johnfabian
2yr ago
Oh boy. This is one of my pet political peeves. It got discussed a few times on /r/slatestarcodex with the head of this project (Alon Levy) even chiming in a few times. I've got a bunch of ideas.
1. Institutional incuriosity
Transit agencies in the USA and Canada are super myopic. There are of course entire regions of the world where transit is built and operated cheaply and effectively, but very curiously North American transit agencies seem to make absolutely no attempt to figure out how they do it. When you read about the planning reports done for projects in North America, what they are compared to are almost always other North American projects. Right down the line, from things like technologies to bid structuring to consulting to public-private partnerships to art design, the "best practices" that are emulated are not in fact the best practices, but the best North American practices (which pretty severely limits your potential from the get-go). I could draw from dozens of examples in this regard, but maybe the most egregious case study for this is the California high-speed rail project which decided to ignore the accumulated six decades of HSR experience elsewhere in the world in lieu of creating a "made in America" solution to every problem they encountered. Part of this institutional incuriosity I think is a result of over-regulation; in the past North American rail projects were severely handicapped by onerous safety rules which forced them to use trains much heavier than those of Europe and Japan, but those regulations were spiked during the Trump administration so it's no longer an excuse. It also doesn't help that since there have practically been zero privately-run new rail projects since the 1970s in North America, an entire generation of people who might have had experience working with this has disappeared.
2. Infighting between relevant governments/agencies
There's a German planning proverb that goes "Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton", literally organization before electronics before concrete. The idea being that when you want to do a project, the biggest gains in productivity and cost savings come from getting everyone on the same team first. North American transit politics often sees the opposite: where different transit organizations that overlap in jurisdiction see each other as competitors for funding and riders. In lots of North American cities the different transit organizations are downright hostile to each other; they refuse to share transfers, they won't show each other on their route maps, they bicker and fight about everything and won't share any infrastructure. Meanwhile in cities like Tokyo where most of the transit is privately-run the various organizations see each other as complementary hubs in a wheel, vital to the other's success.
This translates often into poorly-run transit with little cooperation, obviously, but also contributes to cost overflows. Amtrak wanted $10 billion (read: actually $30 billion) to dig a new tunnel under Philadelphia for high-speed rail... because SEPTA refuses to give them any space in their under-capacity 4-track tunnel.
Or in Europe and Japan you often see regional transit authorities band together when ordering new buses or trains, because the economies of scale offer significant savings when they order 200 trainsets together rather than each insisting on bespoke custom runs of 10. That kind of larger-scale cooperation effectively does not exist in North America. Not only is there a lack of standardized design and operational practices, there is outward hostility to any form of cooperation.
3. Inability or unwillingness to manage cost overruns
There are political dimensions to it. Part of it is I think that in the North American context, especially in the age of diminishing state capacity, politicians kind of like to throw big amounts of money around - it's a proxy for how much they care. Therefore it's not really a bad thing if you spend $5 billion on a project that should cost a quarter of that - look how important transit is!
I think it would be naïve to discount organized crime elements here. At least in Toronto the 'Ndrangheta silently have their hand in just about every public works contract (for a good laugh check out which Ford donors own land along the proposed new highway 413). If there isn't an organized crime element to how much we pay for transit than we're getting ripped off much worse than we think, especially because Italy actually builds transit quite cheaply.
There's also some institutional culture going here. There has been more and more investigative journalism about the extent to which governments rely on private consulting to make decisions for them; where to put the benches and exits in stations, notes about architecture, technology choice, etc. Part of this is in general an erosion of state capacity: the best and brightest don't work for the government, and there aren't many to begin with. (By contrast the Paris transit corp RATP has about 2,000 engineers on-staff). But the worse element, at least according to the people I know who've worked in these roles, is that the consulting groups are paid to provide cover for the people in charge when decisions go wrong and costs inevitably balloon. Then you can trot out this study you paid $15 million for and say well, this was what was suggested to us, we just confirmed their decision.
4. Political interference
Municipal politicians tend to have a lot more influence in what does or does not get built in North America. This is generally the opposite of what happens in Europe, where long-term plans are either established by arms-length governing bodies or by some kind of binding referendum. But largely what does not happen is that some new person gets elected and the existing plans get chucked. Planning is done for the long-haul, not for short term changes in opinion or cash windfalls. Part of this is the distribution of revenues and funds; transit organizations in Europe tend to get long-term budgets which give them the capacity to chart their own course with respect to new projects and maintenance, instead of hapharzardly injecting funds according to campaign promises.
The role of individual politicians in the transit-building process also increases potential for corruption and lobbying. It's not that NIMBYs don't exist in Europe: they do, and they try their best to hamstring projects (like the UK's probably ill-fated HS2, or Stuttgart 21). But the political levers they have at their disposal tend to be larger (like referendums) rather than things like the environmental assessment process or community engagement which are more vulnerable to people who disproportionately care (meaning: hate) the project. Common law might have a role in this.
I could go on about all this forever. But my general point is that North America desperately needs to look inward on this. If the idea is that we have to shift our transportation off fossil fuels (and we do), and that a good chunk of the transition to electric transport means new transit (and it does), then we have to get much better at getting bang for our buck, because right now it is downright pathetic. Look to the countries that build transit cheaply (Spain, Sweden, Italy, Korea, are all positive examples). Look to the countries that build transit expensively (North America, China, Russia). Figure out what people are doing right, and what people are doing wrong, because in general the correlations between high-cost and low-cost countries are not wages, or systems of government, or geology, but rather institutional competence.
johnfabian
2yr ago
people actually tend to prefer the HFCS Coke (I know I do).
johnfabian
2yr ago
well to quote Chappelle quoting Kanye, it's because his life is dope and he does dope shit.
johnfabian
2yr ago
In Canada, if you're interested in soccer of cricket you are either upper class or a poor immigrant
johnfabian
2yr ago
There's an obvious and inevitable problem of self-awareness if the way you approach a problem is "as a rationalist..." It would be like if I created a new school of thought in ethics called Obviously Morally Correctism. So as someone who is Obviously Morally Correct, I could fix all the world's problems and you should trust me with your billions
johnfabian
2yr ago
there is some nominative determinist element here that I keep reading his name as "Bankman-Fraud"
johnfabian
2yr ago
Nukes would not be evenly spread; the majority would be targeted at the enemy's strike and counter-strike capabilities. So that means missile silos, airbases, naval yards, bomber-capable airstrips, etc. get first, second, and third priority. After that you start hitting other strategic sites: military bases, marshalling yards, road junctions, communication hubs, oil fields. Now because you're shooting 500kt+ nuclear warheads at these targets this ends up killing lots of civilians anyways. But ostensibly only then you go to "counter-value" targets of just aiming purely at killing people.
So that can give you a sense of your relative risk. Do you live near important military installations? Do you live near important communications/logistical/infrastructure hubs? Are you downwind (i.e., east) of the most relevant target near you? Those are the most important questions to take in mind considering your immediate survival. But most estimates see even at the height of the Cold War more than half of Americans surviving the initial exchange. The bigger survival questions are then: do you know first aid? Are you fit? Can you grow food? Can you sew/mend clothes? Do you have a supply of water/emergency rations? Do you have a firearm and know how to use it? etc. The irony of a lot of "preppers" is that their survival focus seems to be centered on acquiring gold bullion and guns and not on maybe dropping the 200 lbs of visceral fat they're carrying
johnfabian
2yr ago
I think it's bad for our political system if use of the notwithstanding clause becomes normalized. Governments can use it to suspend sections 2 and 7-15 of the Charter, which means it has a very strong potential for misuse.
I don't know if you're Canadian or if you remember in April 2021 when the Ford government essentially locked people in their houses for two days as they panicked to come up with a "strong" response to the spring COVID wave. This isn't the first time they've abused their powers in some hasty overreaction (or just trying to avoid the natural messiness of governance). I'd really prefer it not to become a regular thing
johnfabian
2yr ago
Update to the education workers strike
Last week I wrote about how the Ontario government was voiding Charter rights in order to impose a contract on the union for education workers (basically, the employees in schools who aren't teachers or admin). They went on strike on Friday, there were protests over the weekend, there seemed to be a crescendo as both sides started to entrench, with other unions from Ontario and Québec announcing plans to strike or protest in solidarity, and rumours there would be a call for a general strike and then... thunderous anticlimax. The government of Ontario announced at 10 AM today that the legislature would rescind the bill and return to negotiations if the strike ended. The union appeared surprised at this (they had their own press conference scheduled right after to call for an escalation in strike actions, but had to delay it), and a few short hours later announced that schools would reopen tomorrow. The union says it reserves the right to strike (because now doing so would be legal; the actions up to now were illegal because of the use of the notwithstanding clause) but with tensions ratcheting down I'm betting on no more drama.
Basically this looks like capitulation from the province. They spent a lot of political capital on bringing out the Big Stick and then surrendered rather than smack someone with it. Maybe there will be further twists to come but it looks like they had an expectation of a much more muted public response. The Ford government relies very heavily on public opinion polling to mediate their decision making (all throughout the pandemic they were some of the worst offenders of trying to make policy via the latest poll) and apparently polling showed most Ontarians blamed them for the strike.]
Anyways I'm obviously tentatively happy about this. The atmosphere among the crowds in Queen's Park today was pretty jubilant. I really hope this is a shot in the arm for labour because it's been a long few decades without any meaningful wins in Canada.
johnfabian
2yr ago
My opinion of Trump circa 2016 (that I think has largely been borne out) was that he would be like Silvio Berlusconi. He would be corrupt, he would be outrageous, he would weaken existing norms, he would drag political discourse into the mud and create a lot of drama. But the country wouldn't be much worse off after him.
The January 6th thing does make me think he was more sinister. I assumed that he had little interest in actually illegally seizing any power, because he had no interest in actually exercising it. But even all the "stolen election" bullshit seems more focused on his personal pride rather than any dictatorial aim.
johnfabian
2yr ago
The Quebec side used French farm lot shapes. The French style uses thinner strips.
It's highly visible on this map.
I remember learning about this in grade 5, it's called the seigneural system.
johnfabian
2yr ago
They have too much power.
The government could always send this to arbitration if they didn't want a work stoppage. Instead they violated the union's Charter rights.
There are certainly public sector unions that grow fat at the taxpayer's expense, but we're talking about a union whose average wage/salary is at about the Canadian median and has gotten dismal raises over the past decade. If they can exercise such power over the Ontario government they're showing it in an odd way.
johnfabian
2yr ago
It seems strange to use the word "tyrannizing" in the context of the government voiding constitutional rights, but having it apply to the ones whose rights are being violated
johnfabian
2yr ago
Since then there have been numerous instances of governments using back-to-work laws. Off the top of my heads the feds used it for Canada Post in 2018 and CP Rail in 2019
johnfabian
2yr ago
The government always could have passed back-to-work legislation and send this to arbitration. But instead they chose to unilaterally impose a contract on the union.
Politicians have gotten handsome raises throughout the pandemic. Does that not count as extorting the public?
johnfabian
2yr ago
In Canada, pretty much everything of note policy-wise is decided at the provincial level, minus international affairs/defence and building cross-provincial infrastructure. The federal government's biggest role is collecting taxes and then distributing it to the provinces. Even the biggest federal projects enacted in the last few years has been childcare (and soon?!?) dental deals which again, amounts to giving cash to the provinces to spend on specific things.
However Canada's political culture is obsessed with the federal government, as well as the United States. So we have a very unproductive public discourse. Take the convoy truckers; the COVID restrictions they were protesting against were almost all provincial (except the federal border restrictions, but we were just mirroring the US and even if we had struck ours down it wouldn't have made a difference). Yet it was the federal government and Trudeau who was the target of the protests. It's not like they were going to protest against the mainly conservative Premiers.
Yes, janitors, like most working class professions, feel sympathetic to the average voter, but that sympathy gives them political power disproportionate to what the free market may otherwise dictate.
I'm aware of this issue. Certainly there are specific public sector unions which use their position to extract excessive concessions from the government. But this union's raises in the past decade combined were less than inflation last year. They have not been milking the province for all they could get. To have the government refuse to negotiate with them and just impose a unilateral contract on them is galling. If the PCs had wanted to they could've just enacted back-to-work legislation, schools would remain open, and arbitration would take care of it and get a fair-ish deal for everyone.
johnfabian
2yr ago
It's not all unskilled labour. Some custodial labour is skilled, and there are other roles involved here (like early childcare assistants) that require degrees or specialized education.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Overriding the Constitution to avoid negotiating with janitors
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has a little escape hatch that has gotten more attention in recent years. By now I suspect there are even a handful of Americans who have heard of the notwithstanding clause; a segment of the Charter that allows provincial/federal governments the ability to temporarily pass laws that violate certain Charter rights (essentially all the rights except those that pertain to the democratic process). The Canadian Charter is a very popular document (in my opinion, it's one of the best things about my country), and the notwithstanding clause gained a sort of mystical aura in Anglo Canada since 1982 as a big red button that Should Never Be Touched. Outside of Québec, it had only been used a handful of times, and for fairly minor issues that many times were deemed by the courts unnecessary after-the-fact. A few other times it had been employed as a sort of rhetorical tool or threat, ultimately avoided because the legislatures did their job and resolved whatever problem they faced without having to use it. The political norm against not abusing it had become very strong.
Enter Doug Ford. Not the most respectful of norms (in the style of his late brother, who as Mayor of Toronto did a number of turned-out-to-be illegal things, and I'm not talking about smoking crack). His first use of the notwithstanding clause was immediately upon gaining power in 2018, in order to halve the size of the Toronto city council in the middle of Toronto's municipal election. Traditionally the provincial government does not interfere in the affairs of municipal governments, but again this was tradition only and ultimately the courts found that the use of the notwithstanding clause was not necessary. In 2021 he used the notwithstanding clause again to limit third-party political advertising in the run-up to the provincial election that he handily won. In this case the courts did rule that his actions were unconstitutional as they were restrictions on freedom of expression.
But his third use of the notwithstanding clause is the most bizarre, norm-upsetting, and (to me) infuriating of all. The contract for the province's school workers (janitors, early childhood educators, school monitors, basically the blue-collar school employees) is up. The average employee in this union makes $46k CAD (~33k USD). Their wage increases over the last decade was lower than last year's inflation. And meanwhile the cost of living has exploded, especially in the province's most populous areas. So obviously the province owes it to these critical workers to give them a good deal, right? This is not a case of some fat public-sector union, and the provincial government and society at large has spent the pandemic fêting the heroics of these essential "front-line workers".
Well, no. Instead the government is using the notwithstanding clause to override their Charter right to strike. Note that this is not back-to-work legislation; that process involves binding both parties to a neutral arbitration process that tends to give labour a fair shake. Instead this is the unilateral imposition of a labour contract by the state, a first in modern Canadian history. The union has declared its intent to strike anyways, but because this would now be illegal, the potential fines for this are up to $200 million per day.
There are no legal countermeasures available to the union. The provincial governments in Canada are very strong by design, but this was supposed to be balanced by social norms against abusing these powers. But with the increasing polarization of Canadian society and centralization of power within political parties, apparently the weight of the potential backlash has been weakened. It was never the intent of the notwithstanding clause to give provincial governments the ability to just force people to work on the state's terms because they can't be bothered to negotiate, yet here we are regardless. Unless the Prime Minister (or the Governor General) were willing to intervene from on high and use their big red button that Should Never Be Touched (disallowance), there's nothing to be done. But that would kick off a constitutional crisis over janitors, and I don't think Trudeau has the balls; he's no friend of labour regardless and oddly buddy-buddy with Ford (that's another topic though).
Even if you were indifferent to the situation of the workers, there's reason for concern here. This kind of flagrant norm-breaking is what tends to start unraveling countries. The notwithstanding clause was not supposed to be employed this way; indifferent and repeated use of it could turn the Charter into a piece of paper. What's to stop other provincial governments from using their powers in this way? What's to stop retaliation when some other party inevitably comes to power? It used to be that Canadian politics was largely regional, with provincial and federal representatives responsive to local concerns and willing and able to keep their leaders in line. That's gone. The safeguards against misuse of power have disappeared.
The strike starts on Friday, and I'm going to be out showing my support. I've tried to keep this write-up somewhat tonally neutral, but I'm truly incensed about this.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Even "Hinduism" is sort of a retcon as a religion; it's really just a jumble of dozens of local Dharmic traditions rather than a unified confession.
johnfabian
2yr ago
I've got a deep enough knowledge base that I think I can wade in with an answer. First thing to note: what you are describing as "colonialism" is, very roughly speaking, three very different types of colonialism.
In the first instance, you have what I'd call "merger" colonialism. This was the kind practiced in central and south America by the Spanish. When the Spanish landed in the New World, they found themselves two large, urbanized, literate, complex, and populous states in the Triple Alliance and Inca. Both probably had a larger population than Spain itself at the time (Mexico probably had something like 2.5-3x the population of Spain), and both had expanded very rapidly in the century previous. They were big, overstretched empires with lots of internal and external enemies, who were very glad to help these strange dudes in shiny clothing who happened to show up just in time for serious strife. It's hard to overstate just how lucky the Spanish conquest of the Americas was in retrospect, and difficult to understate the degree to which aid from rival indigenous groups helped topple the Aztec/Incan empires. In any case, the Spanish did not wipe out the previous governmental or state structures; rather they placed themselves at the top and married into important local dynasties. The subsequent Spanish crown colonies had a Mestizo elite (that Castile often tried to push back against).
In the English/French colonization of North America, the situation was quite substantially different. Serious attempts at colonial ventures began roughly a century after the Spanish entry into the Americas, and somewhere on the order of 60-80% of the indigenous population of North America had died off from introduced diseases in the interim. The east coast of North America had already seen a fair amount of trading and interchange even if there had been no serious attempts at settlement, and the tribes living along the coast (and somewhat less so into the interior) were ravaged with disease. Somewhat more amusingly you have anecdotes like how when the Plymouth Colony landed the first native they met greeted them by asking in English if they had any beer. Unlike further south there were no large states to conquer; even the Iroquois Confederacy which gave European settlers such a hard time peaked at only slightly more than 10,000 people. This was in large part a virgin land with the large bulk of the pre-existing population destroyed before arrival. Settlement did not face the same military response, nor were settlers obliged to marry into indigenous families. The climate was also much more favourable to Europeans and largely lacked the (imported) African diseases that made the Caribbean so deadly to settlers post-1600.
In the subsequent European colonization in Africa, India, China, etc. the ratio between the colonizers and the colonized was even more extreme. By the time the East India Company had taken control over most of the Indian subcontinent, its administrative functionaries (~1,500 men) ruled 300 million souls. I've just finished reading a book on the East India Company's takeover (The Anarchy, by William Dalrymple) and it is kind of mind-boggling to try and process how a few men in dingy offices in London can effect the conquest of a region so much vaster in wealth and population. It's hard to nutshell exactly what caused the "Great Divergence"; there are various ideas, namely with respect to the burgeoning industrial revolution, Enlightenment principles of rationalism and liberalism, and the revolutions in military science (both theoretical and technological). But I think it is important to stress that it was not for the most part Englishmen who conquered India, but rather largely Indians assembled, trained, and organized by Englishmen. Other colonial takeovers were similar to varying degrees; they tended to be small European expeditionary forces that, once landed, trained and organized local forces to do the bulk of the conquest/occupation. Which I think is getting more along to the point you were wondering about: what changed?
Nationalism is the easy answer, if somewhat of a simplification. In some cases it is less nationalism and some other method of pan-identification, but the principle is simple: Europeans were able to leverage significant technological advantages wielded by small groups of men to exert control over massive numbers of people because most of those people did not care who they were ruled by. In fact, when intervening in regional affairs, many groups would prefer to have foreigners be in charge rather than their rival; especially ones so self-evidently powerful. Why would some tribe in Gabon prefer to stand in solidarity with the tribe next to them they've warred with for a thousand years, instead of the guys with Maxim guns? If you're some local noble in the Laotian highlands what does it matter to you if you're ruled from Paris instead of Hue? And if you're a peasant why care at all as long as the harvests are good?
This is the kind of thing you could write 100k words on easily and not get anywhere so I'm trying to keep things simple. Before mass literacy there is no mass politics, there is no nationalism, there is no reason to care about the guy 30 km down the road, there's no reason to worry about who rules over you except for how it matters to the here and now. There is no class consciousness, there is no sense that you, a farmer, has more in common with a farmer a few towns over than the priests or tanners or dyers who live in your town.
Why didn't Indians unite against the British? Because they didn't know they were Indian. Various polities tried to cobble together anti-British alliances with the help of the French (the most successful being a Maratha-Mysore pact that inflicted a few crushing defeats). But this was all elite squabbling. There was no larger identity to draw on.
Now there are other elements here. These different forms of colonialism wasn't all that profitable in the end; go have a look at the GDP per capita rankings of western European nations and look how neatly it fits to their colonial pasts. Would the USA want to colonize the Philippines or Liberia like it did in the past? Would France really retake Algeria if it could? The west is still plenty able to extract wealth out of these places without requiring armies and colonial administrations. And we could if we really wanted play at war in these regions. We could kill millions. But it would be brutality with little benefit, and a lot of international backlash.
johnfabian
2yr ago
The problems within autocracies are that there is always incentives to suppress the free and open flow of information. The sort-of classic text in this genre is Why Arabs Lose Wars, but the problems extend to all closed societies
johnfabian
2yr ago
Kiev was the front line for a good portion of the early war.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Wiki is an encyclopedia; it's a primer on a topic, and a good resource for finding more in-depth resources, but not a substitute for actual academic work. A good academic history, for example, will go far beyond what is able to be captured in a wikipedia article. For example, the wikipedia article on the Thirty Years' War has a bit shy of 16,000 words (and much of that is devoted to the bibliography/footnotes). A recent prominent history on the subject that I read has ~256,000.
Most of them were related to cost disease, so they can be tough to track down because they were tangential to other discussions. But here's a couple examples, including links articles from Levy's blog (Pedestrian Observations):
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