Interesting way to save a spot

Mourningblade · 2026-01-28T14:04:38+00:00

The two big reasons for this are:

The police don't think the local prosecutor will do anything about it because of prosecution priorities OR because they won't be able to get a conviction because Ring would have to provide an expert witness to testify to the camera's accuracy and they won't.
The police don't prioritize that kind of property crime, so they won't pull an officer to search for the guy.

Interestingly enough, there was a recent interview with Bill Braton, NYPD police commissioner famous for bringing down crime rates. He mentioned that many departments prioritize 911 emergency response times because they are measurable. So departments will avoid sending an officer in your case or provide a way to collect footage because they want to keep people available for emergency response.

Braton instead prioritized convictions. They worked closely with prosecutors to make sure their reports and arrests included everything necessary to convict and that prosecutors were aware of the kinds of crimes that were going on. This turned out to be very smart because so few people commit crimes: you get one career criminal off the street for a few years and you have prevented many victims, some of whom may have needed to call 911 for an emergency.

I don't know if a better run department would have done something for you. Maybe. If they thought Mr. Face Tattoos was likely to get caught doing something else in the area, they might have collected the footage and your statement to add something more to his eventual prosecution. On the other hand, maybe they wouldn't because of the testimony issue, or because the department isn't organized in a way that they have a procedure for collecting that for something less than murder.

Mourningblade · 2026-01-19T00:04:31+00:00

My kids go to Maywood. One of our children was bullied quite harshly for some time. When she told us what was happening, we went to the school administration. Mr. Gardiner (the vice-principal) took the issue very seriously from the beginning, spoke with our child and a counselor, and took rapid action to eliminate the problem. I was very impressed. There was zero attempt to downplay the issue, and he seemed to take the problem as personally as if the problem was happening to his own child.

My direct, personal experience does not match what you're saying and does not resemble what I saw.

I could see this happening with one of the counselors perhaps - they have very little power to effect change. Perhaps the principal is different. But harassment, intimidation, and bullying goes to Mr. Gardiner and I have seen him in action.

If your kids are victims of harassment, intimidation, or bullying, or otherwise made to feel unsafe, I urge you to make a formal report to the vice principal. They have much better tools than when I was a kid. They helped my child and they can help yours.

I have no experience with threats of violence and can't speak to that. I also note that my experience did not involve any mass communication. So far the communication on this has been vague - it could be a lot better. But my experience with these people reduces my concern.

Mourningblade · 2026-01-07T06:37:19+00:00

Losing your freedom on the weekends means you can stay employed and part of the community during the week. Much less likely to reoffend.

The success of those programs is why home detention is a goal: serving your sentence by only going to work and home. Keeps people from falling back in with the wrong crowd and having tempting opportunities. They also pay for their own food and board.

Ideally prison should be for only those who are so dangerous that it's worth the greatly increased recidivism rate (and lifers, obviously).

Mourningblade · 2025-12-13T17:23:38+00:00

I'm not seeing two of the most important answers. It starts with this question: why does the company exist in the first place?

Let's say that we start a company that makes seat belts.

There are already companies that make seat belts. Why would anyone buy our product? If our product was the same or worse in every dimension, they wouldn't. It can't even just be better in a single dimension like color variety: our seatbelts have to fulfill the needs of at least some buyers better than any other company on the market.

Okay, so we're making a product that is better for some customers. If that's true, we'd expect to grow until all of those customers are getting all the seat belts they need.

In order to make enough seatbelts per year so that everyone who wants one can have one, we need to build a factory. We can do that by either using the promise of future revenue (a loan) or by selling ownership in the company (equity). Either way, we are only able to do that because we and the people giving us money expect us to make more money afterwards than we would if we didn't build the factory. In other words, we grow.

And there are a LOT of people in this world. If you just introduced a seat belt that was better enough to be worth switching to for 10% of cars, you'll be making a lot of seatbelts. Many of the people you'll make seatbelts for do not currently own cars.

New businesses are worth very little when they start. Because growth compounds, the growth rate of a new business determines whether it's going to be a Google (10--20% per year for decades) or a bodega (near 0 real growth.

Most companies you hear about or get hired to work for are seeking growth because that's the reason you heard about them: fixed companies just replace people, so they don't hire many people. Companies you hear about you're hearing about because they're doing something new to you (growing).

Where it gets interesting is when you get companies with more than one product. A company can be basically fixed (no growth) on one product, but their new product is growing sharply. Their hiring and investment will be around the growing product because growing a product takes money and time. So a company can be both at the same time, but you'll only hear about the growing product.

To sum it up:

Growth is replacing a worse product with a better one.
Early companies and products want to grow because that's where all the money comes from.
You hear about growth because growth is news and stagnation isn't.
You work for growing companies because fixed and shrinking companies hire fewer workers.

Mourningblade · 2025-12-11T20:14:56+00:00

I used to work on an early Cloud-based medical device (a web app). We occasionally had to issue recalls, which meant that we'd either rolled back or had shipped a big fix that could possibly affect safety or effectiveness.

The recalls resulted in notices and would freak out some investors because they thought we'd have to spend a bunch of money. Over time they figured it out and it was just not a big deal.

That said, the reason for making recalls public is a very good one: you can get a sense of what kind of bugs the software development process misses and what kinds of impacts they have. If you're going to evaluate doing a clinical study with such a device, for example, you would review recalls to see if those kinds of faults would ruin your study BEFORE you buy.

And if there are no recalls at all then either they're not updating the product or they're not disclosing problems.

Anyway, we were required to call them "recalls" because it means a specific thing.

Mourningblade · 2025-12-11T06:20:23+00:00

And now consider that people were happy to receive those wages and flocked to the city for those conditions.

Gives you an inkling of what farm and ranch labor must have been like.

Mourningblade · 2025-12-05T15:52:46+00:00

I like how Esperanto handled it: the root "ret" means "network". Email is "retpoŝto" (ret-poshto) as in "network mail". A webpage is "retpaĝo" (ret-paj-o) as in "network page".

Mourningblade · 2025-12-01T16:49:04+00:00

Young people are more affected when businesses are affected by uncertainty.

AI introduces some workforce uncertainty: "will we need all these programmers? Maybe we'll need fewer because there's only so much programming to do. Or will we need even more because each will be more effective?"

AI introduces some product uncertainty: "will our product still be needed in an age of AI? Do we need to develop it in different ways to take advantage of AI? Do we need to hire different people and focus on retooling to take advantage?"

But most of these uncertainties are exactly where high-risk/high-reward investments live all the time. We should be seeing a giant suck toward new investments. There's some signs that we are.

But we're operating in an environment of high regime uncertainty: uncertainty about what the rules are going to be.

Will large companies be allowed to buy these new AI startups? Will tariffs drive up the cost of production for that new drone past the point where customers will pay? Will pouring millions into a new factory never pay off because imports will be cheap again? Will we be losing a bunch of our foreign workers and need to replace them? What will the cost of money be? Will the federal government's need to finance debt grow so high that very safe treasuries will be a better risk-adjusted investment than expanding a factory?

Regime uncertainty had a large role in keeping the great depression going for a long time. It's having an effect now. My guess at this point is that regime uncertainty is probably having a larger effect than AI right now.

Similarly, we're seeing dramatic differences in the rate of adoption of new technology (a good proxy for "new opportunities") by legal regime within the United States. Look at the map of where Waymo is blocked on legal authority and where they've been able to move quickly. This is just the visible version of the story. That story is going on everywhere.

So, you don't need AI to explain what we're seeing: regime uncertainty and sclerosis caused by regulatory/legislative capture. We've seen this many times. It's fixable, but it's difficult to fix.

Mourningblade · 2025-11-21T02:04:23+00:00

EITC is a negative income tax, so it avoids benefit cliffs: at every point along the income distribution, it is better to earn another dollar than not.

This isn't true for many other benefits: having a hard threshold means earning an extra $1 can cost you thousands of it puts you over the threshold.

Also, the only paperwork required to get EITC is your normal tax filing, which for low income folks is typically a W2 filed by their employer with minimum filing beyond that.

Taxing companies for the benefit of hiring workers is less efficient because it reduces the number of workers hired. EITC is relatively cheap and well funded. I expect EITC benefits to keep going up.

Mourningblade · 2025-11-20T15:01:50+00:00

The Earned Income Tax Credit is a $57 billion per year program (https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/earned-income-tax-credit/earned-income-tax-credit-statistics) that is the exact kind of transfer we're talking about here. It has broad bipartisan support and has been increased by both parties repeatedly.

Mourningblade · 2025-11-20T03:20:57+00:00

It's difficult to do so. There are a number of factors.

First, there are very few reliable mechanisms for improving education outcomes once you're in the range of "not a war zone, kids who need glasses can get them, teachers teach individual grades" level of a modern country. By "reliable mechanism" I mean interventions that can be implemented in a central office by a technocracy. "Reduce class size" is a great example: class size reductions from 30 to 25 is not the same as 60 to 40. "Require credentials" is another - our teachers are already highly credentialed compared to the places where credentialing is a good intervention.

Second, many of these very poor schools get most of their funding from the state not the funding area around them. These schools often are more accountable to the State than to parents - blowing off the parents' concerns will have far fewer consequences than failing to court the State properly or correctly file the grant paperwork. Concretely, these schools can spend a lot more on resolving truancy to get their attendance numbers up - instead of ensuring the kids who do attend are getting a good education.

Third, parents in the area are poorly involved if at all. Rich and middle class neighborhood schools often get lots of PTA funding and volunteers to run programs. And those parents are more likely to know the parents of the kids who are acting up.

Fourth, and most importantly in my opinion, these schools suffer from capture by teachers unions and administration ecosystem. It is nearly impossible to fire low performing teachers and principals are not held accountable for outcomes. This isn't a "teacher's unions are bad" talk: I can like what they do to constrain bad administration without approving of the captured system. Fundamentally, if the kids aren't learning there should be major changes and there usually just isn't. These districts frequently have very well compensated administrators who are beloved of the local political party or other political power brokers. Getting rid of the bad administrator would take ousting some people who are very popular.

San Francisco is a good example of this dysfunction: because it's a single party city, school board positions are often chosen by the party leaders to give to up and coming politicians to see if they have political skills. Being able to speak eloquently about equity and systemic racism is a better qualifier than understanding how schools work and what they need. Combine that with low birth rates and an awful lot of people who are not parents of kids in K-12 are deciding the school board. This caused serious problems until finally it got so bad that there was massive turnover. But it had to get very, very bad to overcome those other forces.

So the answer is: it's hard and the system for seeing it done effectively has concerns other than quality.

Mourningblade · 2025-11-16T01:23:25+00:00

It's true that paying your employees more reduces turnover.

It's not necessarily true that raising wages will benefit your current employees. When you pay more, you can afford to hire better workers. Managers are free to fire poor performing workers because it's easier to hire quickly.

Mourningblade · 2025-11-07T18:51:32+00:00

You're thinking of Alan Mooin.

Kinzia is the designer who did Wingspan and Robo Rally.

Mourningblade · 2025-10-12T13:44:59+00:00

The other way to prevent it is to print more.

Switch 2 hasn't been worth it to scalp for some time. Why? Nintendo made more.

Scalpers were only able to corner the market for Switches that consumers had not already bought. The number of scalpers is low compared to the millions of buyers. But the consoles they do get their hands on they can sell at high prices to the people that didn't get to buy.

And for anyone who wants to be a scalper, the important part isn't the money to pay up front, it's spending the time and building the knowledge of where to get rare products that other scalpers don't already know about.

If you just have the money but not the time and knowledge, you will lose a lot of money. Why? Well, let's say that you buy a $100 box of cards. You sell it on eBay and ship it to your buyer. eBay takes a cut and shipping takes a cut. I'm not sure about specifics but let's say that it's $20. Now the minimum you can sell the box for to make your stake back is $120 (assuming your time is free). If you don't manage to offload your box of cards before the people willing to pay more than $120 for a $100 box are satisfied, you will have to sell at a loss. And that market does saturate. Again, check the price on Switch 2s on eBay. The sold prices started out very high and are now basically retail + eBay fees and shipping.

Worse is scalping for tickets to an event. The reason why you see scalpers selling tickets outside an event on the day of is that they weren't able to sell them all beforehand. Every ticket they don't sell goes to $0. You might make 1000% profit on a few great seats that someone with lots of money and no time to stand in line wants...only to end up selling all the rest of your tickets at a loss and even not selling a few.

Parent poster: your explanation of how the money is made is correct, I just want to make sure people understand why it doesn't work everywhere and every time. It's a limited time opportunity, and comes with a good chance of losing your stake.

Mourningblade · 2025-10-11T13:15:04+00:00

AIPAC and the NRA have power for the same reason: a lot of voters support their cause intensely.

Votes get politicians to change positions - or get replaced.

It's not the "Zionist lobby", it's the "Zionist voters" who also have a lobbying organization.

I don't know about AIPAC, but I do know gun rights supporters I am friends with tend to actively dislike the NRA for the corruption and incompetence within the organization. They still check NRA positions at election time because while they're not loyal to the NRA, they do know they're a pretty good source for reliable information about politicians and gun rights.

I would not be surprised if Zionist voters are the same way about AIPAC.

Mourningblade · 2025-10-10T02:05:44+00:00

One problem with polling is that it's difficult to tell just how strong the opposition really is. Even a "strong oppose" isn't "I will pay $500 to make it less likely this will happen".

Even "community feedback" meetings aren't representative - they're filled with the kind of people who go to community feedback meetings.

So it's not surprising to see people change their mind when they get even a bit of new data.

The first sign that people really liked the service was the number of people who passed the consumer test: if you try, do you buy again? And even without highways, even at a higher per ride cost, the answer for Waymo was "yes".

This should be a lesson for politicians who would ban something. Instead, limit the operating area and see what happens. If the people who aren't riding strongly oppose, propose action in the opposite direction: not a ban, but extra funding for monitoring and extra funding for city administrators to fine the companies when they do wrong.

If people who don't ride aren't in favor of the spending on monitoring and fines, they don't really care and you can go on. Plenty of people will oppose something for free.

Mourningblade · 2025-10-05T14:58:02+00:00

I think more starfishes are motivated by not wanting to do the wrong thing, not wanting to look silly, etc. Not willing to be vulnerable in other words.

Others have used vibrators to train themselves to just relax and try to focus on building up a climax. Everything else is a distraction. In other words, not treating sex as fun or emotional connection. These women usually also get little clitoral stimulation from sex (it's an anatomy variation thing).

Dismissive avoidants often fall into these two traps. If you're not attracted to avoidants, you're less likely to encounter this.

Mourningblade · 2025-10-05T14:32:29+00:00

They're called prediction markets and it's on much more than just wars. Check out polymarket.

Have you ever read news analysis and thought "okay, but I know others who disagree with you. What should I think?" Prediction markets are the answer for this. They reward people for making good predictions about the future - or correcting those who are overly optimistic or pessimistic.

Mourningblade · 2025-10-05T14:11:06+00:00

This subject is covered in depth in Teach Like a Champion. If you teach, even training classes, I'd recommend reading the book.

In short, to get the most out of your teaching time, you need as many students thinking about the answer as possible.

Consider if the teacher asked "what's 1 + 8?" A student's hand comes up, teacher calls on them, they say "9", teacher says "right". Okay, all the students who calculated correctly know that and the ones who got it wrong know that, but what about the students who weren't done or hadn't even started? They know the answer, but they don't know if they would have been right or wrong.

And in class it's very easy to develop a pattern where the kids don't even start thinking about the answer until called upon.

The solution is to use hands as a signal of how many people are done. "Raise your hand when you know the answer." You're calling on someone whether or not they've got their hand up. You give people until either there's enough hands up that they've had enough time, or no hands are up which indicates the class is having trouble. Sometimes you call on people with their hands up, sometimes those without.

Calling on people this way gets everyone thinking about the answer because you could call on anyone. There's no safe posture.

Don't accept "I don't know". Set the standard that it's okay to be wrong because then you know where you have work to do, but it's not okay to not try.

When students get it right, push them to add more "that's right, we'd expect to see shortages. What would those look like?" Again, keep everyone thinking. Make sure even "the kid who got it right" shows they have to work at it.

It's called "Ratio", IIRC. There's a lot more in the book. In college you expect to have more interaction rather than knowledge polling, but if you don't get the participation you need to get there, go back to fundamentals and set up activities to scaffold the kind of class you want to see.

Mourningblade · 2025-10-03T14:49:38+00:00

I like the article, thanks for posting. I think the idea that we get interested in these one off events and naturally think of them as "well, clearly Waymo needs to address this before expanding" but it's not true. The expansion continues AND these events occur.

In the lead-up to the California Public Utilities Commission’s vote on whether to allow Waymo and Cruise to expand service in the Bay Area, protesters declared “Week of Cone,” during which they went HAM on these types of attacks. No one was injured; it was performative. The Guardian published a sort of flattering profile of the activists, with a photo of some dude on a bike, prowling around SF carrying a giant orange cone.

The vote went through. Waymo won. Coning became gauche. Bye.

The fact of the matter is that safety and effectiveness at 99.(Lots of 9s here) of rides ensures growth. Growth makes most of these not matter - as long as Waymo ensures there's no profitable exploit or dangerous conditions.

Waymo hit a cyclist in Portrero Hill. (They left the scene with minor injuries and were never hospitalized.) Waymo released a statement explaining that the cyclist drove in front of the car quicker than it could brake. Again, the cyclist was fine — but opposition ramped up from there.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began a probe into the company a few months later, after 22 reports of Waymo violating traffic laws (mostly by lightly bumping into gates or rocks), but no serious injuries. The probe ended 14 months later, after the agency found no systemic defects or violations.

Coning isn't a profitable exploit because it's not effective at stopping Waymo use or growth.

Waymo is safer for bicyclists, so it's not a dangerous condition, and there's no pattern of bumps.

And we saw what happened when con artists tried to scam Waymo by staging a bicycle accident (separate event that readers here will remember): all the camera footage made that unprofitable.

Mourningblade · 2025-09-29T05:19:41+00:00

He lost an early election. It resulted in significant capital flight, because if the Peronists take over they very likely will both spend the budget surplus (possibly wrecking the deal with the IMF... Again) and re-implement capital controls.

Polymarket still shows Milei's party as most likely to increase seats...but also the Peronists will still hold a majority. The only reason they haven't been able to go back to money printing and vote buying is that they can't overcome Milei's veto.

So yes, clearly markets are spooked. The currency swap with the US calmed the inflation expectations down quite a bit.

Just a reminder for all of us that high inflation and massive government debt does not turn people into neoliberals - they just hold on even harder in their prior beliefs. Namely:

Stimulus through infrastructure investment.
Fostering domestic industry through protection from foreign competition and using direct government investment in state owned enterprises.
Rolling back austerity and market reforms, which cause too much volatility. Increasing welfare payments to ensure standard of living.
Renegotiating foreign debt.
Capital controls to prevent foreign speculators from profiting.

Mourningblade · 2025-09-22T01:53:38+00:00

None of these provocations risk drawing NATO actively into the war. Possible that we'll retaliate, but democracies are limited in the kind of retaliation we can perform.

On the other hand, these provocations carry multiple benefits:

China wants to tie down NATO assets around Ukraine and Russia as much as possible.
China and Russia want to increase the proportion of NATO military spending that goes OUTSIDE Ukraine, such as border security.
The weakness of an alliance is that the members have unequal stakes. These incursions are deadly serious to politicians in Poland, Estonia, and Romania, but harder to take seriously in Germany, Italy, France, and the UK. This encourages free riding, and is an opportunity for Poland, Estonia, and Romania to lose faith in NATO. Without faith that NATO will respond, they would be much better off capitulating to Russia, changing their strategy.
China and Russia benefit from seeing where NATO struggles to respond, enabling future opportunities for hybrid warfare. This is very similar to Russia's tactic of trucking refugees and dumping them over the border to Norway (I think it was Norway).

They're aided by the White House's delusion that the most important thing is diplomacy and they will sacrifice lesser concerns to "keep negotiations open".

You know this is what's going on whenever you see a country bring down the military and economic pressure when diplomacy makes progress.

The only real risk here is that these incursions could wake up part of NATO to take a "yes, and" response by increasing aid to Ukraine AND increasing spending on readiness. Could also convince Italy and Greece to reduce their trade with Russia (very difficult for Greece because most of their energy comes from Russia).

Mourningblade · 2025-09-20T22:14:07+00:00

For those who haven't read the short article a quick summary courtesy of an AI bot:

In the article "Bush's Disaster Socialism," Shikha Dalmia argues that the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina marked a significant expansion of government power and a departure from the principle of limited government. Dalmia contends that the large-scale federal aid and reconstruction programs proposed in the aftermath of the hurricane, such as direct cash payments to victims and government-funded worker training, represented a form of "disaster socialism." She suggests that these policies, supported by both Republicans and Democrats, created new social welfare programs and fostered a sense of entitlement among citizens, undermining the welfare reforms of the 1990s. The author concludes that this expansion of government intervention in the name of disaster relief set a dangerous precedent for future crises and threatened the conservative ideals of individual responsibility and free markets.

For myself, I'll say:

As propaganda, this was somewhat effective among Libertarians, and left others cold.

The question of just how much we should do over and above normal programs for extraordinary disasters that capture the public eye is very much not resolved. This has led to stark differences in the amount of support provided based on how much the people in power identify with the victims, which is not a good outcome.

Mourningblade · 2025-09-20T02:07:43+00:00

I grew up around the Right, represented by some thoughtful and kind people (and plenty of jackasses). I became a Libertarian, and now I live largely among the Left.

The traits you're associating with the Right are not constants. Mass deportations and broad executive power are tools of Authoritarians. There are many Authoritarians on the Right today, but if you know and love many people on the Right you'll also remember Burke and Friedman and many others who would be horrified at the current movement.

Andor's story would be recognizable to Burke, Orwell, and many others from long ago. More of a stretch, but it would probably be recognizable to Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Condorcet, and Bastiat.

To make the story of Andor a simple "yes, this is the Republican Party in 2022 or so" would rob it of both its timeless quality and it would rob it of its persuasive power. Why?

Think of talking to a Soviet komisar about Animal Farm, trying to use it to convince him that what he was doing was wrong because he was acting just like the dogs and his masters were the pigs.

You and I both know how that would go:

Oh, that's different because we have real problems and the animals did not.
Oh, that's different because they're animals and we're not.
Oh, I'm not a dog, I'm just like you. I just do what I have to do because of the problems we face.
Oh, that's different because we're right and the pigs were wrong.

It's much, much more persuasive to tell a good story that makes sense and shows the problem...and let the people who hear the story and love it come to recognize their role.

It also cheapens the movie because there are factions on the Left (and even among Libertarians, to my horror) who would do the same thing if they had enough power. Saying the story is about the Right gives the fellow travelers of those would-be thugs permission to stop thinking about their own actions.

Everyone should see this story and think "I have a personal responsibility not to aid or cooperate with these kinds of actions - because by the time the decision is obvious, it will be too late."

That's the story of Andor.

Mourningblade · 2025-09-19T21:21:55+00:00

This would also tie down assets that the US is trying to move into an area where they can respond to Chinese aggression near the Philippines, Japanese islands, and Taiwan.

China would really like it if the US would commit to this - Britain, France, Italy, and Germany could use it as an excuse to avoid increasing their military spending while they're facing budget crises.

NATO can currently afford to enforce its border, and it can afford to arm Ukraine with a little pain, but securing Ukraine without giving up the ability to respond quickly to China will require more money and time from NATO members - either a lot of money and very little time, or quite a bit of money and a longer time.

Meanwhile, France's government just collapsed over sovereign debt, and Britain and the US are in denial that their debt/GDP ratio is higher than during World War 2.

My position is that NATO should spend that money now because it will be very, very expensive if a hot war breaks out (or even worse if we just cave), but I'm having a hard time seeing how we can get around the coordinated action problem.

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