I'm only casually into LOTR, but I immediately recognized her name from my beloved copy of the Dragonlance Atlas. Quite fun to read how she basically invented the field of professional fantasy cartography.
> When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?
That's the... subtitle? Thesis statement? It's the first line after the title at any rate. I stopped reading as soon as the first paragraphs felt the need to define glamour. Anyone with a modicum of life experience should already intuit one obvious answer: glamour can only exist in brief moments in reality. "The Future" necessarily only exists in fiction, and fictional works can string together glamourous moments end-to-end indefinitely.
But in real life, you can't keep the glamour turned on. People need to defecate, that toilet eventually needs be cleaned, and the sewage treatment plant needs to keep working. People have to start as infants that scream and adults that have to hold them and hear it, then toddlers that make messes everywhere, etc. Maybe dinners could all be glamourous, if you want it bad enough, but are you going to get up, do your makeup and put on your most stylish breakfast clothes everyday? Can you get away with the same outfit at lunch and still be glamorous?
"Life" cannot be glamorous unless you are fabulously wealthy AND make very specific life choices.
Plus, only a small fraction of Animal Crossing players, even lifelong series fans, will still be playing the game daily even one year later. In the real world, we need jobs done ~forever, regardless of how novel and fun they are.
Game design is fundamentally about feeding a steady flow of novelty to players. Too little and the game gets boring immediately, too much and the development team can't produce new content fast enough, or the game is too short. I can imagine someone arguing that we could rotate people through jobs as their interest fades, but we should be skeptical that we can maintain our standard of living when most jobs are being done by people whose professional experience includes novelty at the rate even a dull game offers.
That's true - but taxes *always* disincentivize the thing being taxed. If investment in a company is less profitable under taxation than it otherwise would be, there will be less investment in that company, no exceptions. Now the size of that effect is quite likely to be negligible for the companies in question here. But it's at least theoretically possible that taxing corporate profits could lead to a change in the marketplace, including market dropout, that might actually lead to consumers paying higher prices to the remaining members of a market with reduced competition.
Further, if all companies in an already low-competition marketplace are equally affected by the tax, then it's quite possible for all of them to ~simultaneously raise prices to offset the tax, with or without explicitly illegal coordination, knowing that the others will follow suit.
I don't think one has to takes sides on the manager vs Apple conflict to ask a much more important question:
"Why is this newsworthy to The Verge and Hacker News?"
At any given moment, several thousand people around the world are likely going through identical complaints with their employers, and have been for multiple decades. What makes this more relevant than any random similar example from a boring business outside Silicon Valley, where a manager might have a similar number of employees and say a similar thing to one of them? Is there a reasonable belief that this is being encouraged by Tim Cook himself? No? Then why is it "Apple does $Thing"?
Corporate HR and the legal system will work this out and get it right for a reasonable % of cases without involving the whole world in each one.
I know this is about SF but Seattle seems to have essentially the same issues with their liberal response to homelessness. This local news piece was both heartbreaking and infuriating to watch. The interview with an proud, unrepentant criminal-who-is-homeless at 17:31 is something I won't ever forget.
Anyone who's parked a car often in dense areas knows the distance between legal and illegal parking is as small as the width of the bumper you stuck into the fire lane.
They can't because their business is fundamentally built on the "leave anywhere" promise to their customers, who are the ones that actually leave the scooters illegally.
There's just no customer-acceptable way of disincentivizing their bad behavior and unlike parked cars, the scooters can be trivially moved from "legal" to "illegal" parking by a single person, which means that the customer may not even be at fault.
Replace "steal" with "call a registered tow company" and you can do exactly that - have someone remove an improperly-placed item from your property. Cities solved the problem of improperly-parked cars by creating the entire "towing" concept.
Police aren't a service for junk removal, they are for holding guns. You hire a moving company to remove junk and you get the police to come hold guns if the junk-leaver threatens to do you harm because of same.
I live in a city where trash collection rates are tied to how big of a trashcan you have. Along with recycling and compost collection programs, this is intended to deter people from overusing the landfill.
BUT, as a result of having a very small trashcan (to minimize my personal cost) I end up putting the can out every week if the can is even 1/4 full, as I occasionally have a heavy week due to an event or seasonal cleaning and I don't want to have garbage around the place for extra week(s). The desired effect on my waste habits, i.e. reducing the amount of landfill trash I ultimately produce, is negligible.
Therefore the garbage truck must stop at my house roughly twice as often as it would if there was no disincentive cost to having a large can. If enough other people in my city operate like I do, then we're running a significant amount of extra trucks and labor for virtually no benefit.
The primary impetus for the TSA was that people were afraid and it made them feel safer. The TSA actually accomplishes virtually nothing to prevent hijacking compared with the addition of armored cockpit doors and cockpit approach monitoring procedures.
The TSA does theoretically screen for bad actors and explosives, both of which are still relevant to rail travel, even if they're potentially less threatening there.
There are two obvious possible solutions to this from the city:
(1) tiny print on the parking signs that says you consent to be chalked, creating an explicit contract
(2) sell the rights to manage the city's parking to a private entity using private contractors to chalk with no prescription on methodology, rendering the "search" non-governmental in nature
Completely agree - HBO's app is as good as any of them.
I'll add that Netflix is the only video app I've used that mismanages the chromecast control ui. Basically every other time I cast Netflix the app loses track of the cast stream, reverts to the browsing ui or other failure mode and I can't pause the stream from my phone. No other app does this.
It's worth noting that $45bn of funding in the Bay Area probably only goes as far as $15bn would in Austin. Companies are indirectly paying their employees' housing costs after all.
I'd like to see numbers by per-company and per-employee funding, adjusted for purchasing power.
No one is talking about the phone as a physical device. The "phone" is the multibillion-dollar industry dedicated to indiscriminately making every human spend every possible second of their day 'engaging' with media out of a simple paperclip-maximizing business imperative.
This industry doesn't need to make users happy anymore than the tobacco industry makes its own customers happy - as long as the dopamine is within arm's reach they've got most people hooked so much more than tobacco ever could. But unlike cigarettes, no one can cut open a slice of your social media lungs and show you that your mind is covered in tar. And since no one dies directly of exposure, we're left trying to convey how life could have been better without the second-order effects of using the product. If your lungs don't function with all that tar, you avoid physical activity because 'you don't like exercise' (when you can't breathe anymore). And if your brain has been trained to seek fulfillment from your phone that's because 'you like using your phone more than doing other things' (when you can't think of anything else you like to do anymore).
It's easy to forget that BBSes were not at all populated by a representative sample of all people. The communities you experienced were the norm there but are a vanishingly small part of the modern internet. If you were raised now you might never have found your way to one before your psychological development was co-opted and sent in a very different direction by today's social media offerings.