Genuine question, how is giving even more (hyper)local control gonna solve it? This is the exact breeding ground for NIMBYism and the like. The author doesn't really present an argument in favor of that, just sort of drops it as an assertion in the end with a CYA "but yea maybe I'm wrong".
It turns 'sell your house to a developer' into a prisoner's dilemma. If every other block is zoned single-family and your block votes to rezone for large apartment buildings, the value of your property goes up. Of course, then every block should do vote yes, and then the value of everyone's property goes down. And lots of housing gets built.
(City-wide NIMBYism is a solution to the prisoner's dilemma: band together to require that nobody be allowed to redevelop.)
I think the unstated assumption is that if you limit the number of people who have a say enough, a developer could just offer kickbacks to the lot. It's hard to change people's mind by giving a lot of people a little money. It's much easier to give fewer people a modest amount of money.
The Collective Action Problem. Locals have a concentrated interest in preventing development. The broader public's interest in there being housing outweighs that, but it's diffuse. You see the same thing play out over and over again in cities around the world: it's so much easier to organize opposition to housing than support that no housing gets built.
Just take this a step further, bring "local" all the way down to "the person who owns the land". Let the locals decide what to do on the land they own. If they want an apartment, or a store, or a giant mansion in the middle of 20 acres, as long as they own the land let them do it! They're the most local individual, right?
In any HN discussion on housing there is inevitably a couple of people acting like you’re trying to build a krushchevka on their lawn. It’s like if we pretended all detached housing was like the infamous “groverhaus”[0]. The user you’re replying to appears to be getting a kick out of trolling as a NIMBY, slightly odd but it takes all sorts I suppose.
I mean, I spend a lot of time discussing this stuff with actual local development opponents, so arguments like these in the abstract just aren't that aggravating. I'm often happy for people to mount the most superficial arguments against things I believe in; might as well lay the flimsiness of the opposition out clearly.
This is my flavor of activism. FWIW, I've participated in activism to stop destruction of green space and nature preserves from commercial interests. Stopping the expansion of urban sprawl, mcdonalds and walmart, and destruction of greenery (whether it be housing or a self storage business) is something I'm passionate about.
If you don't want an apartment block on your lot, you don't have to build one! But if your neighbor wants to build one, what moral right do you have to stop them?
Developer: "Hi neighbor, would you like me to build a house so that someone can live in it? Do keep in mind that it would increase housing supply in your area, thus increasing supply and putting downward pressure on your property's value. That okay?"
Because "local issues" aren't just local issues, as much as NIMBYs hope to frame it that way for persuasion purposes. There are larger global effects. In this case, a crippling housing crisis, leading to disenfranchisement and alienation of large swathes of the populace, leading to human suffering, inequality, and political extremism.
Nothing, so long as their decisions don't abridge other fundamental rights. I can't speak to Ireland, but we've pretty clearly in the U.S. created a regime that fundamentally violates foundational principles of private property.
This seems like an unwarranted assumption. Some people are going to want to keep others out, other people will have a different attitude. Why would you assume the incentives run the same way for everyone?
When the phenomenon locks out development in an entire municipality, we can stop discussing it as a benign consumer/resident preference, and start discussing it as the public policy problem it is. That's where we're at now.
In the US, I look at it this way: once you get your own school system, you surrender the moral authority to erect barriers to entry for new residents.
They don't, but empirically the overwhelming majority of people who are property owners in some area will either do nothing or actively oppose new housing being built in their area.
The problem is which locals end up being those that dominate the deciding.
What we've seen happen over the decades is that those with the most amount of time and money available end up drowning out the voices of others, as they have more time to devote.
So inevitably older, wealthy, established interests end up dominating the discussion as younger, marginalized, working class people are too busy just trying to get by to engage in local planning.
Accordingly the local consultative process ends up favouring the older wealthy and established land owning locals and not the marginalized working renter class locals.
The math gets trickier when you consider monthly payments. At very low interest rates an extra 500k borrowed might only increase monthly payment by ~1500 which can be partially offset by $500-1000 less in property taxes per month depending on the municipality in Canada compared to US.
I don’t understand how [0] suggests Twitter is dying. Is a power law distribution of content production on a social network that strange? What % of HN comments come from the top N accounts? Is Twitter lying about growing user numbers?
They wouldn't extend an offer to you in this case. Acqui-hires have no upside for employees and barely any for founders. Some small return to investors to sign off on the acquihire. Usually most people still have to interview for their jobs.
Acquihires do often have employee upside, in the form of large stock-based compensation grants or bonus payouts, typically spread over a vesting period of several years. There's no point in the acquihire if you don't retain the employees, and relative to the cost to acquire the company these payouts aren't huge.
You're right that often people do have to interview to remain employed (and thus to receive these benefits).
Would that be a full-on interview as if they were applying for a job, or just some kind of "cultural fit" screening?
It seems contradictory to me: if the hire is important enough to spend a lot of money on (even via an earn-out) then why alienate them with uncertainty about the offer?
I guess the assumption is they don't have a better offer?
But if a few key employees get together then don't they have the ability to scuttle the whole deal? "Keep doing this thing that Apple was willing to buy, but on better terms, and look for a new buyer" sounds like a pretty good alternative to "take Apple's earn-out on Apple's terms with nonzero risk of getting nothing."
It varies between no interview at all, and a full interview exactly like a new hire. Both are done. Interviews are more common these days, because if they're skipped, existing employees may resent the acquihire folks for not having to jump through the same hoops.
This is another reason for the vesting payouts for employees. If there wasn't some reward, and you had to do a full interview, why not just interview somewhere else?
Regarding your last question, it is true that a cabal of disgruntled employees could cause problems for an acquihire. I have seen cases where the acquisition was contingent on a certain number of engineers passing the interviews. Another good reason for a big financial incentive.
I don't think that would lead to better terms in a new deal. The next buyer is likely to learn that the company's employees boned the interviews, which is going to look bad.
I appreciate that having to whiteboard a recursive permutation generator is a rite-of-passage for most of us, it gets old, quick. One's ability to do well in a whiteboard interview is not the best indicator of one's ability to deliver value to the organisation. If I were a hiring-manager I'd prefer to go-over the candidate's portfolio of work rather than grill them over the computational complexity of a logic puzzle.
If some new people from an acquired company were to join and I heard they skipped the third-year CS undergrad oral finals simulation step I'd be glad that there's some progress being made - I wouldn't feel resentful at all.
"I had it bad when I was younger, therefore you should too" is amongst the worst our instinctive behavioral tropes.
In my experience with most acquihires, your “upside” is basically a new hire package at the mid-high end (sometimes I see low) of external offers + a potentially expedited interview process.
The hypothetical case I was describing was when the employees (say, 1-5 people) are also the sole shareholders.
Supposing I write a _killer app_ with a friend and get a patent for it - and it ends up with tens of millions of users quickly - and Apple really wants it for themselves at short notice (too short a notice for them to try to recreate the software code, sic their legal team to invalidate the patent and market it to get enough users) - how far would Apple bend to accommodate my _think different_ attitude?
You’re describing an acquisition including IP and not an acquihire. I’m not sure how much Apple cares about idiosyncrasies of founders for potential full acquisitions but I imagine they matter quite a bit for a run of the mill acquihire.
Uber is in a much better position to capitalize on Eats as well as non US recovery (given that it seems the US is on one of the worst paths of most developed economies). Hell if anything I can see some Western European countries finally unbanning Uber just to stimulate some more economic activity. Italy/Spain/Germany can't afford to be as protectionist moving forward.
Why should it have? Progress is always incremental. Even before civilization there were minute steps towards organization from just pure hunter-gatherer days.
Just because the neolithic period started 12-15k years ago doesn't mean somebody woke up one day with a modern brain smart enough to plant things.
I don’t want to denigrate the achievements of those involved, but it probably didn’t go from seeing seeding plant to, a ha, planting crops. It likely consisted of a long series of very much smaller incremental steps.
1. Hunter gatherers collect seeds, but drop some near their temporary settlement.
2. The next time they stay in the area, they notice food plants growing where they dropped the seeds, so they don’t have to travel as far to collect them.
3. They start deliberately spreading seeds so there will be even more there next time.
4. They start clearing land to make more space to spread the seeds on.
5. The quantity of seeds they can gather at the site meets or exceeds their needs, so now they don’t need to travel to gather enough and can settle down.
Throughout the process they discover little tricks, like scratching the ground before scattering their seeds, or which kind of ground is best to clear and sow, which seeds grow best, etc, etc. This could take many generations but once the process starts under the right conditions with the right seeds in the right area it snowballs.
Writing is also a far greater (/ less likely) achievement than many people realise. You need a language, enough social structure to create a demand for written instructions/messages beyond simple pictures, and an Einstein-level linguistic genius to figure out how to break down and codify language utterances in a way that can readily be learnt and understood by the general population.
Some languages such as Guniyandi have only recently undergone this conversion [0], in fact there are likely thousands of languages still without writetn forms [1]
But writing didn't (IIRC) start with writing down speech. It started with accountancy, with recoding taxes payed and owed. So it arises with agricultural states, it's part of what lets a king rule so many peasants that merely having his brothers remember who owes how much doesn't work anymore.
Figuring out that it could be used to write sentences took a few millennia after that. And only after that came enough simplification for people other than palace/temple employees to learn it.
Interesting. I looked this up and there's a Wikipedia page listing the earliest written accounts [0]. Looks like joint earliest are Egyptian hieroglyphs in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen [1] and ancient Sumerian tablets [2]-[3]. It seems like a lot of early writing was also concerned with religion although a lot of the slightly later writing did cover economic and administrative records.
These seem to define writing to mean only things with which you can write sentences, which is fair enough, but excludes earlier use of symbols for counting (of taxes!). I have in mind things like [1], or this from [2]:
"The original Sumerian writing system derives from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing by using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing were gradually replaced around 2700–2500 BC by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform), at first only for logograms, but developed to include phonetic elements by the 29th century BC. About 2600 BC, cuneiform began to represent syllables of the Sumerian language."
Ah, yes I failed to pick up on that distinction in your last post. Now I almost want to add "sophisticated trade system" to the list of written language prerequisites.
If we were trapped in a hunter-gatherer society, even with our advanced brains today... it would take a very smart person to invent a city and/or writing. And you'd need the support of the entire hunter-gatherer society to bring you food and resources to fund the inventions.
Cities invent the aristocracy, a group of people who are dedicated to advancement of culture and technology. Agriculture and Pottery provide a way for transportation and storage of resources (food especially), supporting the aristocracy.
At which point, true inventions can begin. You can't invent new tools if you're too busy hunting for food every day of your life.
IIRC, many Europeans were throwing Axes in the Dark Ages, just ~1500 years ago.
Even if the bow was invented, creating good fetching and requiring the mass production of fragile arrows makes it a poor weapon in the Dark ages.
You pretty much have to invent mass production + commodities, standardizing the arrowhead before Bows become superior to spear and/or axe throwing. Once "any" arrow can work on "any" bow, you are golden. But this commodity idea is very difficult to come up with.
Shoot an arrow into a deer, and the arrow is ruined. You need to build a new arrow. Throw a javelin or Axe into a deer, and you can use the same Javelin / Axe on the next deer as well.
2. arrows are a distance weapon. You can take out prey or enemy at a distance. Throwing an axe is very short range.
3. throwing an axe means you get one shot. Then you're weaponless.
4. throwing a metal axe is much more effective than a stone axe. I seriously doubt throwing a stone axe is very effective - you'd be better off just throwing a rock.
> 3. throwing an axe means you get one shot. Then you're weaponless.
Romans carried 2 Pilum, a shortsword, and a shield. You had two shots, after which you rushed in with your swords.
Yeah, Longbowmen are obviously superior. But if you have 10,000 Longbowmen with 60 arrows per man, you require a production-capacity of 60,000 arrows per battle. That's a lot of goose feathers, even if you're recycling a significant chunk of arrows.
Note that the modern arrow has fletching for accuracy. Ancient arrows didn't have fletching: no spin, no accuracy.
Before the middle ages, mass production of arrows in this capacity was basically impossible. The British innovation to war wasn't so much the Longbow (there were plenty of archers before the British...), it was the invention of commodity mass produced arrows... which supported the Longbowman as a major unit of warfare.
Even the Roman Legionaries used Pilum (aka: Javelins) as their ranged weapon of choice. Bows existed (see the Sagittarii), but were an auxiliary (and often non-Roman) force.
------------
Slingers (!!) were still used in Roman times. Now a Sling... THAT is an ideal ancient weapon. A trained slinger can kill a Lion or Bear, and you only had to find rocks to throw. Mass production of sling-bullets (really, just a shaped rock) is easy, even with an army marching to a distant location.
Slingers used rocks, clay, and even lead bullets throughout history. They were effectively the longbowmen before the British learned to mass produce arrows.
In fact, the ancient world believed that Slings had greater range and accuracy than bows. Since fletching won't be invented for another 1000+ years, ancient arrows had very limited range and accuracy.
> Ancient arrows didn't have fletching: no spin, no accuracy.
I couldn't find any mention of when spin was added. But I would think it pretty darned hard to align the feathers so precisely that it wouldn't spin anyway. Bird feathers aren't straight, either.
Arrows date back 64,000 years (wikipedia). A long time before the Romans.
Equipping 10,000 soldiers with any sort of kit will be a major undertaking.
Most any bird feathers can be used for arrows. Not just goose.
> Equipping 10,000 soldiers with any sort of kit will be a major undertaking.
Difficulty of that kit is the real question.
Slingers would need 20 lead bullets, one of the lowest melting point substances in the world. If lead were unavailable, slingers would make due with stone, or even clay bullets.
In contrast, equipping 20 arrows to 10,000 archers would be an incredibly more complicated undertaking. You need arrowheads, those arrowheads need to fit shafts. Even without fletching, building an arrowhead design that fits different width sticks of wood is an incredibly complicated undertaking. Especially if you only have access to tools from ancient-times.
To accurately launch the arrow, you must consistently make the same arrow (or extremely similar arrows). That's just how it works. Its far easier to make 20x lead bullets (or 20x clay bullets, or 20x stone bullets) that are all consistent... than it is to make 20x arrows that are all consistent.
--------
It was a real innovation to standardize stick sizes, standardize goose feathers, and standardize arrowheads to equip the British Longbowman. There's a reason why that strategy only really took place in the Medieval period, the ancient world didn't have the tools or inventions needed to support mass-archer strategies.
