superuser2

This is just like the anti-car people. "People ought to be restricted to slow and unpleasant methods of transportation because they should not want to leave their immediate vicinities."

There's a grain of truth in both cases - there's no energy efficiency like not needing to move around at all, and there's no memory/CPU/cost efficiency like not having sophisticated functionality in the first place.

But once you are used to the functionality that comes from heavyweight tools, "do without - it's better for you" is frustrating at best and more likely engenders hostility for the person saying it.

>to an insecure server

Email is insecure regardless of who owns the server or where it's located. The government's own position is that emails in transit are postcards, not letters, and emails at rest are abandoned property, not personal papers and effects.

On the scale of how bad this is, plain old email on a private dedicated server is a 10/10, but plain old email on an @state.gov server would have been at least a 9/10. From an "endangering national security" perspective, we should be equally angry about everyone who used the official State email server for classified information.

It's not just information disclosure. Imagine the lulz to be had from the fact that the Security of State can't distinguish between an email from the President and any idiot who knows how to forge a FROM header.

Also, that time when it turned out that the State Department let the Russians have RCE on its email server for more than a year [1].

[1] http://gizmodo.com/state-dept-just-shut-off-part-of-email-sy...

This is a great article.

The rage of the blue-collar masses is misplaced. It belongs with engineers, STEM people, operations research, Taylorist management. Globalism isn't the architect of their fate. We are.

Want enough work to go around? Ban the last 100 years of agricultural development. That'll create all the jobs you could possibly want, real fast.

Except then you'all find out that more work to go around is a wrong thing to want.

That's met with vigorous opposition in the Bay Area, by people who think we should instead be building more apartments near the BART stations.

Of course, the parking lots service ~1000 people, while apartments obeying the height limits might accomodate a few dozen and would of course be even more desirable/expensive now that commuting to the station from far away is harder.

>I'm sure everyone is a fan of that!

Are you a fan of laws like "people who sell you financial products are not permitted to lie" and "financial institutions must make an effort to ensure that their salesmen are not lying to customers" or at least "there need to be records so we can sort it out on the lawsuit after the fact"?

That's one of the main things employee surveillance is for in financial services.

>All encrypted traffic is typically decrypted by the recipient.

The use-cases for inspection at the corporate firewall are often explicitly about catching cases where the recipient isn't policing itself:

- the device is compromised, exfiltrating company secrets, but has been rigged to send false reports to the central antivirus server saying it's clean.

- the device is not something it makes sense to install a host-based IDS/firewall/AV on.

- the device is assigned to a broker-dealer who is using a non-work email account to give fraudulent advice to clients off the record.

In an enterprise IT environment, "the recipient" is the company, and the company has internal controls, often required by law or regulation, that involve i.e. people who are not salesmen or traders (IT, compliance, legal, etc) knowing what information flows into and out of the sales and trading departments.

Okay, I guess

>we'd be even happier if we could coordinate non-driving

was more central to what you were getting at. I've never really thought of the presence of other drivers as a primary or even ancillary reason to also drive. Far more important are things like the weather, duration of the trip, physical exertion, cargo capacity, do I want to be sweaty and tired when I get there, is there a locker room with a shower, etc. In Milwaukee, Chicago, and Berkeley I've always felt like the separation of pedestrians and bikes from cars was pretty good.

There are places where it's dangerous to bike in the Milwaukee and Chicago metros, but they were also the kind of places you'd never visit unless you lived in them, and I didn't.

It sounds like LA could solve your problem with better sidewalks and bike lanes at much lower net cost to everyone else.

I guess people in LA are being coerced to drive, but plenty of other places facilitate driving, cycling, and walking safely at the same time.

The more interesting tension (to me) is between density and parking, where my basic argument is that parking inhibits density but is also inclusive of a much larger land area (and therefore people paying lower rents), while dense areas without parking are great for their residents but coercive to the people who can't or don't want to pay the rents in them.

The inability to build densely comes from height limits and mandatory separation of residential and commercial districts.

Converting parking lots to apartments just gives you more apartments on the same footprint. It doesn't bring the workplaces of the people in those apartments any closer.

> people would vote for more mass transit

Serious rail projects take on the order of 30 years. I think it's much more likely that people would go somewhere else, rather than endure an entire adult life without acceptable transportation options so that maybe the grandchildren would have it better.

Residential parking permit programs are essentially designed to make sure enough street space available for residents near their homes. If you bought a house under a RPP program and then the government suddenly issued RPPs for 100 people living in six cars worth of street frontage, I'd say you have a right to be angry, though probably not a legal cause of action.

This is why we have alleys.

I don't think there's much doubt about how awesome it is to live a trivial distance from everything you need. This much is clear from the extreme premium that housing in such places commands compared to freeway-connected suburbs of US cities. It's not surprising that abundance of public space and a lack of through traffic would make them even better.

Cars and their infrastructure are indeed ugly and dangerous, but we have them because they so drastically increase the quality of life available to those who can't or won't pay the rent in the same superblocks as their jobs (or move to tenements).

Increasing the luxuriousness of this kind of premium housing would seem to come at the cost of extracting yet more free time from those who need to come into or through these areas but can't live in them, or yet more money from those who decide to stretch their housing budgets. It'd be entirely appropriate coupled with a massive increase in rail infrastructure or something, but on its own is concerning.

I'll be very interested to see whether US cities that adopt this model can add supply faster than people who used to commute can bid up the price of close-to-everything housing. My guess is no, not even close, a few elites get great lives and everyone else is driven to exurbs.

If it were true that other modes of transportation are always better for the people using them, banning cars would be a no-op as there would not be any.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. I've no doubt that you love walking and biking, but if your neighbors felt the same way, they wouldn't need to be coerced into it by car-unfriendly design.

What happens is people have to spend more of their free time in transit (and be much less comfortable in transit), or more of their money for housing that is closer to their destinations. This is time and money that is no longer available for the other things people want. The businesses don't close. People cope. Their quality of life just declines.

This is sort of necessarily true - people wouldn't be choosing to drive unless they felt it was better than alternatives. Taking away that option is necessarily forcing them into worse alternatives.

Spousal support isn't so much paperwork as a long-term standard of living cut.

This is so bizarre. I knew I wanted to keep my car, so I filtered my search to apartments with parking available and factored it into the rental price in my comparisons. My building's garage has pretty high occupancy - the demand is there. It's unclear why the developer would need to be legally coerced to add parking, when the market demand is there. And if the market demand isn't there, what's the point of an empty parking garage?

We don't make every building a blast shelter and everyone wear body armor. People who walk through the steps of attacking the US physically are going to succeed.

Our security strategy is to:

A) surveil, infiltrate, and block conspiracies to do so before they happen, and

B) identify, track, and punish our attackers after the fact.

I don't think (and "cyber" policy makers don't seem to think) that making every piece of software free of vulnerabilities is realistic. Sabotaging hacking groups, and building sufficiently scary capabilities for retaliation against nation-states that might attack us, seems much more attainable.

>Housing can still serve as something of an inter-generational value transfer

Except inheritance comes when you need it least: late middle age, when the house is already paid off or close and there's little time for savings to compound before retirement.

Paying for (most of) your children's education is a much more effective form of inter-generational value transfer: it comes at the time young adults face the greatest expenses relative to their earning power, and lets them reap the benefits of a high-end career without excessive debt (so they can actually build wealth).

>there is a crisis of unreasonable expectations and spoiled people.

We do have a crisis of entitlement: people feel entitled to hold the vertical space in their neighborhoods empty when it is worth much more than they're willing to pay.

The unreasonable luxuries being demanded here are unobstructed views and a cozy small-town feeling for the price of one house purchased decades ago, when they are worth the price of several dozen skyscrapers.

1) Most families have more than one child.

2) Lots of young adults are going to chase the best opportunities in their fields, which are not accessible from the towns they grow up in.

3) Even only children don't get to inherit the house until parents die or move to a retirement facility. This is moving later and later into middle age, well after the "I want a house and marriage and kids" stage.

I don't think inheriting housing is a solution.

>top theatre

It is the lowest tier of theater which demands the greatest sacrifices, because it can, because the people making it are desperate for work. The budgets are also smaller, so more responsibility is heaped onto smaller crews.

The best people get to work with the best theater companies, which have the best working conditions. They have to, or the best people would not work with them. This is often but not always formalized with a union contract.

Top theaters are usually union houses. The actors and stage managers belong to Equity, the crew to IATSE, the designers to United Scenic Artists, etc. In most cases, getting your union card is synonymous with making it into the "big leagues." On union shows, breaks, working hours per day, advance notice required for a call, which tasks can be assigned to people with specific positions, etc. are strictly regulated. Your work is held to an extremely high standard, but the hours in which you are expected to perform it, and the kinds of things that can be made your problem, are strictly bounded.

At higher levels, staffs are larger and more specialized: roles that would have been solo in a lower-budget world are a principal and several assistants on Broadway. Tasks that would have fallen to you by default have dedicated personnel, and you may in fact be expressly forbidden from doing them by the union contract.

There is immense upward pressure on the quality of your work because most engagements are short-term. Even if it's very hard to get fired, you still need to cultivate a network that is impressed by and likes you if you want to keep working.

The theater community, particularly at the top, has an admirably low tolerance for this kind of abuse.

Politics don't exist to be a conversation topic. Local policy has real and massive impact on real people's lives. You can tune out ambient conservatism up until the moment you fall on the wrong side of a majority opinion that has the force of law, and then you can't.

The sufficiently privileged (pretty much by definition) don't have to worry about this much, but say the bubble pops. Are you sure your savings account will last long enough for it to re-inflate? Because if it doesn't, it suddenly matters a great deal where the people who wrote your state laws stand on the question of personal responsibility.

Be warned that only finance-related jobs tend to be downtown; most "Chicago" cost center IT jobs are in low-rise office parks around Chicagoland sprawl and are an hour or more away from the city under normal traffic conditions.

Wow. Imagine if he hadn't gotten access to the forum and preempted the police call.

What happens to the crews of these ships? Can they leave? How? Who pays to transport them to shore? Under what authority are they permitted to walk on shore?

Office and factory workers of a suddenly-derelict company can walk off the premises and go home. Imagine finding out that not only will the paychecks stop, you also can't leave your desk.

It was mine.

To be fair, I think there is a tier of elite institutions which primarily attract the prestige/wealth crowd (Ivy League, etc), and a tier just below them in rankings which attract the nerds who want to do hard intellectual work.

The allowances made for hackers and amateurs in both radio and aviation are pretty incredible. If either of those things were invented today, there's no way the amateur radio or private pilot licensing programs would exist.

Food for thought. We have these programs because the hacker/maker/tinkerer community was at one point pretty good at lobbying. We'll lose them if we don't keep up.

Highly selective colleges are the mother ship. When the handful of isolated gifted students are plucked out of their widely dispersed high schools and collected in one institution, one dorm, it's incredible. People feel home for the first time.

>designs that reduces availability.

It's a slimy abuse of language to call a service "available" when it's giving incorrect output and corrupting its persistent state.

I can write a program with lots of nines that is blazingly faster than its competitors if its behavior is allowed to be incorrect.