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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23377 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Recently there has been some discussion in the media about fare evasion, and I thought in light of @WhiningCoil's comment on low trust societies it might be of interest to you all.

Over the past five years the fare evasion rate on New York City's bus lines has risen from 20% to 50%. while there has also been a similar (but less dramatic) rise among subway customers.

Recently the MTA commissioned a study to investigate the psychology of fare evaders and The New York Post has picked this up and mocked the project.. The study broke down different "personas" of fare evaders like a software product manager might. The NYP felt that this was inane as the obvious conclusion was that scofflaws were simply motivated by a lack of enforcement:

The pricy research – which comes as the authority is crying poverty and pushing for a detested congestion pricing plan — is being blasted by critics as a huge waste that will only tell them what anyone with common sense already knows about scofflaws....If we are going to hire a behavioral consultant, it will be to help change the behavior of a criminal justice system that has determined that fare evasion should have no consequences

I enjoyed this article by Manhattan Contrarian that criticizes the New York Post for completely ignoring race when discussing this issue, and pretending that lack of enforcement is the source of our woes.

But even the Post, in both its editorial and news pieces, is not willing to talk honestly about the association of race and fare-beating. Neither their news article nor editorial says a word about the race of the fare beaters. The subject is too sensitive even for them. But the problem is that until we can have an honest discussion about the association of race and fare-beating, it is almost impossible to address the issue.

I'll note as an amusing aside, that even the conservative Post uses an image of a White teenager for their illustration of a common fare evader.

However, I have to disagree with Francis Menton of The Manhattan Contrarian here when he writes the following:

To enable such a program to begin and to move forward, it is necessary for the issue of refusal to pay fares by race to enter the public consciousness. Someone first must collect systematic data and report it and point out what is actually going on. If it is too sensitive to report by race per se, then how about reporting by zip code? And then the newspapers and TV stations and podcasts and websites would need to pick up the story and make something out of it.

The racial makeup of fare evaders is perfectly well known of course and actually quite openly acknowledged so long as it is being done by the right sorts of organizations for the right ends.

I also wonder why the Post refuses to ask why draconian fare enforcement measures are only now needed? Somehow the MTA functioned perfectly fine with its easily-avoidable turnstyles decades ago. To relate it back to WhiningCoil's comment, I can only say "I think the bottom line, is this is just what a low trust society looks like."

I disagree that race is central here. Treating fare evasion as a complex socio-economic problem where you need to understand the demographics is overkill.

Like copyright infringement and unlike shoplifting, riding a mostly empty bus without paying when you would otherwise walk seems a mostly victimless crime. The extra amount of gas the bus requires to transport you is likely a few cents. As such, you will always have a substantial amount of people who see nothing morally wrong with it, whatever their racial distribution.

Rather than trying to understand why people think that way and how they could be persuaded to change their attitudes, the way to fix this is enforcement. For underground/metro/subway, you want barriers with card scanners. For busses, you could require everyone enter through the front door and pass such a barrier there. While we have seen a lot of AI systems fail spectacularly, I feel "detecting people entering through the rear doors of the bus and telling the bus driver to wait until they have validated their tickets" should be well within the realm of the doable.

The point of having fares in city public transports is not to pay for running the service. The point is to price the undesirables out. I vaguely recollect Scott mentioning that once BART put up barriers, this generally improved the feeling of safety for the customers, because the homeless and drug addicts which made people detest travelling on BART were not buying tickets.

This can be totally solved in color-blind mode, no need to bring up race. Of course, sooner or later the other side will bring up race, claiming that blacks are over-represented in subway fines (due to systemic racism, surely!), but the law&order side should stick to the color-blind mode here.

For busses, you could require everyone enter through the front door

This isn't standard? It's how it works on the buses here in Anchorage: enter at the front door, pay at the little podium next to the driver, take your seat, and exit out the door further back (about midway down the bus) at your stop. No tickets, nobody sneaking on, or past the driver, only one employee on the bus — the driver.

Some busses have a door in the front and a door in the middle. No real way to monitor those ones. Not like the driver is going to notice you walking in throughout the rear door and stop his route to demand you leave.

Some busses have a door in the front and a door in the middle.

Yes, that's how they work here: the front door is for getting on, the middle for getting off.

No real way to monitor those ones.

Our bus drivers seem to do it just fine. A big mirror that lets them see down the aisle and pretty much the whole bus interior.

Not like the driver is going to notice you walking in throughout the rear door and stop his route to demand you leave.

That's exactly what they do.

Yeah that only works for a limited population, it's too slow to handle the volume buses get in new york.

I think that's probably the key. Bus size and usage here in Anchorage is a minuscule fraction of that in large cities.

  • For busses, you could require everyone enter through the front door and pass such a barrier there. While we have seen a lot of AI systems fail spectacularly, I feel "detecting people entering through the rear doors of the bus and telling the bus driver to wait until they have validated their tickets" should be well within the realm of the doable.

Having everyone enter through the front of the bus is bad because it slows the travel time of the bus considerably and also makes it more of an interference to other traffic. Minimizing stopped time is very important for effective transit.

The better strategy is just very visible and frequent fare enforcement. Teams of inspectors rove the bus lines and bust people for not paying, in a very visible and obvious and shaming way. Yeah maybe you still have serial cheats or whatever but you get average people to think there are consequences and more importantly not feel like they're a sucker for paying a fare.

For underground/metro/subway, you want barriers with card scanners.

They bypass them. By literally jumping the turnstiles, or entering through the exit gate when someone else is exiting. Passive enforcement won't cut it; you could use man-trap style doors in every entrance, but you're still going to need openable gates for handicapped, people with luggage, etc, and there aren't the personnel to operate those only manually. Also the man-trap doors are slower to use and will result in congestion.

I don't know about New York, but race does play a direct role in fare evasion in Philadelphia. A bus driver simply isn't going to give trouble to a co-racial free rider.

This is a technical problem. There are turnstiles you can't jump over. A waist high rotating bar can't stop a palsied child from crossing it. 7 foot high one-way turnstile on all entrances and exits are impossible to slip by.

there aren't the personnel to operate those only manually

How come? There are 472 stations, they have, let's say, 1000 entrances, you need just 8000 cops to patrol each entrance round the clock. But you really need much fewer people: you only have to patrol the stations with the highest rate of fare evasion and you don't have to do this round the clock.

There's actually more than 2000 entrances. There are less than 1200 MTA police officers. And 36,000 in the NYPD. The cost of having enough of them to stop farebeating would be staggering.

An individual in a central control room (who can eventually be replaced by AI) can monitor dozens of man trap doors on CCTV to allow those with luggage or in wheelchairs to come through. This isn’t intractable.

… right up until roving gangs vibrant urban youth groups start smashing the CCTV cameras for laughs. Or even just start loitering around the station until someone with luggage or a stroller comes, and then they swoop in and prop open the gate so subsequent thugs delinquents persons of alternative socialization can stroll right through

Once in Shanghai there was a problem with my subway card. The scanner at the turnstile would not let me out for some mysterious reason. I went to the nearby help desk which is an enclosed room with glass panels you can talk to workers through. I gestured to the turnstile with my card and the woman at the help desk gestured me to use a nearby turnstile. It was unlocked when I reached it. She must have unlocked it for me.

There are simple systems that allow for manual override but are not susceptible to gangs of urban youths bypassing. Forethought and will the size of a mustard seed would let us have this in America. It's not like special Chinese-only DNA let them set up this handy and secure system. We are choosing to live this way andcanchooseto stop anytime.

Sure, but this is the general crime spiral. Some percentage of subway fare evaders will give up because they do not want to smash the cameras, are too short, don’t have enough time, etc.

The issue isn't that race is central to fare evasion, but any difference, or perhaps even more importantly, the perception of differences in the prosecution of fare evasion, will be used to show that this is a racist policy.

I spent around seven years living in Seattle. There are a few gangs in Seattle, generally based in the southern area. As it turns out, most of the participants of the gangs happen to be black. This led to the black gang members being arrested and prosecuted for crimes in a disproportionate way compared to the overall population of the city. Seattle's solution to this was to disband the gang unit.

Seattle Police’s Gang Unit was revised to the Gun Violence Reduction Unit (GVRU) in 2020. GVRU does not actively track gang data within Seattle. GVRU conducts the majority of investigations regarding gun violence, whether or not its gang related. Gang specialist Gabe Morales says several local gangs are still active in Seattle. (https://www.kiro7.com/news/investigates/monday-530-gangs-still-plague-puget-sound-especially-among-teens/57BJEHV4IVA65IT2NHPZYI7LGM/)

The criminal irony of this style of thinking is that the (in the case of Seattle) primarily black gangs tend to commit violence predominantly to the black community itself. By not dealing with the problem of gang violence, the black community is being further set back. It's all in the name of "equity" in terms of punishment since there doesn't happen to be any prominent white gangs.

Now apply the same to fare evasion. The moment you have blacks being arrested for it, even if it is proportional to the population, you'll have the activists protesting that this is racially motivated. The end result is that certain crimes go unpunished -- and once that happens, it's defacto no longer a crime. It gets compounded when the individuals involved know they're not going to be prosecuted so they continue to break the law even more.

I spent around seven years living in Seattle. There are a few gangs in Seattle, generally based in the southern area. As it turns out, most of the participants of the gangs happen to be black. This led to the black gang members being arrested and prosecuted for crimes in a disproportionate way compared to the overall population of the city. Seattle's solution to this was to disband the gang unit.

This looks like it'd be a good basis for a reboot or spiritual successor of The Wire. Like how the then-contemporary issue of the drug war was used as good fodder for showcasing dysfunction in policing in the original series, the now-contemporary issue of DEI/socjus/idpol/CRT/etc. seems like it could provide plenty of fodder for showcasing dysfunction in policing today, as well as other related institutions like schools and local government. I just wonder if there's a David Simon today who's been covering local police work in some city for the past 15 years who has the depth and breadth of experience to now put together a show.

Or perhaps rather than something like The Wire, something more akin to Dr. Strangelove would be more appropriate.

I don't disagree. However, I doubt something like this would ever get made while the folks signing the checks are the same people cheering on the DEI, et al. initiatives.

Honestly, I'm hoping there's going to be sea change in the coming years and we get back to something more normal. There are so many changes going on all over the western world with people getting fed up with their governments. Who knows..?

If the change is over the last five years, surely race can be of only marginal relevance in explaining that change?

Possibly, but not necessarily. Say you have an original population of fare evaders that are disproportionately one race, but represent only a small fraction of that demographic in the city. If the larger population of that race comes to believe (almost certainly accurately, in a case like NYC over the last several years) that lack of enforcement is at least partially contingent on race, why wouldn't they take advantage of the "unofficial" policy for free fare? People of other races recognize that they are more likely to be enforced-upon, and so do not change the rate at which they dodge fares.

Surely one can think of a series of events in the last five years that changed how law enforcement behaves around certain demographics, especially in large metropolitan areas.

I enjoyed this article by Manhattan Contrarian that criticizes the New York Post for completely ignoring race when discussing this issue, and pretending that lack of enforcement is the source of our woes.

I have to say that disagree with Manhattan Contrarian and am prepared to defend the New York Post's take.

If you start from the supposition that humans are (for the most part at least) individuals who exercise personal agency it doesn't really matter to the transportation agency what color the free-rider is or how they justify thier actions. The motives of the finance bro who can't be bothered to pay, the edgy teen jumping turnstiles for a thrill, and the homeless bum who just doesn't give a shit about your rules (but will shit on your floor), all ultimately boil down to the same thing. They do it because they beleive they'll get away with it. Thus the clear solution to fair-evasion/free-riders (a solution so obvious that only someone very educated or deep in the terminal stages of woke brain-rot could fail to see it) is don't let them get away with it.

As I was telling @The_Nybbler a couple weeks back, the reason for unchecked crime is that people have chosen to allow crime to go unchecked.

Or to riff off of your own post from down-thread, I think the reason New York has these sort of problems is that woke Democrats, and the people who elect them, are getting the system they deserve.

Want to live in a safe, well-ordered, high-trust society? Try prosecuting trouble-makers and promoting men like Daniel Penney instead of the reciprocal.

Thus the simplest solution to fair-evasion/free-riders (a solution so obvious that only someone very educated or deep in the terminal stages of woke brain-rot could fail to see it) is don't let them get away with it

There is a slow convergent point in most criminal justice studies is that law enforcement works by true arrest rate, not necessarily severity. The problem in the USA and Europe is that the disproportionate arrest rates of minorities is attributed to societal failures that one of the competing dominant political arms can use to attack the other in order to further their own political interests. So long as heterogenous outcomes are treated as failures requiring intervention, the meta will incentivize redefining heterogeneity to maximize resource capture.

The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity, instead of burying its head deeper in the sand about extant problems too inconvenient to address openly.

The Shopping Cart Theory is a great first-order test to determine prevalence of antisocial elements. Disproportionate amounts of resources are invested in cleaning up after noncooperatives, and even more are invested in resources to gently nudge them into being cooperative of their own recognizance or accommodating their preferences through rehabilitation and custodial services. Some people get off on being as difficult as possible because they fundamentally hate the people offering them help to begin with, and self-flagellating to absolve the noncooperative of their responsibility does not lead to greater resource utilization efficacy.

Just like how drug-testing welfare recipients does not meaningfully capture significant amounts of drug abusers or signalling immigration crackdowns does not actually catch many illegals, these programs are meant as signals to the noncompliant that mercy is no longer guaranteed. Less fare evaders will use the services on offer to begin with, and that is a perfectly acceptable outcome.

So long as heterogenous outcomes are treated as failures requiring intervention, the meta will incentivize redefining heterogeneity to maximize resource capture.

Maybe the answer is the Tom Paris rebuttal.

The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity, instead of burying its head deeper in the sand about extant problems too inconvenient to address openly.

That's without counting the effects downstream from Broken Windows Theory. Which despite mainstream academia trying for decades to tarnish it, is so obvious from observation of humans and human nature that it still holds a quasi-tautological position in my thinking on this.

The Shopping Cart Theory is a great first-order test to determine prevalence of antisocial elements.

It is often a private choice, and it is harder to notice if this has any downstream effect because ressources are deployed to clean up, as you've mentionned. I've started to prefer bus queues to point out antisocial elements. Who, when coming up to wait at a bus stop that has an obvious, clear, nonambiguous line of people queueing up for the bus, decides to ignore the queue entirely, without any mitigating factors (joining a friend being barely acceptable). There's sadly patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues.

There's sadly patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues.

Why is it sad?

Are you happy when someonetakes cuts in front of you to get a limited resource (like a seat on a filling bus)? When people line up in order of arrival there's a certain fairness.

Yeah -- not what I was asking about. The question is why it's sad that there are patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues. To me this implies some 'ought'-style thinking that I can neither model nor understand. Should cultures or people all be identical? If not, doesn't that imply differences? Is the sentiment of the person to whom I was responding merely a reflexive genuflection toward prevailing political ideology, or did he mean something else by it?

Within a nation, yes, I believe it's best for the nation to share a single culture. There can be lots of room for personal preferences some might like to sit in the back of the bus others near the front etc but I think nations are best when it's a smaller nation built around a shared culture universal to the nation. Multicultural nations should assimilate or subdivide.

For example I'm of German descent and I think the forced assimilation of Germans during World War I should happen to all the population groups in America. It would be a painful transition but the results would make the nation a better place.

I find it sad because it means some demographics are going to have to shoulder blame. It would be much easier if the blame was diffused and we could blame and address society wide problems, but ones that are targeted are harder to solve because they elicit a defensive attitude.

It's also interesting to note that for the bus queues, the demographics at fault are not exclusively those you're probably thinking about. Yes, they are overrepresented, but some of the most frequently offending demographic I notice are elderly women (of all races).

I find it sad because it means some demographics are going to have to shoulder blame. It would be much easier if the blame was diffused and we could blame and address society wide problems, but ones that are targeted are harder to solve because they elicit a defensive attitude.

I am torn on this.

On the one hand, the fact that offenders are disproportionately members of a certain demographic group makes it harder to gather the political support needed to crack down on fare evasion; this is, indeed, sad, sad because it is a reflection of how thoroughly the mind-virus of wokeism and its opportunistic infection of “disparate impact”-ism has infected the body politic.

On the other hand, what’s not sad is the fact that much-needed and even-handed punishment of fare evaders would affect certain demographics disproportionately. As I see it, the reputation or good name of one’s visible demographic group—race, sex, certain religions, perhaps class insofar as indicated through clothing and mannerisms—is a commons in the economic sense. However, unlike the economist’s favorite example of grazing land, the reputation of one’s demographic group cannot possibly be privatized to avoid the tragedy of the commons: liberals and wokeists (when tactically convenient) tend to argue for a form of “privatization”, viz. “treating people as individuals” and not stereotyping. But the fact remains that humans are too good at pattern matching and stereotypes remain stubbornly accurate in their predictions. And the brute fact also remains that some demographic groups do a good job of maintaining a positive reputation for the group, even at some individual cost, while others overgraze the commons and then complain about unfair treatment.

To be maximally fair, it truly does suck to be judged negatively by the color of your skin, or some other attribute you didn’t choose, when in fact you’re an upstanding pro-social citizen who bucks the stereotypes. The solution here is twofold:

  1. As the unjustly-judged individual, you should put pressure on your group—even if you didn’t choose to be a member of that group!—to do a better job of maintaining the commons, since it’s never going away.

  2. The system as a whole must punish all individuals swiftly, surely, and harshly enough that the calculus of “Well, I’m already going to be seen as $NEGATIVE_STEREOTYPE anyway; might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb” does not make sense.

As for the reason elderly women are often taking antisocial actions, I would hasard the reason is the same as anyone else. People, but men especially, are quickly thaught in life that them taking antisocial actions will usually make people around them angry. Sometimes this anger will turn to confrontation, and rarely (but sometimes) that confrontation will turn to violence. Minorities in majority white countries know that they could potentially turn it around if confronted by a white person by claiming it's racism so some of them abuse that. And elderly women (of any race) are the most oblivious demographic of all, because they are completely insulated from the consequences of antisocial actions as anyone confronting them immediately looks like the bad guy in the situation. If they had the physical ability to jump turnstiles, I have no doubt they would.

More comments

I don't know that I'd characterize it as "reflexive genuflection," but the way I interpreted the statement was that it's sad that the specific pattern that's observed is sad (rather than that it's sad that there is a pattern at all, which is what the text actually says, which I took to be carelessness), because the prevailing ideology makes it difficult to solve the problem due to making the act of publicly noticing this specific pattern severely punishable. Now, I'm personally not sure that ignoring such patterns is meaningfully harmful to our ability to address the problem of the kinds of antisocial behavior that's being discussed, but certainly many people in this forum seem to believe otherwise.

There is a slow convergent point in most criminal justice studies is that law enforcement works by true arrest rate

I think that there is a very real sense in which surety of consequences is a more effective deterrent than severity. IME lots of people who might roll the dice on a 5% chance of something very bad happening become an order of magnitude more careful/conservative/cooperative when presented with a 50% chance of something moderately bad happening.

The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity.

I believe that you, I, and the NYP are all in broad agreement here.

I gotta know. What is actually the ROI on fare enforcement? Here's an article from the AP written March this year talking about NYC sending an "additional" 800 NYPD officers specifically to check for turnstile fare evasion. According to the NYPD Police Officer benefits page the starting salary for an officer is $58580/year and grows to $121589/year at 5.5 years of experience. So the total cost to the city of just these officers is somewhere between $47M and $97M per year (assuming all are between 0 and 5.5 years experience). The fine for jumping a turnstile starts at $100. So in order to justify the cost of these officers they are going to need to ticket between 470k and 970k people. According to that same AP article 28k people had been ticketed so far that year. Here's a Gothamist article from September this year that claims about 70k tickets were issued for fare evasion in the first 6 months of the year. So those 800 officers turned a presumptive 28k tickets/3 months into 42k tickets/4 months, a gain of 14k tickets (or, $1.4M in fines). Set this against the payout of NYPD salaries in the neighborhood of $12-24M. A steal! As long as you're the NYPD.

You're looking at this wrong. The policy isn't expected or intended primarily to pay for itself via fines. The policy is intended to pay for itself by deterring fare evaders from evading fares i.e. a visible police presence will encourage people to buy tickets who otherwise would not have bought them.

Let's take the middle of your cost estimate, $72m/year. Per the NYT, the typical New York subway fare is $2.90. To get a return on investment, in the course of a calendar year, 24,827,586 passengers who would otherwise have avoided paying the fare need to pay the fare. That works out at 68,021 passengers a day.

3.6 million people ride the NYC subway every day, of whom (again per NYT) 14% refuse to pay the fare - 504,000 people a day. If a visible police presence convinces 68,021 of those people (a mere 13.5% of the total number of daily fare evaders) to pay the fare, the policy has paid for itself. Sounds doable, frankly.

Using the lower bound of your cost estimate works out at 44,402 passengers a day (8.8% of people currently evading fares on the subway); the upper bound, 91,639 (18.2%). None of these sound like fantastical pie-in-the-sky figures: at most, you have to persuade a fifth of people currently jumping the turnstiles not to do so, and you're done. Anything above that is pure profit.

Enforcement changes habits. Right now 'everyone' does it, so everyone does it. If 'everyone' stopped doing it, it'd feel weird to do it, and many fewer people would do it, and enforcement costs go down. It's like smoking, or littering, or drunk driving. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-the-war-on-drunk-driving-was-won/

Two underappreciated ideas stick out from this experience. First, deterrence works: incentives matter to offenders much more than many scholars found initially plausible. Second, the long-run impact that successful criminal justice interventions have is not primarily in rehabilitation, incapacitation, or even deterrence, but in altering the social norms around acceptable behavior.

You don’t need to catch all of them. You need to catch enough to make turnstile jumping too risky for the potential gain. If you’re catching 28K, you’re probably missing at least the same number of people maybe more.

So in order to justify the cost of these officers they are going to need to ticket between 470k and 970k people.

Wait, you were being literal when you asked about the Return on Investment? I'm sure that the 11 Insanely Corrupt Speed-Trap Towns have great ROI figures for their police forces.

The "return" for proper policework is non-financial.

This is just the usual "haha we've made it impossible to enforce the law, better give up and let us do whatever we want forever."
The same argument could be (and is) made for bike theft: the value of the bikes stolen in a 6 month period is far less than the cost of catching and prosecuting the bike thieves. Better just to give up and let it happen, right?
This argument is of course only deployed by people who approve of the criminal element in question. Even if the math wasn't incorrect, it should be rejected as a bad faith manipulation attempt. There should be a sudden brutal crackdown on both the criminals and the anarcho-tyrants supporting them, and when we are finished with them the problem will be solved. The long term reduction of bike theft by obliterating the theft rings, fences, and their leftist enablers is worth far more than the few months of stolen bikes the criminal accomplices would prefer to compare the enforcement cost to.

The cost of fare enforcement will decrease as over time, so why not use the cost of fare enforcement in Tokyo as a baseline for our cost comparison? But the value of enforcing law on the lawless (and their supporters) is what really matters.

so why not use the cost of fare enforcement in Tokyo as a baseline for our cost comparison?

Because New York isn't full of Japanese people.

Fun fact: Subway gates don't even have turnstiles in Japan. You can just walk right through without paying. I think they beep or something if you don't pay, but I've never seen anyone just keep on walking, so I don't know if they keep beeping.

The gates slam shut if they detect you trying to walk through without paying. I've occasionally been in a rush and slapped down my card without checking if there was money on it - having the gates knock you back in an instant is a pretty big shock.

There are downstream effects that go beyond the financial loss. Basically not enforcing laws for petty crimes can encourage lawbreakers to escalate to more serious crimes. More police means more natural surveillance and deterrence for opportunistic lawbreakers.

You may as well ask 'why pay for any police to enforce any crime that doesn't directly recoup cash into the cities coffers?'

I notice that that cost question never gets asked when the time comes to prosecute Daniel Penny.

Who? Whom?

What is actually the ROI on fare enforcement?

It's not about the money, it's about sending a message.

What is actually the ROI on fare enforcement?

Keeping actual psychopaths off the subway. Not putting innocent people through the kafkaeque nightmare of defending themselves and then having the state come down on them like a brick of shit.

Fare evasion costs the MTA $600 million a year, according to the Post article. The ROI, of course, depends on how much evasion the enforcement stops, which is hard to know.

Also, not enforcing rules against fare evasion makes honest people into chumps. Why should Joe Commuter pay $116/month for the subway when Johnny Lowlife rides for free?

Somehow the MTA functioned perfectly fine with its easily-avoidable turnstyles decades ago.

I think you are missing the mta lore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_Subway#Crime

The subway was in seriously bad shape a few decades ago

I can only say "I think the bottom line, is this is just what a low trust society looks like."

Luigi's CEO assassination has been a real statement piece to drive your point.

Other than money, the US lacks other recognizable traits of a developed nation.

High violence, low trust, unreliable social safety nets, bad health outcomes...... you name it. The US has money, and that's about it. Yes, being in the top 1% of America makes for an amazing life. Guess what ? That applies to every half-developed nation.

This is how ChatGPT outlines what living in a developed nation feels like:

Aspects of a Developed Country from a Quality of Life Perspective

  1. Healthcare

    • Universal access to high-quality healthcare services.
    • Advanced medical facilities and technologies.
    • High life expectancy and low infant mortality.

  2. Education

    • Free or affordable access to primary, secondary, and tertiary education.
    • High literacy rates and skilled workforce.
    • Emphasis on research and innovation.

  3. Economic Stability

    • High GDP per capita.
    • Low unemployment and inflation rates.
    • Strong social safety nets and pensions.

  4. Infrastructure

    • Efficient transportation systems (roads, public transit, airports).
    • Reliable utilities (electricity, water, internet).
    • Modern urban planning with sustainable practices.

  5. Safety and Security

    • Low crime rates and effective law enforcement.
    • Political stability and strong governance.
    • Protection of civil rights and freedoms.

  6. Environmental Quality

    • Clean air, water, and well-maintained public spaces.
    • Access to green spaces and recreational areas.

  7. Social Equity

    • Gender equality and inclusivity.
    • Access to housing and elimination of poverty.

  8. Work-Life Balance

    • Reasonable work hours and paid leave policies.
    • Opportunities for cultural, leisure, and recreational activities.

(Note: it gave me a couple of woke talking points. I deleted those)

I've personally striked out what America fails at. It's pretty damning.

  • -20

Like, @The_Nybbler (apologies for pinging you twice in rapid succession) i dont care what your glorified markov chain has to say. And even if i did, i would dispute the assertion that it is "The United States" that is lacking and not "a distinct subset of urban areas where the Democratic Party have managed to impose one-party rule".

America is not fucked up, Chicago is fucked up, Oakland is fucked up, and Baltimore is... well... Baltimore.

Don't spam threads with LLM output. ChatGPT answers aren't forbidden, if there is some context or purpose to them, but "I was too lazy to write up my thoughts myself so I had ChatGPT do it" is what every lazy college student is doing nowadays. This place is not for lazy college students half-assedly submitting their homework.

I did only use it to get a list of points that add up to a first world QOL.

The actual value add (the strike throughs) and the core point (Luigi's assassination as major anecdote for America's low-trust-society-ness, America feeling like a developing country) are all mine.

But point taken. Not a lot of 'human' places left on the internet. No point in turning this one into a vanilla slop-fest.

PS: and before I get accused for using Chatgpt, this is the first time I've done that. My point-wise markdown writing style is my own. That chat gpt uses the same style is coincidence.

I have surprisingly few feelings about the object level discussion here, but why must you impugn the good name of vanilla?

Vanilla isn't an insult, Vanilla is a sign of absolute victory. Made from the 2nd most expensive spice, vanilla is exquisite. So much so, that we normiefied it. We now have ways to make imitation vanilla and once the inner bean is used, we can still extract by preserving it in alcohol.

English is the most 'vanilla' language, because the Britain/America won. Fries are vanilla sides because nothing is better. Chatgpt's writing style is vanilla, because that exact sentence pattern dominated western speech for a century.

Vanilla becomes an insult, yes. But, that's because it's already won. High quality vanilla bean is genuinely top-tier.

The US does have a European-sized welfare state, has crime rates which are not globally that high, has a high life expectancy and low infant mortality with universal access to emergency medicine(seriously a driver of US healthcare costs is the constitutional right to access emergency medicine and then just not pay it), and has universal access to college education(which, if you’re willing to accept the kinds of conditions college kids have historically lived in, is actually fairly affordable). There’s a housing shortage, but it’s a lot better than other Anglosphere countries.

Crime rates are geographically constrained in the USA rather than an everpresent reality. Much ink can be spilled about general observations, but the simple fact is that if you don't live near blacks, crime will be a much lower problem. The USA has enough space for crime-worried californians to flee to economic centers in texas or florida, while economic activity concentrated in only a few cities filled with racialized criminality limits the options for Europeans.

Racialized crime is a solvable problem; black people don't like crime either as clearly evinced by their disapproval of 'defund the police'. The problem is liberals who use disparate impact as a means to castigate their proximate political opponent instead. There is of course the grift of NGOs and the like to extract sympathy from do gooders, but that happens on both sides of the aisle and so its a wash.

Much ink can be spilled about general observations, but the simple fact is that if you don't live near blacks, crime will be a much lower problem

Proximity to black people is not the issue. My reasonably affluent suburban nieghborhood is easily 20% black and im not worried about my nieghbors.

Crime rates are geographically constrained, but that constraint is to the above-mentioned subset of urban areas where the Democratic Party has managed to impose one-party rule. IE places like Baltimore, St Louis, Chicago, and Seattle.

My reasonably affluent suburban nieghborhood is easily 20% black and im not worried about my nieghbors.

So is mine, but they're pretty wealthy black people. Many of the older ones moved here to get away from shittier co-ethnics. Even then, though... there's a neighboring town which is also wealthy and also has a considerable number of black people, and the few murders there were disproportionately committed by black people (specifically black men, if it needs to be said), including wealthy ones.

Common regression-to-the-mean W.

I was going to say that it reminds me of how wealthy blacks underperform poor whites (and especially poor Asians) on standardized tests. However, to my pleasant surprise while looking up the previous link, I Noticed that Random Critical Analysis also has a post "Racial differences in homicide rates are poorly explained by economics," where he concludes: "Race is a strong predictor of homicide rates at a county level. It predicts better than the poverty rate, median household income, racial segregation, income segregation, education rates, and so on and so forth."

Ah, but does it predict better than percentage of households headed by a woman?

Indeed it does, if we consider the percentage of households headed by women to be equivalent to single motherhood rates.

The literal next sentence after the brief blurb I pasted reads: "The single-motherhood rate is a close second though" (second to % black, in a bivariate correlation table). As shown in Section 3, black remains a significant predictor on top of single motherhood rates; that is, the black effect on homicides is robust net of family poverty and single motherhood rates.

Not that I necessarily believe blacks should be granted "credit" for family poverty and single motherhood rates as to excusing their high homicide rates. Akin to how we wouldn't adjust for homicide rates using battery rates. The same combination of heritable traits such as low IQ, high impulsiveness, and high time preference would result in high family poverty, single motherhood, and homicide rates.

Crime in the US is a disproportionately but not exclusively black problem- US whites have much higher homicide rates than Europe, and indeed higher than Canada. It’s also not the case that crime is a mostly blue state problem- if anything, it’s more common in blue cities in red states, while there remain many hotspots in other locales.

Red states are disproportionately black, with blue cities in red states blacker than blue cities in blue states. Everytime liberals (so not specifically referring to you) smugly post that red states are stupider and more criminal than blue states they end up shooting themselves in the foot because it goes back to how large the black population is.

The ultimate test of this experiment will be the outcome of St George county in Louisiana after it split from Baton Rouge county. Richer whiter (but still having black residents) zone splits off from failing black county because the whites wanted better schools. With less whites around will the blacker Baton Rouge be free to prosper and flourish without the evils of racism tainting their progress? I posit no, but the anticipation of the upcoming crash is itself part of the journey.

Well yes, Baton Rouge itself does not want St George county to split off for that very reason. And the prototypical blue cities in red states, like Austin and Asheville, are doing at least OK.

Very poor governance associated with extremely large- and often outright majority- black populations is a major problem for these cities; Jackson and St. Louis are not doing well on non-crime related metrics either. Very white red states often do quite well on things like education and crime. But sun belt states maintain high crime rates and rural whites in the south have extremely high crime rates by first world standards- while blacks have a big portion of the blame, there are still other things going on.

if anything, it’s more common in blue cities in red states.

This probably deserves some exploration in itself, but annecdotally there seems to be a flow of bad actors towards places where they will be tolerated, and this is most visible in places where you have an island of "tolerance" in otherwise "intolerant" territory.

There’s probably a confluence of factors, with particularly bad local governance being a factor in lots of cases(Jackson’s water crisis was resolved by the corps of engineers in a matter of hours, but had lasted for weeks with no progress; you don’t get that with even minimal competence from the local authorities). Everything in New Orleans and St. Louis is horribly mismanaged, an adversarial relationship with the state doesn’t help but cant be blamed entirely(Austin seems to do fine despite its frequent and visible fallouts with the state).

Racialized crime is a solvable problem; black people don't like crime either as clearly evinced by their disapproval of 'defund the police'.

I recall polls as such. Perhaps blacks disapprove of "defund the police," insofar as they may imagine themselves as the victims of crime.

However, it's a different story when it comes to blacks being disproportionate perpetrators of crime—blacks are likely not as enthusiastic about law and order when it comes to imagining their brothers, sons, nephews, etc. doing prison time for robbing convenience stores or gas stations, participating in lootings, harassing/assaulting people in subways and other public spaces, beating up Asian and white classmates with their other black friends, punching Asian grandmothers on the street.

I'm not accusing you of this, but I'm not a fan of using the opinions of blacks to subtract/add legitimacy from/to "defund the police"/"law and order". It reinforces the notion that Black Lives Matter More, and has the vibe of DR3. Mainstream conservatives, such as /r/Conservative, are always two-soyjaks-pointing when it comes to blacks being (at least superficially) supportive of things like "law and order," though.

And why does it matter? Until we bite the bullet and actually go into those areas arrest and jail those committing the crimes, they cannot have the save communities, let alone prosperous ones, they say they want. It’s always been a problem for the liberal democratic state — we often know exactly what the problems are, and exactly how to solve them, but because the solutions require short-term pain they can never be implemented. They probably wouldn’t like tge process of law and order policing, they wouldn’t like to see black men going to prison for decades. They will like not having to ask the clerk to unlock the plastic doors so the6 can take groceries off the shelves. They will like not needing bars on their windows. They will love it when the lower crime rates mean businesses choose their neighborhoods to open up shop.

Yeah, if the U.S. has a housing shortage than every country has a housing shortage.

I'm hard pressed to think of any single country where a person can get more square feet per hour of labor than the U.S.

The US does have high life expectancy and low infant mortality though. And most of the issues are caused by obesity not healthcare here in any case. Its not the highest certainly, but that isn't your criteria. Likewise the US does have a fairly robust social safety net, and low crime rates. It also has very little actual poverty. It certainly also has a lot of opportunities for leisure and recreation.

I'm by no means in the top 1% but the US is an excellent place to live.

Just comparing to places I have spent plenty of time in, it's better than the UK, better than France, better than China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Russia. Maybe the Nordics might beat it, maybe, but I didn't spend enough time in Sweden to assess.

I remembered an article comparing America’s gun crimes rate as the best among developing nations but high for developed nations. Certainly gave me food for thought.

And why should anyone care what a jumped-up matrix multiplier trained on the output of the Internet thinks?

That's a tired argument. For near-consensus topics, Chat-gpt gives acceptable answers. I could've done the legwork and found this exact same points elsewhere, but I ain't doing that for free. So you get Chatgpt.

  • -17

but I ain't doing that for free

You don't have to post if a particular comment would cost you too much effort to be bothered to research and then type up.

And I'm not convinced that the median internet opinion fed into ChatGTP is a consensus view worthy of consideration. They poisoned these poor LLMs with all of reddit, etc. Their "consensus" opinion could be overly online nonsense. How indeed should I thicken my pizza sauce.

fair fair.

I doubt I would trust any actual "consensus" on this topic, I'm certainly not going to trust ChatGPT. If you'd found the points elsewhere, I could tell you exactly why the definition was not to be trusted, but since you used ChatGPT as your authority, there is no authority.

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