In the same way Trump claimed to be the President of Peace, supposedly "left" or "progressive" politicians will push these measures forward while also pocketing money from businesses/organizations who benefit from various social/fiscal causes being ignored.
These are the legislative equivalent of the Dem leadership doing the kneel with the Kente cloth around their necks.
These politicians would never push to end qualified immunity, audit overtime usage, investigate police unions, etc. That requires actual change your donors might not like.
Same thing here, no work needs to be done determining why black/native women go missing at higher rates. That's hard, that's a deeper societal problem. It might just implicate a Sheriff or two or illuminate rape kits going unprocessed.
36% of missing person cases in the US are black women and children, even though only 13% of the population is black, but those cases get much less media attention and are treated less urgently than missing white people.
Creating a separate alert for those cases is meant to bring more attention to them.
There is a similar issue with Native Americans, who go missing at an even more disproportional rate than black women and children, and receive much less attention and resources than white cases.
The odd language is a result of sloppy back and forth fighting over the specific legislative language around scope that largely was a result the fact that the driving concern from the main group that sought the adoption of the alert (the California Tribal Families Coalition) was the incidence of both rape victimization and becoming missing affecting indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit.
"A Feather Alert is a resource available to law enforcement agencies investigating the suspicious or unexplainable disappearance of an indigenous woman or indigenous person."
I think it's a matter of perspective maybe more than 'knowing what they are talking about'.
Like - seeing property as 'investment and ownership' vs 'places where people live' is sometimes pretty big gap. Especially when we've been grounded in 'mortgages and wealth creation' for regular middle class people.
Rent control and the underlying civilization power dynamics are kind of a subtle thing, I think most folks are going to just answer in terms of 'what is good for them'.
Rent control drives up rents, not down. Since rent control was enacted in SF, rents have increased by 15x in 45 years. That's 24% a year annualized over 45 years. Its similar for other places that enacted it.
Rarely in human history has a specific policy failed more spectacularly. Yet you still hear supposedly educated people advocate for it every year.
> Rent control drives up rents, not down. Since rent control was enacted in SF, rents have increased by 15x in 45 years.
A couple of things:
You're aware of the Californian property tax control? If you aren't, go read up on the 197X Proposition 13, as well as the ways even vaguely-savvy landowners can get around the "tax is reassessed when the property changes hands" rule. IMO, it's only fair that tenants get the same sort of price-increase-protection that landlords get. If the landlords get rid of Prop 13 and anything even remotely like it for the next fifty years, I'll be first in line to clamor for the removal of what passes for rent control in the few cities that have it.
Unless you -as a developer- especially request otherwise, SF's rent control only applies to buildings that were in existence back in 197X, when the ordinance was enacted. New units are not covered by rent control. It does not apply to any commercial buildings... just residential rentals. It also only controls the rate of rent increase until the unit is vacated. Once it's vacated, the landlord is free to charge whatever rent they wish.
Your story gets confounded by the fact that -for a variety of reasons- it's nearly impossible to build any new residential buildings in SF. When demand is met with a nearly zero increase in the supply, the cost of the thing being demanded tends to go up.
Rents are generally quite high in California, not just in SF. From [0]
2000 1990 1980 1970 1960 1950 1940
United States $602 $447 $243 $108 $71 $42 $27
California $747 $620 $283 $126 $79 $42 $27
Washington $663 $445 $254 $113 $71 $43 $22
Only a few cities in California have rent control [1], so that doesn't explain the fact that rents are high state-wide.
Though, it is more interesting to look at the numbers when adjusted to 2000's dollar. [2] I wonder if your "15x" figure is inflation-adjusted...
2000 1990 1980 1970 1960 1950 1940
United States $602 $571 $481 $415 $350 $257 $284
California $747 $792 $560 $484 $389 $256 $286
Washington $663 $569 $503 $434 $350 $263 $226
Let's be real, if a bigtech ignored judicial orders, whether you would describe it as "fighting autocracy" or "corporate fascism" is 100% dependent on who is currently in office
Google is a multi trillion dollar company, not a scrappy libertarian upstart ready to gamble everything in court
Parent comment has a strong implication that the bets will impact their decisions, and invariably for the worse.
If "Politician XYZ takes the day off and sits on the couch" were paying 100-1 odds, it wouldn't be such a big drama (although, again, the existence of the bet would still impact their behaviour)
Correct. I've always had a hard time getting my point phrased in a way that gets people to understand my point, but I'm baffled that people don't see an issue with creating something that says "Hey if you blow up these random people in Iran today you can make $50 million dollars and no one can punish you" and thinking its not a big fucking deal.
This also isn't a theoretical issue that may happen - it dissapoints me that very few people know this but - on October 10th when BTC fell from $122k to $104k because of a trump announcement, someone created a short position 30 minutes before Trump announced 100% tariffs on Chinese imports and profited $200M USD.
I replied to 1 comment below yours - but I want to ask, how do you think this incentivizes people to make info about decisions public? That would lower the return on their bets.
> Like mandatory seat belts, some people argue that there would be no need for CHERI if everyone "just used type-safe languages"[...] I'm not having any of it.
It wish the author would have offered a more detailed refutation than "I'm not having it". I'm pretty sure the claim is right! I'm fairly convinced that we'd be a lot better off moving to ring0-only linear-memory architectures and rely on abstraction-theoretic security ("langsec") rather than fattening up the hardware with random whack-a-mole mitigations. We're gradually moving in that direction anyway without much of a concerted effort.
For the vast majority of customers' utility functions, Apple has the best hardware (both in absolute and per dollar terms) on the market right now. It's not "objectively best", but it certainly meets the most stringent definition of "best" that's still useful in conversation.
Not really, price is still extremely important and doesn't really factor into the definition of the best product. Taken to the extreme, Imagine a laptop a thousand times faster then the best there is now, with an extremely bright HDR screen with perfect blacks and a 1000hz refresh rate. It has a battery life of years, It's made of an unscratchable metal alloy and is fanless. It runs windows, linux and macos flawlessly. It's CPU can natively executable all major instruction sets. It's extremely light. Yet it costs 50 million USD. Sure there will be some super rich who may buy it. But never will the majority of the world use it.
>price is still extremely important and doesn't really factor into the definition of the best
Heh. Who says it doesn't?
>Taken to the extreme, Imagine [...]
Okay. Likewise, imagine a computer exactly like you've described, except it costs five cents and measures a cubic kilometer. Sure, there may be a couple people for whom operating such a gigantic machine is no problem, but the vast majority of the world will never use it. So the size of the computer also doesn't factor into whether it's "the best", right? And so on for any single property you care to name.
Yeah, no. The price is as much a part of a product as its physical shape. If Macs cost about the same as non-Macs, maybe they'd the most popular computers in the world, but they're not. And even in that case, they would not be the best. If, say, the program I need to run doesn't run on a Mac, the best computer for me would not be a Mac, it would be whatever computer is able to run it.
Well, it’s not a formal definition, of course. But most review sites that compare products typically distinguish between best overall and best value categories. For example, if I asked gamers what the best GPU is, most would say the NVIDIA RTX 5090. Its price-to-performance ratio is terrible, but it still holds the crown.
> Okay. Likewise, imagine a computer exactly like you've described, except it costs five cents and measures a cubic kilometer. Sure, there may be a couple people for whom operating such a gigantic machine is no problem, but the vast majority of the world will never use it. So the size of the computer also doesn't factor into whether it's "the best", right? And so on for any single property you care to name.
I’m not describing a computer in general. I’m describing a laptop. What you’ve described wouldn’t even qualify for that category. And even if it did, size and weight are core quality factors for laptops. Portability is part of what defines the category.
> Yeah, no. The price is as much a part of a product as its physical shape. If Macs cost about the same as non-Macs, maybe they'd the most popular computers in the world, but they're not. And even in that case, they would not be the best. If, say, the program I need to run doesn't run on a Mac, the best computer for me would not be a Mac, it would be whatever computer is able to run it.
Price isn’t an property of a product itself, it's part of the product offering. If you have a laptop sitting on a table and you start using it, there’s nothing in the experience that tells you what it costs. If you can’t determine something by using the product, it isn’t an inherent attribute of it. Your cubic kilometer example also falls completely flat here, you can notice it when using the product.
So I'd agree with your point if we would be talking about the product offering. That includes things like pricing, warranty structure, on-site support, marketing message, availability etc.
The best laptop doesn’t have to match everyone’s personal needs. Your criteria may differ, but there are still objective qualities that most people agree are important in a laptop, build quality, display, battery life, input feel, and so on. In those respects, MacBooks tend to push these qualities to an extreme degree, more than any other laptop.
>For example, if I asked gamers what the best GPU is, most would say the NVIDIA RTX 5090. Its price-to-performance ratio is terrible, but it still holds the crown.
Not for me. My 3090 can already max out my UPS. Being gifted a 5090 would be a terrible inconvenience for me. What you mean is that it's the fastest gaming GPU. Is that what "best" means? Something is the best in its product category if it tops the chart on the primary property of that category that applies to some abstract consumer? An abstract gamer with no other constraints would just want the fastest GPU, so the fastest one is the best? Fine. But then I'm forced to ask, where do categories begin and end? The 5090 is the best gaming GPU, but it's not the best GPU. Macs may be the best laptops (I don't know, but I'll grant it), but they're not the best PCs, or the best gaming laptops. Or, if I'm feeling cheeky, not the best laptops for under $(price of a Mac - 100).
>If you have a laptop sitting on a table and you start using it, there’s nothing in the experience that tells you what it costs.
I didn't realize arguing like this was possible. So if the laptop instead of being borrowed was yours, but if you ever type and send an email with "テスト" on the subject and body it would explode, but you never send that email (because you don't speak Japanese), that's a perfectly fine laptop, right? I mean, it's the same thing; in one instance the price is irrelevant to you (because you didn't pay it), and in the other the little lithium bomb is irrelevant to you (because you can't ever set it off). So they're both equally good products, at least subjectively.
>build quality, display, battery life, input feel, and so on
Those are the way they are not in small part because of how much they cost. Do you think Dell wouldn't rather make make much higher quality laptops for the same cost and the same price? Yes, you can get a feel for the price of something by using it. Haven't you ever heard someone say "ugh, this feels so cheap"? It's a vague feeling that's difficult to attribute, but it is informed by real experience. Inexpensive products often "feel cheap" and bad to use, while more expensive products don't, or to a lesser degree.
I see the points you’re making, but I think there are a few misunderstandings in how you’re framing the discussion.
1. "Best" versus "fastest" or "most expensive"
When I said the RTX 5090 is "the best GPU" for gaming, I meant it objectively tops the category on the core property most gamers care about: raw performance. That’s exactly why review sites separate "best overall" from "best value", they are acknowledging that there are multiple ways to judge a product. If you’re defining "best" by convenience or personal constraints, that’s fine, but that’s a subjective criterion, not the same as evaluating intrinsic qualities of the product. Conflating the two muddies this discussion.
2. Thought experiments
The "laptop that explodes if you type a certain email" analogy is clever, but it’s not equivalent to price. Price is an extrinsic property. It doesn’t affect the physical functionality or design of the laptop itself. A latent, never-triggered bug or trap is intrinsic, because it could affect you at any time if the condition arises. By contrast, whether you paid $50 million or $500 for the laptop doesn’t change its display quality, weight, or battery life.
3. "Feels cheap" argument
It’s true that price influences how companies allocate resources, and a higher-priced laptop can often feel better due to higher-quality materials. But that’s a correlation, not an inherent property. You can measure build quality, screen brightness, or input feel directly without knowing the price. Saying "Dell could make a higher-quality laptop for the same price" is exactly my point: price itself is not part of the intrinsic definition of quality, it’s part of the product offering.
I get that you’re making thought experiments and analogies to illustrate points, but many of them subtly shift the definitions or mix subjective preferences with objective qualities. That makes it hard to have a clear discussion about the intrinsic qualities of products versus their price or accessibility. If you keep ignoring this point and try to again shift the discussion I will stop engaging because I don't consider you acting in good faith.
>Saying "Dell could make a higher-quality laptop for the same price" is exactly my point
You understood the exact opposite from what I said. Dell couldn't make a much better laptop for the same price, the same way Apple couldn't make the same laptops for much cheaper.
>Price is an extrinsic property.
No, it's not extrinsic. That was my point. Do you think materials and R&D are free for manufacturers and OS developers? The price is not merely correlated, it's a direct consequence of the build quality. You can't sell a product for less money than it cost to make it. Higher quality -> higher cost -> higher price.
>By contrast, whether you paid $50 million or $500 for the laptop doesn’t change its display quality, weight, or battery life.
In what world could you pay either $500 or $50M for two products which are otherwise equivalent? How do you think the latter one could be viable? Are you serious? Do you actually think cost and price are literally independent variables?
4chan is not "operating in the UK". They accept and respond to packets from the UK. If the UK government doesn't like this, they can block 4chan themselves.
If I were to fly to the USA, purchase something that was illegal in my home country (and explicitly state I was going to take it back home), then took it back home - would the vendor be prosecuted?
I'm sorry that you are not familiar with how laws work but it's kind of a big concept and I don't really have time now to teach it to you. I would recommend Wikipedia or perhaps ChatGPT to get started.
Bartenders from other countries don't get locked up the moment they enter the US because they served alcohol to someone (a US citizen?) between 18 and 21. The US does not have jurisdiction over alcohol sales in other countries.
In this scenario, what's more likely to be illegal is bringing the item into the country.
It's difficult to make physical analogies to these types of internet laws. What makes them 'tricky' is how they are not physical.
If they pack the alcohol up in a crate, and then ship it to the person after they make the order in person? Less clear yes?
If the consumer goes to a place it is legal, and consumes it there without bringing any back, most people would say ‘meh’. Depending on the product. Hard drugs and sex work, being two common exceptions that some countries get more worked up about even traveling to ‘enjoy’ it.
But ship it back (especially hard drugs or sex workers!), and almost all people get more concerned.
The issue here is exactly why customs typically is a mandatory ‘gate’ for packages AND passengers entering a country.
Similar, one could say, to a giant country level firewall?
And why it is so lucrative for smugglers, which are defacto performing a type of arbitrage eh?
If you are purchasing any form of financial service that involves moving money around and said financial services provider also happens to interact with a US based financial entity, then yes, Uncle Sam will make life very difficult.
And no before you ask crypto won't solve this because Uncle Sam demands USD stablecoins to have sanctions mechanisms built in and clearing entities that don't implement KYC etc. will find themselves subjected to prosecution in other ways.
Mmmmmhhhhhhh…What if I buy some goods (say electronics) in the EU from a foreign firm (v.gr. China) using mail and these goods do not comply with the EU’s regulations? I really do not know the proper reply to this.
The regulation - and the actions Ofcom are taking - are saying "look, you can deal with this, or you can get blocked and pay our fines the moment we have a way of being able to enforce them. What's it going to be?". 4chan are saying neither. Which means they're going to get blocked.
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