fatbird

72 ms·

811.
by fatbird 9y ago
If they fill up because they're cheap, that indicates market demand that will bring the investors back. You're not going to keep them out unless Vancouver becomes, in significant part, a ghost town. Which has another cost: everyo
812.
by fatbird 9y ago
For the last 20 years Vancouver has had a building boom in which housing starts and completions have been at record highs. We're adding housing stock as fast as we can and faster than almost any municipality in North America. After 2
813.
by fatbird 9y ago
I'm not sure why I should give the "correct free market response" any airtime at all, given that 1) it would appear to require making one of the top 5 Canadian cities into "scorched earth", meaning a wasteland of em
814.
by fatbird 9y ago
Nihilism is never a solution.
815.
by fatbird 9y ago
On a Saturday night at dinnertime, I get cabs within 5-10 minutes, and I'm (just) outside downtown. Between the individual cab company apps and eCab, Vancouver's taxi services have shaped up a lot. One cabbie even described in d
816.
by fatbird 9y ago
I just implemented it in a Meteor site using React for the frontend, and it worked beautifully, smoothly, and with perfect React orthodoxy. I was seriously impressed.
817.
by fatbird 9y ago
How do you sell highly targeted ads without revealing your data? How did the Obama campaign download the entire U.S. social graph in 2012, and brag about doing so, with Facebook’s approval? How did Cambridge Analytica do a comparable thin
818.
by fatbird 9y ago
They weren’t helpless, they were complicit, at least if early reports are still accurate that Facebook (meaning the Facebook employees who were actually assisting CA) knew what CA was doing while they advised CA on maximizing their data hau
819.
by fatbird 9y ago
It’s not that your data might be revealed, it’s that the data of you, your friends, and 50 million other voters might give someone an effective lever over a national election. Regardless of how you feel about Trump or Clinton, that should
820.
by fatbird 9y ago
If Clinton had won, the propaganda and dirty tricks would have failed, and so would have seemed much lower priority.
821.
by fatbird 9y ago
Cambridge Analytica’s actions had real world political consequences, so yes it’s political for that reason. But another angle of the CA portion of the story is that they were ratfucking in a very effective way—such as publishing fake news
822.
by fatbird 9y ago
The Obama campaign took all that data and did normal political campaigning with it: targeting likely voters and bombarding them with campaign messaging. Cambridge Analytica ran Facebook-powered ratfucking operations: for example, organizin
823.
by fatbird 9y ago
Building an establishment to facilitate conversations of all kinds generally does not obligate you to allow every specific conversation. Were it my establishment, I wouldn't permit members of NAMBLA to organize their sex-trafficking t
824.
by fatbird 9y ago
The problem with Reddit is that, while it's not endorsing the content, it is facilitating it. You can let the white supremacists in your neighbourhood use your garage for their weekly meetings and plausibly claim that you're just
825.
by fatbird 9y ago
We both have extra fine nibs, and haven't found them to be scratchy at all. I do recall a bit of a break-in period with hers, making circles on a sheet of paper for a while, to smooth it out.
826.
by fatbird 9y ago
My wife and I both draw with Namiki Falcon fountain pens, which are fantastic, and use Platinum Carbon Black ink, which is a pigmented ink. I don't know if it's nano-particles (i.e., the pigment is ground extremely fine so browni
827.
by fatbird 9y ago
I feel like part of the story is missing because I have trouble imagining that UC couldn't easily find someone to head the institute. I would think that getting to head a well-endowed institute for a top-3 university would be one of t
828.
by fatbird 9y ago
The phrase "we had to burn the village in order to save it" was uttered by the officer who perpetrated the My Lai massacre, and it was an unironic paraphrasing of "better dead than red". Nothing about addressing the pas
829.
by fatbird 9y ago
You can't stop discrimination without addressing the long-term systemic effects of pervasive discrimination.
830.
by fatbird 9y ago
And those same millions have been halted simultaneously in development around the world by the removal of key packages due to namespacing issues. Or, today, we find that running the newest version of npm under sudo can rewrite file system
831.
by fatbird 9y ago
> you simply can't And yet, virtually every retailer for the last 3+ decades has, in fact, done so as a matter of normal operations. It has nothing to do with Obamacare. The employment norm was not to only schedule full-time hours
832.
by fatbird 9y ago
Nothing here validates B&N's decision. 30 years ago I was a part-time employee at a big box store from October to January. Large retailers long ago figured out how to ramp up their workforce temporarily to adequately handle the sa
833.
by fatbird 9y ago
When it's concentrated in one neighbourhood, you can concentrate social services in that neighbourhood. The DTES has a bank dedicated to avoiding paying a percentage of welfare checks to check cashing businesses. Insite has a rehab f
834.
by fatbird 9y ago
You didn't see the Downtown Eastside before the safe injection site was opened. Needles filled the gutters. The alleys were where you went to get robbed. There's a reason the Vancouver City Police support the safe injection site
835.
by fatbird 9y ago
It's been illegal to sublet for less than 30 days in Vancouver for more than a decade. Before AirBnB, there were people doing this manually over CraigsList. In most condo buildings, strata boards cracked down hard on short term renta
836.
by fatbird 9y ago
Bezos is an accomplished entrepreneur, but from everything I've heard about how Amazon works, I can't imagine being an effective politician. He's a corporate dictator, not a coalition-builder: the exact quality that built Am
837.
by fatbird 9y ago
I understand. I also understand that even with a psychiatrist prescribing it appropriately, with full evaluation and diagnosis for depression, a particular SSRI can make the patient worse, not better. I've had friends spend years wor
838.
by fatbird 9y ago
In my experience, they were quite upfront about the fact that it was an anti-depressant that had the effect of aiding quitting smoking, because it fairly obviously dealt with the predictable effects of trying to quit smoking: anxiety, depre
839.
by fatbird 9y ago
Arguably, this is a good deal, especially if the renewal fees go to further public good like archiving of public domain works. Disney would pay tens of millions to keep Mickey, Goofy, and Donald under copyright, but they'll quickly tr
840.
by fatbird 9y ago
More police are killed in traffic accidents than in violent confrontations. When you factor out traffic accidents in police deaths, being a cop is actually one of the safer jobs in North America. All your bullshit about putting your life o

More ›