Services have costs. They don't lose money. No one says the US military "loses hundreds of billions of dollars a year" or expects them to cover it back.
??? did you actively not read my comment before posting this?
Readit Newsanthonypasq commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84
My advice is always: Just hodl some bitcoin, but not in amounts that make you cry when you loose it.
It's been better for me so far than normal savings accounts.
well i would hope so, a normal savings account has 0 risk. im not sure this is a great argument to hold some bitcoin lol
anthonypasq commented on The Great Downzoning worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/barry-cotter
Where I live in France there was a big relaxation in building permits in the 50s to 70s, and we are dealing with these projects badly designed (because of the lack of oversight) today. Neighborhoods that are urban hell, disfigured city centers with giant hotels 5 times higher than other buildings, etc.
With better planning the same capacity could have been added but with way better quality of life.
> urban hell, disfigured city centers with giant hotels 5 times higher than other buildings, etc.
you have quite a breezy perception of hell. does something like this actually bother anyone with a brain who chose to live in a city?
That's assuming there is nothing else on the ledger.
Suppose you have to choose between a suburban house without any convenient access to mass transit (i.e. you're going to have to drive everywhere) or a more expensive unit which is closer to the city and is near a transit stop. Paying $40 for parking is going to offset the cost advantage of the less expensive housing and leave a lot of people near the breakeven point, and then a $100/mo difference in transit fares could be the deciding factor.
theres plenty of essentially free park and ride stations. theres commuter rail access in basically a 1 hour drive radius of the city. nothing about what you said is relevant.
rich people (of which boston has plenty even in the burbs where average house prices are 800k+) pay to avoid existing near poor people. they think they are going to get stabbed on the subway.
if the subway was faster, safer, cleaner, but more expensive, more people would use it.
Call me crazy, but maybe mass transit doesn't need to make money to be useful. Maybe the entire point of government is to provide services to its citizens. I mean, I don't pay $2.40 every time we drone strike some Yemeni wedding, right? Why should I have to pay to take a train in a city, which is about a thousand times more useful to me?
>People that drive cars actually pay most of the cost to upkeep car infrastructure. people that ride the T dont.
This is... so ridiculously untrue. Most car-dependent infrastructure is funded with federal dollars, the vast majority of which are conjured up out of thin air and vibes.
> Call me crazy, but maybe mass transit doesn't need to make money to be useful.
This is such a heinous non-sequiter i dont even know where to begin. Government services take money to operate. Government services are paid by taxes. In a democracy, you need to make people agree that they want to pay taxes for particular services.
The 60% of massachusetts residents who dont live in teh greater boston metro area do not want to pay for a service they dont use, so it is nearly politically impossible to raise the budget of the MBTA.
So if you are a massachusetts state legistlator you have a couple options. you can allow the MBTA to continue to deteriorate while also going over budget every year (current state) or you could increase the fare to compensate for the actual cost it takes to run the service, or your third option, which is to decrease the amount of money that goes to an already deteriorating public service.
edit: 50-55% of car related infrastructure costs are paid by gas taxes, tolls, excise taxes etc. currently <30% of the mbtas budget is covered by fares.
Speaking generally, free fairs also provide various benefits to a community such as reduced use of cars and easier access for lower income access to jobs and services.
you probably dont live in Boston, because there is no one on the planet that drives into boston rather than taking the T because its too expensive. people drive downtown and pay $40 for parking instead of taking the T.
Because governments aren't allowed to simply provide services for free anymore. It is inconceivable that something like moving around on mass transit would be free at point of use.
brother the MBTA arleady bleeds money at an astounding rate despite a large budget and fairs.
Why would your solution to be to make the rest of the state pay more for services they cant even use rather than make the people that use it pay the true cost it take to run it?
People that drive cars actually pay most of the cost to upkeep car infrastructure. people that ride the T dont.
If only they’d make the T fare free and run more frequently and later into the night. The C line in Brookline has the potential to be extremely convenient, but at present most of the time it’s easier to take an Uber, or drive.
the MBTA already absolutely bleeds an incredible amount of money. No businesses in Boston are even open late, theres no night life. 90% of the young people in the city are nerds doing Phds.
I loved living right on the red line, but its just not worth it unless we figure out how to make it not cost a fortune.
anthonypasq commented on Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public ft.com/content/3254fa30-5... · Posted by u/GeorgeWoff25
> the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2 ... is shrinking fast
Are you ... aware that OpenAI and Google have launched more recent models?
almost every single AI doomer i listen to hasnt updated any of their priors in the last 2 years. these people are completely unaware of what is actually happening at the frontier or how much progress has been made.
There’s still some risk short of a global financial collapse where the FDIC rules are weakened, perhaps by making the $250k limit per individual for example, and then there being some bank failures. Or changing to only covering a certain % of deposits etc.