The solution is simple. Just build big parking lots outside the city where land is cheap, and a bus service from these parking lots to the inner city. That way commuters can get to their workplace and back fast enough.

Making commuting viable that way is beneficial to inner-city folk too. When people who want to live further away from city can do it effectively, housing will become cheaper for those who actually want to live in the city.

It works great when done well but generally the people with expensive inner suburb real estate typically fight tooth and nail to prevent that.

Anyone care to give a detailed argument for this position. Whenever I'm buying/renting a place in the city I always check its proximity to subway/train/bus stops and how frequently those vehicles stop by. That's even when I have a car. So the solution would seem to be build out inner suburb public transportation out at the same time or beforehand so there's less inner suburb real estate people fighting it? Yeah easier said than done, but it's still worth it to eliminate kneejerk opposition when you can.

Social media AND smartphones became popular around that time. I think it's the toxic combination that's the worst - easy, low effort dopamine hits that are available everywhere via your phone, whenever you are bored.

In 2013 social media was still a textual medium, right? There was Vine, but that died pretty quickly, from what I remember.

If social media and smartphones are the problem, I would have expected that results for English proficiency would be steady until the advent of TikTok, right?

Yes, what Western world really needs is more people moving to already unaffordable big cities, because they can't afford a commute from cheaper areas.

Landlords would really love that.

If there only was a way that would allow people to live and work in a more affordable place, no matter where the company site actually is.

Today it's still a matter of a power struggle between beehive-minded CEOs and employees, but if things get more tense, I believe a state intervention would be an excellent option.

It's a good argument if you care about privacy and geopolitical risk, like a dictator suddenly deciding that citizens of your country should no longer have access, or should be monitored when using the service.

If that is the case, where are the LLM-controlled robots where LLM is simply given access to bunch of sensors and servos, and learns to control them on its own? And why are jailbreaks a thing?

The problem with current GenAI is the same as in outsourcing to lowest bidder in India or whatever. For any non-trivial project you'll get something that may appear to work out of it, but for anything production-ready you'll most likely you'll spend lots of time testing, verifying, cleaning up the code and making changes to things AI didn't catch. Then there's requirement gathering, discussing with stakeholders, gathering more feedback and so on, debugging when things fail in production...

I believe it's a productivity boost, but only to a small part of my job. The boost would be larger if only had to build proof-of-concepts or hobby projects that don't need to be reliable in prod, and don't require feedback and requirements from many other people.

>> Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed, many reducing public reliance and boosting the economy.

I don't think legitimate Syrian refugees were the biggest problem. Rather, the open-door policy was abused by lots of young men from other MENA-countries, with no eligibility for asylum. Deporting them proved pretty hard, and crime stats prove that some of them had a very bad attitude towards their new host.

If you're into home automation, you could probably get pretty far with some light & moisture sensors (I recommend Xiaomi Flora bluetooth sensors for the latter purpose) and smart plugs connected to Home Assistant. I did something like that on a small scale, it worked fairly well.

Definitely doable, aquarium controllers are also quite flexible.

We're working on a free Home Assistant plugin that let's you define your sensors and outputs, then choose a plant (see link below, or climate of a specific location) and hopefully take most of the heavy lifting from there.

This is it. It's rational not to give a damn in this environment, at least for anyone who isn't an entrepreneur or very well paid.

Yup, and even that is way harder nowadays. I feel like the VC backed startup thing is dead and there are no big moonshots anymore from underdogs having a big idea.

Everything capitalism, especially of the American variation, promised us isn't being delivered anymore. The numbers are pretty clear, so I don't understand how anyone in their right mind can argue against that.

It's precisely because of the VC backup startup thing that capitalism isn't delivering. VC startups only exist if there's a bunch of people with a lot of money who don't care about anything except making more money. What we need is lots of businesses succeeding on a small scale rather than failing on a small scale while burning VC cash in the hope that they can become big enough to succeed.

Perhaps you can't pay people enough to make them care, but you sure can make them not care by paying too little.

necessary but insufficient, I think. if your salary doubled tomorrow but without a change in responsibilities or agency at work, would that move the needle? I think you need other things in addition to the pay, like recognition for efforts and outcomes