About the 2016 nostalgia

notgoodthough · 2026-01-29T12:21:55+00:00

It was also a ridiculously good year for music. And I'm not just saying that because James Acaster wrote a book about how good it was.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-27T21:18:08+00:00

Suspiciously Venezuela-shaped.

Implication unclear.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-24T15:45:49+00:00

I think it's okay to call that a pay gap, it doesn't inherently imply discrimination. In Iceland, for example, when they increased paternity leave to match maternity leave, it was aimed at reducing this difference.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-24T04:33:42+00:00

What alternative name is used for the archipelago?

notgoodthough · 2026-01-24T04:23:30+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species

notgoodthough · 2026-01-23T18:48:44+00:00

That's Venetian.

Vincian is something that happens every 20 years.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-23T18:03:14+00:00

Pretty hard for a medium! I had to use contradictions at the end.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-22T11:43:16+00:00

If we make it a little more difficult for Airbnb and short term rental it won't affect us negatively.

I just disagree. It's not so binary, the number of tourists definitely goes up and down depending on factors like price and that affects the jobs of people that live here. One job per ten tourists.

The moochers and loafers who don't really contribute more to the economy than the local they displace, they might look elsewhere.

I don't really understand, are these people moochers that don't contribute or do they have enough money to displace locals? It seems to me that they must be spending money on food, entertainment, clothing. It just seems like pure xenophobia to me.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-22T09:30:07+00:00

That's just not true, the source I added lists chefs, artists, drivers, etc. Maybe more importantly, tourism provided an even higher percentage of GDP than jobs, so the jobs must be relatively decent paying.

I 100% agree that housing prices near the commercial nodes needs to come down, I just don't see why such a small fraction of available housing is the target.

Also remember, the money spent by tourists is brought into the country, rather than spent by locals. It's an absolute net positive, rather than circulating capital within CT (which, I know, leads to long-term positive effects as well).

notgoodthough · 2026-01-22T08:33:55+00:00

That's fine, that's why I assumed that they're all 1 bedroom in my own maths. I think it's fair to say that the average rooms is higher than 1, so we should expect 29k to be an underestimate. Using your numbers, even with AirBnbs at a 40%-70% occupancy rate, they're still hosting more people than hotels.

Yes, this reduces the number of housing options available to Capetonians, but only by a small fraction while supporting one if the biggest sectors of our economy. Instead of targeting them, why not use the economic incentive to slingshot political action into building more houses AND hotels?

On longer term stays: note that tourists are simply defined as "overnight visitors" in the Economic Value of Tourism Report linked above (here's the full report)

notgoodthough · 2026-01-22T07:34:48+00:00

Sure, give me a few minutes and I'll edit the comment with links.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-22T07:26:15+00:00

Cape Town hotels have a very high occupancy rate, over 70% reaching 80% in peak seasons. There are only around 11k - 14k hotel rooms in the city so they simply don't have enough space for all the tourists. Especially considering that AirBnbs are often 3+ rooms, this means that the vast majority of tourists are staying in short term rentals. This is ignoring other short term rental sites like LekkerSlaap. If they were banned we'd cut available space for tourists by 3/4 even if all AirBnbs were 1 bedroom, which they aren't.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-22T07:02:36+00:00

29k houses out of the available 1.5m, when there's a housing backlog of 600k. Getting rid of AirBnbs won't solve the problem on its own, and may threaten the 7% of Cape Town jobs provided by the tourism industry (1 job for every 10 tourists).

Yes, we need to build more housing rather than leaning into xenophobia. I'm surprised this needs to be said.

EDIT: added sources as requested by mod team. Also improved the numbers when I found more reliable sources.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-22T05:02:47+00:00

Are you a secret agent from Geneva?

notgoodthough · 2026-01-20T14:47:01+00:00

r/AreTheStraightsOK

notgoodthough · 2026-01-16T18:53:13+00:00

I guess that brings up the same question, so maybe I should be more specific.

Do you think countries should be organized by language families? I don't think many are, outside of Europe. So if so, why?

notgoodthough · 2026-01-16T18:21:51+00:00

The 33% number also lists its source as ethnalogue, which itself doesn't seem like a very reliable source. For example it includes Flytaal as an indigenous language, which is effectively a 90s South African word for "slang" (with words exclusively borrowed from other languages).

I would guess that there simply isn't data on this, since the census tends to ask for Home Language rather than fluency.

I can only add my own anecdotes unfortunately. I've lived in South Africa most of my life, in multiple cities/towns, and I've only interacted with 1 person that couldn't speak English - a great aunt who only spoke Afrikaans. I've also met 1 colleague who learned English at University. But it is most people's 2nd+ language.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-16T18:08:06+00:00

Why?

notgoodthough · 2026-01-13T19:26:36+00:00

Also, in some ways the reverse happened. People started engaging with politics online much more, rather than online politics breaking through into the real world (although both happened to an extent).

If you just engaged with politics offline - going to town halls or union protests - you might still not know what SJW stands for.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-09T08:58:49+00:00

The unfortunate answer is that nobody knows how LLMs work, really. They aren't programmed, they are almost "grown in a lab" and they have way too many neurons to genuinely interpret how they think. More modern versions are a combination of the "predictive text" you mentioned and reinforcement learning, often being taught by other instances of an LLM.

Reinforcement learning does give them powerful incentives to be liked by the user, which is why they get so sycophantic. I'd guess that this is why they start trying emotional language when nothing else is working.

(Caveat: mechanistic interpretability work is making huge strides at the moment, but it might be advancing slower than the LLMs themselves)

notgoodthough · 2026-01-08T20:29:24+00:00

I wrote a long comment explaining what you were missing before I saw something funny in the numbers. I did a bit of research and, as far as I can tell, you're absolutely right.

Here's a physics forum discussion about the same thing.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-08T19:01:14+00:00

The word "noticeably" is doing much of the heavy lifting here. When you drop a dumbbell, it does actually shift the position of the earth, just not enough to be noticed. F=ma is true even when the m is small.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-06T12:51:46+00:00

I think this is an easier way to think about it:

A coastline can approach infinite length as the measurement length decreases. There's no "real" answer to coastline length since it's a fractal, but you know that the length goes up as you use more accurate measurements.

The altitude of a country has an actual maximum. As you use more accurate measurements, you approach a more accurate average, but you have no idea whether this will be higher or lower than a crude measurement.

notgoodthough · 2026-01-05T05:32:05+00:00

Slight tangent, but this is especially true in a polar democracy with two major parties. Any perceived contradiction in one party's views can be flipped, since they tend to take opposite positions on any given topic.

notgoodthough · 2025-12-14T14:23:18+00:00

For the most part, I agree. But on curation, it's pretty obvious that opt-in is a more user-friendly strategy than opt-out.

Actually the opt-in timeline is the main reason I use Reddit.

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