what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I'm just going to say, I don't think this mod action is necessarily wrong with the rules as written, but I think it's inconsistently applied. It seems to me that there are quite a lot of short, low-effort takes making fairly debatable claims that never get modded (yes, I sometimes report them--doesn't seem to matter).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I'm always very skeptical of these sorts of stats. "Federal poverty rate" is not an objective measure given to us by God or nature. That's a somewhat arbitrary and adjusted threshold.
It is, although it was decreasing for a long time before the 70s. I can only find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Number_in_Poverty_and_Poverty_Rate,_1959_to_2017.png which only goes back to the late 50s, but I believe that it was steadily declining for decades before that, even through the Great Depression. I would guess what happened is that general economic and productivity growth brought everyone who is capable of consistently working full-time above the poverty line, and what's left is people with some other problem (mental illness, drugs, crime, broken family, or otherwise incapable of or unwilling to participate in normal society), but it is certainly convenient for my ideology that it bottomed out right when LBJ introduced the War on Poverty.
In that case it's not exactly about improving the quality of life of car users, just mitigating their externalities. Which, for the record, I agree with in this case.
It may not be the primary intention, but it does help.
The alternative to a pedestrian bridge is not being able to cross the road at all.
I think there's just a very far inferential distance here. Why are the only options "bridge" or "nothing" in the first place? The thing being complained about is not that "a crosswalk would annoy those damned cars" it's that "pedestrians are forced to take a much longer and more difficult route to prevent cars from experiencing even the slightest inconvenience." It's not that making driving miserable is an end goal; it's that most American cities have unlimited appetite to add the slightest convenience for drivers at the cost of arbitrary QoL loss for every other form of transportation.
The very short mention about the drug users seems to be taken as more of a joke--as far as I can tell, he doesn't linger on it or claim it's because of the bridge. (He does actually talk about public safety around 1:50 in https://youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw&ab_channel=NotJustBikes, with the concept of "eyes on the street".)
What, like this guy with 1.2 million views? Or this guy? Or /r/fuckcars? To some extent I have sympathy here because, to some extent, all movements are plagued by radicals and extremists, but my sympathy wanes when movements don't self-regulate in this matter.
A weakman can exist (that's the whole point) and be popular, but it's still the weakest form of the argument. The original claim was "I find it curious that so much effort is spent trying to reduce the quality of life of car owners, and not in improving the quality of life of non-car owners." There's quite a lot of the latter. I could say something like "people who like zoning are just racist and greedy." Probably there are some people who support strict zoning for those reasons; it wouldn't be hard to find example of NIMBY's using "home values" as an explicit argument. But there are certainly lots of other arguments, and it doesn't matter if the relative size of each group is 1:99 or the other way around.
What self-regulation do you want to see? I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone on this forum even go so far as to disclaim the worst NIMBYs. It's not like NJB or City Beautiful or CityNerd or Oh the Urbanity can do anything about /r/fuckcars or an opposing blog. Would you want to be grouped in with everyone who posts here on TheMotte, and have your arguments dismissed because of who posts here?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Empirically, yes. You still have to pay to live somewhere, so induced demand is limited by price. We rarely charge for driving on roads. If we did that, the long-run elasticity wouldn't be so close to 1, but also we wouldn't have to build new roads in the first place, or at least not as many: We could use congestion pricing to limit traffic.
The ability to add more housing capacity is also much larger. Over time, you can slowly convert single-family areas to include townhomes or duplexes, then lowrises, then midrises, and all the way up to highrises if the demand is there. That's easily a 20-fold increase in density, if not more. But building up is much more difficult with roads--it's not really reasonable, if your 3 lane highway is congested, to build 30 more lanes, whether they're on the side or above.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Are you seriously suggesting that a typical 1,000-ft² apartment in a four-story building is just as attractive for a family of four or five people as a typical 2,000-ft² one-story or two-story house is, when the two options have exactly the same cost?
I thought that "housing unit" referred to the space that ~ 1 person needed, so e.g. a 2 BR apartment would be 2 units, just like a 2 BR house. However, this does not appear to be the case, after googling, so I'm not sure what term I was thinking of. What I meant to say was something like, "what matter is the cost per person that you can house."
In any event, we can use square footage, but that isn't a perfect metric either: The first 1,000 square feet is much more important than the next 1,000: If you build only 2,000 square foot homes, but not everyone needs or wants that much space (e.g. a childless couple) and can't afford it, then an apartment that is half the square footage might be better, even if it's 60% the price and therefore more expensive per square foot.
Specifically, he alleges (again, based only on that one rather shaky source) that three-story buildings are only 30 to 50 percent more expensive than one-story and two-story houses. That's in comparison to 100 percent more expensive for four-story buildings and even worse for buildings taller than that. The (alleged) difference is not insignificant.
The linked presentation isn't clear enough on its own for me to completely evaluate. For example, what math is being done on slide 5? What are the obscured numbers? I think it's saying that you aren't going to get midrises (5+floors) in a suburb an hour's drive (without traffic) from the Bay itself, which isn't particularly surprising.
My impression is that a lot of developers have tried to build denser housing in the Bay for many years, and have been held up by legal challenges, artificially imposed restrictions, CEQA, etc and not by economic fundamentals. And if these types of dwellings aren't economic on their own, why do they have to be banned? Why have so many of them been built in other places, and are continuing to be built, even in cities like Austin, Denver, Houston, etc where land is substantially cheaper?
The density the author uses for single-family homes is 5 per acre. That's actually reasonably dense for such housing; many areas have minimum lot sizes of a quarter acre, half acre, or even an acre. They also claim that housing does generate sufficient tax revenue, but this is only due to the insanely high housing prices. What happens if housing prices come down?
I think most urbanists agree that it only makes sense to build extremely tall apartment buildings in expensive areas, but what is the point of this argument? Again, if it's really the case that small apartments are not economically feasible in areas that are currently SFR-only, then why do they need to be banned?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Well, many of the stuff they champion as improving the QoL of non-cars also just happens to worsen the QoL of car users, e.g. Oxford's traffic filters plan.
If you look at the video I linked, he makes the point that requiring cars to sometimes take a slightly longer route makes it faster to drive, since some people won't drive, reducing congestion.
Ironically, sprawling suburbs often have these exact same limitations. Cul de sacs are very popular, and suburban roads are often windy rather than direct, because everyone realizes that having cars go through your neighborhood sucks--but for some reason we don't think about these forms of road design as "limiting freedom to drive" or whatever.
NJB's argument about pedestrian bridges seems to focus entirely on how they lower QoL for pedestrians, in direct contradiction to the claim that "so much effort is spent trying to reduce the quality of life of car owners, and not in improving the quality of life of non-car owners." You say this doesn't make sense, but he makes several specific arguments and you don't offer any explanation at all, you just make an assertion about his state of mind.
There might be people who hate all driving and want to ban cars, so fine, it's not a "pure strawman." I still think it's a weakman to boil all arguments in favor of urbanism down to "they just hate cars" so all arguments can be ignored.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
It definitely does not match my experience that most American suburbs allow kids to bike 15 minutes to a store. Like, it might be possible but it's not particularly safe, there's not usually infrastructure for it, etc.
DC is one of the least car-dependent places in the US. According to this, it has the lowest car ownership rate outside of the NYC metro area. The White House and immediately surrounding area is very bikeable, in my experience--it's right in the middle of the city! It seems like a weird choice to focus on. What about a city like Houston, LA, or Miami?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Multi-story housing is expensive to build, but those costs, as well as the cost of land, are spread out among more people. The relevant metric is cost per unit of housing. Single-family homes can easily be 3 stories, so it's not even like you're necessarily saving much. The cheapest housing to build in an area depends on many factors, but as the price of land goes up, you would (unsurprisingly) expect taller buildings to become more efficient. To consider the extreme case: Would a single family house in the middle of Manhattan be cheaper than 1 apartment in a building that takes up the same area?
But, most importantly, in this article he claims that single-family housing and multi-family housing simply are not considered close substitutes for each other by most consumers of housing—building more apartments (or even condominiums) will not satisfy demand for single-family houses.
This is exactly why we have markets, so that we don't have to have arguments like this. People want a single family house? Then they should be willing to pay for it at the efficient price. We wouldn't do a survey that found that a car and a private helicopter are not "close substitutes" and therefore we should only build helicopters or subsidize their use.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
This seems like a pure strawman. The bulk of the urbanist content I'm aware of is focused on things like "make walking safe", "have stuff closer together", "run more frequent trains" etc. that all are based around improving the QoL for non car-users. And you even have https://youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k which is about how driving is better in the Netherlands! What, specifically, are you referring to?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
As token_progressive mentioned, there are wildly different "suburbs." Urbanist youtube channel NotJustBikes has a video praising a suburb of Toronto known as Riverdale: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&ab_channel=NotJustBikes
It differentiates between "streetcar suburbs" or similar, and "car-dependent suburbs" and explicitly states that suburbs are not inherently bad.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
In my opinion Randal O'Toole makes arguments that are mostly not worth taking seriously. For example, he writes a bunch about how density and affordability are negatively correlated. Obviously! Places that a lot of people want to live are both denser and more expensive than other places. That's how supply and demand works, especially when supply is artificially constrained! As far as I can tell, he never addresses this reverse causality. The best quality evidence (e.g. natural experiments) show a causal effect of more housing -> lower housing prices.
(This debate always baffles me because on on the one hand, you have some YIMBYs agreeing with most NIMBYs that restrictive zoning increases prices ("home values" from the NIMBY PoV), but then O'Toole is on the side of various leftist groups that claim to hate the rich suburbanites but also claim that building more housing doesn't make housing cheaper. It's literally parody, but real.)
Similarly with the CA growth boundaries. I don't like them as a policy, but the idea that most of the population of CA is "forced" to live in a few metro areas is absurd. Many people want to live near the places that have jobs, other people, things to do, etc. Telling them to live in even further suburbs and drive 3 hours is not a solution!
And, of course, the idea that zoning is a property right. Keep in mind that O'Toole freely compares the aforementioned growth boundaries to feudalism or communism. But your neighbors have basically unlimited right to tell you what you can and can't do with your property, because they're a majority--that's fine! It's one of the most obvious "coming to the conclusion first" arguments I've ever seen. I mean, take this:
Zoning land as a substitute for deed restrictions and then yanking away that zoning betrays the homeowners in such neighborhoods.
You can't just say that one thing is kind of like another thing, and therefore one counts as the other. For one, it's not even the case that zoning is fixed in place--the local government can modify like with any other law, and they often do. Or they put in a nebulous approval process without any restriction at all. But also, you could say the same about repealing any restriction or changing any law. It's a betrayal to alcohol and tobacco companies to legalize marijuana. We can never change IP law, even if it's clearly being abused to enforce a monopoly. Changing how taxes work betrays people who saved based on different laws. Repealing a tariff isn't fair to the company that bought off politicians lobbied for it.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Isn't this hellscape exactly the product of government regulation? I.e single-family zoning (with a lot of additional bizarre rules) in the US? Doesn't sound very libertarian to me... Single-family suburbs wouldn't dominate a libertarian economy even if people really wanted it.. because they are grossly economically inefficient if not net burdens and when there are no subsidies you either abandon your white picket dream or pay a hefty price for it, most won't consider it worth bearing that additional cost.
Yes, although IMO a lot of self-described libertarians seem fine with them for various reasons, mostly around the (IMO false) feeling of freedom that comes with cars.
The rest of your rant is about how the moral failings of libertarians can be disregarded based on its shoddy premise.
I don't get this claim at all.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Desmond documents how the poor are squeezed. There is a Clinton-era welfare programme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In 2020, poor families received just 22 cents in every dollar it disbursed. The rest was used by states to pay for things such as job training and even abstinence-only sex education. Meanwhile, George Stigler, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, argued that a higher minimum wage would raise unemployment, but when New Jersey raised its minimum wage, and neighbouring Pennsylvania didn’t, there was negligible effect.
Intractable poverty has been blamed on family breakdown, but Desmond cites a study showing that single parents aren’t poorer in other rich countries. The right says the poor are hooked on welfare, but he estimates that hundreds of billions of dollars a year in benefits are unclaimed.
The US spends almost as much as France on welfare, but this welfare — including tax credits and employer-sponsored health insurance — favours the rich too. Overall the US tax system is barely progressive: rich families pay an effective tax rate of 28 per cent, while poor and middle earners pay 25 per cent.
I would want to see more details on a lot of these claims. I am inclined to believe that a lot of aid money doesn't go where it's "supposed" to; public choice is powerful. But how do you solve that? And is it a problem elsewhere? I think it somewhat undermines the rest of the thesis: Americans are generous, but it's hard to support more of these programs if 80 cents of every dollar doesn't actually go to the poor. If your solution is "brute force this inefficiency by raising the tax rate to 70%" then yeah, that sounds like a terrible idea.
(For the record, we actually had many more tax breaks back when the top marginal rate was 90%--as far as I know, no one really paid anything like that rate, and federal revenue as a portion of GDP is constant since the end of WW2and uncorrelated with rates anyway).
The literature on the minimum wage is complicated and inconsistent. One comparison of 2 states isn't a lot. Where I live, the minimum wage was recently increased. But as far as I could tell, pretty much everywhere already paid more than the MW was. Starbucks, Walmart, fast food, supermarkets... I don't think I saw a single advertisement that wasn't at least a few percent above MW. A handful might have offered below the new minimum. But overall, I'm not surprised if you would see a negligible increase in unemployment. Of course, you would also see a negligible increase in wages. I think Scott's review of the minimum wage literature a while back came down on the side of "probably no negative effect" but most of the studies looked at small increases, because that's what governments tend to pass. Making the minimum wage 25$ an hour in a poor town is not something that, as far as I know, we have any data on.
As for comparing single parents across countries, well, why are they single parents? And how many of them are there? If you have 1 or 2 tragically single parents in a neighborhood, then the rest of the community helps out. If a quarter of the neighborhood is single parent homes, you overwhelm their resources and potentially contribute to overall disorder (something like this happened in government housing projects in Chicago that tried to only house families with a high number of children per parent). In the US, "single parent" is likely a strong correlate with e.g. some sort of criminal activity or substance abuse, while in other countries they might be more evenly distributed across classes because it's the result of amicable divorce, accidents, etc. (Actually, divorce seems like a strong candidate--IIRC from Coming Apart, the upper class has only become slightly more likely to divorce, while the lower class has become much more likely to do so, compared to the 60s, and I wonder if the same is true in those countries). Maybe the study found a way to control for all of this, which is why I would want to see it before making a judgement. But I believe there's relatively strong evidence from within the US showing that single parenthood has a detrimental effect on both the parent and child's future economic prospects.
Similarly the "effective tax rate" is something I'm skeptical of. How is it calculated? Most sources I'm aware of have the US has having one of the most progressive tax systems in the world; even if they're counting things like sales tax, most European countries rely heavily on consumption taxes like VA, which are more regressive than an income tax. I know some forms of investment and saving, particularly if you own your own home, get tax benefits; maybe that's where the difference comes from.
I'm somewhat confused as to how employer-sponsored health insurance is welfare. I agree that there's no reason why it should work this way; I believe it started during the wage freeze of WW2 but I'm not sure why it persists beyond "employers can get a good deal on price." But no other form of insurance works this way, so I assume something weird is still going on. Aren't there laws against selling insurance across state lines or something like that?
“What if I said, what’s crazy to me is that the country does so much more to subsidise affluence than it does to alleviate poverty.”
It's certainly the case that there's a lot of subsidies for the middle class and up. Everything from mortgage tax breaks to agricultural price supports and steel tariffs should be ejected at high speed, and social security at low speed. But as already discussed, attempting to tax more money to spend is unlikely to help--you can't actually do that (you would have to reduce spending elsewhere instead) and it would be horribly inefficient.
Things that I think would actually help:
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End the war on drugs. We spend a lot of money on police and prison, which could be redirected to medical solutions and other social services (or returned to people. "Tax people less and let them spend their charity where they think it works and also generally improve economic growth" is an alternative to anything I suggest spending money on in this list). I think single parenthood is likely to be bad, and imprisoning lots of young men from poor places doesn't help, plus it makes it harder for them to get real jobs in the future. On the flip side, aggressively police for real crimes like robbery, assault, etc.
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Overrule local zoning, parking minimums, and related ordinances that prevent reasonably affordable housing and dense, mixed-use development from being built. These massively drive up the cost of housing, which is a major expense, and often force everyone to have a car, which is also expensive. Invest in transit--surface light rail is probably cheaper per passenger-mile of capacity than a highway, even in the US.
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Repeal trade barriers, which make basic goods more expensive and cost more jobs than they save.
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Open up standard public education to competition from charter schools and, especially, trade schools. Traditional school has marginal benefit for the average poor student, especially since they are likely not to complete it, but a well-run school can help the smarter and more conscientious of them actually graduate and maybe even go to college. Trade schools provide an alternative to sitting in a useless class and working a dead-end job on the side for the rest.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
That is an example, yes. It doesn't mean that all of the people he opposes are literal jocks in the sense of playing sports.
Thinking about this harder, maybe it's all nothingburger.
The US saw over 40,000 traffic fatalities in 2021 and car crashes are one of the leading causes of death for young people. This hardly seems like a nothingburger (do you think crime is a nothingburger? Homicides are something like half that or less).
But that's not what the data shows. Compared to 10 years ago, the rate of traffic fatalities in the US dropped by a quarter (per mile travelled).
What data? The table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year seems to show either flat or slightly increasing deaths per million VMT, depending on whether you're looking before or after the pandemic as your end point. It's even worse if you look at pedestrian deaths, which are way up. And heavy SUVs are contributing to this trend.
Certain technological innovations have improved the ability of vehicles to either alert the driver or protect them in case of a crash. Also, as 2020 showed, congestion can reduce automobile fatalities. These developments are offsetting the effects you mention, but that doesn't mean that distracted driving and heavier vehicles aren't a problem.
clearly they're having a positive effect in aggregate so maybe I'm complaining too much about it.
Based on the data I've seen, the aggregate effect is negative, but also there's no need to couple these things. Repeal CAFE, make narrower lanes and smaller parking spots, add traffic calming, harsher penalties for distracted or reckless driving leading to injury, maybe even tax heavier vehicles.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I know this breaks Scott’s world model where nerds are always good, and jocks always bad, but they, along with Stalin and Hitler and plenty of others who accrued power by pushing ideologies, were all a lot closer to nerds than jocks, winning power via their essays and public speaking, and they also killed hundreds of millions of people—because intelligence is the most dangerous thing in the universe.
This strikes me as a strawman of Aaronson's views. I think he's well aware that the woke people he resents for trying to destroy his life lean towards the "nerd" end of the traditional nerd-joke spectrum. This isn't about literal nerds and jocks: It's about intellectualism and rationality, vs things that oppose them. Being sucked into a particular ideology, even one that claims to elevate science and reason or that sounds academic, but actually actively opposes truth-seeking by force, doesn't put you on Scott's side. Hiding your lack of understanding with pretentious wordplay is, I think, something most of us can agree to oppose, and I think that's what he's writing against: Destroying something you don't understand because you fear the truth.
And then carries that ahistoric wrongness into being completely anti-human because his values boil down to intelligence=morality=superiority
Personally, my eyes went a little wide when I saw him say that he would take a 2% chance of the world ending to learn the answer to the big questions. But this also seems like a bit of a strawman. He's focusing on the upside: What we could perhaps learn from an AI smarter than we are? I think he is legitimately concerned about existential risk to humanity.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I think you're making this problem a lot more complicated than it actually is. A lot of deaths could be prevented with a few classes of changes: separate cars from pedestrians and cyclists, and use road design to encourage safety. People gravitate to driving at the speed which feels safe; narrower lanes and roads naturally encourage slower driving, because you're closer to other vehicles, roadside barriers, etc. There's a huge number of other things you could implement as well. And if you assume that people will screw up, it becomes clear that you should design infrastructure to be safe even when someone does make an error.
Over-indexing on phones specifically doesn't do anything about speeding, other forms of distraction, drunk driving, or just regular old human error.
Not just bikes has some videos on traffic calming and related topics:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA&ab_channel=NotJustBikes
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc&ab_channel=NotJustBikes
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_ByEBjf9ktY
SUVs aren't going to ever go away mainly because the population is aging and those people find climbing up easier than climbing down (and they're generally above most of the LED high-beams that might as well be military dazzlers, and give the illusion of better visibility because collision standards have made it so you can't see much of anything out of modern cars), so you'll probably have to take that class of vehicle from their cold dead hands.
Car size is also an issue, but this paragraph is pretty baffling to me. Given how high some SUVs and trucks are, I don't believe for a moment that they're easier for anyone with limited mobility than a sedan or smaller SUV or crossover--you have to climb up and down in any case anyway, to get both in and out. Safetywise, SUVs are a defection that only become "necessary" if others already have them; ditto for the issue with elevated lights. If you limit the number of high and heavy vehicles on most roads, and how bright their lights are, then much of the motivation to buy them goes away.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Rationalists are almost all atheists, because the evidence for God is so incredibly weak, especially compared to the magnitude of the hypothesis (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, etc.). And it lacks explanatory or predictve power (video if you prefer that format).
To expand on this: a religious person asks the question "what if there is no god" and spends a life exploring it. An atheist asks that question when they're a teenager (usually), figures that they know the answer, and then refuses to explore further.
I'm going to suggest that you don't understand atheists (or at least, atheist rationalists) very well. You have already skewed the discussion by asking "what if there is no god", which presumes we have any prior reason to think there is a god. "God" does not actually answer any questions we might have about the universe--it is the believer who can use it as an answer for any question, without investigating further. Hence, for example, Lord Kelvin's assertion that many mysteries of life, which we have since explained with science, are completely unexplainable by science.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
The primary danger from cars and from guns are very different. They are involved in a ballpark similar number of total deaths, but gun-related deaths are around 2/3 suicides, 1/3 homicides, negligible unintentional, while the vast majority of auto fatalities are unintentional. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare them directly--how do you know if regulations on cars are "stricter" than those on guns? They're aimed at different things (or at least, they should be--restrictions targeted at homicide probably far outweigh those targeted at suicide). For example, there's a laundry list of individuals who can't legally buy firearms, including anyone ever convicted of a felony or a domestic violence crime, anyone under a restraining order, and others (full list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Instant_Criminal_Background_Check_System#Prohibited_persons). As far as I know, the only similar restriction for driving is if you drive drunk--and I believe this is conditional/state dependent, rather than being a universal and federal law. The former is also probably somewhat easier to enforce. Driver's licenses are fully reciprocal within US states and even from many foreign countries, but attempting to travel with a firearm across state lines, let alone international ones, is potentially nightmarish. Transferring a firearm or any of a long list of accessories to another person can require a months-long wait and expensive fee, etc.
Of course, cars also have their own restrictions. Every state requires passing written and road tests for a DL; the requirement to buy a gun is usually pretty light aside from age and the specific restrictions mentioned above. Even the requirements to carry concealed, which are more stringent, are only more difficult than a DL in a few states, and even that may change if Bruen is actually enforced. I suspect most gun-control advocates don't actually know almost any of the regulations on guns, gun ownership, and carrying.
And these differences aren't necessarily inconsistent: Using a car safely is far more difficult than using a gun safely. There are more rules, the machine is vastly more complicated, it usually is used in a much less controlled environment, it takes a lot of practice and constant awareness, etc.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Is it a realignment? This article doesn't really provide evidence of that. It shows that Trump is doing better among non-whites when looking at Republican voters and comparing to other Republican candidates. This doesn't necessarily generalize to doing better among non-whites in general, or doing better compared to non-Republican politicians. I believe that Scott has a few posts that show some evidence that he did (or e.g. improved his performance among non-whites from 2016 to 2020), although the effect is not as strong as the one described in this article.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Also, the NYC subway and transit system is sufficient, and the city is dense enough, that a majority of New Yorkers don't own a car. Once you have a car, the marginal cost of a trip drops by a lot (although it's still probably higher than people intuitively expect, once you account for wear and tear, insurance, maintenance, etc). But if you can get by without owning a car at all, that's a big fixed cost you can avoid, and it encourages you to take transit for marginal trips.
It's worth keeping an eye on this, because self-driving cars could completely disrupt it, either by dropping taxi prices 50% or more or by allowing cars to drop off their owners and then go find parking on their own.
Maybe, although congestion is so bad that it still might not be worthwhile. I've been in a NYC bus that was slower than walking in between stops, and reducing the price of a cab ride just makes this problem worse.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I think other countries subsidize transit tickets heavily and don't see those issues, or at least not nearly to the same extent. I've even been to some places where the transit is free to use, and don't have those problems, because there aren't homeless thugs wandering around (admittedly these places have some unique advantages, but still--actually doing something about homelessness and crime seems like a better idea to me). Unless you actually enforce rules against skipping a fare, it wouldn't even accomplish anything (it would probably be counterproductive, since you would have fewer regular passengers, and therefore a higher rate of the indigent). And in that case, why not just enforce existing statutes?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
How often do the working poor ever organize politically, and when they try, is it ever effective? It wasn't effective at stopping the destruction of many poor neighborhoods to build roads through American cities back in the 60s (when the upper class, with more money and political capital, organized, they were able to stop it in their neighborhoods).
Political movements are almost always drawn largely from the middle class, often being more educated than average. As far as I'm aware, this is true of groups from Occupy Wall Street to Islamist terrorists to the Bolsheviks to the far more milquetoast political parties of modern developed countries. You could probably make a political organization called "more stuff for poor people now" and it would be 90% college-educated middle-class or richer (99% in leadership).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
The question is not whether current technology will help you make better technology, or whether AGI is theoretically possible. The question is how quickly change happens, and to what extent advances make future advances faster: You have better tools but the problem has also become harder. So far, it seems to me like the latter effect is winning out. GPT 4 can write (allegedly) working code, use documentation, bug fix, etc. But is it good enough to make writing GPT 5 substantially easier or faster than making GPT 4 was?
I don't quite understand what you're saying here. This statement looks either tautological (only cars use the road) or essentially false (pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders get way less consideration than drivers) to me.
Having a few pedestrian bridges doesn't mean that all of the infrastructure is car-centric. I don't know about China; Tokyo was definitely not car-centric. Not all pedestrian bridges are bad--the video even says that they're fine if they keep pedestrians at the same level. Pedestrian bridges are just one piece of infrastructure of many--no one feature makes or breaks a city. But in much of the US, they seem to be thrown in for the primary purpose of not slowing down cars, while every other consideration is secondary. This is true of a lot of infrastructure, like slip lanes for right hand turns: slightly more convenient for drivers, but much less safe for pedestrians.
If you recall, the reason we're talking about pedestrian bridges is because you wrote:
You can disagree, but I see no reason to assume that NJB's stated reasoning is a cover for a desire to annoy drivers, which is not something you have any evidence for.
"Negatively impacting property values" is a common NIMBY argument for opposing any sort of zoning reform. My inclination is to take these people at their word (like I do with NJB above) unless there's convincing reason otherwise.
In this case, I think you're making the same error I accused Randal O'Toole of making in one of my other comments. Dense areas have higher property values than sprawling ones because a lot of people want to live there. That's what makes them dense in the first place! But for a given neighborhood, building more housing will lower the price of renting or buying, because that's how supply and demand works, and is confirmed by the highest quality evidence that I'm aware of.
One individual might be able to make more money by building the only apartment building surrounded by single family homes, but that's not an option.
So... is the same true for YIMBYs?
The video you linked said it's not actually clear if this is a crime, and NJB calls it "really extreme behavior." Maybe I've just spent too much time on this forum, since that doesn't feel disproportionate to me. This comment just casually drops a mention of executing all the homeless and got 10 (net) upvotes and no response.
As far as I can tell, all the channels I mentioned have explicitly disavowed the idea that one should ban all cars or whatever. Demanding they explicitly go through and also disavow each individual person/group who does hold such a view seems, in my book, to mostly be bad faith smear attempts, akin to when the left threw a fit over Donald Trump not disavowing each different KKK member specifically or whatever the details were.
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