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.
I thought the purpose of the tsa was to make people feel less safe / have more reminders to fear - thus making people less likely to demand we slash the military / police / other security budgets. I suppose they do add to the expense of moving drugs, and make it harder to move large sums of money - so people who control other routes are able to extract higher prices for them, but I don't think that in of itself actually makes people feel safer.
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.
Not sure what "most estimates" means but that'd be $400k a year in passive income assuming the smallest possible number and an extremely conservative 4% return -- index funds have been hitting longterm returns around 10%.
Suffice to say, by your passive income alone you'd be in the top 1% of all American earners.
You're assuming that there is a platonic ideal 'you' that the living person you are should be compared against. Ask yourself if you believe that statement. It doesn't make any sense to me.
If we can generously interpret the underlying desire as: "How can I live in the way that will make me happiest with myself?" then it's not complicated:
- Reflect on what you want for yourself as the person you are right now
- Consider how your recent actions do or do not support those goals
It's more that they are collectively overpaid. As house prices rise the %-based commission causes new agents to flood the market, lowering the number of houses sold per agent. Agents then spend a lot of time acquiring clients in competition with each other.
If you think about what an efficient use of realtor labor would look like it would be ~2 houses a month or more with agents spending all their time on showings and contracts. In a market with $1M houses this would yield roughly 24M * 0.025 = $600K/yr and up.
Hence the market becomes flooded with people that would like to make $600K/yr on a educational investment period of 6 months or less (plus an apprenticeship-like paying job for a few years).
The industry is weird because the price of agent service is resistant to supply&demand forces for various reasons but the main reason is that it's impossible to know what the selling agent's contribution to the house price is, since you can't sell the same house twice under the same conditions.
In principle, a good agent can easily recoup their commission by adding a few percent to the house price, but in practice agents have a counter-incentive to this because the homeowner will never know what the added amount was and raising the house price a small amount adds less to the agent's bottom line than moving on to the next house more quickly. In most cases the agent is simply setting the price that will sell the house quickly for the local market. As a seller, you'd probably prefer to make an extra 20K on that 1M house by showing for a month instead of a week, but this makes the agent do 4x the showings to make 2% more commission.
Ironically, the buyers' mortgage lender will have an impartial professional estimate done after they've already agreed on a price with you. In a perfect world, the seller would get this estimate done up front and then the seller's agent would be be paid on a structure that incentivizes beating that estimate. But wait - if the mortgaged portion of the price is greater than the estimate then the buyer's lender will back out ($collateral < $loan). So if your market is mostly buyers doing 20% down then the price is soft-capped at no more than 125% of the estimate even for the best agents.
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.