Look at this guy acting like there isn’t also a housing crisis in the USA

Let me know where I can sign up to help clean sunlight off of squirrels

TLDR: No, but they may have the sense to not push through the wackiest of the right-wing endeavors.

I love Neal Stephenson, and that might be my favorite as well

Private is probably not the correct word, but flying the LGBTQ+ flag is probably a for of capital ‘S’ Speech, i.e. the thing the 1st amendement of the US Bill of rights is supposed to protect.

To what extent should government institutions engage is Speech is a question without an easy answer.

In this case the LGBTQ+ flag represents, in part, common sense civil liberties and protections for a community. Unequivocally a good thing, and to say otherwise is bigotry.

However the undeniable goodness of the Speech does not necessarily mean it is a type of speech we want government institutions to engage in. One method to illustrate this is to replace the clearly positive flag with a clearly negative one, say a nazi flag.

I’d expect most people here would have a problem with the dmv flying a nazi flag.

So we simply say that government institutions can only fly good flags. The problem is someone has to decide which flags are good. It may seem obvious which is which, but unless we put it to a vote, we’ll need a committee or a single person to make the call. And some people are evil, and would falsely claim the Nazi flag is the good one, and now we’re in a bad spot again.

So like all things there’s a lot of annoying nuance to be dealt with and sucks when it should be easy to just allow good supportive speech.

Yeah seems like there’s a general thermodynamics problem with sending a bunch of energy through the atmosphere

I mean fundamentaly your question is "Why do people have different preferences? " and I think that’s a very interesting question, with philosophical as well as economic implications.

All we can say for sure is that individuals do indeed seem to have different preference, without clear criteria across individual people.

For example, if Jill has the opportunity to purchase either wine or beer, and both are the same price, same alcohol content, same social implications etc, we have no way to predict which Jill will choose based on the information available in the world outside of Jill consciousness.

However Jill herself may have an obvious and consistent preference, and I’m not sure anyone fundamentally knows the reason for that, other than Jill thinks wine tastes better.

It’s so completely wild and backwards. Imagine your not a reddit user, but a search leads you to a reddit link, and you’re on your phone. You see all this stuff about downloading the app instead, and you’re just going to bail, never reading the post. If there was no friction, they may have converted a new user.

They act like everyone already uses reddit and the users are so addicted they’ll put up with anything.