In some ways, I agree and in others, we’re still very far away from it. Germany had extra-judicial killing squads terrorizing communities, that still seems very far away for us.
If he does send troops to Chicago as he says he intends to, the court challenges are going to be critical.
well, our "best friend and ally" who gets free money and weapons (including nukes) is doing it. A very slippery slope to be allied with a regime that's been overtaken by ultraorthodox maniacs, and it's also bad for Jews everywhere.
> The fight over the water has pitted residents of Fort Garland who have plumbing and pay for metered water against those living outside the city limits with cisterns. The board of the Fort Garland Water and Sanitation District — which cut off water sales to rural residents Aug. 1 in a 3-2 vote that wasn’t even on its meeting agenda — has devolved into shouting matches and dysfunction.
I don't begrudge people who choose to live outside of municipalities in order to avoid taxes, but it's hard to empathize with them when the municipality they're not paying into makes a decision on behalf of their own voters/taxpayers. Hopefully the county/private sector resolves it soon.
"but it's hard to empathize with them when the municipality they're not paying into makes a decision on behalf of their own voters/taxpayers."
They're paying for the water. It's not like they're getting it for free. Sure, the municipality could just not sell outside the municipality, but most utilities are forbidden from suddenly cutting off service due to health and safety concerns.
From the article is sounds more like, some town folk don't like not being able to water their lawns. Said folks targeted the people buying water, despite them being less than 1% of the water used. Not to mention apparently they are providing 45% of the towns tax revenue with their water purchases.
> apparently they are providing 45% of the towns tax revenue with their water purchases
"Revenue for the water sales to rural residents totaled $43,000 per year, about 15% of total revenue."
This means that 'total revenue' is about $287k. I would guess that's the revenue of the water system, not the town's entire tax base. Still a significant figure, but not 45% of the town's tax revenue.
I agree with some of what you said, but doing it without warning seems unnecessarily harsh. This quote from the article is pretty ripe though:
“I was always drawn to the mountains when I was traveling around the country and, to be honest, it was affordable,” she said. “It was off grid. It had a structure. It was away from people. The view is incredible. There’s climbing, hiking. It was somewhere I could afford and have land in Colorado.”
I wanted to live off the grid, but not that off the grid.
I grew up drinking from well water. People are seriously overestimating the amount that certain services need to be provided by a municipality.
Arguably, the issue here is that we're going to need to deal with the fact that many americans are bad at assessing personal risk. Living in the country is in fact expensive—there are fewer people to amortize costs across, especially in societies that don't have market-based housing (which is arguably why country living is considered cheaper). Water and electricity might be the easiest ways to see this, but it's stuff like "access to a hospital" that causes the most harm—a largely invisible cost until you actually need a hospital (or emergency response, or clearing roads from snow, access to postal delivery, etc etc....). At least you'll notice immediately if you don't have water.
> I grew up drinking from well water. People are seriously overestimating the amount that certain services need to be provided by a municipality.
The article addresses this. In this part of CO, wells can cost $25k to drill without any guarantee of hitting water. It's not a panacea for these people.
It’s not just Colorado. Used to live in rural northern California and digging a $25k well (typical price I was quoted) came with no guarantee that water would be found.
$25k is extremely cheap for a well. In my area of Arizona it is common to do well shares, several properties will chip in to drill a $50k-$100k well system, but the cost may be closer to $5k-10K per family.
How deep is the typical well, and is that the primary driver of the cost?
I’m east of the Mississippi and my well is 200 feet deep. But this aquifer is fully allocated; all the new construction has to go to a different aquifer with a typical well depth of 700 feet. Once that is fully allocated, I think there is another one at around 1100 feet.
The price at that depth is dominated by the per foot cost. But inside the per-foot cost is the licensing, regulatory, casing compliance, and permitting compliance.
It's about $50/ft just to drill. After that is electric, the pump, the pressure tanks, burying pipe to enough houses to make each share cheap enough, and the legal cost of setting up a well share.
If you just wanted a well for your own property and merely put a spigot powered by a generator right next to it, you might be able to get away with $35k to start with. If you are looking to do a well share so that it becomes more economically feasible to split costs, I think it would be minimum $50k.
Thanks. Around me I think it would be closer to $15-20k including all the equipment. Permitting is legally capped at $100 and there are about 15 or 20 businesses within 50 miles that do it, so competition abounds.
> The article addresses this. In this part of CO, wells can cost $25k to drill without any guarantee of hitting water. It's not a panacea for these people.
Yes, but that's covered by my second part that americans are bad at evaluating risk (many humans are I imagine, I'm just trying to be narrow in my assessment). You don't get much more "on grid" than relying on a municipal water supply.
Not having reliable utilities comes with the territory. If you want to live off grid, you need backups of backups. And a reliable water source is one of them.
There is every reason to think a town water system is reliable and safe. They were not using enough water to matter to the town, and providing the town a nice source of income.
I don't agree with how the city made the decision either. But the politics is pretty simple: you are going to support the interests of the people who voted for you over those who have no vote. And those who have no vote in this matter chose to have no vote by living outside of the city.
Obviously. The point is cutting off water with no warning in the hottest month of the year is unnecessary cruel. At least give people a few weeks to start accounting for the change.
They are residents of some governance unit and, therefore, vote somewhere. Is that possible to have no right to vote because you live in the wrong place?
I live a couple miles outside the borders of a town, so I don't get to vote in town elections, just county and township elections. However, I do all my shopping in town, use the town library, drive on the town's roads, belong to some organizations that do charitable work in town, etc. It's fair to say that I'm affected by town politics in a lot of ways, but I don't get in a say in those politics.
Sometimes the lines about what affects you are blurry, but the question of whether you get a vote isn't: you do or you don't. Maybe rural people should get a partial vote in town affairs, 3/5 or something like that.
I don't lament my lack of a vote; I understand that it's an imperfect system.
As for whether I pay town taxes, it depends which ones you mean. Nothing on my property tax bill goes directly to the town's coffers for things like the parks and garbage pickup. But I pay the town sales tax every time I go shopping. I pay the town's sizable hotel and restaurant tax every time I go out to eat. I'm pretty sure the town gets some downstream fraction of the gas tax I pay every time I fill up.
Of course, all those taxes are voluntary in the sense that I could drive further to a different town. So does that qualify as "taxation without representation"? The Founders would probably say so, but it doesn't bother me enough to get chuffed about; I'm just explaining it for people who haven't experienced it.
Wouldn't this kind of reasoning - no taxes, no votes - end up making anyone who doesn't pay taxes, by whatever means, unable to participate in democratic governance?
Their companies pay taxes, so no that argument doesn't work. Every company pays some form of employee taxes and so on, there is no way to get around that.
> Is that possible to have no right to vote because you live in the wrong place?
You don't have the right to vote in a city that you do not live in, and the water system is controlled by the city in this case. I assume they can vote for county offices, and the county is now determining how best they can serve their residents now that the city is unable to.
And sometimes, the private water company that services the county absolutely gouges customers because they're private and can get away with it. I saw this in Texas, where a guy I knew bought a house just outside the city limits to avoid taxes and then his water bill tripled compared to when he was on city water.
If you have captive customers and a product with relatively inelastic pricing and no competition, you can basically do whatever you want. That's also just markets
I'm not sure that, where I live, there's a lot of property outside of town/city limits. My water is about $200/year but I use very little outside water.
In the UK, because we are the kind of communist nightmare that terrifies the USA, there is no place outside the city that pays no property tax. Problem solved
While there are unincorporated areas in the US, I'm not sure no property taxes are a given even in those areas. I live in an incorporated town and definitely pay property taxes and get a variety of town services but do need to handle my own sewer and trash (though I get water and electricity along with fire/police/etc. services as well as public schools as relevant).
In fact, I'm not sure the degree to which just bowing out of public schooling is even allowed given that I think that's over half of my town's budget.
This is a disingenuous argument. Of course they weren't choosing to live with no human contact whatsoever.
Besides that, human psychology is such that these people probably couldn't afford anything else and then back-justified their constraints as "drawn to the mountains for hiking and the views".
Many countries have rural water users subsidised by urban water users, because rural users need 100 times as much pipe buried and maintained per customer, but everyone pays the same rate for water.
Of course, in my country we tolerate that - it's normal for food to flow into urban areas and money to flow out, water pricing is just an obscure element of that.
In this case it seems like it's the reverse. The article claims the "bulk water" customers are responsible for 15% of the system's revenue but consume less than 1% of the water delivered.
I live in iowa - nearly everyone is on rural water because wells don't produce much water. I'm on a well and I can't water my lawn - after an hour my well is empty. My well is about a meter in diameter so that should be a lot stored. it would be $20k to extend the city water pipe to my lot.
i used to live in MN, there I knew farmers on a 5cm well who had no problem watering lawns, and 50 cows from the well.
in colorado where this story is water is less available than iowa. (most farms have a year round creek that could be treated to become drinkable)
That’s one of the real solutions - we shouldn’t be using potable water for everything. Houses that are plumbed on city water should have two water sources - potable and other.
They paid for the water that the municipality could afford to sell. They didn't pay into the municipality. If the municipality doesn't have excess water, why should they be forced to sell it?
People are saying they weren't paying into the municipality. That implies people paying into the municipality are paying for more than just water. The people buying the water were just buying water.
Now, maybe that's now how you think of it, but I'm sure you can see how others see it.
Even YOU understand the difference because you had to misrepresent what people were saying.
> They paid the municipality for the water, but they didn't pay into the municipality.
That's the difference. "into" doesn't mean they are merely paying the municipality, but rather, they are paying to support the municipality.
The people buying water? They are merely buying water that's up for sale. That's it. There is no implication beyond that. Intent matters.
And it's clear that the outsiders had no intention of supporting the municipality even if you want to suggest that was the case.
There is a very real legal and practical difference between paying for 100G of water, and paying for the right to buy 100G per week for the next N years.
Both have a price in the American west, and they did not pay the latter price.
Yes, they were buying water that the municipality could sell. And they got that water. The article suggests that the municipality is rationing its residents' water, so they don't have excess water to sell to outsiders.
Basically, the idea that I'm required to sell something is silly. No one said any contracts were broken. People got what they paid for.
Right, but the system needed maintenance, and people would still need to ration water and not water their lawns, even if the water they sell to outsiders (less than 1%) stopped.
That's typical in the small towns around here that let you fill up water tanks at the base of the water tower. You'll pay a lot more than regular customers, but a lot less than buying it by the gallon at Walmart, and it costs the water company nothing except maintaining a hose.
Perhaps, but saying they don't deserve to be served by the township because they don't pay is disingenuous. In fact, them paying more subsidizes the other residents' water.
Except they didn’t. A proper municipality decision would have been discussed publicly with advance notice. This is like the board of directors of Toyota deciding to stop selling to the US without advance notice without input from the shareholders, the US, or advance notice.
It is 100% disingenuous. In no municipality in America is the source of water not considered a long term source where change comes with months of notice. In no municipality is said change executed in a meeting without prior notice to the public with public commenting allowed.
It’s more than that. There is a finite and shrinking supply of water. The water district has every right, and IMO an obligation to protect supply to existing users. They do this by limiting availability to others.
These people should not be living off the grid without securing water rights. This has been the system in the west since before statehood.
This is an absolutely huge deal. It doesn't matter how small the scope of the change is, they thought it was a good idea to apply mandatory AI post-processing to user content without consent or acknowledgement.
Secret experiments are never meant to be little one-offs, they're always carried out with the goal of executing a larger vision. If they cared about user input, they'd make this a configurable setting.
The idea of it being "without consent" is absurd. Your phone doesn't ask you for consent to apply smoothing to the Bayer filter, or denoising to your zoom. Sites don't ask you for consent to recompress your video.
This is just computational image processing. Phones have been doing this stuff for many years now.
This isn't adding new elements to a video. It's not adding body parts or changing people's words or inventing backgrounds or anything.
And "experiments" are just A/B testing. If it increases engagement, they roll it out more broadly. If it doesn't, they get rid of it.
Yeah, the big video platforms are constantly working on better ways to store and deliver video. If this stuff is applying to some workflow that automatically generates Shorts from real videos... whatever. Very similar to experimenting with different compression schemes. Video compression can differ on a per-shot basis now!
If you want to make pristine originals available to the masses, seed a torrent.
Given Google's history and the fact they rolled this out without notice or consent makes me feel comfortable saying "yet". If YouTube can get away with making GenAI YouTubers (via some likeness sign off buried in the T&C) without paying the originals I'm sure they'd love to do so. All the ad impressions with none of the payout to creators.
Their AI answers box (and old quick answer box) has already affected traffic to outside sites with answers scraped from those sites. Why wouldn't they make fake YouTubers?
Certainly not the first time something like this happened. During Vietnam, the US Army sent soldiers into combat with the M16 knowing that it had major issues that often caused it to jam. We’ll never know exactly people were killed by such a bad decision, but it quickly became infamous early in the war.[0]
There was nothing wrong with the M16/AR-15; the Marines had been issued the weapon in Vietnam as well (with different ammo than the army received) and it worked fine.
The issue was that the Army Bureau of Ordinance insisted on making 5.56mm ammunition with a propellant composition different from the one that Stoner had specified when designing the weapon, one that was entirely unsuitable and led to jamming.
Yes but it was worse due to design problems with the gun as well, seeing as how they did change it - I.e. adding chrome plating to the chamber and barrel which reduced fouling, and actually including a proper cleaning kit.
The chrome lining was done to significantly increase the service life of the barrel and to reduce corrosion in some environments. Prior to the M16, chrome lining was only used on machine guns due to the volume of rounds that went through them.
Far more rounds were put through the M16 by soldiers than prior weapons like the M14. Despite the chrome lining, M16 barrels still wear out over time and have to be replaced.
"in some environments" being the Vietnam war the US was involved in, in reaction to casualty reports where a large number of men were killed with their rifles broken down for repair likely due to mid battle stoppages.
And the same applies to number of rounds: the entire point of a 5.56mm cartridge was to give soldiers more ammo so they could sustain volume of fire in the field: it was a design goal.
If design changes fixed a serious flaw with a weapon, then it was a flawed design.
There was nothing wrong with the M16, it worked very well for a number of years. Then the US Army unilaterally modified the ammunition to save money in such a way as to make it no longer within specification for the weapon. Predictably, the use of out-of-spec ammunition caused issues.
The Army never changed the ammunition back. Instead, the weapon was modified (M16A1) to be compatible with the formerly out-of-spec ammunition and the issues went away.
You can't blame the M16 for the US Army using ammunition that wasn't fit for purpose.
A dishonourable mention for the original A1 version of the British SA80, which required high levels of lubrication to operate properly, and as a result often jammed in sandy environments... like Kuwait and Iraq [1].
I seem to recall the A0 also used to yeet the magazine when you ran with it across your chest on the sling, because the mag release button had no guard (but that might be me misremembering it. )
Are you referring to the M9/92? I don't own one but I've heard it's one of those guns that everyone who was issued one hates it, and everyone who bought one on the civilian market loves it - the implication being they just don't shoot it enough to run into any issues.
Curious to see how this works out. The flight booking example is interesting because it’s one of the last purchase powers I’d want to hand over to an AI.
If it gets a major travel detail wrong, purchases a business class ticket on accident, etc. and I need to adjust the booking by calling the airline, then I’m way less happy than I was if I just bought the ticket myself. Not to mention what happens when Google flights gets a UI refresh and knocks the accuracy rate of the agent down even 10%.
Digital criminals are gonna love it, though.
I’m personally much more interested in automating browser tasks that aren’t economically valuable because that mitigates the risk.
UI refreshes knocking down simulator realism is a real issue that we're still trying to solve.
I think this will probably be a mixture of automated QA/engineering and scale.
Another interesting path is actually partnering directly with software providers to offer their platforms as simulators IF they see there is a competitive advantage to training agents to perform well on their UI.
This idea we're really excited about, but it would require a company to see real revenue potential in enabling agentic access vs not. I'd say we're still on the "block them out" phase of the internet (ex. see Cloudflare's recent post about bot detection: https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-unde...)
Why are flight bookings the go to example always? For most people, booking a flight happens infrequently, is a non-trivial expense (to your point), and is not that burdensome to do yourself.
We agree that as a demo flight booking is probably overused.
However, in talking with my AI Labs, their perspective on flight booking is a little different. "Solving" flight booking requires the AI agent to solve a LOT of hard problems. Namely, personalization, context, weighing multiple options, interacting with the UI, math, then wrapping that all up into a coherent response. The thought process is IF a computer use agent is able to solve flight booking well, then we will have developed many other powerful primitives that will scale to other problems.
So as a standalone use case, I'm inclined to agree this might not be where the most agent traction is seen. However, as a research/capability goal, there are some generalizations that could apply to other very important use cases.
It's because most people have done it; and it's infrequent and sufficiently expensive that makes it enough of a pain point to make for a good example. Because it's infrequent, most people don't have a rigorous well-practiced system for how to go about it to get the optimal ticket for their particular circumstances for that flight, and because it can be somewhat expensive, there's a bit of a burden taken on in order to optimize for price as well, especially given all the shenanigans airlines play with pricing.
If you're rich, you can just look for the ticket at the time you like on your preferred airline and buy a first class ticket, whatever the price, for whenever you want to fly, even if it's tomorrow. For the rest, that's not practical. So the flight search has to begin a few months out, with the burden of doing multiple searches (in incognito mode) across various airlines and/or aggregators, in order to optimize various factors. This takes a non-trivial amount of time. Add in looking for hotels and rental cars, and for some it's fun,
for others it's an annoying burdensome chore that stands in the way of being on vacation.
It's just an example use case though. Similar to how "robot maid" that folds clothes isn't the be-all or end-all for robotics, if an AI is able to perform that task, it's going to have capabilities necessary for performing a wide variety of other tasks.
I don't know about you, but it takes me hours to book a flight if it's for my family, because I'm usually booking a flight, a car, and a hotel, and I have to constantly min-max the costs between hotels on certain days, flights on certain days, and cars on certain days.
If it's not burdensome for you, then you're either taking very simple trips or you're so rich that you don't care.
> I have to constantly min-max the costs between hotels on certain days, flights on certain days, and cars on certain days.
I agree it's a burdensome chore!
Just wondering - your hotel stay can't be less than the days between your flight. For car, one can manage to cut down with Uber/public transport, but still turns out to be expensive than a rental car.
> your hotel stay can't be less than the days between your flight.
This is exactly right, and why it's such a pain. Because if I have a bit of flexibility, I have to figure out which flying day is best for prices and seats, and then see if the hotel is more or less between those days.
For example, if I fly on Tuesday I can save $400 vs flying Sunday. But if I want to stay a week, the hotel may not have the following Sunday. So now I have to look an alternate hotel, which may not include parking like the first one, and so on and so on. There are so many variables that can all change based on the day of arrival and departure.
We used to have travel agents for this (and still do!). But I've used travel agents, and I've used (other people's) personal assistants, but no one ever gets it right. I only trust myself, my wife, and my sister in law to get this right.
Having an AI agent that gets this right would be incredible.
> For car, one can manage to cut down with Uber/public transport, but still turns out to be expensive than a rental car.
If I'm getting a car it's usually because it's a place where Lyft and public transport won't work. Otherwise I always default to public transport and then Lyft if necessary.
Recently, I've been travelling for events, so my dates are fixed, and that's why I could not connect with your scenario! Travel bookings and other web searches are ripe for automation. Even if the system can bring down the search results to the final 3 instead of a complete automation, I'd still call it a win. Shameless plug, I'm working on such an agent, although currently at a very early stage.
> I only trust myself, my wife, and my sister in law to get this right.
Can you please elaborate on that? Do others not look at cost savings across the board and focus only on one item out of all?
AI vibe coding tools already prefer some solutions over others, probably because of training data distribution/post training preferences. This is leading to massive revenue differences and growth compared to companies that have not optimized to be AI agent preferred/in their training data distribution.
I imagine something similar will happen over time, where companies who are in the training data distribution get used by agents more, while others who neglect this get slowly phased out because systems don't know how to use them (out of distribution).
I use Cursor with Claude Code running in the integrated terminal (within a dev container in yolo mode). I'll often have multiple split terminals with different Claude Code instances running on their own worktrees. I keep Cursor around because I love the code completions.
Historically, the infantry ranks in the US military tend to come from the working class, not the wealthy. If MOH recipients disproportionately come more from forward deployed troops than the officer commissioned class, it makes sense that there’s a larger contingent of recipients who are immigrants or come from immigrant families.
Apologies for repeating myself but this directly addresses a question I posed in a sub-comment: of the total population, at the time, what proportion were considered working class?
The reason being, class distinction would only count if non-working classes were very statistically significant. Having never examined this before, I'm having a hard time getting solid information, and it appears superfically that the class distinctions of today may not quite apply.
I'm operating under the hypothesis that the vast majority of the population would have been considered "working class", probably with a variety of sub-strata within (think hobo who occassionaly works vs. prosperous sustenance farm who's a pillar of the community).
Was there an excess of places in officer school for middle class+, or did they have to compete for their place? If they couldn't break in, was it socially acceptable to choose not to fight with the troops?
How is the database migration support for these tools?
Needing to support clients that don’t phone home for an extended period and therefore need to be rolled forward from a really old schema state seems like a major hassle, but maybe I’m missing something. Trying to troubleshoot one-off front end bugs for a single product user can be real a pain, I’d hate to see what it’s like when you have to factor in the state of their schema as well
I can't speak to the other tools, but we built PowerSync using a schemaless protocol under the hood, specifically for this reason. Most of the time you don't need to implement migrations at all. For example adding a new column just works, as the data is already there when the schema is rolled forward.
If he does send troops to Chicago as he says he intends to, the court challenges are going to be critical.
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