negativez

I'm only casually into LOTR, but I immediately recognized her name from my beloved copy of the Dragonlance Atlas. Quite fun to read how she basically invented the field of professional fantasy cartography.

> When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?

That's the... subtitle? Thesis statement? It's the first line after the title at any rate. I stopped reading as soon as the first paragraphs felt the need to define glamour. Anyone with a modicum of life experience should already intuit one obvious answer: glamour can only exist in brief moments in reality. "The Future" necessarily only exists in fiction, and fictional works can string together glamourous moments end-to-end indefinitely.

But in real life, you can't keep the glamour turned on. People need to defecate, that toilet eventually needs be cleaned, and the sewage treatment plant needs to keep working. People have to start as infants that scream and adults that have to hold them and hear it, then toddlers that make messes everywhere, etc. Maybe dinners could all be glamourous, if you want it bad enough, but are you going to get up, do your makeup and put on your most stylish breakfast clothes everyday? Can you get away with the same outfit at lunch and still be glamorous?

"Life" cannot be glamorous unless you are fabulously wealthy AND make very specific life choices.

Plus, only a small fraction of Animal Crossing players, even lifelong series fans, will still be playing the game daily even one year later. In the real world, we need jobs done ~forever, regardless of how novel and fun they are.

Game design is fundamentally about feeding a steady flow of novelty to players. Too little and the game gets boring immediately, too much and the development team can't produce new content fast enough, or the game is too short. I can imagine someone arguing that we could rotate people through jobs as their interest fades, but we should be skeptical that we can maintain our standard of living when most jobs are being done by people whose professional experience includes novelty at the rate even a dull game offers.

That's true - but taxes *always* disincentivize the thing being taxed. If investment in a company is less profitable under taxation than it otherwise would be, there will be less investment in that company, no exceptions. Now the size of that effect is quite likely to be negligible for the companies in question here. But it's at least theoretically possible that taxing corporate profits could lead to a change in the marketplace, including market dropout, that might actually lead to consumers paying higher prices to the remaining members of a market with reduced competition.

Further, if all companies in an already low-competition marketplace are equally affected by the tax, then it's quite possible for all of them to ~simultaneously raise prices to offset the tax, with or without explicitly illegal coordination, knowing that the others will follow suit.

I don't think one has to takes sides on the manager vs Apple conflict to ask a much more important question:

"Why is this newsworthy to The Verge and Hacker News?"

At any given moment, several thousand people around the world are likely going through identical complaints with their employers, and have been for multiple decades. What makes this more relevant than any random similar example from a boring business outside Silicon Valley, where a manager might have a similar number of employees and say a similar thing to one of them? Is there a reasonable belief that this is being encouraged by Tim Cook himself? No? Then why is it "Apple does $Thing"?

Corporate HR and the legal system will work this out and get it right for a reasonable % of cases without involving the whole world in each one.

I know this is about SF but Seattle seems to have essentially the same issues with their liberal response to homelessness. This local news piece was both heartbreaking and infuriating to watch. The interview with an proud, unrepentant criminal-who-is-homeless at 17:31 is something I won't ever forget.

"Seattle Is Dying" (KOMO 4 News) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw

Anyone who's parked a car often in dense areas knows the distance between legal and illegal parking is as small as the width of the bumper you stuck into the fire lane.

GPS just can't help with that.

Nope, only the scooter companies.

> and they are now upset with another business model that found /their gap is actually well-covered by existing towing law/

FTFY

They can't because their business is fundamentally built on the "leave anywhere" promise to their customers, who are the ones that actually leave the scooters illegally.

There's just no customer-acceptable way of disincentivizing their bad behavior and unlike parked cars, the scooters can be trivially moved from "legal" to "illegal" parking by a single person, which means that the customer may not even be at fault.

Replace "steal" with "call a registered tow company" and you can do exactly that - have someone remove an improperly-placed item from your property. Cities solved the problem of improperly-parked cars by creating the entire "towing" concept.

Police aren't a service for junk removal, they are for holding guns. You hire a moving company to remove junk and you get the police to come hold guns if the junk-leaver threatens to do you harm because of same.

On a related note:

I live in a city where trash collection rates are tied to how big of a trashcan you have. Along with recycling and compost collection programs, this is intended to deter people from overusing the landfill.

BUT, as a result of having a very small trashcan (to minimize my personal cost) I end up putting the can out every week if the can is even 1/4 full, as I occasionally have a heavy week due to an event or seasonal cleaning and I don't want to have garbage around the place for extra week(s). The desired effect on my waste habits, i.e. reducing the amount of landfill trash I ultimately produce, is negligible.

Therefore the garbage truck must stop at my house roughly twice as often as it would if there was no disincentive cost to having a large can. If enough other people in my city operate like I do, then we're running a significant amount of extra trucks and labor for virtually no benefit.

The primary impetus for the TSA was that people were afraid and it made them feel safer. The TSA actually accomplishes virtually nothing to prevent hijacking compared with the addition of armored cockpit doors and cockpit approach monitoring procedures.

The TSA does theoretically screen for bad actors and explosives, both of which are still relevant to rail travel, even if they're potentially less threatening there.

There are two obvious possible solutions to this from the city:

(1) tiny print on the parking signs that says you consent to be chalked, creating an explicit contract

(2) sell the rights to manage the city's parking to a private entity using private contractors to chalk with no prescription on methodology, rendering the "search" non-governmental in nature

Completely agree - HBO's app is as good as any of them.

I'll add that Netflix is the only video app I've used that mismanages the chromecast control ui. Basically every other time I cast Netflix the app loses track of the cast stream, reverts to the browsing ui or other failure mode and I can't pause the stream from my phone. No other app does this.

It's worth noting that $45bn of funding in the Bay Area probably only goes as far as $15bn would in Austin. Companies are indirectly paying their employees' housing costs after all.

I'd like to see numbers by per-company and per-employee funding, adjusted for purchasing power.

No one is talking about the phone as a physical device. The "phone" is the multibillion-dollar industry dedicated to indiscriminately making every human spend every possible second of their day 'engaging' with media out of a simple paperclip-maximizing business imperative.

This industry doesn't need to make users happy anymore than the tobacco industry makes its own customers happy - as long as the dopamine is within arm's reach they've got most people hooked so much more than tobacco ever could. But unlike cigarettes, no one can cut open a slice of your social media lungs and show you that your mind is covered in tar. And since no one dies directly of exposure, we're left trying to convey how life could have been better without the second-order effects of using the product. If your lungs don't function with all that tar, you avoid physical activity because 'you don't like exercise' (when you can't breathe anymore). And if your brain has been trained to seek fulfillment from your phone that's because 'you like using your phone more than doing other things' (when you can't think of anything else you like to do anymore).

Talk to an emigrant from a former soviet country to find out what permanently living in adverse social conditions does to a culture.

Sure, (most) people survive it.

It's easy to forget that BBSes were not at all populated by a representative sample of all people. The communities you experienced were the norm there but are a vanishingly small part of the modern internet. If you were raised now you might never have found your way to one before your psychological development was co-opted and sent in a very different direction by today's social media offerings.

You need about 8 figures generating passive income by most estimates.

You're assuming that there is a platonic ideal 'you' that the living person you are should be compared against. Ask yourself if you believe that statement. It doesn't make any sense to me.

If we can generously interpret the underlying desire as: "How can I live in the way that will make me happiest with myself?" then it's not complicated:

- Reflect on what you want for yourself as the person you are right now

- Consider how your recent actions do or do not support those goals

- Do this again next week, forever

It's more that they are collectively overpaid. As house prices rise the %-based commission causes new agents to flood the market, lowering the number of houses sold per agent. Agents then spend a lot of time acquiring clients in competition with each other.

If you think about what an efficient use of realtor labor would look like it would be ~2 houses a month or more with agents spending all their time on showings and contracts. In a market with $1M houses this would yield roughly 24M * 0.025 = $600K/yr and up.

Hence the market becomes flooded with people that would like to make $600K/yr on a educational investment period of 6 months or less (plus an apprenticeship-like paying job for a few years).

The industry is weird because the price of agent service is resistant to supply&demand forces for various reasons but the main reason is that it's impossible to know what the selling agent's contribution to the house price is, since you can't sell the same house twice under the same conditions.

In principle, a good agent can easily recoup their commission by adding a few percent to the house price, but in practice agents have a counter-incentive to this because the homeowner will never know what the added amount was and raising the house price a small amount adds less to the agent's bottom line than moving on to the next house more quickly. In most cases the agent is simply setting the price that will sell the house quickly for the local market. As a seller, you'd probably prefer to make an extra 20K on that 1M house by showing for a month instead of a week, but this makes the agent do 4x the showings to make 2% more commission.

Ironically, the buyers' mortgage lender will have an impartial professional estimate done after they've already agreed on a price with you. In a perfect world, the seller would get this estimate done up front and then the seller's agent would be be paid on a structure that incentivizes beating that estimate. But wait - if the mortgaged portion of the price is greater than the estimate then the buyer's lender will back out ($collateral < $loan). So if your market is mostly buyers doing 20% down then the price is soft-capped at no more than 125% of the estimate even for the best agents.

Quite the free market, eh?

Everyone wants to go everywhere - because people live Everywhere and have jobs Everywhere and their friends live Everywhere and there are stores Everywhere.

No one is entitled to anything - you added that word apropos of nothing in my post.

Houses don't get left abandoned in places with jobs. Knowledge workers are the only ones that can do remote work and thus are the ideal people to take those houses.

(This is all kind of beside the point that NY's transit problems are mostly due to localized cost absurdity, but...)

I don't disagree that it's hard to quantify the exact economic value, but you can't use a free market to solve coordination problems like public transit.

Coordination failure in stages:

1) A transit line that goes where you want, when you want for only a fraction of your trips means you need a second means of travel the rest of the time.

2) Having a second means of travel on hand (e.g. a car) means that you're less likely to use the transit line when it would work for you.

3) Lack of use of the transit line leads halted growth and reduced service.

4) Reduced service further drives users away

5) Evidence of failure causes a loss of investor/government support.

6) Transit line dies slowly to the extent that political inertia allows.

Or to put it another way, asking a transit line to pay to for itself is like saying "if human beings really wanted world peace they could have all just disarmed!", ignoring the fact that until everyone else is disarmed you'd be a fool to disarm yourself.

And if you succeed and build a critical-mass, sustainable system you've just swapped your market problem for a natural monopoly and have to use non-market techniques to deal with the monopoly service provider. (And now we're back to NY)

Since this a crazy hard problem that won't be solved in a comments section, how about playing with a completely silly idea instead:

> Outlaw rental housing - force everyone to own their residence

The people we're most interested in helping are those pushed out by rising rents. Rents can't rise if they don't exist. New migrants can't drive rent up if rent doesn't exist - to the contrary, they would be increasing property value for all residents.

I'm confident we can make this work, people.

I had one success simply not signing a non-compete I was handed on orientation day. I returned the packet of docs without that one and never heard a thing about it.

The word you're all looking for is 'exploitation'. Advertisers and their clients are trying to exploit children for their personal gain.

Please don't abuse words like 'abuse' and 'aggression' by exploiting them. But even if you did, that wouldn't be an aggression.

Here's a counter-idea for this game:

You wake in in 1993 with no memories except perfect insider knowledge of how Amazon was built down to the finest details. You have a full year of lead time to drink Jeff Bezos' milkshake.

Do you:

1) Spoil all the resources he used so that an unknown entity becomes the main online merchant instead, with the typical "morals" you'd expect a big company to have?

2) Build Amazon yourself plus "morals" accepting the real possibility that those changes to the formula cede your competitive advantage to a less "moral" unknown entity?

3) Build Amazon exactly as Bezos did, but with the strong belief that after 20+ years of extremely dedicated work on your part you'll still feel like the rest of the world deserves the payoff more than you do?

4) Find out you're mostly interested in video games and can't be bothered to change history. Plus, it's really convenient to get those games from Amazon!

These laws should also force any business using them to visibly post the wage they're paying the employees in question. If the argument is we need to pay charity to these employees then people should see it as such. Guilting customers should cause some shame for the business.