planetguy

Besides, price booms are the natural result of demand outstripping supply. If rents don't go up to reflect this fact, then how do you cope with the fact that the number of people who want to live in San Francisco outstrips the number of people who can fit into San Francisco?

As far as I'm concerned the lack of cheap housing in San Francisco is no more of a problem than the lack of cheap housing in Beverley Hills.

Has this ever actually happened? Has any city ever run out of garbagemen and janitors due to a lack of rent control? I have never heard of anything like this happening, even in extremely expensive cities with free rental markets.

>Gandhi's great insight was that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violent resistance.

Except: that isn't true. Or rather, it's true only in certain circumstances.

>Popular movements pretty much instantly lose their legitimacy when they turn violent

Perhaps, but "legitimacy" and three bucks will get you a cup of coffee. Power accumulates in the hands of whoever controls large numbers of men with guns.

>That some authorities massacre people doesn't refute it.

Actually it pretty much does. In the contest between a nonviolent movement with "legitimacy" and a violent authority without it, the violent authority wins every time.

The few times that nonviolent movements have succeeded, they have done so against a tired power that was pretty much in the process of withdrawing anyway -- the Soviet Union circa 1990 and Great Britain circa 1950.

Depends what part of the East Bay, of course. West Oakland is the closest BART station, but it is in some serious ghetto. Lake Merritt, Berkeley (esp North Berkeley) and Rockridge are your first good options, but they'll take a little longer to get to. My advice would be definitely to check out Rockridge, it's a surprisingly nice part of town.

You could adjust the timing of the traffic lights to ensure that the rail line always (or usually) has priority and cross the whole city in ten minutes.

That is to say: I seriously don't see any need for new note-taking software. If I want to take a note, I'll write it on paper. Or use one of MacOS's stickies. Or email it to myself. There are many other options, but those are the ones I actually use. If I wanted specialized note-taking software, I would have downloaded one of any number of free options ages ago.

All a landlord needs is one tenant who is willing to pay $N a week. An auction is just an efficient way of finding the appropriate value of N.

There are other issues which make auctioning rental properties a bad idea though. Auctions are good in situations where the appropriate price is unclear; in most rental markets it's fairly clear to everybody roughly what a given apartment is worth, though, plus or minus five or ten percent. The second issue is that as a landlord I'd much rather have a good tenant who I think is likely to be able to pay the rent than a tenant who looks bad on paper but is willing to pay an extra ten bucks a week; so I don't automatically want to choose the highest bidder as my tenant.

I'm a pragmatic libertarian, which I suppose makes me a conservative.

I'm not convinced that there's a difference, legally or ethically, though it would be interesting to see it play out in a court of law.

>I do not believe there is anything inherently unethical about copyright infringement in pirating movies or tv shows

Y'see, the problem is that following up a defence of "this isn't quite illegal" with a defence of "this shouldn't be illegal" tends to weaken both cases.

I'd listen to the opinions of internet-people on the subject of copyright a lot more often if they didn't always seem to boil down to "Anything that I personally think I should be allowed to get away with ought to be legal"

A non-serious crime? C'mon, anytime you're making hundreds of thousands of pounds by doing something illegal you're into reasonably serious crime territory. You can argue that the law should be changed if you like, but until it is, people who decide to make a living by breaking it for their own personal gain are criminals and I don't have sympathy for 'em.

That he did it for the money isn't necessary for me to want to see him face charges, but it certainly gives an idea of the scale of the problem. Small scale personal-use privacy shouldn't be the subject of this kind of action, but on that kind of scale it's a different matter.

As to the question of whether he should be extradited, though... well, that's not my place to say. I think he should be treated perfectly in accordance with British law, and I don't know British extradition law but it can be assumed that the judge who will hear his case does. Who am I to try to tell a British judge how to apply British law? Stop telling judges what to do.

Congratulations, you've invented the textbook. In video form! Don't get me wrong, a textbook is a nice useful resource, but it's not some kind of "revolution in higher education". The option has always been there to learn stats 101 from the book.

Also, how is this guy a "hacker"?

Extradition between the UK and US is usually pretty easy, except in cases where the defendant is likely to face the death penalty in the US; the UK currently has an issue with this.

It doesn't matter that much, of course, if Valve never finishes the Half Life series; they'll no doubt continue to make other projects which rake in the bucks. But for most companies you can't just abandon a cash-cow project like that. What would happen to Toyota if all the engineers decided they really wanted to work on sports cars and nobody could be bothered to work on the next iteration of the Camry? What happens if all the employees for the water company decide to design a new dam and nobody stays on the maintenance team to stop the existing dam from bursting?

I can only assume that the actual firing process involves a lot of hushed talking followed by an approach to gaben followed by a discussion followed by a "sorry, bye".

One could in fact suggest that the flat management structure only works when there is exactly one clear owner of the company. Everyone can pretend that everyone gets a say, when it's clear to everyone who really has the final say.

What's my point? Just that it's easy to over-fetishize a non-heirarchical structure, but it only works (a) under certain very specialized circumstances and (b) with a little bit of smoke and mirrors.

I mean, did the credit market dry up overnight? Once the precedent has been set that the king can cancel everyone else's debts for no reason, what reason would anyone have for lending money? Or did some folks come up with "un-cancellable" debts which are deemed not to be cancelled in jubilees (under penalty of private leg-breaking)?

I'd forget the argument-from-authority, though, and just say that Graeber went into this project with some kind of irrational antipathy towards "debt", which despite years of careful research he's been unable to shake. Much like if a KKK member decided to write the definitive history of the US Civil War [substitute less inflammatory example if you feel like it] he might put together a really well-researched, well-footnoted piece of writing but still be just plain missing some fundamental piece of understanding due to the blind spots he had when going in.

The history of debt, in all its glory, is a fascinating subject. There have been debts which turned out mutually beneficial, debts which drove debtors to ruin, debts which drove creditors to ruin. There have been debts imposed under terms unfair to one party or the other, and debts between close friends where the terms are kept extremely lenient both ways. There have been formal debts and informal debts, debts of money and of literal backrubs. But Graeber, for some reason, seems to skip over all those debts which make the concept of "debt" look good and only describe those which make it sound bad.

It's frankly just plain weird. It reminds me of Eric Cartman's class report on Asian culture: "Asian culture has plagued our fragile planet for centuries. It must be destroyed."

You're right, page 4 does mention the idea that a debt is a promise. But it's immediately pooh-poohed as an idea that's "dangerous because it's self-evident". And the last paragraph does call a debt a "promise corrupted by both math and violence", but it's not clear how anything is "corrupted" here. So yeah, you acknowledge this self-evident idea, but only to dismiss it without a proper argument.

Also while you're here (actually yours is exactly the kind of book that I read while wishing that I could argue with the author about certain points, so it really is a privilege to have you here and I hope that doesn't sound like a backhanded compliment), the other point I think you dismiss without enough of a fight is the idea that all human interactions are based on reciprocity. There is of course one counter-example, the child-parent relationship in which the parent is generally happy to give selflessly, but that's a special case which seems to be more-or-less hard-coded into our genes; our minds are programmed to give selflessly to our children since from our genes' point of view they're nearly equivalent to ourselves. Once we step outside the parent-child relationship, however, your other examples of non-reciprocal human behaviour (apart from outright theft, extortion and other forms of behaviour where one party isn't consenting) don't ring true. Two labourers working on the same project will, of course, pass each other hammers, but there is an expectation of reciprocity even in group work, as anyone who has ever worked in a group with someone not pulling their weight will know.

In conclusion, you've written an interesting history of debt, but I think you've started off with some kind of antipathy towards debt which has stopped you from really gaining a good perspective on it. I still don't understand the objection to the basic concept of debt: that if Alice has something and Bob needs it then Alice can lend Bob that thing and get it back in the future, for mutual benefit. I find that to be a glorious example of human interaction at its best. But then again, I've already paid off my mortgage.

Actually, you pretty much do, in a lot of places. Mind you the segmentation is less Toyota vs Honda and more American vs Japanese vs European, but there's a lot of automotive fanboys having stupid arguments in the comments section of any automotive site you might care to check out.

My phone is a bit crappy. There are definitely better ones on the market. But I don't care, it does the job. There are better TVs than my TV, better ovens than my oven and better vacuum cleaners than my vacuum cleaner, but they all do the basic job for which I bought 'em and their imperfections don't cause me any huge grief, so who cares?