After I moved to Beijing, my first job was at a company opening a network of village banks. The villages had a population of around 1 million. SF has 850k people.
There's a theoretical limit of 1400 villages in the entire country at that size, and that's assuming zero population in cities. I don't see how it can be true.
If a village has 1 mil, then China is probably entirely made up of something like 40 cities and 500 villages, plus some smaller stuff.
From the perspective, I would think a city of 800k is definitely midsized if you compare with China.
I'm from Brazil, and we would definitely say 1 million people is a midsized city there (I don't live there anymore). For example, have you ever heard of Campinas? Well, it has a population of over 1.2 million people, and everyone I know around the area call it a midsized city.
But no, no one in their right mind would say a 1 million people city is a village :D.
China has over 100 cities with > 1 million population. (113 to be precise).
The 100th-ranked US city (Huntsville, AL) has a population of 225k. (The 113th, Fayetville, NC, has just under 210k.)
San Francisco, with 808k population, would rank 126th in China. Not "small rural", but definitely a 2nd or 3rd tier city at best. (The comparable Chinese city, Anqing, is a prefecture-level city in the southwest of Anhi Province, and has, to boot, 631 years on SF.)
Consider that Wuhan, a city in China you'd likely never have heard of prior to early 2020, has a population of 11 million, more than any US city, and ranks 9th overall in population within China.
The city of San Jose is spread over a huge area (a good fraction of Santa Clara Valley aka Silicon Valley). The downtown area of San Jose which you might think of as a city is rather small.
The convex hull of San Jose also encloses a ton of junk that is not San Jose because of their unincorporated enclaves and incorporated exclaves. San Jose badly fails my test of whether a city is good or bad based on the geometric complexity of their boundary.
yeah, SF is only 800k people, it is pretty small, and the sunset, richmond, parkside, excelcior, and visitation valley neighborhoods are basically single-family subrubs.
Realistically, SF is only a city in it's north-east quadrant. the rest are cute, sleepy suburbs. And I say that as someone who lives in one of those neighborhoods.
I will wager a box of donuts the like-hiding was due to some combination of politics and Musk’s embarrassment for being called out every time he liked some cringe porn-adjacent tweet.
There’s a substantial difference between governments trying to provide a service (which they are generally terrible at) and paying for a service on behalf of those who cannot afford it (which they tend to be reasonably competent at).
EBT is a pretty good program. Government grocery stores would almost certainly be an abomination (just ask your local public school cafeteria or military base mess hall).
Edit: adgjlsfhk1 is correct that “generally terrible” is overstated and simplistic. Hopefully better take downthread.
the idea that the government is inherently bad at providing services is just very silly. roads, postal service, and national parks are all really great services that the government provides. the idea that the government only does things well by paying private companies to do them just doesn't have basis in reality.
I take back “generally terrible”. How about “often spotty and rarely held accountable in practice”?
It’s not that governments literally cannot provide good services — it’s that when government appoints itself as a monopolist, outcomes and accountability become effectively disconnected, unless the service is so high-stakes and the quality is so abysmal that it rises to “vote the bastards out” territory.
Agreed that the government isn't inherently bad at providing services, but I do think it's important to define how we measure "bad." For example, does "bad" mean the UX is bad? If so, then government isn't inherently bad at it (though can be, see next paragraph). If we define "bad" as "less economical (i.e. more expensive/wasteful of resources) then it does have a general tendency toward bad.
It largely comes down to who is running the thing, and do they care? With private sector, they are forced to care because otherwise it will affect revenue and brand value, which will get the leader fired. The consumer is empowered with ability to spend their $ elsewhere, which rewards the better service and punishes the worse (note that this is becoming much less true in the age of giant corps, especially big tech). With government services, (particularly in monopolistic situations like the DMV), the consumer is largely powerless. They have no choice but to use the system given, and if they aren't happy they can complain but that complaint won't have any teeth (unless they happen to be politically connected of course).
tldr: I most agree, but it depends on how you define "bad"
> Military bases run PXs and commissaries and these stores have reasonable (mid to high mid) quality goods.
The PXs are pretty good but are priced comparably or higher than free-market stores off-base, and even still are subsidized by base funds. The Class Six is very well done and potentially profitable, though that's just a guess.
The commissaries are much more expensive than off-base stores and likewise are subsidized by base funds. For the most part only the officer's and senior NCO's families can afford to shop at the Commissary.
Disclaimer: I left active duty in the late 00s so things might have changed since then
This is so disgusting. The idea of milking maximum profit from such a basic human function really highlights the way extreme capitalism trends toward evil.
I agree very much in principle, but pragamatically (i.e. in the real world) this strikes me as utopian and impossible, at least until human nature changes.
Toilets are a scarce resource (economically speaking), and thus there must be some rationing method in place. If it's not monetary, it will be something else. In a perfect world there would be plentiful bathrooms and everyone would diligently clean up after themselves and take the trash out when full, so operating costs would be minimal (power and water bill and occassional maintenance). In the real world though, people don't do that, meaning you have to hire people to clean. Some people will also vandalize, which gets expensive in a hurry. Public (government-run) restrooms tend to be even worse because they aren't actively monitored, and for whatever reason people like to trash them.
It's a proposed alternative to having no option at all. Restrooms are too expensive to maintain and prone to misuse to justify maintaining free options, which is why public restrooms have become virtually non-existent in US cities, following the eradication of pay restrooms. It is a much more moral option than giving the public no option at all, other than to become a customer at a business in order to be granted access to the business's restrooms, which would typically be far more expensive.
In some places, like Phoenix, the situation is currently so bad that even paying customers cannot use the restroom in some smaller shops, due to the large homeless population. Having any option at all, whatever the cost, would be a far better alternative.
Maybe the "prone to misuse" bit is the problem, and we need to address the underlying issues there. In most of rural and suburban America, all public businesses have bathrooms freely available for the public (i.e., no asking for a key or whatever), and free, clean government-run public bathrooms exist in public spaces like parks or "downtown" areas. I see this slowly shifting, but obviously the problem is changing behaviors and not some feature of human nature.
I agree that it is largely an urban issue, but it is a serious issue, which likely exists in large part due to the greater density of urban homeless populations and drug related crime. Solving these problems is arguably far less trivial than re-establishing pay restrooms in the urban US.
Yes. But, having the freedom to watch something and decide for yourself is a different question. 16 is two years short of military age, and old enough to pay taxes on your income.
16 does seem late for a first phone and likely they will find the phone necessary by the time their child reaches high school (age 14). Still, I appreciate the goal of trying to protect their child from the always connected lifestyle until they have some mental tools and life experience to understand and manage it.
My kid is college age now and a couple years ahead of the first iPad generation. There is a huge difference in how those kids handle the internet even though they are nearly the same age.
Two or three times a year, I schedule a dozen emails to my wife. Just little missives that say something sweet that I appreciate about her. I spread them out over the next few months, so she gets little reminders from me that say I love you.
When I’m staring down a long, busy day and she looks run down, I schedule an email a few hours later to say “Hope your day is going well, you’re awesome and I’m grateful to have you.”
When my wife gets the emails, I’m almost certainly not thinking about her. I’m usually at work focused on work.
Personally, I think that if there's time to schedule an email, then might as well just send a quick text message. That's more personal and allows for an instant response. I'd also never send an email for personal communication like that, but maybe that's just me.
Not sure if you are disagreeing with my comment but I don't see any contradiction. You are showing your wife that you are thinking about her and that you care about her wellbeing. The fact that there's a time lag between the moment you think about her and the moment she gets the message, isn't an issue.
I recently got into TCGs for the first time in 20 years (I’m in my 40s), and holy hell is the structured activity with recurring people liberating. I’ve made more fiends in the last six weeks than I had in the previous three years.
The formula is simple: show up in the same place at the same time, over and over again, as part of a group that does the same.
This is why so many friendships and relationships come out of work and school.
For me, it happened by accident, first in the techno music scene (clubs and parties are third places), and then again in the poker scene in Las Vegas. 100% of my local friends in Vegas are math/strategy nerds.
I had a similar path. In the 90’s I was very much into Magic. Too much. But in 2017 I picked up Pokémon TCG and enjoyed it immensely. The local scene was strong pre-covid, and regional tournaments were a blast.
I work on a small internal ERP, and our new UX guy said “nobody needs all this info”. And I said “agreed, nobody uses more than six columns. But the key stakeholders can only agree on 5.”
I think that’s the key: nobody needs 20 buttons on a microwave, but some people love defrost or popcorn or whatever.
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