This combined with a tv that had tactile buttons again would be nice! So tired of the buttonless TVs now, or the buttons that have no tactile feedback so you don't know what you are doing in the dark.
Like no tactile controls in cars, this was also a mistake for TVs
There was a video posted in the article that demonstrates it better than a comment would. One of the most glaring defects these days are the keyboard registering the press on the correct letter, and then inputting a different letter. The keyboard is hot garbage right now.
Wow that video [0] is incredible, in a bad way. How can the OS correctly register the letter tapped but then input a different letter? That is like the most fundamental feature of a keyboard. It's not even autocomplete because the letters "Thj" as shown in the video don't even match any words that start with T. Glad I'm sticking to Android then, whose typing, you know, actually works, not even to mention how good (at least SwiftKey's) autocomplete and swipe typing is.
I think Denver (I live here) is an example of our horrible zoning. We have entirely focused our cities (especially Denver and RTD (Regional Transportation District)) around people commuting in for work.
This is one of the main principles of BAD design, where you create an entire area around close to a single use (offices). That creates a very fragile city. This "single use" zoning that the US proliferated makes us really fragile to changes like working from home vs in-office work.
Another point is that cities are rather hostile for families. We create cities so they need to be fled as soon as people have kids. We have streets entirely of concrete and 1 and 2 bedroom apartments. If we want cities to be more resilient we need to rethink them. We need streets that have greenspace as a fundamental part of the infrastructure. We need permeable surfaces.
I went to Park am Gleisdreieck in Berlin and stayed in a multi-family unit right along the park. There were tons of families with kids playing in the park, people riding bikes for transportation along the park bike paths, adults playing ping pong on outdoor tables together. It was wonderful. It made me rethink what a city can look like.
Denver needs to take notes. We don't need a single use city and a light rail system that only goes into that city. We made an incredibly fragile city. We can build better cities.
Everything is part of an ecosystem, even office buildings. Nature shows us that a healthy ecosystem, one that survives shocks, is a diverse ecosystem. Diverse ecosystems find niches faster and niches grow over time to turn into major driving forces. They absorb shocks as new things enter since not all parts react the same or on the same timeline. Diversity is key to long term health. This is why monopolies are bad, this is why we should be looking for every kind of diversity we can in every problem. I have gotten to the point that when I see large scale problems I start looking for where the diversity is low and that is almost always the issue. Politics bad? Maybe if we had more than two choices things would be better. Housing bad? Maybe if we had more mixed use things would be better. Energy segment issues? Look at how fast the energy segment is improving now that renewables have finally been added to the ecosystem and we have more choices. Etc, etc etc.
I agree with you about ecosystems and many systems for that matter. Diversity in diet leads to diversity in gut microbiome leads to diversity in methods to absorb nutrients leads to longevity and health.
Lots more example I could list.
However I think there are contexts and levels of abstraction where diversity at one level prohibits diversity at another. An example of this would be standards. There is little diversity in shipping container sizes and designs and that standardization enables more shipment of goods.
Standardization in web protocols enables larger diversity in website content.
While I'm not an expert in biology, I'm pretty sure some of our organs have a lot less diversity in cell types than others. E.g. a healthy heart has little cellular diversity compared to a healthy gut.
By standardizing money (limiting diversity in barter) enables a larger economy with greater diversity of products and services.
A highly functional team will all share a core set of values, and if everyone had extremely diverse values the team wouldn't be able to function. For example some businessess thrive on a culture of internal competition, and some thrive on internal cooperation, but mixing these up can create dysfunction. At the same time, some diversity in values leads to better decision making, so again context matters.
So my point is that diversity is a really important property that sometimes needs to be maximized, sometimes needs to be minimized, and sometimes needs to be balanced, in order to achieve the desired outcomes. I also think that in general maximizing global diversity is a good north star value, and I am acknowledging that to achieve it requires minimizing diversity in some narrow contexts.
I also live in Denver. The biggest problem with downtown isn't zoning (though that may be a part), it's the homeless people. Who's going to want to go hang out on 16th when there's a dude asking you for money on every street corner? I don't know what the solution is, but it seems clear to me that revitalizing downtown starts with removing the "I'm going to have to deal with vagrants" factor.
The only solution is to provide stable long-term housing and social support. Most else has been tried, but it doesn’t seem that you can punish people and make them less poor. Cops continue to sweep through and steal their belongings, but that clearly won’t solve the problem, and hasn’t. You can throw them all in jail, but that’s more expensive than providing non-jailed housing and rehabilitation services. You can forcefully or enticingly move them along with cops or free bus tickets, but that just shifts the problem elsewhere temporarily. As long as we continue to decide to solve this by increasing funds for cops above all other services in a city, this is the result we will get.
Homelessness is a choice that society has made. We have enough excess that we can feed and house these people. People are a lot less scary when they have some measure of security.
Oftentimes, the homeless themselves don't want to be fed or housed. In fact, they--especially the ones with mental health and/or addiction problems--often destroy public housing. Reality does not match the propaganda that all homeless are just down-on-their-luck unfortunate people who would otherwise fit into society.
When I worked off of 16th street, years ago, many of those homeless people had jobs with the Denver VOICE, selling newspapers. I even bought a few. Are they still around?
Last time I went to Denver (downtown) a homeless lady 10 feet from my niece said she had a gun and reached into her jacket. I tackled her, immobilized her, and then me and my family waited 90 minutes for the police to show up after many 911 calls.
> I went to Park am Gleisdreieck in Berlin and stayed in a multi-family unit right along the park
That's a favorite running spot of mine when I'm in Berlin. It's also along a great bus line, close to gyms, a technology museum, a bio market, Victoria Park and not far from Tempelhof. But that little park shines on its own. And the cars parked along the road are down a half level so you don't feel surrounded by parked cars.
That's a pet peeve of mine in America, and especially the American west. We put outdoor seating for cafes and restaurants along busy streets or busy parking lots. Which downgrades the outdoor experience and supports the car priority mindset.
Berlin has too many cars too (so many parked cars), but it’s mostly flat, has great public transport, and generally slower streets. It also has a lot of people who aren’t scared of waking or riding bikes. And a ton of outdoor seating at cafes.
> There were tons of families with kids playing in the park, people riding bikes for transportation along the park bike paths, adults playing ping pong on outdoor tables together. It was wonderful. It made me rethink what a city can look like.
Sure sounds like literally every major park in the city.
The rest of your comment certainly describes downtown/RINO, but does not, at all, describe anything even half a mile away from downtown.
I’m slightly confused by your descriptions. I’m more confused by how you think Denver ought to build transit that goes from the suburbs to other suburbs, or if you think we ought to just raze the whole thing? I’m not sure that would get voter support.
> We have entirely focused our cities (especially Denver and RTD (Regional Transportation District)) around people commuting in for work.
This isn’t Denver-specific at all. It’s how every US city was built.
For ~100 years we planned cities around one assumption: work happens in a centralized office, five days a week. Transit, zoning, downtown land use, parking, even tax bases were optimized for the daily commute. Downtowns became office monocultures; neighborhoods became places you slept.
Remote work broke that model. The result is cities that are now unfortunately organized around a behavior that no longer dominates daily life - and we’re still trying to operate them as if it does.
Denver does have some neighborhoods that almost are good in some of the respects you mention, or at least I remember some development that seemed similar in the vicinity of the Millennium Bridge - it's just insanely expensive (and I'm remembering pre-pandemic times).
Is it actually badly zoned? There's also a lot of apartment buildings and first floor retail in downtown Denver. I do agree though, it's a concrete jungle, we really need more natural environments to feel human.
Everything has pros and cons. I lived in both setups, and the mixed residential/commertial/recreational can be very noisy. Also big parks, if not well illuminated, become unsafe for the families around.
>mixed residential/commertial/recreational can be very noisy.
I'd rather live in a somewhat 'noisy' vibrant neighborhood where I can walk to shops or restaurants than an absolutely dead residential cul-de-sac where I have to literally drive miles to the nearest amenity. If the noise bothers you at night, get a sound machine or install triple pane windows.
I understand having industrial separate from everything else, but commercial and residential should always be blended IMHO, and SFH zoning should not exist.
I would kill for reformed zoning standards like they have in Japan.
I liked very much Japan or Buenos Aires. Sure. Just pointing out there are downsides also. Traffic is a mess, and that shows in times for ambulances and firefighters. I like things of both. I guess people should vote by choosing to live where they want
Traffic is a mess in Tokyo? Ambulance response times are typically under 10m in japan, so not sure the relevance there. Also the entire point of living in a dense neighborhood is that one is able to address many of your day to day needs without driving.
>I guess people should vote by choosing to live where they want
I'd have no problem with this if dense, multi-use zoning were common. As it is, very few places in the US are as livable as much of Europe and the more developed parts of Asia.
… So live where you want. I do, and it’s a SFH neighborhood. We don’t all need to live in Kowloon City, just because that’s what you like.
So tired of this strident bullshit (“and SFH zoning should not exist”) from people who can’t seem to figure out other people exist and have thoughts and preferences, too.
I'm just going to copy and paste the end of my last comment since it seems you didn't read it
>I'd have no problem with this if dense, multi-use zoning were common. As it is, very few places in the US are as livable as much of Europe and the more developed parts of Asia.
It's easy to say 'live where you want' when your preferred housing isn't illegal in most of the US.
I'm "just going to copy and paste" your actual statement: "and SFH zoning should not exist"
> It's easy to say 'live where you want' when your preferred housing isn't illegal in most of the US.
And yet, even if we take this obviously bogus statement on it's face, there are still many places you could live if you were more interested in living there and less interested in trying to force me to live there, too. You could even, if this were honest concern, join your local city's planning commission and talk to people who actually understand your local area about it's zoning, though I suppose that takes more effort than shit posting about SFH BAD on social media.
The good news for you is that you can live like this in almost any major city. Those of us that absolutely want to drive places and live in SFH zoned areas can also do that. Win win.
It's quiet, I get a larger piece of land with a yard that I can enjoy, I can have a porch, there are no homeless people accosting me when I sit on my porch, when I go to the grocery store it is clean and doesn't have a homeless encampment outside the front door, and nobody shoplifts from it so nothing is locked up, etc etc. I used to live in Seattle, these are not invented problems.
Yes, Seattle would certainly be much nicer without the homeless people, no argument there. But even if we assume that would reduce the crime rate, I still would prefer my large SFH with a garden and allowing my kids to safely run around the neighborhood unsupervised.
This is not mentioning the gorillion dollars Seattle already spends on homeless help to no avail; asylums are probably the only real solution to that.
I grew up (as the oldest of 5 siblings) in a split-level home about 1200 sqft. It was fine, we just shared bedrooms. Based only on anecdotal evidence, we grew up closer than other families I knew where each kid has their own bed and bathroom.
Well it’s time to rethink that then. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and at one point it’ll be a necessity to downsize if you want an affordable home.
And location. While going to school my family lived in a 2 bedroom that was, I think, just under 600 square feet. The fridge was in the living area. The kitchen was a space so small you could touch every surface/cabinet if you stood in the middle of it. But we were right in the middle of amazing services. A park was a 3 minute walk away. My first class was visible from my bedroom window as was the shared play area of the apartments around me so I could let my 6yo 'go to the park' and play but still watch him if I wanted to. All the shopping was local and actual businesses that did actual things were in walking distance. We had many friends that lived/worked/played/shopped all within walking distance and that tiny apartment didn't feel small at all because the real living room was the city.
How much space do you really need to raise a child? I’m genuinely curious because Americans act like you need a mansion to raise kids.
A 3 bed with 1K sq ft still gives you like a 10x10 room - more than enough space for a crib and a queen bed. And you have two other bedrooms to spare. As they get older and need space to run around and stuff, there’s no shortage of parks / trails / fields.
> How much space do you really need to raise a child?
It definitely depends on climate. I live in Ireland (in a relatively small house in the suburbs) and in the summer, there's absolutely no problem as we can take the kids out pretty regularly. However, in the winter when it's dark at 5pm and wet and windy, I definitely feel like we don't have enough space.
I do think the US houses seem absurdly large to me, but then lots of the more recent houses built in ireland are of a similar size.
Yeah, the cold would bother me less than the rain and darkness, tbh.
> for short stints.
This is the issue though, we have a 2.5 year old who's just super active, and it's much easier to tire him out when the weather is better and there's more light. Like, right now in Ireland it's still completely dark by 5.30 which means it's hard to tire him out in the winter.
> and we still have 3rd Places nearby, like community centers
That's cool, we have those too but they're mostly kid friendly in the mornings and afternoons and used for adult stuff in the evenings.
As someone who lives in a 700 sq ft 1bd apartment, I guess maybe you could pack in another two bedrooms in with 300 more sq ft (my bedroom is ~ 120-130 sqft w ~ 25 sqft of closet space). You wouldn't have a whole lot of elbow room. Still makes more sense than the 2500+ sqft monstrosities we regularly build in the states.
Even 2500sqft is modest by modern American new build standards. It's pretty challenging to find a "nice" home that's <3,000 sqft in most markets, and basically impossible to find a truly high end home that's <4,000.
Interstate 70 in Colorado is very problematic. It is constantly backed up. Colorado needs to learn from this and get serious about rail for shipping and for human travel.
I feel you man. Problem is that would be a major dollar infrastructure problem that would need federal dollars. With a deficit over 40T dollars and political wind blowing against more federal spending generally and Colorado not being a favored state at the moment I'd say the chances are slim of it happening in the next three years. It would be boffo if some liberal corporate billionaire put his shoulder against the project like that enough to inspire a combination of a Colorado bond issue, some state funding and support. The way California handled its high speed rail in Central valley here is not an inspiration I'll tell you that right now. What a fcuk-up and embarrassment that is. What were they thinking?
IF Colorado did this all alone they could potentially avoid a lot of the high costs that result from getting federal dollars. Maybe - Federally funded projects tend to cost 4-7x would they would elsewhere in the world - but nobody really knows why and so it is questionable if Colorado could figure out how to build cheap. Still the potential is there. Colorado's costs would be a lot higher at 7x the cost with federal funding vs doing it all themselves for reasonable costs - but only if they solve all the issues the drive costs up.
Note that I have no confidence Colorado will tackle the issues driving costs up. Several of the known factors are places where politically powerful people (from all sides so don't bring in class warfare) are increasing costs and they let you cut them off. There are a lot of unkonwen issues left after factoring the above, and it is likely they also have politically powerful people increasing costs.
It's great to see other people working on this. It's a problem that needs solving, and you've solved it in a meaningful way. I have been building https://spoonme.kitchen/ for a couple of years now (but with a different focus) to help solve this problem and a few others that are meaningful to me.
One aspect that I've been really wrestling with is how can we make the end user experience of seeing a recipe better, while still providing meaningful income to the recipe creators who labor so much to share their stuff with us. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. That to me would be the very meaningful, positive change: that end users get a better experience, and creators get paid. That's been my overarching goal and motivation.
I have the opposite viewpoint, and I lean heavily progressive in most of my views.
Healthcare in the United States isn't a market, and that is why it is so terrible. For instance, there is no reasonable ability to compare prices of services. Prices are entirely hidden. Then there is the "with insurance" price vs cash prices.
Healthcare doesn't function as a market, to our detriment.
Healthcare doesn't function as a market because the nature of it is largely at odds with the principals of an efficient marketplace and perfect competition. Not to mention the tens of billions of dollars being pocketed by middlemen every year.
In some places, free market healthcare is great. Dermatologists, dentists, chiropractors, things like that. And part of the reason it's great is because you get to shop around and people fight for your business.
In other areas, like heart attacks and strokes, you do not get to shop around. And you pay whatever they say you will pay. When those are the circumstances, there is simply no free market. And since no one is competing for your business with lower prices in that case, you do not get to see lower prices. They charge whatever they can maximally wring out of you.
In those places, free market healthcare is great because they don't have healthcare practitioner cartels and can pay their doctors middle-middle-class salaries instead of investment banker salaries
If you're talking emergency medicine and old age care, yes, it's not able to function as a market.
Hence why the US already has government healthcare that covers almost half the population (Medicaid and Medicare cover the old, young, disabled, veterans, and poor people).
However, the place you give birth is, in the vast majority of cases, something people do like to have agency over, especially given the 9 months of heads up given by nature.
If healthcare weren't so perversely incentivized by the twisted triangle of regulated public/employer/private systems and their interactions, I would argue this is something that could be a functioning market.
Like Universities with their endless ability to raise prices due to the US government guaranteeing student loans of any size to anyone, a big problem in healthcare is there being no anchor to reality due to the principle-agent nightmares of the current regulated system.
In Europe, when you give birth it is not a luxury experience with a doctor of your choosing in a 4-5 star level private room where you're sent home with a big basket of freebies. If all Americans had to pay directly out-of-pocket (as Europeans de-facto do via taxation), you can bet reality would set in quick.
That has at least one fairly simple explanation: those centers only take lower acuity patients. If you're complex with a history of complications, it'll be "we'll do this one at an actual hospital".
Right, I know that surgical centers operate with a variety of important limitations (surgical centers as they exist now are not an answer to the US health spending problem, which I preemptive agree is very real). I'm just saying that they're evidence of an at least semi-functioning market; they couldn't exist without that (who would send pts to them otherwise?).
That some pieces of the healthcare market may function is something we can all probably agree on. But /u/Sparkle-san was clearly speaking about something broader than these individual exceptions from the rule.
(And even in the case of a surgical center, your decision is likely to be significantly impacted by who your insurer will agree to cover.)
Recent legal changes have made pricing more transparent. In 2020, the federal government issued the "transparency in coverage" final rule under the Federal No Surprises Act. This limited the expenses for emergency care when out-of-network and a few other things, but even more exciting is that hospitals and insurers are now required to publish a comprehensive machine-readable file with ALL items and services. They have to provide all negotiated rates and cash prices for the services and include a display of "shoppable" services in a consumer-friendly format. The machine-readable files are impractical to process yourself for comparison shopping (picture: different formats, horribly de-normalized DB dumps), but many sites and APIs have emerged to scrape them and expose interfaces to do so.
Sorry, I'm not going to Google "cheap MRIs near me" when I'm bleeding out on the floor having an emergency. Healthcare is not expensive because you can't see how much a doctor visit costs, it's expensive because that's how a lot of people make a lot of money, and they get very upset when that is threatened.
Most medical care is not an immediate emergency. If I could compare MRI prices and it would impact how much I pay (either as an insurance copay or out of pocket) I would absolutely do that. But I have no opportunity to do that so there is not price feedback like there is in a market.
Even if it's not an emergency, many medical events come with a lot of unknowns. Like having a baby. No way to say how long labor might be, if there will be complications, how long you'll need to stay afterwards. MRIs are actually pretty easy to shop around for and MRIs don't make up a huge part of healthcare.
Sorry, this is simply not true. Every 1-3 years, I get a simple diagnostic procedure to make sure I don't get cancer. Without it, I'm at a very real risk of developing cancer that would quickly kill me.
There is no universe in which it doesn't cost around $10,000. None. It is simply impossible for me to get out of paying that. My options are:
1. Use insurance, and hopefully it's covered.
2. Pay out of pocket.
3. Skip it and hope I don't die.
That's it, those are my options. I can't "shop around" for this, and I shouldn't have to. This is basic medical care available to everyone in a developed nation. Ours is the only one for whom this is apparently an intractable problem, and I am, frankly, tired of being gaslit about it.
Many of those “simple diagnostic procedures” are a tenth of the cost if done outside of insurance out of pocket. MRIs are one of them.
My routine blood work done via my doctor bills something like $1600 to my insurance every other year or so - but it do it on my own outside of the medical system for about $180 every six months.
No one should have to do this for necessary care - but once you get into things not typically covered by insurance like plastic surgery or LASIK the true costs are generally rather reasonable.
A whole shadow ecosystem for “health hackers” or whatever you might want to call it exists where standard medical stuff is 10% of the cost if paid out of pocket and through alternative prescribers. It’s a small subset of all available medical items, but the difference in true cost is illuminating.
That's what the parent is saying. This is totally insane and should be just handled for us with a system that is something like what almost every other country has put in place.
Many have mixed systems. You have the public system which is fine if you have acute appendix for example. And then you have private providers, which do tell the prices and you can check which you can pick for less urgent, even a hip replacement.
It really is two separate questions how much basic procedures should cost. But I see no reason why non-urgent even important care shouldn't operate like real market. Open prices where competition is either on those prices or quality of care.
Nor should it strive to be a market. Healthy markets can only exist where demand is elastic. If the choice is between dying to kidney failure or enduring life-crushing medical debt, you bet I'm going to do anything it takes to get that transplant. And therein lies the problem: You *cannot* have healthy markets in healthcare. Period. Demand for healthcare is fully inelastic. Anyone arguing the opposite is either profiting off the status quo or woefully ignorant of economics.
I think this is actually an opposite problem. For kidney failure in particular, you can check the insane amount USG spends on end stage care. The demand for healthcare at the limit exceeds any reasonable supply. Healthcare spending across counties goes up pretty much with disposable income. There are massively expensive interventions that could give someone close to death few extra months.
Healthcare has to be rationed. Rationing by market is the least bad kind of we learn anything from history... Too bad healthcare in the US is not a market in any way or form, and in fact the most expensive least DALY efficient interventions (Medicare) are subsidized at the expense of everything else.
In a society that values McDonald's staying cheap and Coca-Cola superbowl ads, maybe this is true, but it's not a universal rule at all. On the other end of the spectrum from kidney transplants are regular checkups and ability to walk into any doctor's office to get your flu/cold checked out. Rationing healthcare at these stages is only going to make it worse as people wait until they need an emergency room visit to get care.
Sounds like you are looking at it from a consumer's point of view.
The US "market" is between the drug companies, hospitals, practitioners' groups, insurance companies, and government.
They are the ones that have market participation, the patient's not involved with that, their primary duty is to provide justification for the transaction.
>Healthcare doesn't function as a market, to our detriment.
So true, but even worse than that, the market that is there is predatory to a cumulative detriment worse than when simply dropping the ball makes things go wrong :\
yes, "heavily progressive" and advocating that market solutions would address the root causes of the healthcare situation in America. You guys are great
One of the main things that I want changed for conversation mode is I don't want it to be so sensitive to any background noise. ChatGPT can be reciting back and answer and someone across the room turns a page in a book and it stops dictating, and then, instead of finishing the previous answer, starts to answer the same question in a different way. ChatGPT is way too deferential for any noise during the conversation.
Like no tactile controls in cars, this was also a mistake for TVs