rrrrrrrrrrrryan

I mean yes, obviously: the nation was founded with a giant genocide of native peoples.

I do imagine original white people were perhaps more keenly aware of the fact that this land was not originally theirs, and that other people should be let in and given a fair shot, even if they're poor.

I was merely making the argument that U.S. immigration policy has historically not been very classist (even if it was immensely racist), and not caring about the wealth of the incoming immigrants has worked out immensely well for the country over its lifespan.

You're kind of describing two different ideas: pigouvian taxes, and taxing The Commons.

What both have in common is that economists from all different schools of thought widely agree that they're the least distortionary taxes.

Japan does not have a shortage of homes - they have a surplus. Their economy very much need younger workers as their birth rates have fallen. But instead of simply allowing new workers in, they're choosing to devalue the shit out of their currency, then complaining about the huge influx of tourism that it triggered.

This is not a joke - they're actually banking on this.

Dude ethnically Japanese people that were born in Japan, lived their entire childhoods in Japan, are no longer considered Japanese if they live outside of Japan for 5-10 years.

People who have lived their entire lives in Japan, but are not 100% ethnically Japanese, will literally never be accepted as Japanese.

> “ive me your tired, your poor, > Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, > The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. > Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, > I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The U.S. was founded as a nation of immigrants, and has a cultural history of being exceptionally immigrant-friendly (compared to other nations), especially with regard to immigrants without much means.

I don't believe other nations have any obligation to follow this example. On the contrary, they should be able to set whatever immigration policies make sense for them. But this model of letting in poor immigrants, letting them do the work that nobody else wants to do, and letting their kids become net contributors, does seem to have benefited the U.S. greatly over the past few centuries.

It's actually worse with veterinary practices.

Younger veterinarians are drowning in school debt and can't buy the practices from the older folks that are retiring. So, private equity is basically snatching all of them up right now, betting that childless millennials are going to pay tons of money on veterinary care when their pandemic pups begin to reach end-of-life.

They're going to cut wages for all the staff, and hike all the prices, because unlike with human medical care, there's hardly any regulation (yet).

Yep, also explains why businesspeople who hate their jobs absolutely love it, and why artists absolutely hate it.

I've found that the biggest perk of being in a driverless car is being able to speak freely with the people in your group - whether that's arguing, telling a wild story, or just having a heartfelt discussion with someone.

It's the difference between sitting at a table with friends, and sitting at a table with friends + one stranger.

> Perhaps I'm just too painstaking a type of person, but I can't grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words.

> As I write, I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.

- Murakami, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running"

We're obviously long past the days when people's politics could be mapped on a nice normal distribution, with some outliers at either end and a big group of moderates in the middle who vote differently depending on the election. Today the distribution is not only bimodal: there's almost no overlap at all.

Your politics are part of your identity now. It's part of how you define who you are, and according to the research, over 95% of people are completely entrenched and will never vote for any candidate from the "other" party. (This the highest since right before the Civil War.)

That said, while nobody's changing sides any time soon, people _do_ stay home on election day, and we're going to see that next election.

The races for the next couple decades will be won by the candidates and the parties who can drill up enough enthusiasm from their base. Preach to the choir so the choir sings, etc.

This is true if you only have one access point.

If you have a mesh system with more than one access point, your network benefits greatly by using WiFi 7 (or 8, now) as a dedicated wireless backhaul that connects the access points to each other.

Ancient Egyptian women, above a certain socioeconomic threshold, also removed their body hair. (So did the men.)

Hair traps odors (ever smell your hair after a campfire, or going to a Korean BBQ?), but it's kind of a bitch to constantly remove. People with the means and the time to remove their body hair have done it at various periods throughout history.

Women in ancient Egypt also wore makeup, could own property, could divorce men without social repercussions, etc.

Many aspects of society that we think are new are actually things that just kind of arise given a couple hundred years of peacetime and abundance, and/or things that wealthy people have been doing on and off at various periods throughout history.

I'm similar to you in that encouragement and external valuation goes a long way for me, but I've found that all successful business-minded entrepreneurial types really love playing the game where they bounce ideas off each other and try to shoot each other's ideas down.

When they pitch a new idea to family and friends they get pats on the head and it doesn't materially help them at all, but when someone says "that'll never work" they get excited and their ears perk up, because that new perspective could save them a ton of money going down a wrong path.

Proximity is the issue. If the watch or bracelet wrist is very physically close to the detector, it will set it off.

You're supposed to the watch/bracelet, but you do have to hold your wrist close to your body. You kind of want to hold your hands in front of your body as if you're about to grab one of your wrists with your other hand.

Watches and other jewelry are basically right at the cutoff of detection. They want to detect small knives but not earrings.

This is all absolutely tribal airport knowledge. I had been traveling for work for years, taken hundreds of flights, but I only found this out when my partner tried to go through a metal detector with a semi-permanent bracelet that requires a small screwdriver to take off, and the TSA person mercifully told her exactly how to pose as she walked through the detector.

Also windows that go down to the floor has been considered bad architecture for decades.

Wall-to-wall windows are great.

Floor-to-ceiling windows are stunning when you walk into an empty place that you're thinking about buying or renting, but when you're actually living there, windows that go down to the floor create a few feet of dead space. You can't really put any furniture there without feeling guilty about blocking the view you're paying for, and it's uncomfortable to walk up to the edge and look down - it makes you feel uneasy like you're standing on a cliff with your toes at the edge. It's much better for the window to end around waist high.

They're psychologically fine if both the floor and the ceiling extend beyond the window (e.g. it's on the ground floor, and the roof overhangs), but when they're used on every floor in a high rise apartment building, killing limited square footage and driving up energy bills, it's absolute madness.

Tangentially related anecdote: I used to break tons of stuff all the time (my whole family growing up did), and I just assumed that all things just have finite lifespans, until I started dating someone who's tremendously careful and called me out on it. Then for a long time I just assumed I was a clumsier than average person.

Then eventually I finally was forced to admit that I'd just been choosing to move about the world as a bit of a careless brute who treats my things with disrespect, and by being more intentional with the way I move about the world, all my stuff suddenly lasts 10x longer.

Interestingly, I'm not sure it's worth the trade-off, but it's been kind of wild to experience.

More often than not these are usually cheap Chinese devices that are expecting a USB-C to USB-A (power-only) cable, because they're actually USB-A devices, with USB-A circuitry, modified slightly to appear as if they're USB-C.

Basically they skipped out on building power negotiation smarts that are required to support real USB-C charging, and instead just swapped out the physical connector.

Eh it's partially true - the browsers on phones needed to get better as well.

Zuckerberg famously made the Facebook apps basically just a responsive webpage under the belief that maintaining one codebase for all platforms would be best.

The performance on mobile was so terrible that Instagram started eating his lunch simply by maintaining native mobile apps that are actually performant, and Zuckerberg was forced to panic purchase Instagram (made by a team of 13 people) for a billion dollars.

Eventually phones got more powerful and mobile web browsers got good enough that PWAs could perform comparably to native apps, but it was too late, and Apple and Google had absolutely zero interest in promoting something that would damage their app store / play store revenue.

Executive level non-competes are probably the most damaging for the overall economy though.

If there's a market-dominating company, and execs are allowed to leave said company, start a competitor, get some investor dollars behind them, then start poaching employees from the old company, the market can have a really viable competitor quite quickly.

Without that ability, little monopolies spring up throughout the economy and use their size to crush upstarts, under-compensate their employees, overcharge their customers, and squeeze their suppliers.

Banning non-competes is an absolute requirement for free-market capitalism to function properly.

I wonder if Firefox is a better user agent string for bots or AI?

Or perhaps some big IT departments are switching the employee base from Chrome to Firefox because it now has better ad blockers?

A mass of end-users switching browsers on their phones or home computers doesn't seem to line up with the reality that I'm living in though, though.

There's a strong argument to be made that the banning of non-competes is the main reason California is the software capital of the world.

In Japan, if you get on a 1 hour train just before midnight, the printed ticket will say something like "23:05" for the embarkment time, and "24:05" for the disarmament. Same date for both - the clocks can just go beyond 24 hours.

Spend enough time out late in Japan, and you'll see hour 24, 25, even 26.

Yeah Steve Jobs was deeply frustrated with Obama when he got to meet him. Jobs hated unions, and felt like the Obama administration was not business friendly enough. He also felt the Obama administration was too reluctant to offend people.

He didn't live long enough to become the bad guy, but if he were alive today, I think there's a near-zero percent chance he'd support Clinton or Biden over Trump in either of those elections.

> with short selling in public markets being possible, an accurate price will be established very quickly

It'll be virtually impossible to short sell the stock within the first month due to lockups, and it'll take 180 days for all the pools to be available: then, we'll have a more-or-less "accurate" price, as you put it.

In San Diego we're voting on a new property tax that only applies to nonprimary residences.

The landed gentry want you to believe that they can't be touched unless you're willing to kick your grandmother to the street, but we can absolutely write taxes that apply more narrowly, and sensible tax policy leads to better outcomes and fewer market distortions than hamfisted regulation.

Apple ultimately developed their own map application specifically because Google was unwilling to remove the Google logo from the Google Maps app, no matter the price.

It'll absolutely be interesting to see if "Google" or "Gemini" appear anywhere in the new Siri UI.

> Something nobody's talking about

Nobody is talking about this because it's not a thing.

People here will shit on LLMs all day for being confidently incorrect, then upvote aggressively financially illiterate comments like this.

This is true for amateurs encoding video files to be pirated, but for the mega corps, sending more bits costs more money.

Many years ago, I had a couple drinks with a guy from Netflix who worked on their video compression processes, and he fully convinced me they're squeezing every last drop out of every bit they send down the pipes. The quality is not great compared to some other streaming services, but it's actually kind of amazing how they're able to get away with serving such tiny files.

Anyway, I think we can expect these companies to mostly max out the resultant video quality of their bitstreams, and showing the average bitrate of their pricing tiers would be a great yardstick for consumers.

Honestly, it used to be worse. I remember when 16:9 TVs were new, people would often stretch the aspect ratio of 4:3 content because they "don't like the black bars."