fresh

There is truth but also some corporate myth making here. The main elements of the modern GUI was presented during the so-called Mother of all demos by Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart would later work at Parc to make working prototypes of his ideas he already developed at the Stanford Research Institute. Now the corporate side of the history dominates the story. Same with Ethernet, which was an extension of a researcher’s dissertation work. This sort of corporate historical revisionism is exactly what I’m addressing.

I would go further: the idea that great research comes out of the private sector is a myth perpetuated by self-aggrandizing corporate heads. Even most AI research is the result of decades of academic work on cognitive science coming out of universities. (The big exception is transformer technology coming out of Google.) mRNA vaccines are based on publicly funded university research too. All the tech in smartphones like GPS and wifi comes from publicly funded research. The fact is, science works best when it’s open and publicly accountable, which is why things like peer review exist. Privatized knowledge generation is at a disadvantage compared to everyone openly working together.

The private sector is very good at the consumer facing portion of innovation, like user experience, graphical interfaces, and design. But the core technologies, with rare exception, almost never came out of the Silicon Valley.

You make it sound like the American left pushes a lot of symbolic issues. Which ones are you thinking of?

Hot take: the American left loses on the material issues because it has lost on solidarity, symbolism, ideology. Don’t you know that healthcare and vacation days will “hurt the economy”? There are many poor working class people who still oppose Obamacare even though they directly benefit from it. The material gains matter a lot less if people reject the ideas behind them.

I’m not sure if the timing of Labor Day is important, but I wouldn’t underestimate the power of symbols.

I feel like we’re getting old. Is this our “kids these day can’t even change their own oil” moment?

ah, I see what you mean now. Yes, Vancouver is MUCH more dense than Calgary. But Calgary isn't just sprawling, they also deliberately planned for more housing supply throughout the city, including more density. Vancouver and the LM have not implemented such a plan.

I think there needs to be some disambiguation.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop One is literally a train. They themselves call it a train. I guess the idea is that they're small individual cars (called pods) instead of a chain of train cars connected together, which seems really energy inefficient.

Elon Musk's Hyperloop is a train for automobiles, which has all the inefficient downsides of a personal car, with none of the energy benefits of a train. It is the worst of both worlds. And it relies on car infrastructure at both ends, so it will bottleneck just like a highway on/off ramp. Completely nonsensical.

Vancouver geography is not that constrained. Land use is just very bad. The classic Vancouver skyline is a surprisingly small area. It's surrounded by SFH suburbs. The Lower Mainland has tons of strip malls and parking lots due to car culture. It's not a lack of land, it's a bad use of land.

• BC Lower mainland: 36,000 km^2. Population 3 million.
• Netherlands: 41,500 km^2. Population 17 million.
• Belgium: 30,500 km^2. Population 11.7 million.
• Switzerland: 41,250 km^2. Population 8.7 million.

These countries are not Hong Kong. They have nature, a mix of big cities and small towns, and lots of low density areas. Switzerland is a famously mountainous region with lots of untouched nature and rural areas.

haha I thought it was a good question!

There is a pinned post on this community. It reads:

Firstly, the issue of donations. Since the inception of this instance, your most frequent request has been the ability to make contributions to support my initiative. While initially, I had never intended to accept donations, I’ve come to realize the value this brings in ensuring our platform’s sustainability. In response to your requests, within the next week, I will be introducing several options for those of you who wish to donate. I want to emphasize that these donations are entirely optional and will directly support our instance’s operational necessities - dedicated hardware, colocation fees, email services, and more.

I'm not sure, but I can think of two reasons for this:

1. Being a single parent is more expensive than being a couple. Because you can't share costs with another person, a greater proportion of your income goes to required expenses like food, housing, and utilities.

2. Along those lines, food is cheaper per person the more people you buy for. Buying in bulk is a huge savings. This is presumably why they give you more money for the first child than for each subsequent child.

But weirdly, every time Singh or the NDP propose things like a windfall tax of better regulation, the comments are dominated by criticisms.

We can't just be loud when we criticize. We need to vocally support progressive policies when they come up.

On a related note, you can think of wildfires as forests transforming themselves into deserts.