That’s what a small earthquake with a nearby epicenter feels like. The first time it happened to me it felt like a tree hitting the house. (“Small” is circa 3.0 magnitude.)
A lot of enshittification is driven by market consolidation. I really don't want my economic interactions to be with massive chains in a race to the bottom. The cure is to enable new competitors to offer alternatives. It starts with anti-trust but also includes reducing regulations and barriers to market entry. And maybe not so many billion-dollar, me-too AI investments and more focus on things like building delivering healthcare cheaply.
SFO art shows are well-curated and interesting. There's a causeway in Terminal 3 to reach the F gates. It's now under construction but in years past it used to have outstanding art exhibitions that you could take easily while walking to your gate. I used to go out of my way to see them. The international terminal has a beautiful exhibition of flight attendant uniforms across the West face of the building.
Overall SFO is my favorite large airport. Things just work. The fact they went through the hurdles to get a private contract for TSA now looks like a prescient move. Only about 20 US airports have it. [0]
It's a source of jokes in the UK at least. Most Americans don't know the difference. As the saying goes, "two countries separated by a common language."
> I’m convinced that it’s impossible to write good SQL without peeking into the data.
That's been my experience as well. One question that comes up is how to ensure confidential information does not leak out of the database and into somebody's model or otherwise escape containment. Is that an issue you considered in the design?
There does not seem to be an easy answer for which political system delivers the best benefits.
Direct democracy has defects that have been apparent for thousands of years. I believe Plato was one of the first to argue that democracy turned into mob rule.[0] It seems unlikely that this was entirely original. Similar ideas must have been current in Athens well before his time, since they had abundant experience with demagogues and other problems during the Peloponnesian War. I don't think Plato's solution (Philosopher Kings) was correct, but it's harder to argue against his framing.
It therefore seems like a question of which approach is less bad up front and whether it decays into something worse. Personally I would satisfied with a functioning republic in the US, which is where I live. What we have now is an oligarchy.
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