zamfi

This writing is among the most beautiful anti-slop writing I've seen in a while -- there's such an essential humanity here that is captured brilliantly and beautifully in the language, pacing, punctuation, and content.

More of this please!

I wondered the same. ff and fi are common ligature letter pairs, maybe the original is in an encoding where those are represented with separate characters, which then correspond to § and Ö in whatever encoding we find here?

On its face this sounds like an indictment of an electorate.

But I think it's actually a much deeper indictment of the incumbents who couldn't present a vision more appealing than the "madness on television".

> The biggest evidence against collaborative editing working and being useful is that programmers don't use it. We go through the pain of having git branches and manual merges.

Hmm -- this seems a bit apples and oranges to me: collaborative editing is sync; git branches, PRs, etc. are all async. This is by design! You want someone's eyes on a merge, that's the whole rationale behind PRs. Collab editing tries to make merges invisible.

Totally different use case, no?

Yes, and yes. The sibling comment here about liquidation preferences is correct, and these separate incentives are usually structured as retention incentives — eg, compensation for future work with the acquiring company.

Shareholders are of course free to sue the board for acting outside of the interests of the shareholders overall, but this happens very rarely because typically the company would otherwise be shutting down and it’s very hard to make the argument that the deal undervalues common shareholders’ shares.

These days, most employees getting nothing out of the deal is par for the course for acquisitions, unfortunately. The acquisition price is almost never exchanged directly for shares in the company as implied, often a chunk of it is kept for key personnel retention, etc. Typically just enough goes towards the share purchase to make investors happy, and the rest is structured as incentives for founders and key execs with milestone payouts. That‘s the set of people with leverage towards making the acquisition happen, so that‘s who gets paid.

If you‘re just a regular employee with some options, and the acquirer doesn‘t want to keep you on, you should expect nothing.

Huh, which process was doing this grinding on your MacBook?

Why would the transactional nature favor students now though? What’s the mechanism for that, that’s internal to the system?

In other words it sounds like you’re arguing that the root cause is “the transactional nature” but that’s the one thing that hasn’t changed. So why is it worse now?

What is it that makes students “better equipped to ignore you”?

Wait, but the point of the piece is that although college has always been transactional, behavior has changed.

If so, why would transactional-ism be the cause?

Read on:

> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.

And then, crucially:

> Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies.

As a counterpoint, Postel's Law as implemented in other domains has been spectacularly successful.

One classic example is in transistor networks: each node in a network (think interconnected logic gates, but at the analog level) accepts a wider range of voltages as "high" and "low (i.e., 1- and 0-valued) than they are specified to output. In 5V logic, for example, transistors might output 5V and 0V to within 5%, but accept anything above 1.2V as "high" and below that as "low". (Sometimes called the "static discipline" and used as an example of the "robustness principle"—the other name for Postel's Law.)

This is critical in these networks, but not because transistor manufacturers don't read or fully implement the spec: it's because there is invariably unavoidable noise introduced into the system, and one way to handle that is for every node to "clean up" its input to the degree that it can.

It's one thing to rely on this type of clean-up to make your systems work in the face of external noise. But when you start rearchitecting your systems to operate close to this boundary—that is, you're no longer trying to meet spec, because you know some other node will clean up your mess for you—you're cooked. Because the invariable noise will now push you outside the range of what your spec's liberal input regime can tolerate, and you'll get errors.

The problem isn't Postel's law. It's adverse selection / moral hazard / whatever you want to call the incentive to exploit a system's tolerance for error to improve short-term outcomes for the exploiter but at long-term cost to system stability.

> The $/sqft of housing tends to go up as density increases

This is only true generally, not within a specific neighborhood, and it's because of correlations between demand and density.

If you look at a neighborhood with mixed SFH and condos, the condo $/sqft is lower than the SFH $/sqft. (To be clear: that's $/sqft of housing space not of land).

Having a diversity of density enables home pricing at different points. Looking only at SFH (as this article does) is missing the forest for the trees, IMO.

> there is a highly lucrative business in simply buying low-density zoned land and going through the entitlements to turn it into a high-density zone

Sure, but this is only a lucrative business because despite the land getting more expensive, the housing units are less expensive—otherwise who in their right mind would pay as much for one unit in a duplex/triplex/etc. as they'd have paid for a single-family home in the same location?

> This is not the case with land.

Not with that attitude!

Kidding aside, most people looking for housing aren’t buying land, they’re buying housing — which absolutely does not have elastic supply by policy, not by natural law.

Why doesn't it feed through to the price of food? Of vehicles? Of energy?

It only feeds through to the price of certain classes of goods: housing, healthcare, education.

Those are also "markets" that are artificially supply-constrained, through zoning, the AMA, and accreditation.

To be clear, I'm not saying that we should get rid of zoning, the AMA, and accreditation—but we should be much more careful to avoid use of those tools to curb supply.

> Gentrification actually only affects a very small percentage of people who end up refusing to sell and holding out until they cannot afford anymore.

Not quite just those who refuse to sell — because housing costs impact the cost of every other local service, maintenance in a gentrified area often becomes unaffordable for those who hold out, and then they can’t afford it. Roof replacement is the classic example. Another example (though not as relevant to the 90 year old on social security) is childcare costs.