I agree with the general principle that game theory is a powerful tool for public policy, but the idea of these transferable development rights or "air rights" seems a bit absurd to me.
What the government is saying by allowing these rights to be sold, is that the place to which they are transferred to has arbitrarily restrictive zoning. In my mind, the value of transferrable development rights should be zero. Zoning should actually have some hard principle behind it that isn't bendable by allowing the non-development of some other desirable piece of land. Either a building is too tall for the neighborhood or it isn't. It should be "too tall unless you pay a farmer 10 miles away".
Why is uneven, concentrated development some kind of public good?
How does this position unroll? How does the farm eventually get developed in 50 years? Do they have to buy TDR from someone else? Does an "equivalent" TDR have to be demolished?
>Why is uneven, concentrated development some kind of public good?
Because of agglomeration and the incredible desirability of mixed-use walkable neighborhoods (see rents in walkable neighborhoods of NYC + SF + Boston for proof). This farmland is only desirable and sought out by developers because of zoning restrictions elsewhere.
>How does this position unroll? How does the farm eventually get developed in 50 years? Do they have to buy TDR from someone else? Does an "equivalent" TDR have to be demolished?
These are all great questions which reveal that TDRs are not a very forward-looking policy solution to the housing crisis. Maybe planners believe there will be more appetite for taller buildings in the future, or that land prices will rise enough that the owners' support for zoning reform will overcome opposition. It does seem absurd, and more like a way to bribe property owners so that local politicians can avoid making public decisions in meetings that 90% of NIMBY cranks disagree with.
If you can get a payout for "selling" something without having to actually sell any part of your property that you intend on using, and nothing will change in your neighborhood, why wouldn't you sell it? And if property owners and residents in a neighborhood are crying to anyone who will listen that the world will end if four-story buildings give way to six-story buildings, you now have a big incentive to show up to those same land use meetings and push back.
You also got a connector that supports much more than USB 2.0 speeds. It also supports high power charging, video, thunderbolt, etc.
Lightning was a dead-end connector that was only kept around to keep the Made-for-iPhone moat drawbridge up.
USB-C makes the right design choice in putting the springs in the cable. Those wear out over time. I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's possible. But reversing this would require that the springs on the USB-C cable are on the outside, and those are quite fragile, so that sounds like a worse idea.
> I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's possible
I know anecdotes don't mean anything, but I have. Every USB-C phone I've ever had, apart from my iPhone that I currently use, ended up with having completely worn out connectors after two-three years of use. They stop holding cables in firm enough and start only making the connection when holding the cable at an angle.
I don't want to sound like a jerk, but have you considered that you might need to improve your putting/unplugging habits? I used to have connectors and cords break after around that much time. Around 2018 or so I bought a new set of chargers and decent quality cloth sheathed cables. Because all my cords were new, I was much more diligent about carefully plugging and unplugging (no mashing the port, no flexing across the short axis, no yanking by the cord) and eventually a habit formed. Not a single one of those cords, nor any of the ports on my phones, have broken since then. Even the daily use ones next to my bed!
I treat my phones carefully, I've literally never cracked a screen on any of them, the same goes for handling the charging cable and port. I'm always quite gentle with it, never leaving it propped up by the cable or at a weird angle, and the cables I used were the original ones that came with my devices. Mainly because my phones spend a lot of time plugged in acting as a hotspot for half a week, so I try to minimize the harm I cause by the extra (un)plug events.
The Lightning port iPhone that I used for 3 years however handled my usage just fine (just tried it now and it feels just like it did new), and the USB-C one I've had for half a year seems to be holding up fine as well. These I used with a mix of cheap Aliexpress cables and the genuine Apple ones.
I don't understand this logic. If lightning connector had less issues than USB-C how could it the users fault for not being careful. This exactly how engineers/developers answer to problems they cause with bad engineering/design choices. Anyone that gives feedback is blamed. It leads to terrible engineering decisions like the USB standard, which frankly has always been bloated and terrible because of its design by committee. As much I would love a standard connection port for all my phones I won't accept substandard engineering. That's why I am still holding onto my lighting connector devices even though on principle I disagree with using them.
Who gets to decide that I have to treat my devices that I pay for like fragile glass vases.
I do both QA and Development and pretty competent at both. I almost never make broken things or poorly thought out because I know this negative feedback loop will continually make the situation worse. Lack of empathy for people that use products just leads to issues like Windows taskbar not even being able to search for applications. Its all the same thought process that leads to the result.
Probably a lot of lint in there! My 4 year old phone gets that way until I clean it out with a plastic pick (very vigorously at that) and it's like new again.
They were an LG Nexus 5X, a OnePlus 3T and a Xiaomi Mi 8. The ports became loose on all of them over time, especially on the OnePlus where the cable would just fall out if you held the device upright, and in its final days the Xiaomi would need the cable pushed at an angle to make a connection.
You don't want that. I was organizing my cables and noticed how much thicker the USB3 cables are than USB2. USB2 cables are cheaper than USB3 cables, the latter have gotten cheaper but still buy two USB2 for some USB3. USB3 cables are also shorter cause harder to transmit signal, this has also gotten better.
The flaw is that USB-IF didn't require marking faster cables. Putting a blue ring, stripe, or dot would have solved the problem.
USB-C is decent for data transfer. It's pretty poor for power delivery: the pins are too close, so it's not rated for use in bathrooms or kitchens, and there are many more of them than needed for power delivery, making it relatively expensive to use in things like children's toys.
It was a mistake to conflate flexible power delivery and data transfer, you rarely need both at the same time. It's possible to design a better and cheaper 3 or 4 pin power delivery standard that can use higher power. But the law now says USB-C and good luck ever changing that.
1. The law doesn't mandate USB-C in particular, the port can change without the law changing
2. Nobody was going to add a second port for charging when USB can handle fast charging already. And if you need to charge in a damp environment then use wireless.
3. I'm pretty sure you can add a second port and the EU law doesn't mind at all
And assuming USB 2.0, how much cheaper do you expect a simpler port to be?
> ownership is literally the _only_ job that will never be replaced
Humans will always be the roots of the ownership graph, but I think AI can be any other node. Start an AI-first hedge fund or private equity firm. The AI makes the decisions. There may be a human manager, but they've agreed to be the AI's arms and ears. AI starts looking like a root owner if/when it starts managing a large charitable endowment, however.
Same thing with managers, particularly CEOs. The board may become dissatisfied with the present CEO, and start requiring that they run all decisions past an AI. The board agrees to certain values or priorities for the AI. Eventually, the AI is the one effectively in control, and the CEO is just a vestigial organ drawing a salary in case the AI ever makes a very bad decision.
This has curbed somewhat in small cities because of the insurance industry. Turns out that small towns need insurance to cover police malpractice, and those insurers don't like high-risk or overly aggressive police tactics. Turns out the police can be reasonable, if only they are even slightly accountable.
All the sound engineers in the world can't fix "don't care" and "want to".
A modern US city has the combined problems of cheap construction of residential buildings, with insufficient unit-to-unit and exterior noise isolation (builders "don't care"), and near-zero enforcement of vehicle noise laws (police and muffler shops "don't care", drivers "want to" be loud).
Contrast this with, say, Germany or Switzerland, where concrete construction is the norm, noise laws are often strictly enforced, and a modified car would get pulled over quickly.
Peter Thiel is at least cosplaying a super-villain.
Palantir is mass surveillance as a product, including "predictive policing". He's been grooming JD Vance as the next president. He has given lectures about the anti-Christ, and seems overly interested in armageddon. And life extension, like getting blood transfusions from the young and joking that he's a "vampire".
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." So which one does he plan to deprive the western world of?
I've been subscribed to this guy for some time. His work is much more impressive, and IIRC, he either works for a defense contractor or is studying for that.
I think there's lots of people talking past each other on this post. These kinds of designs won't be as reliable as the existing designs, and they may have a systemic flaw, for example, susceptibility to disabling with microwaves. And they aren't going to work after sitting in an ammo depot for 15 years in the desert or after being dropped from a plane.
But these designs will cost just a few dollars more than the equivalent dumb munition (and can possibly be retrofitted), and can be two orders of magnitude more effective in the short term. The threat here isn't "guy in garage makes MANPADS", it's "IRGC converts 100's of thousands of existing unguided cold-war rockets into guided S2A and S2S missiles for $20 each". Even if it doesn't hit any target, each aircraft has a limited number of countermeasures and has to return to base if they run out or risk being hit.
Guided munition at a dumb munition price is enough to invalidate many strategies.
From day one, Social Security was a "new money pays old money" scheme, the one thing that makes it Ponzi-like.
To be fair, the boomers got screwed in the 1980's SS reform to pay for their parents (but had it sweet before), so maybe this is just paying it forward.
It was specifically sold as 'insurance' to the public around the time it was being passed.
Well except for a short period where that was going to be deliberated on by the courts, where they stopped calling it insurance since SCOTUS indicated this insurance wouldn't be constitutional, so instead they put it under general welfare clause but then changed up their rhetoric immediately after it was found constitutional back to it being insurance again.
Also the people that wrote the bill later admitted they intentionally wrote it in a confusing as way to evade public and judicial scrutiny.
JBL Tune is what I have. I wouldn't call them amazing, but the USB-C connection is super useful. You never pair, you never charge, you can't lose them, and even if you did, they are cheap.
The only real downside is lack of ANC, and the wires can transmit some mechanical noise if it rubs on your clothing. I just have a little lapel clip (from my old Etymotics) to stop them moving.
What the government is saying by allowing these rights to be sold, is that the place to which they are transferred to has arbitrarily restrictive zoning. In my mind, the value of transferrable development rights should be zero. Zoning should actually have some hard principle behind it that isn't bendable by allowing the non-development of some other desirable piece of land. Either a building is too tall for the neighborhood or it isn't. It should be "too tall unless you pay a farmer 10 miles away".
Why is uneven, concentrated development some kind of public good?
How does this position unroll? How does the farm eventually get developed in 50 years? Do they have to buy TDR from someone else? Does an "equivalent" TDR have to be demolished?
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