bufordsharkley (u/bufordsharkley)

bufordsharkley commented on The tech monoculture is finally breaking jasonwillems.com/technolo... · Posted by u/at1as

idiotsecant · 17 days ago

>You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software polish and quality of life that an iPod had in the early 2000s

wat. I'm curious how an ipod from 2000 is better than, for example, the Fiio jm21. It's worse in pretty much every possible way, other than the ipod might be appealing to a certain kind of 'old man shakes fist at clouds' type of user.

bufordsharkley · 17 days ago

I can't speak from personal experience with the Fiio jm21, but I was a big user of a previous generation of Fiio, and while I imagine some technical leaps forward have been achieved with this generation (the Fiio M1 never, for instance, achieved gapless playback from 2015-2021, even though this was promised with every new software version), taking a quick look at it... this is just an android phone interface! App store? Chrome? I certainly don't want this from a dedicated music device

Beyond this, I'd say that the true advantage of the iPod Classic was a matter of polish and UX:

* Dedicated buttons/wheel/etc that are tactile instead of a touchscreen interface (the Fiio M1 was button-and-wheel based, but it never approached the quality of Apple engineering); I see the jm21 has some side-based buttons for pause/forward/back, which is nice, but a touchscreen as main interface still grates * A way to interface with your albums that was delightful and visually dense (Cover Flow remains the single greatest music UI put forward)

bufordsharkley commented on The entire New Yorker archive is now digitized newyorker.com/news/press-... · Posted by u/thm

smelendez · a month ago

I’ve long thought about trying to map of how the locations of music and maybe theater events listed in the magazine have changed over time.

There are performances of some kind in pretty much every corner of NYC but it’s interesting to see which neighborhoods have had events deemed relevant to The New Yorker readership in different eras.

bufordsharkley · a month ago

It also speaks to what we lose when we lose magazine listings of events (New Yorker effectively gutted this section within the past decade), movie showtime listings via newspaper, etc

We have a very strong archive going back a century until about 2015, but now wading through linkrot circa 2017 is miserable

bufordsharkley commented on There Was a Texas Lottery Arbitrage bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/ioblomov

cgriswald · a year ago

IIRC, there was at least one case where the lottery got wise that this was happening and refused to sell the parties involved any more tickets. They had enough tickets for better than even odds, but not a guarantee. IIRC, they won.

bufordsharkley · a year ago

I remember a 1990s lottery event in which a "buy all combinations" was attempted, but their physical machines they acquired were partially deficient, and they simply couldn't physically acquire enough tickets in time (as the procedure was relatively time intensive), but they still won with something like a 75% probability of success

bufordsharkley commented on Does Georgism Work? Part 2: Can Landlords Pass Land Value Tax on to Tenants? astralcodexten.substack.c... · Posted by u/feross

bufordsharkley · 4 years ago

No, this is a different subject than the article yesterday. That one focused on "what is the overall magnitude of ground rents", this one focuses on "won't the incidence of LVT be passed onto tenants?"

bufordsharkley commented on Ask HN: What benefits of quitting alcohol consumption? · Posted by u/throw51319

moxd · 6 years ago

Take the problem at the source and ask yourself why do you need to get wasted?

bufordsharkley · 6 years ago

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_Do_Men_Stupefy_Themselves...

bufordsharkley commented on Things that are illegal to build in most American cities now twitter.com/CascadianSolo... · Posted by u/oftenwrong

YokoZar · 6 years ago

Mountain View underwent a dramatic political change within the last decade - housing/rental prices got so bad that the entire city council was replaced.

Prior to that the situation was much like it was in most places in the US: current homeowners interested in raising home prices ran the politics, and everything listed was effectively banned.

bufordsharkley · 6 years ago

And in 2018, two prominent pro-housing councilpeople got voted out of office (Lenny Siegel and Pat Showalter), returning things to a majority of NIMBY homeowners

bufordsharkley commented on As U.S. 'superstar' cities thrive, weaker ones get left behind reuters.com/article/us-us... · Posted by u/aaronarduino

appleshore · 7 years ago

Do you have an example of that? Perhaps I’m biased being in LA and SF but those city budgets seem irreplaceable broken. Infinite amounts to pensions while no one can propose viable fixes to problems.

bufordsharkley · 7 years ago

The existence of Prop 13, coupled with pyramid-scheme-style approaches to financing municipal pensions, have led to disasters of financing.

One can imagine a better world in which pension programs are effectively time-independent w.r.t financing (neutral for growth or shrinking), and more financing comes from sources that are likely agnostic to growth or reduction (like Land Value Tax), but the politics here... are not trivial.

bufordsharkley commented on Housing can’t both be a good investment and be affordable cityobservatory.org/housi... · Posted by u/DoreenMichele

scythe · 7 years ago

LVT is a good policy but it doesn't make land ownership a bad investment. It just tends to decrease the price of land, which is not usually a problem because land is not produced by people, unlike other securities.

bufordsharkley · 7 years ago

The reason that land is a good investment is precisely because of future land rents that a land buyer expects to receive.

If these land rents are instead paid towards a tax, how wouldn't this make land less of a good investment?

bufordsharkley commented on Housing can’t both be a good investment and be affordable cityobservatory.org/housi... · Posted by u/DoreenMichele

briandear · 7 years ago

> administer the market

That’s a scary idea. There are massive unintended consequences to such a strategy of reducing the benefits of “absentee” ownership. Almost every private rental property in existence is the result of absentee ownership. A move to disrupt that would result in a dramatically reduced supply of rental properties. Not everyone has the resources, credit or responsibility to own their own home. The financial crisis of 2008 was trigger by a whole bunch of people buying when they shouldn’t have. The places where people try to “administer” the market either through aggressive regulation or capping rents through rent control have the most inefficient and expensive markets.

bufordsharkley · 7 years ago

It's interesting that you jump to "aggressive regulation" or "rent control" instead of the solution that has close to full consensus from the economic profession: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

bufordsharkley commented on Housing can’t both be a good investment and be affordable cityobservatory.org/housi... · Posted by u/DoreenMichele

black6 · 7 years ago

The major flaw I see in this analysis is believing the only way to build wealth by "investing" in home-ownership is increasing property values. It completely ignores the equity one builds while paying down a mortgage. If one intends on staying put for a while (even just a couple-few years in some cases) then one can build wealth through home ownership without runaway property valuation. Money is "lost" on interest payments, but if you are leasing a home, you're paying someone else's mortgage and interest[0].

[0]: Not necessarily the case, but it works for simplicity's sake.

bufordsharkley · 7 years ago

Even if prices are stable, what makes it the case that the system works so well for those who own land and creates such problems for those who are landless?

We take it for granted that renting is just a form of having your money stolen by landowners, without realizing that this is a choice we make: we could just as easily administer the market so that absentee ownership ceases to be a smart bet.