bufordsharkley

I definitely find trio (formerly curio) to be so thoughtfully designed at every turn; it's dispiriting that it never seemed to gain much of a user share over asyncio (whose main advantage appears to simply be inertia and stdlib privilege)

Advance ticketing (at least, based upon my querying online, I was under the belief that Phillies don't have any sort of will-call in effect with the main MLB ticketing, so I took a tablet to be safe--I was visiting from out of town)

Similar to many live music venues: maybe they have a functional will call, but often it's overlooked/nonoperational/etc, so just using the app is the safe call

I've still never had a smartphone (technically my flip phone, a Kyocera Dura, is an android device, but it can't install apps so I'll consider it suitably "dumb")

Occasionally I need to tote along a tablet because several places (some MLB venues, for one thing) will either require a smartphone, or impose a severe surcharge for the convenience of not using it.

Anyway, I really regret that we didn't impose dumbphone protection laws back when we had a large enough bloc of seniors that didn't "upgrade" to a smartphone yet

I've never been a smartphone user, and have moved from a Flip Camcorder, to various point-and-shoots in video mode (never liked very much), and just in the last 3 years, have discovered that Sony handicams are now pocket-sized, I never considered carrying around one before, but it's actually completely reasonable.

The model (HDRCX405) is wonderful, 30x optical zoom a real value-add over smartphones, but also I just love the ergonomics in general, very easy to pick it up, and start a video within a second.

That said, Sony discontinued the low-end handicam line last year (this model went from $200 new to $800 used), which is really unfortunately, right as I hope this niche might gain momentum.

The search functionality has been mostly broken (in several, overlapping ways) for several years now

I can't speak from personal experience with the Fiio jm21, but I was a big user of a previous generation of Fiio, and while I imagine some technical leaps forward have been achieved with this generation (the Fiio M1 never, for instance, achieved gapless playback from 2015-2021, even though this was promised with every new software version), taking a quick look at it... this is just an android phone interface! App store? Chrome? I certainly don't want this from a dedicated music device

Beyond this, I'd say that the true advantage of the iPod Classic was a matter of polish and UX:

* Dedicated buttons/wheel/etc that are tactile instead of a touchscreen interface (the Fiio M1 was button-and-wheel based, but it never approached the quality of Apple engineering); I see the jm21 has some side-based buttons for pause/forward/back, which is nice, but a touchscreen as main interface still grates * A way to interface with your albums that was delightful and visually dense (Cover Flow remains the single greatest music UI put forward)

It also speaks to what we lose when we lose magazine listings of events (New Yorker effectively gutted this section within the past decade), movie showtime listings via newspaper, etc

We have a very strong archive going back a century until about 2015, but now wading through linkrot circa 2017 is miserable

I remember a 1990s lottery event in which a "buy all combinations" was attempted, but their physical machines they acquired were partially deficient, and they simply couldn't physically acquire enough tickets in time (as the procedure was relatively time intensive), but they still won with something like a 75% probability of success

No, this is a different subject than the article yesterday. That one focused on "what is the overall magnitude of ground rents", this one focuses on "won't the incidence of LVT be passed onto tenants?"

And in 2018, two prominent pro-housing councilpeople got voted out of office (Lenny Siegel and Pat Showalter), returning things to a majority of NIMBY homeowners

The existence of Prop 13, coupled with pyramid-scheme-style approaches to financing municipal pensions, have led to disasters of financing.

One can imagine a better world in which pension programs are effectively time-independent w.r.t financing (neutral for growth or shrinking), and more financing comes from sources that are likely agnostic to growth or reduction (like Land Value Tax), but the politics here... are not trivial.

The reason that land is a good investment is precisely because of future land rents that a land buyer expects to receive.

If these land rents are instead paid towards a tax, how wouldn't this make land less of a good investment?

Even if prices are stable, what makes it the case that the system works so well for those who own land and creates such problems for those who are landless?

We take it for granted that renting is just a form of having your money stolen by landowners, without realizing that this is a choice we make: we could just as easily administer the market so that absentee ownership ceases to be a smart bet.