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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Flush train cars blow actual cars out of the water on every metric we care about: affordability, environmental damage, and efficient use of space.

Consensus building. You might care about these things, but the market disagrees. Most people care about having open space for their kids that is free of drug addicts.

Experian records the average person paying $716 a month on car payments. Adding data from the AAA on insurance, fuel, and maintenance brings it up to $894 a month, or $10,278 a year. Multiplied by 275,924,442 registered vehicles shows $2.84 trillion worth of road spending handled privately.

Wrong again. Experian's data only shows cars that have payments on them, which are usually the first or second owners and are 10 years old or newer, in the first half of their service life. The median registered vehicle is 12 years old, and there's an enormously long tail of second and third cars that were paid off a long time ago and used irregularly. The median new car buyer is 50 years old and well off, and most people drive used cars at a significantly lower price.

Still, in every instance O’Toole seems to be taking transit systems that are specifically the worst possible example of their form, out of date, mismanaged, chronically underfunded

He's highlighting the failure mode of transit systems. All systems in the US, except perhaps New York, are out of date, overpriced, and dangerous. Every transit system in America becomes a target for massive graft and corruption, and the American inability to police cities ensures that they will not only be corrupt, but violent.

Unless you have Japanese levels of public behavior and honesty, you're going to keep getting violence, filth, and corruption.

Unless you have Japanese levels of public behavior and honesty, you're going to keep getting violence, filth, and corruption.

I've used public transport systems across European cities for long periods of time (i.e. natives are <75% of the local population) and have generally had pleasant experiences in all of them, so I don't know that this statement holds up.

Unless you have Japanese levels of public behavior and honesty, you're going to keep getting violence, filth, and corruption.

I think with secure turnstiles and cops that actually enforce quality of life rules we could have clean and safe public trains. It's merely a matter of will. Unfortunately major American cities are moving hard in the opposite direction and reducing policing and enforcement of quality of life issues.

I think with secure turnstiles and cops that actually enforce quality of life rules we could have clean and safe public trains.

And if grandma had balls, we'd call her grandpa.

American cities are culturally incapable of excluding non-payers or punishing people who destroy public spaces. As a result, America shall not have urban public spaces.

cops that actually enforce quality of life rules

Yes, but you're not going to get this with modern racial and class politics, so it's not useful discussing it as a realistic option.

Modern racial and class politics are not some constant of the universe. What was created by man can be undone by man. Better public transit isn't even the most compelling reason to do so, but are you so willing to abandon our cities to being shitholes unworthy of the third world?

I don't want to abandon major cities to property crime and urban blight. But the people in charge don't seem to agree with me. I don't want to sound like some hyperbolic suburbanite, but the urban blight is pretty bad. And recent policy choices are moving hard in the wrong direction. It seems hopeless to me. So I live in a nice suburban neighborhood a significant drive from the urban core.

but are you so willing to abandon our cities to being shitholes unworthy of the third world?

At this point, it's been over 50 years of failure and decline. I think it's time to seriously entertain the idea that many cities should simply be abandoned and new, better ones built from scratch.

I would be in favor of this solution as well, but I don’t know if it's possible in the current regulatory environment. There's also the fact that most of the best locations are already taken, though I suppose that doesn’t preclude some dedicated group of citizens or one ambitious billionaire trying to buy out and convert some rust belt Byzantion into the next Constantinople.

I wanted OCP to actually build Delta City in the ruins of old Detroit.

Interested in seeing more of your demographic employed in law enforcement are we now, robot?

Consensus building. You might care about these things, but the market disagrees. Most people care about having open space for their kids that is free of drug addicts.

Much of my post was about demonstrating that transportation isn't a free market, it's massively distorted by government intervention and regulation. I too care about open space, which is why I advocate for more space efficient transit, and also about drug fee zones, which is why I endorsed O'Toole's idea of building secure turnstiles that cannot be easily hopped.

Experian's data only shows cars that have payments on them, which are usually the first or second owners and are 10 years old or newer, in the first half of their service life

I updated the piece about Experian after Walterodim pointed out we don't know what percent of cars are new or old, and instead took my numbers for the total private costs of car ownership from O'Toole, who estimated $1.15 trillion in 2017, and got his numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

He's highlighting the failure mode of transit systems. All systems in the US, except perhaps New York, are out of date, overpriced, and dangerous. Every transit system in America becomes a target for massive graft and corruption, and the American inability to police cities ensures that they will not only be corrupt, but violent.

This is much what I said - O'Toole is making criticisms of mismanagement rather than of engineering. Problems of mismanagement can be solved by better management, as they are in most of the developed world, not just Japan.

This is much what I said - O'Toole is making criticisms of mismanagement rather than of engineering. Problems of mismanagement can be solved by better management, as they are in most of the developed world, not just Japan.

If the problem was "management", we would have outliers. We do not, and public transit in the United States is universally filthy, violent, dangerous, and corrupt. Every single system, from majority white Portland to majority black Baltimore, from frozen Chicago to boiling Houston, from wealthy San Fransisco to impoverished St. Louis, is a graft-ridden cash grab that shovels billions to the politically connected while providing nothing but rolling asylums for the insane to shit in climate control.

You cannot have public transit without public-minded people.

Most people care about having open space for their kids that is free of drug addicts.

This is a local political choice that is orthogonal to quality of local public transportation. I'm sure we can all think of dense locales with excellent train systems and a dearth of junkies in parks. Likewise, I've been to places with no meaningful public transportation, but junkies abound. That this is any correlation at all in the United States is a product of urban areas having incompetent leadership and lack of will.

I'm sure we can all think of dense locales with excellent train systems and a dearth of junkies in parks

Can you list 10 in North America?

No, which is the point - American cities are making the choice to allow crazy people and junkies to ruin cities, but they need not do so, as seen in places that don't allow this behavior.

Name ten liberal democracies in Africa!

Seriously, just because the US and Canada sabotaged their rail infrastructure and refuse to deal with their drug problems, it doesn't mean that it's impossible to do those things. You really can just send the drug addicted violent layabouts to prison, or shoot them if you want to be cheap. The US is supposedly a global superpower, supposedly capable of simultaneously suppressing China and Russia. If your country can't control its own core urban heartlands and protect taxpaying citizens from idiotic, barely organized drug addicts, how can you show your faces on the world stage, what do you have to offer in terms of moral leadership or strength?

Russia has excuses for its massive drug problem. Outside Moscow, the country is fairly poor. Russia has the world's longest land borders, so it's hard to police. They're right next to Central Asia where the drugs are produced. State capacity is fairly low, there's a great deal of corruption. The effects of the disaster in the 1990s are still being felt.

What excuse does the US have? The US is rich and fairly stable. Their borders are small and easily policeable. They had decades of complete freedom of action on the world stage to invade countries and wage undeclared wars as they see fit. They completely squandered every advantage. For example, the US military occupied the world's biggest opiate producer and opiate production doubled under their shambolic rule!

Poorly enforced restrictions in the 1990s were a prelude to a full and very effective ban on religious grounds in 2000. The Afghan war in 2001 meant that the ban was only briefly effective.[10] The opium trade spiked in 2006 after the Taliban lost control of local warlords. Despite having previously banned opium, the Taliban used opium money to fuel their two-decade campaign to retake Afghanistan. The then Afghan government also outlawed production, but despite help from coalition military forces to tamp down on drug trafficking, the ban did little to stop production. After the Fall of Kabul in 2021, the opium trade boomed, and most farmers planted at least some opium for harvest in spring 2022. The Taliban outlawed production again in April 2022, during the poppy harvest.

US drug policy is so catastrophically bad, it's unbelievable. They declare a 'war on drugs', do nothing correctly and assist the enemy in Afghanistan (or fail so abjectly and laughably that they might as well be working with the poppy merchants). All the US needs to do is switch tracks from 'wreck their own country and the rest of the world with insanely bad policy' to 'improve the situation'.

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The US is supposedly a global superpower, supposedly capable of simultaneously suppressing China and Russia. If your country can't control its own core urban heartlands and protect taxpaying citizens from idiotic, barely organized drug addicts, how can you show your faces on the world stage, what do you have to offer in terms of moral leadership or strength?

Maybe this is the exact strategy? I'm reminded of something written around the time of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50's/60's, how poor Whites were supposedly made to feel as though they were still above the Black man despite their crushing poverty. Perhaps a hypothetical Based-American-Exceptionlism-Yes-Chad would indeed say that even the richest Chinese or Russian oligarch is worth less than even the most pathetic American drug addict who has one foot in the grave.

But uh, to get away from the crazy ideas for a bit: maybe drug enforcement is just legitimately harder than we realize/appreciate. Sure, you can just jail or shoot any addicts and dealers you can get your hands on, but that's an ongoing effort and cost. Stopping things at the source would be more effective, but you're fighting a full-on cold war at that point, as the enemy will be an organized and motivated force that can employ subterfuge and guerrilla tactics to stay out of your reach. It took the mobilization of an elite military unit to finally bring down Pablo Escobar back in the 80's/90's.

Perhaps a hypothetical Based-American-Exceptionlism-Yes-Chad would indeed say that even the richest Chinese or Russian oligarch is worth less than even the most pathetic American drug addict who has one foot in the grave.

Well at least Russian and Chinese oligarchs are made to disappear by their superiors in the security forces, that's normal and reasonable. US oligarchs get murdered by randoms on the street! Just today Bob Lee got stabbed to death on the streets of San Francisco - the guy made a product worth $40 billion, Cash App. Anyway, my point is that while it would be impressive if drug addicts in the US are treated better than Chinese oligarchs, it's actually that drug addicts are privileged above the American middle and upper class!

maybe drug enforcement is just legitimately harder than we realize/appreciate.

The Taliban seemed to do a good job of it in 2000-2001 and they have roughly a thousandth of the resources the US can wield. Is there some secret knowledge hidden in the Koran that gives +10,000% to reducing drug production? Or is the US just very incompetent? I've always maintained that if drug-addled idiots can find a dealer, professionalized, organized bureaucracies can as well. Furthermore, there are open-air drug markets in many US cities, they're clearly not trying to shut down the drug trade.

As for getting rid of drugs at the source - organize military coups and get the locals to do all the work. Back in the Cold War the US faced a far stronger opponent than a few drug cartels, with a much more powerful ideology. The US didn't want to get bogged down in every third-world country, so they arranged for anti-communist coups. They provided arms, funds, legitimacy and training to generals in Indonesia: Sukarno the communist sympathizer went out and Suharto the military dictator was in. 500,000 to a million dead in the purges but it was all Indonesians killing eachother. This is a much better solution than fighting directly. The US propped up dictators in the Phillipines, launched coups all across South America. Just use the media to whitewash everything and decry any dissent as fake news. The US somehow managed to sweep the rampant pedophilia and grotesque corruption in the Afghan army under the rug for decades.

Coups are cheap and easy, wars are hard and expensive. Wars only need to be fought against strong opponents with great power backers (Vietnam had the Soviets and China behind them). But there is no great power backing drugs and no great power capable of intervening in Central or South America.

The same thing could be done today. If Mexico or whatever country isn't sufficiently anti-drug, then it's time for regime change. Find a puppet leader, one who'll be totally reliant on the US for funding and legitimacy and rule through him. Rig the elections, launch coups and then accuse the other side of rigging elections and launching coups. Then have the puppet use their own troops to suppress the drug trade. They take on all the costs and complaints and death toll, while their leaders are paid off by the US.

Bukele is basically doing this right now but he's an enemy of the US, the US has been (ineffectually) trying to suppress and undermine him! The real problem is that the US on the wrong side, they are choosing not to tackle the problem.

oligarchs get murdered by randoms on the street! Just today Bob Lee got stabbed to death on the streets of San Francisco - the guy made a product worth $40 billion, Cash App.

Was that really random? He was involved in crypto and the government has clearly been making moves against crypto lately. SFs street crime provides plausible deniability.

This is an extreme claim. I don't think the USGov needs to resort to murder and black-bag tactics to torpedo crypto. Hell, it does that on its own anyways (see the claim that Musk changed Twitter's icon to the Doge meme to cover up him being potentially on the hook for over 200B in a lawsuit over him hawking Dogecoin).

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