bufordsharkley

I definitely find trio (formerly curio) to be so thoughtfully designed at every turn; it's dispiriting that it never seemed to gain much of a user share over asyncio (whose main advantage appears to simply be inertia and stdlib privilege)

Advance ticketing (at least, based upon my querying online, I was under the belief that Phillies don't have any sort of will-call in effect with the main MLB ticketing, so I took a tablet to be safe--I was visiting from out of town)

Similar to many live music venues: maybe they have a functional will call, but often it's overlooked/nonoperational/etc, so just using the app is the safe call

I've still never had a smartphone (technically my flip phone, a Kyocera Dura, is an android device, but it can't install apps so I'll consider it suitably "dumb")

Occasionally I need to tote along a tablet because several places (some MLB venues, for one thing) will either require a smartphone, or impose a severe surcharge for the convenience of not using it.

Anyway, I really regret that we didn't impose dumbphone protection laws back when we had a large enough bloc of seniors that didn't "upgrade" to a smartphone yet

I've never been a smartphone user, and have moved from a Flip Camcorder, to various point-and-shoots in video mode (never liked very much), and just in the last 3 years, have discovered that Sony handicams are now pocket-sized, I never considered carrying around one before, but it's actually completely reasonable.

The model (HDRCX405) is wonderful, 30x optical zoom a real value-add over smartphones, but also I just love the ergonomics in general, very easy to pick it up, and start a video within a second.

That said, Sony discontinued the low-end handicam line last year (this model went from $200 new to $800 used), which is really unfortunately, right as I hope this niche might gain momentum.

The search functionality has been mostly broken (in several, overlapping ways) for several years now

I can't speak from personal experience with the Fiio jm21, but I was a big user of a previous generation of Fiio, and while I imagine some technical leaps forward have been achieved with this generation (the Fiio M1 never, for instance, achieved gapless playback from 2015-2021, even though this was promised with every new software version), taking a quick look at it... this is just an android phone interface! App store? Chrome? I certainly don't want this from a dedicated music device

Beyond this, I'd say that the true advantage of the iPod Classic was a matter of polish and UX:

* Dedicated buttons/wheel/etc that are tactile instead of a touchscreen interface (the Fiio M1 was button-and-wheel based, but it never approached the quality of Apple engineering); I see the jm21 has some side-based buttons for pause/forward/back, which is nice, but a touchscreen as main interface still grates * A way to interface with your albums that was delightful and visually dense (Cover Flow remains the single greatest music UI put forward)

It also speaks to what we lose when we lose magazine listings of events (New Yorker effectively gutted this section within the past decade), movie showtime listings via newspaper, etc

We have a very strong archive going back a century until about 2015, but now wading through linkrot circa 2017 is miserable

I remember a 1990s lottery event in which a "buy all combinations" was attempted, but their physical machines they acquired were partially deficient, and they simply couldn't physically acquire enough tickets in time (as the procedure was relatively time intensive), but they still won with something like a 75% probability of success

No, this is a different subject than the article yesterday. That one focused on "what is the overall magnitude of ground rents", this one focuses on "won't the incidence of LVT be passed onto tenants?"

And in 2018, two prominent pro-housing councilpeople got voted out of office (Lenny Siegel and Pat Showalter), returning things to a majority of NIMBY homeowners

The existence of Prop 13, coupled with pyramid-scheme-style approaches to financing municipal pensions, have led to disasters of financing.

One can imagine a better world in which pension programs are effectively time-independent w.r.t financing (neutral for growth or shrinking), and more financing comes from sources that are likely agnostic to growth or reduction (like Land Value Tax), but the politics here... are not trivial.

The reason that land is a good investment is precisely because of future land rents that a land buyer expects to receive.

If these land rents are instead paid towards a tax, how wouldn't this make land less of a good investment?

It's interesting that you jump to "aggressive regulation" or "rent control" instead of the solution that has close to full consensus from the economic profession: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

Even if prices are stable, what makes it the case that the system works so well for those who own land and creates such problems for those who are landless?

We take it for granted that renting is just a form of having your money stolen by landowners, without realizing that this is a choice we make: we could just as easily administer the market so that absentee ownership ceases to be a smart bet.

And to finance things sensibly based upon real revenue flows, not speculative debt drawing on wishful thoughts about future growth.

KFJC achieves more consistency with its music shows, whereas KZSU is more of a grab-bag. Music shows that fill certain niches, experimental talk programs, and other things like sports broadcasts.

It's certain not to give someone a consistent sound that they'll like, but it usually puts out interesting stuff.

KFJC is a tremendous place.

If I may plug KZSU, on Stanford campus, as another college/community radio outlet in Silicon Valley.

...I worry all the time that, owing to the lack of affordable housing for the creative class, and the general lack of culture throughout the Silicon Valley, that there won't be enough energy to support all these radio stations.

If you're curious, don't be afraid to look into joining them! They both take on community members from throughout the area.

Let's say that your town is considering whether to preserve a zoning policy of all single family homes with a large minimum lot size, or is looking to allow density. What would prevent you from supporting the lower-density option?

One reason may be that you are concerned that restricting the development of land would drive scarcity, leading land values to rise (which would cause your property tax to rise). You're effectively forced to pay for the cost of rising land prices.

...Now, if you are sheltered from rising land values, as per Prop 13, you now suffer no repercussions from a downzoning, and in fact may be completely indifferent to how the land market is behaving. Many homeowners are now free to act in their own best interest (which means downzoning), instead of being incentivized to create capacity for more housing.

Not to self-promote too heavily, but I did an episode of my georgism-centric radio show about this very article[0].

Videogames really offer a fun space to explore economic instruments-- treating the real world as a laboratory is a bit more dangerous.

[0] http://seethecat.org/ep/2017-09-12.html

When something is good for the landed and bad for the landless... it's generally bad.

Now, we could reform our policies so that the landless get a fair shot, but realistically, what are the chances of this happening?

This is fair. Anyway, sanctions of this sort are absolutely immoral unless a government is willing to take on all affected refugees, which is very very rarely the case. Human rights abuses are difficult to solve without open borders, but unfortunately open borders are politically infeasible.

Some things are not cut-and-dry. Some are. Something like abolitionism has been justified by history as mere common sense, and an absolutely necessary component of a humane society.

I'm curious how China currently views Sun Yat-sen's "Three Principles of the People"[0], one of which is Democracy. Does his philosophy attract any attention today?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Principles_of_the_People

I don't claim to be an expert on any of this, but it's pretty clear that China is unwilling to deny trade with North Korea, effectively propping up the Kim regime. Kim is engaging in increasingly dangerous provocations (admittedly provoked by the fact that the United States is still fighting the Korean War).

One can offer stability within a democratic framework.

To say that the wholesale slaughter of protesters was necessary to deliver market reform is simply absurd.

It's the kind of thing that isn't obvious at present, at least given most discussions of money, equities, and wealth. But with a different economic paradigm, some of things concepts become more obvious. Henry George was commenting on precisely this some 140 years ago:

http://fortfairfieldjournal.com/mpl_hgeorge_money.htm

1) It can fund revenue for public goods with little to no deadweight loss 2) It targets "unearned wealth" instead of earned income 3) It grows with the growth of a municipal area, allowing for public finance that scales with the demands of a growing city 4) It can efficiently be used to pay for declining cost industries within a municipality (natural monopolies such as public transit) 5) It naturally is compatible with a UBI, insofar as you're merely distributing value which is considered to be commonly owned to all

Construct some building in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the Sahara desert or something, and see if it increases or decreases in value.

The structure itself will depreciate somewhat, and that's all.

...It's the location for a structure that is responsible for increases and decreases in real estate.

For non-personally-owned self-driving cars to catch on, you'd probably have to see an expansion of convenient storage lockers near parking lots.