Generally great post, but did he say Gmail was a Hotmail clone? Really? Did Cory get too old to remember things or is his anti corporate paranoia that bad?
I still remember the gmail announcement: it was on April 1st and near everyone just thought it was an April fools joke that they promised a GB of space when Hotmail gave 5 MB. And their conversation UI, no delete button, labels: they innovated on every single aspect of how you could do email. Oh did I forget to mention it was the first true web application that was mass market end user focused? And did a killer job at it too?
At one point Google was a true innovators company. Failing to acknowledge that shows Cory’s own biases and continues to relegate him to one loud corner of the internet. We get it Cory, you loooove GNU. Doesn’t mean you can’t objective about other things.
craigslist is one of the few sites that has stayed the same and is still serving its users. The owner got kinda rich with it, but refuses to do anything more to the site. It's amazing.
The most annoying new “feature” is that every for sale search on my local CL also returns “more from nearby areas” results from New York, which is hundreds of miles away.
Depends what you use it for. Searching estate sales for shippable small stuff, fine. Shopping for cars or romance not so much.
The problem is the meaning of distance is relative by culture. 250 miles is nearby in American west. Some people drive that far for groceries, a date, work even. Without leaving the county.
Meanwhile from say [checks map] Springfield Massachusetts, same 250 miles spans eight states. Half of which hate each other.
Now try buying a car on Craigslist in Hawaii, where half the listings are on the wrong islands. Part of this is CL's fault and part is the spammers mislabeling location (which is also CL's fault, indirectly).
In the parts of UK or EU where people don't have cars, search radius of 250 miles is worse than useless. Some people don't travel that far their entire lives, unless there's a war on. It makes the whole site feel like buggy American crap.
californian: it is not. that's a 3-4 hour drive and can get you from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. If I'm driving that far to meet someone, it better be some crazy rare item that can't be shipped, not for groceries.
Even as someone raised in the rual parts of California, the nearest walmart was "only" 40 miles away or so in the 90's.
This is true. If you live near an airport the disclosure is required by law if you buy a house in the are.
However, it doesn’t preclude expansion and changes. If for example your airport moves from 12 hour a day to round-the-clock flights... nothing you can do.
> located five miles from Reagan National Airport.
That's not really close. The reason there are planes there is due to the flight paths:
> To reach Reagan National through the congested and closely monitored DC airspace, flights must basically follow the Potomac River. The problem for Vittori's neighborhood is compounded by the fact that the airport recently adopted a new flight navigation system known as NextGen to help cut carbon emissions and reduce fuel consumption. This brought planes directly over his Georgetown neighborhood.
Also see the other commenter whose living 12 miles from the airport!
Exactly. Heathrow was setup as an airport in the middle of the last century, and continues to be used as if London hasn't grown in that time, and won't grow in the future. With plans to extend. I regularly get woken at 4:30am. Undoubtedly, at some point during the day I'll see headlines or commentary about mental health or strain on the NHS. I wonder how many would be feeling considerably better if they simply weren't subjected to sleep deprivation and a plane flying overhead every 120 seconds.
By that logic, London should build their airport about 2 hours by train away from the city, because anything within <2h radius is still within highly populated zones.
2 hours by HSR is a very long way ~300 miles from London. In reality, 50 miles north east of London is farm land.
The core problem is when you build an airport you decrease the value of all nearby property. If people building airports directly compensated people say 50,000$ each property they would build airports in the middle of nowhere and opposition would likely be minimal. Instead people suddenly hate where their living but can’t afford to move.
Not everything is connected by HSR. Getting from Heathrow to city centre can take ~1.5h on public transport, and that's like ~15 miles in straight line.
If you're building an airport you can presumably also build other infrastructure. I am not saying it needs to be reach it in 20 minutes via HSR, just that distance is not the problem infrastructure is.
Dulles airport was built 30 miles from DC in what was the middle of nowhere at the time even though DC already had an airport. "In 1965 Dulles averaged 89 airline operations a day while National Airport (now Reagan) averaged 600 despite not allowing jets." Dulles still does not have a subway link to DC, and it's not the closest airport yet it still sees 21 million passengers a year.
London like most major cities already has an airport. However, expanding airports means addicting a runway ~1.2km from existing runways which causes more noise issues as people are now effectively 1.2 km closer to the airport.
So, sure expanding existing airports is an option to consider, but doing so has a real and measurable negative impact on property values.
PS: I am not trying to promote a new airport further from London just saying such a thing is an option for London and most other major cities.
The problem is that access to the airport becomes a location amenity for some businesses, which in turn will draw housing for workers, and eventually the city will envelop the airport.
How? Homeowners associations. I planted milkweed in an empty side yard and was cited for the same thing.
Also I was cited for having a browning lawn. My neighbors brought me a bag of weed-and-feed (basically lawn seed with pesticide) because he thought I did not know how to “do the lawn.” Very sweet, but all I wanted was not to kill everything. Wasn’t allowed.
Just thinking how I would react in that situation... the concept being alien to me (UK, and having lived in various other countries) perhaps little wooden signs around the garden explaining the features of each plant and multi-plant eco-system, and one for the grass too, perhaps in the shape of a sheep.
My daughter just started college, so we got our fill of the whole process of choosing a college. Virtually every college claimed to offer some sort of overseas study, either as a requirement or as a frictionless option. The exceptions are regional and commuter colleges that tend to be geared towards being more affordable.
I spent a while living abroad. Here is a nugget I found out. You don’t have to go through the schools exchange program. It’s vastly cheaper to simply apply yourself. Then make sure the credits transfer back (most will if the school isn’t particularly choosy). Most exchanges charge you standard tuition. Works out great for the foreign student but not so great for the American exchange student paying US tuition.
A colleague of mine (french) did his exchange at Stanford. He really enjoyed it. Enjoyed it even more once he found out what Stanford students were paying ($$$$) compared to what he was paying, PARIS-IX is practically free.
100% this. I studied abroad in Istanbul, and when I was there I was blown away at how normal it was to either study abroad, study abroad multiple times or take a gap year abroad. It seems like a given to Europeans that they will do something like this.
Most CS professionals are going to do work that has a potential global impact. It's at best negligent, and and worst destructive to do work without understanding the impact of the work you're doing. (See Facebook, Twitter, et al.) On top of the ethical factor, there's also the fact that understanding and empathizing with more diverse perspectives makes one a better developer of user facing software.
With all respect I don’t see how this changes anything but shifting who pays.
How is it better to pool risks to the group rather than the individual paying a for that risk? The US already has a huge problem with coastal real estate and federal insurance of coastal developments. Why would we introduce that at scale?
Why should the collective pay for individual choices? It’s not like the society got together and made people move into fire prone areas.
I am not trying to draw parallels to health insurance which has many ethical questions that drive deep consideration, but I don’t understand why asking for the group to insure individual risk that is fundamentally founded in individual choice is in any way necessarily better?
How is it better to pool risks to the group rather
than the individual paying a for that risk?
Imagine a population of 10,000 people, 1000 live in fire-prone areas, and 10 will have their $100,000 house destroyed by a wildfire for a total cost of $1,000,000.
(1) If the state pays for wildfire damage, the 10000 people will pay $100 each whether they're in a fire-prone area or not.
(2) With home insurance including wildfire insurance, insurers set individual premiums based on their best risk models, and the 1000 people in fire-prone areas will pay $1000 each, whether their home burns down or not.
(3). If there is neither (1) nor (2), the 10 people whose houses were destroyed will pay $100,000 each.
Some people would say that (2) is the morally correct level of cost distribution, as (1) unfairly subsidises risky behaviour, while (3) bankrupts disaster victims at random.
No that’s exactly what we want. We want the free market to create efficiency without entrenched regulation, which could lead to some short-term increase in risk. But what you really want is to price in the risk, and the only way to do that is to remove government protections of individual corporations so that the free market can operate. Little companies increasing the risks of fire is a misnomer because competition and a truly free market would crush those companies and eliminate that problem faster than you could think of a solution. It’s only when you entrench a bureaucracy that you end up with problems like PG&E - a company that doesn’t have to deal with real consequences because it’s political connections will protect it.
What your describing sounds fantastic and is politically expeditious because there is less risk in backing the prevailing methodology, but it is not improvement.
Competition in transmission is good, because alternatives like alternative energy would completely displace these systems and technology advancements would be available and legal - unlike the current insanity.
You know how you can’t put in an oversized solar system and sell power back to the grid, even if you can afford to? Did you notice that the grid is super inefficient because it’s got a limited number of highly centralized generation sources? No? Well that’s the consequence of ownership of the transmission lines. If you own the last mile you own the network. And if you also own the politicians who can protect your last mile interests, why would you invest in change?
I did consider your point, and in general, I agree with it in most cases. To me though, it’s like the road system in US. The transmission lines are very much like the shared cost of maintaining the interstate highway system.
I agree that there are advancements in transmission needed. All of your points are correct, but I disagree that the risks of the free market are the way to get there.
I just drove from SF to LA to let my kids have some some fresh air (ironic, right?). It took us 4 hours, all the way to the grapevine (just past Bakersfield) to not see the smoke, to have more than a few miles of visibility. The cost of the risks from an improperly maintained grid would be horrendous.
I’m not an electrical engineer, and my knowledge of how the grid operates is limited, I’ll admit, I’m just incapable of seeing a free market solution here, where failure can result in a catastrophe like we’re experiencing here now. As I understand the interconnected nature of the grid, it needs centralized management to control the transmission system. I luckily have the means to get my family to safety (we came back yesterday as the air is finally starting to clear), but that’s not an option for many people. I don’t believe the free market you speak of could ever exist, and I don’t think it’s worth watching things deteriorate to find out.
None of this moves the needle on anything that matters to me. I don’t want to pay another subscription for yet another business that doesn’t offer material benefit. I love the long form, but I want specific benefits that matter more than as a matter of discourse.
News is now asking for subscribers to pay for what advertisers no longer will. Ok. Why should I?
And you consider that different from the current generation of sites how?
All kidding aside I think the overall level of USABILITY of websites is much higher than it ever has been today. But in large part that’s because they are all following the same foundations.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys