what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
The obvious counter-argument to me is that the trend of sprawling, samey, car-dependent, SFH-only suburbs started in the 40s and 50s, when crime was generally at a low and prior to the riots mentioned by Kulak. The crime wave may have accelerated this trend, but it didn't start it.
The planners who built these places also had no issue planning and building similar developments for blacks, though they were separated because those people believed it was just the natural order of things for races to be separate, not that blacks were inherently incapable of civilization.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
For most of that time, when people had lots of children, many of them died in said wars, famines, and plagues, or just from everyday diseases. The mother often died in or after childbirth as well.
not a single thing related to raising children should be expensive given the capabilities of modernity.
What is the saying? Consumption always expands to meet the income available? Children are just one example of this--possibly one of hte clearest examples, in fact. Obviously calories are cheap, and people are rich enough to afford much more space per person. But if you tried to raise a child like an 1800s farmer (minimal or no schooling, having them work on your farm from a young age, 12 people in a 1 room house, everyone sleeping on the floor, no electricity or running water, letting them walk to a neighbor alone, etc) you'd be locked up for child abuse (and they wouldn't be set up to do very well in the modern world).
Even if you think about these labor saving devices... many of them correspond to tasks that weren't done at all or were much easier in the past. When your house is small and 1 room, cleaning is much easier than when it's large with many rooms. A simple wood floor is easier to sweep than if you have a mix of tile, wood, carpet, etc. You don't need a dishwasher or laundry machine if you have the absolute bare minimum of dishes and clothes. Or take medicine: If the only medicine you could possibly access is what you can make from herbs, well that's certainly cheaper than buying something expensive at the pharmacy! It just might be completely useless and your child might die.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
To go from median to +1SD requires that you jump past 34% of the population, no matter how compact or spread the variable is
I'm pretty sure this is not correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule only applies to the normal distribution and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality gives no minimum at all for the portion of the distribution within 1 SD. And of course, this is all assuming that the standard deviation is even finite, which it may not be.
inherently by talking in standard deviations, we are talking in ordinal terms not absolute terms.
I don't follow. Ordinal data can't have a SD, since it by definition corresponds to an ordering or categorization of data, without meaningful numeric values assigned.
Yes, which is mostly a remark on just how huge 1 SD is
But 1 SD income seems like a lot, while 1 SD of height (about 2.5 inches) seems like it's not a lot. I don't think it's meaningful to talk about 1 SD being intuitively big or small since it depends on the variable in question.
Those things aren't typically enough to move you up by 1 SD of income. So even postulating a perfect correlation between the two you wouldn't expect a sub-1-SD rise in income to yield a 1SD+ rise in happiness.
That's fair (although the correlation isn't even defined if income has infinite variance).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Income isn't just skewed, it has a very long tail. Many variables have much more compact distributions. Happiness doesn't have natural units and could be distributed however you want depending on how you measure it, although it would be weird to me if the range of feelings human brains were capable of expressing spanned such a wide distribution (also something something CLT handwaving arguments, emotions are the sum of many small features).
1 SD can be a substantial impact, but if the result above is correct, it would be very difficult to obtain by increasing one's income from typical means (promotion, career change, getting an advanced degree, etc).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
But the ancient Arab world didn't lack large and rich cities, centralized empires, writing, art, mathematics, etc. either. Even today some Arab countries have most of those things; yes, it's unsustainable decadence due to oil rather than true economic development, but they still managed to maintain a reasonably stable government, something resembling property rights, etc.
Actually, Arabs are Semitic, so yes the current inhabitants of North Africa are not directly descended from pharaohs or Carthaginians, but they aren't that distantly related either.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Ok, but the Northern part of Africa is still incredibly dysfunctional and poor today, so it still seems to present a question about what makes people capable of building civilization which can't be answered by reference to inherent intelligence. I don't know enough about the ancient history of sub-Saharan Africa specifically, but I do know that Botswana has seemingly dodged most of the problems plaguing its neighbors and is substantially richer than Egypt today.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
This is more questionable
I can only assume that you don't consider Egypt to be "Africa" if you are questioning the impressiveness of African art and architecture.
It takes a lot of organization and manpower to extract rents from the poor.
Rulers have been extracting wealth probably since rulers and concentrated societies existed. This review agrees with you that it is difficult, but it seems an exaggeration to say that Africans couldn't figure it out until the past few centuries. Unless I'm wrong, but if Africa also lacks anything worth anything worth stealing, maybe that contributes to its lack of developed nations?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Intelligence is helpful, it just isn't sufficient. African kingdoms have been prosperous before (at least in a similar way to other old civilizations, which is to say, they had rich rulers and impressive art, even if the average person's life sucked). But building truly prosperous societies, in the sense of benefiting a large portion of the people, is incredibly difficult. What many African countries have now--a strong man extracting wealth from an oppressed populace--is probably closer to many ancient societies that we now glorify as being important steps on the road to civilization, than the latter are to what we have today.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
It makes sense to me that the vaccine could cause very different symptoms than COVID itself. It's not the most intuitive, but it wouldn't be the weirdest fact about biology by far. However, I'm still very skeptical that the vaccine could cause hundreds of different syndromes covering every single system in the human body. Is there any single cause that causes such a wide variety of medical symptoms?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I'm no doctor, but this claim doesn't explain anything to me. The spike protein is in COVID, that's the whole point. AFAIK COVID doesn't cause anywhere near this range of symptoms, and if it did, it would be vastly more dangerous than most vaccine skeptics seem to think. Just because something is "toxic" doesn't mean it causes literally every symptom imaginable.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
That would be my guess as well. In addition, these likely reflect reports rather than any sort of confirmed illness (edit: I would guess coming from https://vaers.hhs.gov/). In attempting to make its point seem stronger, in my opinion, it actually makes it weaker: how could a single vaccine (not even a new idea, just a different way of making them) causes eye injuries (something the article itself admits is unusual for a vaccine), vascular disorders, skin and tissue, ears, respiratory, breast or reproductive... the list goes on. It also is clearly doing the thing of "Big! Numbers!" by pointing to the number of different categories, even though looking at the list a "category" may be extremely specific, such as differentiating "vaccination site pain" "...swelling" "...discomfort" and then repeating them all for "vaccination site joint X".
Oh yeah, and the author is also advertising their book, which looks like a very reasonable and dispassionate review of scientific evidence.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
You can continue to try to be overly literal for the sake of scoring fake points, or you can address the substantive argument being made. I'm not sure what you think you're accomplishing with the former.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
This is obviously hypothetical, but I disagree. Taking a streetcar (or tram, bus, light rail, whatever) into the city, and walking to your final destination, is very different from living in a far-flung exurb that, at best, involves commuting for work (and by the 80s, often didn't even involve that much). And building such places is far less destructive to the city itself. One could argue this just subjects the middle class to the awful conditions of the cities in the 70s without any alternative; on the other hand, maybe if they stay, they vote for better crime policies, provide stabilizing social forces, don't displace lots of inner-city residents, and improve the tax base in the city. (My inner libertarian is outraged at that last one, but usually whenever the urban/suburban arguments start to happen on TheMotte, someone tells me that it's ok that car-dependent suburbs are subsidized because one function of government is to provide public goods for the benefit of all, so I figure what's good for the goose is good for the gander).
As far as I can tell, this "long-term decay" lasted a few decades and has generally been on the reverse since the 90s (in general; obviously some cities continued to decline, but e.g. NYC has had increasing population over the past few decades.)
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Pack too many people in too little space.
...this is what makes a city, a city. Are you just opposed to the existence of cities?
Cities aren't built to walking scale.
I think it's clear from the other poster's previous comments that they mean a combination of walking and transit; not that you can walk literally everywhere. No one who lives in NYC would walk all over the entire city. I think you can understand this and are trying to make gotchas rather than engage in good faith.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Suburbs are very old, but the cities they surrounded were never rebuilt to allow the suburbanites easier access to the detriment of the city's inhabitants. Certainly the streetcar suburbs we just discussed did not do that and did not require that. Cars' mere existence are not the problem; it's enforced car dependence: Knocking down urban neighborhoods to build highways to the suburbs (which already couldn't handle all the traffic even back in the 50s), building suburbs that can literally only be accessed or traversed in a car, preventing the building of any housing other than sprawling and expensive single family homes, etc.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Poorly designed transit is slow. Walking is slow when things are far apart. You can absolutely design cities so that other options are faster than driving... especially since if everyone is driving, you inevitability face heavy congestion, especially within cities. When I was in Switzerland the trains ran beautifully (even during construction) and were probably much easier than driving would have been.
Cars are useful for some things but it would be nice if I didn't have to own one just to get around town, and could get by using one rarely enough that I could make do with the various car rental apps.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
If the street cars are gone (and not replaced with some other transit) it's not really a streetcar suburb anymore.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
This creates a spiral, where the most walking-friendly destinations and infrastructure end up neglected, making them even less attractive, and people who want to drive end up going elsewhere.
Something like this is possible, or even likely. Another point, often made by urbanists, is that having more regular people in spaces makes them safer, and feel safer, because of safety in numbers. However, mainly what I was trying to get at is that the policies that allow lawlessness to continue and spread are orthogonal to policies that favor driving/other modes of transportation, and so it is entirely possible (easy, even, aside from the political constraints that seem to be unique to America) to make walkable places that are nothing like what firmamenti describes.
Yes. People began moving to suburbs almost as soon as they could get cars. Even before, with the "streetcar suburbs" proliferating in the 1920's. Then rising crime and unrest, and safety-hostile urban policies like blockbusting and forced school integration caused mass flight right when the new interstates made it convenient to do so.
Streetcar suburbs are the opposite of a car-dependent development and are not a problem.
I think you should re-check your history. Homicide rates declined from the mid 30s until the mid 60s, which is exactly when American governments started demolishing urban neighborhoods to build highways, subsidizing homeownership, etc.
If you're just going to drop a thinly veiled claim that being near black people is a public safety hazard, you should have some evidence for it. "Controversial claims require evidence" etc.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
God I seriously wish that some of these anti-car people could just spend a month actually living in the "car free" cities that they think everybody wants so they could realize how terrible it is.
A lot of them have done so, probably most notably NotJustBikes, who moved to Amsterdam.
Most of these problems seem to be unrelated to the extent to which a city is walkable. Car-dependent American cities still have homelessness, crime, and drug use, while many walkable ones in Europe or Japan have much less. Walkability does not mean doing nothing about social problems; Amsterdam did a lot of work (see section 9) to clean itself up.
This idea that "boomers like cars and ruined everything by making car centric cities" is absurd and I can only assume is parroted by people who never leave their goon caves.
This is unnecessarily rude, but also seems to neglect history. Were cities already plagued by the same issues after WW2, when the exodus to car-dependent suburbs began, and is that why people started to leave? Have the policies imposed to make cities and suburbs more amenable to cars, such as knocking down urban neighborhoods to make way for highways, or preventing any housing from being built, contributed to these social problems?
(The actual thing to object to is that boomers aren't responsible for these policies for the most part--it's actually Silent and Greatest, until more recently.)
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
There's not "no evidence" in the sense that you can certainly find papers claiming narcissism has decreased over time. However, you can also find ones saying that it is flat over time, or has increased over time. E.g. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_surprisingly_boring_truth_about_millennials_and_narcissism
In a foundational 2008 paper, Jean Twenge (coauthor of The Narcissism Epidemic) and her colleagues reviewed 85 studies that surveyed more than 16,000 college students between 1979 and 2006... The researchers found that college students were becoming more narcissistic—by a full 30 percent from 1982 to around 2006. UC Davis’s Kali Trzesniewski and colleagues responded in 2008... The results indicated no change in narcissism... In yet another 2008 paper, Twenge and Joshua Foster re-analyzed data... they found that narcissism rose among both whites and Asians from 2002 to 2007. But because Asians tended to have lower narcissism scores in general, and the Asian population at UC campuses increased during the time period under scrutiny, the overall trend may have been obscured. Twenge and Foster also objected to the data that Trzesniewski and her coauthors had used... Further studies in 2009 and 2010 found no rise in narcissism. But a 2010 paper by Twenge and Foster objected to their methods... “The debate on changes in narcissism [is] seemingly settled,” Twenge and Foster wrote in 2010. “Seemingly” being the keyword: In late 2017, a new study appeared in Psychological Science that called all the previous ones into question... They found a “small and continuous decline” in narcissism throughout that time period.
The actual section is several paragraphs with a lot more details, but you get the gist. It then points out that the instrument used has a constant wording, which may be interpreted differently. Other sources don't provide a single simple answer, either, such as https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191210111655.htm or https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171115-millenials-are-the-most-narcissistic-generation-not-so-fast (which I think summarizes some of the same evidence as the first article).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
The Cochrane meta-review contains 12 studies, only 2 of which are covid-specific. Those 2 studies are https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069 which says
mask wearing averaged 13.3% in villages where no interventions took place but increased to 42.3% in villages where in-person interventions were introduced. Villages where in-person reinforcement of mask wearing occurred also showed a reduction in reporting COVID-like illness, particularly in high-risk individuals
and https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817, reporting that
Infection with SARS-CoV-2 occurred in 42 participants recommended masks (1.8%) and 53 control participants (2.1%)... Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection.
That's 1 positive and 1 neutral study, with the positive study having a much, much larger sample size; based on https://www.stat.ubc.ca/~rollin/stats/ssize/b2.html the neutral study is only about 30% powered to detect a decrease from 2% to 1.5% infection rate.
In addition, all of these studies are really testing the combined effectiveness of masks against COVID, and whether various measures to get people to wear masks actually do so, and the baseline level of mask wearing. For example, the latter study I quoted above says
Based on the lowest adherence reported in the mask group during follow-up, 46% of participants wore the mask as recommended, 47% predominantly as recommended, and 7% not as recommended.
and the former has the adherence levels in the passage I quoted.
Obviously you can't do a meta-analysis with 2 studies, which is why Cochrane grouped these 2 in with the other 10, but "By the best standards of evidence available, masks do nothing for covid-19." is simply not true. In some cases an individual study is more reliable evidence than a meta-analysis, and this is probably one of those cases.
Crime by native whites is low
It looks low in comparison to the AA rate, but the US white-offender homicide rate is still higher than most developed European countries' total rate (and many of the poorer ones as well). Even if you assume that none of the "unknown" in the first link below are white, it's still 2.1 per 100,000. If you use the distribution of victims as an estimate (2nd link) since most murders are same-race, you get 2.5; if we assume the unknowns are distributed the same as the knowns (41% white), then we get just under 3. Countries such as Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, France, the UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands are all below 2, as well as Poland, Spain, Albania, and Croatia, among others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Vital_statistics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I'm all for facing certain risks head-on and accepting that some amount of risk is unavoidable in a life worth living. I don't know what's to be gained from neglecting even basic safety regardless of context. At least Pasha's post from today is about taking risks to have fun, explore, and learn things. Risking disability or death when it's easily avoidable for misplaced machismo is the opposite of masculine, in my opinion. "Duty is heavier than a mountain. Death is lighter than a feather." Your duty as a traditional man is to take care of your family. Can't do that if you're crippled or dead. Put aside your ego and do the boring but important things; that's actually the hard part.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Seems to me like locals might not want to live in an environment you consider "interesting" or "unique." The US was full of dangerous, dirty cities and poor farms in 1900. Then after WW2 everyone who could afford to moved to the clean and safe (ish) but absolutely boring, sterile, repetitive suburbs that no tourist would ever want to visit. Partly this was due to top-down changes that other places have the capability to avoid, but people would like to be rich, and with that comes convenience, safety, etc. (Both because those things cost money, and because your time is more valuable and dying is worse when you're reach).
The Amish strike a different balance between 1800s living and modern living. They do fine, although they also give up a lot of modern amenities that many people don't want to live without. These things cost money, but trying to compare the cost directly to the past is pointless because they didn't exist at all.
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