Isn’t Taiwan legitimately a threat to the CCP, though? Not in the sense that Taiwan the country can do anything to China the country, but Taiwan’s government used to be China’s government, right? It’s like an exiled royal family. And since Taiwan has the government type that the west supports, if the Chinese people at some point become sufficiently unhappy with the CCP, the Taiwanese government could appear as an alternative and it has a historical claim to do so and the west could back them (with a morally coherent and therefore defensible to its own people story for doing so). If I was CCP leadership I probably wouldn’t feel good about Taiwan either. This is also probably the real reason why the USA supports them, by the way. It isn’t about defending democracy, or industry there or whatever. It’s like if Russia was protecting the Confederate government that had fled to Puerto Rico. America probably wouldn’t like that. It’s weird that we have such a hard time looking at things from other people’s perspective, and instead project some moral framework on top of everything and whoever violates it is “bad” or whatever.
I think you're mistaken if you assume that many of the US people whose opinions matter, senators and the likes, are not supportive of defending Taiwan for boring ideological reasons along the lines of "it's a democracy". I don't doubt that there are some people who share the line of thinking you propose, but I would realistically expect them to be in the minority.
Well I don’t mean to suggest that random senators feel this way, I agree with you that they probably don’t. I mean the groups that actually make policy based on realpolitik interests probably feel this way, because it is the thing that actually makes sense (and while morally bad sounding to admit is totally coherent with historical great power competition). Who that is I’m not totally sure. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking that the people running the show are evil but smart, as opposed to good but stupid.
Devil’s advocate: depending on the ownership turnover rate, the pricing impact of institutional investors could be outsized compared to their current ownership share if their property acquisition ramped up recently.
I think a better metric would be what percent of purchases are made by institutional investors. This is because pricing is based on sales, not on the overall stock including properties that have been sat on for a long time. Have you looked at that metric?
One heuristic that points in the direction of this being meaningful is that a lot of SFHs seem to be owned by old people who have lived there for a long time.
I agree that the comparison is stupid though since computer hardware is much easier to scale with demand. If anything this may show that hardware manufacturers are betting that this demand spike is temporary and they aren’t yet willing to ramp up production since they could end up sitting on unsold inventory after the bubble pops.
I’m generally not a lefty type person, but aren’t resource agnostic fines actually less blind-justice than the alternative?
The wealthy speeder shrugs it off, while the poor speeder has to change their spending allocation in a way that is noticeable and could be challenging.
Why should the punishment have a different impact based on wealth? The felt impact of a monetary fine fundamentally depends on how much money the offender has. Whereas the classic “locked in a cage” punishment affects everyone equally.
Maybe I’m not good at the basics, but as an ostensibly quite successful engineer, I have rarely had to do “the basics” at work, and I don’t see how leetcoding would improve my actual performance.
Leetcoding is basically testing how well you can cobble together solutions out of a decently large bag of tools. You run into other tools you have to cobble together as part of actual work, but you never have to memorize those particular tools.
So leetcoding becomes memorizing an arbitrary feeling set of tools that you never actually have to use in practice just in order to prove that you can cobble together solutions on the fly using the tools.
Certain personality types bristle at being told to memorize a large set of things for no practical reason. It feels subservient to do so.
Now if what you are really saying is that forcing yourself to feel subservient is required in a lot of careers in order to succeed, then yes totally :)
> You run into other tools you have to cobble together as part of actual work, but you never have to memorize those particular tools
The statement I like to use as an analogy to this one is:
"I don't need to know how to add or multiply numbers, calculators can do it"
This is true in a certain sense, but if you are numerate you know that speed with numbers allows you to do all kinds of quick checks that less numerate peers cannot. It's my experience that colleagues who don't get good at leetcode style problems don't actually understand the skills they've left on the table.
It seems like you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. There are lots of areas where I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I tend not to confidently interject in those areas. I’m curious what makes you feel differently?
Probably not, but at the time Google had a better reputation than it does today and I’m guessing Tony had gotten bored by that point.
I don’t have firsthand knowledge regarding the timeline, but I believe the entire product concept for nest required an internet connection and internet server dependencies, didn’t it? Like a fallback mode makes sense and I’m pretty sure there was one, but a lot of the capabilities they were targeting needed internet capabilities. For example could you control the thermostat with your phone only after the acquisition? I think that happened before, and I think it was a foundational part of the concept?
Stupid question: why is the government even allowed to redact stuff? Isn’t the government keeping secrets from the people totally antithetical to democracy?
It's not the government, it's the department of justice. To name two: protection of witnesses, protection of state secrets ("the people" is not a person who can keep secrets).
Right, I’m aware of the excuses the government uses to keep secrets.
But on principle, what right does the government have to keep secrets from its own people? I don’t believe we had that button at the founding, it was added somewhere along the way. I’m asking what is the justification for this, and whether in the grand scheme of things that outweighs the principle of the government not being a separate entity from the people.
There are multiple ways to approach witness protection. For example if we have a problem with witnesses being harmed we could make being involved with witness harm at any layer of indirection a capital offense. We can probably think of other options besides the government being allowed to keep secrets from its own people.
>I don’t believe we had that button at the founding
Every government everywhere has and has always had state secrets e.g. names of spies.
>make being involved with witness harm at any layer of indirection a capital offense.
People still commit capital offenses. This just makes it much easier to get to that witness and get away. We also know from empirical evidence that the death penalty is not useful for deterring crime.
Witness protection is also getting to start over without everyone in your neighborhood knowing you were a criminal. It's part of the deal.
No you are confused. People commit capital offenses for one of two reasons: either because they lack impulse control, or because they don’t think they will be caught.
If we fix the second one, we only have the first group. We can fix the second group, and the remaining first group, while it does apply to capital offenses in general, does not apply to violence against witnesses.
It seems like killing witnesses (after the fact, since witness protection does not intervene during the initial crime being witnessed to protect the witness mere moments after their witnessing) actually requires impulse control, because to do it you need to a) anticipate an abstract threat b) formulate a plan in advance c) carry out the plan. This is why it is typically executed in organized crime by bosses, and not by people engaging in random violence.
I’m not saying no one carries out capital offenses, I’m just saying that no one engages in witness directed violence due to lack of impulse control, they do it because they don’t think they will be caught, and more thorough rules enforcement does address that.
On witness protection making one’s criminal record secret. Okay? One can easily be opposed to that practice. How about we don’t make deals to hide relevant safety information from the public? It seems pretty easy to oppose. Just because the government does it, doesn’t mean it is a good reason. Are you defending the reason, or just stating what is? If you are just stating what is, I don’t see how that’s relevant.
The power/right came from national security legislation written and enacted by elected officials. Because we have a government that works by proxy, it means that the leaders we elect are effectively supposed to represent the people they serve (that's the ideal. Obviously we've fallen WAY short of that).
Pragmatically, I think it's easy to recognize that the government should be allowed to have some secrets from the public. I think the clearest and most extreme example is the details of our nuclear armaments.
But the question of where the line is is a tricky one. IMO, we definitely allow the government far more secrets than it should have.
Is there an enemy invader actively performing military operations inside the country? In that case, I believe it’s typical for a nation to suspend its normal procedures, we don’t need our principle to hold in case of active invasion.
Otherwise, just don’t do war. It’s pretty simple. Especially when you have zero need for land.
Witness protection is a compensation for an inadequate and overly soft criminal justice system. If the person calling the hit fully expected to die by hanging for calling the hit, he would not call the hit.
It's not correct that there is a legal duty to redact names of people who might be accused of wrongdoing, but where the allegations haven't been proved.
The only two reasons that redactions are allowed are a) to protect the privacy of victims and b) to protect the integrity on ongoing investigations.
Competence and possibility of malicious compliance are interesting questions, but I think the more appropriate question is if DoJ will be sued for violating the law by redacting unrelated content?
That falls under “dishonest stuff companies do all the time”. Unless there are major political points to be scored by nailing him (which there may be now, don’t get me wrong), this would get a slap on the wrist. The cars do drive themselves, they have for awhile, Tesla never claimed it was perfect, they only claimed it would be perfect in the near future and musk plausibly could have (delusionally) thought this so there is no case (not saying he isn’t dishonest, though, that’s just not how the legal system works).
So I don’t think being looked at for the kind of stuff many companies do all the time explains <checks notes> infiltrating the government and personally disrupting the people investigating him, in public. If he’s worried about a financial hit, souring Tesla’s reputation as he has is obviously not worth it. If he’s worried about prosecution, surely he would be better off being nice to everyone in politics, not pissing anyone off and strongly supporting choice causes off the mainstream radar that happen to be in the interest of politicians.
So if he is doing it on principle, he just needs to be hubristic and reckless and possibly very autistic. If he is doing it to mess with the people investigating him, he needs to be outright stupid.
Hubristic and reckless (and autistic) are much, much more realistic adjectives for Musk than “outright stupid”. I know a lot of people will just assert that he is stupid, but if you yourself are sufficiently intelligent and you listen to the guy talk for a long time, you can at least tell he isn’t stupid. You can tell because he doesn’t do the rhetorical things stupid people need to do in order to mask contradictions or logical holes in what they are saying. They always do it. Even smart people sometimes do it quite a bit, like Steven Pinker for example m. Musk very rarely does it, and when he does it’s so completely obvious you can tell he’s bad at it and didn’t get where he is by being good at it.
But no they literally aren’t. If the Chinese government takes data from a Chinese company in China, there is no legal process available to anyone affected because it is outside of US jurisdiction. What is America going to sue China the country in American court? That’s <mentally deficient>.
I don’t mean US law is perfectly enforced on US drone companies, that’s <mentally deficient>. I mean that there exists a legal system that harmed people can use, as opposed to the case of Chinese companies where there does not exist etc.
