People need to get from point A to B.
Lots of people. Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested.
Non sequitur. The fact that current modes of travel are congested does not prove that people need to get from A to B:
Let's give everyone free McDonald's hamburgers. Let's put 10,000 hamburgers a day on a table in front of the Capitol (or wherever).
What would happen? People would take and eat the hamburgers, and once word got out, all 10,000 hamburgers would be taken very quickly every day. We may thus infer that because people need food and they really seemed to like those burgers, McDonald's hamburgers are an important public good.
A city planner might notice a problem: those 10,000 hamburgers just aren't enough. They get taken very early in the morning, so not everybody has a chance to get a hamburger. The obvious solution--because burgers are a highly-valued public good--is to provide more free burgers. So the city planner starts to provide 20,000 hamburgers a day.
You can see where this is going. People start going out of their way to get the free hamburgers, and planning their day around that trip. The city has to keep providing more and more free burgers--eventually millions a day--to keep satisfying the demand for free hamburgers. The competing food markets crater, because who would pay $2/lb for apples when you can get as many free burgers as you want (although maybe you have to wait in a 30-minute line). Public health goes to hell, because everybody's eating six burgers a day. And yet, everybody likes their free burgers and the Hamburger Department is an untouchable political powerhouse. Proposals for a 10-cent hamburger fee to cover the huge costs of hamburger provision get shot down by public outrage.
What's the problem here? The problem is that food is indeed a necessity, and yes, people seem to like McDonald's hamburgers--but the fact that people will take free burgers does not prove that they are "highly valued" by the market. We are not seeing actual demand for burgers. We are seeing induced demand for a good which is being provided at artificially low prices.
But for some reason, replace hamburgers with roads and everybody goes nuts.
In short, the fact that a new lane or road immediately fills up with traffic does not "prove" that there was a high demand for that road--it proves that people will use way too much of something that's free.
If you write an app that asks for accessibility permissions, how do i know it isn't scraping my screen and sending my passwords to your mothership? You can't 'fix' that.
Why does a screen reader for the blind needs network access? Does it take a screenshot and send it to India where someone reads it and sends the audio back to your app?
So maybe the fix is to prohibit an app from having both network access and accessibility permissions. It can have one or the other but not both.
First let's tell our cities to stop subsidizing the roads with sales taxes and stop forcing developers to build more parking than the market thinks is financially optimal. Freedom, low taxes, and low shelf prices are all good things, right?
Cities, states, and people are stepping up to take care of the environment on their own. An that is how it should be.
That's like saying when a freeway gets congested, cities along that freeway should step up and widen their portion of it and hope the other cities do the same, instead of depending on the state or federal government to do it for them.
I see what you mean. Look at this depressing place. It's such an ugly street because it was built before minimum setbacks, maximum floor area ratios and so on. And people are walking in the street, so you can bet people are getting mowed down by cars every day. Also you can't fit a 40-foot fire truck on this street so the whole place is a massive fire hazard! It's a good thing we've outlawed building such places like that anymore, because with all the carnage, no wonder everyone looks so sad.
So I stand corrected. Thank you for educating me. I feel more informed already!
there is a tremendous amount of real estate consumed by retail outlets
That's absolutely true. We force brick and mortar retailers to build more parking than the market thinks is necessary, and we mandate minimum setbacks, maximum floor area ratios, and height limits, and if stores don't meet these arbitrary requirements that drive up their building costs and property taxes, we don't let them build at all.
In the end, the only retailers who can afford to navigate these regulations are big-box chain stores who are able to woo local governments into giving them massive tax breaks. And then we wonder why cities have no money!
Online retailers can build in small towns where land is cheap and the people are just glad to have the jobs. Then we subsidize their shipping costs. So the decks are stacked against brick and mortar stores.
The death of retail isn't happening naturally. We are causing it ourselves. Once again regulations are killing commerce just as it did in Soviet Russia. We have met the anti-capitalists and it is us.
If you are rating an app and you have nothing to compare it against, how do you know whether it's a good app? Should you give it the benefit of the doubt and rate it a 5, or should you give it a 3 because you don't know whether it's good (5) or bad (1)?
A better rating system would make you put two apps of the same type in order from most to least liked, and justify your reasoning for the metamoderators. Then the polling software would use Condorcet or whatever to put all apps of that type in order from most to least liked, weighted by their metamoderation score, and assign each app a percentile ranking.
I think this would be resistant to boot attacks and create better, more precise ratings.
As others have said, the credit disproportionately benefits people who (1) are in higher tax brackets (wealthy people), and (2) those who can afford electric vehicles (also wealthy people).
What we should be doing instead is to charge the full societal cost of gasoline consumption (up to $1,000 per person per year) and adding that to the price of gasoline. Then people will naturally switch to electric vehicles, no subsidies or government social engineering necessary.
Of course, we also need to charge drivers the full cost of the roads, up from less than half (who says Republicans oppose welfare?); and abolish laws that show favoritism toward Big Oil such as those that force developers to build more parking than the market wants, but that's a different topic of discussion.
So if each state can set their own standards, companies will either default to high privacy standards that apply in all states, or they will have to spend inordinate amounts of money to find and exploit loopholes, right?
We had Mark Swedlund, a database expert whose clients include eBay and American Express, look at the data from Georgia and Virginia, and he was shocked by Crosscheck's "childish methodology." He added, "God forbid your name is Garcia, of which there are 858,000 in the U.S., and your first name is Joseph or Jose. You're probably suspected of voting in 27 states."
...if they expect to run their electric smelters on windless nights in cities without hydroelectric power without paying more. But that's a lot of loopholes they can exploit!
Not budgeting for maintenance is how this country can "afford" nice things. It's a Ponzi scheme..
Then instead of repairing old bridges, we build new ones right next to the old ones and let the old ones crumble. Or we raid other budgets, or we raise massive infrastructure bonds, or we simply build new neighborhoods for the rich and let the poor live with potholes, broken sidewalks, and the occasional water main break. Because keeping the poor segregated from the wealthy is the American Way! (Try to build apartments in a middle- or upper-class neighborhood and you'll quickly see what I mean.)
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Non sequitur. The fact that current modes of travel are congested does not prove that people need to get from A to B:
Why does a screen reader for the blind needs network access? Does it take a screenshot and send it to India where someone reads it and sends the audio back to your app?
So maybe the fix is to prohibit an app from having both network access and accessibility permissions. It can have one or the other but not both.
First let's tell our cities to stop subsidizing the roads with sales taxes and stop forcing developers to build more parking than the market thinks is financially optimal. Freedom, low taxes, and low shelf prices are all good things, right?
Try building a new one. The existing ones violate a number of ordinances that new ones must follow.
A robot driving the truck would also have prevented the accident. Clearly the solution is self-driving semis, not human-driven shuttles!
Are those storefronts new, and each in a separate building (not one big strip mall), and sitting on land that isn't close to worthless?
If so, it would be interesting to learn how they managed it.
That's like saying when a freeway gets congested, cities along that freeway should step up and widen their portion of it and hope the other cities do the same, instead of depending on the state or federal government to do it for them.
But that's how we get bottlenecks.
I see what you mean. Look at this depressing place. It's such an ugly street because it was built before minimum setbacks, maximum floor area ratios and so on. And people are walking in the street, so you can bet people are getting mowed down by cars every day. Also you can't fit a 40-foot fire truck on this street so the whole place is a massive fire hazard! It's a good thing we've outlawed building such places like that anymore, because with all the carnage, no wonder everyone looks so sad.
So I stand corrected. Thank you for educating me. I feel more informed already!
That's absolutely true. We force brick and mortar retailers to build more parking than the market thinks is necessary, and we mandate minimum setbacks, maximum floor area ratios, and height limits, and if stores don't meet these arbitrary requirements that drive up their building costs and property taxes, we don't let them build at all.
In the end, the only retailers who can afford to navigate these regulations are big-box chain stores who are able to woo local governments into giving them massive tax breaks. And then we wonder why cities have no money!
Online retailers can build in small towns where land is cheap and the people are just glad to have the jobs. Then we subsidize their shipping costs. So the decks are stacked against brick and mortar stores.
The death of retail isn't happening naturally. We are causing it ourselves. Once again regulations are killing commerce just as it did in Soviet Russia. We have met the anti-capitalists and it is us.
Keeping global average temperatures from rising more than 2C this century does not benefit us? What are you, a camel?
If you are rating an app and you have nothing to compare it against, how do you know whether it's a good app? Should you give it the benefit of the doubt and rate it a 5, or should you give it a 3 because you don't know whether it's good (5) or bad (1)?
A better rating system would make you put two apps of the same type in order from most to least liked, and justify your reasoning for the metamoderators. Then the polling software would use Condorcet or whatever to put all apps of that type in order from most to least liked, weighted by their metamoderation score, and assign each app a percentile ranking.
I think this would be resistant to boot attacks and create better, more precise ratings.
Agreed, but remember on #2 that mass transit is used as a form of welfare which would need to be replaced somehow.
False.
Oops, #1 is wrong, as someone else pointed out.
As others have said, the credit disproportionately benefits people who (1) are in higher tax brackets (wealthy people), and (2) those who can afford electric vehicles (also wealthy people).
What we should be doing instead is to charge the full societal cost of gasoline consumption (up to $1,000 per person per year) and adding that to the price of gasoline. Then people will naturally switch to electric vehicles, no subsidies or government social engineering necessary.
Of course, we also need to charge drivers the full cost of the roads, up from less than half (who says Republicans oppose welfare?); and abolish laws that show favoritism toward Big Oil such as those that force developers to build more parking than the market wants, but that's a different topic of discussion.
That's how it's done. Or if the office is in your house, block off the door to the office and build a new entrance from the outside.
It would be ironic if you write that from a deforestated suburb!
That's true, calling the FBI is cheaper than implementing real security. A pound of cure is cheaper than an ounce of prevention!
So if each state can set their own standards, companies will either default to high privacy standards that apply in all states, or they will have to spend inordinate amounts of money to find and exploit loopholes, right?
What's the downside?
No, they don't check if you submitted a ballot.
Possibly, but I can't find any sources that even attempt to debunk this particular article.
...if they expect to run their electric smelters on windless nights in cities without hydroelectric power without paying more. But that's a lot of loopholes they can exploit!
Not budgeting for maintenance is how this country can "afford" nice things. It's a Ponzi scheme..
Then instead of repairing old bridges, we build new ones right next to the old ones and let the old ones crumble. Or we raid other budgets, or we raise massive infrastructure bonds, or we simply build new neighborhoods for the rich and let the poor live with potholes, broken sidewalks, and the occasional water main break. Because keeping the poor segregated from the wealthy is the American Way! (Try to build apartments in a middle- or upper-class neighborhood and you'll quickly see what I mean.)
Just distribute binary diffs so people can patch their own copies of the game.