InfoTeddy
4mo ago
I think that a large part of it has been downvotes affecting your participation. If you get downvoted too much, you're restricted from commenting, so you're always incentivized to say whatever gets you upvotes, which will always be what the majority consensus is. This is also where the judginess comes from, because if you have a differing opinion, people don't want to seem like they are the ones with a minority opinion, so they will attack you to keep the consensus afloat. Contrast that to TheMotte where downvotes don't affect your participation at all.
InfoTeddy
8mo ago
I mean, yes. But arguably even if you do link your real-life identity, it's still a digital simulacrum, because typing text is different than saying words in real life. Is there a standard by which if you reveal enough details on a pseudonym, it's no longer considered a "digital simulacrum"?
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Apparently it was pulled but probably not for his politics.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Not to defend the mod decisions too much, but I'd imagine that they would've banned the replier for a longer length if the replier had more of a history of antagonizing people in this way than the original poster. Though, I'm not a mod and don't have access to the notes they have on each user, so I can't say for sure that's why they banned Westerly for longer than MeinNameistBerd.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
I wish they would take this definition to its logical conclusion and charge the phone book and people finder sites with doxing, but they never do. (Of course, they added the "with malicious intent" part which could be used to conveniently absolve said people finder sites of wrongdoing.)
It's absolutely staggering how people will blame anything and everything but data brokers for doxing. The United States is an unreasonably easy place to dox people. If you reside in the US and give me your legal first and last name, I can very likely find your home address in seconds by going to one of these sites and typing them in. That's absurd. I hate to play the "this only happens in the US" card (and to be fair, equivalent sites exist for Canada and possibly other countries), but this genuinely seems like a US-specific problem. Nowhere else will governments just release what should be private information to any party who has enough money to buy them.
If there were any laws against releasing that sort of information to data brokers, and people finder sites were forced to be shut down, 99% of US-based doxing (and subsequent "online harassment") would disappear overnight. But of course, there's a huge financial incentive to keep things the way they are, as having data rakes in huge revenue for companies (it's digital oil after all) and they're not liable for their information being misused. And modern journalism isn't suited to actually rocking the boat, so they will never publish a news article on how easily people can be doxed in the US because of these data brokers, and they will never challenge this state of affairs.
InfoTeddy
8mo ago
Just goes to show that even in Europe, it's not enough. Europe solves many of their complaints, but they can always find something new. Even Not Just Bikes said he's ceased talking about North America to focus on advocacy in Europe, because there's apparently (or at least it seems like he thinks this) a real risk that Europe will backslide into car-dependency hell. He attributes this hypothetical backslide to the rise of right-leaning parties.
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
I wish many more parts of the internet had a norm of habitually archiving stuff. These days, anything posted is lucky to stay up for a day before getting taken down for one reason or another.
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
There is, however, violence involved here. The arms race making vehicles larger and taller means that every life saved by an SUV costs four lives outside of the vehicle. Pedestrian deaths are steeply rising after falling for decades. I think that's worth caring about as well.
I don't care what your noble goal is. This is not a valid legal or moral justification for vandalism and deflating people's tires.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Personally, I don't think it even matters how representative it is. What matters is that many in the movement don't call out their own for bad behavior like this. And this extends to every time someone in the trans movement has committed some form of bad behavior.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Again, this seems to just simply not be correlated. What say you about Japan, which has a cultural/demographic problem so bad it's the origin of the term "hikikomori", meaning a youth or middle-aged person deliberately socially isolating themselves from society at large? Isn't Japan full of walkable cities? Conversely, suburbs have a culture of their own, not all of them, but many of them do.
Simply put, it seems to me that however much an individual chooses to interact with their environment is completely up to them, and not necessarily correlated with "car-dependency".
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Probably 2. In that case though, the definition of "induced demand" has been changed to be something more reasonable. At that point you might as well drop the "induced" part because, well, the demand doesn't come from nowhere. Even a name like "proportionally induced demand" is far better.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Before cars, cities were built to accommodate horses and horse traffic, such as horse-drawn carriages. This resulted in wide roads being built, which is not at all like the picture you linked to.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I think "transphobe" is a hugely overloaded term that communicates almost nothing of value. The only thing you know for certain when someone invokes it is that they are referring to something negative, and something to do with trans people. That's all the information it conveys. It's frequently used to describe everything from the tiniest, object-level objections to certain trans positions (don't put biological males convicted of rape in biological women's prisons) to extreme, hateful rhetoric that genuinely wants to see trans people genocided (and not the "soft" form of genocide that entails detransition; actual murder).
It reminds one of calling Martin Luther King Jr. a criminal.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
The people who owned them could no longer have a car, or perhaps store it somewhere outside the city, so it's less likely to be driven around what is clearly a walkable area.
They could, but I'd imagine that it's a lot less reasonable to ask them to just do that rather than simply providing them a parking space elsewhere. I'm not well-versed in Netherlands politics but I'd imagine that the Green Party wouldn't have won the election on a platform to remove 10,000 surface parking spaces if it didn't have reasonable compromises like giving the car owners another place to park their cars.
You can do those things, although they quickly become much more expensive, and still occupy a lot of space. A double-decker highway 3 lanes wide on either side still carries maybe 18,000 people per hour per direction. Because of parking requirements, apartments and offices in downtowns will often be built on top of several stories of parking, which of course makes the actual usable space more expensive
Yes. And then you can use the freed-up space to go crazy with transit, protected bike lanes, pedestrian-only streets, removing street parking, etc. We're not just building more expensive infrastructure for no reason, we're doing it because we recognize that the opportunity cost of having the infrastructure spread out horizontally is far costlier. I agree that de facto parking minimums are dumb, though, and should be removed while letting the free market sort out the number of parking spaces.
Do you have a preferred source?
You can just look at Google Maps' satellite view and/or street view and count for yourself. If not, then look at PolitiFact, which says it's 13 lanes at its widest not counting frontage roads (which reasonably lines up with the 6 lanes per direction I see on Google Maps). It seems like the "26 lanes" myth is repeated everywhere you look when you do an internet search though, probably just one of those things that spread quickly without anyone fact-checking them.
Ok, but why?
Because the city is simply less dense. And yes, it's possible for the city to be built denser, but density has various advantages and disadvantages, and the residents should have a say in this regard.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
NJB seemed ambivalent about replacing surface lots with double the number of underground parking spaces, not "railing against."
Ambivalent is still the wrong reaction to have. Surface space is valuable, so he should be happy that the space is removed, and that the underground spaces were built (else where would the cars parked on the surface go?).
And if NJB is a bad example, look at CityNerd's video on why he thinks parking garages are bad then.
Cars do take up more space, I'm not sure how this is controversial.
My point was that the amount of surface space taken up can be reduced, by e.g. building multilevel parking garages or double-decker freeways. And it's often the surface space that is most primary and valuable here. My secondary point was that any form of transportation can be argued to take up more space by looking at instances of it that have been implemented poorly, e.g. a railyard that's 40 tracks wide.
I quoted it from https://charlesandcharles.co.uk/f/take-a-look-at-the-katy-freeway-in-texas
The image on that page isn't even of the Katy freeway. It might be in China or someplace else but it might not even exist in reality. It seems to be right that there's 6 lanes in each direction but I'm still not sure what it means by "eight feeder lanes" (frontage roads?) and "six managed lanes" (I'm completely at a loss here). I wouldn't trust anything on that page without verifying with other sources.
Why do you think that there's so low ridership in Tulsa?
Because there's barely any demand for it. I'd imagine that if they aren't using the bus, then people are using the car instead, or getting rides from others.
I know that Zorba made these claims, but it's pretty laughably weak evidence in my opinion. Is there any reason to believe that Google Maps is sufficiently accurate for all modes? I'm very skeptical, as in my experience maps doesn't handle varying congestion very well. Same with traffic lights.
I don't know what your experience is, but Google Maps does pretty well at estimating longer times if you are viewing a route during rush hour. If there's congestion at that point in time, it will definitely show it. I don't have the link on hand but there's a thing one guy did in Germany where he dragged a bunch of phones in a wheelbarrow down the road to make it seem like the road was hugely congested, coloring it red on Google Maps.
In any case, I think Zorba's point was to use numbers favorable to both transit and driving, and show that driving still wins, thus explaining why some people prefer to use cars. Of course other people may prefer to use transit regardless, and that's fine too. I don't know the exact numbers of people who prefer to drive versus use transit but I'd imagine in North America the number of transit preferrers is lower than the number in Europe. Most people don't consciously think about the costs and benefits of driving versus transit and have restrictions (like needing to be at work on time at a specific time) that simply make driving favorable to them. The Singaporean woman commuting in to work at noon doesn't sound like she has any of those restrictions.
If all of the people on those trains drove instead, how long do you think driving would take?
In Singapore, extremely long because it's a tiny island nation with probably not much capacity to handle it (I haven't checked though). This isn't necessarily true for other places, however.
Know that what happens? Know that pedestrians stand next to the button they have to push in order to cross? I'm confused by your question.
Again, I wouldn't assume malice here, and I would attribute this to ignorance before jumping to conclusions and attributing it to malice.
That's... basically what negligence is?
My point was that if you have a standard policy to use a specific pole design everywhere, then it's a mistake to ascribe intent or knowledge to engineers that simply isn't there. That's also partially why I pointed out that the pole was mounted on a concrete bollard in the pictures Charles Marohn showed - it seems to just be a standard thing rather than them knowingly recognizing that pedestrians stand there, and then simply not caring about them.
There's also a kind of Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics thing going on here - if the engineers didn't use the breakaway pole, then things would be worse for everyone, but Charles Marohn wouldn't be on stage talking about how engineers have gross negligence for the safety of people. So again, I don't want to accuse engineers of negligence here. I feel like if they were sued for this (as he advocates elsewhere) then they simply wouldn't use the breakaway pole design, which I guess wouldn't be a negative (or a positive) for pedestrians but would just make drivers worse off for no reason.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I'm not sure what Dreher's Law is - searching with DuckDuckGo suggests it's something to do with a Nazi prosecutor - but if defying it means trans women convicted of sex offenses will be put in male prisons, then while I would consider that a win, I wouldn't say it's completely out of the woods. Trans rights activists will almost certainly campaign for that trans woman to be put back in a female prison and may even end up reversing the decision.
InfoTeddy
1mo ago
Java Edition mods are in Java. Bedrock Edition is in C++ and I'm not as familiar with their modding scene but it appears to be much more difficult, so the vast majority of Minecraft mods are Java. Even still, that doesn't mean they can't be malicious. There was an incident last year where a Fediverse instance got compromised because the owner ran a malicious Minecraft mod on her computer.
InfoTeddy
3mo ago
Technically, that's a website :P
Some big music YouTuber made a video on it, and there's a Kiwi Farms thread refuting several blatant lies in said video. Shame that the thread hasn't spread much, but that's likely owed to the YTer's influence and generally positive reputation and KF's generally negative reputation.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
Screwing up the dating market, for one. China has the opposite problem with vastly more men than women as a result of their former one-child policy, and that leads to a ton of men being unable to find a partner. Analogously, an excess of women would leave a ton of them unable to find a partner. Of course China has more demographic problems beyond that (namely having more old people than young) but you get the point.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
Philosophy Tube's, for one.
I think there's a chance of coordination because an independent attack would be quickly refuted with accusations of homophobia and bigotry, but if everyone in the community agrees, then the attack becomes okay.
InfoTeddy
8mo ago
Not least because it's verboten to consider whether trans people can "spread" being trans to others like a social contagion.
There's a couple reasons to believe this is the case. The proportion of trans people historically has been almost zero. There's two ways they try to explain this:
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Cite various examples of historical trans people. But the problem is that these examples are not trans people in the sense of a person who thinks he's a woman in a man's body. These are always an effeminate man who couldn't perform the male gender role, so he was assigned a third gender role (this is almost always what the "third gender" or "two spirit" stuff means), or someone who pretended to be the opposite gender for strategic reasons (e.g. a woman pretending to be a man to join the army).
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Say they were just not noticed, or, uncharitably, suppressed by cisheteronormativity. But this doesn't explain why there wasn't a lot of suicides from these transgender identities being suppressed or not affirmed.
I am confused at how the above comment is promoting hate upon vulnerable groups and would like to see this claim elaborated on.
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