This explores the ideas behind your post: important things, like education and healthcare, have disproportionately risen in price while not-so-imortant thing have gotten less expensive.
If the problem is that the system is very skewed to the top, then isn't the solution to be found in addressing that skew? In closing those particular loopholes?
Shouldn't everyone pay their fair share of taxes? Warren Buffett and others seem to think that they should.
This hit on a peeve of mine, that automatic high beam systems really suck for pedestrians. Manual control is genuinely better in this regard. Try walking around at night in a wealthy neighborhood, and about 1/8 of the cars just blind every pedestrian.
I assume you're an American? As a Brit, your comment confuses me. Why would anyone ever have high beams on at all in anything reasonably described as a "neighbourhood"? Do built-up areas in the US not reliably have street lighting?
Here in the UK, it is pretty much universally the case that if there are buildings, there are street lights. (Maybe there are occasional exceptions where there's a single building in the middle of nowhere on a rural road; I'm not sure. And I suppose there must be occasional outages of street lighting even in e.g. dense city centres. But such things are rare.) Having high beams on in almost any context where there are buildings around is therefore unnecessary, against the Highway Code, and quite possibly criminal under RVLR reg 27.
I'm not the one you asked, but I think a lot of 'wealthy' neighborhoods in the US mean suburbia with larger single-family-home lots, and roads often feel a bit more rural. In my area in California, these are often unincorporated (county) lands just outside larger towns.
You sometimes see a very clear boundary. The more middle-class housing is subdivisions built all at once somewhere in the 1960s-2000s, with underground utilities and street lights. This infrastructure was mandated by the city, when the developers were looking to get their newly built neighborhood annexed into it. Around the next corner, darker streets with overhead utilities and more spread out lots with oversized "McMansion" houses. These are following the more relaxed county building codes and had the space available for such construction.
These roads are also more likely to have expensive new cars with all the computerized functions. Walking in this limbo world at the edge of our town, I've also noticed being blinded by cars as a pedestrian with more dynamic effects. I suspect are the car's system actively painting me with more light. It is a little bit like the "fringing" you see when the cutoff of older HID projection lamps sweeps over you due to road undulation. But it happens too quickly and both vertically and horizontally. It feels like being hit with a targeted spot light.
I wish the engineers spent the same care to put a dark halo on a pedestrian face as they do for oncoming drivers. Even when carrying my own flashlight, such encounters can be dazzling enough to basically go blind and not be able to see the dark paving in front of me for a minute. My light is more to make me visible to the cars than to really illuminate my path for myself. It doesn't stand a chance against the huge dynamic range of these car lighting systems.
This strikes ma as a bit unnecessary, like forbidding people from using chatGPT to develop nuclear power plants.
I mean, there is a lot of professional activities that are licensed, and for good reason. Sure it's good at a lot of stuff, but ChatGPT has no professional licenses.
I'm glad you mentioned nuclear power plants because this whole topic reminded me of the following clause in the Java SE license:
> You will not use the Programs for, and will not allow the Programs to be used for, any purposes prohibited by applicable law, including, without limitation, for the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction.
>
> https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/javase-license1.ht...
IANAL but I've come to interpret this as something along the lines of "You can't use a JDK-based language to develop nuclear weapons". I would even go as far as saying don't use JDK-based languages in anything related to nuclear energy (like, for example, administration of a nuclear power plant) because that could indirectly contribute to the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear WMD.
And I always wondered how they plan to enforce this clause. At least with ChatGPT (and I didn't look any deeper into this beyond the article) you can analyze API calls/request IPs correlated with prompts. But how will one go about proving that the Republic of Wadiya didn't build their nuclear arsenal with the help of any JDK-based language?
Those are rhetorical questions, of course. What's "unnecessary" to you and "unenforceable" to me is a cover-your-ass clause that lets lawyers sleep soundly at night.
I just saw almost the exact same clause when installing VMWare recently. My understanding is that its a standard clause that exists to stay within compliance of US Export Control laws
> EXPORT CONTROL: You acknowledge that the Software is of United States origin, is
provided subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations...(2) you will not permit the Software to be used for any purposes prohibited by
law, including, any prohibited development, design, manufacture or production of missiles or
nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
I think that a lot of people here at HN have had bad web interfaces and GUIs inflicted on them for a long time, that a TUI is a welcome change and a big improvement. TUIs are limited, which make it hard to create great interfaces; but those limits also make it hard to create really bad interfaces. Also the TUI is genuinely good at simple-to-moderate complexity software. For an example, try out Midnight Commander.
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