pjlegato

26 ms·

211.
by pjlegato 6y ago
The walkable parts of those cities is vanishingly small, on the order of a few square blocks. The tiny walkable segment is also super-expensive.
212.
by pjlegato 6y ago
The vast majority of the bay area is typical sprawling American suburbs that absolutely requires a car. The cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley are about the only walkable places where it's feasible at all to not have a car,
213.
by pjlegato 6y ago
Clojure is a highly practical Lisp that retains most of the Lisp mystique. Previous Lisps were impractical largely due to lack of libraries, but Clojure comes with first class Java interop out of the box. But you still get macros.
214.
by pjlegato 6y ago
Yes, git is more or less universal in San Francisco / Silicon Valley companies. The only places I'm aware of that don't use it are game companies, which tend to use source control systems like https://www.plasticsc
215.
by pjlegato 6y ago
There is no coherent "software industry" as a unitary entity with shared norms and standards. There never was. Since all you really need to get started is a laptop, there are rather millions of more or less atomized software shops
216.
by pjlegato 6y ago
This. I've tried credit unions and big banks. I really wanted to like the credit unions, but their general level of operational competence is a small fraction of the big banks. Everything takes much longer and major hassles are far mor
217.
by pjlegato 6y ago
Global society has indeed become far more efficient today than in the 1950s. That's precisely why a working class job no longer affords a middle class lifestyle. All industrialized countries except the United States were physically des
218.
by pjlegato 6y ago
The seller can _ask_ for any price they like, not unilaterally "set" it. They're only going to get that, and thus set the price, if there is also a buyer who agrees to pay that price. In technical terms, I was using "set
219.
by pjlegato 6y ago
This argument assumes that pricing is to be determined through some a priori philosophical consideration of what is "fair" or "reasonable" compensation for effort involved in creating supply, according to some subjective
220.
by pjlegato 6y ago
Interesting idea! Who would take the other (long) side of the trade? Why would someone who thinks housing prices are going up not just buy a house outright?
221.
by pjlegato 6y ago
There are shortable futures contracts tied to US housing price indexes[1], but they're highly illiquid (rarely trade, and have wide bid/ask spreads). This is probably related to the difficulty of hedging, since as another poster p
222.
by pjlegato 6y ago
Almost all apartments in SF are rent controlled. The landlord can only raise the rent by some tiny nominal percentage mandated by the rent board every year.
223.
by pjlegato 7y ago
The word "dead" is hardly offensive. It's a common and universal part of nature. All things eventually die, including software.
224.
by pjlegato 7y ago
Pushback has begun against legal mandates for helicopter parenting in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-range_parenting#Legal_sta... Utah has made it explicitly legal to leave children home alone. In response
225.
by pjlegato 7y ago
Bloomberg doesn't need money. He solicits donations because the act of donating money causes the donator to feel personally invested in the campaign. They will be more likely to take steps to influence their friends and family to vote
226.
by pjlegato 7y ago
All of the other candidates are also doing that; there's nothing special about how Bloomberg is spending his money. The others are doing the same, but with other people's money -- people who will now expect to wield influence behi
227.
by pjlegato 7y ago
Many here seem upset at the idea that Bloomberg is spending a lot of his own money to run for president. Running for president is very expensive. All other candidates are also spending a lot of money -- but they're spending a lot of _o
228.
by pjlegato 7y ago
The atrophy of personal cooking in the United States is a broad and pretty well documented phenomenon: "The percentage of daily energy consumed from home food sources and time spent in food preparation decreased significantly for all s
229.
by pjlegato 7y ago
> there just isn't the same kind of intense urge to clean and purify public space as in other European and western cities This is rather a gross romanticization of the situation. It's not at all that the exotic people of Naple
230.
by pjlegato 7y ago
The new title omits the interesting part, which is that the refrigerator refuses to use filters wihtout the RFID chip.
231.
by pjlegato 7y ago
This in fact happened in Russia in the early 20th century. The results were, among other things: - allocation of resources happened through centralized planning committees of credentialed supposed experts, rather than organically by decentr
232.
by pjlegato 7y ago
Yes, but not in the way I imagine you intended. In capitalism, perhaps 80% of the value you create as an employee is captured by others (see sibling comment.) You can also opt out -- by becoming self employed, by joining a commune or collec
233.
by pjlegato 7y ago
Most other countries don't have free government-sponsored addiction treatment camps for teenage phone use. Anecdotally, teen phone addiction is just as bad elsewhere, but few or no other governments are addressing this topic as the Sou
234.
by pjlegato 7y ago
Alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine are legal, widely available drugs that are all heavily used in east Asia.
235.
by pjlegato 7y ago
Costco was started as a business supplies wholesaler. They shifted to a consumer orientation and not requiring a business license as they realized that most customers were buying significant amounts for their own personal use, and not just
236.
by pjlegato 7y ago
Metagaming the purported hidden motives of people you disagree with is not rational. There is no evidence for your claims about how those you disagree with manipulate social discourse in order to shut down topics.
237.
by pjlegato 7y ago
It is precisely the process you describe -- that people are very prone to thinking about something for "a few seconds" and "find[ing] some plausibility in the notion" -- that makes the rationalist scientific method impor
238.
by pjlegato 7y ago
Many people with leftist and anti-capitalist political views attach a strong negative bias to anyone who works for an entity they deem supportive of the capitalist economic system, such as major financial media.
239.
by pjlegato 7y ago
As an anecdata point, I recently asked a person who lives in Shenzhen the same question -- what is the broad public sentiment about the HK protests in the PRC, and how much information do ordinary people in general even have? I was told tha
240.
by pjlegato 7y ago
This analysis is whataboutism[1]. It is an attempt to create a false moral equivalency by drawing vague, factually inaccurate parallels between two radically different information dissemination structures, as a nationalistic apologetic for

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