supertrope

Governments frown upon KYC-less digital purse cards. Gotta force everyone to share their national ID number to just open a bank account to keep out drug dealers, terrorists, or NSFW game peddlers.

Banks generally don't like disposable digital purse cards. They make money off fees and interest. If a product doesn't rope you into a customer "relationship" where you link your pay deposits or later might get a mortgage or car loan they can only make money off fees. Enjoy paying $5 to activate a $100 prepaid debit card!

Lack of negotiation power. Less control over Android than Apple has over iOS.

Google keeps self-sabotaging Android Pay. They lacked market power so cellular carriers blocked it hoping to advance their own payment ecosystem (ISIS). Google changes the payment brand every few years, and fragments it into two separate apps or combines them. It's rather like their messaging strategy.

When picking a city, pick two:

-Good job market

-Not high cost of living

-Good quality of life (commute, amenities, etc.)

Many industries are concentrated in high cost of living cities or very high cost of living cities. Not everyone is a nurse who can work anywhere. Big cities generally have bigger salaries.

One of the ways the Netherlands made streets safer for dismounted people was by framing it as stopping killing kids with your cars. Yes this is "think of the children" logic but since kids are generally healthy the top causes of kid death in the US are gunfire and cars.

This. The prospect of a brighter future at least means capital and labor are fighting for slices of a bigger pie. If the pie per capita stays constant or shrinks there will be a lot more anti-social behavior to response to the zero-sum environment.

If you want to punch up try aiming higher than the upper-middle class. Other countries have MRIs and drugs as part of universal healthcare.

The book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam is about the decline of civil society.

Church membership is down. Labor union membership is down. Parents got crushed in the pandemic with school shutdowns, daycare shutdowns, and formula shortages. It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.

Local governments have a huge incentive to favor commercial construction over residential construction: schools. Adding an office building adds tax revenue without adding students. Adding housing means they have to enroll students.

School financing needs drives a lot of local government decisions. It's an invisible force like gravity. Approving office buildings and retail stores adds tax revenue without adding to school district costs (enrolling students). Approving housing construction means more students to absorb.

The public cannot directly vote to reject the electric company's price increases, or more expensive groceries, or car dealers charging MSRP. Requiring voters to directly approve school taxes or public services is great for cost control. But you get what you pay for with austerity: long waits for service, crowding, short hours, lower quality employees. Voters only approve the school levy when the pain of service cuts exceeds the pain of forking over another $$$/yr in tax. While residents choose politicians, over long periods of time politicians choose what mix of residents can move into the area! Think of downtown areas that are purely zoned for office buildings and parking garages.

Civ III battles are best thought of as dice rolls like the board game Risk. If you have more modern units you get to roll more dice but there's still a small chance archers defeat musketmen.

dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884023

Amazon.com now only shows you a few reviews. To see the rest you must login. Social media websites have long gated the carrots behind a login. Anandtech just took their ball and went home by going offline.

Car traffic magnets like highways inside urban cores? Or people traffic magnets like office buildings, colleges, sports stadiums, performing arts venues, shopping malls?

Mass transit is a capacity multiplier. If 35 people are headed in the same direction compare that with the infrastructure needed to handle 35 cars. Road capacity, parking capacity, car dealerships, gas stations, repair shops, insurance, car loans.

It also shows a lack of imagination. If you have to provide a union with a job bank, why not re-deploy employees to other roles? With one person per train, re-deploy people to run more trains therefore decreasing the interval between trains. Stations used to have medics but this was cut. How about re-train people to be those medics? The subway could use a signaling upgrade and positive train control. Installing platform screen doors to greatly reduce the incidence of people falling onto the tracks is going to need a lot of labor.

Copy files onto Micro SD cards. Smuggle them out of the country or to a contact who has Internet access.

July 2020.

Many state minimum insurance limits are laughably low. Like $30,000.

Leaders see the cost of a raised right of way or even just a dedicated lane and balk. Which is really dumb because after spending all the money on rail you screw up the last 1/10 by having a tram get stuck behind single occupancy cars. One person illegally parking can hold up dozens of riders. But our politicians still can exploit our bias of rail = good, bus = bad and show up for the ribbon cutting ceremony.

VC Fund My Life!

Are you selling renewable memory offset credits? My company is seeking to burnish our ESG reputation.

As new moms tend to change their consumer purchasing habits they are coveted by advertisers. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h... Certain cohorts and keywords are very valuable so even searching a medical condition once or clicking on a hiring ad for an in-demand job can shift ads toward that direction for a long time.

While businesses hate being a dumb pipe and love vendor lock in, lots of customers choose dependence on big tech. Each retail business that only has a Facebook page to save the cost of hiring a web developer reinforces this dependence.

The business model of Facebook, YouTube, traditional TV, app stores, and yes video games depend on people not touching grass.

If it's more profitable to keep your money under a mattress than to make things, provide services, or provide loans, the economy will tilt toward hoarding cash instead of more productive activities.

Educating and socializing kids takes more than 180 days a year. It takes a village to raise a kid. Think of all the things you learned from your parents, your extended family, your sports coach, your neighbor, or the manager of the corner store you frequented. Did you ever have a lesson at school about tying your shoe laces? How did you learn that advertisements don't have tell the truth?

Teaching to the test is about pulling low achieving students up to standard, not so much about supporting high performing students. Even though a lot of difference between a good school district and bad school district comes down to out of classroom factors like socioeconomic class and parental involvement, the district gets praise or blame. The district can't fix food insecurity, absent parents, abuse, and anti-intellectual attitudes. But it can focus those 180 days on reading and math and specifically what's on the test.

"Dad, download the PDF and then email it to me."

"The file disappeared. I can't find it."

"Look in the download folder."

"How do I get to that?"

Even when the phones on both ends use IP calling technology, the interconnection between phone companies is usually not IP.

iCloud backups are something normal people do each time they plug in their phone.

No. SS7 predates cellphones. It's the legacy control plane for the PSTN (public switched telephone network). It was never designed for security since it originally never crossed corporate boundaries as everyone had to use the monopoly provider. (Except for international calls).