ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
1d ago
If
the rule you followedall the training and experience brought you to this, of what use was all that training?
When something bad happens, it allows the organization responsible to say, "well, we have a training program in place, so we did our due diligence and are not responsible." See also diversity and sexual harassment training sessions. At worst the organizational fix is to just hire a new set of training consultants to revise the training program.
ThenElection
1d ago
Something like 2/3 of operating costs of public transit in the USA is labor costs. If you can replace most of those with AVs, you can get more bus routes, without any radical assumptions or requirements for the broader transit system.
ThenElection
1d ago
My suspicion is that the issue is less about how an actual, well-constructed UBI would be corrupted/abused (as you say, it's difficult), but in that most actual "UBI" programs wouldn't be an actual, well-constructed UBI. In practice, it wouldn't be rolled out universally (even if universality was a genuine aspiration), and that would allow for politicians to pick and choose the constituencies that benefit. And so you get the government creating a "UBI" targeting black pregnant trans artists.
ThenElection
1d ago
Citation needed for inflammatory claim
Sure.
https://sftransitriders.org/on-mayor-luries-plan-to-allow-waymo-on-market-street/
ThenElection
1d ago
One of the weird things about American politics is that "public transit advocates" have a hate-on for autonomous vehicles. This is despite the fact that AVs would allow running far more bus routes, more cheaply, than today.
I can't decide if this is because public transit advocacy today is mostly about an aesthetic aversion to cars and roads, or if it's because coalitional politics demands that public transit advocacy simultaneously look to protect make work union jobs.
ThenElection
1d ago
One thing that makes it a bit worse than regular make work corruption: public transit is useful in a place like DC. WMATA's existence makes it so a more reliable, cleaner, effective replacement can't take its place. Just handing out bags of cash to favored groups would in some ways be better, because at least private companies could run the existing profitable routes.
ThenElection
2d ago
"Actually Indian" can be your new tag.
ThenElection
2d ago
UBI is definitionally giving income to people without conditions. Requiring them to work an (even fake) job is a very different thing, proponents of which (a "Job Guarantee") have a long history of feuding with UBI advocates. You might as well say any form of redistribution is a UBI.
ThenElection
2d ago
Vietnam is also right next door to a regional hegemon (which has invaded it, in living memory) which also has the ability to immiserate it and militarily dominate it. And although it avoids poking the dragon when it can, it still is able to maintain real and significant independence.
I don't doubt that the US could turn Canada into a frozen hellscape if it were sufficiently motivated. But that threat isn't enough to get infinite pliability from Canadians, just as the Chinese threat of the same isn't enough to get infinite pliability from the Vietnamese. Both middle powers perceive that their respective hegemons are balancing multiple objectives and believe (correctly, in the Viet case) that the costs to other objectives prevent the maximal response.
ThenElection
2d ago
A theory I played with was that it was intended as a distraction from Venezuela. Greenland is far more ridiculous than Venezuela, so you make a bunch of noise about it and then later walk it back, and everyone's forgotten about Venezuela.
The issue with that theory is that... Venezuela seems like a success? Why would you want to distract from it? It can be a feather in your cap, not something to bury with the next noise cycle.
ThenElection
2d ago
What would the US do to stop them? Mass seizure of financial assets? A blockade? Decapitation strike? Invasion?
There is still an order, which is the order of reality. And although the US is very powerful, it's not infinitely powerful. All of those would rapidly result in the whole world looking for a better deal with a new protector.
ThenElection
3d ago
Storm Horncastle. She appears to be Norwegian; not an adopted name.
ThenElection
3d ago
I have lived in China, and I like it a lot. Some of its tier 1 cities are quite livable, and there are smaller towns that are also quite nice as well.
The core issue is that... It's not a democracy. Not in a moralistic sense, but it ends up making bad decisions, and then follows through with them come hell or high water. It was genuinely impressive how they marshalled society to get to (near) zero COVID for years, but it was a stupid goal that hurt its economy. It could similarly do something really stupid re:Taiwan, and it can persist in that decision for years.
It also has severe fertility issues, but that seems a broader issue affecting all the East Asian countries. You might hope that its authoritarianism would give it more capability to address that issue, but so far we're not seeing anything too effective coming out of it.
ThenElection
3d ago
Shapiro, when asked about Harris:
"Kamala Harris? Who's that? Oh yeah, I think we might have met at a fundraiser once, didn't leave much impression. Did she ever end up getting that job she was applying for?"
ThenElection
7d ago
When I think back to what was the first step for me off the progressive reservation (this was back in 2013 or so), a coworker of mine was arguing that I (a man) was privileged compared to her. This is a woman who went to boarding school at Andover, spent most of her high school and college years snorting coke, and had parents who bought her a condo in SF as a graduation present. While I literally grew up on food stamps.
ThenElection
7d ago
Going by the digging ditches comparison, it's also pointless and stupid, but for many kids it would be genuinely more fun and engaging. That's because it has the possibility of a positive reward signal: finishing the ditch. But the quadratic formula is something many genuinely are just not capable of: there is no final "get shit done" point for it.
ThenElection
9d ago
LBJ won a Nobel Prize for inventing the free lunch.
LBJ never won a Nobel Prize. He was nominated in 1964, but even that nomination was for steering American foreign policy toward international cooperation.
ThenElection
13d ago
It's a shared culture of narcissism. People look for identity and meaning in stupid acts of protest, and they imagine what the government does is provide the stage for it. Totalitarian symbolically, but it will never engage in any kind of violence at all against you personally, which would interfere in your bragging rights about how righteous and badass you are.
ThenElection
13d ago
I don't think it's incoherent to say that protesting an evil regime is good and protesting a holy regime is evil, which seems to be the reason for the split view. It's even my view and likely the majority view: although it might be unwise to publicly fight against Hitler/Stalin, I'd definitely be rooting for someone who does. Where I'd differ is in not judging either administration as calling for unmanaged or badly managed protest.
The issue is that maintaining public order inherently involves violence, and both Babbitt and Good (and their supporters) thought that they were somehow exempt from facing violence when they were protesting (ironic, since they probably think of the respective administrations as closer to Communist/Nazi than I do).
ThenElection
13d ago
That explains only the Somali daycare fraud, though. George Floyd wasn't Somali, and Renee Good wasn't trying to save an illegal Somali immigrant. And I don't see Somalis as having some Svengali like ability to warp the entire culture; Good, after all, had only been in Minnesota for a couple months, without giving an opportunity for them to work their hypnotic magic.
ThenElection
13d ago
Minneapolis has been stagnant economically compared to more "woke" cities. In 2000, Minneapolis had a GDP per capita significantly above the US average; now it's basically average. Maybe it's vibes: when you're relatively treading water, you have worse outcomes on a range of measures?
I had ChatGPT pull data (change in GDP per capital; data sources are BEA and the Fed):
| City (metro area used) | GDP per capita (2001, current $) | Latest year used | GDP per capita (latest year, current $) | % change (2001 → latest) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minneapolis (Minneapolis–St. Paul–Bloomington, MN-WI MSA) | $46,924 | 2023 | $94,214 | +101% |
| San Francisco (San Francisco–Oakland–Hayward, CA MSA) | $57,487 | 2022 | $159,777 | +178% |
| Portland (Portland–Vancouver–Hillsboro, OR-WA MSA) | $39,601 | 2023 | $86,805 | +119% |
| Seattle (Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue, WA MSA) | $51,397 | 2023 | $138,947 | +170% |
| Los Angeles (Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim, CA MSA) | $41,367 | 2023 | $100,522 | +143% |
| Boston (Boston–Cambridge–Newton, MA-NH MSA) | $52,592 | 2023 | $122,902 | +134% |
| New York City (New York–Newark–Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA MSA) | $50,967 | 2022 | $110,691 | +117% |
| Chicago (Chicago–Naperville–Elgin, IL-IN-WI MSA) | $43,525 | 2022 | $89,514 | +106% |
Supports my hypothesis, but it doesn't really ring true to me.
I think perhaps it's the white people in Minnesota. When I think of the prototypal white person there, I think of some middle manager for Fortune 500 #352. Competent and well-meaning, but not quite a go-getter. And that ends up reflected in the political culture, in that it's not especially responsive to changing circumstances. California, by contrast, has the same issues, but it encountered them earlier and its system has rapidly evolved to be resistant to shocks from them. A billion dollars in corruption and fraud, you say? Race riots? We found ways for the system to manage those decades ago.
Minnesota is naive; its system assumes good intent and isn't able to deflect or absorb the actors with bad intents.
ThenElection
17d ago
Every measurement has costs. What if we could go from 98% to 99% accurate by having kids grind for 12 hours a day for grades, every day, while doubling public education spending? That would prevent millions more from being misclassified.
ThenElection
20d ago
Manuel Noriega was, what, two weeks? New record set? Impressive indeed.
ThenElection
20d ago
How to make CSAM is widely known, and plenty of places don't cooperate usefully with the USA in stopping it. Despite that, the USA does manage to broadly limit how much it proliferates.
I'm not saying that it's a good idea, and I'm not saying that open weight models could be completely eliminated. I am saying that they could be quite effectively suppressed, as there are plenty of tools that the government can use to enforce a ban, imperfectly but substantially.
Yeah, it's not realistic to think labor costs would literally go to zero. Did some research and public transit labor and associated costs in the US are likely around 50B annually; for comparison, Alphabet's workforce is around 100B (though of course the vast majority aren't working on AVs).
LIDARs are expensive, but probably a lower proportion of the cost of the vehicle for a bus than for a regular car (even if buses require more sensors).
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