drblastoff

It’s incredibly difficult to run a large social platform without it quickly devolving into a cesspool of hate speech, pornography, extremism, misinformation, propaganda, etc. It’s a never-ending tightrope walk, and you ultimately need to empower a team to make decisions they believe are in the best interests of the site and its users. But you can never please everybody. People who leave comments like this only reveal their naivety. But leaving comments like this today reveals something worse than naivety.

This assumes the staff engineers work more hours (not my experience)

The card check at entrance and “club” concept serves another purpose: it deters random people from going to Costco to steal or cause problems. Retail theft is a major problem for most stores these days, unfortunately.

I’ve fallen victim to this, though perhaps fortunately with digital synth plugins that take up no physical space.

This is related to another problem of mine: ignoring things I’m naturally good at, and fixating on things I’m naturally bad at. In this case, I have no real musical talent, can’t play instruments in rhythm, can’t arrange a song, and I’ve nevertheless been pursuing this in my spare time for a decade with no results. Sometimes I buy new gear thinking it will help, but people with musical talent can do much more with much less.

On the other hand, I showed promise for visual arts but never pursued it. My frustration with being bad at something seems to overpower my desire to be really good at something.

I’m constantly torn by the natural inclination to climb the ladder and enjoy the financial rewards, but I have little interest in the day-to-day tasks of my staff engineer coworkers (mostly sitting in meetings and writing emails, very rarely writing code because that’s considered beneath their pay grade and they’d likely be chastised for it at my company). If I had a family to provide for, I think it would be a much easier decision to take the money.

If the city says “You cannot live on the sidewalk, in public parks, or in Bart stations,” that’s a far cry from putting a gun to someone’s head.

The city can offer other options:

- shelters in the city

- shelters outside the city if shelter in the city are full (this is my controversial opinion, but if you can’t afford housing in a specific place, you may need to live in a different place until you can afford it. I’d love to live in Malibu, but I can’t afford it. I don’t think it’s my right to plop myself down on the sidewalk and shoot heroin until the city of Malibu builds me free housing. That’s not a realistic expectation.)

- bus fare return to family

- treatment for addicts

The point is that you don’t incentivize moving to SF with no money and no job and no prospects and living on the street until you get free housing.

Newsom tried this while he was mayor. His conclusion was that for every person they put in housing, two new people showed up on the street.

Another issue was that most people they put into “temporary” supportive housing never moved out. A significant portion of SF’s budget goes towards paying for the housing of formerly homeless people. The city won’t put them out on the street, so why would they ever leave?

Do you let the shelters become drugs dens? Because many chronically-homeless people in SF are addicts, and they prefer to live on the street than give up drugs to sleep indoors.

Addicts should have a choice: shelter, treatment, or jail. If you bring drugs in the shelter, your choice becomes treatment or jail. Drug encampments on city sidewalks should simply not be an option.

Some chronically homeless people in SF also suffer from mental illness and cannot look after themselves. They may also not do well in shelters. But leaving them outside is not humane. Institutions had a reputation for poor living conditions, but leaving them to suffer in the street is no better. And institutions can be improved.

Yes, tags, and really anything illegally spray painted on public or private surfaces. No problem if the city or a building owner wants to commission or invite graffiti artists.

I spent time in several European cities recently (and in the past), and Zurich was the only place where the amount of graffiti really stood out to me. Maybe there was an expectation that a wealthy city/country wouldn’t have tagging, which made it stand out more. Berlin had a lot of both good street art and tagging, but the tagging seemed more concentrated in specific areas.

The graffiti stood out more to me than billboards, but as an American I’m surely desensitized to billboards.

The IQ of the average college student has dropped from ~120 to 102 over time.

College no longer the domain of a people pursuing intellectually-demanding careers. It’s become an expensive and completely unnecessary prerequisite for the general public, costing them a fortune not only in tuition, textbooks, boarding, etc., but also in the opportunity cost of delaying their earnings and career advancement by 4+ years. We’re now stuck in a fundamentally flawed system.

By ignoring the problems, and actually making them worse by lowering academic standards and pushing the student loan burden to taxpayers, it reeks of either gross incompetence or corruption in our government.

If they want to limit “visual pollution” they should crack down on graffiti. Zurich is covered in it and it’s really ugly. Local Swiss claimed it’s no worse than other cities, but it was worse than any place I’ve seen.

Why are you pretending that $100k-$200k is the ceiling in the defense industry, when the comment you’re replying to is specifically pointing out that it’s frequently a stepping stone to more lucrative career options?

Not to mention that those nominally earning more in SF/SV often have worse quality of life than those earning less elsewhere due to housing prices and overall cost of living.

> My point is the world will develop whether or not that is in the interest of those in power.

I didn’t get that from “if the rest of the world is allowed to develop.” But yes, parts of the world have been developing much faster than the U.S., for instance, and in many cases now surpass the U.S. by many metrics.

I don’t believe the U.S. has actually done much to prevent this. In the case of China, actually just the opposite: the U.S. government and U.S. industry have repeatedly traded away its long-term advantages for short-term political and financial wins in a series of unforced errors over the last 30+ years. But who knows, maybe this is a good thing for the world.

You think the rest of the world has not developed? Have you been out in the world?