Then why are you reading - much less commenting - on an article about ebook readers? Do you think ranting about dead tree carcasses is going to convince others that we've made a grievous error?
I'm not trying to sell you on anything, but you seem to be hell-bent on evangelizing.
You pay less "cash money" than without the ads, and they don't show up when reading. If you don't mind reading on the epaper screen, Kindles have only gotten better with time - backlights, controls, speed, capacity, and screen quality have all improved.
If small areas are allowed, that enables apartments to coexist with the burbs.
Sure, they coexist - but once developed, there is no more more market force at work. Density cannot be increased and so prices go up, up, up as demand increases with no more supply. Demand is artificially constrained by the free market. The only place for poor people to go is where market forces are still free to work: blighted areas with depressed demand and further away from the city where land values have not yet appreciated and supply is still keeping up with demand.
This strengthens my point, which is that people coming out of the inner city are not wanted in the suburbs
It rather depends on the city. In Manhattan or San Francisco, poor people mostly come from outside the city. This is increasingly true as cities revitalize/gentrify, depending on how you want to paint it. Most cities of appreciable size (Boston, NYC, Philly, DC, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, etc.) have some form of commuter rail, meant to bring in well-off suburbanites into the city center. It's cheaper to go the other way, out to the suburbs - precisely because people generally don't want to do that. The type of public transit you say is opposed already exists. The kind that doesn't exist is public transit that can efficiently take you from one suburban location to another.
They do exactly that in suburbs, with only relatively small areas sequestered away as high density or mixed use - usually right next to high-density commercial or even light industrial.Even inside the city limits, they will often restrict building heights in residential zones. For instance, in Philadelphia the building height limit is 38 feet in most of the residential-zoned areas. That is the vast majority of the city by area.
Chromebooks are awesome if you have kids or if you are the de facto IT person in your family. Support consists only of fixing hardware failures and resetting forgotten passwords, occasionally disabling a rude extension. Beats the shit out of spending a full day cleaning up Windows.
No, because the market regulates who can be in a neighborhood more effectively than that.
Absolutely not. A piece of land can be zoned single-family, which completely subverts the market drive to put high-density housing up.
The worry is
No, the worry is that people will blow a bunch of money on a useless suburb-to-suburb transit system that even the proles have no use for. Good luck getting a bunch of loot on a bus or train, anyway.
Toll the roads with demand-based pricing to keep them moving and use the proceeds beyond road maintenance to fund public transit. This fleeces the well-to-do and subsidizes everyone else. A compromise that lets everyone wait in line if they really want to is a parallel express highway like they have in Virginia near DC - this fleeces the rich to pay for the roads while letting everyone else continue wait in line like they always have.
they do not want poor people coming into middle class neighborhoods.
You are thinking of zoning. Public transit is opposed because it generally sucks and is a pasted-on solution to what is essentially a planning problem. In places where it makes sense, it is quite popular and is used to bring huge numbers of low-income people into service jobs in areas that they could not possibly afford.
Congratulations, you've just redefined 3 words in a vain attempt at marketing.
Taxation and theft are both taking someone else's property, but they are separate words with distinct features
Socialism is not the receipt of stolen property, socialism is the control of the means of production by the state. Redistribution has only a tangential relationship to production.
Oh yeah, that RAZR flip phone wasn't marketed as a fashion accessory at all...
They also made real phones, like the v360. I could take a conference call walking down 1st Ave in NYC and the thing would automagically eliminate street noise - as far as I can tell, call quality on smart phones has never matched that phone model.
This is one of the arguments for a guaranteed minimum income. I would like to see such a thing trialed (and trialed for real, not like in Finland) in a first-world country, just to see if it holds up to any of the claims its proponents make.
Forgive my wording - that should not be "the only places" and should instead be "the main places".
There are of course examples here and there of socialized industries in Europe, but - and please correct me if I'm wrong - none approach the scale of the petroleum and healthcare industries. The main thrust of my comment is that European countries are not command economies, even if the government does own a few companies - most of the economy is dominated by capitalism.
This stuff is all standard AGW denier stuff, and it's all been thoroughly rebutted by people far better qualified than myself - it just takes a little research on Google. I can do that if you want, but I have a feeling the conspiracy sites will provide you with more information than I have time.
In this specific case, the problem is that you are referencing some localized events (Medieval Warm Period), when "global warming" is exactly that - global, not "European warming".
The constitution definitely clearly lays out a place for spending by the federal government for common defense, that certainly is not in dispute.
However, there was a big fear at the time about standing armies - so much so that we got the 2nd Amendment as part of the Bill of Rights. The idea was that we would try to provide for the common defense with militias of citizens, who would even provide their own weapons. In hindsight, this was a terrible idea. There were several high-profile failures, and within a few decades this system was completely abandoned... and here we are, with the most powerful standing army the world has ever known despite the existence of the 2nd Amendment.
So I mean, yeah, the Constitution does explicitly authorize this spending. But, well, it also specifically calls out militias as the way to accomplish this... and yeah, we just sort of ignore that part because it was a neat idea that didn't work.
At an 800,000 year scale, a "sudden" change takes thousands of years. We have reduced that to decades - within a single generation of some species, including our own. If we had 1000s of years to slowly migrate our populations around, we wouldn't even notice, and the same is largely true of the rest of nature. But now we're dealing with change 10-100x faster than that and it will be much more stressful to migrate quickly.
You linked to a chart that shows an x-axis with a thousand-year increment, and zoomed in "recent proxies" inset shows a 0.5 degree C anomaly as of 2004. This is entirely consistent with models. I'm not sure what you are getting at, but your conclusion that "there's really zero indication that things are different now than in the past 10, 20, or 500 thousand years" is completely unsupported by the linked chart.
I haven't bothered to see if your math checks out, but naturally there are other ways besides CO2 to play with the Earth's climate. You can add or remove any number of chemicals to the air. More feasible than what you propose is spraying particles into the upper atmosphere which reflect sunlight - and importantly, this has been demonstrated naturally by volcanic eruptions.
But you miss the point. Doing something novel that changes the natural balance is a very different thing than allowing the natural system to continue functioning the way it has for thousands of years. We are currently artificially adding CO2 to the atmosphere, which is throwing it out of whack. By far the most straightforward thing to do is "don't do that". Everything else will almost certainly have consequences that we will not anticipate.
Yes, this is why a proper incentive structure is so important. I was mulling over how to introduce some competition into the process - try different approaches and reward the ones that work at the expense of those which don't. Perhaps fund charities based on their success in removing people from roles while also measuring outcomes in some way (e.g. recidivism, wellness measures, etc). You could set it up with a grant structure, where the grant money starts as a pilot and is adjusted based on success or failure. I think that, at least, this would get the low-hanging fruit - obviously some people will always be dependent on someone else for support.
In my casual observation, there isn't a lot of difference between a government-run utility and a private-run utility when a monopoly is involved. Either way, the forces that make capitalism so powerful are not it force - and in practice the regulation tends to be so heavy that the private operator may as well be government. We end up with the same suboptimal situation in almost any sphere where competition either can't work or we aren't willing to live with its consequences - usually infrastructure and utilities. If you can find a way to encourage competition in, say, power delivery without also having a bunch of parallel systems all over the damn place, you'll be a famous man in certain circles.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha, sorry to send you off the deep end :)
I'm here for the echo chamber. It's a tech site. If I want curmudgeonly anti-ebook stuff I'll go talk to the old lady who runs our book store...
Then why are you reading - much less commenting - on an article about ebook readers? Do you think ranting about dead tree carcasses is going to convince others that we've made a grievous error?
I'm not trying to sell you on anything, but you seem to be hell-bent on evangelizing.
That gives you a clue how often I buy books from Amazon :)
Removal of Amazon DRM is trivial in Calibre and you don't need to use DRM ebooks in the first place.
You pay less "cash money" than without the ads, and they don't show up when reading. If you don't mind reading on the epaper screen, Kindles have only gotten better with time - backlights, controls, speed, capacity, and screen quality have all improved.
If small areas are allowed, that enables apartments to coexist with the burbs.
Sure, they coexist - but once developed, there is no more more market force at work. Density cannot be increased and so prices go up, up, up as demand increases with no more supply. Demand is artificially constrained by the free market. The only place for poor people to go is where market forces are still free to work: blighted areas with depressed demand and further away from the city where land values have not yet appreciated and supply is still keeping up with demand.
This strengthens my point, which is that people coming out of the inner city are not wanted in the suburbs
It rather depends on the city. In Manhattan or San Francisco, poor people mostly come from outside the city. This is increasingly true as cities revitalize/gentrify, depending on how you want to paint it. Most cities of appreciable size (Boston, NYC, Philly, DC, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, etc.) have some form of commuter rail, meant to bring in well-off suburbanites into the city center. It's cheaper to go the other way, out to the suburbs - precisely because people generally don't want to do that. The type of public transit you say is opposed already exists. The kind that doesn't exist is public transit that can efficiently take you from one suburban location to another.
They do exactly that in suburbs, with only relatively small areas sequestered away as high density or mixed use - usually right next to high-density commercial or even light industrial .Even inside the city limits, they will often restrict building heights in residential zones. For instance, in Philadelphia the building height limit is 38 feet in most of the residential-zoned areas. That is the vast majority of the city by area.
Chromebooks are awesome if you have kids or if you are the de facto IT person in your family. Support consists only of fixing hardware failures and resetting forgotten passwords, occasionally disabling a rude extension. Beats the shit out of spending a full day cleaning up Windows.
No, because the market regulates who can be in a neighborhood more effectively than that.
Absolutely not. A piece of land can be zoned single-family, which completely subverts the market drive to put high-density housing up.
The worry is
No, the worry is that people will blow a bunch of money on a useless suburb-to-suburb transit system that even the proles have no use for. Good luck getting a bunch of loot on a bus or train, anyway.
Toll the roads with demand-based pricing to keep them moving and use the proceeds beyond road maintenance to fund public transit. This fleeces the well-to-do and subsidizes everyone else. A compromise that lets everyone wait in line if they really want to is a parallel express highway like they have in Virginia near DC - this fleeces the rich to pay for the roads while letting everyone else continue wait in line like they always have.
I only know two kinds of motorcyclists, young ones and those that have been in serious accidents. Even then, the Venn diagram has a big overlap.
they do not want poor people coming into middle class neighborhoods.
You are thinking of zoning. Public transit is opposed because it generally sucks and is a pasted-on solution to what is essentially a planning problem. In places where it makes sense, it is quite popular and is used to bring huge numbers of low-income people into service jobs in areas that they could not possibly afford.
Congratulations, you've just redefined 3 words in a vain attempt at marketing.
Taxation and theft are both taking someone else's property, but they are separate words with distinct features
Socialism is not the receipt of stolen property, socialism is the control of the means of production by the state. Redistribution has only a tangential relationship to production.
Oh yeah, that RAZR flip phone wasn't marketed as a fashion accessory at all...
They also made real phones, like the v360. I could take a conference call walking down 1st Ave in NYC and the thing would automagically eliminate street noise - as far as I can tell, call quality on smart phones has never matched that phone model.
Yeah, except there is $$$ involved with the Hollywood sign.
This is one of the arguments for a guaranteed minimum income. I would like to see such a thing trialed (and trialed for real, not like in Finland) in a first-world country, just to see if it holds up to any of the claims its proponents make.
Forgive my wording - that should not be "the only places" and should instead be "the main places".
There are of course examples here and there of socialized industries in Europe, but - and please correct me if I'm wrong - none approach the scale of the petroleum and healthcare industries. The main thrust of my comment is that European countries are not command economies, even if the government does own a few companies - most of the economy is dominated by capitalism.
This stuff is all standard AGW denier stuff, and it's all been thoroughly rebutted by people far better qualified than myself - it just takes a little research on Google. I can do that if you want, but I have a feeling the conspiracy sites will provide you with more information than I have time.
In this specific case, the problem is that you are referencing some localized events (Medieval Warm Period), when "global warming" is exactly that - global, not "European warming".
One of these (defense) is actually constitutional
You opened this can of worms, not me. :)
The constitution definitely clearly lays out a place for spending by the federal government for common defense, that certainly is not in dispute.
However, there was a big fear at the time about standing armies - so much so that we got the 2nd Amendment as part of the Bill of Rights. The idea was that we would try to provide for the common defense with militias of citizens, who would even provide their own weapons. In hindsight, this was a terrible idea. There were several high-profile failures, and within a few decades this system was completely abandoned... and here we are, with the most powerful standing army the world has ever known despite the existence of the 2nd Amendment.
So I mean, yeah, the Constitution does explicitly authorize this spending. But, well, it also specifically calls out militias as the way to accomplish this... and yeah, we just sort of ignore that part because it was a neat idea that didn't work.
At an 800,000 year scale, a "sudden" change takes thousands of years. We have reduced that to decades - within a single generation of some species, including our own. If we had 1000s of years to slowly migrate our populations around, we wouldn't even notice, and the same is largely true of the rest of nature. But now we're dealing with change 10-100x faster than that and it will be much more stressful to migrate quickly.
You linked to a chart that shows an x-axis with a thousand-year increment, and zoomed in "recent proxies" inset shows a 0.5 degree C anomaly as of 2004. This is entirely consistent with models. I'm not sure what you are getting at, but your conclusion that "there's really zero indication that things are different now than in the past 10, 20, or 500 thousand years" is completely unsupported by the linked chart.
I haven't bothered to see if your math checks out, but naturally there are other ways besides CO2 to play with the Earth's climate. You can add or remove any number of chemicals to the air. More feasible than what you propose is spraying particles into the upper atmosphere which reflect sunlight - and importantly, this has been demonstrated naturally by volcanic eruptions.
But you miss the point. Doing something novel that changes the natural balance is a very different thing than allowing the natural system to continue functioning the way it has for thousands of years. We are currently artificially adding CO2 to the atmosphere, which is throwing it out of whack. By far the most straightforward thing to do is "don't do that". Everything else will almost certainly have consequences that we will not anticipate.
Yes, this is why a proper incentive structure is so important. I was mulling over how to introduce some competition into the process - try different approaches and reward the ones that work at the expense of those which don't. Perhaps fund charities based on their success in removing people from roles while also measuring outcomes in some way (e.g. recidivism, wellness measures, etc). You could set it up with a grant structure, where the grant money starts as a pilot and is adjusted based on success or failure. I think that, at least, this would get the low-hanging fruit - obviously some people will always be dependent on someone else for support.
In my casual observation, there isn't a lot of difference between a government-run utility and a private-run utility when a monopoly is involved. Either way, the forces that make capitalism so powerful are not it force - and in practice the regulation tends to be so heavy that the private operator may as well be government. We end up with the same suboptimal situation in almost any sphere where competition either can't work or we aren't willing to live with its consequences - usually infrastructure and utilities. If you can find a way to encourage competition in, say, power delivery without also having a bunch of parallel systems all over the damn place, you'll be a famous man in certain circles.
I'd love that, or even just approval voting.