"You need a doctor's note for sick time" is one of those things that ought to be a sign labour doesn't have enough bargaining power.

some estimates are that it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness in the United States which naturally raises questions of why a billionaire hasn't just done it, like maybe it's harder than that in practice, maybe they're just greedy and don't want to, etc. etc.

however MacKenzie Scott has donated over $19 billion to various charities so far (legit charities I believe, not the "name a museum wing after me" kind of charities) across the fields of "Education, Equity & Justice, Economic Security & Opportunity, and Health" so maybe take it up with her?

because it seems like there are two possible stories here:

or:

Homelessness is one of those problems I don't think you can fix by throwing money at it, no matter how much. The way to end homelessness is (he said with a weary and exhausted sigh) by building homes, and even billionaires cannot just do that: they run into the same land use regulations and community pushback as everybody else. Actually, probably more community pushback: can you imagine the shrieking which would occur if a billionaire announced they were going to muscle past zoning regs to plop down 10,000 units of low-income housing in a major metropolitan area? People would throw a shitfit.

Note that in a lot of cases, especially in the case of tech billionaires who employ expensive software engineers, it would be in a billionaire's pure self-interest to build a lot of cheap housing in expensive cities. Imagine how much money Jeff Bezos would save if Seattle rents suddenly decreased by $1000/month, and so he could pay all his programmers $500/month less and they'd still come out ahead on net. The fact that this doesn't happen suggests billionaires have only limited ability to move real estate markets on their own.

*nodding* building more homes does seem like a good way of making more homes

In this particular case, the people keeping you down are not 10 billionaires but 10 million millionaires, who want their property values to stay high

Endorsed; I'm gonna self-plagiarize here and just link to my "Who is to blame for high urban rents? Homeowners." post instead of typing it all out again.

(This reblog by @mentalwires was a good addition about the political economy which got us here)

i know orms are kind of an unsolved problem but jesus it's crazy how bad they can get. if you're gonna have that much magic im gonna need you to be able to do simple joins

I was confused by this post because at first I assumed "orm" was some kind of fantasy creature.

I came across this diagram and found it really funny, I think because it's like ... alright, so gender is complicated, right? The common social conception is that there are two categories, male and female, and then you add in this "spectrum" idea where male and female are just on opposite sides, and you're either one direction or the other.

And someone saw this and said "actually, this is wrong!" but their fix for it is just ... adding on more axes? Like "ah yes, the problem is that they put male on one side and female on the other, it's actually two different things, and you can be either more or less male, a real and coherent thing, or more or less female, also a real and coherent thing, and then a third, unlabeled thing, which is assuredly also real and coherent".

It's like watching someone come this close to rejecting the categories, then they decided to just make a more complicated version of it where you can pin things into place with precise coordinates.

When you want to reject the systems, but you still believe in charts so so much.

I'm watching Enola Holmes to compensate for Stranger Things deficiency and it uses that amusing trope common to period shows of making some characters pompous stuffed shirts who espouse views typical of their time and other characters cool cats who roll their eyes at them and think modern thoughts, so we the audience who know how history turned out can immediately identify with them.

I think the clumsiest example of that was at the start of Titanic where they made Kate Winslet say "well actually I think Picasso has artistic merit" so her asshole fiance can go "girl wutttt no way lol" and we can feel smug about how wrong he is.

but history is never static and reputations rise and fall with each generation: thirty years on most of the people writing about Picasso seem to focus on his misogyny, and it would be funny if that ends up being a cringey part of the movie for completely different reasons.

The best place for the Great Filter has to be like *right* before the development of intelligent life, right? So that the universe is relatively full of cool alien animals but there's no big risk of us wiping ourselves out and no chance of us doing colonialism to aliens or vice versa

or right after the development of intelligent but aggressive life, so that only the rare peacefully altruistic species make it out into the universe-- will we be the first

we used to pay humans to be computers before computers took their jobs

Red sails, Antarctica

danielkordan

me and my mutuals be like

She CRINK on my BRICS till I dedollarize

"we must smash this machine that threatens established power relations" is a reactionary impulse, "we must ensure the benefits of this development are shared amongst us all" is progressive

is it, though? why not ban email so we need to hire back all the professional typists and messenger boys and manufacturers of those vacuum tube things for delivering capsules?

AI will only put people out of work if it's useful, if it's delivering value, and that frees up labour for more productive purposes, it makes us all richer, and if we can't share that wealth due to political gridlock then what makes you think we're going to ban it?

inventing a salty goo for people who love the seasoning qualities of salt but hate the grains

"Aren't you forgetting something?"

A lot of people are misunderstanding this post. Originally, I was discussing the commission price of this piece with an artist (my budget was roughly $2000) but after I saw you could make it with a robot for free, I decided to do that instead.

Blood test results are back. 0’s across the board, dry as a bone under the hood, they’re not sure what they’ve got in those vials but it recoils from light and lunges towards living tissue, which is all normal for girls these days.

Outer space is impossibly vast, but it’s really not that difficult to learn all the important types of objects that are out there (kinds of stars, kinds of planets, kinds of galaxies, whatever), which sort of weirds me out. There’s a lot of complexity within that, and a fair amount we still don’t know, but it’s eminently plausible to get the gist of it. A precocious preteen could handle it all. We aren’t there yet, but I find it very easy to imagine a future in which space is well understood and seen as nothing but a dull, endless repetition of the same few dozen building blocks. There should be more variety to it!

Hard disagree (says the planetary geologist). Almost every planetary body in our solar system is the only known object in the universe that does [x], and a good chunk of the larger moons too.  Some of these are probably common in a larger extrasolar framework, and we can expect to see them in many solar systems; but others may be very rare, and very precious.  Consider the hemispheric dichotomy of Mars, which places its northern hemisphere kilometers below the southern half of the planet, or the equatorial ridge around Iapetus that circles it like the seam from a cheaply molded plastic toy.  Consider the sulfur raining down on the surface of Europa as its orbit trails in the shadow of Io’s volcanic emissions, gently mixing water ice with potentially bioavailable nutrients from two worlds.  Consider the plumes of Enceladus, the ice of Mercury, the shining salt domes of Ceres. This is true in time as well as space; Mars had a hydrological cycle and surface weathering processes unlike anything we ever saw on Earth (which is causing all kinds of trouble trying to pick up the pieces here in the present, let me tell you); I myself participated in some research not long ago suggesting that mountains on Mars might have grown from the top up.  Earth has had several major climate regimes with a radically different character, none of which exists elsewhere in the solar system.  Venus almost certainly had a very different surface and atmosphere than it does today; whatever that looked like, it’s a safe bet that something unique was lost forever. We have models of planetary formation with some granularity; within broad strokes, planets will evolve along certain pathways and within certain limits.  Yes, the cosmos is ordered.  But those limits are broad enough to encompass literally everything you have ever experienced, and we have not begun to exhaust even the simpler possibilities of worlds that are barren of life.  Other systems with other worlds will do things we never imagined, and probably never will imagine without first going to see what the universe has to offer. In a sufficiently vast universe, all of these will come again.  But then, in a sufficiently vast universe, so will you.  Below that threshold, these things really are incredibly interesting.