mikem170

32 ms·

301.
by mikem170 4y ago
Conclusions, from the end of the article: > Sweden is not a clear-cut example for either the pro-restriction or anti-restriction side, but it does weigh against particularly painful restrictions, by showing how hard it is to definitively
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by mikem170 4y ago
I've read all of Zeihan's books, and you may be emphasizing different points than those he focused on. >US has more navigable river You may be right. You quoted the poster, who said they quoted Zeihan. Are both countries blesse
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by mikem170 4y ago
Demographics are big. But Zeihan also evaluates countries based on their geography, taking into account things like energy supplies, food production, and navigable rivers.
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by mikem170 4y ago
Agreed. Same in Japan, where the basic zoning allows for triplexes with low impact businesses allowed as a percentage of the square footage, having setbacks to ensure you don't put three stories on the edge of your property blocking th
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by mikem170 4y ago
How about a one line comment that summarizes what the block of code directly below does, in order to avoid the need to run an interpreter in your head while skimming code to find what you are interested in. That little bit of extra informat
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by mikem170 4y ago
I wholeheartedly agree! The U.S. federal government was first and foremost designed to be responsive to the states, not the people. I'm a big fan of Leopold Khor and his book Breakdown of Nations. He talks about how national government
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by mikem170 4y ago
The people have no direct voice at the federal level, or choosing members of the fed, so now we are talking about representative democracy, as you mentioned. In a representative democracy the voters are supposed to choose the representative
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by mikem170 4y ago
You're right, thanks for the correction on that. Wikipedia said 8% of health care in England is private, mostly specialist, often through employer provided plans meant to augment NHS. The other 92% of health care is directly supplied b
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by mikem170 4y ago
Across the board price controls seem to be a common to the various European health care systems. It is my understanding that upper limits are set for the cost of medicine. There is quite a bit of variety across Europe - U.K. is 100% governm
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by mikem170 4y ago
I assume something like you suggest would be possible. It's normal to want to be able to take dozens of long-exposure photographs, maybe even a couple/few hundred. Each exposure might be 10 seconds, 30 seconds, or 2+ minutes long,
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by mikem170 4y ago
I've dabbled with astrophotography, I've been out with the camera a couple times so far, and was prompted by your comment to do a bit of reading on the effects of these starlink satellites. The first useful bits I found described
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by mikem170 4y ago
I see your graphic posted by someone named jgreene777 on reddit and raise you a 72 page report prepared under the direction of eight prominent conservatives - people like retired federal judges, former senators, a solicitor general, an elec
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by mikem170 4y ago
I'm currently a very happy OpenBSD user. I've stuck with Thinkpad laptops because I know they are well supported (sleep, hibernate, etc). OpenBSD does everything I want to do - I'm running a couple/few web browsers for d
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by mikem170 4y ago
> It was never intended to be a true democracy Agreed. And it's interesting that (collectively) we like to believe it was. > there have never been true democracies that scale up I'd put modern Switzerland forward as an examp
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by mikem170 4y ago
> You forgot 5) mic drop Hardly. The parent reminded me of other issues affecting inflation in the U.S. - things I would chalk up to a sub-omptimal reglatory/legislative environment, which has made a mess over the decades of health
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by mikem170 4y ago
How come Switzerland has only 2.5% year-over-year inflation, less than a third of the U.S. rate? Last I checked there seemed to be some correlation between a country's money printing and current inflation rates. That's not to say
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by mikem170 4y ago
> If one learned how to collaborate on projects which, I think, the perl language does not incentivise. I tend to think that things like high level documentation, organizing libraries and functions into good abstractions, comments, and n
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by mikem170 4y ago
The freedom to flexibly put thoughts into code can be used to make code more readable, or less, it depends on the programmer. A significant code base in any language can turn into a hot mess The perl coding team I was on made readability ou
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by mikem170 4y ago
How about if you could sit in the cargo hold with your pet?
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by mikem170 5y ago
Long term it might be better if we find a way out the the car-centric local maxima we find ourselves in, rather than heading further in that direction. As you suggested in reply to a sibling comment, more bike lanes make sense. Parking on s
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by mikem170 5y ago
Did his resigning have something to do with him personally donating $1000 in 2008 in support of California's Proposition 8 referendum? (opposing gay marriage) Just checking, you really didn't mention why he resigned.
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by mikem170 5y ago
> No country likes itself to be split apart That doesn't morally justify forcing thousands or millions of people to remain in a political situation that they are opposed to.
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by mikem170 5y ago
Agreed! There's the theory that people don't willingly aggregate into large countries, they need to be manipulated or coerced (pledge every day in school, anthem at sports events, etc), and that large countries inevitably become b
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by mikem170 5y ago
I agree that the discussion about pandemic lockdowns is more complex. Good and honest people can look at the same data and disagree on how to handle something like this, even individuals who share the same age and health related covid risks
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by mikem170 5y ago
Agreed. It's crazy that we got into this spot where places people live are also expected to be an investment that forever out-paces inflation. It's not sustainable.
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by mikem170 5y ago
> there is no substantial definition of "empire" by which the U.S. is an empire I'm genuinely curious about your take on that. I've had the assumption that the U.S. control over so much of the world's economics a
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by mikem170 5y ago
My assumption was that density would be allowed to increase as part of a land value tax regime, since that is what it is meant to encourage. More supply of housing. The OP mentioned concerns about changing to a land value tax. I was throwin
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by mikem170 5y ago
The intention behind my reply was to say that the right to life is not the only right that people have, they have many others, and it is not a simple matter of saying one right some people want automatically gets priority at the expense of
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by mikem170 5y ago
> Consolidation of all ownership onto a few large players is not a good thing for society. For the past few decades a large percentage of new housing has been built by large developers who buy cheap land just outside of town, clear cut i
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by mikem170 5y ago
The absence of something like a land value tax, and/or the current zoning/tax regime, can cause distortions in the market when things change, also. San Fransisco is a good example, where new housing is not being built to satisfy d

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