dr_analog
razorboy
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User ID: 583
dr_analog
razorboy
9d ago
From https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart
The average district spends $12,000 per pupil per year on public schools (up to $30,000 in big cities!)
My $3000/month number is is computed it from my local district's 2025 budget statement. We're not even a big city.
Note schools in general bullshit the number into being about half of that by telling you what the program expenses are, but they're not telling you about total costs like grants to build them shiny (or shitty) buildings that are depreciating. You have to dig more to calculate that.
Their kids will only be in school for twelve years, while they'll be working for about four or more decades in all probability, so you need to factor that into your hypothetical.
Do we? OK, the state will spend $360,000 per kid just to put them through school alone (again, not counting CHIP, and other social costs), and one of them will perhaps be employable enough to get their own sugar water delivery job for $40,000/year for 40 years while the other takes half of that time off to look after their future kids who repeat the cycle. Then they start drawing retirement benefits and maybe cost $10k/month in health care for the last 1-10 years of their life.
This isn't a total accounting but I'm not seeing obvious upside here.
dr_analog
razorboy
9d ago
Yes, I didn't like public school to begin with but learning how ludicrously expensive it actually is is what radicalized me on homeschooling.
dr_analog
razorboy
9d ago
Relax. It's only $3000 month per kid. It's $6000 per month for two kids.
I have a hard time appreciating this POV. It sounds pleasant but how is this quantified?
Example: a family of 4 moves to my town, attracted by affordable housing. Dad works full-time delivering pallets of sugar water for $20/hour. Mom picks up DoorDash shifts while kids are at daycare school for some extra bucks. So, lets say their household income is $45,000/year.
Their two kids consume approximately $6000/month in public school funds alone, or $72,000/year. That's just going by their kids in school.
Are we arguing that the value provided by sugar water delivery and DoorDash makes up for the cost of putting their kids in school, to say nothing of all of their other socialized costs (roads, police, fire, sanitation, etc)? Am I looking through the wrong lens here? Because I can't see how society is ever ahead in this scenario.
dr_analog
razorboy
9d ago
For completeness he has this quite fantastic followup post where he expounds https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1819867003966148655?t=nxw_B_ejIP_ZsG_GhBVdMw&s=19
I think he's not describing hedonic treadmill stuff. People don't really continue working 60 hour a week jobs alternating between Walmart and driving Uber just because they consider Steam games a burning need.
dr_analog
razorboy
9d ago
sorry
but! I don't quite understand. what's an example of an increase in material productivity that's not an increase in utility?
I don't really believe your claim from first principles, aside from the fact that building any housing at all moves the needle slightly towards making you a place more aligned with building overall.
I don't have any data to argue against you with though, so take that for what it's worth.
dr_analog
razorboy
9d ago
sorry the median income in Eugene is irrelevant to this. I just meant to say everyone who you invite to your town that makes less than $100k consumes more in taxes than they pay
On The Poverty Equilibrium vs NIBMYism
Big Yud recently posted an interesting thought, The Poverty Equilibrium. The most brutal possible summary is: despite an insane amount of technological progress over the last centuries, some people still toil all day in miserable jobs to provide for some urgent need and it's not clear why this is happening and therefore it's not clear that another 100x increase in utility will make it any different.
I have a not quite neat rebuttal. Maybe call it a partial agonist rebuttal: poverty kind of persists because of NIMBYism, but NIMBYism also prevents more poverty.
Lets take my town of Eugene Oregon as an example. Eugene has become a desirable place to live the last 10 years. It has moderate weather, rarely snowing but also rarely hitting the 100s. Is very bike friendly and it exhibits Portlandia levels of absurdity regarding organic and local food and products. You can exercise outdoors all year round, comfortably, and stunning natural beauty is a stones throw away. You're also surrounded by sensual hippies and violent crime is below average for the US, though there is the usual west coast share of scary homelessness and menacing.
Naturally, as a near-coastal elite city, building is heavily restricted and housing inventory is low so prices are high and home ownership is unreachable if you only make minimum wage ($14.70/hour). There are constant calls to build more affordable housing, but instead all that seems to get built are luxury apartments that don't alleviate housing shortages, regularly outraging the /r/Eugene subreddit.
EAs cry incessantly that NIMBYism is to blame for this state of affairs and if we would Just Fucking Build the cost of housing would plummet and gripping poverty would be solved.
One digression. Eugene has, wedged immediately against it, a town called Springfield. The quality of life is nearly identical, you have access to all of the luxuries I said above but maybe add 10 minutes of drive time. It's less bike friendly and the public spaces are a bit less nice. Alternatively, the police do enforce laws harder. Anyway, the cost of this almost-but-not-quite Eugene town is that housing is about 30% cheaper, into the range of comfortable if you make minimum wage. However, nobody wants to live there. Instead people treat living in Eugene like some human right and Springfield Oregon may as well be Springfield Missouri.
But back to NIMBYism, building more affordable housing would actually make living here worse and it can be argued mathematically: median income in Eugene is $30k. In the US, the top 10% of taxpayers provide about 70% of government funding. If you invite people who make less than the top 10% into your town, you make your town poorer. But it can also be argued in hand waving qualitative fashion: the population of the town is about 175,000. If we built 100,000 tiny houses that cost $400/month, the cost of housing would certainly plummet but the quality of life in town would collapse. Traffic, which barely exists here, would become awful, the public spaces would be full of much more homeless menacing, crime and littering would increase and the public services would be stretched thinner.
Aside from tragedy and also usual bad decisions that contribute to poverty (addiction, bad with money), poverty persists because it's actually pretty hard for some people to leave their town if it becomes unaffordable (family obligations, can't find a job in cheaper towns). Similarly, there are not robust ways to accommodate more poor people without making the entire town poorer. I can see how Kowloon Walled City can accommodate high population density but living there seems pretty unappealing compared to quiet quaint little Eugene. Could a 100x increase in utility fix this? Probably! If building was radically cheaper, I could imagine beautiful Sim City style arcologies that have these peaceful pockets of small towns that can support millions of people. But until then, NIMBYism is good actually and prevents poverty from spreading.
If you want Kowloon Walled City in America, on the other hand, what's stopping us? Plenty of room in Nevada. We can build a tech bro metropolis around it. Hell, I'd visit. I'd probably even buy an apartment there that's vacant 50 weeks a year.
dr_analog
razorboy
9d ago
But a few examples that clearly dispel your point. He had a hand in appointing SC justices who overturned federal abortion access. This affected women across the country in states that are not solidly blue. You might say they could still travel or access things illegally, but this is already a sizable effect.
The bomb was already dropped though, in 2020. How would electing Harris in 2024 have changed the impact of this at all? The token conservatve flagship issue was achieved and isn't getting restored without an enormous political shift the other way.
Further to that point, unless you want to argue the Supreme Court has no effect on any of these people's lives and could not for their foreseeable lifespans, it seems a strange argument to make that their lives will not be affected at all. Are you that confident the SC will dither meaninglessly for 40 years?
What issues do you have in mind?
dr_analog
razorboy
12d ago
This will almost certainly not affect your life in any way!
And this is almost certainly wrong. It won't be the most important thing in most people's lives, but the federal government writes laws by the thousand and writes regulations by the million and spends dollars by the trillion. Even the second and third order effects on people not directly impacted can be huge.
I should say, won't matter in any legible way versus the counter-factual.
Like, obviously inflation affected people but it is debatable whether this would have been worse than high unemployment, and it's not clear at all that Biden would have done one and Trump would have done the other.
I voted for Harris and I'm annoyed that I have to deal with 4 more years of Trump, but I'm mostly fine. I am even looking at the silver lining a bit since he has some interesting people in his orbit.
But all of my liberal friends are so bummed. I'm not sure what to do about it. I kind of want to take them and just shake them a bit and say look everything will be fine. Stop believing the propaganda. We're not descending to Christian fascism! We're not going to have a national abortion ban! This will almost certainly not affect your life in any way! Nothing ever happens!
But I think that might be the wrong approach.
I guess I'll let them process their grief and come out of their shell when they're ready.
In the meantime, my urge to troll right now is 11/10 since a small part of me uncharitably considers these displays as very histrionic grief vanity. But I am resisting, for now.
dr_analog
razorboy
13d ago
My local library doesn't stock The Bell Curve by Charles Murray. In fact, it doesn't even appear in their library catalog as a book that exists.
They do have other Charles Murray books, but not this one.
How much should I read into this? We have a shiny 5 story library in our downtown with things like 3D printers and a kids play area, so it's probably not for lack of resources? My town's extremely liberal though.
What should I even do about it?
dr_analog
razorboy
16d ago
I also use a wealth insurance based approach to health care and I am regularly surprised that a bit of negotiating and shopping around can bring the cash price of something down to less than it would've been with co-insurance.
(I'll level with you, 250ms is an ass-pull on your part, even planet scale databases like Spanner that are way overkill for something like this can manage much better latencies
I can tell you for an absolute fact that plans to use Spanner to back geographically redundant multi-master git repos made latency even worse. But this is a digression.
(and yes, it doesn't have to be geographically redundant, I'm simply upping the scale to demonstrate tradeoffs)
I'm saying the magic distributed database introduces tradeoffs over the single SQLite file, and they vary by project and used github.com as a mundane but easily accessible example.
dr_analog
razorboy
16d ago
Mmm, I notice it. if I'm working on solo projects I switch to a git repo on a personal server instead of github just to avoid it
dr_analog
razorboy
16d ago
We eventually ended up with a custom Debian for all_dependencies.deb because one of the tools he’d used had stopped supporting versions properly.
based
There can be only two reasons for that, based on my experience: either you are an extreme, generational quality genius, proper Einstein of bug triage, or you've just got lucky so far.
I just know UNIX really well. It's not a freak accident. I used to go to bed reading UNIX programming manuals when I was a teenager. I know it at a fairly fundamental level. But it's also an open platform and there's been a lot of forks so there's been some natural selection on it as well on what runs today (not that it's all awesome everywhere).
I can't say the same about cloud platforms at all. They're purposefully atomized to a much larger extent and you can't see into them and there's no wisdom of the ancients text books that take you through the source code. The API is all you have, and the documentation usually sucks. Sometimes the only way I can figure some of the APIs out is by searching GitHub for ~hours to see if someone else has done this before, if I'm lucky.
Consequently, this means a bigger system will have to fall into hands of persons who, unlike you, aren't Einsteins. And if the system is built in a way that it requires Einstein to handle it, the system is now under catastrophic risk. It
None of what I'm arguing for really requires being the lone genius, but I recognize trying to hire teams of people with this kind of knowledge is probably a risk.
Whatever not my problem crank crank crank
no? not every system wants the same CAP tradeoffs. not everything benefits from the overhead of being a distributed system. it's not free to make something distributed.
example: github.com has real costs because it's planet scale and multi-master. it takes 250ms+ to process your push because it makes geographic redundancy guarantees that cannot physically be improved on. if you did away with the multi-master setup it would take significantly less time
you have "solved" the distributed system problem here but making every push take that much longer is a big cost. in this case, it just so happens github doesn't care about making every developer wait an extra 250ms per push
to say nothing about how you've also blown up complexity that needs to be reasoned through and maintained
(and yes, it doesn't have to be geographically redundant, I'm simply upping the scale to demonstrate tradeoffs)
In cranky neckbeard era UNIX-based distributed system environments I almost never hit a problem that I can't diagnose fairly quickly. The pieces are manageable and I can see into all of them, so long as the systems are organized in a fairly simple way. Like maybe once or twice in 20 years have I been genuinely stumped by something that took weeks of debugging to get to the bottom of (they were both networked filesystems).
With cloud-based garbage, being stumped or confused about unintended behavior is more the norm. Especially on GCP. I am frequently stuck trying to make sense of some obscure error, with limited visibility in the Google thing that's broken. The stack of crap is so deep it's very time consuming to get through it all and we often just give up and try to come up with some hacky workaround or live with not being to cache something the way we want or weaken security in a way we don't want to. It's just ugly through and through and everyone has learned helplessness about it.
dr_analog
razorboy
17d ago
yes, and if we reach that point we will introduce the complex multi-master thing
but most things never reached that point
It also just seems a lot easier than it really is. There's the whole Aphyr Jepsen series where he puts a bunch of different distributed databases to the test that everyone knows are supposed to be good and correct and they fall apart miserably. Almost every single one. It's bad enough that people don't really understand the CAP theorem's tradeoffs, but the real world systems are even worse because they can't even live up to what they claim to guarantee.
If you really think your application has outgrown the directory tree of .json files or the SQLite instance, show me how you plan to deal with failures and data consistency issues. It's not trivial and if you think it is I'm not going to let you drive.
or they see it as a career builder/educational opportunity
I feel like this is the unstated rationale for using every single cloud provider's API
yeah Docker's fine
dockerizing every single possible thing is not really fine. it gives way to some super aggressively microservice oriented architecture that adds much, much more overall bloat
dr_analog
razorboy
17d ago
In contrast I find it's pretty easy to set up a service with a few replicas and a load balancer with health checking in front of it so that nobody needs to be manually selecting replicas.
yeah that part's easy. what about if you want to make the database they write to redundant? you have to worry about CAP issues and that makes things much more obnoxious
if the goal is to reduce poverty globally, build a Kowloon Walled City metropolis in the Nevada desert and encourage people to move there
if we're confusing "everyone should be able to live in a quaint quiet town" with "reduce poverty globally", my answer is NIMBY
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