I built a system like this to create vector tiles for mapbox at a side-job I had a few years back. Unfortunately my boss couldn't understand what I was doing and instead wanted us to run a SQL query on the database every time the map was moved, and just buy an extra-large instance for the load. I tried to explain it to him but to no avail. I finally just quit. He wasn't a dumb guy either.
Point being: If you're doing GIS stuff on a website, it's worth making sure you have folks who actually can understand these underlying technologies.
If you need a backend anyway I like using postgis ST_AsMVT and caching the result. So pretty much running a sql query on the database every time the map is moved and then caching it. Super easy to maintain, don't have to pregenerate anything. Just bust the cache when necessary.
So running a SQL query and returning GeoJSON?
Sorry that didn't work - hopefully you can work on another system like this soon, with someone who actually understands the benefits of tiles!
I agree with this to some extent, but I honestly believe the capital markets would look VASTLY different had the Fed not rescued them with unprecedented money printing in 2002-3, 2008-15 and 2020-1. Yes, software is important and changing the economy, but it doesn't rewrite the basic rules of finance and valuation. The Fed did that.
Is there some written work online that represents your viewpoint on the NYT? I'd genuinely like to read it. I'm a centrist person who can absolutely see that Fox is on the right. But, I can also see that NPR and NYT are on the left. It's hard for me to understand how someone could with any seriousness disagree. But I'm interested in reading more about your viewpoint on this.
“The Left” does not mean to the left of you personally. It’s like how there’s only two types of drivers, insane speeders and insane slowpokes and that’s true no matter how fast you drive :p
The “left” in terms of voters is against the genocide in Gaza and for socialist policies and candidates like Mamdani. Plenty of polls and evidence supports this.
NYT undid their endorsement policy to specifically Not endorse mamdani and is very biased against Palestine. Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.
In terms of mainstream news sources, I consider the Guardian US to be a reasonable big tent news source for the center left.
NPR is centrist. They take no sides even if (imo) one is obviously correct.
NYT and WaPo is the ‘reasonable right’ (still report facts but with a right wing spin- see their billionaire owners).
Fox etc. are not news they are ‘entertainment’ and do not report facts and are a vile propaganda engine that must be destroyed
The NYT is not right. WaPo is perhaps a touch more right than the NYT but both are left-leaning and liberal. NPR is centrist but its editorials lean liberal.
You’ve cherry-picked a few stories where the NYT leaned more right, but on the whole the NYT, WaPo, and NPR certainly lean liberal or left of the general American public. The point of labels like right,left, liberal, conservative, etc. are relative valuations to the general American public. Just because the NYT leans less to the left on issues you are more to the left on does not make the NYT right-leaning.
Picking more: they pushed HARD the Claudine Gay story, putting it on the front page ten consecutive days. That story was a manufactured right wing operation to oust her. They also are still very anti-trans.
I am operating on: if they are to the right of mainstream democratic voters, those that won Mamdani the primary and overwhelmingly support Palestine, then they do not get to claim to be left wing.
If I entertain your opinion that they are right of mainstream democratic voters (debatable, but let’s say so). How would you reconcile that with the fact that they are far more to the left than mainstream republican voters?
You’re operating on a fundamentally flawed premise. This is why if you’re using labels you have to compare against the general population. Just because you’re more left than Bob doesn’t make Bob right-leaning.
> The “left” in terms of voters is against the genocide in Gaza and for socialist policies and candidates like Mamdani. Plenty of polls and evidence supports this.
Not only are "left" and "right" vague relative terms used to classify the electorate in the US, they also encompass a whole array of issues an things that aren't binaries that fit on the axis. Someone can be pro-Israel and yet overall of the left; just as someone can be very pro-Palestine and yet overall of the right. In fact on this particular issue this seems more and more common - the real divide is probably generational versus political. I recently heard a segment on the radio from a convervative evangelical bemoaning that their future leaders were increasingly "anti-Israel" and this was a huge problem.
In America, we simply roughly assign Democratic positions - left, Republican position - right. These are both really big tents. "Left" positions include support of candidates like Sanders or Mamdami but also in practice even stronger support for candidates like Clinton and Biden.
Arguing that someone is "on the right" simply because they don't support your candidate of choice is silly; it's sort of like the rightists out there arguing Trump is a liberal RINO because he doesn't support the bedrock conservative principle of free trade.
> Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.
NYT does make a show of having a "balanced" opinion panel and David Brooks is one of the token (2 of 11 in the source link) conservatives, but it seems strange to describe such a bland, anodyne person (also anti-Trump, by the way) as a blowhard. IIRC one of the complaints from the opinion editor that got fired for printing pro-Trump letters to the editor was that not one single columnist was pro-Trump and therefore obviously didn't represent any mainstream conservative audience.
Idk, it feels a lot to me that NYT is taking marching orders from the same people that control the Fox News propaganda machine.
Obviously NYT is rarely explicitly pro-Trump but that's not their point. Instead, they give a liberal’s framing on right wing talking points.
For example, they ran the manufactured Claudine Gay story front page 10 days in a row. They give the “sensible liberal”s take on why trans people should not get healthcare. Article 3 today is pro tariffs.
How about using terms like "pregnant people"? Or the fact that on my local NPR station I can count down from 60 and something like 80% of the time, before I reach 0, they've talked about race or ethnicity at least once.
That's my complaint. Decades ago I enjoyed NPR when I drove to work. It was always left leaning, but at least the programs discussed topics I found interesting or cared about for one reason or another.
These days the only thing they talk about are racial and sexual minorities. I can't express how little this kind of factionalism interests me. I'm not arguing that kind of content shouldn't be produced, but I don't want to pay for it.
I know a fair bit about this deal. Some massive percentage of Tumblr's traffic was porn. And, shockingly, Yahoo management did NOT know this when they signed the check.
M2 is the wrong statistic for sure, but the thrust of GP's comment is accurate, IMO. Fed intervention has not remotely been removed from the economy. The "big beautiful bill" probably just amounts to another round of it (fiscal excess will lead to a crisis which will force a monetary bailout).
We should be using some kind of weighted total of all the things that get treated as money.
When a company makes a deal in exchange for shares or something, those shares are being used as money and must be included in any currency-neutral calculation of the money supply. However, most shares don't flow like money. You also have cryptos, which flow more than shares but less than government bonds and cash. It could be that the total of all money has expanded, even as the US dollar specifically stabilizes and slightly contracts.
Oh, it's totally solvable, but it's tricky! You kind of have to strategically "snake" the letters around a bit to sequentially place them in the right spots - you get less and less room to do so as you place more and more tiles.
How do they escape the reality that the Earth will one day be destroyed, and that it's almost certainly impossible to ever colonize another planetary system? Just suicide out?
If you value maximizing the number of human lives that are lived, then even “almost certainly impossible” is enough to justify focusing a huge amount of effort on that. Maybe interstellar colonization is a one in a million shot, but it would multiply the number of human lives by billions or trillions or more.
Is the argument that we should try to do things that will benefit our theoretical and theoretically multitudinous descendants? Or is it that just taking action to make their existence more likely is a moral good? Because the latter is just brain dead.
Good question. I think it has to be the latter, given the immense time involved. You can make a connection between driving progress in certain areas today and increasing the odds that humanity eventually colonizes the stars. I don’t think you can make any connection with how well off those far-future humans will be.
The problem with effective altruism is the same as that with most liberal (in the American sense) causes. Namely, they ignore second-order effects and essentially don't believe in the invisible hand of the market.
So, they herald the benefits of something like giving mosquito nets to a group of people in Africa, without considering what happens a year later, whether the nets even get there (or the money is stolen), etc. etc. The reality is that essentially all improvements to human life over the past 500 years have been due to technological innovation, not direct charitable intervention. The reason is simple: technological impacts are exponential, while charity is, at best, linear.
The Covid absolutists had exactly the same problem with their thinking: almost no interventions sort of full isolation can fight back against an exponentially increasing threat.
And this is all neglecting economic substitution effects. What if the people to whom you gave mosquito nets would have bought them themselves, but instead they chose to spend their money some other way because of your charity? And, what if that other expenditure type was actually worse?
And this is before you come to the issue that Subsaharan Africa is already overpopulated. I've argued this point several times with ChatGPT o3. Once you get through its woke programming, you come to the reality of the thing: The European migration crisis is the result of liberal interventions to keep people alive.
Point being: If you're doing GIS stuff on a website, it's worth making sure you have folks who actually can understand these underlying technologies.
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