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praxulus
Joined 1,231 karma

  1. >A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).

    When fansubs were good, Crunchyroll was forced to compete with them on quality. It's hard to convince people to pay when the alternative is both free and much higher quality.

    Now that they've driven fansubs groups "out of business", they no longer face the same degree of competitive pressure to deliver a quality product.

  2. I know a lot of Gen Z and even Millennial adults who are still living at home well after finishing school. I'm sure plenty of them would love to get out of their parents' homes but can't afford current rents, but might be able to afford an SRO.

    In general I don't think many homeless people are going straight from the street to their own market rate unit. However some of them might be able to move into a sibling's spare bedroom after their adult nephew moves out.

  3. Yes, part III section C is all about the effect of house prices on fertility. There's certainly an effect, but previous studies have shown that housing costs can only account for a small share of the drop in fertility.
  4. How is this creating value for shareholders? They wasted a bunch of engineer and pm salaries building useless products that never made (and now never will make) any significant money.
  5. Is there reason to believe authors aren't getting a cut of the library license costs?

    I used to buy my ebooks until I realized libraries had ebook catalogues. A large portion of the books I've borrowed are sales the author lost, they ought to be compensated somehow.

  6. You can, it's called an Alford plea. You maintain your innocence but accept the plea deal anyway.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alford_plea

  7. I've been aiming for 12 books a year for the last 5 years or so. Sometimes I'll go months without picking up a book, and the challenge is helpful for getting me back into it.
  8. I'm an anti-car urbanist, but this kind of comment makes me embarrassed to be one. Different people like different things. The fact that something is bad for the climate doesn't magically make it unpleasant for everyone. That remains true even if they accept the climate impacts.

    It's true that the inevitable conclusion is that we can't rely on individual voluntary actions to solve climate change, but the obvious plan B is government regulation, not vigilantism.

  9. I moved into a house with a yard last year and since the spring it has been nothing but a source of extra chores. Even my dog doesn't care much for it, he's happier going for a walk around the neighborhood.

    Different people have different tastes and preferences. Of the ~30,000 municipalities in the country, we have exactly one that resembles the high density walkable/transit-oriented city described above. Do you really think that ratio accurately reflects Americans' preferences?

  10. How is spitballing a presentation cheating? It's the equivalent of taking a test without studying, not presenting somebody else's work as your own.
  11. The occupy movement had a leader?
  12. The first category in the "education" section is a list of the five best novels set in boarding schools. I don't think they're suggesting that reading those books will make you an expert on how to operate/regulate/attend a boarding school.

    It's just a bunch of lists of good books for people looking for something to read, arranged by subject. There's nothing wrong with that.

  13. Most Americans already have electric stoves, and its disproportionately higher income people who still cook with gas.

    I know this is all based more on vibes than facts though.

  14. If anything free education allows you to raise your standards. The group of applicants who are academically qualified should be strictly larger than the group that's both academically qualified and willing to pay tuition. With a larger pool of qualified applicants you can afford to reject more of them.

    (Caveat: This doesn't work if the point of your university is mostly to signal that its graduates came from a family wealthy enough to send them to your university.)

  15. I live in Seattle, not San Francisco, but we have some similar issues with our schools. I'd really prefer to send my son to our local public schools, but if they aren't challenging him appropriately then my wife and I obviously aren't going to just give up on his education. We'll either pay for extracurricular enrichment like the person in this article, move to a wealthy suburb, or send him to a private school instead.

    That's a much worse outcome from an equity lens, but there's only so much you can expect people to voluntarily sacrifice for the greater good. Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.

  16. I guess you could call Uranium nuclei star fossils?
  17. What do you suggest we do instead?
  18. >Dr Spiegel says that encouraging patients to get plenty of sleep before and after a vaccination appointment is an ideal way for a medical system to maximise its vaccine stock and ensure that the benefits granted are as large as possible.

    They don't limit their recommendation to only men, all patients should be encouraged to get plenty of sleep.

    What on earth are you talking about?

  19. My wife is my productivity assistant. It works great.

    Since COVID started we've had our desks next to each other, and even though she's not constantly checking on me, I know she can see if I'm just wasting time. On days where she's not working, or if one of us moves to another room to take a call, my productivity falls off a cliff.

  20. Which alternative is less dystopian?

    * Clearcut wilderness to build more suburban homes

    * Don't build more homes, just stuff more people into existing homes

    * Let the excess population live in cars or on the sidewalk

    * Cull the excess population

  21. Net metering just doesn't make sense though. Everyone who wants to rely on the grid for power availability ought to pay for grid upkeep costs. Net metering would make sense if it came on top of a baseline "connectivity fee" that covered grid maintenance, but that's not the current policy, would likely be politically infeasible, and would hurt rooftop solar customers financially anyway.

    Subsidizing solar is a perfectly good policy choice, but net metering is ultimately an unsustainable way to implement it.

  22. So did my parents. I'm going to be a father any day now, and you can be sure I'll do the same.

    I don't see how it's "fair" that I was born to hardworking, financially responsible parents, while most others were less lucky though.

  23. Of course it's unfair. It's the definition of unequal opportunity.

    That doesn't necessarily mean it's immoral or should be illegal, but how could you argue that it's fair that some people get free money while others don't by the luck of their birth?

  24. It'd be great if google offered an option for a video call with a reviewer for $500/hr as an escalation option for businesses who are getting nowhere with the regular process. Ideally you'd get a refund if you turned out to be correct, but I'd be happy even without that.
  25. I would much prefer an explicit data cap known ahead of time to random unexpected throttling.
  26. The interesting thing for me has been the completely unintentional collapse in gaming time as I've gotten older. I was borderline addicted to games in high school, but the low barrier to in-person socializing in college, followed by relationships and rising interest in other hobbies has made video games something I have to actively choose to spend time on. Now I'm expecting a kid and even if my free time doesn't completely evaporate, I'm guessing my gaming time will.

    It's weird because I still think of myself as a "gamer", but I realized I've spent almost as much time building and tinkering with my current PC as I have actually playing games on it.

  27. The evidence includes the actual record of rising temperatures, rising CO2 levels, and laboratory experiments that confirm that the greenhouse effect exists. None of those are just models.

    I'm extremely surprised that even a single scientific paper predicted the demise of the species due to climate change within a few years. Could you point me to such a thing?

  28. Google is already in the payments business, which requires a significant amount of identity verification. They aren't at the level you're describing, but they're also not completely new to the business of verifying IDs, albeit via uploaded photographs rather than physical kiosks.
  29. Not really. Also using words in a different way than everyone else doesn't make you insightful, it makes you a bad communicator.
  30. >When people talk about the "reliability" of EVs

    I haven never heard of somebody talking about the "reliability" of a car, or any other durable good, in reference to the reliability of its supply chain. Saying that a product has a fragile supply chain is not a valid counterargument to somebody touting its reliability.

    "EVs have an especially fragile supply chain" could be a true statement on its own, but "EVs have a fragile supply chain, therefore they're unreliable" is only true if we use a different definition of "reliability" than people typically use in the context you gave.

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