wlxd
1yr ago
Except, of course, the ones who were evicted to have their homes razed to build those lanes.
First, this is not something that routinely happens for traffic mitigation projects. Second, people who get eminent domained are compensated for this, typically more than their house is actually worth. Third, this is just as much of an argument against densification, upzoning, and public transit: those also displace people.
infrastructure that the suburbs can't afford and need subsidies for.
Somehow I knew without clicking that this will be a link to Strongtowns. I knew it, because nobody else is making this argument, and this is because their entire argument is completely bogus. I wrote about it years ago, see also this more detailed one.
Here's one more reason why it's entirely wrong: observe that every year, dozens of new master planned communities crop up. The development of these is basically entirely funded by the sale of the properties. The developers can't just come to some adjacent or local government and ask them to just build roads, water mains, electricity lines etc. This is not paid for by "someone else", it's the homeowners themselves who cover all of this cost, when they initially buy their new construction houses, and then later when they pay property taxes and/or HOA fees. Local governments do not build stuff for the developers, typically they actually ask developers to pay extra taxes and fees, labelled as "impact fees" and such.
At some point the harm from the externalities starts to outweigh the benefit of people living "where they want to live"
What externalities, exactly? On whom they fall? Where is the assessment that honestly tries to measure these, balance positive vs negative externalities, and compares to the balance of externalities of any alternatives? I've never seen anything of this sort, at best I see tendentious, motivated reasoning of the StrongTowns variety, one sided assessments that only calculate costs, do little to actually determine who pays these costs, and does not even attempt to assess the benefits.
wlxd
1yr ago
So when you add lanes, more people get to live where they want to live. Isn’t it great?
wlxd
1yr ago
What about most normal suburbs, which were built way after streetcars left the living memory, and still allow kids to bike to a store?
This conversation is revolving around some archetypes, but why don’t we focus on a specific example? For example, let’s focus on DC metro mentioned by /u/ResoluteRaven. How far do we have to go from the White House to find a place that’s more than 15 minute bicycle ride to closest supermarket?
wlxd
1yr ago
Sure, I don’t dispute that places like that exist, but if the argument is “some far exurbs are too remote for kids to even bike to the store”, then it is much different than claiming that this is a typical suburban experience, that it is hell for kids, and we need to change zoning rules across the board to fix it.
wlxd
1yr ago
That’a certainly one of the drawbacks, but it’s also worth considering this in both historical and global contexts.
From historical perspective, Americans have been driving a lot for many decades now, but obesity rates have only shot through the roof relatively recently. This means that other factors contributing to obesity might have much bigger impact than driving.
Second, it is worth observing that European countries, which allegedly are more walkable, and where people drive less, are rather quickly catching up to obesity rates of Americans. The upward trend is clear and is not looking like it is plateauing in most countries. See eg. Germany or UK.
wlxd
1yr ago
I have lived in Seattle metro for a couple of years, and I am yet to encounter a location within it which is more than 15 minutes bicycle ride from a normal grocery store. I just tried to find one using Google Maps, and only places I can find are at the very edges of farthest exurbs.
My experience with suburbs is exactly the same as /u/TIRM . Ability to form social relationship with your neighbors, and for your kids to play outside with other kids is one of the things that’s attracting people to suburbs, not repelling them!
wlxd
1yr ago
No, the 100th family is just going to move somewhere else.
You are using terms originating from economic theory, but you have an apparent lack of understanding what these terms mean, given that you describe reality which simply does not exist.
wlxd
1yr ago
J.R.R. Tolkien, back in his mostly ethnically homogenous home before any real science on intelligence was done
In the 60s, when this letter was apparently written, real science on intelligence has most certainly already been done. This was already decades after Galton, Spearman, Cattell, Terman, just to name a few. Just read the Jensen’s seminal article of 1969, and observe that by then, most of our current understanding of intelligence has already been established. We already knew about positive manifold, g-factor, heritability, polygenicity, impact of assortative mating, inbreeding depression, adoption studies, twin studies (including twins reared apart, he quotes a study from 1937), and, ultimately, race gaps and the fundamental constant of sociology.
In fact, I can scarcely come up with something that’s really material to our today’s understanding of intelligence, but has not been known already and mentioned by Jensen in 1969. Only thing that comes to my mind is Flynn effect, but this one is, arguably, quite irrelevant for most intents and purposes (because Flynn gains are hollow, so they do not represent material differences in intelligence, and are rather mostly indicative of the deficiency of our research tools). Really, since then we have mostly just been filling the gaps using better data and better statistical methods.
wlxd
1yr ago
The burden of proof is on people calling for regulation and complaining about SVB lobbying to actually show that the stress tests they were allegedly exempt of would actually have prevented the situation. Otherwise, this is just pure partisanship without any substance: if you claim the problem here is lack of regulation and stress test, you better show that what you propose is more than empty quasi-religious ritual to appease the regulation gods, and that it would actually causally achieve substantial outcome.
wlxd
1yr ago
Would those stress tests actually detect any issues, or would SVB have been fine either way, with or without the changes they lobbied for? Has anyone actually checked that, or is this just an empty pro-government regulation talking point?
wlxd
1yr ago
Because SVB understood startups, understood their business, their requirements, the realities of funding, of cash churn/spend, knew all entities involved in SV startup scene, from VCs, through insurance brokers, to startup lawyers etc, and do their business operations were very explicitly tailored for needs of SV startups. Their advice was extremely useful, often nearly as much as the actual financial services they offered, and as a result many if not most VCs explicitly encouraged their startups to bank there.
wlxd
1yr ago
You are missing the point. Sure, you can certainly make the case that Jacob Chansley’s actions were criminal if you look only at the bare letter of the law, and ignore context. The argument is, however, that there have been thousands of other people, hundreds in the specific example of Kavanaugh hearings, that also broke the bare letter of the law in roughly the same degree of egregiousness as Chansley, but none of whom even faced anything close to criminal trial, much less years in prison. The argument here is about malicious prosecution which is completely outside historical norms for the behavior.
Imagine, for example, that federal government found that some of these protesters are not US citizens, but permanent residents, and found that they are not carrying their green card, as required by law, and charged them with misdemeanor and put them for 30 days in jail. The letter of the law clearly allows that, but it would be completely outrageous, as this law is never enforced in any other circumstance, so it would be hard to see it as anything other than malicious political targeting.
wlxd
1yr ago
Hundreds of millions of Americans routinely incur bills higher than that. $20k is cheaper per ton that many normal cars cost per ton.
wlxd
1yr ago
The study…is that really the fully study, or just the abstract…has a total of 48 infants.
And with this small sample, they nevertheless got massively significant p-value of 0.0001. Small sample size makes it harder for p-values to reach significance.
And the primary criteria is quite subjective—besides blink rate, it was all unquantified “oh the baby struggled more quickly”.
That's why the discuss the reliability:
Four arbitrarily selected infants formed reliability sample, and of the 160 items involved, the authors were over 1 point apart in only three instances; all scales reported below yielded reliability coefficients of 0.912 or better, with an average reliability of 0.969.
So, they are quite subjective, but the authors subjective judgements were in very high agreement.
wlxd
1yr ago
They don’t perform as well. Someone has to actually examine the patient, observe his state and put the findings into the expert system. The expert system cannot do that. What it can do, on the other hand, is relatively trivial for the doctor who does the examination.
wlxd
1yr ago
I suppose this is the sort of cultural ability that is non-recoverable once it's been lost.
I am not sure about that. It is true that for past few generations, women were progressively more and more socialized into thinking that they can have it all. For so long as the societies drove on the fumes of old norms and habits, the fundamental falsehood of the notion was not obvious, but ultimately the reality will reassert itself. It might take one more generation, but already among millennials the failure to form families is extremely widespread. As these millennial women enter their 40s, and huge, double digit percentage of them never managed to form a family, they will become a huge cultural force, a massive living testament to the lie their generation was fed and eagerly believed.
For the generation after zoomers, these millennial women will serve as a clear, explicit warning sign of the peril that threatens them. The millennial mothers will know many other women of their generation who missed their chance to procreate, chasing the career goals, while overestimating their chances of snatching the top man and then failing to adjust to their increasingly precarious situation on the sexual marketplace. They will warn their daughters of this very real phenomenon, despite not being warned by their own mothers, as by that point it will be impossible to ignore, and impossible to pretend that they can expect to settle down into stable family with a high status man after a decade of whoring around and girlbossing.
wlxd
1yr ago
It's not really a solid proof, but the one convincing argument I've heard for the "ceiling" on superintelligence being low enough to avoid instant annihilation is that as the AI gets more complex it will be just as incapable of understanding/controlling it's own systems as we are/were understanding and controlling it.
I have seen this argument played in Travis Corcoran’s series of moon novels. I actually highly recommend these to right wing aligned motte readers as a light and and satisfying entertainment.
wlxd
1yr ago
I asked GPT for my eldest daughter's name and it failed to provide an answer, neither telling me that I don't have a daughter nor being able to identify my actual offspring.
What did it answer, though? Can you post screenshot? I strongly suspect that you still haven’t even tried to do this, and all of your theories about ChatGPT abilities are based on absolutely zero experience with it. It is otherwise basically impossible for me to square your claims against easily observed reality. You come across as someone who claims that an object made of metal will always sink, and when people tell you “come here and look at this fucking boat”, you respond “yeah I was there when you weren’t around and it was at the bottom of the harbor, forgot to take the photo though lol”. Extremely infuriating, which is why you get accused of being postmodernist, as reality simply doesn’t matter to you nearly as much as your narrative.
wlxd
1yr ago
This is, by the way, what drove me nuts in people like Gary Marcus: very confident claims about the extent of ability of contemporary approaches to AI, with scarcely any attempts to actually go out and verify these. It has been even more infuriating, because many outsiders, who had very little direct experience and access to these models, simply trusted the very loud and outspoken critic. As recently as November, people in places like Hacker News (which has a lot of quite smart and serious people) took him seriously. Fortunately, after ChatGPT became widely available, people could see first hand how silly his entire shtick is, and a lot fewer people take him seriously now.
@HlynkaCG, if you haven't tried to interact with ChatGPT (or, better yet, Bing's Sidney), I strongly recommend you do. I recommend forgetting any previous experiences you might have had with GPT-3 or other models, and approaching it in good faith, extending the benefit of charity. These chat LLMs have plenty of clear shortcomings, but they are more impressive in their successes than they are in their failures. Most importantly, please stop claiming that it cannot do things which it can clearly and obviously do, and do very well indeed.
wlxd
1yr ago
Wait, that spike in the white homicide graph in 2001... It can't be that they threw 9/11 under "homicides by whites," surely?
Why wouldn't they? It was, indeed, homicide, and it was, as a matter of fact, performed by people whom the official government racial classification scheme classifies as whites. Sure, this is a huge outlier, but I don't see why should this require us to treat it specially.
wlxd
1yr ago
You assume that marginal cost of extra birth will stay flat. There is every reason to expect otherwise. As you buy yourself more births, each additional one will be more and more expensive.
wlxd
1yr ago
"do I want to leave school at 18, be pregnant at 19, and have no life until maybe I'm 40, or do I want to get a degree and a guaranteed good job so I don't have to depend on a man in order to make my living"
I do not doubt that many, perhaps even large majority of women today think in these exact terms. This is, however, not a frame of mind that necessarily follows from the assumptions I described above, but rather is a result of relentless cultural change, spearheaded by progressive activism. The reason I believe so is that only half a century ago, huge majority of women did, in fact, leave school at 18, median woman was married by 23, and very few had "being able to make a living independently of a partner" as even a secondary goal. As far as I can tell, large majority of women at the time was completely fine depending on their husband, and I believe (based on my personal experience) that this arrangement was better for their emotional well being (as long as, of course, the men kept their side of the bargain).
This is the crucial problem: the culture has changed, and it is simply hostile to the patterns of behavior conducive to forming stable, fertile families at a very fundamental level. Unlike /u/DaseindustriesLtd in his comment, I didn't even bother trying to come up with ways to change this culture, because, for one thing, I'm not really good at this, but even more importantly, I think that the setting of "populist center-right leader of a country, with a hostile progressive Cathedral that cannot be dismantled" makes a chance of successfully pulling off a cultural victory rather slim. Such complex programs of shaping narrative to make over entire social perception is simply not something that populist (or, for that matter, any) right is effective at. That's why what I propose can be easily instituted with a stroke of a pen, and doesn't require building entire self-perpetuating propaganda machine. This is also why so much of what I propose would be necessary to do covertly: if people understood what's actually going on, they'd likely oppose it, even if on some level they agreed with the ultimate goal.
But, yes, what about men. Well, they should also marry early, but not as young as women, maybe 2-3 years older, to give them a few more years to get more settled into their occupation, so that they can confidently provide for their new families, and take pride in it. The newlyweds should feel ready to have kids immediately,rather than put it off for a few more years to stabilize their economic situation.
in today's economy in order to have a house and kids you need two incomes
I simply do not buy it, sorry. I grew up in a society where two incomes bought you much less actual consumption than one regular job brings you in the States today. Now, if you said that these two incomes are needed in today's culture, I'd be in total agreement.
Observe, however, how all my proposals are designed to make two incomes simply not worth it, or harder to benefit from. High tax benefits for husbands of stay-at-home mothers mean enormous marginal tax on a second income. Cap on maternity leave income is another large marginal tax, and so is extension of leave upon birth of extra kids. Artificially high cost of childcare services means that most women will spend more on daycare than they'll earn from the second job.
Cut off their choices too by making it impossible to get an education, reducing paid leave as much, and confining them to blue collar/manual labour work.
In my proposal, I already cut tertiary education to minimum. Regardless of whether we condition the remainder on marriage/parenthood status, I don't think that this will push the needle much, given that this should affect only small fraction of people who actually enter universities. Now that you suggest it, however, I do think that this is an interesting and possibly viable idea: make universities expensive, but offer big scholarships to married parent students. I am also totally for diminishing the social status and economic perspectives of unmarried, childless men: I think strongly progressive income taxation for childless individuals would be highly successful here, but it might be hard to implement in the given setting. American cathedral has successfully diminished the status of white men in corporate setting through legal bullying based on Civil Rights, and supported by the federal government, but I suspect the setting does not allow us to run similar program.
The cleaner or the shop assistant isn't that employee so far as they're concerned, and that's the calibre of employee when you're talking about "graduated high school, immediately started popping out babies, has no education or qualification and hasn't ever worked outside the home in a full-time adult job":
My personal experience in the academia and the corporate worlds, alongside with general research into the problem, has led me to believe that formal education and qualifications are in themselves worth very, very little, and are only useful for the employers to the extent they serve as a signal of the latent quality of the individual. Remember, America has built industrial economy, ran Manhattan project and sent a man to the moon when less than 10% of the population had a college degree.
I think you greatly overestimate the value of the higher education, and judge its value based on comparing people who today obtain it with those who don't. This is a huge mistake. Today, anyone even remotely intelligent and capable gets a college degree, because it is stupid not to, but in a world I propose, most of them would just be intelligent, capable and productive immediately in their jobs, instead of being artificially delayed by 4+ years. This is not a pipe dream, this is the world of yesterday.
Thank you for asking this question, it forced me to compile the sources for easy future reference, but, more importantly, also caused me to learn a new fact about the history of Hamilton's involvement in the project, which fundamentally changed, for the second time, my understanding of her role (stay tuned until the end).
In any case, I cannot answer it as stated, because there is too little easily accessible data to say accurately what was her "actual" contribution, and in any case I'm not so interested in this topic to spend months digging through primary sources. From the more easily accessible ones you can, however, glean some of her actual contribution. These were certainly not trivial, given that you can find some sources from way before the recent craze that refer to her by her name. For example this report published in 1982, on the history of AGC by David Hoag, who was the head of the entire thing, names Hamilton as the lead of "a team of specialists", which has written "much of the detailed code of these programs". This seems to imply that she did led the software team, but other evidence makes it rather clear that while it is true that she did, in fact, lead that team, she did not lead it as it was actually writing the detailed code of these programs.
In short, I thus very much stand behind the statement in my quoted comment. I think the clearest evidence is coming from the horse's mouth:
I was a young kid, and I was hired by Dan Lickly over here (pointing to Dan).
(...)
Then, because I was still a beginner, I was assigned responsibility for what was thought to be the least important software to be developed for the next mission. I was the most of the beginners; I mean, I was the first junior person, on this next unmanned mission.
(...)
And I learned an awful lot from Dan [Lickly], who was a real guru in all of these areas. I was trying very hard to learn from him all of the things that he knew that I needed to use in order to be more successful at doing my job.
(...)
We began to grow, and eventually Dan [Lickly] put me in charge of the command module software. He had the courage to put me over that whole area, and I got very interested in management of software; again, integrating all of the glue. And when Dan [Lickly] left, Fred [Martin] then even had more courage and gave me the responsibility for the LM too, in addition to the command module flight software and now I was in charge of all of the on board flight software.
She was put in charge of the command module software after Apollo 8, which flew in December 1968, just six months before the moon landing. I'm not sure exactly when she was put in charge of LM, whether it was before or after moon landing. In any case, I think it is safe to assume that between December 1968 and March 1969, which is when Hamilton submitted the final Apollo 11 software, no new software has been written for either CSM or LM.
To me, the above paints rather clear picture: the actual software lead was the aforementioned Dan Lickly, who, when the project was complete, moved on, and gave up the position to his mentee, whose growth he guided, from the most junior team member to a senior lead. Indeed, Dan Lickly is described in these proceeding of the conference on the history of the Apollo Guidance Computer exactly as someone who "was in charge of a larger group of programmers that did programming for the AGC on the CSM and LEM". The whole program was led by Frederick Martin, whom Hamilton also mentions as the person making the decision to promote her. It is he whom Hoag describes, in the article linked above, among "the notable names", as the lead of COLOSSUS (CSM) software program.
Now, here comes the best part, which I only now realized as I was redoing this research, trying to find again the sources that originally prompted my comment you linked: Hamilton married Dan Lickly in 1969 before Apollo 11 (which flew in July). Think about it: Lickly literally promoted his own fiancee to the position he was leaving behind, and half a century later, not only we never hear about Dan Lickly (say his name to not forget), but we get fed the story of the leader of the team that wrote the software that sent the man to the moon, without ever hearing that she only received this position when the whole thing was already done from the guy she was sleeping with.
This is not Europe, this is everywhere. As for explanation, I like how Charles Murray's wife has put it:
Even if you refrain from eating snacks or sweets (and these also have been extremely optimized for palatability, with many different local maximums to choose from), we are no longer constrained by difficulty of obtaining ingredients, or cost for normal breakfast/lunch/dinner sort of food. Everything is available close by (or can be ordered online), and everything is very cheap relative to our incomes.
More options
Context Copy link