I think it’s largely just that people just don’t want to live near poor people, because they think they have bad culture/values/behavior, and will be risky to live near.
Based on comments I’ve seen at city council meetings about this stuff, there’s also some aspect of feeling like infrastructure is already overstressed, traffic is already bad, etc, which is largely an artifact of car-centric development patterns being incredibly wasteful/inefficient, and capping out at relatively low densities. But the existing development pattern is usually not a good fit for mass transit - the utilization is usually too low.
I think the California approach of aggressively upzoning near public transit is pretty good, except that it might cause resistance to public transit expansion.
This kind of thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when all the poor people get crammed into one place.
Singapore does it right by having high quality housing which happens to have a certain amount subsidized for lower income people. You get a mix of incomes and not a slum.
A lot of California's housing development also incentivizes this type of arrangement: permitting can be fast-tracked and local NIMBYs can be steamrolled if a development allocates some, but not all, of the development to be designated as affordable.
Yeah, no argument. I think many in the US want the bar to be higher, though - many want expensive single family housing to be the minimum in their area, apartments would be too affordable, even unsubsidized.
Yep, with video games, we started with SNES and have been slowly moving higher fidelity. We've got a VOIP landline for the kids, as well as a CD player. It's been working pretty well. For computing, they have a desktop Raspberry Pi 400 running Raspbian, terminal-centric setup.
I wouldn’t trade the hours I spent with a group of friends in front of a n64, and a handful of multiplayer games (shooter, fighting, and racing). It was us 4 to 8 kids for 2 controllers. While I play a handful of PC games and have a console, there’s nothing better than a good living room session.
Yeah for sure, we've been mostly focused on couch co-op as we've started adding a few Steam games to the rotation - Brotato and Castle Crashers are big favorites, along with the more modern Minecraft Dungeons, a really simple couch co-op action RPG. It's been awesome, the neighbor kids drop by whenever, and it's been making some great memories as they pull through by the skin of their teeth.
Also got an Analogue 3D recently, it's been awesome digging out my old n64 collection and showing them the classics, while still having new controllers without stick slop, and HDMI so I don't have to fiddle with a bunch of converters.
I'm not making this up to make excuses for the US' behavior. Pax Britannica and Pax Romana weren't entirely peaceful either. Pax Romana had an unusual absence of civil war, but near-constant conflict at the edges of the empire. Pax Britannica refers to the absence of wars between great powers, but did have some brutal colonial conflict - the Opium wars, scramble for Africa, etc. Pax Americana has been very peaceful compared to WW1 and 2.
I think it’s less about loyalty to the US and more about the fact that loved ones in adversarial countries are pressure points those countries can push on.
Or governance of large organizations... There are a huge number of factors to consider, counterfactuals, studies, lots of non-obvious second and third order effects, etc. We're barely able to get basic governance without creating huge problems (low density zoning rubber stamped across the nation creating a housing crisis, for example), so the bar isn't high.
We pay CEOs an enormous amount because a small improvement in performance of an org because of them can make a massive difference in organizational value.
It is one of the most eye opening pieces of media. Especially the French and Russian Revolutions are covered in such great detail, while staying interesting. I also loved the appendix to the show where Mike talked about "patterns" in a revolution. Learned a lot about the relationship between the government and its people.
Yeah, for me, Revolutions and The History of Rome are two of the best examples of "this is why knowing history is useful", and that history isn't actually boring - it's basically a highlight reel of some of the highest human dramas. Mike Duncan put out some incredible work.
It's never been a good way to get things done, but when you block off every other venue for change people will be much more willing to take a chance on a high risk option. Violent revolutions aren't usually the first thing people try.
Democracies that arise by nonviolent revolution, do so in part due to the threat of what comes next if the nonviolent revolution is crushed. Because if you make sure placards and petitions don't work, it eventually won't be placards and petitions anymore.
'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable', and all that.
Yeah, I get that it's a useful threat to back up the nonviolent options. I just don't think Americans have tried the nonviolent options wrt economics with any amount of real effort yet, and it's worrying/annoying to see people jumping to the nuclear option as soon as they personally hit a rough patch or start getting scared of one.
When I've gone to local government meetings, I've generally been one of only a few without gray hair. The vast majority of working-age people seemingly can't be bothered to learn the basics about who's running in a non-presidential election, let alone go argue for the boring but extremely impactful things that would actually help people out.
People need to put down the phones and put in some actual effort on fixing things before even jokingly advocating for something that would almost certainly be a mass casualty event. It's shameful.
Everyone remembers Malcolm X, but does anyone remember the names of the thousands of civilians who protested the Iranian regime and got summarily executed?
Resistance doesn't work very well against highly militarized autocratic regimes.
And can 'most people' even afford most of these services? Having seen some people's spend, even a $200/month plan has me questioning why I'd spend $200/month on Anthropic products when $200/month would be a substantial chunk of my housing as a blue-collar class IT worker just to survive.
You don't need a $200/mo plan, that's for people chewing through Opus tokens with multiple instances of Claude Code going in parallel. My impression is that most people just use the free ChatGPT tier, or $20/mo at most.
I think I'm already real? The main reasons for inflation, outside of computer components, are related to the fact that we're near the end of a long-term debt cycle. Look at demographics and monetary/fiscal policy. This is just the scapegoat du jour for long-term structural issues.
Stability in the job market seems to mean stagnation in the long term. That's fine in the short run, but eventually, you're Germany/France and major pillars of your economy are cornered and in trouble. Personally, I think the move is total at-will employment paired with UBI rather than the heavy-handed employer regs that those countries have for stability, and I think that's where we're going to have to go if job losses really start materializing.
Low paid humans have been pumping out low quality SEO slop full of misinformation for at least the last 15-20 years, it’s not much different. If anything, the quality is probably somewhat higher.
Yep, skimming the cream of the world is the engine of US dominance. We generally got some of the most highly motivated people, because it takes a lot of work and determination to uproot your life.
There used to be a bipartisan agreement that a US advanced degree should come with a green card stapled to it. Even Trump: “You graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country."
It’s cheaper and faster to make in volume. It doesn’t require nearly as much shielding, because it’s less fragile, which saves a lot of weight. The engine itself is lighter. And on top of that, it develops more thrust, at higher fuel efficiency.
The net result is cheaper and lifts significantly more mass to space, which significantly drops the cost per kg to orbit.
It already worked, they’re making it much better, and getting it ready for a level of mass production that we’ve never seen anything close to in the space industry, even from SpaceX. They are much more ambitious than I think people who haven’t been watching them closely understand. The US grid is 1.4 TW of generation, they’re aiming to put up 1 TW of AI compute every year. Maybe they’ll stop well short of that, but their stated goal is insanely ambitious.
Based on comments I’ve seen at city council meetings about this stuff, there’s also some aspect of feeling like infrastructure is already overstressed, traffic is already bad, etc, which is largely an artifact of car-centric development patterns being incredibly wasteful/inefficient, and capping out at relatively low densities. But the existing development pattern is usually not a good fit for mass transit - the utilization is usually too low.
I think the California approach of aggressively upzoning near public transit is pretty good, except that it might cause resistance to public transit expansion.
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