I don't think the lack of talent is preventing us from having good public transportation. Diverting smart folks from yacht building will not eliminate the problems with unions, zoning, or crime to name a few of the issues. These are difficult problems because people and their different desires are involved.
One city has a millionaire who builds a yacht for 100M dollars in a local shipyard and uses it for holidays. The neighbor city has a millionaire who spends 100M dollars to build 10 ferries he gifts to the city.
The general population is clearly better off in the second case, even if it does not matter for the workers in the shipyard.
That seems very lucky of the second city. Let's hope we get lucky with some generous billionaires soon!
I don't claim that regulations are simple, and incentives couldn't be created to result in infrastructure investment by the wealthy... but I won't hold my breath.
Cute gambit to talk about ferries, the one mode of transport that doesn't have insane land-use debates. (Although they do need waterfront property on both ends.) I'll give you a point for that one.
But let's be serious. Ferries have a very limited use in only a few cities. Even then, the appeal is limited because they're relatively slow.
I submit that the most common result of replacing one yacht with $100m of public transit spending is that the unions and the bureaucracy will eat up the $100m in a few minutes.
The theory here is that diverting more smart people into "good" careers like urban planning will be great. But if we look at the last 100 years in the United States, the rise of careers like urban planning have been correlated with an explosion in construction costs.
Yet back in the bad old days when there weren't urban planning degrees and only a few effete twits went to college, private capitalism was able to build two big urban transit systems in NYC. No book smart people. Just sandhogs and profit motive. How much did it cost to add just a few stops to the NYC subway over the last two decades?
Yes, when you don't care about the environment or safety regulations or displacing people poorer than you, infrastructure is a very easy problem to solve. Fortunately for you, we seem to be heading back towards that way of thinking.
Also, I live near a city that had one of those ridiculous, way over budget projects where sure, some money was funneled to unions and bureaucracy or whatever evil monsters you've concocted here. No amount of billionaire pet projects could match the amount of good it did across the number of people it affected. Sometimes the inefficiencies of human cooperation are greased with money, and that's perfectly fine.
The worst problem for all of us humans is that we go "all in" on the company that hires us. If the company suffers a big loss in another division, we can lose salary, raises or our jobs, all through no fault of our own. Yes, it sometimes works in the other direction. A big profit in one division can be reinvested in ours. But much of our fate depends upon the larger company.
So you can't say this is about merit when so much of the equation depends upon others who many have nothing to do with your daughter.
If the asset has risen in value over the years, the donor could (a) sell it for dollars, pay capital gains taxes, and then donate the rest or (b) donate the asset and let the FSF do the selling. (b) avoids the tax which means more money for the FSF. It's a common approach with non-profits.
Are you saying 501 non-profits don't pay capital gains? (b) certainly avoids tax on the donor's part, but on the non-profit? I am assuming the non-profit would have to convert to fiat to do something useful with the donation.
> Are you saying 501 non-profits don't pay capital gains?
Correct, as long as those gains are used as part of the 501-aligned mission. Same with donations, they don't pay a corp income tax. This is part of being a tax exempt organization.
I think this is kind of cynical. I often adopt open source tools because I want to avoid vendor lockin. And so do many. It's not like I say, "Wow. Another code base to dive into and spend hours trying to understand." Nope. I just want the assurance that I can do it if I ever need to do so.
Certainly a neat idea. But when I go to the farmer's market, mushrooms are relatively expensive per pound. Why not use something cheaper like, say, corn cobs that must be much cheaper.
So is the data extracted the names of the victims that were supposed to be hidden to protect them? Or is there something else that might be worthy of exposing?
The downvoters assume that it is a bad faith question. The downvoters are 99% right with that. If the 1% hit then OP is just exceedingly naive and did not followed the scandal in which case they should maybe first do some reading.
The names of involved powerful people were NOT supposed to be censored. All those names except Bill Clinton name were redacted. To protect Trump and everybody else involved in the scandal except said Bill Clinton. But especially to protect Trump.
I assume that de facto federal "law" now makes it illegal to be raped, and those men are the victims. That would be a logical conclusion of edgelord vice signalling, right?
I took the question to mean "were the easily circumvented redactions only covering victim details, and maybe suspects from Team Not-One-of-Us?" Implying the "stupidity" card was played to cover the "malice" card.
You do realize that the decisions at the corporations are made by people. You may try to draw a distinction between people and corporations, but in the end it was some person who decided to ghost someone.
You do realize that the people making those decisions at corporations are largely shielded from the liability of said decisions, and that when companies are treated like citizens they almost never get equivalent punishment like human beings do.
I can draw a distinction between people and corporations because it’s literally encoded in the fucking law.
I actually don’t know how or why you would imply that such a distinction doesn’t exist.
G, the gravitational constant is (as far as we know) universal. I don't think this is what they meant, but the use of "across the universe" in the parent comment is confusing.
g, the net acceleration from gravity and the Earth's rotation is what is 9.8m/s² at the surface, on average. It varies slightly with location and altitude (less than 1% for anywhere on the surface IIRC), so "it's 9.8 everywhere" is the model that's wrong but good enough a lot of the time.
It doesn't even hold true on Earth! Nevermind other planets being of different sizes making that number change, that equation doesn't account for the atmosphere and air resistance from that. If we drop a feather that isn't crumpled up, it'll float down gently at anything but 9.8m/s². In sports, air resistance of different balls is enough that how fast something drops is also not exactly 9.8m/s², which is why peak athlete skills often don't transfer between sports. So, as a model, when we ignore air resistance it's good enough, a lot of the time, but sometimes it's not a good model because we do need to care about air resistance.
Gravity isn't 9.8m/s/s across the universe. If you're at higher or lower elevations (or outside the Earth's gravitational pull entirely), the acceleration will be different.
Their point was the 9.8 model is good enough for most things on Earth, the model doesn't need to be perfect across the universe to be useful.
No. That wasn't the promise. Obama said that his plan was going to cut a family's bills by $2500.
Now you may say that inflation has to creep in and I think that's fair. If oil rises in price, that affects everything. But the premise was always that the magic of the ACA would lower premiums.
I recall the "magic" of the aca actually being focused on junk insurance so bad they look like scams, a marketplace to facilitate apples-to-apples competition, and most importantly, making it illegal to deny coverage to people because of genetic tests or public/stolen information like that (a great thing to see the 23&me breach coming).
My impression was it would be painful in a lot of ways but we need better competition and better protection in order to have the private insurance industry actually work for people instead of abuse them and health insurance is too important (and complicated, and too much history of dishonesty) for laissez faire.
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