admiralteal

Yours, on the other hand, is predicated on the belief that they’re all super-incompetent and have no capability of doing anything right ever

Nope. It’s only this specific thing that I necessarily think they’re doing a bad job of. And I’m right; they are. Their algorithm is a struggling baby compared to TikTok and YouTube at large is not a major profit center (and indeed may not be profitable at all – but they maintain it because abandoning it would be too costly for them).

TikTok is so good at doing this thing that it is a profitable business for them. YouTube is struggling, and we can clearly see why.

It’s your account and your comments. You can do with them as you wish.

That’s the point. If you don’t wish to leave them behind to be profitable to Reddit, that’s also your choice. I don’t feel strongly about your choice to do it one way or another. Personally, I nuked my 15yo account and all comments completely because I don’t want to leave anything valuable behind to make profits for a company that I feel doesn’t deserve them.

The point is, those comments were mine, not theirs. I don’t want them selling them for profit, especially to an LLM mill.

Fediverse stuff is essentially not commercialized by nature.

We should hold commercial actors to entirely different standards than non-commercial ones. There’s no hypocrisy in doing so.

It wasn’t that Reddit was going to do so. It is that they were going to do so in a fundamentally proprietary way – they were treating the content as THEIR property to monetize and sell.

And also stops Reddit from monetizing this volunteer-made content they intended to disrespectfully pilfer.

“Multiple properties” is SIX or more?! That is so many properties. In a housing shortage, rich fucks should have to sweat to keep even a single residence unoccupied, but consequences don’t start until six. It’s the right direction, but that is still so bad.

Every city should just pass big ol’ pied-a-terre taxes. Property taxes for a property operated as a primary residence by the owner should be a low coefficient on the millage rate. Property taxes for places with long-term tenants who call it their primary residence should get a medium coefficient on their millage rate. Properties that are not a primary residence should get a huge multiplier on property taxes. And unoccupied homes should be so expensive as to force a nearly-immediate sale.

Rent payments up to some reasonable threshold based on prevailing rates should be tax deductible, ensuring most rents show up on the city ledge.
This helps make up for the fact that renting costs more than owning in a way that targets relief to renters instead of owners without creating crazy incentive structures where rich fucks start selling their own homes to an LLC they rent it back from or other nonsense. Individuals can declare their rent payments absent any action by the landlord; totally under-the-table rent should be very rare.

All real estate transactions that aren’t resulting in a property becoming a primary residence should have a HUGE sales tax.

Properties operated as a primary residence should have significant leniency on permitting for infill development – owners living in their own property should have development-by-rights permission to do things like build an ADU. Development led by members of the community infilling in their own community should have a SUBSTANTIALLY lower bar for permitting than development by outsiders.

What’s the “no” part of this? You don’t seem to disagree with anything I said at all.

For what its worth, lower speeds are one of the most straightforwardly effective way to reduce congestion. Road capacity is higher at lower speeds. Errors are less likely to cause serious incidents at lower speeds. Traffic controls don’t need to be so aggressive, causing you to spend less of your trip fully-stopped. For most trips, going a bit slower has a completely negligible effect on drive times, especially when you can get most of traffic to do it leading to more laminar flow.

The problem is, only road design is effective to lower speeds. You can’t just ask drivers to slow down or change the posted signs, you have to re-engineer roads. People tend to just drive at whatever speed feels comfortable on the road.

This is predicated on the belief that Google/YouTube is run in a 100% hyper-competent way. I don’t buy that.

Google does things the easiest way possible to make tons of money. They make unforced errors all the damn time.

That should mean engagement. It serves up such bad videos that I disengage.

Once in a while I’ll realize I just spent 20, 30 minutes looking at a streak of pretty decent stuff. Rare enough to be remarkable. Usually after just 3 or 4 consecutive crap clips I’ll close it down and get back to work.

I doubt anything disengages a user faster than low-quality content. I bet it does it even faster than the authoritarian politics and bigotry YouTube seems to inexorable serve you.

I’m not even sure it is bad policies. I am pretty sure that they just don’t have moderators.

I doubt anyone reads 99.9% of reports.

So you get bigotry and hate, you get insane and deadly DIYs, you get 12yo girls being creeped while posting random 5s clips from their lives.

Not to mention just the vast amount of extraordinarily low-quality content YouTube serves up. It’s amazing how bad a lot of the videos it thinks you will like are. The algorithm makes no sense.

But hey, here’s 16 different Joe Rogan clips with sigma male music in the background.

God I hate so much the technowizards who think all of our society problems around cars are going to be fixed by self-driving cars. My dad always does this – any time you point out the issues with expense and congestion near him in the city downtown, he’ll start talking about how any day now the self-driving cars will fix it and won’t need to park and it’ll be sunshine and roses.

Nope. The geometric problems of cars are not solved by fleets of vehicles that park in huge lots at the edge of town. It may mitigate issues, but it does not fix them.

Want to get rid of downtown congestion? Putting people in automated cars won’t do it. Only getting rid of the cars will.

The only upside is it will make it that much easier to get rid of mandatory min parking rules which are totally unscientific and should never have been codified to law in the first place.

The irony being, of course that a true “conservative” that cleaved to the values they claim to care about would absolutely want this kind of car-light/car-free downtown.

Time and time again, complete streets and walkable cities are shown to save huge money on the city budget. They cost so much less to maintain and they boost economic productivity so much. The return on investment is just immense compared to car-intensive infrastructure. There’s a reason a city like Houston has something like double the per capita spend on transportation of a city like NYC in spite of NYC’s massive subway system and there’s a reason NYC has something like double the per capita spend on transportation to Amsterdam with its vast networks of bike paths and trains. Car-intensive infrastructure is crazy expensive to maintain. It’s unfrugal madness.

And for the non-financial side, car-intensive civic design still doesn’t qualify as “conservative”. Having car-intensive design requires a huge, top-down approach to urban planning where the city tries to plan every aspect of its citizens lives. Plan for them and fit them into figurative boxes in order to make the literal boxes practical to use. It’s practically authoritarian. It’s a violation of the traditional values of cities which grew slowly and organically, adapting to the changing needs of their citizens through work done typically by those very citizens’ hands.

Switching urban planning models to a car-first approach led to a lot of the other problems of modern cities, including the fact that small-scale/neighborhood developers have been all but run out of business by huge outsider development firms that refuse to build anything other than huge exurban sub-developments and luxury condos. Conservatives should be there to resist and reject this total upending of normal development of society, but they make money off of it so stay mum.

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Carpeted bathroom is a thing, Some people really swear by it.

But taking a shit on the living room toilet? That’s a real power play from a host.

The judge also granted an injunction prohibiting Khatkar from entering or interfering with the claimant’s property.

Slap the side and say “Ah, that’ll do it.”

It also has what is called the “leakage” issue in carbon offsets – if one group of people were going to cut down the trees, get paid, and don’t, there’s still a demand for the timber/land. Some different hectare of trees somewhere else will likely get cut down instead.

It really is a rare case where the neoliberal logic has it right. We expect the cost of decarbonization to grow as we have less and less CO2 being produced. The first tons of CO2 to get rid of are the easiest and cheapest ones. The very last ones, the holdouts, are going to be the most difficult and expensive. In a paradigm where as close to 100% of carbon as possible must be eliminated, then any carbon offsets only make sense if they’re being sold at an equivalent price to those last tons of CO2 to be eliminated. Because otherwise, the person who thinks they’re selling it is really just loaning it out – and the payment is guaranteed to come due.

So carbon offsets should be at least as expensive as, say, direct air carbon capture. Likely more, since even air capture may struggle on those last few tons of emissions. And that’s assuming no scammy accounting practices with the emissions are happening. When in reality, carbon offsets is nearly nothing but scammy practices.

I’ll eat my fucking hat if Shell’s follow-up here is to invest more money instead of less, absent state consequences forcing them to behave.

They are in the business of selling virgin oil. Anything they spend towards decarbonization hurts the selling of virgin oil. They know it. The rest of this shit is just advertising and they will terminate the campaign as soon as it stops performing. They can just do more adbuys for advertorial content through the NYT if there’s any backlash.

Always happens. A commitment to achieve some climate goal in the future isn’t even worth use as an buttwipe. There need to be serious consequences for failure that go above and beyond the worst-case theoretical cost of the commitment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRB6rSDW5i4

It’s literally nothing. Only ACTUALLY decarbonizing is worth a damn.

And to be clear, offsets in ANY form don’t count either. The Paris commitments are to get to ZERO carbon. The only way it makes sense for a country to sell an offset is if they sell that offset at an equivalent price to what it will cost you to get rid of your LAST ton of CO2. Since the offsets aren’t nearly that expensive, we know they are load of total bullshit. They’re fraudulent. Double or triply so for non-national exchanges.

Carbon removal can count, but the legit research is almost always worse bang for your buck than just fucking decarbonizing.

Our parents and teachers grew up under the Warren and Marshall courts.

These were hardly all good, but they were a rare time of stability, sanity, and defense of civil rights out of the courts. Which is a blip in the history.

On the whole, the SCOTUS has always been a force for evil. It has always leaned against civil rights and towards statism and fascism. Towards maintaining and enforcing the police state. The current state is returning to the norm, not an anomaly. But with so many of society’s elders being raised on a reasonable court, they forget.

It is a 100% politically-appointed institution with zero oversight and lifetime terms. It’s obviously a bad idea. Just another of myriad compromises in the founding of our nation to cater to regressive-thinking, anti-civil rights right wingers that have always been a major part of the American experiment.

Everyone should read Balls and Strikes and listen to the 5-4 Podcast. Especially the fucking law school professors that uncritically and dogmatically teach the mostly very, very bad SCOTUS case law. We need to get serious about fixing this bad institution if we want to have a future.

Seen this before. It is a great read I recommend for people.

The simple truth is, if being a trans woman were such an immense competitive advantage in sports, we would’ve seen a lot of them performing at the top levels. We should see AT LEAST the same sample representation of trans women athletes as the greater population of trans women, and indeed should see far more than that.

We don’t.

Professional sports is such an insanely elite field that we should expect any microscopic physical advantage would get multiplied into a dominating force.

Again, we don’t see this happening with trans women.

No one was even looking out for it. It could’ve slipped completely under the radar. But those elite, successful trans women athletes? They are a severely, severely underrepresented minority. Not only are they not winning left right and center – they’re barely present at all.

That’s not even facing the much more fundamental questions like “does sportsmanship really override someone’s autonomy of body and genuine identity” or “since when did we start caring about women’s sports so much that it was worth passing insane laws about it” and all the like. And also the scientific and medical fact that gender and sex are a spectrum, not a binary. A bimodal distribution for sure, but a spectrum nevertheless.