It appears that, as expected, a young millennial is trying to blame this on human accelerated climate change. (not necessarily you, but someone in the above comment chain).
And yes, I agree that human accelerated climate change is causing faster extensions. However, I could care less. When does the new MacBook Pro refresh come out?
> So the value of ivory going up as a result of being tougher on poachers would be proof that it is working.
Have you taken Economics 101? You do remember what happens when the selling price of a good gets too high? Lots of profit to be made will encourage poachers to hunt. They will take even larger risks (e.g. Being shot by drone) to obtain ivory since the profits are too high.
If the price of Ivory rises then yes, more people will be driven to poaching but unless the price drops to the previous level due to the subsequent increase in supply still more elephants will make it.
Only if the price of Ivory drops relative to the baseline could you conclude that a program to target poachers has failed.
If what you write is true then we should simply not do anything about poaching at all... but ideally the price of Ivory would rise to incredible heights because none of it makes it to the market because all poachers are caught.
They were talking about how to save money, and from that limited discussion you came to two completely unjustified conclusions: (1) their overall quality of life will be lower in SF, and (2) the only benefit is that SF is "cool". Nothing they said suggested either of those two things.
Logically, one would try to save money by cutting the largest disposable expense first, before proceeding to the next largest, in order.
By the time you'd get to the expense of owning a car, I presume a lot of other luxury expense would've been dispensed. Therefore, it's logical to assume you'd get a lower quality of life as a result.
If lacking a car, you find yourself walking more, aren't you healthier? Doesnt San Fran have among the greatest selection of fresh foods in the country?
We can go on, but clearly cutting expenses doesn't necessarily mean a lower quality of life.
Cars are a very expensive luxury. Probably the first thing I cut from my life. I am genuinely struggling to think of any more expensive luxury (housing costs more but it's pretty much a necessity).
You pretend as if people are just moving for some "cool" factor and not because the location offers things other places do not, such as real cultural and lifestyle differences, and most importantly, job opportunities for certain professions the likes of which are simply not found in such quantities (or potentially quality) in other places.
You pay a premium for reduction in economic risk and a desirable lifestyle. The fact that younger generations overall have a lower standard of living due to baby boomers and fiscal policy decisions doesn't mean they are irresponsible.
I can (easily) afford SF. I can also afford to own a car in SF. I prefer not to because it is expensive and I prefer to spend my money on other things.
Also, contrary to your assumptions, I find my "quality of life" has dramatically increased since getting rid of a car due to not needing to stress out in traffic (and dodging cyclists); not doing any car maintenance ever; never needing to look for parking and the unknown time duration that could require.
TL;DR: Without even knowing anything about the topic in question, it should be blindingly obvious how stupid it is to consider "being in a cool place" in opposition to "quality of life". Particularly because "being in a cool place" doesn't just mean enjoying the cachet of getting to say you live somewhere, it means enjoying the reasons that people think the place is cool: the abundance and diversity of natural beauty within a short trip, the weather, the huge amount of things to do (arts/music/cultural events/non-cultural events), even just something as simple as enjoying the aesthetics and rhythm of a place. On top of that, the flood of people moving into these places hasn't been because it's "cool", it's in large part been because of economic opportunity. You should really glance at a newspaper once in a while...
As far as not having a car:
I grew up in Los Angeles and I can tell you that the ~10 years I've spent living without a car in SF is a trillion times better, in almost every way. Even leaving the absurd expense aside, the hassle of having a 2-ton ball and chain that needs to be fueled, parked, maintained, and moved around with you everywhere you go is not even close to worth the advantages, particularly when you can rent a car as needed and still end up paying tons less. It's hard to oversell the relative freedom of being able to make plans on the fly with friends all over the city while rarely having to figure out the logistics of how you're gonna get around and how to fit your car into your plans. Having spent a lot of time in both living situations, I'm close to the point where I consider every non-discretionary mile traveled in a car to be a failing of transit policy. And I actually enjoy driving! I just get my fill of it once every month or two when I happen to be on an excursion with friends where I'm the one driving, and being required to do so (and required to own a car) is ridiculous. On top of that, the fact that my transpo budget is almost nil means that I get to rent as nice a car as I feel like and don't have to think about whether it's "practical" to own.
Regarding roommates, this doesn't appear to be a Bay thing as much as a "dense city" thing. My take on it was always that if I'm spending enough time in my apartment that having a roommate is annoying, I'm probably living in a boring-ass city. So far, this has held up pretty damn well: I spend only a couple waking hours in my apartment each day, and I enjoy the company of my roommate quite a bit in this hours (for example, we often cook together). I readily admit that this is a preference thing and it's just as legitimate that some people are considerably more couch-and-television-bound, but it's sort of bizarre to claim that that's objectively a "lower quality of life".
As far as keeping track of expenses, I have something like an 80% savings rate and I still keep a casual eye on my discretionary expenses. How is being aware of your expenses a lower quality of life?
I know for a fact (and you can check online too), that Google's non-public datasets are magnitudes larger in training size and far superior in learning signal (labels are very close to their task).
Google has thousands of real robotic manipulator arms to train their reinforcement learning algorithms. Algorithms trained using the OpenAI gym are practically guaranteed to fail in the real world since OpenAI gym is (designed as) a perfect simulator. Don't even get me started on internal image and speech recognition datasets collected from YouTube, search indexing, and Hangouts/Duo calls.
There is no way in hell you can compete with this. The closest you have is Facebook. But they've built an AI that has just learned how to play Go. Let alone defeat a world champion. Hell, Google is already working on beating humans at Starcraft.
It sure as hell seems like natural evolution is being applied to the social sphere. Statistically, children from "well off" families do consistently better across all life pillars (health, money, family, friends) than poorer families. Come on, financially richer families are less fat/obese than poorer families. This is a direct link to living and longevity (Darwinism).
Yes, but the two groups exist and are adapted to two totally different environments. I imagine that some in the well off population see the others as a different species. Thusly, strict Darwinism doesn't apply here.
To truly see who is more fit, I propose that we take a group of 12, 6 from each class, and drop them off on an uninhabited island. We will places weapons and traps at strategic locations. We shall call this experiment Project Craving Romp.
