A) If customers can't manage select a properly secure cloud camera system, what makes you think they're going to do a good job picking a VPN vendor and setting up their product? But perhaps more importantly..
B) What about the apparently huge majority of us that prefer these devices precisely because the video is not stored on-site?
Additionally, if this urban farm plot exists to the exclusion of several stories of apartments, and those apartments must instead be located further away from where people want to be, the net carbon emissions (not to mention the effect on housing prices) are definitely higher than that of a regular rural industrial farm.
I feel it’s worth pointing out that saving people from financial ruin was only part of the intent of the PPP legislation. The main point of a “stimulus” is to stimulate the economy. If your friend received money and then spent it on something, the legislation essentially worked as intended.
You are correct that the access security of a booklet is almost certainly better than that of a password manager. The issue with the booklet is that humans do not like transcribing long strings between computer and paper so (at least in my experience) people who use the booklet method tend to eschew longer passwords, they tend to avoid creating new passwords when they can re-use an old one, and they don’t change the passwords very often (if at all). Also in the event that the booklet is ever lost or stolen (which is made significantly more likely by the fact that you must carry it around with you everywhere in this age of the pocket computer), you are suddenly in a very bad place.
Suburbs ARE evil, but our land use policies keep us from building enough housing in cities, which makes them too expensive to be considered a good option for most people.
It seems like this is an unsubstantiated claim. At the time that this change was introduced, Chicago was at the tail end of one of the longest economic declines that it has ever experienced. Several huge retailers that were located in the area closed around the same time. The hope was that changing this street into a pedestrian mall would save it from economic collapse. Unsurprisingly, it did not as the forces at work were much larger than anything that could be fixed by changing the traffic pattern on a single street.
I'm not sure this is right. One of the very clever things Uber did was take advantage of a loophole in the hackney laws that allowed drivers to operate for hire without taxi medallions as long as they did not perform street hails. From the point of view of taxi operators who had long relied on this system to protect them from meaningful competition, this was a flouting of the intent of the law, if not the actual language of the law itself. They did not however, as far as I know, actually break the law.
I'd posit that we are going to have a very hard time fighting off climate change if we aren't allowed to do anything to discourage people from driving 40 minutes to a nearby town every time they want to go shopping. The transportation sector is the biggest carbon emitter, and at some point we have to come to terms with the fact that in order to reduce our carbon emissions, we are all going to have to drive a lot less.
But even in the relatively narrow scenario you describe, there is an immediate benefit for those living and working in the city, which is that there is significantly less car traffic, which means less noise and pollution and greater safety (also access for emergency vehicles etc). And, over the longer term, fewer cars within the city means that roads can be narrowed and sidewalks widened. And this is all without even considering where the increased taxes would actually be spent.
Driving and transit are not the only two ways of getting around. There is also walking, which is both the cheapest form of transit to provide and also completely dependent on density in order to work. Places like Boston, London, and New York are not dense because they have great transit, they're dense because they predate things like parking minimums which would have prevented them from becoming dense in the first place. Their high density, in turn, drastically increases the efficiency of public transit, meaning a lot more people can be served by a given amount of transit spending. Parking minimums undermine all of this by forcing buildings to either be very far apart (to accommodate the parking lots) or very expensive (to pay for parking structures). Both of these things tend to make cities less vibrant and walkable, while also increasing economic inequality and carbon emissions.
The question is, if you’re going to design a system where 1 person != 1 vote, how can you argue that it is in any way more fair for someone’s vote to count double (or more) simply because they have chosen to live in a sparsely populated area? Why is basing it on the local population density a good method of deciding the strength of a vote?
I would advise the opposite of this. Many of his solutions listed at the end are ineffective, poorly researched and/or totally impractical ("more rent control!", "socialize all housing!"). It's telling that he doesn't seem to have spoken to any economists about any of the things he proposes.
The real value of that book is in the stories and descriptions of the inner workings of how evictions work in the two cities he profiles, which it does an excellent job telling throughout the rest of the book, and because of that I would highly recommend it.
New York is nowhere near as bad as San Francisco when it comes to permitting, and it does have more parcels where height is not significantly limited, but it still builds far less housing than it needs to, and overly restrictive zoning is still basically the reason.
This is actually a key problem with using rent control as a primary means to achieve housing affordability. Rent control works as a way to soften the blow of large rent increases (like the kind you might see after a major building renovation), but it really only works as long as there are plenty of other units on the market so that when eviction inevitably does happen, the tenant has somewhere else to go that they can afford.
The problem is, many cities like NYC and San Francisco are trying to have their cake and eat it to. Liberal residents want to keep their suburban-style single family neighborhoods while simultaneously appearing to care about skyrocketing rents. You simply cannot have it both ways. The ONLY viable solution is to relax the rules blocking the construction of new housing. SB827 in California, which would have overridden local zoning to legalize the construction of higher density buildings within walking distance of transit stops, was a valiant effort to do the right thing, but it failed because of a strong anti-development sentiment from anti-capitalist tenants rights groups and pro-housing-appreciation single family home owners (in a particularly absurd moment, the mayor of ultra-tony Beverly Hills, which has built almost no new housing in the last few years, claimed to be against the bill because he was concerned about all of the "luxury housing" it would build in his town).
> What I find annoying is the same people that are against rent control and zoning are also utterly against government providing basic public services such as buses, subways, and mass transit.
I guess I must be the exception then. I am very much in favor of government spending on public transit (which is a reliably good investment in our economy) and generally against rent control (which is known to suppress the creation of new rental stock) except as a temporary measure.
B) What about the apparently huge majority of us that prefer these devices precisely because the video is not stored on-site?