Comment Re:Being too wealthy really is sociopathic (Score 1) 174
Calling this out, show me. Also show me an economist that measures economic output by where people happen to live and not where they work.
What exactly? The tax return information is available from the IRS. Cross-reference it with Census district zoning.
Also show me an economist that measures economic output by where people happen to live and not where they work.
So offices create value, not people in them? Do a mental experiment: replace offices with remote work. How much value remains?
And yet the major cities are in a housing crisis because so many people want to live there. Square that circle for me please.
No. Around 80-85% of people would prefer to live in single-family homes. People instead are forced by economics to live in dense areas that are designed to be hostile for humans (bike lanes instead of roads, forced public transit, no good grocery stores forcing people to eat junk, etc.)
Comment Re:Cops were actually well behaved, shockingly. (Score -1, Troll) 128
Probably because he's a middle aged white guy. Swap him out for a black guy and I suspect the outcome would be a bit less cordial.
Police are statistically less likely to harm Black people during an arrest.
Comment Re:Being too wealthy really is sociopathic (Score 1) 174
Urban cores subsidize suburbs
This is simply false. Most of the US wealth is generated in suburbs. Or perhaps you think that companies are people?
Urban cores steal from suburbia by taxing company offices that are located in urban cores. But if you look at PERSONAL tax returns, suburbia is clearly funding the lifestyle of urban cores. And as usual, welfare queens always think that they're actually the hardest-working and deserve all they get.
Oh, just "dis-aggregate" (whatever that means) the foundation of human civilization.
Yeah, let's instead force people into 15-minute neighborhoods. With barbed wire and fences, so they won't dare to go out.
Why they may ask?
Cheaper housing, better jobs, more space for kids, better entrepreneurship, better general outcomes. There's simply nothing that urban cores can offer in these areas.
Comment Re:Being too wealthy really is sociopathic (Score 1) 174
The houses themselves tend to be more expensive because they tend to be larger. But the _services_ do NOT significantly differ in cost!
The problem is that construction and maintenance in cities is FREAKING EXPEN$$$$IVE. For example, Greater Houston Area is mostly suburban and has similar population as NYC. Yet GHA spends 2.5 _times_ _less_ per capita. If you look at specific services, it's a wash. Police is slightly cheaper in suburbs, sewer is more expensive, water is similar, electricity is cheaper.
If you're a local government trying to figure out how to house 100 families for the next 30 years, for example, it will definitely be cheaper to throw down a few 3-5 story apartment buildings than to build 100 single family homes. Especially if land in your area is expensive.
Nope. It's cheaper to ban all commercial construction larger than 2 stories and just shoot everyone who proposes densification.
Comment Re:Being too wealthy really is sociopathic (Score 1) 174
Why is rent so expensive in NYC/LA/Chicago/Seatle/SF etc etc?
Because of toxic urbanism. Large cities subsidize the large companies by offloading externalities (costs of living) on population.
Are you a progressive leftist? This is their bad argument!
No. Leftists are morons. And you're right about the location: we need to dis-aggregate cities to make other locations viable.
Comment Re:Being too wealthy really is sociopathic (Score 1) 174
Yes, that's a problem, particularly as they keep getting further and further away from the urban core they depend on to sustain themselves.
Another way to look at it: city cores became so toxically dense that they force people to live in misery, because it's their only option. In other words: the country is getting strangled by bike lanes.
Why would it matter if I can't look it up? Nationwide? In a particular state? In a particular local region (where it actually matters)?
Nationwide. There are almost 1.10 houses per family, we literally have empty houses decaying right now because nobody lives there.
Comment Re:Being too wealthy really is sociopathic (Score 0) 174
And of course the homeless people in the urban cores are partially an outcome from suburban living becoming the mainstay.
Bullshit. Suburbans are the CHEAPEST way to construct housing. And we have so many homeless because we _stopped_ constructing new suburbs.
Can you tell me without looking it up, how many housing units per family do we have right now?
Comment Have you done it with two layers at the same time? (Score 2) 108
Comment Re:Media literacy would be better (Score 1) 134
"the difference between a story originating from the Guardian or some Russian bot-farm..." But how much difference is there? The Guardian is just a bot farm staffed by humans following a party line. Or they have been humans, though increasingly it seems like they too may be largely bots.
Yes, this is what the government has in mind. The Guardian, BBC and other certified righteous outfits would have to come at the top of searches. Other misinforming broadcasters like GBNews would come at the bottom with the Russian bot farms or not appear at all.
The faked news clips of Trump that the BBC broadcast would be at the top of the searches, and the stories that GBNews carries pointing out how they were faked would not feature at all.
This would be 'Verified Live', and challenging it would be misinformation. It would be sort of like the gender mafia at the BBC, but on a national scale.
And as a late great anti-psych writer once wrote: if you cannot talk about it, you cannot talk about the fact that you cannot talk about it. VPNs would be next, and pretty soon after that it would not be permitted to mention that there are such things. The Great Wall of Britain, Chinese media control with British characteristics. To protect people, or course.
Comment Re:Reminder that the BBC is funded with coercesion (Score 1) 134
The license fee is taxation tied to supporting one particular broadcaster. Its a government imposed tax on watching live TV from any broadcaster.
If you want an analogy from the cases you cite, it would be if you had to pay a tax on every newspaper purchase, whose proceeds were handed on to the Guardian. And if it were a criminal offence to read any newspaper without paying this tax. Go into a library, and you cannot read the papers without producing a paid permit. Go into a newsagent, and you cannot buy a paper without producing it.
Or it would be like a tax on shopping at any supermarket, whose proceeds went to Tesco. You would have to have a paid supermarket permit to allow you to shop at, for instance, Sainsburys or any other supermarket, and the proceeds would be given to Tesco, and it would be a criminal offence to shop at any supermarket without buying such a permit.
Or, put it another way, you would have to have a paid permit to drive a car, any car. The proceeds would be paid to Ford.
Still strikes you as reasonable? Still think its good value? For who is it good value? Its good value for all the people who like the BBC and would subscribe to it were subscription voluntary. Its good value because the other half of the country, or maybe more, are subsidizing them.
Its the great liberal tradition. Get something we want, then make everyone else pay for it whether they want it or not, call it 'public service xyz', then claim its great value. Because the fee, paid by everyone including all those who do not want or use it, is lower than the fee for, for instance, Sky. Which is only paid by those who want to watch it. So no wonder its cheaper.
Its like if beer from one brewer, every pint, half the cost was paid out of taxation, and they all go around saying what great cheap beer this is. Yes, because the whole country is paying half on every pint drawn, whether they drink it or not.
And then, immune from commercial pressures, the BBC goes around unaccountable and systematically making up fake news, and there is nothing you can do about it, if you want to watch any kind of live TV at all.
A garbage system. No wonder the French have dropped it.
Comment Re:Oracle could still shed about 30/40% of it's or (Score 3, Funny) 40
Oracle is extremely over-staffed.
You know that it's not true! They're extremely understaffed in their legal department, they don't have enough lawyers to sue their customers for license violations.
Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 264
If you don't know this, perhaps you should go back and do some more study?
Comment Re:Yes (Score 2, Insightful) 264
ADHD stimulants absolutely do not work as _enhancers_, as your article explains. But they are not used as enhancers, they are used as medicine to fix problems. As another example: vitamin C does pretty much nothing normally, but if you have scurvy, it's life-saving. Here's an important quote from your article:
ADHD undergraduates are capable of performing just as well in college as their non-ADHD peers, if they acquire well-established effective study habits
Which basically says: "ADHD drugs are not needed if you can fix all the symptoms of ADHD without drugs". Well, duh.
Comment Re:More power for my AI overlord (Score 2, Interesting) 101
its a noble effort, but you are posting to an environment where everyone here knows that wind+solar+batteries is cheaper than gas or coal, because the wind and the sun are free, and they have no fuel costs. They also know that the only people who are skeptical about this are climate deniers.
These deniers keep talking about something called Net Present Value and claiming that is the correct way to evaluate and compare costs of generating systems. Net Present Value is a concept you will find in all kinds of Corporate Finance textbooks, well, do I need to say more? Its hetero-normative, racist, patriarchal and neo-colonial, and probably Islamophobic and transphobic with it and denies indigenous wisdom. Its on the wrong side of history, like coal, gas and nukes. Of course it pretends that wind+solar+batteries is actually a very expensive technology.
Well it would, wouldn't it?