Defenestration

This suspicion gets more true every year as the cost of streaming services skyrockets

It's a side conversation, but I really do wonder about the long-term electrical cost of streaming services relative to blu-ray disks and/or a DRM free download system.

I have a sneaking suspicion that long-term Netflix actually will cost much, much more than physical media.

Yup, with many small places in a city a giant truck just doesn't make sense. Especially for something like small deliveries in an inner-ring suburb, you can cover most locations more quickly with a cargo trike.

Looking into similarly aged townhomes in DC. What are the things to look out for? How can you tell if it's been updated to modern wiring?

Like the fundamental problem with American urban planning is a combination of bad transit and bad land use (not allowing density)

Houston solves the latter but not the former, whereas California is the opposite (many BART stations have basically zero density around them)

The problem is you can only do this so long until you become LA, where everything is choked with traffic. So either we get Blexas raising taxes to massively fund transit or all these cities have to stop growing due to traffic (Krugman recently wrote an article about Atlanta in this context!)

Insanely deep cut tbh. I'd recommend starting with Adam Smith then going to Capital just to understand the full context

Yeah- the real story here is that the anti corporation agency was, for the first time, able to actually investigate and prosecute people in positions of power!

Local Craigslist continues to exist!

I worry that technological development is only going to continue to slow down tbh. If we don't restart social development once again we're gonna be hosed long term.

I think a lot of engineers genuinely believe that their profession simply created so much abundance that it solved all the social/labor issues of the 19/20th century and not like, massive amounts of social development

It's a huge blind spot if you can't imagine the proles rising

Two weeks from today! Should be a super fun conversation on the intersection of imagery analysis and city planning with me and Prof. Ayda Kianmehr, and Prof. Maryam Hosseini. Free and open to the public: sjsu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

I think we have conclusive evidence at this point that a certain amount of internet fame is basically guaranteed to eventually cook your brain

No disagreement here. But this is the kind of scenario Trump will point at as an example of how they think it'll go. They don't realize that's an extremely specific scenario to Panama and the *much more common* outcome requires a type of colonialism where you drown in rivers of blood.

The point is that the people cheering this (which is a significant percentage of Americans) think that it will go similarly to Panama in 1989.

They are extremely wrong but I think it's worthwhile to point out so we understand why they're making such a stupid decision.

bsky.app/profile/madw...

Unlike Trump I am aware of geography! bsky.app/profile/madw...

Oh totally agreed. But it's the type of example they'll point to, saying "look! It went so well in this one case! Look at nothing else"

Like "we overthrow the government and bring in western oil companies to rake in the profits" is the kinda thing that takes YEARS to start making money and is much more likely going to require Guatamala under United Fruit Company type bloodshed IMO

I mean, Panama was a relatively contained operation in 1989-1990. But I suspect that Venezuela is far more fragile by comparison (I don't think anyone wanted long-term instability of the type that would harm the economic golden goose in the canal)

By comparison incentives here are very different

This is why I simply don't understand these kinds of comments by NP. Like does the guy only interact with weird twitter trolls?

Maybe my perspective is swayed by being in DC surrounded by federal workers but in my experience basically everyone here has traveled extensively only to come back to "we love the US despite its flaws and want to make it even better"

Like the left wing patriotism here is off the charts!

Sanderson coming to the publisher: "oops I accidentally wrote a whole manuscript in the last month, does this mean I can keep going?"

This is why the more advanced far-right is openly contemptful of Christianity. To them, it's a religion of losers and suckers who think Jesus should have come back after 3 days to go on a crusade and burn Rome to the ground

One of my friends in undergrad went to a women-only Bible Study where she was set up with 3 consecutive boyfriends that she had to break up with because they all drove drunk

I think many of the clergy are just happy to see new converts who are involved and they aren't really aware of how extreme these young men actually are (though there are exceptions)

At least in rural areas, these men get married extremely early. Their wives are indoctrinated from an early age!

It's the same thing in Catholic churches unfortunately. Many of the *most* involved members are tradcaths who bring in a bunch of far-right converts, pushing moderates out.

Shockingly, it's the WORST on some college campus Newman centers in my experience! All my moderate Catholic friends avoid them

My "combatting antisemitism by making lists of jewish faculty" has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt

... and yet, I think most people are aware that driving sucks! They just can't imagine any alternative options that don't involve cutting yourself off from the outside world with an air conditioned box

The fundamental problem with urban sprawl is we've turned a housing problem into a transportation problem so now nobody can even imagine walking to work