InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I wonder how much JK Rowling is hated just because she's hated. Like the Kardashians are famous for being famous, it seems to me that Rowling is hated because other people hate her, and not because she's actually done anything particularly objectionable. You ask people to provide specific details for why they hate her and they either can't, or they make a tenuous reach to connect her with something transphobic, or they just plain make up completely false facts.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Is there no way for mods to move comments to the appropriate thread? We're on our own codebase now.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I think the "Trans Floyd" event is the recent murder of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender woman, in the UK, allegedly by two 15-year-olds who were placed in custody thereafter. It appears to not be a hate crime - just a dispute gone wrong - but the trans activists are pushing the narrative that this is the result of transphobia like crazy, and especially the "protect trans kids" narrative too. I think it's too early to tell what the lasting public reaction to this will be.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Did they only walk? Did they walk if they had a choice not to walk?
I never see this brought up much in urbanist discourse, so I'll just support your position by pointing out that before the automobile, horses ruled the streets, and people used horses quite a lot.
Incidentally this also contradicts the claim that auto lobbyists "invented" jaywalking and took space away from pedestrians - pedestrians already had their spaces taken away, by horses. Maybe that's why I don't see it discussed much.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
But, yes, a moderately healthy single person living in a European style town will not find walking while carrying things difficult.
This reminds me, for all the arguments about "how will disabled/eldery get around without a car" "actually, walkable cities are better for them", a wheelchair user visited the Netherlands, wrote a Twitter thread about her experience, and came to the same conclusion that you did:
Overall, my assessment is this. Amsterdam’s transit system is world-beating…IF you are a young, fit, healthy, non-disabled person who can cycle.
The Netherlands are pointed to a lot in conversations about urban planning and active travel. This is probably why, in my head, I had built Amsterdam up as some sort of mecca for pedestrians, walkability and accessibility.
It was interesting to see the reality.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Would you be surprised to know that urbanists scoff at most of those things? Here's NJB saying "cold weather is just an excuse; the real problem is inadequate bike infrastructure". Here's him again saying "it sucks to have to walk or bike in the rain, but by golly, it's simply better to force me to exercise". I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with other defenses against objections of someone being pregnant or has a 39-degree fever. And that's if they consider them at all and don't just say "okay but most of the time you don't have these conditions; really you're just being lazy".
For the record, I agree with you and do not agree with NJB; I'm presenting this because I've spent way too long trying to get into the headspace of online urbanists and can recite most of their arguments from memory.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
The people who owned them could no longer have a car, or perhaps store it somewhere outside the city, so it's less likely to be driven around what is clearly a walkable area.
They could, but I'd imagine that it's a lot less reasonable to ask them to just do that rather than simply providing them a parking space elsewhere. I'm not well-versed in Netherlands politics but I'd imagine that the Green Party wouldn't have won the election on a platform to remove 10,000 surface parking spaces if it didn't have reasonable compromises like giving the car owners another place to park their cars.
You can do those things, although they quickly become much more expensive, and still occupy a lot of space. A double-decker highway 3 lanes wide on either side still carries maybe 18,000 people per hour per direction. Because of parking requirements, apartments and offices in downtowns will often be built on top of several stories of parking, which of course makes the actual usable space more expensive
Yes. And then you can use the freed-up space to go crazy with transit, protected bike lanes, pedestrian-only streets, removing street parking, etc. We're not just building more expensive infrastructure for no reason, we're doing it because we recognize that the opportunity cost of having the infrastructure spread out horizontally is far costlier. I agree that de facto parking minimums are dumb, though, and should be removed while letting the free market sort out the number of parking spaces.
Do you have a preferred source?
You can just look at Google Maps' satellite view and/or street view and count for yourself. If not, then look at PolitiFact, which says it's 13 lanes at its widest not counting frontage roads (which reasonably lines up with the 6 lanes per direction I see on Google Maps). It seems like the "26 lanes" myth is repeated everywhere you look when you do an internet search though, probably just one of those things that spread quickly without anyone fact-checking them.
Ok, but why?
Because the city is simply less dense. And yes, it's possible for the city to be built denser, but density has various advantages and disadvantages, and the residents should have a say in this regard.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
NJB seemed ambivalent about replacing surface lots with double the number of underground parking spaces, not "railing against."
Ambivalent is still the wrong reaction to have. Surface space is valuable, so he should be happy that the space is removed, and that the underground spaces were built (else where would the cars parked on the surface go?).
And if NJB is a bad example, look at CityNerd's video on why he thinks parking garages are bad then.
Cars do take up more space, I'm not sure how this is controversial.
My point was that the amount of surface space taken up can be reduced, by e.g. building multilevel parking garages or double-decker freeways. And it's often the surface space that is most primary and valuable here. My secondary point was that any form of transportation can be argued to take up more space by looking at instances of it that have been implemented poorly, e.g. a railyard that's 40 tracks wide.
I quoted it from https://charlesandcharles.co.uk/f/take-a-look-at-the-katy-freeway-in-texas
The image on that page isn't even of the Katy freeway. It might be in China or someplace else but it might not even exist in reality. It seems to be right that there's 6 lanes in each direction but I'm still not sure what it means by "eight feeder lanes" (frontage roads?) and "six managed lanes" (I'm completely at a loss here). I wouldn't trust anything on that page without verifying with other sources.
Why do you think that there's so low ridership in Tulsa?
Because there's barely any demand for it. I'd imagine that if they aren't using the bus, then people are using the car instead, or getting rides from others.
I know that Zorba made these claims, but it's pretty laughably weak evidence in my opinion. Is there any reason to believe that Google Maps is sufficiently accurate for all modes? I'm very skeptical, as in my experience maps doesn't handle varying congestion very well. Same with traffic lights.
I don't know what your experience is, but Google Maps does pretty well at estimating longer times if you are viewing a route during rush hour. If there's congestion at that point in time, it will definitely show it. I don't have the link on hand but there's a thing one guy did in Germany where he dragged a bunch of phones in a wheelbarrow down the road to make it seem like the road was hugely congested, coloring it red on Google Maps.
In any case, I think Zorba's point was to use numbers favorable to both transit and driving, and show that driving still wins, thus explaining why some people prefer to use cars. Of course other people may prefer to use transit regardless, and that's fine too. I don't know the exact numbers of people who prefer to drive versus use transit but I'd imagine in North America the number of transit preferrers is lower than the number in Europe. Most people don't consciously think about the costs and benefits of driving versus transit and have restrictions (like needing to be at work on time at a specific time) that simply make driving favorable to them. The Singaporean woman commuting in to work at noon doesn't sound like she has any of those restrictions.
If all of the people on those trains drove instead, how long do you think driving would take?
In Singapore, extremely long because it's a tiny island nation with probably not much capacity to handle it (I haven't checked though). This isn't necessarily true for other places, however.
Know that what happens? Know that pedestrians stand next to the button they have to push in order to cross? I'm confused by your question.
Again, I wouldn't assume malice here, and I would attribute this to ignorance before jumping to conclusions and attributing it to malice.
That's... basically what negligence is?
My point was that if you have a standard policy to use a specific pole design everywhere, then it's a mistake to ascribe intent or knowledge to engineers that simply isn't there. That's also partially why I pointed out that the pole was mounted on a concrete bollard in the pictures Charles Marohn showed - it seems to just be a standard thing rather than them knowingly recognizing that pedestrians stand there, and then simply not caring about them.
There's also a kind of Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics thing going on here - if the engineers didn't use the breakaway pole, then things would be worse for everyone, but Charles Marohn wouldn't be on stage talking about how engineers have gross negligence for the safety of people. So again, I don't want to accuse engineers of negligence here. I feel like if they were sued for this (as he advocates elsewhere) then they simply wouldn't use the breakaway pole design, which I guess wouldn't be a negative (or a positive) for pedestrians but would just make drivers worse off for no reason.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Transit becomes very flexible when you add in multiple forms of transportation, such as a walk or cycle near the station. Roads have plenty of their own issues, and will also slow down and/or run much below theoretical maximum capacity, for example due to lights, congestion, and crashes. In the cases where transit exists but is unused, it's usually because the city is designed to prioritize cars and so transit runs rarely, buses don't have their own right of way, it doesn't go lots of places, etc. Yes, there are reasons to have cars. But they're only necessary (edit: this should say, "only necessary for every trip") because of the specific way in which North American cities have been (re-) built since the end of WW2.
I agree that for people living and working within walking/cycling distance near stations (or have their other destinations near them), transit will work fine for them. (In fact there's a lot more of these places near transit than internet urbanists would have you believe.) I wouldn't describe this as flexible, though; they are pretty much limited to those places unless they take a car. I also agree that any form of transportation may not reach their theoretical maximum capacity, which is why I compare actual observed numbers of usage and don't rely solely on arguments like "there could be much more usage if we just bit the bullet and built more". I'm not inherently against transit, I just think they should be built where they make sense to be built.
Who are "real world urban planners"? In much of North America, they consider car capacity and congestion, and basically no other factors. I stand by the statement that cars are, as a general rule, inefficient for populated areas, because they take up so much space.
The same planners who have built many transit systems in North America. If they really only cared about cars, why would they bother building transit? Then again, I do see this weird take sometimes (from people like Not Just Bikes) where certain transit systems are described as "car-centric infrastructure", even though that makes no sense.
I'd be more sympathetic to the space argument if I didn't see people rail against multi-level parking garages (which take up much less surface space) even when they're underground (like Not Just Bikes hated when in Amsterdam they removed surface parking spaces and replaced them with a new underground parking garage). It's also just as possible for transit to take up as much space (like a rail station 40 tracks wide on the surface). As @ZorbaTHut has pointed out in the past, there's plenty of ways the surface space taken up by cars can be reduced. If an urban planner decides to have a giant sprawling surface parking lot instead of an underground garage, sure, yell at them, but I don't think they inherently must take up so much space, nor is the amount of space taken up inherent to any form of transportation.
This is the description I found:
2 main lanes (six in each direction), eight feeder lanes and six managed lanes. The managed lanes carry mass transit vehicles during peak hours and are only made available to single-occupancy vehicles for a toll-fee during odd-peak hours.
I'd like to know where you got that description, because I can't find it myself. In any case, you can go on Google Maps and count the number of lanes yourself.
There are several issues here. One is land use, where transit is often surrounded by parking and empty lots, on the expectation that people will drive to the station, rather than stores and homes.
Is this really the case? Tulsa's bus routes look like they're surrounded by plenty of stores and homes. You might have to walk or cycle a bit more than in Zurich but it's doable. I did a quick perusal on Google Maps but I don't buy this narrative that transit in North America always just happens to be built around nothing and nowhere by incompetent city planners.
Another is inconsistency. If there's 1 bus or train every hour and it's always late, people won't bother trying to use it. Running more frequent service encourages ridership, and Zurich is probably running dozens of times more trains, trams, and buses than Tulsa, but they're still full.
I don't think they're running more in Zurich just based off the notion that ridership will just get better if they invest more and ignore how much ridership currently exists. I think they do it because at some point in the past they found that their existing capacity could not satisfy the existing level of demand at that time. Which leads me to the fact that Tulsa is considerably less dense than Zurich, hence why they have very low ridership.
If there's a North American city that initially had very low ridership (like Tulsa does now) but managed to generate tons of ridership by simply brute-forcing the amount of service they provided, I'd love to know about it.
A third is traffic priority--in many cities outside the US, bus-only lanes are common, so buses can avoid congestion. Transit also often gets priority at intersections. These things make it faster than driving in traffic, even with stops to pick up and drop off passengers.
I hear this claim all the time that transit is faster than driving in countries outside the US, but is it actually true? If you do some Google Map tests like @ZorbaTHut did, it really doesn't seem like it.
Also compare this video from Singapore, a country that heavily restricts driving and it makes it prohibitively expensive for many people (understandably so since it's a tiny island nation). In the video, driving is faster (though then of course the argument becomes "well it's nicer to be able to sleep or use your phone and not have to pay attention"). Maybe they restricted cars too much and now driving, if you can afford it, is too good compared to a country that doesn't restrict driving so heavily.
I think the point of the argument is that engineers know that cars regularly drive into the area that pedestrians wait at high speed, but haven't done anything for the pedestrians, and in fact encourage them to stand in this exact spot.
Where is the proof that they know that this happens, and this breakaway pole isn't just a standard design that's used for any sort of pole anywhere? That's the impression I got doing a quick search for "breakaway traffic light pole" with articles like this. Again, I wouldn't assume malice here, and I would attribute this to ignorance before jumping to conclusions and attributing it to malice.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
But it sounds like you and they are making different arguments.
That's probably the case. I admit that I'm very sympathetic to people who don't want to live near unpleasant or disruptive behavior, though. But maybe it's fine for them to live there if their externalities are taxed somehow?
What do you mean? The subsidies are what make them expensive. Different parties pay for it and make spending decisions, which means that the normal incentive to spend less isn't there.
Okay, this makes more sense than the assertion that they are over-consumed. Which was in contrast to the many tales of Americans actively refusing medical treatment because they'd rather die than pay the medical bills.
It's pretty inefficient for any sort of populated area. A 3-lane highway has less capacity (in terms of people per hour) than a single light rail track. Houston's Katy Freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, and it's still congested.
Yes, if your only metric is capacity, then a single light rail track wins hands-down over a 3-lane highway. However, there are usually other factors people consider in efficiency, such as the amount of people who actually use it, plus other harder-to-quantify factors like the fact that people using the highway can get off and on at any on/off-ramp, and can thus easily make journeys with a wide variety of starts, destinations, and stops, whereas people with the light rail must get on or off at specific stations, and the more stations you add, the slower the light rail becomes, and this limits the amount of starts and destinations people can get to.
I judge each project on a case-by-case basis; I personally wouldn't make generalized statements like saying a mode is inefficient "for any sort of populated area", and in the real world urban planners consider more factors than just capacity.
As for your claim that the Katy freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, is this actually true? The most lanes I could find at any point were 6 lanes each direction. I'm not counting ramps or tollways here, and I don't count frontage roads either since they have stoplights, bikes, and sidewalks, and freeway lane counts elsewhere don't include any parallel roads either. As for the congestion today, that can easily be explained by the fact that Houston is one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the US, and when the expansion was completed in 2011, congestion was definitely reduced, only to slowly be undone by the growing population. I think it makes intuitive sense that any significant population growth or density would put a strain on the transportation system; compare this to the trains in Mumbai which are packed full of people, because so many people live there in such a small area.
I agree that in sufficiently sparse areas, transit becomes inefficient. But in the US, we have cities with hundreds of thousands, or in some cases millions, of people, with borderline non-existent transit.
What, like Tulsa, Oklahoma (pop. 413,066)? There are plenty of buses there and they're pretty empty. And not for a lack of trying; the city keeps running the empty buses under the assumption that if they're there, people will use them, when that's clearly not the case.
As for negligence: Can you say that this argument is wrong? (I find this example fitting, given your link above--this is an example, completely typical in cities, of making pedestrians less safe to protect drivers who, most likely, made some sort of error).
I'm a bit confused by the pictures he showed. The pole seems to be mounted on a concrete bollard two or three feet above the ground, so I don't see how it follows that if a car veers off the road and hits it, the pole will shear away, when the car would just be stopped by the bollard.
But even assuming that the pole and shear are mounted at ground level, I guess the argument is not-even-wrong? I don't think it necessarily makes drivers safer, though. If the pole breaks away, then that will bring down traffic lights onto the ground with it, which can crash onto drivers on the roadway below. In fact if the driver isn't stopped by the pole then there's also the possibility that they will continue and crash into other vehicles too, if they're approaching from a side road heading towards another side road. If they're approaching from the middle of the intersection, then the pedestrian would be injured anyway (and maybe even pinned against the pole if it didn't break away).
So the narrative that traffic engineers have gross negligence for the regard of pedestrians in favor of drivers is completely unwarranted.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I believe that some transit can actually pay for itself. For example, the first NYC subway was private (the city took it over after refusing to allow them to raise the fare to account for inflation, bankrupting them). Japan currently has private train lines.
Funnily enough, most urbanist discourse I've seen online is against privatization of trains and in favor of nationalization, e.g. so Amtrak will actually gain the right-of-way over freight rail that they ostensibly have on paper but isn't meaningfully enforced.
If you don't care about that, then fine--but then "I just want to live how I want to" isn't valid either. If you expect that public services will be provided to you at below cost, then you should also expect that you might have to give up some of what you might want to benefit other people in turn.
I'm a bit confused here at what you're arguing against. This seems... obvious to me, and not something I was saying? I'm not saying "I just want to live how I want to"; that's trivially impossible because we are all constrained by various external factors beyond our control. More to the point, all planning decisions go through a committee and people will argue over what the best possible plan is, which indeed may include some people having to give up something in order to benefit others as you said (that's called compromise). This is true even if public services aren't provided to you at below cost.
I disagree that it's an isolated demand for rigor, because I oppose a broad array of government programs on similar grounds. Medicine and education are heavily subsidized, for example, and thus are over-consumed.
Well good for you, at least. Though that position seems hard to square with how expensive healthcare and college is in the US.
(This is somewhat outside the scope of NIMBYism specifically, but it's also the case that if you're going to subsidize some service, you should account for how effective it is and what the externalities are. Driving is low-capacity and has high externalities and negative side-effects, so it isn't a good choice to subsidize.)
Yes, you should. But I believe subsidizing driving is extremely effective at getting people to their destinations (well, as long as you aren't Myanmar and build a 20-lane highway in the middle of nowhere). It seems hard to believe that this analysis is getting applied evenly to, say, buses in Tulsa, Oklahoma that are running at basically empty capacity (and will even waive your fare for the rest of the day), which I would consider not effective and incredibly wasteful in fact.
Complaints about which things are being taxed (property vs gas etc.) seem to be irrelevant when the cost of replacing a single piece of infrastructure is 25% or more of the median household income.
Sorry, I should have linked to the later reply:
Yes, but they're not right. Lafeyette Parish's budget is available online, and its total Operations Expenditures for the current year are 427 million USD, with an included 90,000 households. Assuming no taxes are paid by businesses or out-of-parish people, all operations expenditures together runs at 4.7k USD per household. Its Public Works expenditures, which include all transportation spending, end up 654 USD per household. Even assuming that the 3.3k USD number StrongTowns comes up with is correct, that still doesn't get to 9k USD infrastructure -- and that's defining 'infrastructure' so broadly as to include police, parks, recreation, information services, so forth, (and spotting them two years of inflation, too).
--
What the police do is irrelevant if the legislature and/or courts have decided that nobody is actually to blame.
I should've been clearer; this is also part of my point. Courts seem to let just about anyone out on bond these days no matter how bad of a crime they were arrested for. San Francisco recently had its prosecutor recalled because he kept just not prosecuting crimes. And this all stems from rhetoric of "restorative justice" along with complaints about minorities being unfairly persecuted.
My point is people will kill someone and then just get out of jail and then do it again, no matter if they did the killing by running them over with a car or stabbing them with a knife. Hence my feeling that it rings hollow to paint driving as uniquely worse than homicide when deaths from both sources are hampered by lack of meaningful enforcement.
Also, any sort of meaningful enforcement is discouraged because, ironically, of how car-dependent we are. Preventing someone from driving, in most of the US, means they are entirely dependent on someone else to do things like work or buy food.
Is this really an objection people take seriously? I certainly don't. Yes, it is a punishment to have to be dependent on someone else, and that will suck. In fact the point of punishment is to suck, so you will have a strong incentive to not do the thing that got you in trouble. In this case, you're less likely to be a dangerous, negligent driver. And personally, someone being dependent on someone else is the least of my worries if it's because they killed another person.
However, even better than enforcement is prevention. There are ways to design roads and other infrastructure which are safer because they naturally cause drivers to be more careful. For example, posting a low speed limit on a sign does nothing if the road itself is straight with wide lanes. People tend to drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted limit, so rather than just posting a sign, make the road itself narrower.
I feel like this would do nothing if the driver is drunk and not likely to care at all about how narrow the road is, which is what happened in the Strong Towns example of the State Street fatality that they just... shrug off. Charles Marohn prematurely dismisses it by saying something about how engineers consider drunk people too, even though I sincerely doubt that a speed bump or lane narrowing would've prevented this drunk driver from speeding right through anyway. And then to go further and then say "Someone needs to sue these engineers for gross negligence and turn that entire liability equation around. It’s way past time." is... certainly a take, I suppose.
Finally, the negative externalities of cars go well beyond deaths related to negligence. They're loud and they pollute, to give 2 examples.
I mean, trains are loud too, so again, seems like an isolated demand. I'm not inherently against loud things on principle either; if a train runs through your apartment, then just have good soundproofing. Pollution can be solved by electric cars, and in fact, many places around the world have already banned sales of new gas cars by 2030-2035. My point being that these externalities should be solved and not just diagnosed.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Let me clarify my point. I'm generally skeptical of arguments of the form "they did [thing] in [Japan/Europe], why can't we do it here?" that do not take into account culture. Because my answer to that question is culture. If you live in Japan and affordable housing gets built next door, the worst thing your new neighbors might do is talk on the phone too loudly. If you live in America and affordable housing gets built next door, the worst thing that could happen is, well, let me just quote OP again:
One of my best friends used to live in a condo that was seated next door to one of these, which gave them a rather first-hand and literal application of what it means to say, “yes in my backyard” to this sort of project, and it was about as unpleasant as you’d expect. The frequency of parking lot fights, ambulances in the middle of the night, and police presence were, again, about you might expect.
So then people oppose these projects when they otherwise wouldn't if they had lived in Japan.
You state that "Prices are lower because supply is higher." This I do not have a disagreement with. But you seem to miss the point of why, exactly, supply is higher.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
It's easy to say you support a policy, when the costs are spread among everyone else. For example, when you live in a neighborhood of all single family homes and drive everywhere, do you pay all of the costs for the roads, infrastructure, and other services? Often not.
This is a non-sequitur / isolated demand at best, and wrong at worst. It sounds sensible to argue for the principle that you must pay for all the costs of services you use, except in practice no one has ever truly done that and it's much more practical to get people to pay for a portion of stuff they use. For example, on average 50% of road funding comes from gas taxes, and 50% of transit fares are subsidized. Both transit and road subsidies here are reasonable because infrastructure has economic benefits for all of society. If you told a transit operator that riders aren't paying for all of the costs of their services, they'd stare at you blankly and go, "of course they aren't; the point of infrastructure is to get them to their destinations, not to turn a profit".
In general, I am skeptical of Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns. Strong Towns especially since they've been shown to not be honest with their numbers, and Not Just Bikes for repeating Strong Towns's argument without any criticism, as he does in the video you linked to.
Driving is incredibly dangerous; car crashes kill several times more people each year than homicide in the US,
This rings hollow to me because a significant factor in both car crashes and homicide is a lack of accountability. First off, anti-police sentiment has been on the rise, resulting in less police and less police funding, so traffic enforcement goes down and along with it traffic safety. (Cue the arguments from activists about how pretextual traffic stops are just harassing minorities and resulted in the death of George Floyd and whatnot.) And of course with less police, there's more homicides. Next, judges and prosecutors release people that probably shouldn't be released, so you get cases where police end up pursuing a six-time felon whose license is suspended which hasn't stopped him from actually driving in the slightest.
I mean, yes, you can argue cars are just a bad of an externality as the homeless. But personally I'm like, well people have been railing against the police these past few years, what else did you expect?
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Well, they do in fact acknowledge this, and that is why they don't want to sell their house and become the rich equivalent of a hermit. Nothing you said in this comment has addressed your interlocutor's comment in any way. I find this move of attempting to turn your interlocutor's argument against themselves to be logically confusing.
In general I am skeptical of any comparisons to foreign countries like Japan or any in western Europe. This is because, for example, Japan has a culture of falling in line, keeping your head down, and being normal that is far more strict than culture in America. So the worst of the worst people in Japan are only doing things like, I don't really know, let's just say maybe talking too loud on the phone once in a while. This is far more tolerable than the worst of the worst in America, which OP describes as:
One of my best friends used to live in a condo that was seated next door to one of these, which gave them a rather first-hand and literal application of what it means to say, “yes in my backyard” to this sort of project, and it was about as unpleasant as you’d expect. The frequency of parking lot fights, ambulances in the middle of the night, and police presence were, again, about you might expect.
Not only that, but for Japan especially, they are more hostile to foreigners than America is, so they have far less of an immigration workload to deal with. That means if you're Japanese and you live in Japan and you were raised Japanese from the start, your neighbors are more likely to be just like you and as Japanese as you are, and dealing with the same culture. Having neighbors similar to you is what OP wants:
I want to live next to married couples with decent careers. [...] Even aside from trustworthiness, transience, investment in the property, and quality of friends and relatives, we simply don’t share the same cultural norms and preferences. I would rather be around the petit bourgeois.
Of course, it's not all roses. Japanese culture has plenty of downsides (high rate of innocent convictions, peer pressure, work suicides, etc.). But I simply don't understand why any time someone brings up how Japan or the Netherlands has better housing/urban design/transit/etc. they will always, without fail, never mention the important difference between those countries and America: culture. (And other important things too, like law enforcement policies.)
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
The rhetoric around his killers have used the word "gang" more often than other police killings, and I can't help wonder if that is because his killers are Black. It's an odd form of racist dog whistling from the "woke" denizens of reddit.
I view the use of "gang" more anti-cop than anti-black. For example, see these pieces covering the Los Angeles "deputy gangs". That said, it's easy to interpret it in an anti-black sense, and I wonder if it will end up going down the euphemism treadmill like many other words that were at first benign then turned into slurs.
We don't give terrorist videos this kind of air time, and we actively scrub videos of mass shootings that get posted online.
I disagree that this should be standard operating procedure. People should know what happened, and not be restricted to learning about it through second-hand accounts. When you don't let people see video, you end up with wild and unsubstantiated speculation like "Paul Pelosi's attacker was a right-wing MAGA-wearing extremist!" (no, the bodycam footage shows he was just some random dude who decided to break into a house).
I agree with the rest of your points, though; hyping it up in any way is atrocious and disgusting, and in fact all the hubbub around this situation is unnecessary. Protests and riots of any form are unnecessary at best and excessive and damaging at worst.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I'm not sure what Dreher's Law is - searching with DuckDuckGo suggests it's something to do with a Nazi prosecutor - but if defying it means trans women convicted of sex offenses will be put in male prisons, then while I would consider that a win, I wouldn't say it's completely out of the woods. Trans rights activists will almost certainly campaign for that trans woman to be put back in a female prison and may even end up reversing the decision.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Besides my opinion that this doesn't seem to be related much to the bureaucracy the OP describes, none of your other points make sense.
The cities that went full traffic engineering in the 60s are now often the cities with the worst traffic due to induced demand.
"Induced demand" is a confusing argument. The demand doesn't spawn in from nowhere; the demand was already there, but the congestion simply suppressed them, and adding more roadway allowed more people to use the road. Otherwise, what is the reason that people don't just stop driving if the congestion gets too bad?
Building massive freeways didn't reduce traffic, it turned cities into Houston, while people in Copenhagen take a 15-minute walk to work.
From what I'm seeing, there's still plenty of people who drive to work in Copenhagen.
civil engineers tend to optimize for speed*volume of traffic.
Do you have a source for this? It sounds uncharitable to claim they don't also take safety into consideration.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
What do you mean by that? If someone's trolling, report them. Presumably, the mods can still see all their posts regardless of them having a private profile, and can still take action against them.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
First, Twitter is not the uber-app proposed forth (not yet at least). Second, I doubt Musk will be able to achieve his vision of said uber-app on any timescale relevant to us. But yes, if Twitter is an uber-app with payment systems and crypto integration, the comparison to a socioeconomic system that builds a wall to keep people from escaping might be warranted.
I'm not 100% sure though because despite all the deplatforming of right-wingers, many have still managed to keep an audience and even earn some revenue.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Seems like Wikipedia's "notability" rule is the same as (pre-Musk) Twitter's "notability" rule for verified accounts. Namely, it's nothing to do with notability at all, and it seems entirely to do with whether Wikipedia editors like it or not (barring cases that are too obviously notable to be dismissed like Trump).
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I mean, Musk explicitly talked about implementing free speech on Twitter, using the words "free speech". However I think before this policy dropped, there were many signs that he never actually followed through on the promise of free speech.
I agree with the rest of your comment, though. Calling out hypocrisy doesn't inherently make oneself better.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
It's really interesting how Elon Musk taking over Twitter has been in the news cycle for like, what, a month at this point? Maybe even two? You'd think there'd be bigger news at some point, but no, all day every day it's just Musk Musk Musk.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I wouldn't call the Watergate dismissals a massacre either, and I would much prefer to use the word "massacre" to mean killing rather than broadening and overloading its meaning, which would make it less useful (i.e. you would learn less about the world from hearing the word "massacre"). In any case the severity of what Elon Musk did is in no way, shape, or form equivalent to what Richard Nixon did. For starters, Nixon didn't un-dismiss the special prosecutor afterwards, and what Musk did isn't illegal.
No one understands that to be a claim that they are equivalent in any way to actual killing.
I mean... I did. And that's not how it works. If I didn't know anything about Watergate and you told me something called a "Saturday Night Massacre" happened, I would assume that Nixon killed someone or something like that. This is what I mean when I say that overloading the meaning of a word makes it less useful, because if I accept that "massacre" could mean not killing, then if I didn't know anything about the Chiquola Hill Massacre I would wonder if it was just people getting fired or people getting killed.
I think "transphobe" is a hugely overloaded term that communicates almost nothing of value. The only thing you know for certain when someone invokes it is that they are referring to something negative, and something to do with trans people. That's all the information it conveys. It's frequently used to describe everything from the tiniest, object-level objections to certain trans positions (don't put biological males convicted of rape in biological women's prisons) to extreme, hateful rhetoric that genuinely wants to see trans people genocided (and not the "soft" form of genocide that entails detransition; actual murder).
It reminds one of calling Martin Luther King Jr. a criminal.
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