ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
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User ID: 1098
How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)
Not Just Bikes has a new video out: How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it). I have a love/hate relationship with urbanist essayists like this. On the one hand, they often raise issues that most of the time are not explicitly considered by most people. On the other hand, they tend to have a very leftist perspective, and ignore important costs, benefits, and solutions.
The video makes roughly the following arguments:
- If you don't have to pay attention to the road, you can do other things while in transit. This lowers the effective cost of traveling a given distance. As a consequence, there will be more demand for road space, increasing congestion.
- Because autonomous cars are so technology-laden, the market will favor a few large companies that offer a subscription model. There are several consequences of this, which can be summarized as: laws will favor the companies rather than the public.
- Getting into doomer territory, car makers might succeed in banning human drivers and pedestrians from most roadways, and increase speed limits to ridiculous levels, causing noise pollution and other problems. They might also get public transit banned (I'm not sure how this would happen but that's the argument).
Externalities
1 and 3 are similar problems. There are externalities that current laws don't address because they weren't huge problems given historical technology. Namely noise, tire pollution, and congestion. But new technology, autonomous cars, changes the costs and benefits of driving and will make these externalities much worse.
Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers: highways, roads, parking spaces, parking garages. Bans are the same blunt tool that current laws use to force too much parking and not enough housing and bikes lanes to be built, just in the opposite direction. But he redeems himself by proposing putting a price on driving.
If you've ever heard of Arthur Pigou, a price on driving as the solution to 1 and 3 is pretty obvious. If someone really wants to drive at 4:30pm on a Friday when everyone else in the city wants to drive too, let them pay extra to be one of the people who can actually get places. There's a limit to how many people can actually get anywhere at that time, and we might as well offer the slots to the people who get the most value from it, and get some money back for public use in return. Charging a congestion fee completely solves the problem of autonomous vehicles circling the city hoping to be closest to the next customer. They have to pay the same fee as anyone else, so they'll only be on the road if they're the highest-value use of road space.
Not Just Bikes proposes investing in "functional and viable public transit", especially in forms that are difficult to remove, presumably to be able to resist transient political pressure. Of course, any publicly-run agency is going to have a very hard time running "functional and viable" transit when compared to a selfish private organization. And there's no reason a company that makes autonomous vehicles can't make and run buses as well.
A better solution is to price road space appropriately, and be agnostic to who's using the space. This allows the highest-value uses without artificially restricting to "public" or "autonomous" uses. Offer express lanes that guarantee certain speeds by limiting the number of vehicles that can enter. The entry fee is set high enough that there aren't any queues to enter. Crucial here is that any vehicle, private or public, should be able to use the lane as long as the driver pays the fee. This allows many more solutions to transit problems, without the dysfunction of publicly-run bus agencies. For example, corporate shuttles, church buses, and private rideshares should be allowed to use the same express lanes as public buses. And if Jay Leno wants to drive his personal car in the express lane, as long as he pays the fee, let him! Same goes for autonomous vehicle makers. If they want to reserve some space on freeways for their cars, make them compete on price the same as anyone else.
Putting a market-based fee on express lanes has a side benefit of making the opportunity cost of formerly transit-only lanes more legible. A few such market-based lanes can illustrate how expensive existing transit-only lanes really are.
Public Choice
Point 2, that laws will tend to favor autonomous car makers over the public, is just a specific example of public choice being a hard problem. There are analogous situations with Big Tech and the public commons, John Deere and right-to-repair, and Big Oil and climate regulations. I don't have a lot to say here, except that this has always been a problem, in other times and places has been much worse, and is likely to be manageable. People are smart.
An Aside on Congestion and Induced Demand
This video mentions the old chestnut that (paraphrasing) induced demand means it's pointless to increase road capacity. I'll quote one of our own:
Likewise a new freeway lane immediately filling up tells us there are still more people who want to be using this freeway.
If autonomous vehicles lead to people traveling more, that's good! It means more trips are now worth taking. People are visiting friends and relatives more often, working at jobs that are farther away but are a better fit for them, and in general doing more valuable things.
Conclusion
I'd like to see more discussion of the economics of transit, and economic solutions, especially without a leftist slant. But this is the first time I've seen a popular urbanist talk about the fact that self-driving cars will increase road use and congestion. This is great! This fact should be obvious to anyone who's spent five seconds thinking about the consequences of making driving cheaper, but I haven't seen it mentioned much outside rationalist circles. This point alone makes up for any other failings in this video.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
14d ago
Time, on October 22nd: "Don’t Trust the Political Prediction Markets". Oops.
When it comes to accuracy, these prediction markets have an even poorer historical track record than political polling– not to mention these companies come and go with startling transience.
the reality is that the Circuit Court could well rule that these platforms are illegal and shut them down in merely a few weeks’ time.
Maybe they would last longer if Time wasn't writing hit pieces on them.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
I thought unions were like some kind of trade association where all workers join and they collectively bargain with employers if they want access to their skilled labor pool.
That's what they should be. In reality the NLRB and labor law make them more like a local Mafia. Pay us for protection or we'll destroy your business. This is but one example of why libertarians want less regulation: any government power is always corrupted to enrich whoever can get their hands on it.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2mo ago
Secret data but more importantly secret code (any programs, algorithms, statistical techniques, data cleaning, etc.), would never cut it in the professional world. If you're a data scientist or a product manager proposing a change to a company's business processes you need to have your work in source control and reviewable by other people. There's no reason academics can't do the same. Make the PI responsible by default unless they can show fraud in the work their underling did. If they didn't review their underling's work then the PI is fully responsible. This would have the added benefit that researchers would learn useful skills (how to present work for review) for working in industry.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2mo ago
This is a good definition. Other commenters have mentioned that punishment being disproportionate is a key aspect of cancel culture, but I don't think it's necessarily bad. Punishment being disproportionate is how people build moral systems that are effective in keeping people from breaking them all the time. 'Cancel culture' is a pejorative term for this process, used when the speaker doesn't like the moral system being developed. But the same process is responsible for creating the morals we all take for granted.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3mo ago
The solution to violent crime is easy: incapacitate criminals. The hardcore crackdown on violent crime that does not take away pro-social people's guns is possible right now in most places but doesn't happen, I think largely because of prosecutorial discretion by progressive prosecutors. Maybe the solution is something out of left field like allowing any citizen to press charges, in the same way that civil rights law works. Take the discretion away from public officials.
I am much more of a 2nd Amendment maximalist (private fighter jets? Yes.). However, I think the real goal of preventing tyranny can't be achieved by the 2nd amendment alone, as you've argued. What must be possible is alternate centers of power and the real possibility of them becoming autonomous, of seceding from the authority of the federal government. What would make alternative centers of power a more realistic possibility is making self-determination an explicit right. It should be one of the unenumerated rights that the founders didn't think necessary to put in the Constitution, but the modern interpretation of rights (at least post-1860) requires listing it explicitly. I'm not sure whether it needs to be about secession specifically vs. a more generic right to self-determination, but the specter of the federal fist coming down on any group that wants to go their own way makes it practically impossible without the right to do so.
If there was a right to self-determination or secession, then the threat of a group leaving the union would force the federal government to accommodate individual groups more. As things are, tyranny of the majority keeps ratcheting up.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3mo ago
The campaign's proposals include a "first-ever" tax credit for builders of homes sold to first-time buyers, as well as up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance for "eligible" first time buyers, a move that her campaign estimated could reach four million households over four years.
To anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of economics, this is just gibs for her constituents. It'll of course raise housing prices in general, hurting all the people who don't qualify for the tax credit.
- A: Behold our new policy: Subsidize Demand!
- B: How will this help lower prices?
- A: Lower prices?
Which... totally makes sense if one believes her constituents are good people and deserve more than they're getting right now. Or that the people hurt by the policy are bad people (a.k.a. status competitors) who deserve less than what they have.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3mo ago
one has to register as Democrat or Republican to be able to vote in the primaries? Is that open information ?
It is, at least in my state. Keep in mind that people sometimes register in one party to influence the primary, then vote for the other party in the general election. So you can't tell someone's true allegiance just by seeing which party they're registered under.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3mo ago
This will be very difficult, for two major reasons:
- Government operates based on rules, while private entities operate based on performance. Your boss can fire you if you're ineffective. The government can only fire you if you don't follow the rules. It's easy to follow the rules and still be ineffective. So government relies on constructing the right rules to achieve its ends, and we don't even agree on the ends, much less the specific rules. The rules end up being byzantine tomes of regulations that no one understands. So there's tons of intractable inefficiency that cannot be addressed. Musk would have to somehow make government employment contingent on performance rather than rules.
- More importantly, efficiency requires making costs and benefits explicit and commensurable so tradeoffs can be made. People hate making money commensurable with lives, happiness, or other sacred values. Even conservatives use terms like "death panels" when this topic comes up. Any cost-cutting that comes at the expense of a few hours at the end of a few peoples' lives, or of the academic success of a few economically disadvantaged children, is going to be raised as a fatal flaw in the whole endeavor, regardless of how many billions of dollars were saved. Musk would need to sidestep this issue somehow.
My best idea for solving #2 is to give people a choice to accept a payment to forgo a government benefit. For example, instead of government-dictated healthcare provided by your employer, you're allowed to opt out in return for $X, where $X is less than the average cost of the healthcare plan. This of course is distasteful to supporters of government healthcare, because they want the costs to be socialized. Adverse selection will cause people who are healthy to opt out etc. The same adverse selection follows for other kinds of government benefits, such as education with school vouchers. In the limit, the people remaining receiving benefits would be precisely those who take out more than they put in, and this would highlight the cost everyone is paying to support those people. The existing system obfuscates who is causing the high costs.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3mo ago
If it were not true that most of the people who voted Democrat before Reagan vote Republican now, then where did all those Democratic voters go and where did all the Republican voters come from?
Exactly. People change their party affiliations over time. Parties change their platforms over time. Ascribing a consistent principled philosophy to a political party, a group that is a Ship of Theseus in both membership and in ideas, is a fool's errand. It would be more accurate to treat the parties as brand new groups every election. Republicans_1984 is not Republicans_2024. And criticizing a party based on the platforms of past parties that share the same name is invalid. It was different people and a different platform.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3mo ago
There's a difference between consequences from the state and consequences from private actors. The jail term is just the least-common-denominator solution society has agreed on for punishing his crime. Any private person can also form their own independent opinion of what consequences he should face, and share their opinion.
From the perspective of private actors, it is deeply unfair to expect them to treat someone who has served a sentence for a crime the same as someone who never committed the crime. Clearly the fact that someone committed a crime predicts their future behavior in a Bayesian sense. People should be allowed to use that information to inform how they treat the perpetrator. Imagine the state, for reasons, fines criminals just $1 for committing, say, date rape. This is the right balance of deterrence, justice, incapacitation, and bureaucracy that meets the state's needs. If you're a woman considering having a drink with a man who's paid out $200 in such fines over the past year, you should be allowed to know and to act on the man's criminal history! Your own judgment of the severity of his crime can be wildly different from the state's.
However, I also believe in rehabilitation. I see no reason to report on this any more than if he had served a year for insurance fraud in 2016.
I assume that any competitive male athlete has a higher level of sexual aggression than average, so this article doesn't shift my judgment of him by much. But it's reasonable for other people to get value out of learning this part of his history. It's also reasonable to want to strike fear in the hearts of future statutory rapists to prevent them from acting. So I can't condemn this article; people have a right to know.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3mo ago
The costs are not symmetric, and the woman bears costs no matter which option is taken.
| Right to financial abortion | Right to physical abortion | |
|---|---|---|
| Woman | Impossible; still has to bring the child to term and give birth, a huge cost. | ✓ |
| Man | ✓ | Reprehensible; would be forcing the woman to have an abortion. She still bears medical risk. |
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
HuffPost misrepresents the ruling:
In overturning Martin and Grants Pass, the Supreme Court found that homeless people do not constitute a class with an immutable status that confers protections from cruel and unusual punishment.
This is completely wrong. The Court found that laws can target a wide variety of behaviors, and that the 8th Amendment prohibition on "cruel and unusual" is just on the punishment after conviction. Homelessness is still a status that can't be criminalized.
Sotomayor's dissent in the ruling is also lacking:
the majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.
...or leave. This really cuts down to the roots of ideological disagreement between left and right: who are we ("we" meaning local government in this case) responsible for? Left says everyone, right says not everyone.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discuss this on a recent podcast, motivated by the recent example of Ibram X. Kendi’s waning influence:
- NYTimes: Ibram X. Kendi Faces a Reckoning of His Own
- Washington Examiner: Ibram X. Kendi’s intellectual implosion (up for four days then deleted, make of that what you will)
There definitely is a vibe shift and it feels safer for critics of the social justice movement to speak publicly.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
5mo ago
Reaching verboten conclusions through 'rational means' on topics long decided by the 'ruling class' doesn't protect you from the consequences.
This is... true in a black-pilled way, but the way you've stated it sounds like you're defending the ruling class's morals as correct. The whole point is that the rationalists are starting from reasonable moral principles and following logical reasoning using the available evidence and reaching different conclusions than the ruling class. The ruling class's morals either don't incorporate the available evidence (i.e. are unscientific), don't follow from logical reasoning (i.e. are inconsistent), or start from different principles. All of these apply to various extents. I think the most parsimonious explanation is that the ruling class uses morals as tools, and chooses the set of morals that get them what they want. It's reasonable to criticize the ruling class on these grounds, and to think it unjust that people are punished for advocating for a less selfish set of morals.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
5mo ago
Yes, but two comments:
- The people who believe in the progressive position tend to be blank slatist and to believe in group rights and ideas like groups "catching up." The analogy doesn't work if these are true.
- Under certain conditions, affirmative action is necessary to equalize groups and it actually works. The conditions are roughly a) persistent immutable easily identified groups, b) skills require investment, and c) skills are costly to evaluate. Under these circumstances an equilibrium can develop where groups invest in skills at different rates. This is from Glenn Loury's work on statistical discrimination.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
6mo ago
This could be really interesting.
- Adding political party registration as a protected class could end up changing the character of many institutions and organizations. For example, forcing universities to hire Republicans would have major long-term effects on the values of future college graduates.
- This law conflicts with the principles of freedom of association and equal protection. It'll force the issue up through the courts (no way it doesn't get an instant challenge up to the Supreme Court) and with this Court the result could be something wild like reversing Griggs v Duke entirely.
- Even if it stands, it will bring quotas to the fore as a political issue and make the public conversations more clearly about group spoils vs. overall efficiency. It adds such onerous requirements for businesses to make any useful predictions about people that there will be tons of examples of waste and inefficiency due to the law. In an accelerationist way this could be good for getting back to a more reasonable set of laws.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
6mo ago
This hypothesis is advanced in e.g. Gregory Clark's books (Farewell to Alms, The Son Also Rises) with violent European criminals being executed before they could reproduce, causing the population to become less violent and more conscientious over time. It's also mentioned in other older works (I forget the exact reference but maybe Lynn or Rushton) observing that the average IQ correlates with gracility/robustness and other traits like age at puberty.
One of the key claims in The Son Also Rises is that social status is heritable and genetic. This I think is the encompassing fact (if true). Races can have different average social status that's genetically determined, and the details of which specific traits mediate that status aren't as important.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
6mo ago
I doubt most respondents are taking the question at face value. Social desirability bias is very strong, especially when the question is just hypothetical. Put the respondents in a real situation and they will choose very differently.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
If environmental racism causes decreased intelligence, then people affected actually have decreased intelligence. But progressives deny this conclusion.
If your sense of pride in your own accomplishments depends on others not being able to do it, that reflects pretty poorly on you.
This is a ridiculous stance. Being better than other people in some way is the whole basis of our social hierarchy and much of the motivation for striving at anything.
Edit: On reflection, this brings to mind Michael Malice's razor "Are some people better than others?" Someone right wing says yes; someone left wing gives a speech. I'd characterize the left wing stance here as counter-signaling. "I'm so far above everyone else that I don't need to participate in this competition to prove my worth." It's cool to personally bow out of a competition, but destroying the competition so others can't get value from it is very rude. You could say the same thing about leftists' policy preferences regarding taxation, housing, and immigration. In all of those areas the leftist policies make it harder to prove one is better than others by having wealth/living in an expensive area/being a citizen of a powerful nation.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
This is a bit hard to parse, but I think the answer is
It would be helpful if the rules for pairings were delineated more clearly.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.
Doing the math, you're responsible for 26 minutes of each casualty's life. Pretty okay trade for advancing humanity's knowledge about what policies are effective.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
What would it look like if the richer side needed the money more? Could that ever happen?
Sounds a lot like the situation with many unions. If you are the owner of a business, depending on the local laws the people who happen to work for you get a free monopoly on your labor supply if they form a union. If it's a capital-intensive business then the owner has more to lose.
This is an interesting analogy and lends itself to more elaboration.
In aviation, there have been autopilots for many years. But always the human pilot is in command, and uses the autopilot as a tool that has to be managed and overseen. Autonomous vehicles, at least in some companies' visions, have no way to control them manually. An airplane pilot enters waypoints into the navigation system to plan out a route; an autonomous car routes itself. The biggest difference is in who is responsible for the vehicle; is it the human operator or the vehicle's manufacturer?
I could see a kind of autonomous vehicle that works more like an airplane autopilot - you wouldn't necessarily need a steering wheel, but if you had control over the different high-level choices in route planning and execution (do I try to make this yellow light? Should I play chicken at this merge or play it safe?) then the human could be considered responsible in a way that a fully autonomous, sit-back-and-relax mode doesn't allow.
I am revolted by the idea of relying on a company akin to an airline for my day-to-day mobility. There are too many failure modes that leave one stuck. What if there's a natural disaster and all the phone networks are down? Or the car company has a de facto local monopoly, but then withdraws from this market or goes out of business? What if the company starts blacklisting customers for things that shouldn't be related to transportation, like their political affiliation or their credit score?
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