Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Sorry, on mobile now and it's difficult to look up. You can search for the number of arrests and the number of lethal shootings during an arrest by race. Black people have far more interactions with police per capita, but each interaction is less likely to result in death than for other races.

What exactly? The tax return information is available from the IRS. Cross-reference it with Census district zoning.

So offices create value, not people in them? Do a mental experiment: replace offices with remote work. How much value remains?

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.)

Police are statistically less likely to harm Black people during an arrest.

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.

Yeah, let's instead force people into 15-minute neighborhoods. With barbed wire and fences, so they won't dare to go out.

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.

Yes, classic American suburb. And it IS cheaper.

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.

Nope. It's cheaper to ban all commercial construction larger than 2 stories and just shoot everyone who proposes densification.

Because of toxic urbanism. Large cities subsidize the large companies by offloading externalities (costs of living) on population.

No. Leftists are morons. And you're right about the location: we need to dis-aggregate cities to make other locations viable.

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.

Nationwide. There are almost 1.10 houses per family, we literally have empty houses decaying right now because nobody lives there.

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?

Oldie but goodie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

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.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

??? This is pretty common terminology. Enhancers ("performance enhancing drugs") are designed to _enhance_ something above the baseline, not just to merely correct a pathology.

If you don't know this, perhaps you should go back and do some more study?