I can't speak from personal experience with the Fiio jm21, but I was a big user of a previous generation of Fiio, and while I imagine some technical leaps forward have been achieved with this generation (the Fiio M1 never, for instance, achieved gapless playback from 2015-2021, even though this was promised with every new software version), taking a quick look at it... this is just an android phone interface! App store? Chrome? I certainly don't want this from a dedicated music device

Beyond this, I'd say that the true advantage of the iPod Classic was a matter of polish and UX:

* Dedicated buttons/wheel/etc that are tactile instead of a touchscreen interface (the Fiio M1 was button-and-wheel based, but it never approached the quality of Apple engineering); I see the jm21 has some side-based buttons for pause/forward/back, which is nice, but a touchscreen as main interface still grates * A way to interface with your albums that was delightful and visually dense (Cover Flow remains the single greatest music UI put forward)

It also speaks to what we lose when we lose magazine listings of events (New Yorker effectively gutted this section within the past decade), movie showtime listings via newspaper, etc

We have a very strong archive going back a century until about 2015, but now wading through linkrot circa 2017 is miserable

And the current era of less-than-major-venue music listings in many places is exclusively on Instagram and Facebook pages of venues and bands.

I remember a 1990s lottery event in which a "buy all combinations" was attempted, but their physical machines they acquired were partially deficient, and they simply couldn't physically acquire enough tickets in time (as the procedure was relatively time intensive), but they still won with something like a 75% probability of success

No, this is a different subject than the article yesterday. That one focused on "what is the overall magnitude of ground rents", this one focuses on "won't the incidence of LVT be passed onto tenants?"

And in 2018, two prominent pro-housing councilpeople got voted out of office (Lenny Siegel and Pat Showalter), returning things to a majority of NIMBY homeowners

The existence of Prop 13, coupled with pyramid-scheme-style approaches to financing municipal pensions, have led to disasters of financing.

One can imagine a better world in which pension programs are effectively time-independent w.r.t financing (neutral for growth or shrinking), and more financing comes from sources that are likely agnostic to growth or reduction (like Land Value Tax), but the politics here... are not trivial.

Even if prices are stable, what makes it the case that the system works so well for those who own land and creates such problems for those who are landless?

We take it for granted that renting is just a form of having your money stolen by landowners, without realizing that this is a choice we make: we could just as easily administer the market so that absentee ownership ceases to be a smart bet.

Korea has a different system where they don't pay rent, but they pay what's called jeonse (jun-sae). You pay about 33-50-60% the value of the property and live rent free for 2 years. At the end of the 2 years, you get your lump sum back.

The idea is that the landlord makes their money by investing the lump sum, though there seems to be risks where the landlord is unable the cough up the money at the end of the term and needs to find someone else to cough up jeonse money to pay back the original tenants.

Of course many tenants can't come up with 33% of a property, so they are also taking out a loan to come up with the money and making payments on that money to which essentially comes out to rent, but significantly cheaper.

It does seem that rent is becoming far more common in Korea now, so jeonse may be on its way out, but it is a different system, can't say that it's better or worse.

We did that with the American dream of suburban home ownership, which broke the bad old landlords and tenements.

Prices are wacky because the market is wacky. We subsidize loans, subsidize unprofitable commercial property via taxes, restrict supply of higher density housing and set a price floor for housing with subsidy programs like section 8.

It's interesting that you jump to "aggressive regulation" or "rent control" instead of the solution that has close to full consensus from the economic profession: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

LVT is a good policy but it doesn't make land ownership a bad investment. It just tends to decrease the price of land, which is not usually a problem because land is not produced by people, unlike other securities.

The reason that land is a good investment is precisely because of future land rents that a land buyer expects to receive.

If these land rents are instead paid towards a tax, how wouldn't this make land less of a good investment?

And to finance things sensibly based upon real revenue flows, not speculative debt drawing on wishful thoughts about future growth.

KFJC is a tremendous place.

If I may plug KZSU, on Stanford campus, as another college/community radio outlet in Silicon Valley.

...I worry all the time that, owing to the lack of affordable housing for the creative class, and the general lack of culture throughout the Silicon Valley, that there won't be enough energy to support all these radio stations.

If you're curious, don't be afraid to look into joining them! They both take on community members from throughout the area.

I no longer live in the area, but I aso enjoyed KZSU a lot. It seemed a lot less music focused and felt more like an NPR. They had some really awesome segments, like I remember one in particular about having students look at themselves in a reverse mirror.

KFJC achieves more consistency with its music shows, whereas KZSU is more of a grab-bag. Music shows that fill certain niches, experimental talk programs, and other things like sports broadcasts.

It's certain not to give someone a consistent sound that they'll like, but it usually puts out interesting stuff.