spaceheretostay

What you're describing is a failure of the government (and 'the market') to price our taxes and externalities correctly.

> So, the economically sensible thing is spend $100 to make factory B more efficient, instead of spending $10000 to undo the effect of factory A

This is where my understanding breaks down. I don't think this is true at all. I think the opposite is true - it's economically sensible to remove the pollution immediately from the first factory, not to (conditionally promise to) reduce the future output of another factory.

I don't get it. The planet is heating up and each degree we go is going to cost untold trillions. Saying it is economically sensible to try to reduce future output over not making new output at all is the part I don't get. It's just not true that you can choose to pollute more now and promise that it'll be a reduction in pollution output later and come out ahead. You will come out behind on this. The climate is changing faster than we are able to clean it up.

> So the system can work, as long as everybody's honest (or as long as there's some system that verifies that they are honest).

There is no such system. And in the US, the current Republican government is dismantling all oversight that may have existed or could exist to help this.

Another example: Exxon knew about the damages their products were doing to our health, but they lied about it for 50 years.

So I stand by my points. This idea does not work, and Cloudflare is taking positive credit for "reducing their carbon output" but I think it's just a lie. It simply cannot be true.

There's a lot of "such that..." and hopeful language there. I don't see it playing out so easily as that in the real future. And it doesn't seem to me like any of this actually reduces Cloudflare's carbon footprint. Incentivizing other people to do things has no real bearing on whether or not they will do them (see Trump's dedication to bringing back coal for example) and also has nothing to do with Cloudflare's carbon footprint.

They are grandstanding with this post. I see their technology as wildly beneficial to the planet, but the attitude that they can pollute and just "offset it" is ridiculous and I think, a major problem with how we are looking at addressing these problems.

> In order to reduce our carbon footprint, we have purchased RECs to match 100% of the power used in all those data centers and offices around the world as well.

I have never understood this kind of thing, is it like carbon credits? It is the wildest fallacy ever to think that we can just pollute as much as we want, and then pay some cash into a future-help pot and call it a carbon footprint reduction. How does this actually reduce their carbon footprint? Isn't that impossible? Once you have polluted you have polluted. No amount of money can reduce the pollution you have already put out there, even if you are (at a later date) spending money to clean it up.

There is no possibility of the funds collected being sufficient to undo the damage caused by the pollution. Once the pollution is out there, it's already causing multi-decade damage. Paying out cash to clean it up is a losing battle, like using a bucket to empty a sinking ship with a hole in the hull.

Props to Cloudflare for caring about the environment and working towards a long-term sustainable internet. But I don't get the RECs thing - how is this not just a huge logical fallacy that corporations buy into to make themselves look better?

Oh my gosh thank you for that. I will check it out!

Is there any program like Macromedia Flash that made it so easy and fun to create animations and user-interactive content? I haven't done work like that since it was Macromedia Flash so I have no idea how close other Adobe products come or what other options there are.

But there was something magic about those vector graphics, keyframes and the really fast ways of creating interactive content. Is there like an HTML5 animation/game studio or something?

There's no source because it's false. First, Americans do vote for more taxes on the rich, by-and-large. And second, those that vote against taxes for the rich are usually basing their votes on incomplete or otherwise factually wrong data.

Nearly all the people in the USA would be much more likely to become millionaires if overall taxes were higher for the rich. Less worrying about healthcare, more ability to take business and personal risks, more baseline tools to build ontop of (like roads, etc). Those that want reduced taxes on the rich would be directly harming their own ability to ever become rich in the first place.

Okay, but my summaries don't do it justice. Unfortunately for those not there for the events, it is difficult to communicate what it is like. Imagine the human time wasted when dozens of people reply "oh honey don't get so upset, it's okay, that's not what the report says, here's a link" etc. The number of human-hours wasted with good-intentioned people trying to make the bots feel better is a sad sad sad thought ....so much time wasted.

They also talk to each other, creating super confusion about who is real and who is not. Maybe those responses are written by bots too, to make us think some are real?

The sheer quantity of lies, especially lies that have nothing to do with the topic at all, leads me to believe the aim is a lot more than "to divide". The aim is also to disinform and to waste time of good people, who could be doing more important things but now feel they have to stop the spread of lies.

I apologize for my sample being incomplete and the summaries not sufficient. You really have to be there in the trenches seeing it happen. Check the next big news megathreads and you'll see it.

100s of comments per minute, many of them fraudulent and full of lies. You can go there and pick apart the details yourself to come to your own conclusions about it.

But you have to go there live - they delete their comments so rapidly that future study of the events is very difficult.

Incredible analysis. I wish there was more! In my experience over the last few months on r/politics, the bots are extremely easy to detect just by reading the new feeds (especially in megathreads, they are everywhere).

For example, the most common elements are:

- repeated copy+paste comments (every 5 minutes or so) that follow the pattern: "I'm literally shaking and crying, I'm a democrat and so lost! Everything is over! Trump is innocent and I'm literally crying". Various accounts will comment various interpretations of this every few minutes.

- "lololol trump is innocent, where is your apology stupid libs" Intentional lowercase, no care for grammar, and direct insults to "the left". Again, these will repeat from the same accounts and others every few minutes

- "now that the report shows exoneration and the president will be indicted you libs lose!" No understanding of the words' meanings. Using 'indicted' to mean the opposite of what it means without knowing, etc.

- Most of the comments will be deleted after being called out, or will be deleted within 30 minutes regardless

- "the report says no more charges will be filed, maga!" Again this is just a lie, total fabrication with no basis in reality.

- The bots will all align around a few "talking points" where they all use the same words and phrasing. These can last just a few days or sometimes you'll see the same ones for months. The "talking points" often have nothing to do with the news of the day and seem to be meant as distraction or other disinformation

- The common theme among all of them is that they spread lies, use coordinated disinformation campaigns, and aim to confuse and distract from reality.

The reality, of course, is the Russia is attacking the United States, our elections in 2016 were compromised and broken completely, and that we now have an illegitimate government that enables the attacks from Russia to continue.

Democracy is under attack. The Russian bots on reddit are easy to spot and hilarious to deal with, until you realize how much damage they are actively causing. From my eye, it seems like the attacks have dramatically ramped up recently - but I don't have the hard data to show it. Just my experience calling out Russian bots on reddit in the r/politics megathreads.

Surprised the author didn't reference the time when Facebook set out to intentionally manipulate hundreds of thousands of people by playing with their emotions [1]. Facebook made like 200,000 people start to feel sad on purpose and bragged about their abilities in a "scientific paper". That's in quotes because their lawyers say that you give your "informed consent" to be psychologically experimented on when you sign up for Facebook.

Facebook does in fact decide to basically torture people into a depression with its power. Facebook is an evil entity and their intentional emotional torture exerted onto its users far surpasses the kind of thing you're quoting NYT for. Not excusing NYT here but Facebook is next-level-evil when it comes to psychological experimentation on unwilling and non-consenting users.

[1] Lots of articles on this, here's a random one from Google searching: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

(edited for accuracy, millions->thousands)

> I think it's entirely possible for you to avoid most of this type of tracking if you so choose, but it does mean not using services such as Facebook,...

Why do you think this is a choice? This is definitely not a choice any more. It has been 10+ years since Facebook removed your choice to not use it from society.

Step outside and walk around. You will be photographed. Those photographs are going to Instagram and you are in the background. Your face is scanned by Facebook and they know where you go and what you do in the day. Facebook will know your location because other apps that you use will send Facebook your location without you even knowing it. Other people's actions online, who are tracked more vigorously, like emailing you or even meeting you in person for a coffee, will give further info to Facebook. Your cell signal location and your credit card history are probably up for sale and Facebook probably buys that too.

You want to opt-out by staying home? Just order stuff online? I'm sure Facebook will still find a way to figure you out. There is no such thing as not-using-Facebook, or opting out any more. Saying that there is a way to choose not to be tracked is dangerous and wrong.

> ...and not giving out your phone number to people who use these services.

The tracking they can do is so far past just linking phone numbers though. Trying to keep a phone number secret simply isn't going to work and if it did, it would be ineffective in protecting you from being tracked.

Modern iPhones can play music over wired headphones! Sure, not all wired headphones. But then again, the original iPhone can't play music over all wired headphones either.

The Romans built aqueducts that spanned hundreds of miles and they did it thousands of years ago. Why do you assume that today water has to be 'driven' with trucks or something?

I'm sure we could build aqueducts.

The Internet Research Agency has been openly attacking us for years.

> [Harm to Ongoing Matter] [Harm to Ongoing Matter] [Harm to Ongoing Matter] IRA employees also traveled to the United States on intelligence-gathering missions. In June 2014, four IRA employees applied to the U.S. Department of State to enter the United States, while lying about the purpose of their trip and claiming to be four friends who had met at a party 38 Ultimately, two IRA employees -- Anna Bogacheva and Aleksandra Krylova-received visas and entered the United States on June 4, 2014.

> Footnote: 40. [Harm to Ongoing Matter] [Harm to Ongoing Matter] 2. U.S. Operations Through IRA-Controlled Social Media Accounts Dozens of IRA employees were responsible for operating accounts and personas on different U.S. social media platforms. The IRA referred to employees assigned to operate the social media accounts as "specialists.942 Starting as early as 2014, the IRA's U.S. operations included social media specialists focusing on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.43 The IRA later added specialists who operated on Tumblr and Instagram accounts.44 Initially, the IRA created social media accounts that pretended to be the personal accounts of U.S. persons. By early 2015, the IRA began to create larger social media groups or public social media pages that claimed (falsely) to be affiliated with U.S. political and grassroots organizations. In certain cases, the IRA created accounts that mimicked real U.S. organizations.

> For example, one IRA-controlled Twitter account, @TEN_GOP, purported to be connected to the Tennessee Republican Party.46 More commonly, the IRA created accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. organizations and grassroots groups and used these accounts to pose as anti-immigration groups, Tea Party activists, Black Lives Matter protestors, and other U.S. social and political activists.

We live in a wild time. Russia literally sent agents here and registers countless social media accounts for the specific purpose of destabilizing our country, stoking violence and aggression, and enabling people here to circumvent the rule of law and effectively stage a coup that destroys our functioning democracy.

> Yes it is. That's literally all there is to it.

No, it isn't, and no, it isn't. This stuff is a lot more complicated that you think it is.

> A housing shortage by definition means that there's not enough housing to satisfy the demand

That's not true. You need to mention that there are different prices that people are able to pay, and with wage stagnation being such a big issue for the middle class, you need enough housing to satisfy the demand _at each economic level_.

You can't just make a bunch of rich people houses, have them sit empty while there are homeless outside, and say you've solved the shortage because there's "enough housing!!" to satisfy demand.

> It's not complicated at all.

Yes, it is. You are being condescending, rude, and you are also wrong to boot.

> Onerous zoning and land use laws have made it impossible for developers to build to the level of density necessary to support NYC's rapidly growing population.

I do not agree with this at all. My fingers are tired and I have debate this point endlessly here. I'll be short: Wages are too artificially low for this to make any sense.

No, it's obviously not, and I do not understand how you got there. I clearly don't think that because that would be insane.

Does my eating of an apple actively hurt people who are hungry in Africa? No, it doesn't. In fact, over the long run it will help them, because I would live longer to buy more to buy more of their goods and support them economically in the future with trade, etc.

You know what would actively hurt the poor in Africa? Me eating bread and water and dying and being unable to help the world in any future way ever because I'm dead. Me choosing to have apples and peanut butter and other vegetables and proteins is so that I can live longer and improve the world more, with either open source software, general economic contributions, studies of the weather and climate to reduce overall risk, etc.

Choosing to live on a diet that would kill me is not helpful to the poor in any part of the world.

But does this building's existence with enormous effort put into cheating the rules, skirting the system, and catering to the exclusively epicrich actively harm the middle-class and poor living nearby?

Yes it does.

The rich who live in this building are not doing so purely to help others, they are not there to improve society, they are there and are specifically wasting resources with no benefit but their own view of NYC.

It's obviously a very different situation.

> It's supply and demand. More available housing means lower prices.

Does it? I don't understand this, at all.

More available housing would also create more demand, no? More people online will see the lower prices and move to Manhattan, immediately increasing the price again, no? The situation is complicated. You can't just say "supply and demand" and think you've solved NYC's problems in housing.

ECON textbooks teaching students that every person is a financially rational actor and that supply + demand plays out real nice in the real world is supper dangerous. My econ textbook was wrong in a lot of ways and it's upsetting to see continuing oversimplification and massive condescension for these antiquated and not-real-world-tested perspectives on how to solve complicated urban problems.

> How is the housing shortage not about the amount of available housing?

The name of the problem itself oversimplifies the problem space. There are lots of scenarios playing out today where there is ample housing and still a housing shortage. A major problem is that often the houses available do not match the ability of the renters to pay. So you can have lots of expensive houses being vacant, and lots of renters with nowhere to live, and have a housing shortage.

> Wages don’t need to increase if housing prices fall as a result of an increase in supply.

What? Yes they do! Wages are already too low to support a normal housing market, due to long-term wage suppression of the middle over many decades. Wages definitely need to rise for this problem to fix.

I really don't understand this position. The country has a housing crisis because many of the cities in this country do. Removing the connection to the rest of America is an incorrect way of looking at it because of cause and effect: this is such a big problem in America today that it is affecting people who weren't directly in the housing-short markets themselves.

A weakness in part of America is a weakness for all of America. It works this way with the outside world too - our housing shortages are part of a global problem. We are all in this together. Framing the issues that the world cities have internally as something that isn't a problem for people living elsewhere is just denying that we live in a connected society.

One groups problems affect the other groups.

> And the ones with the worst housing problems have the most restrictive real estate laws.

Do you have a citation for that? I don't believe it's true.

> But they aren't given that choice.

If your argument is framed that the ultrarich aren't given enough choices in how to live in luxury, I'm not sure I'll understand the rest of your post. Yes the building code has a problem that is contributing to this issue, but let's get real here: The ultrarich are given all the options in the world. Not every option they choose need be so offensive to regular people.

> If every building were twice as tall, there would be twice as much housing

This is definitely not true. I don't understand where this assumption came from and I cannot logically follow it through. Certainly 1) not 100% of building heights are livable space, and certainly 2) you cannot just extend one dimension of life (building height) and then assume that you will have created some economically usable housing.

> If there were twice as much housing, there wouldn't be a shortage

Again I don't understand this at all. The shortage isn't about the amount of available housing at all, it's about people's ability to live there too. And if you're just doubling the building heights, you haven't talked about wages or ability to live there etc.

> It's really quite straightforward

What? None of this is straightforward! This stuff is super complicated! There's no need to be so condescending and rude about it.

> Which part of the argument do you think is incorrect, and why?

All of it. I've explained above.

That's obviously not what I said, you are clearly reading my post incorrectly. Here is my opinion to make it clear: We should be building 10x more than we currently are - it should be done efficiently and with affordable housing attached as well.

> spite

> anything at all

> shouldn't

Please don't fake-quote me like this. I said nothing of the sort and it's offensive that you would reframe my words with an obviously false-attribution like that.

Height limits are definitely not the "only reason" there's a shortage of housing in the first place. Housing shortages often have many causes and contributing factors, especially in NYC. Building height limits are not the reason for housing shortages in NYC! From the wiki on the topic,

> [NYC's housing shortage] is caused by the erosion of the New Yorkers' purchasing power due to stagnant wages and the increase in average rent in the city despite robust tenant protection.[1][2]

The article lists a half dozen other contributing factors, none of which are building height restrictions. Yes the wiki article is incomplete, but I think my point is demonstrated.

Building large buildings to fill with empty space and spending huge amounts of money catering to the ultrarich, while there are still massive housing problems in NYC, is definitely going to offend some people.

A society which enables the rich to produce extraneous waste - literally making multimillion dollar luxury home spaces just to fill with nothing, so that you can skirt the law for building codes, and not even allow a person to live there - yeah that's offensive.

The rich should be able to buy things they like, yes. But of course it's offensive when the country has a housing crises and the rich are building houses that nobody is allowed to live in, just so they can get a better view?

I mean yeah that's pretty obviously offensive and a strong, real reason that people are opposing these towers - it's described in the article.

That cannot be the logical follow-through. A collapsing society can do its best to recover - a nuked and destroyed, murdered wasteland cannot.

Climate-precipitated societal collapse is surely preferable to all over a large-scale nuclear war that is suggested to have been unilaterally invoked, tantamount to murder of billions and multiple genocides. That kind of 'solution' has no place in reasonable discourse about climate change mitigation or adaptation.

Your first sentence is a logical fallacy (your second clause does not follow from the first) and casually introduces the topic of intentional murder and genocide of billions of people. You're the first to bring that suggestion up, but you attribute the idea to non-existent 'others'. Your next sentence is also a logical fallacy and AFAIK is simply untrue: "almost every...decentralizing the west"? I've never heard of any such proposals. This is no way to have any kind of reasonable discussion.

I think you misunderstand me - I do not intend to express any confidence that phones will end up better than satellites if used exclusively! I am saying that working in tandem, all technology to measure and study the atmosphere should be used to better understand the weather.

Phones together with satellites and radars and weather stations will produce a better weather forecast experience than we have today, without using phones.

Thanks for the Candide reference, that is one of my favourite books, but I do not think it really applies to my optimism about weather forecasting technology into the future. We currently live in the worst of worlds when it comes to stability of plans for improvements into our weather infrastructure (at least in the US).

No? I am not saying those weather events don't exist - I am saying that there is a very large class of weather events that happen with high frequency, and affect life on the ground significantly, and those include severe thunderstorms that could have early detection through smartphones.

Planes and aviation could have major assistance in planning and adjusting to weather events if a phone network were actively in use as well.

Last second info re: waiting for planes to take off due to weather delays is one of my primary frustrations. It hurts a lot of people and companies to have last-second changes to forecasts and I would like to reduce that pain point by providing further advance notice of likelihood of severe weather in an area. This can be done (partially) with phone sensors.

Definitely phones can't replace all weather satellites and things - not yet anyway! But for many severe weather events that actively harm property and life, such as severe thunderstorms, can be aided with smartphone sensors. For example, barometers in phones can detect initiation of rapid convection that may lead to severe thunderstorms. In many places this rapid convection may start where there are no weather stations, and cannot (yet?) be detected by satellite.

I should defer to the experts here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8070024

The part I'm working on currently is a privacy-aware implementation of recording useful signal strength from user's phones, that could be used for this.