It's not a perfect system. There are very few jobs that just let you take off a couple of months a year, so legislators tend to have specific careers. Constituent services are required year-round, so legislative staff are full-time, year-round employees. And legislating has to happen quickly, so it's harder for citizens to interact and follow along with the process when they want to advocate for a bill.

Maybe there's some kind of third party certification system to support signing information sharing agreements ("BAAs") with other health information systems. I worked at CMS on first-party stuff so I'm not really familiar with how it works in the private sector.

This is the main one for me. If I am working on a large project with decent unit test coverage, the feedback loop in IntelliJ or Visual Studio is just much quicker than the alternatives because you can run and debug the specific tests you need.

It may not be wise to assume non-profits exist within the confines of the law that authorizes their continued existence, but I don't see how it's fallacious.

[0]: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...

This is a "noble savage" conception of the past. Thinking/cleverness/craftiness was highly rewarded even in preliterate societies. Even in war, "polytropos" Odysseus comes out ahead of the dumb brutes with bigger spears.

"Meat shields" has a nice physicality to it, though

To hear Marc Andreessen tell it, the US tech industry's rightward turn in the 2024 campaign was specifically intended to head off any attempt to regulate AI [0]. So the blame rebounds to tech CEOs even if you believe that only the government should take a holistic view of a given technology's impact.

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-06-11/marc-andr...

I can only imagine the GP mentioned the PELOSI act (which, as I recall, was cosponsored by Nancy Pelosi and blocked by Republicans) because it was designed to be partisan messaging.

[0]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5106...

[1]: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/03/25/congress/la...

The most overt statement of "we don't want to build more houses because it will decrease the value of existing houses" in recent memory was Trump[1], who is not exactly a reliable source (and whose whole brand prior to politics was destroying the character of established neighborhoods by building giant condo complexes).

[0]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5780364 [1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/trump-says-the-quiet...

I don't know, and I don't believe it's possible to know in a specific instance. Like I said above, I believe that in the long term, denser towns raise the property values of their suburbs by making the area more desirable.

But there is definitely a plausible case that increasing the supply of housing immediately lowers or slows the growth of property values by reducing scarcity. It's the argument made by both sides of the "missing middle" debate in Arlington -- the pro side says it will make housing more affordable, and the con side says it will lower everyone's property values. The article we're commenting on found that at least some version of this is true for the Austin, TX -- increasing housing stock lowered rents, even if the new stock is luxury units.

But Falls Church is much nicer now that a few mid-rise apartment buildings with ground-level retail have gone in! As a resident, I am very happy about all the new development. I expect that over time, that will have a positive effect on property values, but there is an observable short- and medium-term effect working in the opposite direction as the increased housing supply eases demand on the existing housing stock.

It's a commons problem. In your scenario, you have absolutely increased the value of your property. 20 apartments is more valuable than a single family home. However, you have also reduced aggregate demand by housing 20 people. That reduced the value of your neighbors' properties (or at least reduced the rate at which their value increased).

NIMBYism posits that values will continue to increase without forcing any property owners to invest in improvements so long as they collectively block any efforts to increase supply.

Because it sure looked to me like they renamed the department and immediately started bombing fishing boats, then affirmatively decided to start a war with Iran, all while the guy who came up with the new name goes on TV and screams about how we're free to kill more people now.

I don't think this is a real proposal, but more a thought experiment about how a static site could integrate into BlueSky. I saw a few similar efforts to integrate the "passive" components of ActivityPub into static site generators so that you could make your static blog consumable via the Fediverse.

In reality, if you really wanted to publish your static site blog posts on BlueSky, this is probably a good place to start! As you mention, there are some serious usability issues with doing everything by hand, but you may find that acceptable or invest in workarounds. Maybe it's possible to use your BlueSky identity so that you aren't in the business of managing keys. Or maybe you could use a script or static site generator plugin to pull credentials from somewhere.