tptacek

NIMBYism is inherently wrong.

The idea of national mappings of "IQ distributions" are mostly fictitious. Nobody has ever run even plausibly-powered surveys to establish such a thing. Most people reading this thread have never even been offered a proctored IQ test, let alone been requested to take one to help establish an American national IQ statistic.

From what I understand, a reliable "America vs. China" IQ comparison is mostly hopeless.

Thanks for posting this clarification. It's actually even simpler than that: for white collar employment there's going to be a presumption that IQ is relevant to the job, and there's no procedural hurdle you have to clear to IQ test applicants. The sole concern is, presumably, whether a candidate who is rejected can mount a successful disparate impact claim.

Several household name corporations routinely apply general cognitive tests to candidates. The companies who deliver these tests have logo crawls just like any other SAAS company. If this was a lucrative field for plaintiff's lawyers, you'd expect that not to be the case.

IQ tests aren't more widely used because they're not very useful for qualifying most candidates for most jobs. You generally want to know if a candidate can do the job, not how well they do on IQ tests.

Do you think that means I make my own data centers? Like, to get my next product off the ground, I have to go site a data center somewhere near you? How do you think the world works?

You are relaying NIMBY talking points (down to "you have a vested interest in shutting down public comment", which is a first-ballot hall-of-famer), because you're so negatively polarized against data centers. It's a weird thing to be proud of.

How exactly do I have a "vested financial interest in building out data centers"? What the fuck do I care if your community does or doesn't allow a data center? Data centers seem like a horrible business to be in!

I oppose public comment processes for the same reason that everybody working in permitting reform --- especially for housing --- does, and I'm relating an extremely normal take that you've managed to be scandalized by, presumably because you don't really pay attention to housing policy. That's fine! Nobody said you had to! But it's weird to get all het up about it then.

I think that's awesome and I do the same kinds of things, but have to note that doing so makes us both extreme weirdos. What did the opposition look like at that meeting?

This isn't a hill I'm interested in dying on but I think submitting public comment on state/federal matters through standard online public comment process is one of the least effective ways you have of influencing policy.

That's not true at the local level! Public comment is a much bigger deal locally.

I think it's telling that you think apartment buildings are easier to get through permitting processes than data centers. There are in fact multiple overlapping sets of laws in force specifically to prevent the construction of apartments, which generally have to be done (or rather not done) under variance.

I'm a housing activist who is heavily invested in getting zoning fixed to allow for new housing to be built, and has spent an unreal amount of time as one of the youngest people in a meeting full of old white homeowners trying to convince electeds that they speak for the whole region when they say that there's nothing worse that could happen than for an apartment development to be allowed.

You, on the other hand, are scandalized by the idea that public comment processes might be deleterious. Since this is an extremely normal thing for political participants to complain about in 2025-2026, my most natural conclusion is that you don't really do much work in politics (especially local politics), and that you don't share many of my premises. That being the case, it's perhaps better that we not waste time trying to convince each other of things.

It's striking the visceral reaction some people have here to what is in fact a pretty banal (and intuitively explainable) social science result.

I've got news for you: public comments on web forms are uniformly ignored at the state and federal level.

We should ignore people showing up to give public comment in front of elected bodies, outside of literal Town Meeting governments, which are rare.

Look, if you have an actual Town Meeting form of government, I reserve judgement. My expectation is that standing one up in a random metro area would be on net anti-democratic, but I don't know them well enough to be confident about that. But we're not talking about the Town Meeting form of government; we're talking about elected representative governments where some residents get extra votes because there are procedural side doors optimized for certain kinds of people to show up.

The disabled are in fact a concentrated interest group!

I don't understand what you're trying to say, but housing/development is structurally disfavored in public comment processes. Again: this is not a hot take from me; it's also a social science finding.

They are definitionally a concentrated special interest group. If that's hideous to you, that's on you.

I do too; I'm a housing activist. Also, I can count, and read!

It's depressing that we widely deploy these antidemocratic processes! But it's not depressing that turnout math works the way the rest of math works.

No, it can't work. Elections are decided on turnout. We schedule elections on specific days, with great ceremony, in part so we can maximize turnout. Public comment processes are the opposite. They structurally select for people with high-amplitude opinions, and for what should at this point be obvious reasons the high-amplitude opinions about development are almost uniformly negative. It's the exact same phenomenon that keeps guns deregulated in the United States: most people support regulation, but the people who don't really don't and turn out disproportionately.

If you set up a process that selects for people who can show up at random times on random days and that samples exclusively from people who pay unusual amounts of attention to policy and have high-amplitude opinions, you are going to get disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, owner-class participants who are sharply skewed towards opposition.

You don't have to take my word for this; you can look this up in the literature, too. But I was just at a large public meeting about a rezoning we're doing; turnout around 150 people, and I was one of the youngest in the room.

Special interest groups? Yes, that's what you do.

Public commenters aren't "the people"; they're the specific concentrated special interest that bothers to show up to a meeting on a school night to share their opinion. We have a mechanism to poll "the people" already: it's called "elections". The things you do besides the scheduled elections everyone knows and plans to show up at are all subversions of democracy. That's literally the point.

You don't even have to think hard about why turnout skews "no". You can see immediately why your neighbor might show up to comment against a new apartment building on their block. But what neighbor of yours has even considered showing up to comment in favor of one? Most of your neighbors are probably just fine with development, but almost none of them are nerds about it, which is what it takes to show up to support a commercial developer.

You can't fix it. Avoiding broad representation is the point of public comment processes. It's the same reason local elections in single-party states tend to be held off-cycle: to keep turnout low.

This isn't a hot take or anything. It's well documented in the social science literature. It just happens that you can intuit why it works this way as well.

After 4-5 years of doing fairly intensive local politics I just don't have time for this helpless take anymore. I get where it's coming from and used to feel the same way, but it's wildly out of step with how local politics work. Local politicians are almost never full-time, they're elected by margins of hundreds or (maybe) thousands of constituents, they take personal phone calls from those people, and they read their emails. They're not generally staffed, and they don't work through a party apparatus. They are responsive to the voters who elect them.

None of this is true for your local congressional rep, and certainly not for your senator. But those people aren't voting on local development projects. Your alderman or trustee or councilmember is doing that. If you haven't learned what they're about and how they get elected, that's on you.

(None of this is to say that you're going to get your way with your local electeds! They may very well not care much about what you have to say --- because they're elected by a bloc of local constituents that they serve and that reliably turns out for them. That's democracy! The good news is: you can often organize and replace those electeds. I live in a relatively high-end inner-ring suburb of Chicago, and I ran a successful campaign for a friend there for $5000 all-in.)

Public comment is anti-democratic. It's an intrinsically low-turnout off-cycle process; it's specifically intended to amplify the influence of concentrated special interests. We have a democratic process already: it's called "elections".

Negative comments on data centers, or power plants, or day care, or apartment buildings, or coffee shops, or new fire hydrants are exactly what you'd expect from the (demented, sometimes literally) municipal public comment process, which sharply biased towards negative comments structurally --- people turn out because they're risk-averse and don't want to see change that could impact their own homes, and virtually nobody turns out for the abstract upside of new development --- and also demographically: public comment skews sharply older, wealthier, and towards homeowners.

The public comment process is an anti-democratic pox on our system (all the political systems that support it) and we should all be shifting to a mode where we more openly impeach it. Public comment is one of the first principal components of the American housing shortage.

tl;dr: eBPF programs that run hot off the DMA buffers, before skbufs are created, that can XDP_DROP packets.

Huh? Yes they did. Why do you think they didn't?

Dropping packets with IP options from XDP should be a more complete mitigation (also more performant).

I've got extremely normal marketplace health insurance and my doctor is at an extremely normal overworked large regional health chain, and I would have to argue with him to get an at-home test; the whole system is set up to funnel us all into colonoscopies.

This "war footing" stuff is just goofball infosec idiom. It just means "take it super serious".