Linky Friday #192: Everything Is Groovy
Cities:
Image by JamesZ_Flickr 
[C2] Vancouver has implemented an enormous tax on vacant housing.
[C3] If you’re concerned about your children, here’s where you should move.
[C4] This reminds me of the olden days when I used to have a map of Colosse pinned to the wall so that I could easily know where stuff was. Printed maps. Those were the days, weren’t they?
Planet:
Image by PetroleumJelliffe
[P2] Winner? Keystone! Maybe. And oil.
[P3] Climate Change delegates are pretty distressed.
[P4] The EPA is modifying its wind and solar rules on federal lands to protect wildlife, among other things.
[P5] Fracking is apparently not the culprit in Wyoming’s water problems.
Business:
Image by thisisbossi
[B2] My experiences with the Amazon products have been good, but this sort of sets me on edge. If I don’t mind Walmart house brands, though, I’m not sure why this should bother me.
[B3] The Netflix library is shrinking, but that’s okay. I wasn’t even aware they had a good children’s selection. I may need to give it a test-run.
[B4] Everything you ever wanted to know about the dangerous field of crop dusting.
Technology:
Image by Gwydion M. Williams
[Te2] Tim Worstall says that everything is going to be great, though.
[Te3] This will cause great fun in the news and especially fake-news industry.
[Te4] Texting… for cows.
[Te5] Here’s a kind of cool history of dreams of automation and artificial intelligence.
Transportation:
Image by flightlog
[Tr2] The Trolly Problem has a pretty easy solution, as far as Mercedes is concerned.
[Tr3] Is it time to lift the speed limits of flight?
[Tr4] A look at Trump’s transportation plan. Whatever it is.
Food:
Image by Paula Satijn
[F2] From 2014: Minneapolis is micromanaging food sales.
[F3] Olive Garden’s Never Ending Pasta Pass ended, and Hayley Peterson talked to some people who took advantage and ate at Olive Garden every day. Apparently, the only downside was the food.
[F4] If your food lacks zing, maybe you need a zap from the spoon.
Mind:
Image by PlaSmart Inc
[M2] I thought we already knew this, but people dream even when they can’t remember them. And yeah, those high school anxiety dreams…
[M3] Nautilus looks at the hardest logic puzzle, and how to solve it.
[M4] Why time speeds up as we grow older.
[M1]: I did this a lot when I realized that society was in the great whirlpool of collapse. I got insular. After a while I realized that I was missing out and decided to enjoy myself. Screw it. Until the barbarians actually come over the wall, let’s party. Besides, being drunk and watching the cities burn can be fun.Report
Re: P2. Like we’re already seeing with the Dakota Access pipeline, even when Keystone and whatever else gets passed legally, we’re going to see a lot of direct action against any such projects. (The Dakota access pipeline conflict is itself going to escalate now that the federal government is going to be less neutral about the dispute)Report
The truth of C3 is pretty much what Tuesday was all about.Report
Tr3: The ban is silly, but the noise issue is more complex than the article leads on to believe.Report
C1: This is a perennial problem for cities. Upper middle class people need a lot of support staff that do not earn enough money to live in expensive metro area. People like teachers, cops, restaurant workers. store attendants, repair people, pink collar workers, etc. The solution is to build more housing but NIMBYs keep opposing it.
C2: I’d be very interested to see how this turns out.
C3: Ha.
C4: This reminds me of something I read once. Children who walk to school apparently develop a better since of direction and location than children who are driven to school. The pedestrian children have to learn how to navigate and tend to pay closer attention to their surroundings than the children in cars. I think that with GPS, more people are going to lose their ability to navigate because they never had to learn how to get around by looking at maps in the first place.
B1, Te1: Maybe Tech will change how business is done but they got a bit too optimistic about their timing and didn’t quite get how it will change how business is done. You need to wait till automation kills off a lot of jobs to get the sharing economy.
Te2: The issue is whether people will have enough money to enjoy their new found free time.
M1: This is something that Saul would agree whole-heatedly with. In the not to distant past, there was an idea that you needed to consume your cultural vegetables to cultivate your inner self. At least some of the early broadcasters, notably NBC in the United States and BBC in the United Kingdom, strongly believed in the eat your cultural vegetables paradigm. It helped create a shared high and popular culture more than we have now. The ability of people to read and watch what they want when they want when they want is fragmenting society and also causing people to retreat from the world as Freddie noted.Report
[B1] The problem with all those articles about how tech would transform the economy is that the writers failed to look at what all those sharing-economy companies were actually doing.
Like, if the way that you make money is by cleverly figuring out a way to get around the rules everyone else has to play by, that isn’t something you can grow (or even sustain).Report
B2: the Amazon dog waste bags are the only ones I’ve bought that control the smell. All the rest are highly permeable to odor.
The young woman with the globe in the Mind section photo resembles my biracial granddaughter. All the commotion in Britain about Prince Harry’s new girl friend seems silly when she could have obviously gone to my segregated high school in rural Virginia during the late fifties and early sixties.Report
[M3] It seems like the solution to this has the same root as the Monty Hall Problem.Report
Also, Raymon Smullyan was awesome.Report
F1: Only the best-tasting piggies get to be McRib.Report
Good news, everyone!
Donald Trump just said that he might not repeal Obamacare after all.
Dodged a bullet there!Report
Not really. He said he wants to keep two contained provisions: the stuff on pre-existing conditions and keeping kids on the policy til their 27.
He’ll repeal. {{But what to replace it with?? That’s the 3.5 trillion dollar question.}}Report
Pre-existing conditions, with no other policy, would destroy the insurance industry in a very short order.Report
{{Maybe that’s his secret plan!}}Report
Here’s hoping. I can think of no way to get single payer faster than that. The insurance industry, however, would not just passively look on as that was passed into law.Report
Well, there aren’t a lot of options left. This year healthcare costs were $10,345 percapita in the US, and $3.4 trillion total, and of course still rising. Imagine that: over ten grand a year per person in the US. 50% or so of that is gobbled up by only 5% of the people. The number – the numbers – are just staggering.
The PE runs up against the no-lifetime cap on cost in one direction and the mandate on the other. And his current proposal (HSAs!!!) doesn’t do a damn thing to address any of the real problems. (Unless yer young and healthy. Or, for that matter, old and healthy…)
Ugh.
Add: here’s the linky: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/new-peak-us-health-care-spending-10345-per-person/Report
Tr2: Imagine three car dealerships.
1) Sells Traditional Cars Like The Ones You Drove Ten Years Ago.
2) Sells Self-Driving Cars That Choose To Save The Driver Over Pedestrians
3) Sells Self-Driving Cars That Choose To Save Pedestrians Over The Driver
Which ones are still open, barring legislation closing one of them, in 5 years?Report
#2 would be the only one open.Report
I was betting on #1 and #2, because of the nutters who wanted to drive their “own damn car”.
In this brave new world, the best-selling theft prevention is: A Manual Transmission.Report
Nuh uh on #1 and I’ll tell you why. One word: Insurance.
Self driving cars will talk to each other, self driving cars will operate in a web that works together. Into this network careens a self driven car. Accidents happen. The auto-cars dutifully hand over precise recordings of the incident from their own sensors and the sensors of the cars around them. The self driven car has bupkiss to argue on its drivers behalf. The self driving car is inevitably at fault and must pay for its own damages and the damages it did to other cars. The self driving pool will be small and expensive which means the price of insurance on #1 type cars will be astronomical. People don’t buy cars that cost more than the car payment to insure. As interest in those cars decline economies of scale fail driving car #1 prices higher. Car #1’s become either extinct or a crazy high end luxury.Report
I disagree on the number of people willing to pay a premium to drive their own car, but I live in Colorado.
Perhaps, nationally, there are more people who give you your impressions than give me mine. As such, I’ll concede the secondary point.
But I’ll come back to my original one:
Ain’t Nobody Gonna Buy A Kill-The-Driver Car.Report
Oh a premium? For sure! 10% higher? 20% higher? Absolutely. But we’re talking twice as expensive, three times as expensive, there’s no telling how high it would go. Also keep in mind that the self driving cars insurance costs would go LOWER than insurance is now. It could easily be ten times as expensive to insure a self driven car. Absolutely people would like to drive themselves but once auto-cars became the norm it would cost a fortune to insure self driven cars. That’s completely ignoring legislation concerns.
And yes you’re exactly right. The Kill-the-Driver cars couldn’t be given away. Not even if you pointed out that that scenario would be a lightning strike probability event.Report
Unlike everyone else, I think at least a variation of #1 will be open, selling not just traditional cars like 10 years ago, but like 30 years ago – for middle-aged guys like me to drive at rallycross track days. Sure, limited market, and somewhat vanity pricing, but when makers get to target mid-range cars for the track the way they do high-end cars today, I think there’s a good chance of a massive uptick in amateur sport driving. Manual transmission, sport suspension, less weight lost to heated seats and backup cameras, and the like – and an engine you can work on yourself without a CS degree and $1000 worth of hacker gear…
Hell, given what the big makers are doing currently with their high-tech showoff cars, they might even be hybrids.Report
Linky Friday posted in Latest Linkage?Report
Oops!Report
If you were wondering whether John Oliver would be talking about Donald Trump on Sunday night?
I HAVE GOOD NEWS
https://youtu.be/-rSDUsMwakI
How long until he mentions the current year? 49 seconds.Report
Reports differ on whether Donald Trump was destroyed.Report
This is a deeply meaningful comment that really sheds light on our times.Report
I’m kinda surprised that sneering disdain didn’t work out better in the electoral college.Report
A liberal comedian exists therefore the D’s lost. Exactly. We should shun any liberal media ( tv, blogs, mags), that will lead red state swing voters to feel at home with the D’s. The more we cleanse ourselves of it, the purer we will become. That makes sense.
Do you have a Facebook group called Bernie voters who hate liberals?
Edit: damn i’ve just lost EV’s for the next D prez candidate by this response.Report
If you jump ahead to 27:35, you can watch him blow up 2016.Report