I'm inclined to make a snarky comment that it's a poor coffee shop that goes out of business because its customers can afford coffee makers. Target sells them for $20.

But I also don't think a coffee shop just provides brewed drip coffee. For starters, it gives inexpensive access to a clean space where you can meet with your friends or just get out of your apartment. How much would someone's rent rise if they needed to add that extra space? How much work is it to keep your own space ready and inviting for friends? For some, it's too much, and the coffee shop serves them well. Plus, they know how to make all sorts of tasty creative beverages, and stock the ingredients so they're fresh. And you can meet a date there without revealing your home address in case things don't go well. Enough people seem to like these features over Folger's at home to keep them in business.

Oh, I'm not pretending. I'm sure I don't know what "excessive rent" is or why it should be tied to any specific interest rate. So if not knowing those makes me dumb, I'm confidently wearing the dumb hat. If you can't explain these terms, I don't want you to die, but you may want a hat too.

Well-said. Non-HOA neighborhoods can have significant variety, in ways that can affect property values.

Could you please define (mathematical formulas are delightful here) "excessive rent"? Is there a variable in the formula that addresses the risk of loss or property damage, so that a frat house charges a different rate per square foot than a suburban family home? And which interest rate do you consider, the current mortgage rate, the prime rate, or what the bank pays on savings accounts? If the world can come to agreement here on details and terms, I can support it, but without serious specifics, it feels like an empty idea.

I'd rate that statement half true. In some municipalities, almost all housing stock is in HOA neighborhoods. No law compels you to buy there, but in those regions, alternatives are few and far between, pushing you out of the area. Don't want an HOA? You get the longer commute. And that is a perfectly reasonable trade-off for some folks. We can't all have unicorns and jet-cars and 2.5 perfectly-behaved children.

I'll agree that a single vacant business may not deeply affect property values across the neighborhood. And I understand that the property owner is worried that he'll sign a lease for a low amount, and miss out on some sweet sweet money. But he may also be like the former high school quarterback who's dreaming of the old glory years instead of being business-savvy. That's not a free market failure, but an ego failure.

When you own property (on which you are paying annual property taxes at a minimum), it's a losing investment unless you either use it yourself, rent it out or sell it. In the long run, he may make money by selling it years from now. But why he's not renting it in the short run seems bizarre. The honest assessment would be: if people go out less, then brick-and-mortar businesses can't earn as much, so property rents on average should fall. Subsidies aren't needed -- the landlord who understands that someone can pay $40/sf but not $50/sf is earning $48K/year on a 1000 sf space, instead of zero. That's free market economics at work.

The point of "blind auditions" was to get rid of unconscious bias and measure solely on merit. We say we want the best musicians, but we're distracted by appearances for some reason. The blind audition is fully defensible as a best practice without reference to any part of the DEI conversation. And I'm glad that the people who make the best-sounding music get the job, period, full stop. I do laugh, though, at seeing the advertising posters for upcoming concerts. When there's a young female classical artist headlining, they are almost invariably dressed as though they are headed to a disco or a fashion show; the men tend to be pictured very studiously and thoughtfully focused on their craft. Compare Joshua Bell and Yuja Wang.

Heh... calls to mind the old warning: "Go away or I shall replace you with a very small shell script."

I would love to be paying $50/month for water. I am currently paying more than twice that, and that's for using under 4 CCF per month for a family and a yard. Our usage is insanely low, but I pay $84/month just to have a connection to the city water system here. I agree that costs rise partly due to government regulation, partly for deferred maintenance, and partly for new requirements. I'll add a couple other things: employee retirement plans and greedy investors. Our Public Utilities Commission seems to rubber-stamp most applications for rate increases, and every single time they plan work to maintain the water system, it seems to come with an irreversible rate increase.

If you can drink saltwater and brackish water, then you don't have to worry. But when people somewhere else can't drink the water there, some of them will come to where you are and overuse your fresh water. Saudi Arabia banned the growing of food for cattle, and instead imports it from farms in Arizona. China gets almonds from California. Since global migration exists, and global food shipments exist, there is at some level a global market for fresh water. There are thoughtful logical ways to take care of this, and if they are not extremely profitable for someone, they might never come to pass.

Left out of the article is the emissions cost of manufacturing a new aircraft. Yes, per mile, the older ones are less efficient. But making new airplanes is far from emissions-free. And the article acknowledges there's a serious backlog in orders; companies who want planes are having to wait for them. So unless there are serious proposals for how to expand the airline manufacturing industry, the article is not going to lead to any change in emissions.

I see at least two reasons for the press to report layoffs and not hiring.

1. "If it bleeds, it leads." Long before social media, newspapers focused on articles that engaged and got your attention. And we as humans tend to be more engaged with stories of extremes and unusual situations, especially tragedies. People are naturally risk-averse. Layoffs fit the narrative of what interests us to read.

2. The easiest way to win a race is if nobody knows you're racing them. Businesses don't announce big hiring sprees to chase tricky problems or corner new markets; they announce the release of a product or service after months of hiring, development, and testing. So if a company lays off 1000 on one team that they think is going nowhere, and hires 1000 for a new project, the government requires them to disclose the layoffs, but the company keeps the hiring a secret as long as it can.

You can find counter-examples, but the general rule holds.

The article and commenters agree: creating an AI to answer probate questions is tricky, unreliable, takes a lot of resources, and can cause serious problems when it gives wrong answers. So how about approaching the problem from a different angle: simplify probate laws.

We all know that's easier to say than to do, but ask yourself if it's easier than creating an accurate and reliable AI. When your people can't understand the laws and the processes they're required to live under, maybe the solution is to change the laws rather than build another appendage on top of it all. Plus, if you can host the FAQ on a web page instead of continually monitoring a LLM for injection attacks, the state can save a lot of money and resources that can go to solving other problems.

It's not likely they had to do something unique for each camera; they probably hit one or more central master databases. That's the problem with cloud-based things: there's a very tempting attack surface that's outside your control. What stands out to me is that, after reviewing the outputs of these 120,000 cameras to find anything interesting, they found under 1200 videos (an average of 1 video per 100 cameras x who knows how many hours of footage), and the thieves got paid between $20 and $45 per video. For something that invasive, it doesn't look lucrative.

I agree my friend and their job opportunity are not average. But you said "Nobody in the real world." That part is wrong. And if you're researching NYC, you know that I-Banking pays far better than Accounting.