I fondly remember my organic chemistry lab professor giving us all a lecture that was something like this:

"I see that you children have learned how good acetone is at cleaning glassware. And you are correct: it is excellent. However, you cannot pour it down the sink and we have to pay for hazardous waste disposal. So use soap, water, and elbow grease instead."

I'm an anarchist, and my take is that anarchism isn't pacifism, and "no coercion" is a bad summary. It's more about the absence of hierarchical coercion and instead distribution of power to all people and communities.

If you're going around burning down houses, your anarchist neighbors are going to use force to take away your matches and gasoline if you don't stop.

A lemming that has taken off is https://startrek.website/c/risa !

I love my stream of Star Trek shitpost.

Ironically, as I've become more senior (11+ years at a faang company) I've had to do less and less of that "look around and understand everything" work because of time pressure. But I rely on my experience to be more confident that I can ignore the details and focus on the reason I'm in this file.

Well, that, and if it gets too messy I give up and call in a junior engineer...

Constant capitalist and corporatist propaganda: I sleep

A single anticapitalist idea: real shit?

Ok but in writing you do, at least if you're my college professors and want to make your students sad

他 third person singular, neutral 她 she 它 it (non-human, especially inanimate) 牠 it (animal) 祂 third person singular (divine)

"well actually" room temperature superconductors do exist, quite definitely! ... But only at 100 gigapascals of pressure. https://uspex-team.org/static/file/Troyan2022_ufn227g_High-temperature%20superconductivity%20in%20hydrides.pdf

Still really cool, but not useful for engineering.

I agree that this paper needs to be replicated before we get excited.

One way you might resolve this is to get everybody talking about it without the boss there. I bet nobody likes the policy. Maybe everyone would agree to not give a reason, or to give the same reason that is an obvious lie?

You're gonna have to explain a little more about this because on its face I don't see why I should read what a specialist in the philosophy of science has to say about an ideology based on a historical and sociological analysis of the world. They're totally different spheres.

Plus, Marxism is not the entire left, and there's a whole world of thought out there that very likely covers whatever issues you're thinking of.

It's important to not only engage with theoretical economics but also look at studies in practice.

https://journalistsresource.org/economics/rent-control-regulation-studies-to-know/ is a good overview with four papers on the effects of rent control in different locations in the US. They don't always find that it harms construction! That means something else is going on. We should figure that out and fix that problem while at the same time having rent control to keep people housed.

I live in NYC and looking around me it's clear that sky-high rents that have doubled in a few years are not meaningfully driving new construction. With one exception that is: nearby New Jersey. Jersey City has one of the strongest rent control laws around and is booming.

Why is that? I can't say for sure but I think the biggest one is zoning. NYC almost doesn't allow new construction, so builders don't do much of it, especially if you look at it proportionately to the current population. NYC suburbs in directions other than New Jersey nearly don't build at all because they're controlled by single family homeowners who refuse to allow densification.

So in this context, we can impose rent control and not harm housing because we're already not building in NYC. We should also figure out how to build the housing we need! Maybe once we do that we can reexamine rent control, and maybe it will be needed less. Maybe by then the revolution will be here and we won't need landlords at all...

In the US, tap water is regulated to higher standards than bottled! In the rare cases where there is a problem with it, everyone gets notified, for example http://www.msdh.state.ms.us/msdhsite/_static/23,0,148.html.

NYC prides itself on having really good water, both for local food production, and just for taste. NYC did this by buying up land around its reservoirs further inland and building a large aqueduct system. The water isn't even filtered!

That said, some locations have unpalatable water, such as towns near the ocean that get their water from nearby wells.

You might consider cisalpine gaul and transalpine gaul. Regions where the Gauls lived either on "this side" (the Italian side) of the Alps, or the France side.