> We can produce enough food for everyone on earth to eat,
Who is this "we?"
There's a kind of circular complaint built into all such endeavors that goes like, "we can do this, but unfortunately we as a group don't want to, but we could definitely do it if we wanted, but sadly we currently have the wrong opinions, but we can definitely do it, if only we weren't inclined not to, but we should and we will, as soon as we all come around to the truth."
Your "we" doesn't seem to want to do what you want them to do, which is why communists so often end up thinking that the real problem is the existing populace and maybe what they really need is to be re-educated or even replaced.
It's kind of darkly funny that NIMBY ever came to refer to housing in the first place. The term was originally meant to apply to stuff exactly like this -- i.e. genuinely noxious uses that most people nevertheless agree are necessary somewhere. Almost everybody is a NIMBY in this sense.
Incumbent homeowners (and sometimes renters in rent-control situations) voting for policies that prevent new housing from being built near them is a huge reason why housing costs so much where I live; and reducing local housing costs is probably the single biggest way that policy changes could directly improve my quality of life.
Also, housing itself is often a genuinely noxious use of land for incumbent homeowners. In part because construction creates noise and dust and requires upgrading other local physical infrastructure - but also because more housing implies more new people living in an existing neighborhood, and additional people living somewhere can themselves cause problems for the incumbent residents.
Developers share an enormous role in this problem. They want to enshittify nice places to live with overdevelopment, because people with lower standards want to live there - which is perfectly fine. But they could happily live in residential zones built outward instead - however, that doesn't get the developers as much money, so they don't.
This is an explicitly anti-density, pro-suburban-sprawl housing policy proposal. This is basically the opposite of what transit-oriented urbanists would like to see.
> A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design
Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.
Yeah, that's how I knew that he was born 13 years after the establishment of the city's modern borders and that your original claim is incorrect (and, incidentally, not corroborated by the result of your quick google search, which doesn't even attempt to suggest that he had anything to do with the city's "ring suburb design").
I am of two minds about this. As a matter of human disappointment, I totally get it. They liked working there. Now they don't. It's not their choice. And it sucks. This is extremely relatable.
But the naïveté and confusion on display in the post are extremely not relatable. What do you think a company is? What do you think a job is? What is it that you think you're doing there? And what is it that you believe you are owed?
On this front, this person talks like an alien -- or, more condescendingly, a child. I can't relate to it at all, nor do I think it's polite or kind to play along and pretend that their worldview is understandable.
Maybe -- maybe -- you could say something like, "look, these companies lie to their employees. They tell them that they're family, that they should bring their whole selves to work, that they are changing the world, that they matter to the company as an individual. You can't blame them for believing it."
But I do. Those are such ridiculous lies that I somehow have more contempt for anybody who believes them than I do the liars, who I view mostly to be playing out a kind of benign social fiction that's transparently fake to everybody involved.
> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said.
Obviously you can write a law that says anything you want, but as an aesthetic matter, this strikes me as pretty ridiculous. A company makes up a thing called a "blue checkmark" and then, what, it has to mean the same thing for the rest of all time? It's not like the new Twitter lied about what was happening. They said plainly that they were changing the checkmark system to mean something new. Why would anybody cheer a government stepping in to say, "no, sorry, you can't do that?"
As much as we would like otherwise, law is a subjective tool. We implement objectivity as much as is feasible, e.g. using careful wording and precedent, but ultimately it would be a fool's errand to attempt to make it 100% objective/deterministic.
All this to say, we tend to oversimplify in our criticisms when more objectivity would have given us a result we agree with.
We tend to agree that we want laws to stop businesses from "tricking people". The specifics vary widely, but the goal itself is unavoidably subjective, so there will always be some subjectivity in its application.
There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here, so your comment is a non sequitur. If particular accounts are posting fraudulent information, then go after those through regular legal channels. The platform is not the problem here.
> There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here.
That is a purely subjective opinion, since I have talked to elderly people who assumed “blue checkmark = celebrity” and was therefore confused why there are so many such interactions on trivial posts.
Ignorant people sometimes have stupid thoughts. This is not an actual problem, or anything that governments or media companies need to fix.
Even under previous Twitter management, there were a lot of verified accounts who weren't celebrities by any reasonable definition. So only a moron would have ever believed that "blue checkmark = celebrity". We can't protect morons from themselves and it's pointless to even try.
Calling people stupid is a common and low-quality excuse to not regulate. It's part of how societies start to fail. If some percentage of people are mistaken about something, the reality of that is all that matters, regardless of how stupid you personally think those people are.
Nah. There's no evidence to support your claim. You're just making things up to try to find a plausible, friendly sounding excuse to justify government censorship. Citation needed.
Life is hard. It's even harder when you're stupid. Government regulation can never change that reality.
In the United States we have a long, foundational legal tradition in support of Free Speech and free enterprise for this very reason.
The bar is set very high precisely because we know where things go when it's not.
This specific case wouldn't clear a low bar, much less a high one. I, too, have been turned off by Musk's behavior over the last year, but the idea that this case has nothing to do with that is risible.
There's at least a little bit of strawman-ing going on here.
The regulators are not insisting that blue checkmarks mean what they've always meant. Secondly xitter hasn't been transparent about changes to blue checkmarks. There was a long period of time when blue checkmarks were given or even forced upon credible sources at Elon's whim while he sold them to hucksters and frauds. Even if blue checkmarks had been that debased throughout their existence, there's still plenty of basis for regulators to find that they are deceptive.
The worst part isn't that a company makes up a designation and is forced to stick with it by regulators. A designation could have been designed from the beginning specifically to head off regulators.
The worst part is that it is simply a lie. Blue checkmark never meant "trustworthy source of information," and most people who had blue checkmarks were not trustworthy sources of information. Thierry Breton is spreading misinformation here, but that would not have ever been grounds to remove his checkmark.
Blue checkmarks were an arbitrary piece of gamified tat given by twitter when it felt like it, and now it's a paid piece of gamified tat that can be revoked whenever Musk feels like it.
At best checkmarks were "verified" accounts. That meant that most likely party with access to account had identifiable identity connected to it. Say celebrity or real business. For any given value of celebrity also big enough "influencer" counting.
Now would celebrities, influencer or company marketing accounts always be trustworthy sources? For more cynical almost never...
Nope, its just that the current Eu establishment doesnt like how its narrative about the Gaza genocide or the Ukraine War was challenged by including even its own press, so they want control and censorship. The countries that are pushing for this are persecuting people for protesting the Ukraine war or the Gaza genocide. Also there's the thing with the current Eu commission president's secret whatsapp chat with Pfizer lobbyists, which has become a major issue that reached the top European court recently.
> "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
It's worse than that in that it's just plainly wrong. I learn about useful products via advertising all the time -- so often, in fact, that I'm sort of bewildered that anybody could claim otherwise. We must be experiencing the world quite differently.
Running a 2009 Mac Mini in a business setting. Connected to a barcode scanner within a local python development environment and communicates over a wired network. Runs 24/7 with barely an issue.
> I genuinely can't understand the thought process of a Yankees fan.
There is very little free agency in American sports fandom. People are (for the most part) fans of the team local to where they grew up. (This kind of bums me out as someone raising kids in New England, which is not where I'm from, and so not whose teams I root for.)
Backing the local team always makes the most sense. In NYC you can choose Mets or Yankees (though where you live in the city affects even that). Choosing a team from some other city means you see your team play much less often and only after much effort. Worse there are less people to talk about the game as nobody has seen your team play and you didn't see their team plan. (except when your team plans the local team)
In order to rethink Bachelor Degrees, one must first rethink high school. It is routine in the US to see schools where 1) <=5% of the student body is proficient in math; but also 2) the school has a 90% graduation rate.
If that's high school, then it's useless, both as a signal, but also just because, you know, nobody is learning anything. You pretty much have to have some other place for smart people to demonstrate that they're smart.
We need to admit schools are babysitting kids and not teaching them anymore. A few kids can still learn, but so many others don't. Especially the one who would learn in a better environment, but whose class is disrupted by 1 or 2 students preventing their education. Once a student gets behind a year, they aren't going to ever catch up if they are only passed on to the next year instead of being identified as someone who needs to repeat the year.
Edit: I should have been clearer in "are increasingly babysitting" and not been as strong as indicating it as some universal truth. I hear horror stories from teachers about how much of their time is focused on classroom management, how little on actual education, and how much effort it put into processes so the grades stay up regardless.
I wonder if alternative forms of education (like Waldorf/Steiner) would make more sense to more kids. It's clear that the standard way of teaching doesn't resonate with many kids, and we would do well to investigate that.
The hilarious thing is to get a visa in Europe one of the most reliable ways is to start a business under DAFT or be an investor. They want the evil hypercapitalist entrepreneur, they don't actually want the kind of people that their system often claims to champion the most.
Who is this "we?"
There's a kind of circular complaint built into all such endeavors that goes like, "we can do this, but unfortunately we as a group don't want to, but we could definitely do it if we wanted, but sadly we currently have the wrong opinions, but we can definitely do it, if only we weren't inclined not to, but we should and we will, as soon as we all come around to the truth."
Your "we" doesn't seem to want to do what you want them to do, which is why communists so often end up thinking that the real problem is the existing populace and maybe what they really need is to be re-educated or even replaced.
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