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Soriek


				

				

				
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joined 2023 February 22 13:43:12 UTC

				

User ID: 2208

Soriek


				
				
				

				
6 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2023 February 22 13:43:12 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 2208

It absolutely does

I mean no, not really, for the reason I described. If someone said "I want oppressed and persecuted people to immigrate here," which is a more natural interpretation?

  1. "I want oppressed and persecuted people to immigrate here, and I want them to be moral people"

  2. "I want oppressed and persecuted people to immigrate here, and I hope they're really bad"

No, it placed no restrictions on immigration

Yes, that is what this conversation is about.

just restrictions on citizenship, restrictions which I would like to see revived and reimplemented.

Sure I didn't ask.

  • -10

Why cut off the end of the quote?

That's the form I got the quote in. It doesn't change it though, this is the standard pro-immigration stance - ever hear people argue that we should prioritize indecent people known for their bad conduct?

Yes, the infamous Free White Men of Good Character. That's who he was addressing

Significantly, the 1790 Act placed no restrictions on immigration whatsoever, from white or nonwhite nations, which feels like the opportune chance to have done so if they wanted. Either way this is not a particular contrast with our late 19th century poet. A mostly white crowd is who Lazarus was addressing as well, writing during the era of mass European immigration. It is well known that Washington was himself a racial supremacist and I think it's good we've moved past his bad ideas (he himself felt that the slavery he profited from was immoral and hoped that it would be done away with). My point is that being welcoming to poor immigrants isn't some commie Jewish revisionism, it's been an attitude present in political tradition from the very start - many of our other founders expressed similar sentiments.

  • -10

It isn't really, no. If what we care about is how much people have to spend on transit then you both take into account how much they pay in taxes and how much they pay out of pocket.

I feel like you're focusing on the definition of subsidy when the focus for O'Toole and myself is the costs we're all paying, of which subsidies are one form and private costs are another. Of course, much of the funding for cars is also money that other people spend for driver's benefit; from the above linked piece up to 40% comes from general funds, mostly from local property and sales taxes.

I mean, he could have made immigration law take morality into account but didn't, suggesting it wasn't really that important to him as a matter of policy. Is the claim "not everybody in the world is equally awesome" really relevant to anyone but Bryan Caplan? Few people genuinely imagine the entire earth should move into their country.

That's not "depressed". That's actual less subsidy. Car users pay for their own rolling stock, both operating and capital costs.

I guess I should clarify that O'Toole's concerns wrt subsidies revolve around the cost burden on the taxpayer. Paying those costs privately is just a different, higher way of tallying the same burden

Isn't this his point? Since the constitution doesn't guarantee a freedom of association then you don't have that right, AKA there's no reason the states can't infringe upon it, which is what they did in quite extreme fashion during segregation - if I as an individual wanted to go to McDonalds with my friend of a different race I was deprived of that right and legally barred from doing so. By ending the State's ability to prevent people of different races from voluntarily comingling, surely the CRA represented one of our history's more dramatic expansions in freedom of association.

Yeah it can be confusing because gas taxes are used for both systems as well. Also correct that the 40% doesn’t include private costs but rather taxes; the remaining 60% is from user fees. I just added that in to point out that both systems are financed partially by people other than their users; the fact that car owners bear the private burden of their vehicle doesn’t mean that car infrastructure doesn’t receive other people’s money as well.

I didn’t remove the end of the quote, that’s how I found it. Since you’re commenting on the tail end of a long conversation of me repeatedly arguing the addendum doesn’t change anything, either semantically or when we look at the actual immigration policy the quoted speaker pursued (or his other quotes on the issue), and you aren’t bothering to try to counter, do you have any point of substance to make? If not, let’s end this.

because the claim that they don't change the meaning is not an objective, undisputed, fact, it's something you have to explicitly argue

Given that I have been explicitly arguing that, what exactly are you complaining about?

What makes you say this, based on the CBO report that raising the cap could raise an extra trillion?

Sure, but that was why I added in the stats noting that ridership doesn't just decline, it bounces around and can be increased as well as decreased

Trains are less efficient not because they aren't capable of better per-passenger-mile metrics than cars, but because trains use the same amount of energy no matter how many people ride them, and right now not that many people ride the train, so a lot of energy goes into moving around not that many people. The more that people use the train the more efficient it becomes (easily beating cars long before reaching peak capacity), so while I am not personally advocating for higher car taxes, to the extent that they shifted consumers towards trains they would be solving the problem of efficiency/reducing externalities per passenger mile in real time.

they sabotaged white South Africa until they gave up:

American sanctions didn’t have much impact on the Safrican economy, most of their econ indicators get slightly better after 86 even. This is likely in large part due to Reagan being opposed to them (they were passed over his veto) and slow walking their enforcement. The Treasury said they had lists of Safrican SOEs but not lists of which goods originated from them, so they were pretty limited in application. There was I believe a GAO report saying basically “sanctions didn’t hit most companies, those it did hit just rerouted trade through third party intermediaries in neutral countries”

My argument is that the longer quote doesn’t change the meaning at all. You’re trying to argue the longer quote means something different, that actually Washington would have reservations about poor immigrants. The fact that he pursued the most maximalist open borders immigration policy conceivable is a hint to which interpretation is more likely correct.

This seems like an uncharacteristically low effort take from you.

Their entire logic rests on the assumption that the higher spending is causing higher test scores.

If they're taking two neighborhoods and controlling for income, cost of living, demographics, population, pop density, and so on, and find that the difference in the better performing school is more funding per student, this is a reasonable argument to make. As far as I can tell you haven't made a counterargument here. If anyone has any actual objections with the adequacy model they're welcome to raise it, but the entire thing is besides the point because, again, the EPI paper isn't saying "funding is equal but they should be given more for the adequacy score," they're saying "poor districts are funded worse, period." It's also besides the point because my OP isn't some philosophical argument about who deserves what or what's the best way to fund schools; I'm asking a pretty specific question about how these two different think tanks found different conclusions from the same data.

Yes, trains are more expensive than they need to be, because of the reasons I listed in the comment you’re replying to and in my OP. The “growing consensus” isn’t among policymakers and politicians but among urbanist advocates. Like him or not, if Noah Smith were transit god king these projects would likely happen much more cheaply.

(2) Figure out how to contain the high costs of projects in the US.

This is the hardest one, but is not limited to transit. If we solve this one we solve a ton of our other problems. I'm convinced that the lack of pay/prestige in public service is the issue - we should have less jobs that are much more highly paid.

Agreed, while cutting project costs is definitely the most challenging battle, it's also one that encompasses so many things beyond trains - our inability to build housing, energy infrastructure, etc, to meet Americans needs and decrease costs. It should definitely be one of the top public policy priorities. And it's not like it's a mystery where to start; there's a lot of low hanging fruit from streamlining environmental review, permitting, and procurement processes.

Sure, I don't disagree with any of that. Though I'm personally not a fan of driving I do think there's a place for both cars and trains in society and that each accomplish better efficiency in different areas. Among new urbanists this is the much maligned "cars- and- trains" take but I don't really see how anything else would work for America. All I want is for both to better serve customers . Insofar as transit's contingent lack of success is used by folks like O'Toole to argue for cuts to productive funding, that's all I'm personally against.

If all that has to be done to make transit superior is (1) Convince people to abandon existing driving infrastructure. (2) Figure out how to contain the high costs of projects in the US. (3) Improve the strength of our institutions and management (4) Move forward transit spending to update all outdated systems. Then there is NOT a small potential barrier to cross from the O’Toole analysis world to the idealist Urbanist paradise world.

All true, but while there are public policy situations that are genuinely so daunting they might as well be imaginary, I don't think this should include systems that we see a bunch of peer countries having solved. In truth these countries haven't built paradise either - they all deal with project delays and cost overruns as well - but they have managed to make things function well enough that transit can turn a profit, and that's the really important question for me.

We had surprisingly robust state welfare in his time, and he lived through a period of far more extreme restrictions on the first amendment via the Sedition Act. I imagine things nowadays would be pretty unrecognizable for him, but I like to think he'd be proud that we built the richest and freest nation in the world.

I lived in North Korea in 2015 and 2016 in order to teach computer science at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. I have a pretty detailed journal of my trip posted online. From that I think you should get a decent sense of what life as a university student in North Korea is like.

Thanks a ton for the insider account.

I'm in favor. It would be a pretty massive move away from federalism and towards centralization, so I imagine it would be hard to pass though.

because I remember him posting in that specific style over and over and over again

Sure, I remember it differently - same place we were in at the start of this conversation. I'm more than happy to agree to disagree, but you're not going to convince to me by linking to some random comment from somebody else. I don't think that comment is good. There are lots of comments I see here regularly that I don't think are good, or in good faith, but I don't publicly call users out or complain about them the way I see people do for him.

But you aren't actually a 100k salary employee. Your post-payroll cost to your employer is 106.2k.

But the way you calculated your number is by taking the sticker salary, 100k, and applying the full 3.44% tax there instead of to the real 106.2K, which is why your estimate is higher than it should be. Or, more specifically you took the median household income, $74,580, and multiplied by 0.0344, when the total median compensation for purpose of tax burden is $79,203. If you're going to use sticker salary that's fine, but then you should multiply by 0.0172, which is $1282, half of what you cited. Do you seem what I'm trying to point out?

This is also of course the most extreme solution, equivalent to funding the full 75 year projection window. In reality we likely won't raise it anywhere near this high, we can't even agree on the proposal to raise the tax by $3/week/person to close the gap by a fifth.