The US used to use this logic until around 1960. It was a horrible country, at least if you were black. Even if a white person wanted to offer housing to black people, the white person was discriminated against. Collective private action used to reinforce a white supremacist social structure.

That's why we needed laws to require public services be available without discrimination based on race, religion, and various other protected classes.

"A private business can refuse anyone. That's because it is private."

A business may be privately owned while doing business with the public. That is quite different than a privately owned business which operates a private club.

Furthermore, businesses are subject to regulations that private people do not have. This is clear in organization structures like a limited company, where the company is a recognized as being legally distinct from its owners. These companies exist only because the government says so, which means the government can control what they can or cannot do.

It's also clear in places like licensing, where someone cannot simply say "I am a medical doctor" and offer medical services, and in other regulations like food safety, where restaurants -- even privately owned ones -- are held to standards which people don't have when cooking for themselves.

I oppose Real ID because I don't understand the problem it's trying to solve, and it seems expensive and cumbersome for at least some.

Real ID is a US-only issue, so I interpreted "If you are worried that your tenant might happen to be an illegal migrant" in the US context.

In the US case, quoting https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination :

> National origin discrimination involves treating workers (applicants or employees) unfavorably or favorably because they are from a particular country or part of the world, because of ethnicity or accent, or because they appear to be of a certain ethnic background (even if they are not).

> National origin discrimination can include preferring foreign workers, including workers with a particular visa status, over American workers.

> National origin discrimination also can involve treating people unfavorably because they are married to (or associated with) a person of a certain national origin.

In where you live, and where you used to live, a business can refuse service to a minority group? To indigenous people? What about to someone whose boyfriend is a member of a minority group?

You write 'exercising their basic rights of liking and disliking whoever they want (and consequently making or not making commercial agreements with them)'.

The "consequently" is doing some heavy lifting. In the US you have the basic rights of liking and disliking whoever you want. This is part of the freedom of assembly, which is the US way of saying the freedom of association.

Commercial agreements for services available to the public, however, are interpreted under different rules than private agreements. In the US you are free, under the law, to run a private club which refuses black people, Jewish people, women, and so one. These all exist.

However, if your club is open to the public, then you cannot discriminate on race, religion, or sex.

(Technically the US had federal civil rights laws, which under our federal system only apply to businesses large enough to nominally be involved in interstate commerce. However, state laws essentially extend this to everyone, with a few carve-outs for, for example, a women looking for a housemate and insisting they be another woman.)

Do you live in one of the handful of countries which are not signatory to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination? Quoting from https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/cerd.pdf

"In compliance with the fundamental obligations laid down in article 2 of this Convention, States Parties undertake to prohibit and to eliminate racial discrimination in all its forms and to guarantee the right of everyone, without distinction as to race, colour, or national or ethnic origin, to equality before the law, notably in the enjoyment of the following rights: ... The right to housing .. The right of access to any place or service intended for use by the general public, such as transport hotels, restaurants, cafes, theatres and parks."

Almost every third-world country is signatory, so it can't be some broad "third-world brain" viewpoint.

How does Real ID guarantee (1), (3), or (4) better than the state-issued non-Real IDs?

Places are not required to accept all Real IDs as proof of age. A bar, for example, may reject out-of-state ids for proof of age for those who look under 25.

Real ID does not prove citizenship (2). Non-citizen residents may have Real ID.

If a Canadian claims to be a snowbird tourist and wants to rent your guest house for five months, and you are worried that he might happen to be an illegal migrant and would risk being deported instead of paying rent next month, how does Real ID help?

He has no Real ID, only Canadian ID.

Note also that the Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination based on national origin. Landlords must provide equal opportunities regardless of nationality or immigration status.

Your proposed scenario seems like it breaks anti-discrimination law.

Even better, if that person shows you a valid tribal id from a federally recognized tribe, but which is not Real ID compliant, will you rent to him? The feds consider it a valid alternative to Real ID.

Some people in the US take longer than that to get Real ID. Like, elderly black people born in the Jim Crow era where birth records simply weren't kept for them. https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/florida-woman-says-she-ca... , or a missing 50-year-old marriage record - https://local12.com/news/nation-world/elderly-womans-real-id... .

Are you proving your age for a store or a concert venue for alcohol reasons? Don't people age out once they look over 25? Or do venues check for other reasons?

I've read about the big backlash when a national ID scheme for the UK is proposed, so I presume the benefits aren't all that high.

Like, when you check into a hotel, do you have to show ID? https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowTopic-g186216-i15-k1095345... tells me that it's uncommon. While in the US, I nearly always have to show ID for an overnight room.

Or, in many place in the US, everyone is IDed for alcohol, even if you are 70 years old, which annoys a lot of people who are clearly old enough to drink. Even better, since US privacy laws are so poor, these ID checks also gather demographic information, identify 'high-value customers', and collaborate with other places to ban people -- rather like the facial recognition systems you all have in the UK.

Maybe Brits want to avoid normalizing more id checks?

"If you are unable to provide the required acceptable ID, such as a passport or REAL ID, you can pay a $45 fee to use TSA ConfirmID. TSA will then attempt to verify your identity so you can go through security; however, there is no guarantee TSA can do so."

From https://thepointsguy.com/news/tsa-security-with-confirmid/ :

"TSA agents pull you aside for secondary screenings and to verify your identity. ... After looking me up in his system, [the supervisor] asked me a series of questions only I could answer (previous addresses and that sort of thing)."

You might consider it part of the Anglosphere mentality as Canada, the US, Australia, the Bahamas, and New Zealand don't have national ID.

I've never understood the problem that RealID is supposed to solve.

How is it TSA can accept a Veteran Health Identification Card or photo identification card issued by a federally recognized tribe, and the passports from every country in the world, but not a state-issued ID which is not REAL ID-compliant?

Of course that, like literacy tests for voting, will never be gamed.

FWIW, I'm saving up for an apartment.

As I understand it, the Vienna model has city-owned housing ("government agency"), but also has housing cooperatives and nonprofit housing - the latter two are not government owned, and still have a housing queue. I take it you are fine with the latter?

Just, I imagine, like you are okay with wanting to buy in a new housing project, only to have the developer say that all the lots are bid, but you can do on the wait list in case someone drops out?

If you rent, do you want agency in your living situation, or whatever the landlord deems appropriate for the property?

How disastrous would it seem if your sibling and spouse died, leaving 2 kids (8 and 10), which is too many for your small loft, so you need to move somewhere, but you can't afford to move? Wouldn't you like the government to help you have some agency?

Czech schools: "The new measure, which has been at the center of heated debates in recent months, will apply in kindergartens and elementary schools, most likely from September 2027. ... It doesn't apply, however, to secondary schools, universities or vocational schools."

The Stanford study was based on "more than 43,000 middle and high schools nationwide".

Also, while half of the authors are Stanford research associates, the other half are at other institutions. The publication is a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

And from the preregistration, "Our measure of treatment (i.e., whether a given school has a true phone ban at a particular point in time) is based on organizing sales and shipping data from Yondr (i.e., a company that sells lockable phone pouches)", a company they partnered with for the study.

How .. odd. Is sales data for a single company really the right way to tell if a school has a true phone ban?

Do you think socialists should embrace higher prices for everyone over longer times for everyone?

Even without an explicit wait list, I've been saving money for years and still don't have enough for a down payment to own in the neighborhood I prefer. The price growth seems to match my savings.

And unlike a wait list, I don't have a rough ETA on when I'll have enough money.

It's not like there's only a single price vs. wait list time trade-off. I could live in the suburbs, where it's certainly cheaper, but where commute time increases and local options are reduced.

I think that finding reasonable housing quickly, where you can wait two years until moving into your desired housing area, sounds embraceable.

When you say "reconstructing from having read it elsewhere", does that mean you also didn't read the linked-to FT piece?

The "but it’s a single pool" cannot be a correct summary as there are multiple levels of luxury apartments.

Someone with $20 million is rich, and someone with $20 billion is rich, but these are very different levels of rich.

The general argument about the hedonic treadmill is the expectations rise with wealth, but the happiness and pleasure do not. The person with $20 million looks at what a person with $100 million can get, and wants more. This drives the need for ever-more luxury apartments.

There is of course some limit, as $30/hour isn't enough for a luxury apartment. But the affordable apartments get further away, or replaced with luxury apartments, and their middle manager bosses, who want their bonuses, are incentivized to use wage theft, poor working conditions, job insecurity, etc. to extract more profits while minimizing costs. Thus we have the opinion "there are no ethical billionaires", which implies there should be an upper bound to what is acceptable luxury.

rekabis specifically called out the Vienna model, which doesn't follow the same 'easier sell for developers' logic you referred to, because it uses different market incentives, including limited-profit housing associations, to build housing.

I mean, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism sounds fun and all, but at what cost to the environment? Is it warmed-over trickle-down economics? Why are the progressive taxes on those people so low that they can afford a luxury apartment, and how did they make that money in the first place?

Just how deluxe is "luxury"? Is an extra 25% of living space per person (and a room of one's one) sufficient luxury? Because what I've seen, "luxury" is a never-ending hedonic treadmill as rich people judge their luxury by what even richer people can afford.

Lastly, the FT is the newspaper for the already-well-off, with summer homes in France and fancy kitchens, who likely want comfort that the luxury they have is justified.

You started with:

'Am I the only person who thinks its odd that my government (US) thinks its can tell me what time to get up and go to bed?'

How do you have the timezones you want without the government (federal, state, county, tribal, or whatever) still involved in telling you when to go to bed?

You write 'Permanent DST screws things up for the cities that are southwest of me' but you have not explained how that screwing up is all that worth complaining about or changing, when we know of places like Reykjavík which are far more screwed up, with seemingly little concern.

  % curl -LO 'https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/sqlite3'
    % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  100 4845k  100 4845k    0     0  1384k      0  0:00:03  0:00:03 --:--:-- 1384k
  % chmod +x sqlite3
  % file sqlite3
  sqlite3: DOS/MBR boot sector; partition 1 : ID=0x7f, active, start-CHS (0x0,0,1), end-CHS (0x3ff,255,63), startsector 0, 4294967295 sectors
  % ./sqlite3
  SQLite version 3.40.0 2022-11-16 12:10:08
  Enter ".help" for usage hints.
  Connected to a transient in-memory database.
  Use ".open FILENAME" to reopen on a persistent database.
  sqlite>:

Everyone who defended the right of soldiers to skip the COVID vaccine should be even more supportive of the right to skip required testosterone injections which have no medical support or proven operational benefit, right?

Alas, my comment is made with weary sarcasm.

> Am I the only person who thinks its odd

No. Many people have complained. In the TV show "The Bob Newhart Show" we find that Bob Hartley thinks that talking about the then-recent timezone standardization to be a safe topic with his father-in-law, but the latter finds it very odd and irritating.

> that my government (US)

Time standardization started without governments. Would you rather follow local sun time and railroad time and radio/TV station time, all different? Which time do you follow if you want to call your aunt 150 miles west of you?

> that my government (US) thinks its can tell me what time

How are they preventing you from keeping your own time? How are they preventing people from following the Jewish calendar?

OTOH, if you have jury duty at 9am next Monday, you better be there on government time. But note that when I last served on duty, the county was huge, and some people took an hour to drive in. Their home could well be many minutes off court house time. So how do they determine the right time to be there?

> time to get up and go to bed?

The government has never told me what time to get up or go to sleep. I was never in the military or other organization where the government had that much power over me.

> Before timezones, "noon" was the point where the sun was the highest in the sky.

Which ended up being a problem once fast long distance travel became commonplace. So how do you solve that problem?

> It seems we should

Yes, you've expressed an opinion. I responded by pointing out the known consequences should everyone followed it, based on historical practices.

> with a little more flexibility for rural areas so they can stay on the same time as their closest major population center.

I also pointed out how that can happen in a timezone system, by changing ones listed hours of work/school/etc.

Iceland is on UTC+00:00 year-round (Greenwich Mean Time), to stay in synch with much of western Europe, even though that's at least an hour behind local solar time.

So plenty of people disagree with your opinion, and changing their opinion would be hard.

We can get an idea of the issues in China, which has a single national timezone instead of 4 or 5 geographical time zones. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China

> Beijing Time users in Xinjiang usually schedule their daily activities two hours later than those who live in eastern China. As such, stores and offices in Xinjiang are commonly open from 10:00 to 19:00 Beijing Time, which equals 08:00 to 17:00 in Ürümqi Time.[17] This is known as the work/rest time in Xinjiang.

Thus, "9-5" would get a name like "work time", or the existing name of "day shift" would have increased popularity.

You can say today's date is 27 Messidor Year CCXXXIV if you wish.

The problem is when you want to coordinate events between people following different time conventions.

Timezones as we know it started off as a railroad company invention. Does the London/Birmingham train follow London time or Birmingham time? Does the stop in Rugby use Rugby time?

DST in the US used to be a regional choice until 1966. Coordination became an issue.

"The lack of standardization led to a patchwork where some areas observed DST while adjacent areas did not, and it was not unheard of to have to reset a clock several times during a short trip (e.g., bus drivers operating on West Virginia Route 2 between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio, had to reset their watches seven times over 35 miles)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_time_in_the_United_...

> with a little more flexibility for rural areas so they can stay on the same time as their closest major population center.

We can do that already. I remember when most of Indiana didn't follow DST. Businesses in Danville, Illinois, near the border followed Indiana time by changing the listed hours of operation during summer.

Speaking of Indiana, 'Attitudes began to change in the 1990s, as Indiana's time zone situation was seen as impeding the state's economic growth. Interstate travel and commerce were difficult as people wondered, "what time is it in Indiana?"' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana

Having 12:00 noon be when the sun is highest makes these issues reappear.

A lot of Latino Americans and indigenous people are Roman Catholics, so part of European heritage.

I don't understand why you mention "never had blood .. ties" when at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842245 you reject the relevancy of blood ties. Wouldn't your argument make more sense as just "never had ethnic ties with Europe.

As a reminder, Obama, African-American son of a white woman, once visited Moneygall, where an Irish ancestor lived, and said "My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas."

Lastly, I see you switched from "blood or ethic ties" to "heritage". Could you elaborate on what that means? Must I be Greek inherit some of the intellectual heritage of Ancient Greece? How is my claim to the traditional European liberal arts education heritage any stronger or weaker than that of W. E. B. Du Bois?