jimmy1

If you were really trying to engage in a thought experiment with me honestly, I don't think starting with a mischaracterization and inventing a fallacy ("appeal to hypocrisy") to tear it down is a good place to start. That also seems, to me, lazy.

> Overpopulation is something that, if real, will have an impact regardless of the motivation for people's concern

"If real", that is the key, and I am glad you pointed it out. For the sake of argument, we would first have to define why overpopulation real. It seems to me most people start off with the assumption that it is real.

Who is defining overpopulation? What is the criteria? Not enough food? Well that's not true at all, we know that the US for example wastes more food daily that could feed the entire continent of Africa with 1/3rd of a pound of food. Not enough land for people to expand to? Well even a 5 year old knows that one is false. Is it not enough natural resources? Despite the fearmongering about water and energy resources drying up, we seem to be doing just fine. Capitalists reaping the country to sell to a nation of consumers? This is the most insidious form of the argument, but again, very wrong. Plus it assumes greedy capitalists somehow wouldn't exist with 5 billion people, or 3, or 2, or even 1, that wouldn't cause some kind of destruction to natural resources. The final one is one made more by hard left academics in favor of socialism. They need an easy explanation for why socialism always sounds so great in theory and never works in practice, so they point to overpopulation. If we simply had less people, then socialism would work!. Except, as we now know, this was in part one of the rationales behind the gulags and gas chambers.

So what is the criteria? Not comfortable enough for you and me -- that seems to be the essence of the arguments left after eliminating the ones above.

Plus, even if the above were remotely true, why rule out technological solutions? Seems to me pretty crazy people on a technology focused board would rule this one out (not singling you out, "overpopulation is a problem" is an opinion expressed here often, unfortunately), especially since it was technology that has allowed us to easily achieve our current population levels at the exploding standard of living the globe is currently undergoing.

People who think overpopulation is an issue by just pointing to some things "drying up" or some places "crowding" is by definition engaging in a lazy form of argument. So to me, until there some hard facts and figures on what overpopulation means, please excuse me if I take it for a hypocritical statement, as the great Carlin said, made by bourgeois liberals that have never experienced actual hardships and live in such an advanced society they have nothing better to do than ponder the scenarios where their cushy lifestyles could be threatened.

When you don't have any actual enemies to fight, you have to invent some in your head to keep you busy.

The replacing the existing keys is a good point. I don't feel the pain of the ESC key since I remap caps lock to it, I always thought "Function" keys were relics of a bygone era, (and unergonomic to use), and the little black doodad functions just as well as a power button as any other one I have ever used.

I'm adding onto this -- I have a 2017 edition of the MBP for work, and I have a faulty keyboard. I hated it. "The touchbar is stupid", I proclaimed.

I recently bought a 2018 edition for the wife because she has always expressed a desire of owning one of her own (my work always provided me with a mac). The keyboard is much improved.

Additionally, watching a "normal" user interact with a Mac and a touchbar, versus me, a developer was eye opening, and I suddenly realized there is a lot more to the puzzle we are so blind to. She loves it. Sure, it is an "emoji bar" when she is in iMessage, but she also loves the scrolling functionality it provides in Photos.

I still don't see much use for it personally, but I am no longer a rapid opponent of it as I once was. There's always been extra ports and features on other laptops I've used in the past, and I never seemed so critical of those as well. Maybe I bought into the mob mentality? Going back to my wife, her work provided her with a Thinkpad Yoga. It has a touch screen, and a stylus. Ok touch screens I am not the biggest fan of, but I happen to think the stylus is cool! I am sure there were many users of the previous Thinkpads at her company that were going "What!? A stupid stylus? Who needs this!" I realized I was doing the same thing with the new MBP.

Touchbar or not, it is still the most quality, aesthetically pleasing, well built laptop I use, and it still remains miles beyond any PC I ever used as well, Inspirons, XPSes, Surfaces included.

That's because the US made you as part of the Marshall Plan (assuming where you are from is Germany)

I am fortunate to have had the experience of growing up with a rabid Greek mother who would get to the bottom of any shenanigans with any sort of insurance agency, bill collector or anything. I now have my own experience. Yes the first time was stressful, but reading your story, trying to put myself in your partner's shoes this would not have ended up causing me any stress, especially if I knew the law is on my side. I certainly wouldn't paid any bill until it was all sorted out. I also have experience where a medical charge that was suppose to be covered as a legitimate procedure was not and charged off onto my credit (because again, I refused to pay). I was easily able to negotiate with the credit reporting agency to remove this negative mark on my credit. (Negative marks due to medical bills affect your credit much less than say missing a credit card payment, IIRC, I was still able to obtain credit cards, get loans, and generally had decent overall credit).

My father currently undergoing treatment for lung cancer. He has medicare and supplemental coverage through Humana. Bills are still in excess of 150,000, so I definitely understand the other side of it.

I don't mean this to be snarky, but if what you are saying is true (Congress can't do anything), why do you think the governmental disfunction will not carry over to an expanded medicare-for-all program? Medicare is not without issue and is wrought with fraud that needs decisive congressional action to help fix, yet they have shown inability there as well.

I think your phenomena might be due to startups? Obviously this is a startup focused board so I am not saying this to mean go one way or another, but I ditched the startup, job hopping life a little while ago, and had to deal with "insurance bs" roughly two times in 7 years.

I am either the luckiest person alive, or maybe there is additional benefits not obviously well represented here to working for a stable, revenue producing organization, but I don't seem to encounter what seems to be the well-represented insurance pains documented here (probably a little bit of both, in my guess).

I find HN more rewarding than any other social site I visit.

Healthy discussions, engaging topics and interests, no clear political slant in either direction, with multiple groups and opinions represented (you know, real diversity of thought). Finally no ads being shoved down my throat unless its engaging content disguised as an advert that reaches the top, in which case I am OK with because at least the advertiser tried, and it got support enough to be upvoted and shared.

And the option to choose the algorithmic filtering based on my needs, in the rare cases that the number of individuals or volume of their tweets may be too large to take in chronologically.

I guess some of us do. But then you have Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, The Saud family, etc.

I have heard the NIMBY argument many times before but I just don't buy it. It's too easy of a target. Plus there is so much land. Ok fine, won't build in your backyard, I'll build in the next yard over. We have this exact situation in a town called Davidson, NC where I am from. Builders can't build there. So they built in the hundreds of thousands of acres immediately right next to it. Problem solved.

Plus people exercising their right to let things happen or not happen on land and electing to do what is in their own best interest sounds fine to me and nothing to be vilifying. It sounds like to me the "NIMBY" finger pointers are just upset that low cost housing isn't built in neighborhoods they want to live in -- that is, it is being portrayed as some altruistic goal but really has self interest in mind.

Even if I conceded your point about NIMBYism, it may explain a very small part of the problem, but it absolutely does not explain why builders are not flocking to a state with a 117k/yr housing shortfall to figure it out.

Wow this is jaw dropping.

> By one estimate from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the state needs to build 1.8 million units over the next seven years just to keep pace with population growth

You need to build about 257k just to keep up with growth, not to address any sort of shortage. This to me should sound like a builder's gold rush. Why are builders not flocking to CA to build? Are there some stringent set of regulations that greatly reduce the economic feasibility? Is this Prop 13 proving to be a failure?