tommy5dollar

قبل سنتينdiscuss

I don't think "state funded" is the important part to take away from the piece, it's a shortage of infrastructure in general, both state and private, in part due to incredibly restrictive rules. These days you can easily trap a planned piece of infrastructure in court cases for years for largely spurious reasons.

tommy5dollar

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This doesn't really seem relevant since no one is disputing whether the UK as a whole has enough space for more houses. The relevant comparisons are Paris vs London and then the various 2nd tier cities in the countries. Paris has a MUCH HIGHER population density than London, in part due to the housing mix, e.g. Parisian mansion blocks.

Prosperity comes from cities where densification is allowed (far too much of inner London is only 2-storeys) and being able to affordably put in supporting infrastructure.

tommy5dollar

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Transport projects seem to be particularly expensive these days in Anglo countries compared to European countries. For instance, we currently have a planned short tunnel in the UK (under the Thames but not in London itself) where the actual planning process has so far cost $400m.

tommy5dollar

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

It seems foolish to say we can never do anything that makes the life of the poor better just because it also helps the non-poor

tommy5dollar

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Well, it sounds like you could come up with a set of useful heuristics, like living next door to the property.

It feels intrinsically pretty cheems to just say "this sounds tricky so we shouldn't bother" when the existing system is completely dysfunctional

tommy5dollar

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

It seems useful to identify the right problem. It's better to know you just need the right compiler than the think the issue is something else as you can then work on building the right compiler.

Obviously democracy should be limited to the relevant franchise. We don't let children vote, we don't let people who don't live (and are not from) an area vote. The entire point is to identify the right set of people who should vote, based on those who suffer from the related externalities.

It seems unfair to say the article just moves the problem elsewhere, it touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes.

tommy5dollar

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

The UK is one of the Western democracies without the protections you're talking about (no written constitution, no ability to bind future parliaments, law passed by a simple majority of parliamentarians, first-past-the-post and strong third-parties leading to parliamentary majorities with ~35% of the vote) but has one of the longest and proudest histories when it comes to freedom and liberty.

Mob rule is always a risk but it's often better than rule by an out-of-touch elite.

tommy5dollar

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Huh? The impoverished residents of the estate voted to have it "destroyed" (from which they would personally gain) but it was rich elites that blocked it because it's a vote winner in the wider community to be viewed as anti-development

tommy5dollar

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

The benefit of this proposal is that it pits property owners against each other. It might be in the interests of property owners as a class to not build in order to see values increase but the greed of individual owners will lead to some cracking and building in order to maximise their individual wealth.

tommy5dollar

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

In the time you've spent arguing about Vercel on here you could have actually tried it out and then you'd actually have your own opinion based on genuine experience.

I've used AWS Lambda professionally for years, Vercel is a totally different beast. I recently span-up a hobby project recently on Vercel rather than AWS Lambda (using Serverless Framework) to try out next.js and it took about 10 minutes to get it working whereas AWS Lambda would have taken a lot longer.

tommy5dollar

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

There's just a cookie prompt and then a newsletter sign-up a little later? I don't think there's any constant bombardment, if there is for you I'm interested to know more.

tommy5dollar

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

Crapification of stuff is good, you don't need a pair of jeans that lasts 400 years that you pass down to your grandchildren and most people don't want to save up for years (or take out financial products) to "invest" in furniture. The previous high quality of goods was a bug, not a feature.

tommy5dollar

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

They use RBS as a routing bank for international payments, so obviously they've had meetings with them

tommy5dollar

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

I'd recommend Tide... they've not done much recently but it seems they were setup with only £2m initial funding and they've just secured another £14m on top so I'd expect them to start releasing new features soon.

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