esoterica

6 ms·

1.
by esoterica 3mo ago
> The vast majority of the world uses standard time. It works. No one there pines for permanent daylight time. Timezones are political, there are many cities and countries that are an hour or more west of the timezone implied by their l
2.
by esoterica 2y ago
The quality of life improves for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders when parking and car lanes are converted to bike and bus lanes. Drivers are not the only stakeholders who deserve consideration. Many of the people who insist that th
3.
by esoterica 2y ago
People with long commutes spend most of that time on highways, which are not affected by traffic calming measures. A surface street going from 35mph to 25mph is not going to add an hour of driving time unless you are driving 100 miles a day
4.
by esoterica 2y ago
Judges are also unelected bureaucrats, and they are less subject to democratic oversight since they have lifetime appointments vs agency heads who are appointed by the executive branch and can be effectively "voted out" if voters
5.
by esoterica 2y ago
Removing Chevron deference moves authority from the administrative agencies to the courts, who are not only also unelected bureaucrats, they are more insulated from democratic forces since they have lifetime appointments. Agency heads are p
6.
by esoterica 2y ago
Congress is broken and structurally incapable of passing laws under this level of political polarization because there are too many veto points (bicameral legislature, the filibuster, the presidential veto) for any law to get passed even if
7.
by esoterica 2y ago
The seatbelt sign tells you whether or not you are allowed to get up and move around. Unlike the no-smoking light it has actual informational content.
8.
by esoterica 2y ago
Tesla is not the leader in self driving, they are pretty far behind both Cruise and Waymo, which have or used to have driverless vehicles legally operating on public roads. If you're betting on driverless tech why would you go with Tes
9.
by esoterica 2y ago
Facebook, Apple and Google are very big companies which hire a lot of very well paid engineers. We're not talking about being an NFL quarterback or something where only a small handful of people will reach that level. Being a big tech
10.
by esoterica 2y ago
A pension is not worth 150k-200k a year in compensation. Also taxes are higher in most of Europe, even taking payroll taxes into account (I assume that's what you mean by social security pay in).
11.
by esoterica 2y ago
Most programmers are $90k/year code monkeys. The $400k+/year jobs are very heavily concentrated in a small number of tech hubs, and mostly in the bay, and that’s the relevant statistic that should inform your decision making if yo
12.
by esoterica 2y ago
Are you seriously insisting that the average product has gone up in price by 850x since 1960 and that gasoline is a huge outlier that has appreciated much much less than everything else?
13.
by esoterica 2y ago
Did you read the article at all? Unless you were buying meat with personal loans the issue of whether or not interest expenses should be included in CPI has no relevance to correct measurement of food inflation.
14.
by esoterica 2y ago
You are completely mathematically illiterate if you think that annual inflation is 3-5 times higher than the reported value. The average annual inflation since 1960 is 3.7%. If the real annual inflation were 3x that (11.1%) then we would ha
15.
by esoterica 3y ago
There are zero recent examples of a large American company ordering a hit on someone. Be serious.
16.
by esoterica 3y ago
The official inflation numbers have shown high inflation over the past few years. If you feel like prices have gone up a lot the CPI does not contradict your lived experience in any way.
17.
by esoterica 3y ago
Wages for the lowest quintile have gone up in real terms, meaning adjusted for inflation (including shelter costs). None of your economic beliefs are grounded reality, you just make up beliefs that flatter your politics and downvote everyon
18.
by esoterica 3y ago
Gold fell 50% from 1980 to 2000, does that mean we had 50% deflation over that time period?
19.
by esoterica 3y ago
The lowest income workers have seen the largest wage gains over the course of the pandemic.
20.
by esoterica 3y ago
Why are inflation truthers so resistant to spending even the tiniest amount of time learning how inflation is computed instead of repeating nonsensical conspiracy theories that match their ideological priors? Replacing porterhouse with hang
21.
by esoterica 3y ago
Rulers want the social status that they derive from ruling over millions of people. If they were no people to rule over they would have zero status, even if all their material needs were met.
22.
by esoterica 3y ago
I don’t know why you are arguing against a phantom position. I never said the government doesn’t grant citizenship.
23.
by esoterica 3y ago
If you truly believe in the principles of free speech, no matter how offensive and evil and cynically motivated, then the logical conclusion of that belief is that adversarial foreign governments have the right to propagandize in America an
24.
by esoterica 3y ago
If you believe that the constitution protects inalienable rights that cannot be taken away by the government then how can those rights be denied to non citizens? The government gets to decide who is and isn’t a citizen, which would mean the
25.
by esoterica 3y ago
They did not actually have time because they mostly died in infancy. That said if you are satisfied with a pre industrial quality of life no one is stopping you from doing zero hours of work and just becoming homeless.
26.
by esoterica 3y ago
Autarkies are impoverished, societies that trade freely are wealthy. Your economic impulses are deeply misguided. If everyone only bought local the world would be much poorer. It’s better (consumer choice, comparative advantage) to buy from
27.
by esoterica 3y ago
Those optimizations increase the value of labor by greatly increasing the amount of output per unit of labor. Do you understand how much wealthier the modern worker is than the pre Industrial Revolution peasant?
28.
by esoterica 3y ago
Corporations get caught doing crime all of the time. The fact that no large corporation in contemporary America has ever been caught hiring a hitman to assassinate a former employee is a very good sign that unlike all the other crimes they
29.
by esoterica 3y ago
The worst example you could find of corporate harassment and no one even got physically harmed, thanks for proving my point that corporations do not hire hitmen to carry out assassinations.
30.
by esoterica 3y ago
I'm not claiming to be smarter than everyone else, but I am claiming to be smarter than the people who believe that Boeing hired Michael Fassbender from The Killer to assassinate a former employee after but only after years of whistleb

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