rndmize

I haven't gotten much use out of my set, but his plan was to run his desktop off it, which sounded very doable. All in all probably not quite the same as Germany (I guess their kits don't need a battery or plug into the wall or something).

This says CA averages spending 42k per year per homeless person, going off the 2022-2021 state budget.

https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...

This says SF is looking to spend 70k per homeless person per year in the next few years (in addition to state spending?). I've seen other pieces that mention SF spending anywhere from 250 mil to over a billion per year on homelessness. I have multiple friends that make less than 70k per year, in CA, and somehow make do. Lack of money doesn't seem to be the issue here.

Odds are good I won't be bothering with Intel hardware or recommending it to others for the next decade or more - this has been a flatly terrible experience (and I'll note the irony of finally deciding to spend on a "dream build" and this being the result).

Consider an environment where a million engineers are all working on their own startups. 99% of them fail and reward the work put into them with nothing. Some subset of the remainder makes barely enough to survive; a smaller subset makes enough to have a successful business; a smaller subset makes millions, and a smaller subset makes the vast majority of the money available. If the effort put into the thing follows a mostly linear line, but the reward is exponential, is this really a good system? Do the people at the top of this structure deserve the wealth they gain, even if they genuinely the best at what they do?

More and more systems today are winner-take-all. Entertainment is notorious for a tiny number of multi-millionaire artists/actors/comedians/etc., while the vast majority of people that try to make it end up with a succession of part-time jobs that never ends. Even if there's no nepotism or corruption, is a system where the people at the top get everything and the bottom gets nothing a good one?

There's something disturbing about PG's take to me - as if only the most successful are deserving, or worthy - that this warped reward structure isn't inherently unjust. It feels like the kind of justifications nobility and royalty relied on, but for modern times - "I worked hard, I found the market, I did everything right, so naturally I deserve more wealth than a human can use in a thousand lifetimes."

So to be honest, I find almost every single one of PG's points worthless. I don't care how easy it is to start a startup if the chance of real money from it is one in a million. I don't care about how much faster growth is when its billions of dollars for a few dozen people. I don't care if the new wealth is genuinely new instead of inherited, if all we get from it is yet another tiny group of obscenely wealthy people - meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And I especially dislike the idea that the "far left" should be happy that "labor has won". Having a system that picks a few hundred of the "most worthy" each year and adds them to the capital class is by no means what I could consider labor winning.

It pretty much is - everything else is window dressing. Pretty much every single city in China is 3-10x more dense than any area in the US, so lack of land is a reason I find continually uncompelling. Our lack of density, zoning practices, NIMBY attitudes and car dependency all contribute to this, with the result being a lack of construction.

Tokyo has been and continues to be affordable for anyone who wants to live there by building: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-...

Here's a grad student on tiktok who does good, well-sourced analysis on this front (he has an entire playlist on the issue of vacancy rates given how frequently it comes up): https://www.tiktok.com/@divasunglasses?lang=en

Article on zoning law changes in CA and how municipalities have put out estimates for how much they should build and then consistently, for decades, not even come close to meeting them: https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/ca-cities-to-lose-all-zo...

There's endless amounts of info on this front - look up strongtowns, YIMBY, parking minimums and associated issues (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8), japanese vs. american zoning policy (https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...)...

> Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause?

This is something I've wondered, and I'm of the opinion there's two reasons that are rarely discussed. One is the great recession/sub-prime crisis, which, at least in the US, caused a collapse in housing construction - I'm not sure how much this is true for other countries. The other is the coming of age of millennials, leading to a "bump" of people in their 20-30s trying to get their first home - I'd expect this to apply to most of the countries listed.

As for trust - I'm not really sure what trust has to do with it. I evaluate communities based on their content, and what I don't see is often just as important as what I do. If I like it, I'll stick around - if I don't, or if it changes, I'll leave. The community is operated by the people in charge of it, it's theirs by default. Do you visit people's houses and refuse to take your shoes off because they're the "authority"? Seems like an odd thing to get hung up over.

  * Spam
  * CSAM
  * Gore
  * Porn
  * Doxxing
  * Threats
  * Libel
  * Personal attacks
  * Racism/other 'isms'
  * Flamebait/ragebait
  * Advertisements
  * Insults
  * Duplicates
  * Off-topic
  * Low-effort commentary
  * Swearing
  * Tone/sarcasm
  * Memes
  * Concern trolling/sealioning/etc.

There's other things at fault, of course - zoning, economy, interest rates, etc. etc., but the current stress on the housing market lines up pretty nicely 80s-born millennials (particularly those that graduated into the great recession) finally hitting their stride and having the wealth to move out/stop renting/have kids, after most of a decade of that being suppressed.

I'd expect this to continue being a problem for the rest of the decade and peter off in the 30s - it feels like governments are taking action (years late as usual, but better than not); movements like YIMBY have matured, boomers are hitting the age where they start to pass, and housing construction has ramped up slowly in the last 8-10 years, and millennials will have mostly bought by then, with gen Z being the new, smaller crop of buyers by that point.

We might not like to admit it, but people can and do, all the time. There's an ideal as far as being a parent goes that we try to hold people to and enforce culturally - but that doesn't stop people from getting divorces or dumping their kids on their partner or parents while they go off and do their own thing. I know a number of people that more or less raised themselves - their parents provided necessities and that was about it.

There's also a larger discussion to be had on parenting and why it takes more time and effort than past generations; the difficulty of raising kids with two working parents; the move away from extended family groups and close neighbors that can help with kids; the increase in helicoptering/worrying and loss of independence; all of which contributes to making things more difficult.

> Just because something "always has been" doesn't mean it's easy.

I never said it was easy. What I said was it's not the hardest job, it's a common human experience, and it deserves celebrating even if it is an average, common thing.

There's a difference between hard = effort, and hard = difficulty. Most people struggle to understand software engineering concepts. If you do understand them, then the effort required to succeed at the job is less than parenting/farming/etc; but there's a reason software engineers are in the top 20% of the economic ladder and picking vegetables on a farm is on the bottom.

And at last check, subsistence farming was still the default job worldwide. Perhaps things have changed in the last decade or two, but I have my doubts.

(I'd also take issue on the idea of parenting being difficult, vs. good parenting, vs. newer cultural expectations on parents/education/helicoptering, vs. kids being free to roam etc etc., but that's a whole huge discussion on its own - and I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that raising kids is not harder on either axis than having a job, but doing both at once is very difficult and forces an economic choice many women are making in favor of money.)

And this shouldn't be surprising. Farming is a very human activity, and can be done by pretty much any human. You don't need to be exceptional to do it. In fact it would be ridiculous if you did - imagine if only 1 in 50 people was brilliant enough to become a farmer - human civilization would never have gotten started.

Praising something like this feels silly to me, much as when people talk about "being a mother is the hardest job" or similar. It's not. Being a mother is a common human experience, and most women go through it.

This isn't to say such things shouldn't be celebrated. The idea of celebrations around harvest or motherhood is appealing to me, but there's nothing exceptional here, and there shouldn't be. Simple things, regular things, things everyone can do or goes through are worth celebrating, not just the exceptions, the geniuses, the stand-outs.

This line of argument has nothing to do with Tesla or EVs. If you aim to make the case that the wealthy produce more emissions, that seems fairly clear, whether EVs exist or not.

> It's one of the reasons why despite the boom in EV adoption, global emissions are also skyrocketing with them. So EVs alone won't save this planet. In fact, according to that book, if we were to replace all ICE cars on the road with EVs, the manufacturing, materials and the mining necessarily to extract all the materials necessary for that to happen, would cause such an increase in emissions that would be catastrophicall to the planet.

> So the solution is actually less cars for earth, not more cars except Teslas instead of ICEs. It was an interesting analysys that I need to find.

Obviously, things would be better if people just stopped buying cars. Obviously, things would be better if everyone had good public transport available and dense development and didn't need cars. Obviously, things would be better if just less people existed and didn't need to be transported. None of this contributes in useful fashion to the here and now. I can go to my city development planning meetings and argue against car-oriented development and seas of parking until I'm blue in the face (and I do), but cities take generations to change. Cars, on the other hand, can be largely cycled out within a generation and a half. And like it or not, cars aren't going anywhere.

Twenty years ago there were no electric cars. Fifteen years ago the idea of a mass-market electric vehicle was considered a joke. Ten years ago people talked about the chicken-and-egg problem of cars and chargers and how you can't have one without the other, and no one was building chargers. Today, Tesla has some of the best selling vehicles worldwide, as an EV only company; other companies are adopting their standard on charging; the idea of them building a charger network, originally seen as completely ridiculous, has ended up as the premier way to charge your vehicle and is being opened to other companies' cars. I'd be tempted to guess that they've had a larger impact on reducing emissions than any other single company on the planet.

Twenty years ago, private spaceflight was considered impossible; this was the domain of governments alone, and the various x-prizes and the like had done nothing to change this matter. Fifteen years ago, reusable rockets was considered impossible (NASA and their contractors can't even do it, how could anyone else?) Ten years ago, SpaceX cut the costs of delivering stuff to space by what, 10x? 20x? Now they're casually demolishing all players in the satellite-ISP space single-handedly, and are looking at reducing delivery costs another 5-10x; the EU's current rockets and space orgs are collapsing under the weight of their lack of competitiveness.

I don't have to agree with the man's recent decisions around Twitter or politics to credit his past accomplishments, many of which were promised years before they became reality, and it boggles me to see all the people that are incapable of doing so.