The model (HDRCX405) is wonderful, 30x optical zoom a real value-add over smartphones, but also I just love the ergonomics in general, very easy to pick it up, and start a video within a second.

That said, Sony discontinued the low-end handicam line last year (this model went from $200 new to $800 used), which is really unfortunately, right as I hope this niche might gain momentum.

Beyond this, I'd say that the true advantage of the iPod Classic was a matter of polish and UX:

* Dedicated buttons/wheel/etc that are tactile instead of a touchscreen interface (the Fiio M1 was button-and-wheel based, but it never approached the quality of Apple engineering); I see the jm21 has some side-based buttons for pause/forward/back, which is nice, but a touchscreen as main interface still grates * A way to interface with your albums that was delightful and visually dense (Cover Flow remains the single greatest music UI put forward)

We have a very strong archive going back a century until about 2015, but now wading through linkrot circa 2017 is miserable

One can imagine a better world in which pension programs are effectively time-independent w.r.t financing (neutral for growth or shrinking), and more financing comes from sources that are likely agnostic to growth or reduction (like Land Value Tax), but the politics here... are not trivial.

If these land rents are instead paid towards a tax, how wouldn't this make land less of a good investment?

We take it for granted that renting is just a form of having your money stolen by landowners, without realizing that this is a choice we make: we could just as easily administer the market so that absentee ownership ceases to be a smart bet.

It's certain not to give someone a consistent sound that they'll like, but it usually puts out interesting stuff.

If I may plug KZSU, on Stanford campus, as another college/community radio outlet in Silicon Valley.

...I worry all the time that, owing to the lack of affordable housing for the creative class, and the general lack of culture throughout the Silicon Valley, that there won't be enough energy to support all these radio stations.

If you're curious, don't be afraid to look into joining them! They both take on community members from throughout the area.

One reason may be that you are concerned that restricting the development of land would drive scarcity, leading land values to rise (which would cause your property tax to rise). You're effectively forced to pay for the cost of rising land prices.

...Now, if you are sheltered from rising land values, as per Prop 13, you now suffer no repercussions from a downzoning, and in fact may be completely indifferent to how the land market is behaving. Many homeowners are now free to act in their own best interest (which means downzoning), instead of being incentivized to create capacity for more housing.

Videogames really offer a fun space to explore economic instruments-- treating the real world as a laboratory is a bit more dangerous.

[0] http://seethecat.org/ep/2017-09-12.html

Now, we could reform our policies so that the landless get a fair shot, but realistically, what are the chances of this happening?

I'm curious how China currently views Sun Yat-sen's "Three Principles of the People"[0], one of which is Democracy. Does his philosophy attract any attention today?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Principles_of_the_People