zukzuk

If you're insinuating that progressive politics per se somehow inevitably lead to crime and urban decay, have a look north of the border.

What passes for centrist politics up here in Canada's major cities would make Berkley look like a conservative stronghold (at least in terms of economic policy... maybe we lag behind in biodynamic freegan wine co-ops). Yet Toronto and Montreal are by far the safest large cities on the continent. We absolutely have the same kinds of problems — homelessness, poverty, inequality — but our "socialist" welfare safety net and public healthcare have so far kept us out of the dystopian mess that seems to be unfolding in the US.

I understand it has no sense of knowledge-of-knowledge, so (apparently) no ability to determine how confident it ought to be about what it's saying — it never qualifies with "I'm not entirely sure about this, but..."

I think this is something that needs to be worked in ASAP. It's a fundamental aspect of how people actually interact. Establishing oneself as factually reliable is fundamental for communication and social cohesion, so we're constantly hedging what we say in various ways to signify our confidence in its truthfulness. The absence of those qualifiers in otherwise human-seeming and authoritative-sounding communication is a recipe for trouble.

We are obviously not going to meet all of our energy needs — especially for certain high-demand applications — from solar and wind alone, but there are some significant advantages to a decentralized power grid that the pro-nuclear folks don't seem to factor into their arguments. Assuming we can build it out, a decentralized grid ought to be much more resilient to the sort of problems France is facing right now.

The cryptocurrency bubble was very transparently built on delusion and avarice, and everyone involved knew it. There are very few truly innocent victims here.

And that symbolism — as seems to be the case with just about anything with any semblance of symbolic value nowadays — has become politicized and polarized, which in turn has further elevated straws' symbolic value for both sides (there's a "straw man argument" pun here somewhere).

The right is obsessed with how the left is trying to control even the most trivial aspects of everyone's lives, and the left is obsessed with how the right would rather selfishly spew plastic into the environment than to give up even the most trivial conveniences.

This feels like a tension that can exist only in the Twitterverse. I really can't imagine pre-internet society actually having strong opinions about any of this.

*The nutrition profile is a bit more complicated as I think they add enzymes to break down starches in the oats, so you end up with more sugar even though it's not technically "added".

The Champs-Élysées for example is a horrible place to actually spend time in, and is currently undergoing major redevelopment to make it a bit more livable.

The NIMBY theory is probably part of it, but definitely not the full story. For one, Toronto and Vancouver's population density is on par with major european cities (Toronto is about the same as Berlin, and Vancouver same as London). Arguably most european cities have similar affordability problems, but if NIMBYism is an issue, it's not particular to Canadian cities.

My pet theory is it all comes down to money supply. All that money generated out of nothing through quantitative easing over the last decade+ had to end up somewhere, and it's settled in real estate and equities. If that's the case, then the end of QE and "balance sheet pruning" is going to put a stop to this... and likely pop a giant bubble in the process. That's a scary prospect for countries like Canada and New Zealand, where RE has played such a huge part in inflating wealth.

The tl;dr is that there's an almost infinite number of ways to atomize/conceptualize code into meaningful "units" (to "register" it, in my supervisor's words), and the most appropriate way to do that is largely perspectival — it depends on what you care about after the fact, and there is no single maximal way to do it up front.

*We are, however, becoming more and more reliant on dbt, and the article makes a good point about Airflow providing no visibility for what's going on in a dbt node. So we're ending up with an increasingly simpler Airflow dag, with most of the complexity hidden inside a single dbt node.

Even the apologists who previously tried to to explain this in terms urbanization, desirability, immigration, etc have capitulated.

It remains to be seen whether we're just an odd case (along with maybe NZ and a few others), or a canary in the coal mine for our neighbours to the south, but the situation here at this point is virtually guaranteed to end badly for everyone involved.

Not to say that von Neumann lived a happy life — he sounds like a bit of an asshole — but I wonder whether Gödel would have traded his achievements for less isolation and a less tortured existence?

That said, the idea that you can enact change by making "good consumer choices" is probably one of neo-liberalisms greatest, most insidious triumphs. It subverts democratic ideals to make us feel like we have power, while diverting our energy away from pushing for the kinds of systemic changes necessary for meaningful impact on big problem (e.g. putting the responsibility for reduction of plastic pollution on consumers, rather than on manufacturers via legislation).

Great book on this very topic!