For me the contradiction is simply how much of the status quo doesn't have to justify itself with those rules.
It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements.
So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.
Ugh. The point of curbing sugar is not that you will magically stop liking sugar.
Someone who successfully quit heroin is still someone who will very much experience pleasure if they use again.
The point of curbing sugar is that for some people, sugar’s interaction with their body tends to be self reinforcing - consuming some sugar creates conditions (mental or physical) that make it more likely you will consume more. By reducing or eliminating, and waiting for your body and mind to adjust to this change, you get to a point where it’s easier to control.
2022 "We need to do a socialism bc climate change!"
2025 "We need to do a socialism bc AI!"
TBC IMO human caused climate change and other forms of environmental damage are very real and worthy of our best solutions, but the idea that collectivism solves environment, that collectivist govts would never decide to damage the environment in pursuit of short term aims is laughable.
Like if someone wants to do crazy stuff, that’s fine, do it as an art project, whatever.
But IMO the only people who benefit when businesses and institutions are required to turn their websites into works of art, are artists. Everyone else is worse off.
Rather a specific anti-monopoly activist, Matt Stoller, was revealed to have played fast and loose with his sources, and to have ignored actual pro-monopoly forces in housing.
Every day, local anti-housing activists lobby local politicians and defend status quo land use rules that grant a de facto floorspace monopoly to incumbent homeowners and landowners. Meanwhile some anti-monopoly activists are incapable of seeing a monopoly or anti-competitive behaviour unless it involves a corporation.
This response article makes the opposite claim, that it was Derek Thompson who played fast and loose with sources. As evidence, the Stoller piece cites testimonials from both Lance Lambert and Luis Quintero saying that in their interviews with Thompson, they never went on record as repudiating claims made on the BIG newsletter.
Sure, but in my experience, people never attribute high insurance costs to the underlying risks being high, rather they blame that on the insurance companies and then vote for people who promise to “do something about it“.
I’m sure there is brand damage from people hearing that a particular car is frequently stolen, because having your car stolen as a pain. I am skeptical the analysis reaches deeper than this first level tho.
I don't think high insurance costs would result in brand damage as such. But it absolutely would result in reduced sales and/or reduced resale value, because sufficiently many people comparing which car to buy will look at the insurance cost for each particular car they are comparing as part of that decision.
I agree that if sufficiently many people consider insurance costs in the buying decision, then a high theft rate will reduce sales. I guess I am just wondering whether or not most people actually do that. It’s been a while since I bought a car, but my impression was that many (most?) people just buy based on the biweekly payment, and everything else from depreciation to gas to insurance is an afterthought.
They could just as easily have felt the underlying reason was so obvious it wasn’t worth mentioning.
I know how base64 encoding works but had never noticed the pattern the author pointed out. As soon as read it, I ubderstood why. It didn’t occur to me that the author should have explained it at a deeper level.
TBC I was addressing the parents suggestion that the writer was incurious.
One blog post is hardly enough to just someone as ignorant but after quick look at the author's writing/coding/job history, I doubt he is that either.
I think it's fantastic that you can look at a string and feel it's base64 essence come through without a decoder. Thinking about it for a minute, I suspect I could train myself to do the same. If someone who already knew how to do it well wrote a how-to, I bet it would hit the front page and inspire many people, just like this article did.
I just don't get the urge to dump on the original author for sharing a new-to-him insight.
They were probably expecting base64 encoded binary data. Base64-encoded-binary-inside-Base64-encoded-JSON-inside-JSON is a really strange construction if you haven't encountered it before, because of how much space it's wasting playing a game of Russian nesting dolls.
Base64 isn't encryption. The overhead added follows an extremely predictable pattern. That said I've no idea what the performance of common compression algorithms might be in such a use case. The comment was entirely tongue in cheek.
Most generic well run companies would never take the risk & expense entailed in a platform transition like Intel => Apple Silicon.
You might argue that generic companies are doing that now as we see Windows ARM laptops finally, but I think they only got the courage to do that because Apple went first.
I mean there was Windows on ARM laptops previously. The first Snapdragon 835/8cx/7c Windows laptops predate the M1 lineup. They certainly weren't POPULAR or FAST but they existed.
It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements.
So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.