What's absurd is that any sort of non-local/online account is required at all to use a hardware device you own.
Half the reason VR's adoption and progress is so slow is Facebook buying Oculus which poisoned the well for the vast majority of the hardcore gaming / high spec userbase, who typically popularizes and drives innovation in the hardware space.
9/11 was not a result of lax security in airports, but lacking security measures onboard planes themselves which have since been addressed with reinforced locking cockpit doors being sealed before departure, etc.
It's been proven time and time again even by other government agencies that it is trivially easy to sneak "dangerous" things (including knives and firearms) through TSA checkpoints onto planes. The current state of airport "security" in the USA is 110% theatre which taxpayers and travelers pay through the nose for.
I'm not even gonna go into if lax security was at the root of 9/11, I think it was certainly contributory but definitely not causal.
That does not answer my question - we dismantled the previous system and subsumed private sector expertise in airline security into TSA - so if not TSA, who should be doing it and how should it be done?
Like I think we could just as well have TSA doing it with policies returned back to 2000 (though I'm skeptical of rolling back the clock that much)?
Like, I don't disagree with the idea that TSA is about 50% theatre - it is, its meant to make Bob and Eileen from Cedar Rapids who fly twice a decade feel safe.
The two things that have made airplane travel safer since 2001:
1. reinforced cockpit doors
2. widespread knowledge among passengers that you have to actively fight the hijackers instead of letting them alone (previously, the assumption was that they just want to fly to Cuba or something and it was safer to let them do that and get off the plane)
That's it.
TSA screening is worth nothing, costs taxpayers and businesses enormous amounts of time and money, and is a gigantic abuse vector. Dissolve it and replace it with a simple metal detectors and X-ray machine regime to check for obvious cases of idiots carrying firearms onto the plane; anything more than that is a waste of taxpayer money.
I would be supportive of a smaller, better selected, better trained, better compensated cadre of TSA agents. I think a lot of the reason why the TSA is so ineffective, and why so much of the airport experience is just theater, comes down to the fact that it is just a jobs program for people who could not get a job guarding the local mall.
I don't actually think TSA can shrink by a substantial amount and still carry out even the reduced mission we've discussed here. You still need roughly the same number of people operating X-Ray and Magnetometers that you have operating body scanners and X-Rays now, it would go somewhat faster, but not vastly faster, the flow thru say, PreCheck and Regular TSA is within 15% of each other.
I think there is an assumption here that the 'theatre' component adds lots of people to TSA, and I don't think that's the case, just from my own observations - and having some understanding of how you move volumes of people thru a space.
For efficiency - I'm gonna make the assumption that we're still gonna keep a distinction between the airside and landside, and not put ID check back on the airlines at the gate.
Lets look at the staffing of a single TSA checkpoint -
1) Before the queue, you have a guy filtering precheck vs not - that guy could prolly go away. so -1 here.
2) At the end point of the queue, you have the guy doing ID verification and boarding pass check, that step is probably still needed here. So 0 - no change.
3) Pre Magnetometer Assist - This is the person helping pax put their belongings on the belt for going thru the magnetometer, its not always present, but usually is when they're busy. So 0 - no change.
4) X-Ray Operator, the person operating the X-Ray. So 0, no change.
5) Team of two people operating the magnetometer. I see no way to reduce this, you need someone to do a pat down for those who fail the magnetometer, so it's usually a pair of men and women. Again 0 - no change
6) 1-3 people to perform hand inspections of bags that look questionable on the X-Ray. You maybe could reduce this? it depends on the particulars of the details of the inspection.
7) Supervisor. Even in an ideal world, you still need a supervisor, plus the supervisor probably helps give breaks and fills in missing coverage on the short term when people are late.
Now while I can believe that the people at the checkpoints are just the tip of the proverbial TSA iceberg, This is the part that seems even harder to reduce, in any meaningful way.
The long and the short of this, is I don't think TSA can reduce its size in any meaningful way, airlines used to do all this threat analysis themselves in some level of isolation. Now its all centralized, without a probable meaningful level of change in employment.
I wonder if there'd be fewer abuses by the TSA (especially theft, but also assault and harassment) if they had the resources to hire better people. Maybe there is still an opportunity to reduce staff if the quality of the staff still increases.
I wonder what the actual incidents of these are, I suspect it's very low - figure that ~2m people fly in the states every day. Also, its not just TSA that has the chance to steal, airline employees do too, because they ferry the bags to the inspection and from it.
The issue for me isn't that TSA does bad things, it's like the whole debate over LE in the US - Law Enforcement Agencies cannot be held to reasonable account when their employees do bad things. Thats the real issue at hand here.
Thre are absolutely legitimate ingredient variation and quality differences in different parts of the world.
Taking your example of Kerrygold butter, have you ever tried it? It's _very_ good. I've had various other "premium" butters even sourced locally, and while they are also good in their own ways, there is a distinct flavor difference which I'm willing to pay for.
So if you as a company want to make your customers happy (and keep them as customers) by continuing to provide some certain specific aspect of your product that can only be achieved by producing it in a certain specific location, it's not reasonable to say "just make it local to where you sell it".
I support this, but it would require so many more city and county level law changes to implement. Many counties have zoning laws in place that require homes to be a certain square footage (my county is 1,500sqft), that also have to be built on-site, and must have 2 off-street parking spots, and must be 50 feet from the edges of the property line, etc. While making townhome-style housing impossible due to those same zoning regulations. While providing tax incentives to luxury apartment complexes.
These zoning restrictions would need to be rewritten first, and incentives given to developers to create high-volume, inexpensive housing. With restrictions preventing them from selling to built-to-rent companies.
But zoning restrictions are incredibly difficult to rewrite. A woman from a county in GA is having to sue the county to try to adjust their zoning restrictions and the counties constitution states that zoning can only be used to protect the health of the citizens. And their restrictions banning off-site built homes or small homes does nothing to protect health since they're built to the same standards as larger site-built homes.
> But zoning restrictions are incredibly difficult to rewrite.
I really want to know how they got written in the first place. It seems clear that somehow, zoning regulations is one of the biggest issues we've got. But everyone has these onerous zoning regulations that make life worse... where did they come from?!
It has it roots from the 20's/30's, but was reinvigorated into what is it now in the 60's/70's as a lot of suburban America was becoming desegregated and redlining was made illegal (redlining is a real estate tactic of marking a red line around an area of town that is the "black" neighborhood, and only showing black customers homes in that neighborhood, etc).
As redlining and segregation had a lot of old white people shaking in their boots complaining about property values, old white people who worked for local government (who were also largely landowners) began implementing zoning regulations that effectively banned any sort of housing being built that was affordable to many citizens. Such as apartment complexes, townhomes, quadplexes, smaller homes, etc.
In today's world, we're now dealing with the continued effects. Wealthier areas of town that do not allow ANY multifamily house. Less wealthier areas of town that do not allow homes to be built off-site, or to have under a certain square footage, effectively ensuring homes there are more expensive than they should be. And then the poorer areas of town only allowing multifamily housing right next to industrial/commercial zoning areas. Effectively preventing anyone (outside of property investors) from affording to own a multifamily property, let alone even be able to legally build a single-family home.
As the separations between middle class and lower class begin to blur, it makes the situation worse for everyone, outside of the financially well-off who either made it big with a business, or have owned property for decades at that point.
Zoning was redefined from a health and safety perspective, to a legal, local government tool to artificially inflate property values by unfairly limiting the types of homes that could be built, and putting the poorer workers and "undesirables" in unsafe communities full of industrial factories, low-wage jobs, and no vertical movement for the community to grow.
I think most zoning regulations came as a backlash to the crime waves in the 60s/70s and were intended to keep "safe" neighborhoods "safe". This uses house prices as a tool to separate people into "desirables" and "undesirables" (roughly). China (and the former Soviet Union) did/does it more explicitly via the hukou system - if you don't have a hukou, you can't live in a given city nor attend the school/use the city's resources.
The process in the Soviet Union might not have involved financial capital, but it involved human capital (i.e. if your profession was not "respectable", or if you were ever convicted of a criminal act, you might not receive permission to get an apartment (or even a room) in a top tier city like St. Petersburg or Moscow)
Industrialization led to many dirty cities especially before sanitation technology was deployed. Restrictions on more than e.g. 8 unrelated people per house, minimum window requirements, separating the meat packing district from a pure residential neighborhood were in response to tenements which were deathtraps in fires.
America doesn't need more urban sprawl and the stigma against renting is ridiculous.
> Rent payments go down a black hole. Mortgage payments at least result in an actual asset, and eventually end.
Generally making rent payments and investing the money you would have spent on the house in the stock market will get you further ahead in terms of ownership stake than just making payments on a mortgage. The only reason this is not true is due to massive, massive government subsidies of owners at the expense of renters (ie. Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac acting as lenders of last resort for nonsense mortgages that no private bank would have ever granted without this support).
> Generally making rent payments and investing the money you would have spent on the house in the stock market will get you further ahead in terms of ownership stake than just making payments on a mortgage.
This cannot be accurate.
1: rentals are often as much or more expensive than a mortgage (the problem is the down payment)
2: rental prices *constantly* go up, despite nothing changing in the house or apartment you're living in. Mortgages stay flat (in the US), so raises, etc, aren't eaten up by a cost of housing that exceeds the local inflation rate.
> 1: rentals are often as much or more expensive than a mortgage (the problem is the down payment)
Not now, no.
You have to compare the money you would spent on the down payment (and excess from mortgage) to the returns you would get from investing that money directly.
And as I said, the only reason mortgages are so cheap is due to the massive, massive amount of government subsidy in favor of owners - if owners were remotely exposed to the true cost of borrowing, it would not even be particularly close.
Do you realize the stocks had such a rally also due to the massive, massive amount of government subsidy? The same "untrue" cost of borrowing drove them up just like all other assets, including the real estate.
> America doesn't need more urban sprawl and the stigma against renting is ridiculous.
Not that there isn't a stigma against renting, but, does one really want to be renting during retirement when most people's income is fixed? And yes, there are ongoing costs to ownership, but you can possibly plan for those better. You can't really plan for your land lord to raise rent by 50% because the media tells him the market is hot and he can do that.
Yes, there are downsides of the flexibility that renting provides.
So if you feel a need to buy a home, you should be able to do it. But the government should not be propping up unsustainable markets at considerable risk to the rest of us to let you do so - if you can afford a home and get a bank to lend you the money and assume the risk, you should be able to. But I am not sacrificing my ability to afford quality housing to give you government-guaranteed mortgages, it's a massive moral hazard.
If you need the fixed-income security, pay for it.
It depends. While mortgages lock in a monthly payment you must first save up a down payment. The same cash flow directed into the stock market would also build "equity." If one does not move within seven years buying housing is better.
Not sure if that is true with current rates - and also is due to government policy propping up cheap money to homebuyers.
As I've said, no bank in their right mind would give out the mortgages they are right now if they didn't know they could turn around and sell it straight to Fannie & Freddie
Indeed. Without Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (government sponsored enterprises) there would not be a 30 year mortgage. Mortgages would probably adjust the rate every five years.
A mortgage is an extremely leveraged investment at preferable rates. Your statement is extremely sensitive to the change in home prices (generally rising), the change in stock prices, and interest rates.
My home has been making an unrealized 11% per year (disgusting) on a much larger pool of money than I actually had to invest. The economics of renting and investing the leftovers are deeply unfavorable.
The problem with this argument is that getting a mortgage locks in your housing payments. If you look at the growth in rents over 25 years you don’t come out ahead investing. In year 25 of my mortgage I’m paying the same amount as in year one but in many markets in the US rent has gone up 4.7%/year and that means rent is 315% of what it used to be. When rent goes from $2000/month to $6300/month and your mortgage was $4000/month you aren’t coming out ahead by taking $2300/month out of savings each month to pay rent.
Renting is much more common in Europe and renters have significantly more rights. This is because much more wealth in Europe is generational (although we are quickly moving in that direction in the U.S. as well).
Some European countries have things like the imputed rent tax (basically taxing homeowners as if they were renting their own home). This goes a long way towards balancing the scales between homeowners & renters.
I bought a condo in 2021 (at a fantastic interest rate), and am currently regretting it deeply because my life circumstances changed and I probably need to move to a different state, meaning I need to either sell the place at a considerable loss or become an out-of-state landlord, which I don't want to do and is unlikely to turn a profit for me.
The flexibility of renting is a real and important phenomenon: people's lives change unexpectedly sometimes.
I regret not buying an apt in 2021 at a fantastic interest rate. Even though I moved since then, it would have been very easy to rent it, and inflation would have paid for it.
Since then, interest rates have only increased, and in my location, real estate is at a record high. It's been increasing pretty much since the 90s without a break. I don't believe a bubble will break any time soon. Also, materials/energy is getting more expensive, there's a lack of labour, so even building/renovating places isn't an option.
The question of whether renting or buying is more financially beneficial is highly complex, and certainly it is not always the case that buying is better. Additionally, there are non-financial reasons why some people prefer to rent. So IMO we shouldn't be designing housing policy around everyone becoming an owner.
I recently learned that it is, but that's not at all obvious for non-US people. In Europe an apartment is an apartment, and the ownership status is a separate matter. Condo is a not a word anyone uses or probably even understands over here.
Hot Coffee is and was an absurd case with absolutely no merit behind it.
It only became a large issue because it was a social fad for politicians and mass-media to dogpile "evil gaming companies corrupting poor mindless children", and Rockstar in particular with the GTA series was one of the most popular targets of said social fad.
Interesting choice of words. Why would it be an "abuse" of a tool that can be adjusted to generate nearly anything, to use it for a relatively specific subset of anything?
Would you also consider it an "abuse" if they were, say, attempting to generate new works in the style of michaelangelo or picasso instead?
in the 51 (states and DC)