>The problem is that you need to first saturate the luxury market, then saturate the AirBnB market, and then what is left is "affordable" rental market. The developers usually take a vacation before the third one with all the profits from the first two.

Actually, there's been some good research on building chains, due to data from Scandinavia showing exactly where people move from and to. If you build a luxury apartment, then the person moving into it from a high end apartment opens up that vacancy, which gets moved into from a middle class apartment, and so forth. The net effect of all of this is to say that increasing supply lowers housing prices. Basic econ 101.

> How is the "Left" "working hard to restrict the speech of those who disagree with them"?

The most obvious example is Twitter banning a major newspaper (the NY Post) for weeks for breaking a true story on the president's son in the leadup to the last presidential election, and refused to reinstate their twitter account until they deleted the true story. (https://nypost.com/2020/10/27/twitters-continued-ban-on-the-post-has-no-rhyme-or-reason-only-bias/)

Another example would be Ebay banning people from selling their own copies of Dr. Seuss' To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street (https://fortune.com/2021/03/05/dr-seuss-banned-books-ebay-removes-listings/).

Another example would be Gofundme accepting donations for the trucker protests in Canada and then refusing to give the money to the truckers, and initially saying that they would give the money to other charities instead before backtracking and refunding the donations. (https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/gofundme-backtracks-canadian-trucker-money-fraud-investigation-threat)

Gofundme also refused to release funds donated to Kyle Rittenhouse's defense until after he was found not guilty (https://www.insider.com/gofundme-explains-why-it-removed-kyle-rittenhouse-legal-fees-fundraisers-2021-11)

Academic positions (for both tenure track and adjunct faculty) are increasingly requiring applicants to have DEI statements (https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/other-than-merit-the-prevalence-of-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-statements-in-university-hiring/) with one recent Berkeley tenure track position using it to screen out 75% of applicants before they looked at their academic work.

"Of 893 nominally qualified candidates, 679 were eliminated solely due to insufficiently woke diversity, equity and inclusion statements. In other words, Berkeley used a political litmus test to eliminate over three-quarters of the applicant pool."

If you look at the rubric used, it is insufficient to merely say that you support diversity, treat all students the same, and so forth. To get the highest scores, you must actively lead workshops and teach DEI or run DEI organizations. Since 75% of applicants were filtered out, this means that Berkeley was about to filter out all but the most woke of all applicants, and is hiring professors not primarily on their academic prowess but on their conformance to wokeism.

Pinterest's terms of service include prohibitions on publishing anything that (however they determine it) would "erode trust", prohibit conspiracy theories (however they determine it) of all kinds, and though I do not disagree with them here, anyone who does not agree with the scientific consensus on global warming. (https://policy.pinterest.com/en/community-guidelines)

Yep. These are probably the same people who celebrate Banned Books Week (https://bannedbooksweek.org/) without recognizing the contradiction in their belief system.

Yep. I had a 780 on the math SAT and didn't get into MIT. I called them up to ask why, and they actually looked through my file and said, "Hmm, yes, everything looks pretty good. Interview went well, grades and SAT where we like to see them... yep, you're good. We just get 10 students like you every year and can admit one of them."

>I've never seen a $1 flight. Why is there a floor to ticket prices even though there are ghost flights? It seems like some sort of market manipulation / poisoning.

I flew first class from Zurich to Los Angeles for about $350 in 2019. I am not convinced that even covered the fuel, but that's not the only time I found some ridiculously cheap seats. You just kinda have to look around.

>What is the root cause for this?

The US government. The government insists that it gets a discount on all services, so hospitals simply mark everything up so that they can get marked down. There's too many services in the health care market to negotiate each one, so it's typically just a certain percentage discount off the chargemaster price that gets negotiated each year. If the government catches you selling services at a lower price to the uninsured, then they will say that's the actual price and demand a discount on that price, so they literally screw over the uninsured with their policies.

Uninsured people have to say they can't pay and then negotiate with collections instead. The entire system is screwed up from top to bottom.

Given the absolute state of Wikipedia, I don't think that Wales has much of a leg to stand on. Democracy only works when people have good character, and Wikipedia editors, especially the ones who engage in extensive never ending edit wars, are not people with good character. A fair number, I wager are shills.

I was engaged in an edit war in which I cited a dozen or so major health organizations on what the definition of something was, and a bunch of people kept deleting it and inventing a definition that wasn't on any of them, but because they outnumbered me, they won (and the bad definition is still up).

Dude should have just bought some shills and outvoted the shills against him, that was his mistake.

Wikipedia is a joke.

Another option: Just keep the current system.

It penalizes people for driving inefficient cars. This will push them into more efficient cars without needing to do anything else.

Then if your revenues dip, raise taxes to maintain the same amount of income.

Passenger cars don't account for hardly any wear and tear on interstates anyway - heavy trucks do.

Yeah, it sounds nice. But the LAO also details all of the hidden costs of people who aren't doctors not being able to live in your town. You can't hire teachers or janitors, child care costs more than college, nice restaurants have trouble staffing, and so forth. It's actually really bad for a community to have astronomical rents.

Yep, NIMBYs have been using it for years to stop housing development, leading to coastal areas in particular building about half the housing we needed, which drove California housing prices through the roof.

Source: CA Legislative Analyst's Office: https://lao.ca.gov/reports/201...

Yep. People don't realize just how bad AB5 was for the freelance journalism industry, basically gutting it here in California. I'm sure all the people who were put out of work were so happy for the benefits they'd have gotten if they had a job, which they didn't.

California Legislators brought Prop 22 upon themselves. As you said, it's unlikely to be a lesson they pay any attention to.

>Typically, billionaires are gonna be billionaires. What are a few lives lost (or severely injured) in the pursuit of even yet just a bit more money?

San Mateo county has a cumulative infection rate of 5.139% (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map)

450 sick workers out of 10,000 Tesla employees is 4.5%.

>When Swisher confronted Musk with the possibility that people would still die in the process, he replied bluntly: "Everybody dies."

This kind of reminds me of the anti-vaxxers talking about all the old people who died in the month after getting a vaccine. Yeah, Musk is right - everyone dies. The real question is if the rate will be significantly higher than otherwise, and in this case it doesn't appear to be the case.

Yes, DMCA. A lot of people had high speed internet already - I had a cable modem then.

The fact that they would abuse takedown notices was an obvious issue we discussed here.

>I don't recall anyone at the time foreseeing the number of totally reckless and occasionally fraudulent claims people would file, often through fully automated means. The DMCA contains no provision for reckless claims - nobody thought that would be a significant problem. Sure if you can PROVE the claim is straight up fraudulent you can sue them. Obviously that's not sufficient because as a factual matter people are not careful to avoid sending improper DMCA claims.

I was also around when the DMCA was being debated, and the fact that there was no penalty for spurious takedown notices was called out as a huge concern, that was dismissed by congress because they wanted to tilt the playing field hard in favor of the RIAA and MPAA.

> Long story short: all they are doing is cashing out the wear and tear on their car.

Sounds like you've never done taxes.

Mileage expenses for wear and tear and gas are all business expenses and come right back off their taxes.

>Take your time driving for these companies, multiply it by $50/hour (actually more to get a decent pay), add $0.58/mile (car expenses) driving for those assholes and THAT is what you should be paid as an independent contractor!

$50/hour for unskilled labor? Sure, buddy.