gottorf

55 ms·

961.
by gottorf 3y ago
> social capital matters and reputation matters. Of course those are disadvantages to misbehavers. This is something that many young adults have forgotten, because it's increasingly more trendy to move around a lot in your 20s while
962.
by gottorf 3y ago
Downtown Ithaca most likely would have been just as vibrant without that law. It's a town with a higher median household income than the US as a whole, plus two colleges, both of which cost >$50k a year to attend. The students, espe
963.
by gottorf 3y ago
The older I get, the more I appreciate receiving nice socks as gifts.
964.
by gottorf 3y ago
> almost every employee had a zombie like appearance one or the other way For what it's worth, in my area (a midsize Deep South city; the customary environment for Walmart), I don't see this. But it is also a city experiencing
965.
by gottorf 3y ago
> What WalMart hates the most is that they can’t get people of affluence who want to save money to shop at one though. Inflation is doing the trick[0]. For several quarters, they've reported marked increases in the share of higher-i
966.
by gottorf 3y ago
Thanks for pointing that out -- I missed that originally. It seems heavy-handed. Either blind trusts are actually blind (that is, real independence on the part of the trustee, not just a facade) or they aren't. If it's the latter,
967.
by gottorf 3y ago
> effects where people think it's not economically worth their time to work This is only possible with generous social benefits given to those who aren't working. In the top 8 most generous states, transfer payments given to th
968.
by gottorf 3y ago
A transcript of the press conference can be found here: https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/press-encounter/2023-07-...
969.
by gottorf 3y ago
A good example of what happens when an individual runs against powerful institutional forces, and a good reminder of why individual rights, like the freedom to speak even when it offends or hurts, must be protected, both in law as well as i
970.
by gottorf 3y ago
I've been full-time remote for many, many years longer than Covid, but I still look back on my time in office fondly; there was a camaraderie that is difficult to duplicate over Zoom. For software engineers at any rate, the optimum may
971.
by gottorf 3y ago
No need to make any policy changes; existing policy appears enough to make people work less. The labor force participation rate has been steadily decreasing from the 1990-2000 peak[0]. As long as the ones who are working 10% fewer hours are
972.
by gottorf 3y ago
Indeed. It doesn't appear to be such a huge burden to ask Federal elected officials, who are all paid a substantial salary and have great benefits, to put their assets in a blind trust, like in that old Onion joke[0]. [0]: https:&#x2F
973.
by gottorf 3y ago
> The pretense of this nation being a functional democratic republic has long been abandoned. We have merely the simulacrum of it now. The institutions of democracy in this country are challenged, but I'd say we are a long way from
974.
by gottorf 3y ago
A democracy doesn't mean that the representatives you elect must always and only follow the will of the constituency: "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you,
975.
by gottorf 3y ago
The idea that Congress cannot bind a future Congress doesn't mean that Congress can't make laws that regulate itself. It just means that a later Congress can vote to repeal whatever laws that an earlier Congress had voted to enact
976.
by gottorf 3y ago
I would have assumed that someone who would go out of their way to steal somebody else's airbags would also not bother with safety inspections or whatever that might have kept their broken car from being on the road.
977.
by gottorf 3y ago
I don't know about all the claims made in the article, but Elon Musk certainly could do with a moment or two of silence in the public sphere.
978.
by gottorf 3y ago
Then we must adapt and rebuild the infrastructure. What's the alternative, that everyone just abandon London? Climate scientists agree that if the world stopped all carbon emissions today, at the snap of a magical finger, the planet wi
979.
by gottorf 3y ago
Status quo just means the world as it sits now. It has no bearing on whether it is an ideal state to be. Humanity is indubitably better off now than it was prior to the Industrial Revolution, and there's 10x more of us now to enjoy it,
980.
by gottorf 3y ago
Driving in the Boston area is hard enough already, we don't need to add wavy walls into the mix ;-)
981.
by gottorf 3y ago
> we will only create more heat and will need even more energy to deal with it Yes, that's a thermodynamic certainty. But the moment Homo sapiens left the year-round pleasant high plains of East Africa, we were going to need energy;
982.
by gottorf 3y ago
> At the same time though, a well-designed low-energy regime isn't perceived by its citizens as despotic. There's very little call (nowadays) to smash Houston-style freeways through Europe's semi-pedestrianised neighbourho
983.
by gottorf 3y ago
> Human development includes a lot of things that have nothing to do with that ridiculous and narrow definition. What other concept so concisely captures the difference between how our primitive ape ancestors lived, to how cavemen lived,
984.
by gottorf 3y ago
> Why did you cite an article discussing black migration from 1965 through 2000 I'm sorry, I meant to cite this instead: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-great-migration-is-... . It shows big gains in bl
985.
by gottorf 3y ago
> The same additional amount in the hands of the top 80% or so of Western hands would be frittered away to no noticeable benefit - we could get by with a lot less. We could, but getting by with less out of choice is much better than gett
986.
by gottorf 3y ago
> we have exactly zero historical precedent to know whether or not climate change will even be a 'net plus'. My point exactly! If you respect Chesterton's fence, we shouldn't make radical changes to the status quo wit
987.
by gottorf 3y ago
Believe me, I'm all in favor of using heat pumps. I think it's silly the degree to which Europe as a whole relies on combustion heating, in a part of the world that doesn't get all that cold. I just want to ensure that the el
988.
by gottorf 3y ago
> lighting alone is a huge sector for unrealized power savings, in all categories. Do you have some sources I can read about this? I find it hard to believe that large consumers of light haven't already switched to LEDs given the fi
989.
by gottorf 3y ago
The difference is that there's a lot of historical precedent against what you described, so we can reasonably expect the outcome of such an idea. Could explain why it's not in vogue, though it does appear more and more popular amo
990.
by gottorf 3y ago
> It might as well be a net plus, who knows. Given that most of the world's land is in the northern two thirds of the globe[0], it seems more likely than not that eventually it will be a net plus in arable land and overall agricultu

More ›