RestlessMind

This is a case where NIMBYs seem to have a point - those who love the new promenade are not the ones paying the cost, whereas nearby homeowners are suffering the increased congestion and reduced home prices.

I was confused by the same when I first came to the US. Had spent my entire life in big cities until then. My American friends explained to me that in a suburbia, apartment buildings or public transportation is used only by poor people. Homeowners do not want them nearby because of the assumption of associated poverty with increased crime.

Which supports parent comment's thesis - disparities in outcomes are not about funding, rather about the students and more importantly their families.

> implementing that is complex and fallible ... but so is everything

not really. VAT is popular because it is straightforward to implement and hard to evade unless someone is outright cheating.

> it won't [put large landlords out of busine-]

It won't. But like any complex regulations, it will give large landlords an upper hand over smaller ones. Large ones have economies of scale to rely upon (eg. one dedicated lawyer to deal with govt for 100 properties). Will just worsen the inequality.

> That does not justify forcing everyone around you to do the same

Literally that's why I wrote: "I know some people who strictly prefer fully remote setup. Over time, I think companies and employees will self sort themselves into those who prefer office vs those who prefer remote. That should work out for most of us."

“ The benefits of sitting together, collaborating in person, and solving problems as a team are clearer than ever in our post-Covid world.”

100%. Speaking only for myself, I was fully remote for a few years and that was a miserable experience. Now everyone is mandated to be in office 3 days a week and that works better for me. Uber is going one step further and structuring teams to be colocated with their manager. That solves the problem of team members distributed across multiple offices, which is still a real pain point in the hybrid model.

I know some people who strictly prefer fully remote setup. Over time, I think companies and employees will self sort themselves into those who prefer office vs those who prefer remote. That should work out for most of us.

> And that issue is exacerbated in the U.S. with the worst parental-leave policy among developed nations.

NYC's TFR was 1.55 in 2021. London's TFR was 1.35 in 2024. Paris TFR was 1.27 in 2024. Other US cities are not really comparable to the European ones, but the broader point is that parental leave has nothing to do with TFR. Norway and Sweden have TFRs around 1.44 while the US has it 1.6-1.8

> it's more like "having a child could cost me my high-paying job so I better not"...having a child is an opportunity cost in an urban environment

At least in the US and speaking generally, people with high incomes in urban areas move to suburbs once they have kids. I would like to see a citation for your "opportunity cost" claim, because high income jobs also come with good benefits like generous parental leave policies.

> and it was far more productive than anything that happens in a 20 minute drive by car

It seems you haven't discovered podcasts yet :)

Point is that if wokism was so great and so popular, one of its most famous proponent who is eyeing a 2028 presidential run would not be running away from it. Woke 1.0 was a miserable failure and a lot of people have grasped that by now.

Why does left have to fall for that every time?

> The underlying technology enablers are from companies like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, TSMC, Micron, all sorts of ISP/cell providers, etc

And they exist because of demand from the consumers. All those providers have no incentive to invest and upgrade their offerings if there is no demand. Said otherwise, without the likes of YouTube and Whatsapp video chat (and many other ad-funded social media apps), we would be stuck in 2010-era infrastructure.

> You don't need a centralized service for video calls.

Need is a funny word. You need a centralized effort to enhance the user experience of video calls which is very expensive. And very companies have resources to pull that off and offer a great experience for free. Only 3 I can think of - Google, Facebook, Apple (via Facetime). Only Apple is not ad-funded and they keep it to their devices only which is for rich people. Ad-funded products at least made it available to the entire populace.

> The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.

I gave you a counter-example to your thesis about Youtube Premium which was offered at a reasonable price. Its failure shows that predatory pricing is an excuse - real reason is that people simply prefer to not pay.

your comment is irrelevant and in fact contradictory in the context of the parent comment I was replying to: "if people don’t want to pay for a thing, it’s probably not worth a whole lot "

What is "worth" is ultimately decided by the market.

What should be allowed, like sacrificing children, is decided by the society. Two very separate topics.

> when the right wing co-opted the term, as they tend to do with all leftist terms, and it became simply another pejorative

Even AOC is now running away from woke 1.0 and admitted that there was a lot of craziness. That says a lot.

> because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap

underlying technology doesn't materialize out of thin air though. Google and Facebook have invested lots of dollars and engineering hours into making Youtube or Whatsapp video a seamless smooth experience for billions of users. That's why the technology seems cheap now. Early on, there were big concerns about Youtube profitability.

> it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful

Again, thanks to Android which was funded indirectly by ads.

> c.f. bittorrent

That is plain old theft.

> And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.

Curating partners have economies of scale. That's how you get Youtube. And for self publishing, you can see that most of the "self publishers" on internet are at the mercy of adtech giants (Google and Facebook) for distribution.

> destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service

That's why I cite Youtube premium. Google offered an ad-free option at a fair price and yet hardly anyone wants to pay for that.

> it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day

Apparently, they have 3B MAUs and 2B DAUs. So you are in some real bubble. While I don't use it, my parents and all their friends use Facebook to share pictures and exchange messages.

That's for people and businesses to decide. Market clearly values Facebook a lot, over a trillion dollars in fact.

> by now we'd probably have widespread p2p video chat

we still have it. WhatsApp video chat is the most widely used video chat app.

> we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area

Skype was barely present on mobile and got acquired by Microsoft before Mobile took off. Then it was as good as dead. So we have in fact progressed massively that anyone in Asia with a crappy handset and a decent connection can still have a video chat with anyone else in the world.

> Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period

And world would be so much better if no one was greedy. The fact is that we have not retained original copyright period and the reasons are beyond adtech, so what are you gonna do about it? Also, that doesn't solve the problem of long-tail content which is massively entertaining.

> The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology

Lol wut? Try running your own Youtube and you will discover massive technical problems (storage, network bandwidth, content moderation, discovery etc).

> Ads enable market capture

Google tried YT premium and look at its adoption numbers. It starts at 89 INR in India (less than a USD) and yet its adoption is minimal. 89 INR is cheap for at least a few hundred million Indians. People simply prefer ads over paying up.

> what do you mean by woke?

There are two parts - one which most of us would support (being against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) and one which most of us would oppose (defund the police, abolish ICE, trans women in sports, DEI quotas and promoting people because of their race or gender, etc).

Woke 1.0 lumped both of those buckets together and faced an appropriate backlash which resulted in Trump's reelection.

> The point is that a crowd doesn't always have a right answer... > popular opinion can be wrong

By that logic, all the laws, regulations and norms would possibly be meaningless. So if we were to ignore those, we all would descend into anarchy.

> A morality by plurality is arbitrary and non-universal

In fact, a majority of popular support is a necessary (may not be sufficient) condition for morality of a society. Something is not considered moral if it is not supported by most of the members.

> society A vs society B

irrelevant. Morality based laws in a society generally consider morality only of that society. That's why we have the notion of sovereignty.

> What criteria would allow for someone to "deserve" death?

As a framework - death penalty should be legalized when a majority members of the society support that as a punishment.

When applying that framework - it should be applied for the cases beyond any reasonable doubt.

Once you agree on these principles, all other details can be easily negotiated.

> move to a cheaper city or country for retirement if your house goes up in price

What kind of life experience would lead to such a conclusion? It's almost like you have no idea what a community is - with one's friends, neighbors, familiar shops, clubs, church etc. Money is not everything in life. Any policy which forces people in their late 60's to uproot and go somewhere else to rebuild their lives is bound to face a very angry backlash. A mindset like yours is why we got prop 13 here in California.

"If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?" - Westworld