thejdizzler
4hr ago
Let me be clear re:crime. We need to crack down on anti-social behavior here in America. If new green spaces are immediately colonized by junkies and other bums then that indicates a problem with society that runs much deeper than public transit. Cars don't really solve this problem, they just confine it to the walkable areas of the city, which are usually also historically the most pleasant.
My vision is for protected bike lanes of 1/4 lane width on the side of most streets. There are so issues with this: mainly it presents a hazard when cars are turning right and cutting off bikes, but it seems better than the alternatives (median bike lane has the problem with both turns, single use trails don't make use of existing infrastructure).
thejdizzler
6hr ago
Bike lanes, denser cities, green space. If you could narrow most road ways to 1-2 lanes we could have bike lanes almost everywhere, larger sidewalks with more trees/green space. Parking lots could be turned into public parks or even businesses.
In 2022 there were 45 fatalities and 16k accidents in Baltimore city. That year there were 350 total traffic deaths in the whole state of Maryland. So 13%. The city makes up 8% of the total population of Maryland so the city is actually relatively more dangerous than the rest of the state for traffic deaths.
thejdizzler
22hr ago
I was thinking more of 7:30-6:30 pm which is what the original post about congestion pricing in NYC was discussing. I don't doubt that people need to get other places during other times of day, but congestion pricing wouldn't affect this: it primarily would affect commuters during these hours which I would argue are very safe times of day for public transit use.
I apologize for the name calling. It wasn't my intention, although it seems obvious when I read my post again that it's there. I'm often frustrated with people who are anti-public transit and/or biking (which you are not) for a failure to acknowledge the externalities they impose on non-car users, and rather prefer to think of the issue of one of individual choice rather than something that affects the whole community (my rights vs. what would be best for the community as a whole).
Let me try to engage more with what you said about why people don't want to use public transit. I think the disagreement centers on to what extent public transit is actually dangerous as compared to driving in a car versus merely uncomfortable. In 2024 there were 202 homicides in Baltimore (these statistics have been on a downward trend since 2020 which is also an encouraging sign). One of those occurred on public transit (a murder on a bus on Eutaw st.- not a terrible neighborhood in December of 2024). Compare this to 45 fatal traffic accidents in Baltimore in 2022. How does this stack up proportionally to use?
The 2024 ridership numbers for the MTA bus system were around 217,700 per weekday. Car ownership in the city averages around 1 per household, or one per every two people. The city had a population of 565,000 in 2024, so that's around 280,000 cars in the city proper. Let's assume all those cars are being used to drive to work/school every day. Of course we also have people coming in and out of baltimore/howard counties, but the MTA bus system goes there as well, so I feel like this is still a reasonable comparison. Our working numbers are 217,700 public transit trips and 280,000 car trips per day in the city. This means that driving in a car is around 43 times more likely to result in death than using public transit.
Of course there are other risks from public transit like mugging or assault that I would also characterize as violent crime. In the last year there were 33,507 crimes committed within the city of Baltimore. About 9k of these are characterized as violent crimes. Assuming all of these were aided and abetted or occurred on public transit, that's still only half the total crashes (16k) reported in the city in 2022.
The numbers just don't add up. Driving isn't a whole lot safer than even the absolute worst case scenarios for public transit in one of the worst cities in America for violent crime. Part of it may be that we don't have a super robust public transit system (although ridership is quite high on the bus system) and so people don't use public transit to commit crimes the way they might in NYC. I'd rather argue that people are not actually responding to the actual risks, but rather the perceived risks from frequent encounters with unsavory individuals, and the fear of a lack of control or agency when it comes to being a rider in a dangerous public transit situation (despite the fact that you can't really control other dangerous drivers either).
I'm all for cleaning up the streets and the bus system, but I think without massive levels of law enforcement crackdown that even the most conservative people in this country will not be able to stomach, the types of people that give a negative perception to public transit systems are always going to be there, despite most of these people being harmless. Violent crime is an issue at a 45 degree angle to public transit. Yes doing a Bekele and locking up or killing all the criminals will improve the perception of the bus/train system in most American cities, it won't stop poor, unsavory and less functional (but not criminal) people from using buses and trains, which is the fundamental issue I think most people actually have with public transit.
I hope this is a better critique that doesn't rely on name calling as much.
thejdizzler
23hr ago
I bike to and from work and the gym on busy streets. It's uncomfortable but I still do it because it's my best option. I have incidents with drivers cutting me off/parking in the bike lane almost every day. It is inconvenient and feels unsafe. Even if every driver was perfect and traffic was reduced 10x it would still be inconvenient and uncomfortable because I have to bike uphill at least in one direction. If the bike/public transit infrastructure was better there would be less cars on the road and the quality of life for everyone, including drivers, would improve.
I agree violent crime is real and a serious problem. Classmates have been mugged multiple times, and one was pistol-whipped outside her house. There are multiple homicides every week in the city. Yet most if not all of this independent of public transportation. Homicides aren't committed on buses or on the one light rail line in the city, they're local or in hit and runs in cars or motorized dirt bikes. Sure, some of these people MAY use public transit to get around and commit their crimes, but the majority of the unsavory people that repel people from public transit aren't actually dangerous.
thejdizzler
1d ago
The pro-car post was not that good and deserving of quality contributions IMO. Really shows the biases of this place. Insane pro car legislature was a thing here long before cities became the dismal wrecks that they are today. I think honestly people also just need to grow a bit of a spine. I live in Baltimore where we have a limited public transit system that I sometimes use (I prefer to bike). There's always an unsavory character using it at the same time as me, but absolutely nothing has ever happened. Maybe this would not be true if I were an attractive young woman, but I doubt there are many users here who fit that description either. People need to learn to be a bit more inconvenienced and uncomfortable. Biking is always a suitable alternative in major eastern urban areas (Boston, NYC, and DC all have good bike infrastructure) if you really don't want to deal with public transit. I get that cars are convenient and make people feel powerful and in control, but they impose such a big negative externality on the rest of us non-car users (pollution, taxes, use of public space, not to mention the very large amount of deaths caused by accidents, far higher than that caused by urban villainy on public transit) that I have a lot of sympathy for NYC trying to price car use correctly. I get that this is not feasible in Texas or in most parts of California, but posters here are so car-brained that they can't get on board with the government trying to address the problem in place where it is actually feasible to fix it. Guys, the subway is not very dangerous during work hours, and the problems with it (congestion, speed) can all be fixed with investment.
I think the righties do this too here. I think the most blatant example was responses to my effort post defending ASOIAF and George R. R. Martin. Many responses were from people who hadn't read the books very carefully, and even more egregiously, from people who hadn't read my post carefully at all.
I think the kind of effect that we see here is due to the fact the kinds of topics that we like to debate on this form are usually ones in which the right is clear-pilled (immigration, economics) much more so than the left. There are other issues that I think the right is weaker on (car-brain, media literacy, veganism, etc.) that don't get as much attention on this forum.
thejdizzler
2d ago
I don't think it really did unfortunately. I still masturbate and lie despite not wanting to and go to confession. The priest will say things but you kind of lead the conversation.
It always feels weird good in, but I always felt good after confession.
thejdizzler
3d ago
I just remember being impressed by your analysis of the right’s problem with didactic media in response to my ASOIAF post. Sorry if I labeled you as something you’re not: I really probably meant something like critical of the right rather than “liberal” per see when I thought of you.
thejdizzler
3d ago
The Motte is more balanced than you think. There are people who are a little bit more liberal here at least in some ways, such as myself and /u/Hoffmeister. That being said I'm not woke by any means, but I have a lot of sympathy with postmodernism, and have little patience for the trad LARPing that some of the less well-thought-out posters here seem to embody, although I generally find this is one of the highest quality places on the internet to actually find good arguments from both sides.
thejdizzler
9d ago
Just ran the Boston marathon without really a proper training cycle before hand. Got injured in February and hadn't done more than 30 miles a week since then. I was going to just jog the race, but my college friends (who are all low 2:30 marathoners) successfully bullied me into trying somewhat. I held just under 6:30s for the whole thing, which felt great and re-qualified with a 2:48 (about ~15 min off my PR), but now my legs are absolutely destroyed and am having trouble walking around work. Any tips for dealing with DOMs in the legs?
thejdizzler
16d ago
You can download shared decks from ankiweb.net. I've used some for spanish colloquial phrases, logical fallacies, and basic vocab for Italian and French. Most of my cards are self-made though.
thejdizzler
16d ago
I agree it's well established, but the last time I made an effort-post on /r/slatestarcodex there were many people that seemed to doubt that Anki was an effective way to learn things.
There's also the question of long-term effects of spaced-repetition. Ebbinghaus's original experiments certainly didn't go as far out as five years, and neither have any academic studies. The long-term posts I've seen on less wrong and other blogs are also not as glowing. I haven't really experienced this, but I'm not sure how to convey it.
thejdizzler
16d ago
It's been 5 years since I started using Anki (Wow!). For those of you who don't know, Anki is a flashcard software that uses spaced repetition to optimize remembering whatever you put on the flashcard. You can use Anki for just about anything, although higher skill levels are required for certain kinds of cards (math cards, cards that randomize questions, etc.). I primarily use Anki for language learning (Spanish and Italian), but I also have cards for lots of work things (biology, stats, math) and things like peoples birthdays and phone numbers. I'm thinking of making an effort post on my blog/here/r/slatestarcodex about this at some point, but I'm struggling to think of objective measures I could use to show that Anki is actually working/useful/worth it. Thoughts TheMotte?
thejdizzler
16d ago
Agree with what you said here and with your assessment of me. I am very agreeable, which is why I think I struggle with these kinds of attacks so much. I also tend to doubt many of my beliefs about the world. There are only a few (veganism, various Christian moral virtues) that I'm very sure about, which makes it very easy to poke holes in my armor.
thejdizzler
16d ago
I've read a lot in Spanish (108 books total, 62 originally written in Spanish). I have a list that needs to be updated a little bit, but some of my favorites below.
Olvidado Rey Gudú: This actually doesn't have a translation to English at all, so you need Spanish (or Italian or German to read it). It's basically Game of Thrones crossed with a fairy story. Haven't read anything like it. I wrote an in-depth review of it here
El Sentimiento Tragico de La Vida: This is a philosophy book that tries to tie together christianity and existentialism. Much like Kierkegaard. I wrote an in-depth review of it here
La Invención de Morel: This is a short novella about a guy trapped on a creepy island filled with holograms. Was intended as a parable against TV.
Los Cuerpos del Verano: This is also a short science fiction novel about a world where death no longer exists because people are uploaded to the net when they're dying. New bodies are an option, but the quality of the body you get depends a lot on your social status. Our protagonist gets the body of middle-aged women (he's a dude). I really recommend this one, and you can find my longer review of it here
thejdizzler
16d ago
Yes, definitely something I missed. I didn’t really want to comment much on that because I don’t know much Latin American history.
thejdizzler
17d ago
Your old interpretation made me laugh out loud. There is some backing for that reading in the text. It's been while for since I read it, but I think one of the main characters kills herself by eating a box of candles.
thejdizzler
17d ago
Hmmm maybe not the best Italian book for me to start with in that case. Thanks for the info.
thejdizzler
17d ago
I have tried multiple times to get into the habit, but I have never been consistent or really seen gains or benefits. Something that I've thought about restarting, so maybe this is the time.
Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude in English) follows seven generations of the Buendía family as they head the foundation, growth, and ultimately, destruction, of the fictional Colombian town of Macondo. The book doesn’t have an overarching plot per see: each chapter consists of a number of vignettes about the family in a certain epoch of Macondo, which are pumped up on magical realism and read to me like someone describing their exploits in a multi-generational game of the Sims 1 . There are some patterns to the madness: most male members of the family are called José Arcadio or Aureliano, and share personality traits, memories, and perhaps destinies with all the individuals of that share their name. Common plot threads also abound: incestuous forbidden love, vague political conflict, and a push-pull with the outside world. There is also a civilizational plot at work here: Macondo is a being that grows, flourishes, becomes decadent and finally dies.
My Background with the Book
I started learning Spanish all the way back in 2020, and this was one of the book was one of the reasons for doing so. We had read A Chronicle of a Death Foretold in one of my high-school English classes, and I was fascinated by the way Gabriel García Márquez (I’ll be referring to him as Gabo from now on) wrote and constructed his stories. This was apparently THE Gabo book to read, so pretty much as soon as I had finished the Harry Potter series I ordered the book. Looking back through my blog records it seems like I tried to read it two or three separate occasions. The first was around 400 hours of Spanish, and I think I gave up about 30 pages. The second and third attempts in 2023 and 2024 respectively went much better, but I still only made it around a quarter of the way through, after the first patriarch of the book dies. I added the book to my ten books to read before I die list, which was enough motivation for me to finish the book this time, though the last 200 pages of the book were like pulling teeth. I’m sad to say it, after being 3/3 on my ten books, but I don’t think Cien Años is a good book, and would recommend you read some of Gabo’s other (and better) stories. I’ll elaborate on why this is below, but in short I had issues with the structure of the novel and the use of magical realism. That being said, I still thought that Cien Años did have something valuable to say on the dangers of self-absorption for social elites.
Episodic stories and the phantom plot development
I talked earlier in my review of Infinite Jest about how important the relationship between story structure and theme is. Infinite Jest does this through the difficulty of its first 300 pages, using this structural choice to reinforce Wallace’s point about how culture and entertainment are not equivalent. In Cien Años, Gabo uses the vignette to emphasize similarities between the lives of different characters, reinforcing themes of cyclical history, that there is nothing new under the sun, and historical determinism: that much of what will happen has been foretold by previous generations, although they may not have the tools to decipher the vague prophecies that they have been given.
There is nothing wrong with an episodic structure per see. Most books use it to some extent. But usually the individual episodes are in service to a larger plot or character development. Two books that do this really well I think are Harry Potter and The Hobbit. The middle half of every Harry Potter novel usually consists of various unrelated adventures that take place through the school year. Yet each adventure either drops a key hint about a larger overarching mystery plot of the novel, which comes to be important in the final quarter of the book, or serves to develop one or more of our characters (or both). In The Hobbit, each of the self-contained adventures in the chapters of the first half of the book serve to make us (and the dwarves) trust Bilbo as a burglar and leader, without which his interactions with Smaug and the Arkenstone in the finale would be unbelievable.
I think the episodic nature of Cien Años didn’t work for me because the multigenerational nature of the story means it can’t do the things that Harry Potter and The Hobbit can. There is no overarching plot, so the story can’t drop important tidbits that will be important for the finale: there isn’t even really a finale, rather just a vague descent into decadence and doom. While in the first half of the novel there was some character development, by page 150 characters were already dying off, meaning Gabo had to start all over again. Now I appreciate some of what Gabo was trying to do with this structure: namely create a confused sense of the passage of time, which is present even in the first iconic line of the book 2 , but the overall structure just didn’t work for me.
Magical Realism Cheapens Character Development
There’s some debate as to what “Magical Realism” as a genre or creative choice actually means, and whether it is distinct from fantasy. My personal position (and definition) is that magical realism is distinct subset of the fantasy genre that places fantastical events in the midst of every day life, and that these events are not treated as abnormal by the plot or the characters. The sub-genre in some way has always been a thing: this is exactly what fairy stories are, but was popularized by the “Latin American boom” of the mid-20th century by writers like Borges, Julio Cortázar and Gabo himself.
Let me be clear, I don’t think magical realism is a ticket to a bad story. Cortázar uses magical realism to great effect in many of his short stories, creating an aura of strangeness and unreality that help to highlight those same emotions in the reader 3 . Similarly, in Como Agua para Chocolate, Laura Esquivel gives food cooked by the main character absurd magical powers to highlight the important role that food has in our sense of self and family. Magical realism works best by turning up to 11 the personal struggles, wants, and fears of our characters. There are instances in which this works well in Cien Años: my favorite example is how an American banana planation just pops up in Macondo overnight, at least from the point of the Buendías, emphasizing how disconnected they really are from what is going on in the town.
Yet unfortunately, magical realism seems to used in this novel quite a lot to get out of inconvenient plot snafus. Have Aureliano fall in love with a prebuscent girl. Rather than actually deal with how messed up that relationship is, have her prematurely hit puberty and become wise beyond her years. Have a woman so beautiful that every man that sees her fall in love with her while she is completely oblivious. Rather than work through the potentially interesting character development that could result from that, instead have her carried to heaven by her laundry. Have one of your characters have seventeen kids all named after him by different women. Quickly kill them all off because you don’t know how to develop those characters. I could go on, but you get the picture.
Elite’s Should be Connected with the People they Govern
One thing that I did like about Cien Años de Soledad is the emphasis it placed on the dangers of self-absorption of a social elite. The tension between self-absorption (or solitude) and connectedness is present in the very first chapter. The matriarch and patriarch of the Buendía family are second cousins, a sign of the incestuous obsessions that will plague the family for the rest of the book. José Arcadio Buendía, the first patriarch of the family, spends the first few chapters vacillating between vainglorious scientific endeavors, and actually being a practical, good leader of Macondo, a trait which all his descendants share to some extent. While better than her husband to some extent in terms of being practically minded, Ursula, the first matriarch, is obsessed with appearances and the reputation of the family above all else, which also leads to disaster on multiple occasions. This endogamic self-absorption leads the characters to fail to connect to one another, giving the book its title, but also for them to blindsided by social forces, such as civil war, commercial colonization by the Americans, and finally the decadence and decay that dooms Macondo. I think what Gabo is trying to say here is that elites need to be connected to the people and places they govern, which might seem like a rather obvious message, but its one that historically seems very difficult to learn.
Overall, although Cien Años did have some interesting things to say, and in some ways was a very entertaining and fun book, I found it a bit of a slog, and would recommend reading other Gabo stories, probably his shorter works, instead.
3/5 stars.
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This is an early 2000s video game where you control a household of Sims (simulated humans). The intended gameplay is for you to live out quotidian fantasies such as building your own mansion, or working as firefighter, but the functionalities of the game mean you can quickly go off the deep-end.
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Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. “Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano had to remember that remote afternoon in which his father took him to encounter the ice”.
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My favorite story of his is Casa Tomada
thejdizzler
18d ago
How difficult was the first book? I'm thinking of reading it in Italian (my Italian is workman-like but not good). Do you feel like it works as a stand-alone?
thejdizzler
18d ago
Before I stopped going to mass completely (~2 months ago), I would go to confession every couple weeks and not usually receive Communion unless I did so (I too am a miserable sinner that tells stupid lies and masturbates).
My goal in converting to Catholicism was to try and connect with the divine that I know is out there in the world. I didn't write this in my post but I had a mystical experience at the church of the holy sepulcher in 2019 that convinced me that something around Jerusalem/Jesus/Christianity was special and true. I've very rarely felt this at mass, but this is perhaps from trying too hard to connect with other parishioners/the institution rather than what I came there for (God).
This is all true and helpful and has inspired me to make another effort to find Christ. I'm going to return to mass and read the book that you suggested and see if it helps me overcome my philosophical doubts and recenter myself on the sacraments and a connection with God.
thejdizzler
18d ago
I like this metaphor a lot! I'll have to use it myself.
I walk to the grocery store and go about once a week. It's about 0.5 miles each way, so it's a bit of a workout on the way back.
If I really need to transport something heavy I'll Zipcar or mooch off of a friend. This kind of stuff is made much more practical by a car. I'm not a car abolitionist, they have their place and their uses and are obviously essential in rural areas. What I'm frustrated by is the desire for many to make the car into the one size fits all transportation model. The actual costs of car use should be internalized by the user: things like congestion pricing seem like a great way to do that. Congestion pricing is not going to affect the ease of me bringing my grill to a friends house, but it might make me change my commuting behavior.
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