penrod

Hear, hear. The freedom to vote with your feet is one of the most important characteristics of the American experiment.

Among all voting methods it is uniquely effective and accessible - you get a large roster of fifty 'candidates', and the cost of moving to another state is much lower than the cost of buying an election.

When power is ceded from state to federal level, diminishing the diversity of candidate states, an important form of democracy is curtailed.

Quite. Who cares whether the NYT revised the article? The more salient criticism is that the article is a deeply lazy and tendentious exercise in using insinuation to push a predetermined narrative.

I wonder how many people would cite the War on Drugs as the primary reason they identify as Libertarian.

It is no surprise that Treasury made a profit on its investments in troubled companies, since the fact of investing in them effectively rigged the market in their favor: If the government declares that it will not allow a company to fail, the company’s borrowing costs are reduced and it now has a competitive advantage over companies that do not qualify for government intervention.

Of course the qualifications for this special treatment were: being very big, being politically well-connected, and having taken stupid risks. So every well-run, medium sized bank that didn’t have an army of lobbyists got screwed. And now we see that our favorites have prospered and declare “profit!” while ignoring the red ink for everyone else in the economy.

"Unfortunately, as a result of my work, several more Linux storage developers came out publicly in favor of harassment and assault."

I really would like links to these public statements. I'm not a fan of shaming, but if people are advocating violence, some finger-pointing would be entirely appropriate.

It seems like you are also selling something. And the price, which you do not mention, is the curtailment of free speech, a steep price to pay for the privilege of having my delicate eyes protected from what those bad salesmen are selling.

"Well, you are aware that the roads were built for cars right?"

Unless you're referring only to freeways, that's a nice bit of revisionism. Especially in any city older than 100 years, the streets were built to carry trolleys, horses, carriages, omnibuses, and a variety of vehicles just as slow as bicycles. And cycles continue to be legal to ride on those roads. So you're managing to be both historically and legally wrong.

"I'm going to go out to my local bike trails and ... throw handfuls of thumbtacks in front of all the bikers"

I'd like to see how that works out for you.

The horror - horror! - of rich people having more stuff than poor people is not alleviated by preventing prices from rising in times of scarcity - rich people can just pay others to stand in line for them.

Equity of distribution doesn't strike me a particularly good metric for dealing with emergencies anyway since it's easily maximized by not letting anyone have anything, which is essentially what 'gouging' bans achieve.

The more positions are elected, the more power the majority have to impose upon minorities.

It is well known that pure democracy does not invariably promote liberal society, which is why the Founders of the US Constitution specifically rejected majoritarianism.

Speaking without specific knowledge of the junction you mention, but with 20 years' experience of urban cycling, my observation is that this type of accident is usually a function of cycling too close to the curb. I've learned to move a foot or two further out into the street when approaching an intersection where cars are likely to turn right, and the effect is that drivers will tuck in behind me to turn rather than overtaking.

> In the modern American cultural context, monkeys are associated with bananas.

Actually, code monkeys are associated with Fritos.

A nitpick about terms, but not all discrimination against women is 'institutional' sexism. Institutional prejudice may be sufficient but is definitely not necessary for acts of sexism to occur. People are quite capable of acting on innate or pre-learned biases.

The article is a little unfair to Seattle. Note the alacrity with which the city clamped down on Lyft and Uber - clearly you can get some things done here if you know the right people.