rangestransform

Volkswagen could’ve bought Tesla for the cost of the dieselgate fines, at the time of fining

Would you say the same thing about Anthropic defining the terms of use of its technology to the military?

You can think of them as the equivalent of the DNC-preferred wing of the democrats

This philosophy is why Windows on ARM is a shitshow and Mac on ARM is a mostly seamless user experience. Microsoft refuses to kick developers to get with the times, whereas Apple doesn’t hesitate to do so, and Windows developers have become all the more lazy for it. Microsoft could really do with regularly breaking private and legacy APIs, and imposing the cost of maintenance onto developers instead of themselves.

The US ideological push for homeownership is what eventually led to the housing shortage that we’re in now. If we tie up a big chunk of the majority’s net worth in their house, of course they’re going to vote for their own net worth going up. Of course they’re going to vote for renters to become their serfs. Of course they’re going to vote for subsidizing housing demand instead of subsidizing housing supply.

We needed a government to crush the majority’s house values yesterday. As a consolation prize, we got ‘08. It sucked investment out of housing, and we got a booming economy.

The average citizen should not own a home and be allowed to vote at the same time. Canada experienced the consequences of a psychotic ideological homeownership push, China dodged it by intentionally deflating property values, the US will pay the price if people keep voting for property values to go up.

Why do you believe that you should be allowed to preserve your present lifestyle in amber at a (very minor incremental) cost to economic prosperity for all of society?

Practically, at the current rate of CO2 emissions we’re going to be needing that electricity to do carbon capture eventually

The buses in SF and NYC suck because of this bipartisan belief of public transit as social welfare rather than a means for the bulk of society to get to their destination. This leads to things like far too many bus stops because granny complained, lack of fare enforcement, high staffing costs, etc. To make the bus as nice as Vancouver, these cities would need to cut stops and do a draconian fare enforcement campaign. For some reason, Canadian bus riders are not ungovernable barbarians like Americans, despite being poorer on average and more diverse.

Will the government pay OpenAI to run an ad-free free tier?

Apple used to do the same thing with TSMC’s newer process nodes, and nobody really complained because people were getting superior products. I happen to like US antitrust enforcement that considers consumer benefit primarily.

Personally, I would not like judgment proof people, who won’t be able to pay the medical bills of anyone they hit, on the roads at all

> but the world has finite resources

we pay our government to point guns at other people, so that resources become their problem and not ours

If we didn’t have stupid regulatory bullshit and protectionism, it would be cheaper to run a data center on solar and batteries in bumfuck Nevada

It should be mind numbingly trivial to stand up a solar farm and ram through some transmission lines in the desert, and mind numbingly hard to set up a temporary gas generator. We needed regulatory exemptions yesterday for clean energy, public transit, and EV charging.

We should have tap in/out in NYC too, it gives another opportunity to catch a fare evader

I chose a MacBook as my laptop last job because my Nvidia drivers kept breaking on my Linux laptop

The pressing issue for mankind is CO2 in particular and not this abstract notion that we ought to be noble savages

No, we will not get to a post oil society by self flagellating like Europe, but by making sustainable options so cheap and plentiful that they displace unsustainable options. (Of course there’s some market intervention and government investment necessary to get there)

One of these days, electricity will be so cheap that we can carbon capture our way back to 0C net warming and fuel flights for every Indian and Chinese with fuel made from CO2. The developing world will accept nothing less than the abundance route to decarbonization.

If ai helping normal people use rich people loopholes cause a government system to collapse, the system deserved to collapse

China prevented the founders from leaving the country

Modern incinerators still get a bad rap even compared to landfill

You can’t reform it because of the immense job loss that would result from an efficiently run public healthcare system. Think about all the useless paper pushers that are allowed to vote

The US could achieve the same thing with a proper migrant labour program

I wish the US could also use migrant labour like Singapore instead of the current system of turning a blind eye to illegal immigration out of necessity

That was what singaporeans were like too when it split off from Malaysia, if enough people wanted to we could beat order and rule of law into the US. The problem is that too much of the US are bleeding hearts who oppose any law that even slightly inconveniences anyone unfortunate, and the other part of the US is stuck in a frontier mentality of the 1800s

Coquitlam is slightly better than American suburbia, I had plenty of parks and restaurants in walking distance, there’s skytrain and BRT now too

Blocking unwanted neighbours with anything is exactly what NIMBYism is, and you could make similar arguments that housing developers are externalizing the burden of e.g. traffic or school capacity while privatizing the profits. Laws that enable arbitrary suppression of whatever the locals don’t like have caused generational damage via racism and now the housing crisis, and we should get rid of them.

I actually really liked uber pool in the Bay Area, talked to some interesting people

The unions will always get in the way of cheap transit construction, see the second ave subway in NYC

The transit-as-welfare idea that pervades the US precludes keeping trains free of antisocial behaviour forcibly as is done in Asia