Indian outsourcing companies are like Walmart. Everyone knows they suck, by almost every metric. But they're so cheap they drive all the competition out of business.
Most folks who get worked up about the "deep state" would be better off turning their attention to the parastate - the "broad state" that includes both the democratically controlled government and the many oligarchic corporations and NGOs that have become so intertwined with it as to be inseparable. The average big bank oppresses more people in an afternoon than the CIA has time to oppress in a year.
For me, highrise apartment all the way. When one lives in the center city, one wants to live as high up as possible. The streets are loud and dirty. Actually I would not want to live on the 14th floor in Manhattan - too low to have good light and ventilation.
NYC's brownstones are architecturally significant, so they should be preserved. But they have little appeal as a place to live.
Tokyo is a great example of how to build a humane high density city. While it is certainly a highrise city, Tokyo still has many smaller buildings for those who prefer that lifestyle.
That's possible because Tokyo's high density zone is not a tightly packed island, but rather spreads for miles all over the Kanto plain. So they can have lots and lots of big buildings, without feeling the economic need to turn every last tiny spec of land into a condo tower.
"some people like living that way, but I don't think it is across the board."
Sure. Diversity of opinion makes the world go 'round. But in my observation, it's not an uncommon desire.
"if you're trying to raise a family, it becomes a lot less desirable."
Personally I want my children to grow up in the city. I grew up in the burbs and that sucked donkey balls. The city is filthy but at least it's not a wasteland of cars and cul-de-sacs.
"I don't think you can point to the demand for housing in Superstar cities as an indicator that people want to live in high-rise apartments, taking public transportation everywhere."
It's mixed. Like you say, for many people it's about following jobs and money. But for many others it's about city life first - and the job is just a way to pay for that.
"people who are living in the less-dense housing are fighting the construction of more housing"
Yup. That's called "I've got mine, so screw you Jack". It'll change once the Boomer population starts to thin out. They just _loved_ living in suburban crap shacks. From Gen X onwards there seems to be a shift in preferences back toward urban living.
Fortunately I haven't been to the Bayarrhea in several years. =)
So if East PA is gentrifying, where's the new ghetto?
I suspect it's a law of nature: Wherever one finds the extravagant rich, one must also find the squalid poor. The existence of Pacific Heights _implies_ the existence of Bayview. Nature abhors imbalance.
"Nobody really wants to live in a high density multi-story building for very long."
Speak for yourself, my brother. Having lived in all sorts of housing types, I _strongly prefer_ to (and do) live in a highrise building in a dense urban neighborhood. So do many of my friends and colleagues.
If you prefer to live in a suburban crap shack, go for it! Have fun! But please remember there is great diversity of opinion about the best way to live.
Fuck those deplorables, always bellyaching about "jerbs" and "living indoors" and "having something to eat". Ingrates! Don't they know that in some parts of the world people live in stacks of used tires and are *happy* to eat a bowl of gravel every other day?
How dare those rednecks complain about their own disinheritance and destitution, when there are far more picturesque problems in distant exotic parts of the world that are fun to visit on vacation! Don't they know they live in THE RICHEST COUNTRY EVER!!!!1!!1!!???!?
In conclusion, those ignorant deplorables should pull themselves up by the bootstraps, after begging for a pair of boots. If only they would just put a little effort into it, they too can graduate from Stanford and take a seven figure sinecure with a loss-making, ultimately QE-funded startup company. Let them live in Palo Alto! Let them eat organic vegan steak tartar!
Actually, lots & lots of people like living in high rise apartments. In a decent building the quality of life can be much superior to living in a typical suburban crap shack.
Don't believe me? Check out the demand for housing in New York, Tokyo, Singapore, etc. Both effective demand - where people have enough money to participate in the real estate market; and latent demand - all the millions who would like to live in dense cities but cannot afford it.
That's the outlook that gets you suburban cultural wasteland "multi millionaire ghetto" shitholes like Palo Alto. And for every Palo Alto nature has ordained a nearby East Palo Alto - a mirror image with sociopath gangsters instead of sociopath capitalists.
"I suspect a lot of twenty somethings honestly think that spending half of of your take home pay on rent is a good deal."
No bro, they know damned well they're getting ass raped by the landowning class. But they still find that preferable to living in the grim, economically collapsed interior of the country.
Public policy since Carter has been a disastrous failure. We went into that period as a Free and prosperous nation. Now we have a 40 year economic depression and a Soviet stone police state - replete with purges, mass surveillance, kangaroo courts, and the biggest gulag in the world.
Truly both faces of the Establishment Party have lost the Mandate of Heaven. Yet both faces refuse even to acknowledge the utter failure of their policies and the resulting immiseration of their countrymen. THAT is why people support President Trump.
When humor is crushed with an iron boot, reasonable people start to worry about tyranny. Believe it or not, most Free Software enthusiasts prefer.... wait for it... freedom.
You nazis have a lot of corporate money behind you - and everything that big money can buy, like PR flacks, lawyers, courts, journalists, and paid "activists". What you don't have is support of the People.
No one likes you nazi assholes. No one wants to live in your dystopian neo-puritanical police state. You are cultural imperialists, invading communities by force and stealing that which you did not build.
Anti-imperialist sentiment is growing. There are Resistance cells everywhere. You social just-us nazis better shine up your jackboots and get ready. This kind of gratuitous oppression will eventually lead to a general uprising.
Or better, send your congressman a suitcase full of cash and ask him to please ban Faceboot's cyberstalking-based business model. (You can also write to your congressman without sending a suitcase full of cash, but don't expect him to give a fuck what you say.)
Slashdot Mirror
Better authoritarian populism than totalitarian oligarchy.
Indian outsourcing companies are like Walmart. Everyone knows they suck, by almost every metric. But they're so cheap they drive all the competition out of business.
Actually the rumbling about a "trade war" with China has strengthened America's economic ties with Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
Most folks who get worked up about the "deep state" would be better off turning their attention to the parastate - the "broad state" that includes both the democratically controlled government and the many oligarchic corporations and NGOs that have become so intertwined with it as to be inseparable. The average big bank oppresses more people in an afternoon than the CIA has time to oppress in a year.
For me, highrise apartment all the way. When one lives in the center city, one wants to live as high up as possible. The streets are loud and dirty. Actually I would not want to live on the 14th floor in Manhattan - too low to have good light and ventilation.
NYC's brownstones are architecturally significant, so they should be preserved. But they have little appeal as a place to live.
Tokyo is a great example of how to build a humane high density city. While it is certainly a highrise city, Tokyo still has many smaller buildings for those who prefer that lifestyle.
That's possible because Tokyo's high density zone is not a tightly packed island, but rather spreads for miles all over the Kanto plain. So they can have lots and lots of big buildings, without feeling the economic need to turn every last tiny spec of land into a condo tower.
Article summarized: Amazon does same lawfully-crooked things as other megacorps, reaps similarly lucrative rewards.
They authors of this study are not "liberals". They hate liberty. Rather they are Corporate Progressives.
This article appears to have several purposes:
1) Divide the masses against themselves, making it easier for the corporate oligarchy to continue exploiting and oppressing the people.
2) Another shibboleth for Corporate Progressive acolytes, deepening their religious devotion by forcing them to believe in obvious falsehoods.
3) Pretext for increased censorship.
It's News for Nerds because they used "AI" in the process of lying with statistics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
"some people like living that way, but I don't think it is across the board."
Sure. Diversity of opinion makes the world go 'round. But in my observation, it's not an uncommon desire.
"if you're trying to raise a family, it becomes a lot less desirable."
Personally I want my children to grow up in the city. I grew up in the burbs and that sucked donkey balls. The city is filthy but at least it's not a wasteland of cars and cul-de-sacs.
"I don't think you can point to the demand for housing in Superstar cities as an indicator that people want to live in high-rise apartments, taking public transportation everywhere."
It's mixed. Like you say, for many people it's about following jobs and money. But for many others it's about city life first - and the job is just a way to pay for that.
"people who are living in the less-dense housing are fighting the construction of more housing"
Yup. That's called "I've got mine, so screw you Jack". It'll change once the Boomer population starts to thin out. They just _loved_ living in suburban crap shacks. From Gen X onwards there seems to be a shift in preferences back toward urban living.
Fortunately I haven't been to the Bayarrhea in several years. =)
So if East PA is gentrifying, where's the new ghetto?
I suspect it's a law of nature: Wherever one finds the extravagant rich, one must also find the squalid poor. The existence of Pacific Heights _implies_ the existence of Bayview. Nature abhors imbalance.
"Nobody really wants to live in a high density multi-story building for very long."
Speak for yourself, my brother. Having lived in all sorts of housing types, I _strongly prefer_ to (and do) live in a highrise building in a dense urban neighborhood. So do many of my friends and colleagues.
If you prefer to live in a suburban crap shack, go for it! Have fun! But please remember there is great diversity of opinion about the best way to live.
Fuck those deplorables, always bellyaching about "jerbs" and "living indoors" and "having something to eat". Ingrates! Don't they know that in some parts of the world people live in stacks of used tires and are *happy* to eat a bowl of gravel every other day?
How dare those rednecks complain about their own disinheritance and destitution, when there are far more picturesque problems in distant exotic parts of the world that are fun to visit on vacation! Don't they know they live in THE RICHEST COUNTRY EVER!!!!1!!1!!???!?
In conclusion, those ignorant deplorables should pull themselves up by the bootstraps, after begging for a pair of boots. If only they would just put a little effort into it, they too can graduate from Stanford and take a seven figure sinecure with a loss-making, ultimately QE-funded startup company. Let them live in Palo Alto! Let them eat organic vegan steak tartar!
It doesn't cost that much to keep a pack of mangy mutts. It's not even a little bit comparable to the cost of housing in the Bayarrhea.
Actually, lots & lots of people like living in high rise apartments. In a decent building the quality of life can be much superior to living in a typical suburban crap shack.
Don't believe me? Check out the demand for housing in New York, Tokyo, Singapore, etc. Both effective demand - where people have enough money to participate in the real estate market; and latent demand - all the millions who would like to live in dense cities but cannot afford it.
That's the outlook that gets you suburban cultural wasteland "multi millionaire ghetto" shitholes like Palo Alto. And for every Palo Alto nature has ordained a nearby East Palo Alto - a mirror image with sociopath gangsters instead of sociopath capitalists.
"when the debt bomb explodes"
Isn't the large majority of Chinese debt denominated in Yuan? Emperor Xi can print all the Yuan he could ever need.
Cool idea. Your country can disband first, okay?
"I suspect a lot of twenty somethings honestly think that spending half of of your take home pay on rent is a good deal."
No bro, they know damned well they're getting ass raped by the landowning class. But they still find that preferable to living in the grim, economically collapsed interior of the country.
Public policy since Carter has been a disastrous failure. We went into that period as a Free and prosperous nation. Now we have a 40 year economic depression and a Soviet stone police state - replete with purges, mass surveillance, kangaroo courts, and the biggest gulag in the world.
Truly both faces of the Establishment Party have lost the Mandate of Heaven. Yet both faces refuse even to acknowledge the utter failure of their policies and the resulting immiseration of their countrymen. THAT is why people support President Trump.
Remember when Google used to be _good_ at searching the web? I do...
When humor is crushed with an iron boot, reasonable people start to worry about tyranny. Believe it or not, most Free Software enthusiasts prefer.... wait for it... freedom.
You nazis have a lot of corporate money behind you - and everything that big money can buy, like PR flacks, lawyers, courts, journalists, and paid "activists". What you don't have is support of the People.
No one likes you nazi assholes. No one wants to live in your dystopian neo-puritanical police state. You are cultural imperialists, invading communities by force and stealing that which you did not build.
Anti-imperialist sentiment is growing. There are Resistance cells everywhere. You social just-us nazis better shine up your jackboots and get ready. This kind of gratuitous oppression will eventually lead to a general uprising.
Sure, the language is a bit sophomoric. But it appears Mr Bachelier is correct: he created an asshole detector.
What a shame that the Debian project has been beset by so much censorious, organized assholery.
"contact Google"
Wouldn't shaking my fist and shouting at the sky have greater likelihood of being effective?
Yup. Who can stop Faceboot? The Air Force, that's who!
Or better, send your congressman a suitcase full of cash and ask him to please ban Faceboot's cyberstalking-based business model. (You can also write to your congressman without sending a suitcase full of cash, but don't expect him to give a fuck what you say.)
"The line between app and malware is shockingly blurry"
By the standards of early 2000s, when I had my first job in network security, every app on my Android phone - as well as the OS itself - is malware.