Viewing profile — esoterica

> The vast majority of the world uses standard time. It works. No one there pines for permanent daylight time. Timezones are political, there are many cities and countries that are…

The quality of life improves for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders when parking and car lanes are converted to bike and bus lanes. Drivers are not the only stakeholders who …

People with long commutes spend most of that time on highways, which are not affected by traffic calming measures. A surface street going from 35mph to 25mph is not going to add an…

Judges are also unelected bureaucrats, and they are less subject to democratic oversight since they have lifetime appointments vs agency heads who are appointed by the executive br…

Removing Chevron deference moves authority from the administrative agencies to the courts, who are not only also unelected bureaucrats, they are more insulated from democratic forc…

Congress is broken and structurally incapable of passing laws under this level of political polarization because there are too many veto points (bicameral legislature, the filibust…

The seatbelt sign tells you whether or not you are allowed to get up and move around. Unlike the no-smoking light it has actual informational content.

Tesla is not the leader in self driving, they are pretty far behind both Cruise and Waymo, which have or used to have driverless vehicles legally operating on public roads. If you'…

Facebook, Apple and Google are very big companies which hire a lot of very well paid engineers. We're not talking about being an NFL quarterback or something where only a small han…

A pension is not worth 150k-200k a year in compensation. Also taxes are higher in most of Europe, even taking payroll taxes into account (I assume that's what you mean by social se…

Most programmers are $90k/year code monkeys. The $400k+/year jobs are very heavily concentrated in a small number of tech hubs, and mostly in the bay, and that’s the relevant stati…

Are you seriously insisting that the average product has gone up in price by 850x since 1960 and that gasoline is a huge outlier that has appreciated much much less than everything…

Did you read the article at all? Unless you were buying meat with personal loans the issue of whether or not interest expenses should be included in CPI has no relevance to correct…

You are completely mathematically illiterate if you think that annual inflation is 3-5 times higher than the reported value. The average annual inflation since 1960 is 3.7%. If the…

There are zero recent examples of a large American company ordering a hit on someone. Be serious.

The official inflation numbers have shown high inflation over the past few years. If you feel like prices have gone up a lot the CPI does not contradict your lived experience in an…

Wages for the lowest quintile have gone up in real terms, meaning adjusted for inflation (including shelter costs). None of your economic beliefs are grounded reality, you just mak…

Gold fell 50% from 1980 to 2000, does that mean we had 50% deflation over that time period?

The lowest income workers have seen the largest wage gains over the course of the pandemic.

Why are inflation truthers so resistant to spending even the tiniest amount of time learning how inflation is computed instead of repeating nonsensical conspiracy theories that mat…

Rulers want the social status that they derive from ruling over millions of people. If they were no people to rule over they would have zero status, even if all their material need…

I don’t know why you are arguing against a phantom position. I never said the government doesn’t grant citizenship.

If you truly believe in the principles of free speech, no matter how offensive and evil and cynically motivated, then the logical conclusion of that belief is that adversarial fore…

If you believe that the constitution protects inalienable rights that cannot be taken away by the government then how can those rights be denied to non citizens? The government get…

They did not actually have time because they mostly died in infancy. That said if you are satisfied with a pre industrial quality of life no one is stopping you from doing zero hou…