thomas_howland

That ignores the role of actual social networks and social proof in the construction of consensus reality. "Our" AI says it's real, and "your" AI says it's fake, and one can debate the margins - just as one debated whether it was metaphysically true that Clinton didn't have "sexual relations" with Lewinsky, or that Bush "lied" about Iraq.

The other thing is that because of CAFE standards, there is convergent evolution towards maximally aerodynamic blobs.

The point is that after you have requested a lawyer they are obliged to refrain from questioning you.

It appears by "safety concerns" the author means "right wingers might be able to chat on the platform". I'm not sure Discord wants to put themselves in the position of weaponizing their platform to suppress particular kinds of private political speech.

Depending on how underwithheld you are, you can avoid tax underpayment penalties.

Be less sensitive. The role of manichaeism in art is underappreciated.

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

Approximately zero of those are unlawful. "Off-year elections"? Really?

A high vote count is not an unmitigated good.

Single family homes are historically how populations insulate themselves from the consequences of the policies the NYT advocates. On a macro scale, they're a defensive architecture. They make your neighborhood expensive enough that the population is (by selection) wealthy enough to ensure sufficiently low crime rates and sufficiently Good Schools, with enough geographic buffer to survive natural population movements.

Not that surprising; can you recognize random Bollywood stars?

Exactly. "We don't store your picture, we store an abstracted entity that allows us to recognize your picture in the future." The latter part is what people are concerned about anyway - the abstracted representation of "their face", not some particular photograph.

There is also the fact that Tesla purchasers tend to be from high socioeconomic classes, even more so than the baseline (extremely predictive) education / occupational category / credit score triptych would indicate. Most insurance risk predictors map directly to SES.

Source? Noncompetes are disallowed in CA, and federal (and probably state) law prohibits a ban on employees sharing salary information amongst themselves. But AFAIK there is no direct prohibition on a contractual obligation not to disclose salary to a third party. You could of course be cute and merely disclose 1040 income or somesuch.

How is "software to run dollar stores" different from generic retailing software?

It's far from "government barely existing". They exist in minimal form solely to extract resources from any remaining piece of value in the city. Eg:

"Then earlier this year, he got a letter saying 333 Midland wasn’t up to code and it would have to cease operations immediately. He took care of the minor matters the fire marshall requested, like installing exit signs and extra fire extinguishers. But he still can’t get a clear answer from the building inspector about what else needs to be taken care of"

Hand-harvestable-only crops like lettuce and tomatoes. Basically the CA Central Valley.

We are absolutely not. Productive farmland in the USA is fairly expensive and farmers are extremely interested in preserving its value. Most "destroyed" topsoil is due to eg suburban developments spreading into former agricultural areas, but it's still minimal in the grand scheme of things.

The amount of labor involved in grain crops like barley per dollar of output is minimal already - the guy running the tractor/combine/etc is mostly making sure nothing breaks and keeping an eye on things (which is important when you're operating $N00,000 worth of heavy equipment on open ground). You do need guys, however, for when things do go wrong, and for all the other farm tasks (equipment maintenance, fencing, maintaining irrigation, and so on).

So do most contractors.

There is a huge difference between taking a loan "on someone's behalf" (as their representative, eg by someone with power-of-attorney) versus via impersonating them. The former is rare but legitimate; the latter is fraud.

This is very silly. FFLs are already prohibited from selling to abusive spouses (if there is any sort of domestic violence conviction or restraining order) and the mentally ill. They also reserve full rights to decline any sale, which they do regularly with people who seem unbalanced or give indication they're intending on misusing the weapon. Seriously, try to buy a rifle with a swastika sharpie'd on your forehead and see how many gun shops you get ejected from.

I don't see this in terms of whether tech co's should "ban hate speech". I see it in terms of whether they should decide to turn themselves and their employees into political targets, especially in the context of escalating political violence and willingness by political actors to go after oppositional infrastructure (cf, hostility towards left wing journalists).

Con Ed doesn't have this problem and manages to make tons of money, despite providing power to I assume some number of literal nazis.

Temporarily at best. They have been active targets for Dem takeover for decades and absent massive population shifts the demographics will fairly shortly ensure that occurs.

I would be extremely annoyed if my mortgage or credit card company actually tried to foist some advise on me.

Credit scores are loose proxies for a conscientiousness score (which is why they correlate with all sorts of useful stuff like likelihood you're going to wreck an apartment, get in a motorcycle accident, or abscond with the till). However there is ample psychological research indicating that you can locally boost conscientiousness with a variety of techniques, mostly involving continual follow up, breaking compliance into small steps, and reminding of the benefits of compliance via frequent positive reinforcement. (It's fair then to ask if this really counts as "conscientiousness" per se given that level of intervention, or a more abstract measure of task completion).

It seems like this fund is using this to its profit. Good for them. It does almost seem, given that level of investment in the actual enterprise, like equity or some sort of hybrid instrument better represents the risk of the investor & the amount of effort they're putting into seeing the ventures succeed.

(Incidentally, this pretty solidly mirrors the approach to high-risk students of basically saturating them with life coaching, which seems to work pretty well as long as you can actually invest that level of resources continuously).

All of the above, plus VCs likely worried about giving excuses for being targeted by sexual harassment claims.

Taxing "robots" is silly, mostly because it's impossible to define what a "robot" is in a remotely non-distortionary way or that doesn't require a horde of accountants to argue out.

Taxing "capital", by its monetary value, is much easier, and has a similar effect of promoting labor substitution. It's also universally despised by economists for the obvious reason that accumulating capital increases the return to labor under most models and makes everyone wealthier.

Of course California state politics are notoriously dumb, so who knows what'll happen.

Every time I see basic internet infrastructure experiencing issues, my default is to think about who is testing a new cyberweapon or censorship mechanism. BGP has been known as trust-reliant for a while.

The wrecking bar also works great at deterring free riders.

A 10 AM Bay Area earthquake is the highest plausibility * severity event you're likely to experience around here on a day to day basis - leaving some people with a 25 mile commute back to a structure that might or might not be standing, intermittent at best communications, and potentially impassible roads.

IMO if you don't have a case of water, a road map, and a change of walking-around clothes in your car around here, you're asking for smiting. Fortunately that's about $10 in total, and you can drink the water even if there's not an earthquake.

Additionally, near everything that would be handy in case of an earthquake (gloves, pry bar, basic trauma supplies, etc) is useful in case of a car crash, which actually is far more likely.