhz spectrum), but AT&T uses the same backbone and infrastructure and towers for large chunks of their and FirstNet's network.

(charitably) - FirstNet is mostly now just a type of billing plan and priority level, on AT&T's network.

> I'm not sure why you can park a car on the street for hours for free, but not, say, a picnictable with a BBQ, a folding tablesaw, a telescope, a pop-up bookstore, a film projector, and so on.

I mean, the traditional answer is pretty clear. Roads are public transportation infrastructure. Parking cars (and bikes and scooters) is allowed, because cars move the public around. All these other things are not transportation for the public. People think of parking spots along the streets as "landed property", but they're not, they're more like the overhead bins in a bus or plane.

But also, from a practical sense, no one cares about public transportation anymore, so you actually can now park random crap in the street, anytime you'd like?

At least in Michigan, restaurants routinely do the "park a picnic table with a BBQ on the side of the road" thing all the time (see https://www.giffelswebster.com/dining-platforms-and-parklets...) -- many of which still persist since COVID assistance ended.

And residential/commercial construction workers routinely do get to block off street parking for a tablesaw or any other construction usage at job sites all the time.

> All my american friends balk at this. But as a swede, I dont think it is completely impossible.

(as an American, balking at this): The American government is too irresponsible and corrupt to ever handle something like this -- it would get abused so quickly, and thus, no regular person would trust it.

Having a single dating app/profile as a free public service is a good idea in theory, but the pre-requisite of having a "functioning, selfless, responsible government, invested only in the public good" is just not a thing we're gonna get here.

> Turns out people don't want a "virtual world", they want a fun game.

Arguably, there are people who want a "virtual world" -- and they currently just play Roblox to get it. Enough of them like it, that every major retailer stocks "Robux" gift cards

To be fair, they're only whining about PWAs, because Apple artificially locked down all native apps. Apple forced the developer shift, their own preferences didn't necessarily change.

If you could install + sell iPhone apps freely, like you can with OSX / macOS apps, 99% of developer complaints about PWAs would vanish.

Come back and say this, after you've gotten a CDL Class A

> The law prioritises people who sign up for something they don't want (e.g. as a contractor, but wants to be perm), over people who sign up for something they do want (i.e. as a contractor, who wants to be a contractor).

I don't think that's a fair statement of the situation. The law is attempting to punish companies who intentionally mislabel the tax status of their employees. (for example, Uber claiming their drivers are "self-employed", when they're effectively just doing modern Piecework).

Not arguing that the law is perfect, but the goal here is noble, and the idea is sound. Without new laws like this, nothing stops all employers from lying to the IRS about all employees and just making every employee anywhere a "self-employed contractor".

> How do you know where you stand, as an individual or a business, if this stuff can just be changed?

You read the rules? Nothing major has been changed, they're just closing previously exploited loopholes. This only really applies to you if you are an employee at a company that's trying to evade paying their taxes by labeling you a contractor.

It doesn't prevent contractors from contracting (unless they're in some kind of weird edge case).

Maybe a decade of doing ruby has rotted my brain, but I love `unless`, and use it often.

Yes, every `unless` could be rewritten with an `if` instead, certainly. But I like the implication of weight these keywords carry in English language. `unless` implies it's a minor condition, that the majority of runs should fall on the opposite side of the conditional, where as `if` does not -- both weights of the condition feel potentially equivilant-ish.

(this is probably unfairly cynical but), reading heavily between the lines, this reads to me like DHH noticed lots of Rails folks and rubyists already like and use "standardrb" for this https://github.com/standardrb/standard -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVilOzkLdlI -- but for some (unspecified?) reason(s), wasn't willing to bless the popular community-created universal standard as default convention, so instead wrote up his own, and is declaring his the default convention for Rails.

It's doubly weird, because "cinephiles collecting 4KUHD discs" would seem like a thing Best Buy wants to capitalize on, it's a high margin hobbiest niche much like custom car audio, and it's slowly growing as conventional streaming services are starting to fall apart (HBO Max and Paramount+ especially)

And every Best Buy I've been in, is practically empty anyway. They aren't hurting for floor space, they clearly don't have any higher-margin / higher-value / higher-selling thing they can fill that space with instead.

> Can it really be easier for end users to use an app that requires an extra installation step?

It's not, but by making it an App, it forces a user to remember to install it (good mindshare), it takes up space on the homepage (good, free advertising), it gets to track your device id and track you (or, partially track you on iOS), it gets to spam your notification bar with more free advertisements, it gets to hook into your Google Pay / Apple Pay cards automatically, and it forever gets to poll your exact GPS position, while also having easier access to various bluetooth stack stuff (tracking beacons, onboarding devices, etc)

Yes, ~80% of that can be done on the web too, but the app gives you effectively permanent-cookies and permanent-permissions, and people have more practice doing it there.

I don't like it at all, but I get why lots of companies write a webapp, and then shove it into a native app wrapper (whether via React Native, Cordova, Turbo Native, or equivilant). The benefits of the app wrapper and app store, outweigh the drawbacks, for many businesses.

And that part is sort of waining too. Games are starting to 'tap out', so to speak, on the massively-growing CPU/GPU desires. Helped along by having really popular devices to target that are CPU/GPU/memory constrained (compared to a gaming PC or PS5 or such), and a desire by business to have highly-profitable massively-online or Games-as-a-Service titles as widely-available as possible.

See how many of the most popular highest-grossing games, like say Overwatch or Warframe or No Man's Sky or Fortnite or Roblox or Minecraft or Apex Legends or such, all end up wanting to target at least one traditionally-lower-end device (a Steam Deck / Nintendo Switch / iPhone+iPad / Android / etc).

> Regulation won't fix a broken culture.

That's fine. Regulation's "job" isn't to "fix a broken culture", it exists to prevent repeat mistakes -- especially risky/damaging ones. The saying goes, "safety regulations are written in blood" -- that most of the regulations we have exist to prevent some kind of tragedy that has already happened at least once.

> Our regulatory state drives up the cost of housing in numerous ways ("look and feel", etc).

Most of those are not regulations, they're just rules. (i.e., 'neighborhood character / look and feel').

> Our regulatory state drives up the cost of housing (arc-fault breakers)

That's not a 'cost drive-up', that's basic safety. (AFCI breakers literally prevent home electrical fires, Home Depot sells these at full retail markup for like ~$50/each. (120v,15a). You might use, what 12 of these on the average home? $600 total? On a $300k new build, AFCI costs you 0.2% of your total budget. These are not why housing is expensive).

Completly agree. NHTSA should (imho) have full regulatory control over the approval of any and all self-driving car tech on the road. (Rather than just 'Voluntary Guidance' suggestions and 'safety-related defects', which encourages manufacturers to ship a known-defective product, and hope NHTSA can't catch it in a recall)

> They chose to buy it.

No, absolutely not, never ever. This just highly incentivizes Manufacturers to dump trash garbage into the market (since you've just forced consumers to bear all liability for Manufacturer failures).

You do this once, and you might as well kiss all of society away. Imagine a toy that kills children, and you tell parents, "well, you pressed the 'On' button, so it's your fault". Imagine a furnace that burns down your house, and you tell homeowners, "well, you pressed the 'heat' button, what did you expect?". No one would be willing to buy anything at all, because every manufacturer would be in a race to see the shittiest thing they could trick people into buying. Every product on every shelf would be snake oil.

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Manufacturers should always be fully liable for any and all problems, that can not be directly attributed to extreme gross negligence on the consumers part.

"wel, consumers are the ones pressing the "run the self-driving car" button" -- absolutely not. Manufacturers sold car with a "self-driving" button, consumers hold zero fault for pressing the button Manufacturers promised would work, unless there's some kind of extreme gross negligence involved. (i.e., pressing the button, while the car is already dangling off a cliff-side, or pressing the button after gouging out every camera and sensor on the car, or whatever).

"But then Manufacturers couldn't sell a self-driving car" -- cool, then the car isn't ready to be sold anyway. If a car company isn't ready to take on the liability for their self-driving product, then it isn't freaking ready for the road -- no exceptions.

> I honestly don't understand the argument. I'm not saying there isn't one - but it's not as though any other tech company is clamoring to allow unauthorized third party access to their services.

I think the argument is the bundling of iMessage in with SMS. Yes, there's lots of third-party chat services too, and yes, no other tech company is clamoring to allow unauthorized third party access either.

But iMessage gets to intercept and pretend to be SMS (or more accurately, iMessage exists to block the RCS your phone line always already had) and it's pre-installed, uninstallable, and with special access exclusive to apple, which is where I think the argument could land.

A case could be argued of iMessage + iPhone is really similar to the late 90s era Microsoft Windows + Internet Explorer, in that they both break Sherman Antitrust Act: Section 2, in very similar ways, for very similar reasons.

(to be clear, I don't think they'd win, but I could see a strong argument there)

> Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities.

I don't know why you say this. As a single parent, who is close to another single parent, and with 5 total children in the mix, we absolutely do stare at the Google Calendar spreadsheet view, trying to think of how to deal with dance and soccer.

> Why do they need to go to different schools?

Different kids are different ages, or have different needs. Pre-K is a different building from K-5, which is a different building from 6-8, which is a difrerent building from 9-12, which is a different building from the Montessori Learning center, which is a different building from the Special Education center, which is a different building from the Intermediate School District building.

It's absolutely possible to have 5 kids, each of them only 1 year or so apart, all of them in the "same district, same zone, same address", and still end up with kids spread across 2 to 4 different schools. This is especially true if any of your children are outside of perfectly average, in literally any way.

> Nobody’s buying property where they think the price will fall.

Regular people do this all the time. Every renter on the planet is "buying property" that will have $0 resale value to them when they leave, for example.

If every house depreciated to exactly $0 upon move out (or even just depreciated at a controlled normal rate, similar to Japan's housing), most regular people would still buy houses. You still have to live somewhere, and plenty of people would prefer to own rather than rent -- even at a zero dollar resale value.

It's both. School systems are often heavily funded (but not always and not consistently, it varies by literal district). School employees are often drastically underpaid (but not always, and not consistently, it varies by district).

My local school district (generic midwest USA), there's a 17:1 teacher ratio, each student represents $13,011/yr in funding (so a single classroom gets $221,187 in government funding each year). Of that, the teacher in that room collects a salary of $40k to $60k W2 salary each year (plus benefits). Or, a teacher's salary is basically ~20% to 25% of the budget for that classroom, and the rest goes elsewhere.

And yeah, our teachers get literally nothing for their rooms, so they have to beg parents to donate crayons and tissue paper and pencils and basically anything else in their classroom, every year. (generally, each parent is expected to pitch in about $100 per student per year, in donate-ables to cover the stuff the district won't provide for teachers)

> they (politicians) limit the number of new builds,

This theory doesn't work very well, because there are lots of places where new construction is entirely uncapped (politicians are desperate for the new property tax growth), and prices still don't fall there. Prices are lower there than SF/NYC comparables, sure, but still up 300% over the past decade, and still rising every year.

I know everyone takes Econ 101, and then nothing else, but there's a lot more to pricing than just "supply v demand". We have lots of markets with high prices despite adequate supply, or even despite major oversupplies.

> Imagine if it was 'flooded': the diamond market would collapse.

The diamond market was already flooded decades ago (we can literally manufacture diamonds without mining now) and the market still did not collapse.

And of course, the supply price of diamond stones has almost nothing to do with the cost of a diamond ring, which is why Zales can still charge thousands of dollars for a loose diamond stone, that can be infinitely manufactured in lab for less than 1/4th of that price

Prices are almost never supply vs demand. And in a capitalist economy, prices are almost never competitive.

I'd argue this is a good thing. In Android UX guidelines, the "back" button's "promise" is not that you go back to a specific item, it's that you unwind your most recent action (notably, not unwind state, it's not an "undo" button, just that it unwinds the most recent action).

Apps get to decide what metaphor makes sense for an "action" (maybe it's a page, a screen, a dialog, etc). But users can be confident that the "back" button always takes them "backwards", even if the metaphor various apps use may differ.

Users can feel reasonably safe that the "back" button will take them "back" one 'step' or one 'action' worth, even if the app is using panels instead of pages, or modal dialogs instead of inline alerts

> I’m surprised there isn’t a price cut Apple TV “stick”. (a $99 price point) would juuuuust crossover into the “good enough” zone for me,

Is that $30 really make-or-break for you?

Apple TV's entry model is already only $129.00 USD, and the hardware is really really nice. Easily the fastest and most fluid interface of any "TV Stick" I've used (nicer than any Chromecast / Roku / Fire TV stick, nicer than any built-in smart stuff from LG/Samsung/Vizio), while also having the least amount of advertisements of anything you can buy.

I don't love Apple's high premium pricing on a lot of their products. But the Apple TV doesn't really have that, it's competitively priced with alternatives (a base Apple TV is only like $30 more than the equivalent Fire TV Cube, and only $5 more than the nVidia Shield TV)

> At some point you gotta draw some lines, and ownership (combined with reasonable zoning rules) is a pretty good line.

Well, that's what we used to have, to make it all work. You used to trust that if you bought in a neighborhood zoned "R-1", it would mostly stay "R-1" for at least a little while. (same for "PUD-3", and so on)

But "urbanists" started de-regulating all the reasonable zoning rules that made that system work, so now no one can trust that the rules would be enforced anymore, which is how you get random citizens reflexively fighting things (and the prevalence of HOAs, as an extra block against it, and so on)

> and then the golf course sells out to a developer who wants to build higher-density housing, and then the people who live in houses nearby complain that they are somehow injured by other property property owners building on their own land

They are though. They objectively are impacted. Your new high-rise often does any/all of the following:

- change the elevation or the permeability of the ground (in the midwest, this means often dumping higher water levels into nearby properties, causing basements to flood that didn't before). In my home state, often 25 to 40% of a home's finished livable SQFT is in those basements)

- dumps lots of new vehicles and new traffic into the neighborhood (that the high-density housing isn't going to build parking for, in their obvious-lie greenwashing attempt to be 'eco-friendly')

- adds new retail on the ground floor, with more noise and more traffic (so that the business becomes viable)

- increase the costs of all insurance (automobile insurance, homeowners insurance, flood insurance, etc)

And of course, the big one:

- Dramatically increases the value of the property, immediately driving cost of living up for existing residents, in addition to increasing the housing costs for all residents (yes, even for pre-existing owner-occupants).

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You can argue that existing residents should just eat all of that, as like, "the cost of living in a society" or somesuch. Because your right, regular people didn't buy up that land too, to prevent the development ahead-of-time. And I get, new housing has to go somewhere, no one is against all new housing.

But you can't pretend these effects are "entirely intangible". New development, especially anything that "increases density" has lots of direct short-term real-world observable impacts, and very real costs, passed directly onto each other nearby resident. They aren't crazy to complain about all that, even if they aren't articulate enough to accurately name each effect individually, and instead label the whole thing "the character of the neighborhood" or similar.

> The opinion piece doesn't claim any of these items are issues for students being absent.

I'm aware. The opinion piece is missing a lot of the major issues schools and kids are facing right now, major issues that play into why students aren't showing up for school.

Hence, my comment above.