Soriek
8mo ago
As others have pointed out, there's some sleight of hand in what people mean when the say "homeless" and what the causal factors in those populations are.
I don't think so. There's more than enough room to talk about how to deal with whatever percent of homeless people are the most destructive (probably mental institutions) and also talk about what drives homelessness overall. Being homeless is bad in of itself and whether or not every homeless person bothers us, they are all suffering.
Cities like Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle have much higher amounts of these total defectors than other cities. The relevant difference between these and other cities is that total defectors are more or less tolerated in those cities.
Correlation wise, the relevant difference (not just among these three cities but for cities across the country) seems to be the cost of living. NYC and Chicago are much less permissive than Seattle and Portland, clear out homeless encampments and arrest public drug users regularly, and it hasn't made their homeless situation much better. To my understanding the really significant legal difference in the west is just that they can't clear homeless encampments unless they have a place to resettle the homeless too. This seems reasonable enough (and clearances still happen anyway); if you don't have anywhere to put the homeless then you're not actually getting rid of an encampment, just moving it down the road. Likewise, states don't have homelessness because of public drug use (or you would expect states with more drug addicts to have more of this), they have public drug use because their drug addicts live outside.
I must object, as usual, to the slur catchall term “globohomo,” which I find both imprecise and inflammatory. It equivocates between the hard power of a neoliberal consensus and the soft, cultural power of American idpol. While this is very handy for channers looking to gesture at the outgroup, it’s a terrible fit for this community.
Hard agree.
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.
Soriek
5mo ago
Democrats impose some destructive rule
What rule are you talking about? State regs constraining supply are very much bipartisan. This is true for education requirements as well as for more obviously monopolistic rules like CON/COPA.
My point that it's an oversimplication to describe federal spending as "just subsidizing a good that has a restricted supply because of over regulation." Just as easily a lack of funding can be the root cause of a dearth of supply.
Administrative excess should be culled everywhere, but I'm unconvinced that "the rest of [the budget] is bloat". From this graph on their budget it looks like a reasonable 5-10% is administration while the overwhelming majority is compensation for services, 50% for hospital care, 25% for physician services, and the remainder broken between prescription drugs, and smaller categories like equipment and nursing homes.
I'm unconvinced the future is bleak either. The largest growing category in spending has been prescription drugs and the IRA should arrest that trend substantially. You've likely also read the recent headlines that our projections have wildly overestimated growth in Medicare spending, which has leveled off significantly per beneficiary for the past decade.
In fact, most people consider homelessness to be bad unto itself, and the fact that it costs NYC $2.2 billion yearly to manage its extraordinary homeless population is indeed the kind of thing we care about averting through policy. You personally might be talking about something else but this is a conversation about homelessness and how to reduce it. I would know, I started it.
Soriek
11mo ago
I mean, he probably convened a meeting of ethics professors, focus grouped the results a bit, got a supreme court ruling and a blessing from the pope before confronting the maniac.
Pretty unnecessary response imo.
I don’t especially care about this incident anymore than I care about any of the other daily killings in NYC, but even maintaining the same hold without putting the one hand behind the head (which is what causes the downward pressure on the bloodflow) would have been both easier and less lethal. Not even saying he should have done that in the situation if the guy was violent, but if all he wanted to do was restrain him (as opposed to knock him out and dip) then almost any way of holding someone other than the really specific RNC position is less lethal.
You want to take the chance on the Guatemalan plumber? The tree of liberty is watered by the blood of patriots?
?
Guatemalan tradesman are pretty normal in America. As far as I know there is no constituency of people demanding government retribution for Mayan house-flooding practices.
The problem's that these texts make incredibly clear that he and the other researchers weren't so clearly certain in private
Here's the timeline as I understand it:
On February 1 the scientists email Fauci saying they're uncertain if the RBD could be emerge naturally from evolution. Then, supposedly, he calls a conference where pressure is applied to them to change their results.
Both scientists testified under oath that this characterization of the conference is a misrepresentation - neither Fauci nor Dr. Collins organized or requested the conference, neither really spoke, and no pressure was applied to change results or push for any outcome. Maybe they lied under oath, but it seems like a silly thing to risk prison for.
On February 17 the preprint comes out with a less definitive thesis, not arguing they've disproven the lab leak but that "this analysis provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus." - which it does.
On February 19 the latest data on coronavirus in pangolins gets released, demonstrating that this particular human binding characteristic can emerge naturally. This removes the uncertainty they mentioned on the 1st. They incorporate it into their research.
On March 17 the final version is released and comes out with a stronger position: "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," because the main lab leak argument seems pretty disproven.
In between the time they were uncertain and the time they have claimed a strong final analysis, over a month and a half have passed and new, directly applicable research has emerged. I do assume that politicization is baked into this stuff, and this study is certainly no exception, but there's nothing highly suspicious about getting new evidence and updating your position.
Also, as Nate Silver grudgingly points out, even in their final report they do not write off the possibility of the lab leak, only say that present evidence offers it no support: “More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another”.
still has to face the counterfactual of some guy from the building devoted to collecting viruses from 600+ miles away picked up samples and did some testing with it without sufficient caution. Sure, that's the sorta thing that rests so heavily on priors that I'd not be certain much one way or the other. But I'm not the guy who called any possibility a conspiracy theory that shouldn't even be entertained.
The scenario here would be that Covid came from a scientist driving out 600 miles (or maybe up to 3000 miles, because these are imports from Malaysia) to find pangolins to test, took them back another 600-3000 miles, studied their RBD, and tried to make something similar? All I can say is it's not an argument I've heard anyone make before. Either way this scenario would still remove the skeptics' main argument that we should assume Covid is man-made because its RBD can't happen in nature; clearly it can.
Soriek
1yr ago
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.
Soriek
1yr ago
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
Soriek
1yr ago
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.
Soriek
6mo ago
Since the money is simultaneously collected and paid out, and the amount paid is currently larger, this represents money creation, as well as obviously trasfer to the elderly.
They're actually paid out of reserves that we had built up in prior decades right now, we're just running out of those reserves.
Soriek
6mo ago
I'm all for cutting unhelpful regulations, but which federal regulation would substantially reduce healthcare costs? The largest increases in costs have been from physicians and hospitals becoming increasingly consolidated monopolies, and this has much less to do with federal law than state-level rent seeking.
New York City has enshrined Right to Shelter where the homeless have to be housed, even at high cost hotels if they refuse. The total homeless population for SF is 7,754 and the total population for NYC is 83,649, twenty times higher than the number you cited. On a population basis NYC and SF both have homelessness rates near 0.95%, quite in line for two of the most expensive cities in the country.
And also, come on. Even if you had been right you can't just cherry pick one city and say that overturns the finding that housing costs have the highest correlation with homelessness across the country.
Soriek
8mo ago
Imo it's more like if we had only seen horses, then one day we saw a Zebra and were like "woah, what gives, the only explanation is some crazy guy must have painted that horse."
But then later we went to Kenya and saw a bunch of Zebras and were like "huh, I guess that is possible by the laws of evolution and doesn't require man-made intervention".
Soriek
11mo ago
Yeah I was gonna say actually knocking him out and withdrawing quickly could have made sense, if the guy was attacking him at least. If you can’t land it perfectly just applying sustained pressure to the throat for a long time is dicier though. And if the guy doesn’t turn out to have attacked anyone, you can’t just knock someone out for being really awful to be around.
Soriek
1yr ago
(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.
I too have an affinity for people who are so X that even other Xs think he's annoying.
A kindred spirit!
I'll be honest, I prefer trains by a lot. I grew up in the middle of nowhere where you needed a car to do anything. My family car broke down all the time and left me immobile, so for me driving only ever represented how stark the limitations on my freedom were. When I grew up and moved to the city I assumed things would be better, only to realize that almost nothing that makes me feel less free than being stuck in urban traffic.
That said, I tried as much as possible to keep my personal experiences out of it, and I don't begrudge the existence of the suburbs or anything. I think you're right that the current situation represents at least some people's preferences - O'Toole cites somewhere that large majorities of people say they want to someday live in single family houses, which is unsurprising. I think America should host all forms of urban planning as catered to different people's needs. I also think there's a balance to be walked between accommodating those different needs that isn't walked well (ie, was it reasonable for New York City to bulldoze hundreds of thousands of apartment units to build expressways for people outside of the city?).
I also think the current situation is to burdened by regulatory nudges and government intervention to really get a good look at what people's revealed preferences would look like. For instance, this paper showing that if parking minimums weren't set most businesses, trying to predict the needs of their customers, would probably build less parking than mandated (if this wasn't true, it would odd that we set minimums anyway).
Soriek
1yr ago
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.
Soriek
1mo ago
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”
Soriek
2mo ago
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.
Soriek
2mo ago
Isn't the obvious objection here that during the first period, citizenship and power in institutions mostly rested with WASPs and similar demographics while in the second one, although immigration had been restricted, now a large share of the native born population consisted of (descendants of) Italians, Irish etc., i.e. ethnic groups that down to the present day have markedly different attitudes towards redistribution or even things like free speech in comparison to English- or German-Americans?
I've seen people try to track with data that various European groups have consistent attitudes on policy over time, but I feel like it's pretty hard to square with how things actually worked in practice. Those same ethnic groups that supported the New Deal democrat party also supported the Democrats when they were the extreme laissez faire, anti-interventionist party, while the WASP-dominant Republicans were much more pro-intervention. I think an easier explanation is just that immigrants probably cluster around the pro-immigration party. The bulk of Irish and German immigration happened in the mid nineteenth century, but it wasn't till the better part of a century later than they (and southern whites and many other native demographics) were sold on more statist policies, so it's hard to draw a straight line from their entry into America towards larger redistribution.
I'd wager that continually adding more people who come from countries that practice more distribution and, when asked in surveys like the GSS, explicitly say that the government should intervene more and reduce income inequality, will in fact eventually result in a society that redistributes more and values economic freedom less.
This was the OP's wager as well and it's not unreasonable. But I don't think it's a claim we see much demonstrated in our own long history of mass immigration. Also worth remembering that immigrants are not perfectly representative of their own countries. The kind of person who crosses an ocean or a desert to start life all over is gonna be a little unique.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you or you meant spending coming back down from the highs of WWII, this claim doesn't seem true, whether for overall spending or social spending in particular, both of which have a strong upward trend starting in the early 20th century.
You're right, I overstated his actual claim, which was that the rate of growth of spending as a percent of GDP slowed.
The federal government radically restricted immigration from 1922 to 1967, when federal expenditures grew from 4.5 percent to 18.3 percent - a four-fold increase...In the 45 years after the modest immigration liberalization of the late 1960s, federal expenditures climbed to 20.6 percent, a mere 8.7 percent increase...The New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and other large expansions of government all happened when the border was closed.
From the Civil War till WW1, the heyday of mass immigration, federal expenditures as a percent of GDP stay barely above 0% and even fell over time.
This is perhaps ironic on a thread where the OP is still frustrated years later by hearing a single user disagree with the dominant narrative here.
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