One other problem is that whenever these conversations come up in "extremely public spaces" (i.e. the internet), you inevitably have a small group that strongly identifies with the textbook definitions of introvert/extrovert. Anecdotally (though this is the internet), this is almost entirely self-identified introverts; they will swear that every social interaction leaves them drained and they need a certain amount of hours alone to recover (there is almost certainly some confounding variables and bias at play here). Afterwards, those that do not see their own lives described by these definitions are generally less interested than the former group in arguing about the definitions' supposed validity.
Chouinard is probably marginally better than your average billionaire, but it was almost certainly not done in a way that didn't also very clearly benefit him, and, more importantly, his family.
That NYT piece is, more or less, a fluff piece; and, it's also worth noting, this same maneuver is frequently used in ways that are probably seen less "charitably," given the political influence 501(c)(4)s' potentially wield.
Reading that interview, it just sounds like a tax-optimized donation. It still causes him to give up wealth that he could have kept, but he's minimizing the loss. Is this not the case? If it is for pure personal financial gain, should we expect Jim Simons to pull a similar maneuver with Ren Tech at some point?
You do realize that I'm responding to someone that made the assertion, also implied in the NYT article, that this "donation" was "done in a way that intentionally incurred a large tax bill." Right? What you're saying directly contradicts that, which was my point...
This was very obviously not done "for pure personal financial gain..." But should billionaires be able to donate billions, tax-free, to exert political influence, which, generally (though, with rare exceptions, like perhaps Chouinard), they will use to directly benefit themselves and their family? And, should they be able to do so in a way that maintains that political influence for their family for generations to come?
Maybe Chouinard and his family have good intentions, but, like the article said, "one doesn’t want a constructed tax system predicated upon everyone being like the Chouinards."
nothing wrong with benefiting yourself and your family - the problem is doing that unfairly at the expense of someone else, which it appears he has tried hard not to do here.
A majority of the use cases for self-driving cars are either solvable, or already solved, by some combination of better urban planning (i.e. zoning and probably large-scale regulatory reform), public transit (specifically useful public transit), and public investment. Unfortunately, in the United States, we are unable to do even one of these things sufficiently well, hence the need for self-driving cars (or, in some cases, some other technological solution; e.g. hyperloop).
Austin was described to me as four quadrants, divided by a giant highway system east-west and north-south. You could walk in a quadrant, but have to take a car to cross into a different one as it is all non-contiguous
This is also not limited to just COVID discussion either. Most things that aren't somehow related to day-to-day software development devolve into unsubstantiated, or ill-informed, "ranting."
Personally if I were constantly disappointed by a website I would take the extraordinary step of simply... not using that website anymore, rather than coming on that website and telling everybody how ill-informed they were. I always have been a bit odd though.
Finally. There are these long comment threads talking about high school students taking public transit/school buses, but that just isn't how most high school students get to school. It is unfortunate that mid/late teenagers are so dependent on cars, which often means dependent on a parent or other adult, but that's the type of cities we've built in this country.
Another thing to note is that none of this is new information. This trend has existed for perhaps a decade or two, and the ignorance to that in this thread is really showing the age of the users on this site.
I was one of those kids. Only because taking the bus was a pain in the ass and my parents loved me enough to put up with it, at least until I could drive.
Bus was awful. Kids had no respect for the driver or other kids. Plus it easily tripled the commute time.
Yes. The bus my kids would have to take to High School served both middle and high school. They would have been on the bus for about 40 minutes and arrived at school 30 minutes before the first period started. School was about 15 minutes away by car.
If I drove them (or when they were old enough to drive on their own), they could sleep nearly an hour later than if they had to take the bus. Since it wasn't much of a detour on my way to work, that's what I did.
Did you live in an area sparsely populated by families with children that matched your child’s age, or did you choose (or forced to use for desegregation) a school that was far away? The fact that transit was an option makes me think it was the latter.
I spent most of my school aged years in an city with a mediocre transit system. Most parents did not drive their kids to school except in very bad weather. Also, most people attended the school closest to their home. This meant the mediocre transit system used buses for special school routes usable only by students. I rarely took this bus as I preferred to bike or walk in about the same amount of time the bus would take.
Where I live now, something similar happens at least for the kids that are bussed across town to achieve a somewhat consistent racial mix in all schools.
Has everyone driving their kids to school eroded the viability of walking, biking, or taking a school bus?
This is one of those cases, where, people like the original commenter, if we assume they are arguing in good faith, will then be "surprised" when it turns out those they are electing actually aren't committed to it being a "states' rights" issue. Devolution of authority to the states is just the current tool the right have to further restrict access to abortion, if federal legislative power to ban abortion becomes available to them, they will drop the "states' rights" approach immediately.
It's really a tale as old as time (or at least as old as the United States). "States' rights," outside of theoretical discussions, has always simply been a tool, not a true guiding ideology.
Yup. Funny how Thomas, in his opinion, believes "access to contraceptives, "same sex relationships", "same sex marriage" are all "errors that need to be corrected in the context of "states' rights", but somehow "interracial marriage" isn't.
Good faith is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. If you're proposing something bad I'm going to oppose you regardless of whether you're proposing it in good faith.
My point about good faith was assuming people that claim to simply be in favor of devolution of authority to legislatures or states are being truthful; and not just also saying that because its a useful and expedient defense.
No, the serious question is why aren't more people living in SF, instead of the sprawl of low-density suburbs and pseudo-suburbs that surround the Bay Area?
The tiny area that makes up the City and County of San Francisco is relatively high density for its size, but the fall off in density once you leave the county (which occupies only the tip of the San Francisco peninsula) is precipitous.
> People act like it is, the reality is different.
No, people act like it is, because it really is... When you're talking about building high-density housing in the actual city (or medium-density in the suburbs with reasonable transit options)... Which is literally always what they are actually talking about. No one is talking about there being problems building low-density housing in the middle of nowhere.
> San Francisco is fairly dystopian.
If it is dystopian, it is not because of density. There are numerous higher density parts of the world that do not struggle with the issues San Francisco does. It has nothing to do with people's inability to see cows. It has to do with the US' refusal to support the things that facilitate living in cities.
> This would help wealth inequality (spreading the wealth) and improve mental / societal health.
The idea that increased suburbanization would have any positive effect on wealth inequality is completely absurd.
> The tiny area that makes up the City and County of San Francisco is relatively high density for its size,
Somewhat, but not to the extent you'd expect of an metropolitan core (which it arguably isn't, it's more just the cultural core of the Bay Area.) The City and County of San Francisco is the most dense county in California, but not the most dense city in the Bay Area, or even the densest area of similar size in the Bay Area. A similar sized slice of Santa Clara County including all of San Jose would still be higher density if the entire 50ish mi² outside of San Jose was completely depopulated. The urban core of Alameda County (the continuous strip consisting of the cities of Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, Emeryville, Alameda, Piedmont, San Leandro, San Lorenzo, and Hayward) has greater population and greater population density than San Francisco, too.
