padobson

I'd rather dissolve D.C. and re-institute the original state boundaries of Maryland and Virginia than elevate a district to a state.

What you want is a slow projection of the will of the people onto the seats of power. That's why separation of powers is so brilliant.

Judges are completely insulated from the people, unelected with lifetime appointments.

The President - when chosen by a real electoral college rather than the funky thing the EC has actually evolved into - is more answerable to the will of the people, but still insulated enough to do the job without the daily whims of the mob plunging the ship of state into chaos. It takes time and slow calculated movements to steer the ship of state. We want an executive who can make those calculations without constant fear of political turmoil.

The Senate, as it was originally designed, is closer to the people but also insulated. Senators get six years to advocate for the interests of their state. Before the 17th amendment, they were chosen by the state legislatures to directly represent the interests of the state as a whole.

And the House is directly answerable to the people, with each member representing a portion of them - 700k or 70k or 7k. It's the most powerful part of the government and also the most distributed. It's the beating heart of democracy and the starting point for all discussion on what constitutes the rights of the citizens, as directed by the citizens. But it is just a starting point. How the will of the people filters its way into the senate and the executive and the judicial branch is the refining process of a representative republic, the best form of government yet implemented by humans.

Chief Justice Roberts' opinion[0] touches on the legislative evolution of the problem. The advent of districts was instituted by congress to encourage proportional representation - and it worked! Gerrymandering is actually an improvement over the older system that led to situations like GP is describing.

Gerrymandering is not the problem, it's a symptom. The problem is first-past-the-post elections. Ranked-choice voting or some other proportional system isn't a panacea either, but it's much better than judges re-drawing political districts instead of elected representatives.

[0]https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-422_9ol1.pdf

I think it was Alcibiades in the Peloponnesian War... ...415 B.C. He said, "If Syracuse falls, all Sicily falls, and then Italy." He knew that Syracuse was the jugular of the island. Old Alcibiades always went for the throat.

Good movie.

[0]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066206/?ref_=nv_sr_5?ref_=nv_s...

I can't speak for every state, but here in Michigan (The Great Lakes state!), companies like Nestle have to apply for a license that subjects them to regular inspections to make sure they're not over-burdening the local groundwater supply. They pump from wells on their own private land using their own facilities. Their license fee is pretty cheap, something like $300USD.

This seems like a common-sense regulation that doesn't overly burden either the company or the regulator.

I buy Ice Mountain spring water with a clear conscience.

I like Dennis Prager's commentary on the 10 commandments[1]

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

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RENPaY043o

That’s a key difference between hypothetical and practical security – your attacker will only do really wacky, creative stuff you hear about at conferences (or wherever) when there’s no easier way and the target of the attack justifies the extra effort.

Emphasis mine.

We don't feed our cats grain free, so they're probably getting enough taurine, but it might make sense to have them screened for heart disease.

The developing world would hugely benefit from a scalable technology that can efficiently service digital transactions. The piece demonstrates this with how quickly WeChat Pay and Alipay penetrated China.

I can't imagine the possibility for prosperity when 3 billion consumers enter the global economy in a matter of years.

Alternative currencies were always going to have to compete (or at least deal with) with powerful governments, and all the most powerful governments are most easily manipulated by appealing to a mass audience.

The Facebook brand isn't capable of doing that right now. There's far more incentive for politicians to talk about breaking Facebook up than to encourage Facebook to embed itself in the financial lives of their constituents.

If a decision is made to breakup Facebook, spinning off Libra will be right at the top of the list. I can't see how it survives as a stand-alone technology without the support of Facebook's network effects.

The study sort of assumes that taking notes at all is necessary, but I think the conceptual understanding vs. rote memorization idea suggests that taking notes should be questionable also.

Jordan Peterson has 3 minutes of advice for taking notes conceptually rather than verbatim: https://youtu.be/lMvvdz7YJ-Q

I take notes in text files every day. I do it for work, I do it for exercise, I do it for cooking and grocery shopping, I do it for planning my day, I do it for self improvement.

Writing it out is the simplest form of explanation - I'm explaining the concept to myself. I'm analyzing it to make sure I don't have any logical holes in my thinking, and then I can refer back to it. If I try to explain the concept to another person, and they point out a logical hole or they otherwise can't grasp the point, I go back to my text file and try to find the missing pieces and add them in.

I like this because I always have the concept at the ready. Maybe I don't encounter the topic for a few months or years, and I go back and read the text file on the topic and it's like the neurons organized around the topic all come to life again - but the best part is that there are all these new neurons that I've picked up that apply to it, and the text file gets a little bigger.

It also helps me compartmentalize. Once I've written something into digital stone, I can switch contexts knowing I've pushed the concept as far as my mind can take it for the moment. Later, I can come back and pick up where I left off after my subconscious has had time to chew on it.

Fox has consolidated the right-leaning audience. Anyone who complains about them should always follow the complaint asking why there aren't more conservative news networks to keep them honest.

That said, brave suppliers are capable of shifting the balance of power. Think about it, if "Tamazon" drops an efficient supplier for one of their competitors, Tamazon is going to expose themselves to a competitor who picks up that supplier - likely a competitor who's trying to break Tamazon's monopoly.

Then, suddenly, Tamazon's competitor is offering the consumer a superior purchase option.

If I was the supplier, I wouldn't get afraid, I'd get even. I'd go to every Tamazon competitor I could find and convince them to offer my product at wholesale and then give a scathing testimony to the anti-trust regulator.

This is the money line for me. People who find purpose, who improve themselves to pursue that purpose, are always looking at their failures and asking how they can make themselves better so they can succeed on the next try.

Those who blame others don't get better, they stay where they're at.

This isn't to say that you can't be held back by circumstance or the mistakes of others, just that you yourself won't improve if you focus on the things you can't control.

Finding a trait in yourself that could have allowed you to succeed had it been better developed can be difficult and requires creativity, but there's a lot of purpose to be found in that difficult and creative work.

Imagine some sort of central, industrial-scale kitchen that makes dirt-cheap prepared meals and uses the aforementioned services delivers them to your house, hot, at meal time.

Could economies of scale drive the cost below $5/meal? $2?

If we can obviate server rooms in office buildings around the world, what would it do to make the kitchen an extravagance rather than a necessity?

Or maybe the laundry room is the right target for obsolescence. Most cities already have industrial scale laundries for hotels. Could Uber and Lyft partner with them to eliminate those two giant appliances in our homes, and let us have the space back for our ham radios and stamp collections?

I see that as only half the story. While 0% loans were filling the coffers of Bank of America and Sallie Mae and Chase and Wells Fargo, those same banks were turning around and loaning the money out for consumption at 25% or for assets that rapidly depreciate like cars and TVs at 5-25%, or purchases of questionable value like college tuition at more variable rates.

r > g is still something of an open question in my mind, but the economic weaponization of debt and the inability of consumers to shield themselves from its adverse effects seems to be the reason for the wealth gap and why the increase in capital returns has payed better than overall economic growth, effectively transfering the future wealth of the poor to the present assets of the rich.

It could probably be solved in a generation with stricter regulations on consumer lending and the conversion of social security into a mandatory 401k, similar to Australia's "Super" program.

The fix for capitalism is to force everyone to be capitalists.

FTFY

He makes a really good point that there are lessons to be learned from, "disciplines like urban planning, zoning regulations, crowd control, effective and humane policing, and the simple practices it takes to stage an effective public event".

But I think what he's leaving out is hierarchy. In 2011, I think a "moderator class" and a "commenter class" was all you needed. But if you want people to treat each other well online, you need something more than that. There needs to be stakes. There needs to be value in building up your standing in the community, there needs to be something to be gained and lost in exchange for the community policing itself.

Right now, a community like Twitter has a sort of chaotic hierarchy. There is the average user, the influencer, the blue checkmark, and the Twitter employee/algorithm doing moderation. Who is answerable to who? How does one climb up the hierarchy? What value does a blue checkmark have in moderating an influencer? Can they? Are average users ultimately incentivized to be dicks in order to get the attention of influencers and blue checkmarks?

Maybe it's time for communities as big as Twitter to make some decisions about this and tame their userbase with more rigid and well-defined hierarchies.

I was of the understanding that most orthodox schools of economics fundamentally view demand as infinite. Supply-siders hope to meet demand by increasing supply, lowering prices, and making more goods available to those with fewer resources. Policy-wise, this is achieved through production subsidies, fewer regulations, and tax cuts.

Their opponents (demand-siders?) hope to increase access to goods by increasing the purchasing power of consumers. Policies like social safety nets, public education, and tax increases on the investor class promote this goal.

Either integrity is a virtue, or it's not. Either it's something people value, or it's not.

If it's something people value, then it should be one of the attributes people weigh when they choose a spouse/job/politician/cell phone carrier. If it is, then the marketplace of spouses/jobs/politicians/cell phone providers should be incentivized to provide integrity, and also to broadcast that their competitors do not.

I would argue this happens pretty regularly. Samsung using Apple's battery throttling in it's ads comes to mind.

So integrity definitely factors into the marketing calculus of politicians and corporations, but maybe the market doesn't value it enough to offer it the primacy you're looking for.

I'm definitely skeptical of people selling home designed cryochambers, but cold stress seems to have real benefits[0], and I've found that a cold shower or a cold jog (15-30 degrees F) seems to have the benefits described by the adherents.

Similarly, I doubt I'll ever go on any sort of meditation retreat, but I really enjoy using Headspace[1] and I find it helps me focus when I'm otherwise scatterbrained.

Finally, intermittent fasting seems to get a lot of flack for being a veiled eating disorder, but so far as I can tell, putting your body in ketosis through calorie restriction is the only way to reduce body fat. You can cook three low-calorie meals everyday, but that's time consuming and expensive and terribly inconvenient for family meal planning. It's much easier to eat one normal-sized meal and skip the extra meal planning, grocery shopping and preparation required to eat healthy.

So have I drank the Kool-Aid on this stuff? Maybe. But at this point I'd need more evidence to push me off of it, because the evidence that pushed me on to it has been validated by my own results.

[0]https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/cold-stress-hormesis [1]https://www.headspace.com/