rrrrrrrrrrrryan

Implement a per-mile tax for vehicles with 0 passengers.

These kinds of exercises are great thought experiments but a little bit useless if they're not grounded in political feasibility.

The interesting reforms are the ones that are easy to sell to the general public with a 30 second elevator pitch, or a one paragraph comment online - even if the people that are currently in power might hate the idea.

The fires of those ideas can be stoked, and if enough people get behind them, then those aspiring to greater political power will begin to adopt the ideas as part of their platforms.

I mean yes, obviously: the nation was founded with a giant genocide of native peoples.

I do imagine original white people were perhaps more keenly aware of the fact that this land was not originally theirs, and that other people should be let in and given a fair shot, even if they're poor.

I was merely making the argument that U.S. immigration policy has historically not been very classist (even if it was immensely racist), and not caring about the wealth of the incoming immigrants has worked out immensely well for the country over its lifespan.

You're kind of describing two different ideas: pigouvian taxes, and taxing The Commons.

What both have in common is that economists from all different schools of thought widely agree that they're the least distortionary taxes.

Japan does not have a shortage of homes - they have a surplus. Their economy very much need younger workers as their birth rates have fallen. But instead of simply allowing new workers in, they're choosing to devalue the shit out of their currency, then complaining about the huge influx of tourism that it triggered.

This is not a joke - they're actually banking on this.

Dude ethnically Japanese people that were born in Japan, lived their entire childhoods in Japan, are no longer considered Japanese if they live outside of Japan for 5-10 years.

People who have lived their entire lives in Japan, but are not 100% ethnically Japanese, will literally never be accepted as Japanese.

> “ive me your tired, your poor, > Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, > The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. > Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, > I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The U.S. was founded as a nation of immigrants, and has a cultural history of being exceptionally immigrant-friendly (compared to other nations), especially with regard to immigrants without much means.

I don't believe other nations have any obligation to follow this example. On the contrary, they should be able to set whatever immigration policies make sense for them. But this model of letting in poor immigrants, letting them do the work that nobody else wants to do, and letting their kids become net contributors, does seem to have benefited the U.S. greatly over the past few centuries.

It's actually worse with veterinary practices.

Younger veterinarians are drowning in school debt and can't buy the practices from the older folks that are retiring. So, private equity is basically snatching all of them up right now, betting that childless millennials are going to pay tons of money on veterinary care when their pandemic pups begin to reach end-of-life.

They're going to cut wages for all the staff, and hike all the prices, because unlike with human medical care, there's hardly any regulation (yet).

Yep, also explains why businesspeople who hate their jobs absolutely love it, and why artists absolutely hate it.

I've found that the biggest perk of being in a driverless car is being able to speak freely with the people in your group - whether that's arguing, telling a wild story, or just having a heartfelt discussion with someone.

It's the difference between sitting at a table with friends, and sitting at a table with friends + one stranger.

> Perhaps I'm just too painstaking a type of person, but I can't grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words.

> As I write, I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.

- Murakami, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running"

We're obviously long past the days when people's politics could be mapped on a nice normal distribution, with some outliers at either end and a big group of moderates in the middle who vote differently depending on the election. Today the distribution is not only bimodal: there's almost no overlap at all.

Your politics are part of your identity now. It's part of how you define who you are, and according to the research, over 95% of people are completely entrenched and will never vote for any candidate from the "other" party. (This the highest since right before the Civil War.)

That said, while nobody's changing sides any time soon, people _do_ stay home on election day, and we're going to see that next election.

The races for the next couple decades will be won by the candidates and the parties who can drill up enough enthusiasm from their base. Preach to the choir so the choir sings, etc.

This is true if you only have one access point.

If you have a mesh system with more than one access point, your network benefits greatly by using WiFi 7 (or 8, now) as a dedicated wireless backhaul that connects the access points to each other.

Ancient Egyptian women, above a certain socioeconomic threshold, also removed their body hair. (So did the men.)

Hair traps odors (ever smell your hair after a campfire, or going to a Korean BBQ?), but it's kind of a bitch to constantly remove. People with the means and the time to remove their body hair have done it at various periods throughout history.

Women in ancient Egypt also wore makeup, could own property, could divorce men without social repercussions, etc.

Many aspects of society that we think are new are actually things that just kind of arise given a couple hundred years of peacetime and abundance, and/or things that wealthy people have been doing on and off at various periods throughout history.