zip1234

That's a good point. Need to stop subsidizing over the road trucking and build more rail. Much more efficient.

It depends on the area. For example a city near me requires 60 feet of road frontage in 90% of the city in order to build a house. Maximum height 30 ft, side setbacks required a total of 15 feet. Front setback required 20 ft. Only 35% of the lot is allowed to be covered by buildings. No ADUs allowed. If the government addressed this problem, there could be a lot more construction.

The government has been subsidizing home construction in the form of mortgage interest deduction, federally insured mortgages, and interest rates. None have helped solve the problem, which is simply that homes are not allowed to be built in areas they are desired. A developer can make a nice efficient design for an attractive building and then go through 3 years of reviews because of zoning and nimbyism and ultimately get nothing built. Solve zoning and housing affordability will massively improve.

What do you mean artificially lower it? Removing zoning restrictions would allow actually building more homes where they are desired. The government does not need to throw money at a problem where the solution is completely free and rather simple.

Really air tight homes sometimes have air quality issues because there is not circulation. There is a reason it is more expensive to build homes like that--it comes with other problems that take specialized knowledge about things like ERVs to build them.

If the US can make it so oil is worthless, that would be a truly useful strategic endeavor from a geopolitics perspective. How many terrible regimes survive because they have money from oil? An abundance of energy should be a great stabilizing force on the world.

There are also public sector unions which appear to only serve a special interest group at the expense of everyone else. Teacher unions are an example--they appear to protect bad teachers, stifle innovation, and it isn't even clear that they are great at getting pay for teachers.

Most likely they will comply like Huawei complies--say they are complying but do the opposite.

I don't think it is quite that they make money selling data--they are selling ad impressions targeted with the data.

My understanding is this is one of the least problematic forms of asbestos. Seems like you are doing the right thing with it although I think it is paintable. If you have asbestos pipe insulation though--that stuff is really bad.

Big cities are not inherently ugly. What makes a big city ugly to you?

There is a definite survivorship bias in buildings. The 'good ones' tend to survive and the horrendous ones torn down. The major problem with brutalist is that it often sacrificed comfort of those using the building. Who wants a building near an outside wall but having no windows?

America is designed to be looked at while zooming by at 50 mph. Auto infrastructure is incredibly ugly and takes up a massive amount of places. If anyone has an example of non-ugly auto infrastructure I would love to see it.

If they reduce cycling, they do in fact prevent that. The old 'nobody cycles so why should we build that' argument is highly persuasive.

These laws 1. make it harder for people to cycle and 2. give motorists a scapegoat when they hit cyclists (a cyclist not wearing their helmet as they were crushed by a 7000lb Hummer).

You say this in jest but truly their should be speed governors on every car. Would do WAY more for safety than any mandatory helmet law for cyclists.

Doesn't really work for small countries.

An SLR is nothing without a great lens. It is the most important part of the camera, more important than APS-C or full frame by a long shot. The lens may cost more than the camera body though...

Do you live in a city?

Reciprocal protectionism is much different than unilaterally doing it. Also, the Chinese gov has clearly taken an aggressive and adversarial stance against the US.

There is no right for foreign governments to have free speech in the US. If they are outside of the US they do not get US rights.

The rule is that if you arbitrarily block American companies then your country gets blocked too. It's called fair competition. If you open your country for American companies that are treated the same as your companies then we will do the same. Otherwise, no. The Chinese government and it's companies should not be treated as American citizens.

Working construction, when I was wasn't there I wasn't thinking about my job at all. Once I left the jobsite I was free.

I know it is different if you are managing a job, but as an average worker it was not too bad.

Many of us are quite familiar with the reliability of humans and have serious concerns about trusting them to make the right decisions in a complex real-world situation.

There are almost 2 million rear end collisions in the US every year. Humans just don't have the reaction times to handle many situations. That is also best case. Many people are distracted while driving.

The goal is not to replace human interaction, it is to replace phone calls and video chat. To make the experience better than those things is not an insurmountable task.

These are all problems that people are working on. There is no reason they cannot be solved.

Tools can be used for this purpose. New tools can unlock new abilities for engineers. I’m not sure if it applies to math but I don’t have any reason why it shouldn’t.

The crazy thing is that there are many fixes for the housing situation that require no spending at all. Just allow construction of housing and it will get built without spending.

Apple and Amazon both show ads and make a lot of money from it. You think Apple's 'privacy' changes are for actual privacy and not to undercut a competitor?

Seems like this is a meaningful contribution to society. As are things like React and Pytorch.