InfoTeddy
9mo ago
(reposting because new thread)
Is Twitter finally dead yet?
Usually, I'd be the last person to ask such a provocative question. I used to be one of the people who rolled their eyes or otherwise ignored sensationalized media stories surrounding Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, stories which have plagued the news cycle for the better part of almost a year now. It felt like you couldn't go a day or two without an article on the most mundane of things that were only remarkable because of Musk, like him going to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
But I have to - reluctantly - admit, maybe all the media's negative hype had a point.
The latest decision Musk has made is to rebrand Twitter to "X". The URL X.com will automatically redirect Twitter. Twitter is changing its logo from the iconic blue bird into a white "X". Apparently a tweet should now just be called an "X".
The obvious question is: Why? Musk's answer seems to be that he wants to change Twitter into some sort of "super-app" where one can do everything on it, similar to the WeChat app in China. This only raises further questions, like why people couldn't just use other apps, or why it had to be done in this why, or why they couldn't even just go the Meta approach where the company is renamed X (in fact, it's already been "X Corp." for a while) but Twitter gets to still be named Twitter and keep the blue bird logo.
The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?
But to answer my own question: No, I think it's the wrong approach to look at each change as potentially an outright Twitter-killer. I think the bigger picture should be looked at, and that in the long run, the demise of Twitter will be a death by a thousand paper cuts, where each change isn't quite so negative to kill it entirely, but it keeps Twitter on a downwards and downwards trend. And there's already been several paper cuts - fleeing advertisers, ratelimits, restricted guest browsing, etc.
Update on Kiwi Farms:
It's not looking good. DDoS-Guard dropped them without warning. There has been no communication from them to anyone explaining their decision. (EDIT: See below.) Some speculate it was because of yet another false flag fedposter who lurked for 3 years before posting a blatant bomb threat that was promptly deleted by moderators in less than 20 minutes, but not before being screenshotted and posted to Keffals's Twitter.
Regardless, the site is off the clearnet and is now only accessible through Tor. Site owner Null has released a statement that says, among other things, the current host will likely give up too, along with the other two potential hosts he's looking at towards for moving.
EDIT: DDoS-Guard have released a statement. They were getting tons of complaints from users that it violated their acceptable use policy and thus found it fit to take matters into their own hands instead of waiting for law enforcement to tell them. Not surprising, tbh.
Remember how back in 2016, there was a funny meme going around about how you could text to vote for Hillary? A man named Douglass Mackey was behind that, who has been found guilty of election interference by a jury in New York. The argument goes that this effectively deleted a bunch of votes that should have gone to Clinton. Okay, so how many?
Leading up to Election Day, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or something similar to the 59925 text number, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
...I'm not an expert on the 2020 allegations of election interference, but come on now, I'm pretty sure those allegations were more than just thousands of votes. And they were dismissed on account of not likely having affected the election. Regardless, the meme was clearly a joke; that 4,900 number seems absolutely paltry and criminally charging him is making a mountain out of an anthill.
More importantly, it's not hard to interpret this in the light of Trump's recent indictment for a matter that also transpired in 2016. Now, I can understand the argument that the reason they didn't try to charge him then was because he was the president, and it would be pretty hard to try to bring charges against the president while he's in office, therefore they waited until he was out. Or, they didn't know that he paid off the porn star until recently. But this? Douglass's tweet was very public and they could've easily charged him all the way back in 2016 if they wanted to. Why are they doing it now?
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
I've never understood how people who are, essentially, less than 0.01% of the population have gained a comparatively much higher proportion when it comes to their representation in the popular conscience. Trans rights activists don't like the 0.01% argument, which is fine - but then they turn around and use it themselves by saying that a people that is 0.01% of the population is harmless. Which, besides being not how things work in any capacity, is having it both ways.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
The War on Kiwi Farms: The Kiwis Fight Back
I'm sure everyone here knows of the controversial site Kiwi Farms, which has been endlessly accused of facilitating online harassment, and endlessly deplatformed. The site's defense has always been that it doesn't do that, the content is completely legal in the United States, and it's just a neutral observer, and with very limited exceptions (namely protecting Chris Chan until 2021, and interfering with zoosadists), I've found that to largely be the case. But I always wondered if this attitude left them vulnerable to just being attacked endlessly like this. Like, if bad actors know that this site won't actually fight back in any way, wouldn't you expect that they would just relentlessly attack it, since they're more-or-less free to do it?
Well, recently, they've actually started doing it. They're using the tactics that have been most effective in deplatforming them, and turning it on others. Namely, filing abuse complaints with upstreams and accusing sites of violating their AUP (which stands for Acceptable Use Policy). Their first target, thematically enough for an anti-trans site, is DIY HRT, as in HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) that isn't dispensed directly from a licensed pharmacy, often homemade and imported in to the country from shady international sources.
DIY HRT sites exist in a very legal gray area, because they more-or-less undeniably facilitate the sale of unlicensed pharmaceuticals. There have been credible reports of the drugs being manufactured in really unsafe and unclean conditions, leading to issues like clearly visible human hair in a vial that's meant to be injected into your bloodstream. Furthermore, the demographic they serve raises child welfare concerns - children are the demographic most likely to be unable to access legal HRT and/or want to keep their HRT on the down low from others - and some of the marketing/labeling on the items is quite blatant (in one case, text reads "Keep away from parents" and the image is of a childlike figure). Naturally, these are the reasons Kiwi Farms uses to file abuse complaints with upstreams. And they're doing it quite openly - there's a public thread on the site where they coordinate and give information on filing abuse complaints. So has it worked?
Looking at the DIY HRT wiki, they list several DIY HRT sites that have been taken down by complaints, so certainly looks like it has. It's gotten to the point that I had to look through an archive of the DIY HRT wiki, because I couldn't connect to the live site. The irony is that, just like Kiwi Farms themselves, the sites haven't actually been taken down for good - they just hop to another web host, domain registrar, email provider, and they're back in business. And the biggest irony of all is that the DIY HRT camp don't have any recourse for this. On their subreddit, one person asks "What is stopping doing the same to KF?" and the answer is "It has been done to KF already." What are they going to do exactly, attempt to take down a site that has spent years hardening itself against being taken down? One is reminded of the Chinese parable where the penalty for being late is death. They can't be more mean to Kiwi Farms, because trans activists have already spent years being as maximally mean as possible to Kiwi Farms, kicking them out of almost every single web host and domain registrar in the world, and all that has resulted in is a horde of people pissed off that their site is being taken down by trans activism, now radicalized against the trans movement. They've been put in a situation where they can either lose, or lose but also take down others with them, and in that respect I don't blame them for finally, finally, starting to fight back.
InfoTeddy
9mo ago
It really does strike me that Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aella et al are putting on the kid gloves tight when it comes to the proposals of transgenderism.
Take Scott, for example, responding to the 4chan post about trans-Napoleonism. He basically says "just let him wear the silly bicorne hat" and points to "Emperor" Norton of San Francisco as a happy-go-lucky story of just going along with what a trans-emperor says because it's easier. But he doesn't ever adequately address the hardball arguments - a Napoleon-gender that demands absolute power over the French Empire and its satellites in Europe (as the 4chan post said), and a Norton that demands the head of President Rutherford B. Hayes (as you, Zack M. Davis, point out). As far as I can tell, Scott's response to people pointing out the demands for a French Empire and Hayes's head - although he doesn't explicitly state this - is "lol, that just doesn't happen".
This is a very troubling dismissal, because there are a lot of Rutherfords in transgenderism. The reason why people point out President Rutherford Hayes and demands for a French Empire is because transgenderism affects others - it has externalities - and attempting to cure someone's distress by agreeing to their false map of reality is not a cost-free action and is not something with no meaningful consequences to other people (hence, the story about putting the hair dryer in the passenger seat is simply irrelevant). In other words, "just be nice" is a really bad argument.
For example, the inclusion of trans athletes in women's sports, or the inclusion of trans people in women's bathrooms, or the inclusion of trans people in women's prisons. Everyone seems to agree that it would be a very bad thing if a trans-Napoleon today gained control over the countries that used to make up the former French Empire, or if Norton was given the head of Rutherford B. Hayes, so they just... dismiss those and say it could never happen. They say they would never demand Rutherford's head and that it's absurd to even consider the possibility that Rutherford might be decapitated to fulfill the desires of an Emperor Norton.
And then when those externalities do happen, and a male-born trans person wins against a female athlete (inherently, unfairly), or a trans person assaults a woman in the bathroom, or a trans prisoner impregnates a woman, those objections are at best handwaved away and dismissed as outliers or discredited, or at worst labeled "transphobic" and censored.
In my opinion, the refusal to honestly engage with these arguments reflects poorly on the leaders - or otherwise influential figures - of the rationalist community. To put it lightly, it's unbelievable how they make a simple mistake - that their own foundational writings (the Sequences) warned about - and how they have failed to correct their own mistake (at least, they haven't corrected it yet, although I'm not optimistic about their chances of doing so).
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Florida governor Ron DeSantis will not assist with extradition: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/desantis-trump-charges-are-un-american-says-florida-will-not-assist-in-extradition-request-by-manhattan
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
1yr ago
This is true, but then in that case people would naturally stop driving past a certain point unless they otherwise can't avoid it (e.g. tradesmen). It's not like if you let it go unchecked, cars will keep coming until the road is so jam-packed it's always filled, all the time.
It's quite curious how rationalist (or rationalist-adjacent) figures will go through the trouble of creating a pseudonym, but then make basic mistakes in opsec that will link them back, thus rendering the whole effort pointless.
The article claims that he reused email addresses, which is a really serious basic mistake. Not only does doing this assume that every website the email address is used on will never suffer a data breach or some other exploit that leaks users' email addresses, it also risks "crossing the streams" where you absentmindedly start doing things meant for one pseudonym on another. And it's really easy to avoid this mistake, too. Just create a new email account.
There's a couple other rationalist figures I have in mind that have had poor opsec, but it's probably best to not name them or go into detail (unless people here are really curious about opsec and want to learn more). Although, all the information I would post is public anyway.
The problem I have is that my supposed brothers-in-arms on the transit crusade seem to think it's optional that transit actually be safe, clean, and enjoyable; this has been hashed and rehashed before so to put it simply my views are that if you want transit to work, you cannot tolerate anti-social behaviour on it.
I've noticed this attitude too. One of the usual responses always seems to be to point out that, statistically, cars kill more people, so like you should just take transit anyway. This ignores aspects like the feeling of control you have in a car and that humans aren't perfectly rational who abide by statistics all the time (otherwise we would all have been signed up for cryonics by now), but also, pointing out something is worse doesn't make that thing better (whataboutism).
And it's just frustrating to me, because one of the reasons why transit is so much better in, say, Japan, is that anti-social behavior isn't tolerated on it. The worst they have is women being groped when people are packed tightly together, and that only happens because other people can't see who's doing the groping. Meanwhile in North America you have, well, murders taking place on it (despite all the "eyes on the street"). I've never really seen urbanists acknowledge this point.
Edit: It looks like Not Just Bikes acknowledges crime enough to the point where he acknowledges that he deliberately doesn't acknowledge it. Oh well.
The assailant was a homeless man who was out on probation for multiple charges, including most recently a sexual assault two weeks prior, and had previously been issued weapons bans and ordered to take mental health counselling.
This seems to be a common theme. All the police bodycam footage I watch nowadays has descriptions like "...the suspect had 5 warrants out for him after being released on $500 bond". All that has to be done here is to simply keep the guy in jail until he's convicted (or exonerated; this country abides by innocent until proven guilty), but there's been a wave of soft-on-crime policies that make people think it's too harsh to keep the guy incarcerated. Of course, prisons being near max capacity hasn't helped matters either.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
It's easy to say you support a policy, when the costs are spread among everyone else. For example, when you live in a neighborhood of all single family homes and drive everywhere, do you pay all of the costs for the roads, infrastructure, and other services? Often not.
This is a non-sequitur / isolated demand at best, and wrong at worst. It sounds sensible to argue for the principle that you must pay for all the costs of services you use, except in practice no one has ever truly done that and it's much more practical to get people to pay for a portion of stuff they use. For example, on average 50% of road funding comes from gas taxes, and 50% of transit fares are subsidized. Both transit and road subsidies here are reasonable because infrastructure has economic benefits for all of society. If you told a transit operator that riders aren't paying for all of the costs of their services, they'd stare at you blankly and go, "of course they aren't; the point of infrastructure is to get them to their destinations, not to turn a profit".
In general, I am skeptical of Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns. Strong Towns especially since they've been shown to not be honest with their numbers, and Not Just Bikes for repeating Strong Towns's argument without any criticism, as he does in the video you linked to.
Driving is incredibly dangerous; car crashes kill several times more people each year than homicide in the US,
This rings hollow to me because a significant factor in both car crashes and homicide is a lack of accountability. First off, anti-police sentiment has been on the rise, resulting in less police and less police funding, so traffic enforcement goes down and along with it traffic safety. (Cue the arguments from activists about how pretextual traffic stops are just harassing minorities and resulted in the death of George Floyd and whatnot.) And of course with less police, there's more homicides. Next, judges and prosecutors release people that probably shouldn't be released, so you get cases where police end up pursuing a six-time felon whose license is suspended which hasn't stopped him from actually driving in the slightest.
I mean, yes, you can argue cars are just a bad of an externality as the homeless. But personally I'm like, well people have been railing against the police these past few years, what else did you expect?
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Well, many of the stuff they champion as improving the QoL of non-cars also just happens to worsen the QoL of car users, e.g. Oxford's traffic filters plan. I think this difference is easier to see if we talk about the proposals they say don't increase the QoL of non-cars, even though they do. For example, Not Just Bikes complaining about pedestrian bridges, and claiming they're "only built for the benefit of people driving, not walking", even though that doesn't make sense. I highly suspect the real reason he dislikes them is because, as he says later, they don't hinder the flow of traffic, and therefore don't worsen the QoL of car users.
And then there's articles like this which directly address your (NJB's) claim that the Netherlands is the best country in the world for driving by saying "...and that's a bad thing."
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Ironically, sprawling suburbs often have these exact same limitations. Cul de sacs are very popular, and suburban roads are often windy rather than direct, because everyone realizes that having cars go through your neighborhood sucks--but for some reason we don't think about these forms of road design as "limiting freedom to drive" or whatever.
In that case it's not exactly about improving the quality of life of car users, just mitigating their externalities. Which, for the record, I agree with in this case.
If the route is only slightly longer though, I doubt it would make a meaningful difference in the amount of traffic. But this argument does have some merit to it and is why, for example, I-5 in California doesn't go through populated areas like Fresno.
NJB's argument about pedestrian bridges seems to focus entirely on how they lower QoL for pedestrians, in direct contradiction to the claim that "so much effort is spent trying to reduce the quality of life of car owners, and not in improving the quality of life of non-car owners." You say this doesn't make sense, but he makes several specific arguments and you don't offer any explanation at all, you just make an assertion about his state of mind.
Okay, I will elaborate.
He says they lower the QoL of pedestrians in contrast to the alternative that they will "just walk across the ground to get to where they're going", but this is a false alternative. The alternative to a pedestrian bridge is not being able to cross the road at all. And it's not like people don't use them; they're plenty popular and packed on weekends in Las Vegas. See also this response by Road Guy Rob (he misspeaks and says "crosswalks" instead of bridges, but the message is still the same).
When he points out that some pedestrian bridges and/or underpasses have crackheads on them, that's not the fault of pedestrian bridges or underpasses. That's just the fault of a city not willing to crack down on drugs and drug addicts. Otherwise, I could say that a city having alleys is bad because alleys are places out of sight where people deal drugs (and then claim that NYC is a great place because it has no alleys). It's actually quite infuriating that this is one of the only instances where Not Just Bikes will acknowledge that crime exists, because to my knowledge he doesn't acknowledge crime elsewhere in his channel, and crime (and policing) is probably one of the biggest differences between North America and the Netherlands (or, hell, even Portland, Oregon and Las Vegas; CityNerd's recent TEDx Talk talks about how he moved from Portland to Vegas but he doesn't acknowledge crime (i.e. why Walmart and Cracker Barrel have closed or are going to close all stores there) and gives other, seemingly-virtuous reasons why he moved).
And the bridge he derides as a "concrete ditch" actually looks pretty okay. But this is just a beauty/subjectivity argument, which I'm not a fan of.
There might be people who hate all driving and want to ban cars, so fine, it's not a "pure strawman."
What, like this guy with 1.2 million views? Or this guy? Or /r/fuckcars?
To some extent I have sympathy here because, to some extent, all movements are plagued by radicals and extremists, but my sympathy wanes when movements don't self-regulate in this matter.
I still think it's a weakman to boil all arguments in favor of urbanism down to "they just hate cars" so all arguments can be ignored.
Alright, well I'm not doing that.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
My immediate objection is to the lopsided gender ratios that this would produce. As seen in China, lopsided gender ratios are not good demographics to have for a country.
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
Never. But I wanted to be a bit less anecdotal and a bit more charitable in my top-level comment.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Why are the only options "bridge" or "nothing" in the first place?
When you're at the point where you're considering building a bridge, you probably have problems with putting a crosswalk there anyway (there's a reason we don't build bridges everywhere), e.g. there's a lot of pedestrian and motor traffic. I don't mean to say a crosswalk is bad; a crosswalk is perfectly fine too and can co-exist alongside a bridge. But that doesn't mean that a bridge is strictly worse and should never be built, which is really my gripe with urbanists.
The thing being complained about is not that "a crosswalk would annoy those damned cars" it's that "pedestrians are forced to take a much longer and more difficult route to prevent cars from experiencing even the slightest inconvenience."
For the ones in Vegas at least, the route isn't that much longer, or more difficult. As a pedestrian, I was perfectly fine with using them rather than having to walk across the street. You even get to be able to stop and look out from the bridge, which you would never be able to do on a crosswalk in the middle of the road.
It's not that making driving miserable is an end goal; it's that most American cities have unlimited appetite to add the slightest convenience for drivers at the cost of arbitrary QoL loss for every other form of transportation.
I hate to make hasty generalizations like this. This doesn't seem true to me; they take into account everyone who uses the road. Unless you're willing to claim that the uniquely-American way of urban planning has spread around to cities all over the world such as in Japan and China (where they build pedestrian bridges too)?
I could say something like "people who like zoning are just racist and greedy." Probably there are some people who support strict zoning for those reasons; it wouldn't be hard to find example of NIMBY's using "home values" as an explicit argument.
See, the "greedy" argument falls flat because if they really wanted money, they would gladly invite in the densification, as dense urban areas lead to higher property values (not including maintenance and taxes). And the "racist" argument is true insofar as being against crime is racist (that is, you'd have to be racist yourself in order to believe that being against crime is racist; yes, being tough on crime will disproportionately affect certain races, but that's only because the base rate of crime is disproportionately committed by those races in the same way). So, it's uncharitable to call them "racist" (extremely so), but it's not completely out of field of what a steelman NIMBY would actually believe.
I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone on this forum even go so far as to disclaim the worst NIMBYs.
That's only because this forum has a social norm where people are assumed to have already disclaimed that. Though, I don't have a good idea of who "the worst" NIMBYs are.
Would you want to be grouped in with everyone who posts here on TheMotte, and have your arguments dismissed because of who posts here?
I mean, this happens all the time on the internet, for basically every community. But ideally, no.
In any case, I'm not discarding urbanists' arguments just for being urbanists. I take them quite seriously. Although maybe I shouldn't, if NJB's bit about drug users was just a joke.
What self-regulation do you want to see?
I want to see condemnations of people committing crimes such as the Tyre Extinguishers. Instead, we get people like Not Just Bikes who apologize for their behavior by mostly placing the blame on governments who've "done nothing".
It's not like NJB or City Beautiful or CityNerd or Oh the Urbanity can do anything about /r/fuckcars or an opposing blog.
Indeed, they can't. But they can at least distance themselves from them.
It's like the man himself says
The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!
I've seen this "gotcha, you're a hypocrite!" tweet linked every single time someone has brought up this new policy in a discussion space I'm in, and at no point has the argument (implied or otherwise) gotten any better. Social media platforms are not socioeconomic systems and this is not a "wall" that Elon "built" to "keep people from escaping". At any time people are free to choose to leave Twitter without much consequence, which is not remotely the case if you're, say, looking to move to the US from Mexico, or if it's the 1960s and you're living in the USSR. Yes, yes, you can gripe that you'll lose all your followers or tweets or what have you, but that is not remotely the same as needing to uproot your entire life to move across national borders or needing to go through the US's complicated immigration system, nevermind the risk of death if you tried to do the same in the USSR, and to pretend that they are the same is... to put it politely, a category error.
This sort of hyperbole seems to be the norm around anything Elon Musk does. If Elon bans a bunch of journalists (nevermind all the journalists that were banned before he took over which didn't receive this sort of outcry), it's suddenly a "Thursday Night Massacre" and deserving of its own article on Wikipedia, alongside other actual massacres that took place on Thursday such as:
Bloody Thursday, Thursday Massacre or Thursday Night Massacre may refer to:
- "Bloody Thursday", on March 28, 1918, during the Battle of Tampere
- "Bloody Thursday" on July 5, 1934, during the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike in the United States
- The Chiquola Mill Massacre, on September 6, 1934, during the 1934 textile workers' strike in the eastern United States
- The Kossuth Tér Massacre, on October 25, 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution
- "Bloody Thursday", on May 15, 1969, during protests at People's Park in Berkeley, California
- "Bloody Thursday", on February 17, 2011, during the fourth day of the Bahraini uprising
And just to be sure, let's look at the Chiquola Hill Massacre:
Violence broke out when Dan Beacham, the mayor and magistrate in Honea Path as well as the superintendent of the mill, ordered an armed posse of strikebreakers to fire into the crowd. As the crowd fled, six strikers were shot in the back and killed, one mortally wounded, and thirty others suffered less than mortal wounds.
Beacham obstructed court proceedings against himself and the other strikebreakers, and ordered some of the strikers arrested. Dozens of unionized workers were fired or evicted from their company homes, and after the defeat of the larger strike on September 23, the unionization effort in Honea Path largely came to an end. Until the 1994 publication of "The Uprising of '34" and the subsequent journalistic work of Dan Beacham's grandson, Frank Beacham, the events of the massacre were largely undiscussed in Honea Path. Today, the event is memorialized by a stone marker in nearby Dogwood Park.
Yeah, that's right. People literally getting shot and murdered and evicted from their homes is placed on the same level of importance and described in the same way as some people being unable to use their accounts on a certain social media app. Nevermind the fact that they still have a huge massive platform to publish their views because, you know, they're journalists and they work at giant media companies, so really this didn't do anything, and to compound the amount of nothing this did, Elon ended up unsuspending them anyway.
I would say something to the effect of "touch grass", but I know everyone's already been told that and clearly it's not working. So instead I will just reiterate that the internet is not real life and Twitter is a platform barely used by less than 5% of the population. It's really not important. Whatever stupid shit Elon Musk does is not going to be the end of the world, and not even the end of Twitter for that matter. If Twitter ever does get run into the ground, life will go on and things will continue as normal.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I think the "Trans Floyd" event is the recent murder of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender woman, in the UK, allegedly by two 15-year-olds who were placed in custody thereafter. It appears to not be a hate crime - just a dispute gone wrong - but the trans activists are pushing the narrative that this is the result of transphobia like crazy, and especially the "protect trans kids" narrative too. I think it's too early to tell what the lasting public reaction to this will be.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I believe that some transit can actually pay for itself. For example, the first NYC subway was private (the city took it over after refusing to allow them to raise the fare to account for inflation, bankrupting them). Japan currently has private train lines.
Funnily enough, most urbanist discourse I've seen online is against privatization of trains and in favor of nationalization, e.g. so Amtrak will actually gain the right-of-way over freight rail that they ostensibly have on paper but isn't meaningfully enforced.
If you don't care about that, then fine--but then "I just want to live how I want to" isn't valid either. If you expect that public services will be provided to you at below cost, then you should also expect that you might have to give up some of what you might want to benefit other people in turn.
I'm a bit confused here at what you're arguing against. This seems... obvious to me, and not something I was saying? I'm not saying "I just want to live how I want to"; that's trivially impossible because we are all constrained by various external factors beyond our control. More to the point, all planning decisions go through a committee and people will argue over what the best possible plan is, which indeed may include some people having to give up something in order to benefit others as you said (that's called compromise). This is true even if public services aren't provided to you at below cost.
I disagree that it's an isolated demand for rigor, because I oppose a broad array of government programs on similar grounds. Medicine and education are heavily subsidized, for example, and thus are over-consumed.
Well good for you, at least. Though that position seems hard to square with how expensive healthcare and college is in the US.
(This is somewhat outside the scope of NIMBYism specifically, but it's also the case that if you're going to subsidize some service, you should account for how effective it is and what the externalities are. Driving is low-capacity and has high externalities and negative side-effects, so it isn't a good choice to subsidize.)
Yes, you should. But I believe subsidizing driving is extremely effective at getting people to their destinations (well, as long as you aren't Myanmar and build a 20-lane highway in the middle of nowhere). It seems hard to believe that this analysis is getting applied evenly to, say, buses in Tulsa, Oklahoma that are running at basically empty capacity (and will even waive your fare for the rest of the day), which I would consider not effective and incredibly wasteful in fact.
Complaints about which things are being taxed (property vs gas etc.) seem to be irrelevant when the cost of replacing a single piece of infrastructure is 25% or more of the median household income.
Sorry, I should have linked to the later reply:
Yes, but they're not right. Lafeyette Parish's budget is available online, and its total Operations Expenditures for the current year are 427 million USD, with an included 90,000 households. Assuming no taxes are paid by businesses or out-of-parish people, all operations expenditures together runs at 4.7k USD per household. Its Public Works expenditures, which include all transportation spending, end up 654 USD per household. Even assuming that the 3.3k USD number StrongTowns comes up with is correct, that still doesn't get to 9k USD infrastructure -- and that's defining 'infrastructure' so broadly as to include police, parks, recreation, information services, so forth, (and spotting them two years of inflation, too).
--
What the police do is irrelevant if the legislature and/or courts have decided that nobody is actually to blame.
I should've been clearer; this is also part of my point. Courts seem to let just about anyone out on bond these days no matter how bad of a crime they were arrested for. San Francisco recently had its prosecutor recalled because he kept just not prosecuting crimes. And this all stems from rhetoric of "restorative justice" along with complaints about minorities being unfairly persecuted.
My point is people will kill someone and then just get out of jail and then do it again, no matter if they did the killing by running them over with a car or stabbing them with a knife. Hence my feeling that it rings hollow to paint driving as uniquely worse than homicide when deaths from both sources are hampered by lack of meaningful enforcement.
Also, any sort of meaningful enforcement is discouraged because, ironically, of how car-dependent we are. Preventing someone from driving, in most of the US, means they are entirely dependent on someone else to do things like work or buy food.
Is this really an objection people take seriously? I certainly don't. Yes, it is a punishment to have to be dependent on someone else, and that will suck. In fact the point of punishment is to suck, so you will have a strong incentive to not do the thing that got you in trouble. In this case, you're less likely to be a dangerous, negligent driver. And personally, someone being dependent on someone else is the least of my worries if it's because they killed another person.
However, even better than enforcement is prevention. There are ways to design roads and other infrastructure which are safer because they naturally cause drivers to be more careful. For example, posting a low speed limit on a sign does nothing if the road itself is straight with wide lanes. People tend to drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted limit, so rather than just posting a sign, make the road itself narrower.
I feel like this would do nothing if the driver is drunk and not likely to care at all about how narrow the road is, which is what happened in the Strong Towns example of the State Street fatality that they just... shrug off. Charles Marohn prematurely dismisses it by saying something about how engineers consider drunk people too, even though I sincerely doubt that a speed bump or lane narrowing would've prevented this drunk driver from speeding right through anyway. And then to go further and then say "Someone needs to sue these engineers for gross negligence and turn that entire liability equation around. It’s way past time." is... certainly a take, I suppose.
Finally, the negative externalities of cars go well beyond deaths related to negligence. They're loud and they pollute, to give 2 examples.
I mean, trains are loud too, so again, seems like an isolated demand. I'm not inherently against loud things on principle either; if a train runs through your apartment, then just have good soundproofing. Pollution can be solved by electric cars, and in fact, many places around the world have already banned sales of new gas cars by 2030-2035. My point being that these externalities should be solved and not just diagnosed.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Having a few pedestrian bridges doesn't mean that all of the infrastructure is car-centric. [...] Pedestrian bridges are just one piece of infrastructure of many--no one feature makes or breaks a city.
I don't disagree, but if pedestrian bridges (not at-grade) are car-centric, then they're bad and that means that something has gone wrong in the planning process, right? If they're bad, then maybe the planner somehow didn't take into account all road users, for example. But yes, it only means that this part of the city is bad and car-centric; the rest of the city will still be pretty okay.
I don't know about China; Tokyo was definitely not car-centric. Not all pedestrian bridges are bad--the video even says that they're fine if they keep pedestrians at the same level.
Okay, here are two pedestrian bridges (that do not keep pedestrians at the same level), one of which is in China and the other Japan.
https://old.reddit.com/r/InfrastructurePorn/comments/so0m50/pedestrian_bridge_in_japan/
https://old.reddit.com/r/InfrastructurePorn/comments/r6ydbe/chengdu_china/
Do you think they're bad and shouldn't have been built? I personally don't see any problem with them, and in fact there are a few people in the comments section who like them too. But then there's these urbanist types who say things like the following:
These are terrible. If you're walking look at how much extra you have to walk just to get around cars. Cars don't live in cities. People do.
,
I dream of a city where cars have to climb stairs to get out of the way of people.
,
I wholeheartedly agree that it's better to make the cars go out of the way, and they should pay for the infrastructure required.
Even this one where the poster says "most nations", not just America:
Cool idea, but it perfeclty illustrates the mentality of most nations, pedestrians are guests on the turf of cars.
Fuck that, let's return to actually walkable cities, instead of 4 lanes in each direction, yuck.
,
Ew, cars
I didn't have to go to the bottom of the comments section to grab these or anything; these are all decently upvoted comments near the top.
And I should've made this clearer, but this sort of conceit isn't unique to pedestrian bridges. You can find complaints of car-centric infrastructure for basically every nation in the world. If you think the Czech Republic would be well-liked for being in Europe, think again.
At the end of the day, if I think that these complaints come from a place of actually caring about car-centric infrastructure, I get confused and start wondering why people would complain about something that seems perfectly fine and usable. It makes a lot more sense to me if I realize that a lot of the time, these people object to car infrastructure existing at all, rather than car-centric infrastructure. For example, in the video I linked, Adam Something walks down a narrow corridor that can barely fit one car, and cars must pass by slowly here - but apparently this is too much for him and it's car-centric.
But in much of the US, they seem to be thrown in for the primary purpose of not slowing down cars, while every other consideration is secondary. This is true of a lot of infrastructure, like slip lanes for right hand turns: slightly more convenient for drivers, but much less safe for pedestrians.
Well, yes, you can think of pedestrian bridges' primary purpose as to not slow down cars, rather than a means to let people cross the road. In fact, this is probably why some people think that many complaints about pedestrian bridges come from a place of wanting cars to be slowed down. Which was my point - there's a big focus on removing car infrastructure and/or worsening the quality of life of drivers precisely because existing solutions like pedestrian bridges don't slow down cars. This doesn't seem to be from a calculation that "well, we have limited funds/space so we can't build a pedestrian bridge, we'll just slow down the cars instead". It seems to be from a dislike that car traffic gets to flow unimpeded.
As an aside, I wouldn't put slip lanes in the same category as pedestrian bridges. Arguably, bridges are safer for pedestrians than not - they are completely separated from car traffic that could easily kill them if a driver is inattentive or disobeys the red. There's a big difference between being less safe and being slightly inconvenienced.
You can disagree, but I see no reason to assume that NJB's stated reasoning is a cover for a desire to annoy drivers, which is not something you have any evidence for.
[...]
As far as I can tell, all the channels I mentioned have explicitly disavowed the idea that one should ban all cars or whatever.
Have they really? NJB may have said that he "doesn't hate cars, just car infrastructure", but what should I make of his multiple statements (which I can't find right now) that a city gets better the less cars there are? Doesn't that lead to the logical conclusion that a city should basically ban almost every car?
How about the things they do disavow? All those channels exist on a sliding scale of more or less car hatred, but some of the more car-hatey ones hate the YouTube channel Road Guy Rob, who notably does not hate cars and says himself he is pro-car while recognizing that many of the Dutch infrastructure NJB champions as being great for bicycles are great for cars alike. However, despite his numerous videos about infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists, he gets called a "car apologist" by Alan Fisher. This is a sentiment that NJB shares. In RGR's latest livestream, he mentions that NJB may even be mad at him.
If I wanted to spread a message that I didn't hate cars (and a genuine message, not one half-hearted just so people stop asking me about a radical position that they think I hold), I wouldn't hate on Road Guy Rob.
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
Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting.
Just to note, this isn't really a hypothetical anymore. Canadians are nudged towards euthanasia after being told how much they cost the healthcare system and a survivor of the Belgium airport ISIS attacks in 2016 was euthanized this year after expressing suicidal ideation. The only difference is that this is not happening to kids and people protesting it are not jailed by governments. Not yet, at least.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I wonder how much JK Rowling is hated just because she's hated. Like the Kardashians are famous for being famous, it seems to me that Rowling is hated because other people hate her, and not because she's actually done anything particularly objectionable. You ask people to provide specific details for why they hate her and they either can't, or they make a tenuous reach to connect her with something transphobic, or they just plain make up completely false facts.
An interesting tweet from Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841
My initial reaction to this was that "well, aren't you already allowing slurs on Twitter, Elon?" But then I realized that there's a distinction here - slurs may be allowed, but harassment is not. After all, he used the words "cis" and "cisgender" without any censorship, much like many would censor a typical slur such as "nigger" as "n*gger" or "n-word". You may be allowed to use "cis", but you're not allowed to directly call someone "cis" on the platform.
More to the point, I think it's very valid to describe "cis" and "cisgender" as a slur, insofar as a slur is something you call a group of people who don't want to be called that (similar to the "'TERF' is a slur" debate). Certainly, "cissy" is definitely a slur (which the person Elon Musk was replying to was called). So why don't people want to be called "cis"?
I think it's because labeling the vast majority of the population (something like 99%) and making them have to use a qualifier to describe themselves is a systematic effort to make them seem more different from the norm than they really are. For the vast majority of human existence, a woman would be described as "a woman", until suddenly (around the late 2010s or so), she would now have to be described as "a cis woman", to distinguish her from "a trans woman". The implied argument seems to be that "a woman" is now suddenly ambiguous and one does not know whether one is referring to a woman in the classical sense, or a trans woman.
I would agree with this, except that I still see many instances of "women" being used when it's really being used to refer to trans women. If a qualifier is needed now, why not just keep saying "trans women" all the way through? So the "cis" terminology seems to just be a ploy to redefine "woman" to by default mean "trans woman", thus making the "cis" qualifier necessary to refer to a woman in the classical sense. But this would seem to contradict one of the supposed goals of the trans movement, that trans people should be treated the same as non-trans people. Why not refer to trans women and "cis" women equally, without the qualifier?
And it's not like it's impossible to refer to non-trans people either. I've seen many terminologies used that are much more acceptable, such as "biological women", or "non-trans" as I've been using. There's also "assigned female at birth", but I feel like that's much more of a misnomer, as it implies that gender/sex is something you're "assigned" rather than a fundamental property that is immutable (at least with today's primitive technology).
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