Edit: You captured the idea, I am able to determine what will be my next steps in life, but once my life has ended it will be written in stone. So what's time, what is the future and what is the past? I do not care if it's some quantum many-worlds interpretation, or a spacetime slice of bread that moves with the arrow of time! In this way I am already dead, and I am still newborn.

I mean it's obviously sensible. In the context of binary information in a computer, for instance, we (generally) don't care about exact voltages, we group it all together as 0 or 1. And talking about genetic information, we don't (usually) care about, say, if a slightly unusual isotope has snuck in in one of the usual nucleic acids, since that "information" isn't copied in the usual way.

It's very obvious, but it's also more profound than it looks. Even for something as seemingly purely mathematical as information, there's actually teleology, assumptions about what matters, baked in every time we apply it.

If there is any city that should be scaling aggressively instead of “gracefully” it’s Berkeley.

I get that some grievances don’t need to wait (Limbaugh) but it’s a high bar.

Death is inevitable maybe, but whether it's necessary is a philosophical question without a satisfying answer.

As for the necessity of death... Plenty of sibling and nephew/niece comments say it's essentially unavoidable and necessary, others say some set of human beings could do something brilliant that would pull us out of it one day. I'd actually say both perspectives capture something important. The pragmatic knowledge of our unavoidable expiration is worth living with, and the hope to overturn death and despair is worth living for.

One metaphor for how this life feels might be that we find ourselves in a testing chamber, being asked questions about the test we're writing, for which we could not study. The good news is, it's an open book test, and we've got many years to write our answers! ...But, then the textbooks contradict each other almost as often as they agree on some important point. Every once in a while it seems as if an invigilator calls someone off, and invites another person into their seat. Also, occasionally, fistfights break out over which textbook you ought to be reading from.

Hopefully we’ll fix it one day.

>In this way he was a kind of useful idiot for the real estate investors who control the city.

This comment doesn't seem like it lives up to the quality of Tom's HN comments. I would object equally if you were described as a "useful idiot" to those who seek to benefit from property development or own land capable of being developed . Noting that I don't care if either or both of you are "wrong", as I don't care at all about Berkeley politics and planning.

If I did I would listen to Tom and his reasoning as I read his HN comments. That is with interest, more so that he has a very different point of view to mine. With that view well thought out and well expressed seemingly motivated by more than pure self-interest.

The same might well be true of yourself but that isn't obvious to me yet.