fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
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User ID: 3415
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
I agree with basically all of this, but I need to nitpick two things
women make up something like 70% to 80% of consumer spending
From what I recall, a ton of this is driven by them shopping on behalf of their families, which drives their "share" of consumer spending way up. However, I think "women be shopping and men are fine to live the life of a monk + a PC/Xbox" is very true and accurate to my life experience.
It's a similar story for having children; most people, if asked, will at least nominally say that they want children, yet revealed preference is for global TFR collapse
This trope/concept really bothers me. I think "revealed preference" totally falls apart when constraints and other limitations are placed on behavior. People cannot express their true preferences when their choices are limited by exogenous factors.
I will use my own life as an example, as I'm not sure how to demonstrate this empirically.
My girlfriend and I live in downtown Toronto, working solid but not extremely lucrative white collar jobs. We will be comfortably middle class, we'll probably eventually own a home, if we play our cards well a cottage too. But unlikely we'll flying around first class on vacations, to set the stage. We're in our late (late) 20s.
We live in a 600sqft 1+1 apartment. It's pretty affordable at this point (thanks rent control). If we re-leased the unit it would be $400ish more a month. To get an extra bedroom/move to an apartment in the 900sqft range would be close to an additional $1000ish a month.
We can fairly comfortably afford our current lifestyle, and I'm actually pretty confident having a kid wouldn't tank our "net income" too much as the additional child costs (not including daycare) would be offset by not buying $11 tacos when out with friends (or PC parts, or whatever).
However, we have no fucking space. So we'd need to get a bigger apartment, which would be pretty expensive. An extra $1000 a month + a kid + the astronomical cost of daycare is a nightmare. There are programs now to make daycare cheaper, and that does help. Although I think they have waitlist nightmares, etc.
This problem will resolve itself eventually. Another ~5 years should see each of us go through one or two promotion cycles, and then having a kid and the subsequent space upgrades are actually doable.
However, at that point I'll be in my mid 30s. I feel very strongly I don't want to be cranking out kids in my 40s. I have a niece and nephew who I love to hang out with, and I can feel how my youthful energy helps me keep up and engage with them. I can also feel this energy fading slightly with age. I don't want to be doing this in my 40s. So depending on timing, we'll very likely have 1 child. There's a decent chance we'll have 2 kids, as long as something doesn't set us back on the "income go up" track.
I would prefer to have 2 kids, but have a sinking feeling it'll end up being 1.
Is having 1 kid despite telling you I was 2 my revealed preference? Or my response to a ton of limitations and issues that I have no power to fix, only adapt to?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
they use LLM's to search through documents
I ask it to include page #s or text snippets so I can CTRL-F and confirm they exist (sometimes they don't!)
get ideas for how something works
This is more situational. A lot of the time I am trying to re-remember something I already knew, so I know if the answer is wrong or right once I read it and my buried memory of the thing resurfaces. Where I can't fact check internally, usually the LLM has given you enough info you can quickly hop onto google/youtube and corroborate the thing with a non LLM source.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
Genuinely asking, how is that assuming the conclusion?
If Tokyo today has tons of traffic, and a quick Google says Tokyo has on average 9 million subway riders every day, then if there were not subways/trains then those 9 million people would need to get around some other way. And if the roads are already packed as you say, there definitely isn't room for them there.
I agree your solution (just have smaller cities) is actually a significantly more effective solution to traffic than anything else.
But isn't that kind of an is/ought problem (to be honest, not sure if I've used this correctly). You say: "we ought to have small cities, this will solve congestion" and that's, true, but we actually have big cities that need solutions now, and dispersing their populations isn't going to happen.
Also you'd probably need to re-align a lot of human society and economy to stop mega-cities from leveraging economies of scale and network effects to dominate smaller cities, because that keeps happening the world over basically since agriculture was invented.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
Just because London/Tokyo/whatever have traffic doesn't mean their trains suck. Imagine how much worse it would be without trains.
That actually kind of proves my point, the cities quite literally would not work without trains, because trains can scale, unlike road capacity.
I would very much like to hear your solution to how to transport large volumes of people in a relatively small area.
As fun as our verbal sparring has been, all you've done is shoot down every possible option as "nuh uh not good enough" without ever acknowledging that once you crest ~3 million people in an area, everyone taking a personal automobile fundamentally starts falling apart due to the limits of space-time.
So I say again my friend, what's your solution?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
But it gets on my nerves a little, the YIMBY assertion that these population shifts are just a fait accompli, that there’s nothing to do but adjust
This is an excellent point. I definitely fall into this trap. I think I've become so frustrated and disillusioned with our societies inability to meaningfully address (any)things that it seems like anything less than "do the thing big and decisively" gets committee'd to death and the end result is either nothing, or so neutered it might as well be.
But yeah, totally agree that there should be room for change that complements what already exists, not change that upends it.
But at the same time, I expect more of our leaders, you know?
Me too, me fucking too, I end up disappointed a lot though lol
whose founder decided to just stick in the area
I dislike having to rely on the charity of billionaires, but we absolutely lost something with the death of noblesse oblige. The Rockefeller's of the world may not have been great people, but at least the dumped money into their communities to show us how big their dicks were.
Now they buy movie studios and make horrific adaptations of classic novels like Rings of Power.
I also appreciate this conversation! You've given me some good thoughts and I've enjoyed articulating and defending mine. I hope you have a lovely rest of your weekend.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
Most Americans like driving
I mean aside from the fact long driving commutes demonstrably make people miserable.
And the fact this misery results in crazy cultural self-owns where people start blocking other people from entering lanes to the point you have to suddenly change lanes without signals (or fake them out with a signal so they speed up to block you so you can sneak behind them) to take the other people by suprise so you can change your lane.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
So just build trains between the suburbs too. Make America Trains Again, we must RETVRN.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
London/Asian megacities do it well and they're not long skinny islands
It's doable, it's not easy, but it's doable
And it's definitely better than doing nothing and drowning in gridlock
I understand your complaints, I guess I don't really understand what your forward looking thoughts are?
If the status quo (gridlock, people hating driving/each other) sucks, why shoot down every potential solution to wallow in the status quo?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
Personally I find drivers with aggressive agency to be incredibly rare.
I find most people are incredibly unaware of their surroundings. I've started to pay close attention to the delay between the light turning green and people going (or the car in front of them moving and them going), so many people's reaction time is measured in actual seconds.
I'd posit most of the times I'm cut off it's not a deliberate choice to shark me, they just didn't look at their mirrors or blind spot. We also have a ridiculous # of uber drivers from India who I shall politely say drive with less conscientiousness than is perhaps ideal.
I'm Canadian but I was actually just in Texas and I was driving there. It was quite fine, people were normal and orderly.
I hope to never drive in a place where someone signalling to change lanes is an challenge to do everything in you can to prevent them entering though. I really cannot emphasize enough how much of a lose/lose that culture is. Take that shit to the third world.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
Well except subways (or streetcars, or even buses if done well) which you have a great example of across the Hudson. NJ transit doesn't suck because transit is inherently bad (might I introduce you to Europe or Asia, mostly Asia). It sucks because Americans refuse to fund it properly and instead triple down on driving.
And then also hate driving, lmao
Also bike lanes (we're back baby) scale amazingly, they have significantly higher throughput for the area they occupy.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
Yeah I had a feeling your streetcar suburbs and Toronto's streetcar suburbs were probably a fair bit apart in terms of density from your descriptions.
You make an interesting point there re: migration/prosperity. My initial knee jerk reaction was "no, the issue is that people in the prosperous places refuse to let the built environment change, thus resulting in the supply/demand imbalance that causes housing prices to go parabolic"
But you're making the excellent point that the "real' issue is the fact people have to all move to the same place to access the prosperity, versus it being distributed around like it used to be.
I'm of two minds here.
On one hand, I am in full agreement with you that this status quo is dumb and we'd be better off if the prosperity was spread around.
On the other, this is the world we live in, and to make it better right now the immediate solution is to build more density in the places people want to be. Because I'm not sure how we'd paradigm shift our economy to fix this.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
This was the study I was talking about by the way. https://tcat.ca/resources/bike-lanes-on-street-parking-and-business-parkdale-danforth/
"72% of the visitors to the Study Area usually arrive by active transportation (by bicycle or walking). Only 4% report that driving is their usual mode of transportation.
Merchants overestimated the number of their customers who arrived by car. 42% of merchants estimated that more than 25% of their customers usually arrived by car."
I imagine Parkdale/Danforth neighborhoods are busier than wherever you live, so grain of salt and all that. This study is now over a decade old (holy shit) so the percentage of non-car trips will be probably be higher as biking is up in Toronto since then. Reading it again, 4% seems a bit low but whatever.
the reason the small storefronts are better is that they’re managed independently.
You're correct. I think the Asian model of retail where the storefronts are purchased and owned like condo units (vs leased) would help. Then the retail owners are essentially condo residents with a say/vote on how things go, and more autonomy than having to keep whoever is leasing happy.
it makes me more certain than ever that such things should be left to the small.
While I appreciate this perspective (and don't exactly blame you for it) you are aware it's this exact attitude that is causing the housing crisis right? Which in turn is a huge drag on economic productivity and is absolutely poisoning the public sphere with resentment, anxiety, and stress. Western society has grown sclerotic and is crumbling under its own weight, and a refusal to accept that things need to change is a HUGE contributor.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
I don't mind the skilled aggro drivers.
I was talking more about the common cultural practice (which I understood to be in LA, but I guess NJ too) of deliberately stopping people from changing lanes if you see them signalling.
It seems less about aggressive/defensive driving, and more about a weird adversarial relationship with other drivers predicated on the belief they'd do the same to you.
Everyone on the road should be allies in keeping the traffic moving. You (I think? I just woke up from a nap) are describing oblivious idiots who are neither ally nor enemy, just in it for themselves. I'm talking about the explicitly adversarial dynamic that seems to exist in those places where everyone just makes everything worse for everyone else on purpose.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
businesses there deeply need some kind of readily accessible parking for their customers
Fairly certain this has been disproven over and over again. The vast majority of customers to downtown (and most streetcar suburbs are "downtown" at this point in major cities) do not arrive to stores by car. In Toronto, it's a tiny fraction vs walk/transit/bike.
Toronto's downtown BIA's are fighting the province who wants to remove bike lanes (they want to keep them). They protested when the bike lanes were put in, have seen the results, and now want to keep them.
Also what I am calling the "Iron law of road scaling" comes into play. Road capacity is fixed, population is going up. Eventually we have to change something, and on street parking is by far the lowest productivity use of road space. Inevitably it will have to go.
unless you want to undermine small ownership in favor of the ubiquitous big developers
You do speak truth here. Streetcar suburb main streets/retail areas are infinitely better than condo podium retail areas. We need more pro-active municipal governments who nudge developers to make better retail spaces. There's no reason we can't have smaller retail units in condo podiums that mimic the way small storefronts on streetcar suburbs are.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
The common thread between LA and NJ is there's just too damn much traffic.
If only there were other transportation methods that scaled better.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
Oh wow I didn't realize it was an east coast phenomenon too.
"Get even" for the great offense of... Driving on the same road you too are driving on?
I really don't understand this, it just seems like you're all making each other more unhappy while driving for no other reason than because you're unhappy while driving? It's a prisoners dilemma situation except there's no payoff for defecting, but you all defect anyway.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
The parked car / bike lane interactions are impossible and stupid. I don't know if I prefer road/bike lane/parked car or road/parked car/bike lane, honestly they both suck.
The real issue is parked cars on major streets. I cannot believe we still allow that. It would be a huge win for traffic too. The fact ~6 people storing their cars at massively subsidized rates on public space can destroy the throughput of a road by creating bottlenecks where it goes from 2 to 1 lane is insane. I think new buildings should have underground paid parking so we can still have ample parking supply, and then we can clear out major streets and increase traffic throughput for all.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
I don't think you should implement bike lanes without stiff penalties for not using them (or for cars, stealing the space).
Tentatively down, although faith in western police to do a good job is low.
For now I see bike lanes as a waste of space that bicycles don't use.
It's tricky, adoption in the west is slow but growing. Very slow though, biking as a mode of transportation is climbing YoY in Toronto's core, but it's lower than I'd expect it to be given the massive utility (and traffic).
However, another reason they seem empty is because they are significantly more efficient. Bike lanes have wayyyyy higher throughput than car lanes, so you also don't see as many bikes because they're not stuck in traffic like you are (you're only seeing the same ~12 cars in your proximity), they're already gone.
If you live in the suburbs they probably are underused though. I don't have a dog in the fight of suburban living, if suburban residents want to have 4 lane each way mega roads (and the perpetual trickle of kids and old people being killed crossing them) that is their prerogative.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
Do you live in LA/surrounding area?
The culture of "we don't let people in, so if you want to change lanes don't signal so you can swerve in an take them by suprise so they don't defend their lane" is one of the most ridiculous cultural own-goals this side of sub-saharan Africa.
Only Americans could design their society around cars and then get mad at each other for having the audacity to... drive cars nearby.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
Few things scare me more than a bike whizzing out of my blindspot and across (or near) the path of my vehicle
Do we think bike lanes may help with lane interactions by giving them a separated containment zone?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
Do we think bike lanes may help with predictability by giving them a separated containment zone?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
Sorry I should have been more clear. I think that having things like "Bayesian reasoning" and "try to seek the truth, if you're wrong, adjust your understanding of the world" and "attempt to anchor your thoughts and arguments in real and truthful facts" are all great things to do. I think they make people make smarter decisions and be correct more often.
I don't think they're a silver bullet, and none of them will make you right when you're wrong. You can also justify stupid shit by dressing it up in smart language.
But I think people who incorporate such ideals/heuristics into their life critically think more, and thus it is useful. It's just that rationalists seem to lean into it a bit much (not "pay lip service but don't do it"). They, like most people, still overvalue their beliefs, see: the perpetual meltdown over p(doom).
Why not? People are not that bad at coming up with heuristics that work for them. They have their limit's, of course, and offer no way of resolving disagreements, but it's really not a bad way of looking for the truth.
I don't think you're trolling me (although if you are, bravo) but are you serious? You will struggle to be right about anything if all your evidence is just you noticing things that confirm your biases and ignoring things that show you may be wrong (or at least not right).
This is a first for me though. I've never seen someone say out loud "anecdotes and confirmation bias is fine, actually"
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3mo ago
No one could ever comprehend the struggles of the American life
This is true, it's also true that poor people (both in western nations, and worldwide) crank out more kids than wealthier people. So realistically if people who work as fast food cashier's and factory laborers can afford to have kids, us, with our mid-tier white collar jobs can too.
However:
/1) that sounds miserable, and like my life would become significantly more stressful with the addition of financial concerns (something I shaped my entire life around avoiding) and a space that is already too small for 2 humans and a dog becoming 3 humans + dog. We could put the crib in the den but then we'd need to throw out a huge # of our possessions, which are currently stored in the den about as efficiently as I could pack in floor to ceiling IKEA shelving and standardized boxes.
I guess one could snarkily point to "well that's just your revealed preference you don't actually want kids" which like okay? But I'm really sad and resentful at the state of society which forces to me to choose between security and less stress or my biological imperatives. So it doesn't feel like I secretly don't want kids but think I do, it feels like I'm choosing between two shitty options that I don't like.
/2) western society pushes a very strong narrative (not explicitly, but strong nonetheless) that your kids "quality" of life should equal or exceed your own.
If born right now, my kid wouldn't have a backyard to play in. We live across the street from a park, but it's downtown so it sometimes has homeless tents in it. Checking for needles in the sand of playgrounds is almost SOP down here. Moving to a fancy neighborhood (lots of "I support my neighbors in tents" lawn signs but never tents in their parks, weird...) is obviously out of the question (see: cost). This also means we have to take what we can get with school quality as there is a nice price premium for neighborhoods with the best schools.
I guess by the time the kid is old enough to have coherent memories we'd be making enough money to take them on vacation, etc, you get a bit of runway there.
But comparing my (extremely middle class) childhood to the childhood we could provide to a hypothetical child, it does raise the uncomfortable thought of
Can I provide an equal or better childhood than I had right now? Maybe, maybe not, trending towards not. If the answer is not it feels like I've failed as a parent and as a "successful" citizen. Which is uncomfortable and unpleasant.
And as a carrot on the stick in front of me, that answer changes to "definitely yes" come out household income increases another ~$50k annually, which is hopefully only a few years and job hops away...
It's also tough because my current career (mid tier finance, better than accounting, worse than IB) is extremely cognitively and time demanding. If I want to make more and move up, these demands will increase, until you get high enough they start decreasing again as you delegate to delegators. So the next 5 years of increasing my earnings will put my kid into a zero sum fight with my job for my time and energy.
/3) there's no village anymore. We moved away from family to live downtown because this is where the good jobs are and commuting 45min-1+hr each day is a hard no, massive evidence this makes you miserable. None of our friends are having kids for all the reasons I've explained, or OP has. So we'd be soaking it solo until we met other parents at school I guess. Makes it hard to trade kids to eachother to achieve informal childcare economies of scale, and grandma/grandpa live hours away.
/4 bonus) Unrelated, and not a great reason to not have kids, but im absolutely fucking horrified at the state of the education system right now. Between the corruption/inefficiency, complete inability to teach based on best practices, DEI insanity, and insane lack of funding (these kids are the future, why aren't we pouring money into them?!?!?!?) means I now also feel like 1) we need to ensure we are near a school that is less captured/ran by retards (now we're paying a school district premium on living costs) and 2) that I will need to dedicate substantial time to ensure my kid is actually getting a good education.
This has turned into an emotionally gratifying venting session, so thanks lol
I want to have kids, but every macro trend in society right now makes having kids a painful trade off, stressful, expensive, or very time consuming.
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