what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I hate to make hasty generalizations like this. This doesn't seem true to me; they take into account everyone who uses the road.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here. This statement looks either tautological (only cars use the road) or essentially false (pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders get way less consideration than drivers) to me.
Unless you're willing to claim that the uniquely-American way of urban planning has spread around to cities all over the world such as in Japan and China (where they build pedestrian bridges too)?
Having a few pedestrian bridges doesn't mean that all of the infrastructure is car-centric. I don't know about China; Tokyo was definitely not car-centric. Not all pedestrian bridges are bad--the video even says that they're fine if they keep pedestrians at the same level. Pedestrian bridges are just one piece of infrastructure of many--no one feature makes or breaks a city. But in much of the US, they seem to be thrown in for the primary purpose of not slowing down cars, while every other consideration is secondary. This is true of a lot of infrastructure, like slip lanes for right hand turns: slightly more convenient for drivers, but much less safe for pedestrians.
If you recall, the reason we're talking about pedestrian bridges is because you wrote:
Not Just Bikes complaining about pedestrian bridges, and claiming they're "only built for the benefit of people driving, not walking", even though that doesn't make sense. I highly suspect the real reason he dislikes them is because, as he says later, they don't hinder the flow of traffic, and therefore don't worsen the QoL of car users.
You can disagree, but I see no reason to assume that NJB's stated reasoning is a cover for a desire to annoy drivers, which is not something you have any evidence for.
See, the "greedy" argument falls flat because if they really wanted money, they would gladly invite in the densification, as dense urban areas lead to higher property values (not including maintenance and taxes). And the "racist" argument is true insofar as being against crime is racist (that is, you'd have to be racist yourself in order to believe that being against crime is racist; yes, being tough on crime will disproportionately affect certain races, but that's only because the base rate of crime is disproportionately committed by those races in the same way). So, it's uncharitable to call them "racist" (extremely so), but it's not completely out of field of what a steelman NIMBY would actually believe.
"Negatively impacting property values" is a common NIMBY argument for opposing any sort of zoning reform. My inclination is to take these people at their word (like I do with NJB above) unless there's convincing reason otherwise.
In this case, I think you're making the same error I accused Randal O'Toole of making in one of my other comments. Dense areas have higher property values than sprawling ones because a lot of people want to live there. That's what makes them dense in the first place! But for a given neighborhood, building more housing will lower the price of renting or buying, because that's how supply and demand works, and is confirmed by the highest quality evidence that I'm aware of.
One individual might be able to make more money by building the only apartment building surrounded by single family homes, but that's not an option.
That's only because this forum has a social norm where people are assumed to have already disclaimed that.
So... is the same true for YIMBYs?
I want to see condemnations of people committing crimes such as the Tyre Extinguishers. Instead, we get people like Not Just Bikes who apologize for their behavior by mostly placing the blame on governments who've "done nothing".
The video you linked said it's not actually clear if this is a crime, and NJB calls it "really extreme behavior." Maybe I've just spent too much time on this forum, since that doesn't feel disproportionate to me. This comment just casually drops a mention of executing all the homeless and got 10 (net) upvotes and no response.
Indeed, they can't. But they can at least distance themselves from them.
As far as I can tell, all the channels I mentioned have explicitly disavowed the idea that one should ban all cars or whatever. Demanding they explicitly go through and also disavow each individual person/group who does hold such a view seems, in my book, to mostly be bad faith smear attempts, akin to when the left threw a fit over Donald Trump not disavowing each different KKK member specifically or whatever the details were.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
It might be the case that someone observing your decisions could impute some sort of indifference curves to you on that basis, but that is not at all the same as your actually having those indifference curves, nor as your valuing the items in terms of money. It may be that I have sufficient reasons for my decisions which make no reference whatsoever to cost and benefits, in which case it wouldn’t even make sense to ask the question about me.
You cannot avoid the fact that you are going to end up comparing unlike things, because in life you face choices between dissimilar things. I didn't mention indifference curves at all, that's you putting words in my mouth. You don't need to invoke a full decision theory to make this point; it's enough to note that, for example, we spend money to reduce risk all the time, but we don't (and in fact, can't) spend infinite money to reduce risk (although some people try to do so when it isn't their money). This implies there is some amount of money you are willing to spend to save a life, and some amount you aren't (clearly simplifying here--real situations involve additional variables--but such complications only make the point more so, since they involve deciding between a wider variety of unlike things).
And it would be question-begging to simply assume that everyone must have some quantitative reasons for what they do.
I specifically noted that people avoid making explicit quantitative judgements. A lot of people also text while driving, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to do so.
“A dart thrown at the unit interval will land within the Vitali set?”
You mean an idealized dart? Like drawing from a uniform random variable on [0,1]? Formally, it's not defined, because probability is only defined on a sigma-algebra. This is irrelevant for all practical purposes; non-measurable sets require the AoC, and so won't be explicitly definable, and in any event you would never be able to tell if some specific number is in a Vitali-like set to know if your prediction was right or wrong.
How is that an “insight” of Bayesianism? It’s certainly an assumption of Bayesianism, but I don’t see how you could possibly prove it independently.
It's an insight because the laws of probability don't actually have distinctions like "aleatory" vs "epistemic." Bayes theorem is true regardless. These distinctions are, at best, useful in some situations to help solve specific problems, but they don't mean that probability doesn't apply.
How do you distinguish that from the model being wrong? We don’t have 100 or 1000 years to wait and see whether the model performs properly out-of-sample or not. This defense could be used to exculpate any sort of model failing by just appealing to the Law of Large Numbers: “Well, everything with some chance has to happen eventually, so no actual event can be interpreted as decisively falsifying the model!”
We actually do have some data on the historical occurrence of earthquakes. But also, you can combine data from different locations. If you have 100 locations where you think magnitude X earthquakes occur about once per 1,000 years, and the assumptions about independence in time and space hold, then you should expect to see about 10 magnitude X earthquakes per century across those locations.
In general "we don't have a lot of data on rare events" can be a problem, but it's a problem which again is well-known and has nothing to do with the rest of the paper. Certainly this statement in the original paper:
Three recent destructive earthquakes were in regions that seismic hazard maps said were relatively safe
is devoid of content. It's like going to a list of safe countries and then digging through the news to find a recent murder in one of them. What does that tell you? Absolutely nothing.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
TBH I suspect there's even a simpler solution: his lawyers told him to do it in an effort to avoid hate-crime charges.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
"Unlimited cosmic power freedom" is the argument of car enthusiasts. Of course all modes of transportation depend on government decisions/can be interfered with by the government. As far as I know, urbanists don't tend to try to pretend otherwise. And yet even with that admission, most of your arguments are just silly. The cost of a car vs the cost of walking? There's no comparison, so I don't know what you're even trying to do. "Lots of space is dedicated to cars and that makes it dangerous to walk" is exactly the argument that urbanists make, and claim that this situation is bad. And this claim:
Dense, walkable, urban environments is what the top-down planners created over the past 70 years.
Is just so utterly wrong and backwards. Taking something I said and changing a word so that it's completely wrong doesn't make an argument, it just makes you look like you're trolling.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I'm a bit confused here at what you're arguing against. This seems... obvious to me, and not something I was saying? I'm not saying "I just want to live how I want to"; that's trivially impossible because we are all constrained by various external factors beyond our control.
It seemed to me to be the argument that the OP of this thread was making. NIMBYism means keeping people he doesn't like out of his neighborhood, which sounds good. That's why I said what I did--if public services are subsidized out of general tax funds, because they provide benefits to everyone, then that contradicts the use of government policy to serve particular citizens at the expense of others. But it sounds like you and they are making different arguments.
Well good for you, at least. Though that position seems hard to square with how expensive healthcare and college is in the US.
What do you mean? The subsidies are what make them expensive. Different parties pay for it and make spending decisions, which means that the normal incentive to spend less isn't there.
But I believe subsidizing driving is extremely effective at getting people to their destinations
It's pretty inefficient for any sort of populated area. A 3-lane highway has less capacity (in terms of people per hour) than a single light rail track. Houston's Katy Freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, and it's still congested. I agree that in sufficiently sparse areas, transit becomes inefficient. But in the US, we have cities with hundreds of thousands, or in some cases millions, of people, with borderline non-existent transit.
Sorry, I should have linked to the later reply:
Ok. That might be right, and I think I've seen this basic claim before, but I don't have time to check it all now. I think what happened is that the parish's actual spending is too low to pay for all the costs, and what they should have been spending was higher. In any event, the amount given still seems to be quite a lot for only the local taxes for an area with below-average income.
Hence my feeling that it rings hollow to paint driving as uniquely worse than homicide when deaths from both sources are hampered by lack of meaningful enforcement.
I think we're still talking past each other. My point was that these situations are similar in the sense of imposing negative externalities on others.
Is this really an objection people take seriously? I certainly don't. Yes, it is a punishment to have to be dependent on someone else, and that will suck. In fact the point of punishment is to suck, so you will have a strong incentive to not do the thing that got you in trouble. In this case, you're less likely to be a dangerous, negligent driver.
I think we agree, but my claim is that in practice it's not common enough to revoke a license (which doesn't even stop a lot of people) because it's seen as such a severe punishment. It shouldn't stop the courts from imposing it, but it should. If you drive dangerously and kill someone, you should just be in prison.
I feel like this would do nothing if the driver is drunk and not likely to care at all about how narrow the road is, which is what happened in the Strong Towns example of the State Street fatality that they just... shrug off. Charles Marohn prematurely dismisses it by saying something about how engineers consider drunk people too, even though I sincerely doubt that a speed bump or lane narrowing would've prevented this drunk driver from speeding right through anyway. And then to go further and then say "Someone needs to sue these engineers for gross negligence and turn that entire liability equation around. It’s way past time." is... certainly a take, I suppose.
Traffic calming is certainly not a panacea, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it. Not having ever driven drunk, I couldn't guess at whether it would be effective in that particular case.
As for negligence: Can you say that this argument is wrong? (I find this example fitting, given your link above--this is an example, completely typical in cities, of making pedestrians less safe to protect drivers who, most likely, made some sort of error).
I mean, trains are loud too, so again, seems like an isolated demand. I'm not inherently against loud things on principle either; if a train runs through your apartment, then just have good soundproofing. Pollution can be solved by electric cars, and in fact, many places around the world have already banned sales of new gas cars by 2030-2035. My point being that these externalities should be solved and not just diagnosed.
It's not isolated. Tax all the externalities (noise, congestion, pollution, danger, etc.) and let the market sort it out, sure. I think the externalities are much larger for cars than for almost any other mode of transit, and if we did that, cars would be much more expensive. But what we're currently doing doesn't make sense.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I don't think I've seen the claim that having covid now will greatly increase your chance of dying over the next decade expressed anywhere. Can you provide some evidence for this claim? (Obviously the mainstream belief is that vaccines reduce deaths in the short term, because there are very large RCTs that got a lot of scrutiny showing that this the case.)
I think they would put it at 1% per infection, and with infections every six months that’s about 20% mortality in a decade
I also don't think a lot of people would give you these numbers or anything particularly close. I know a lot of liberals and leftists who took covid fairly seriously (and even continue to do so) and I don't think they would say this if you asked.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Libraries are a lot more than just a warehouse for books. They provide a lot of services, including research help, internet and computer access, rooms that can be booked (hah!) for various purposes, and often a variety of other programs (tax help, kids programming, etc.). Also, just because some books are cheap doesn't mean that borrowing books as no purpose. Some people are still poor, or just have limited space, so "books are cheap" isn't that strong of an argument.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
...what? I have no idea what you're trying to say. This is just a non sequitur.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I don't disagree, but if pedestrian bridges (not at-grade) are car-centric, then they're bad and that means that something has gone wrong in the planning process, right? If they're bad, then maybe the planner somehow didn't take into account all road users, for example. But yes, it only means that this part of the city is bad and car-centric; the rest of the city will still be pretty okay.
It still feels like we're talking past each other here. Merely having a pedestrian bridge, without knowing any other context, is not the be-all end-all of city design. There probably are good reasons to sometimes have them.
Do you think they're bad and shouldn't have been built? I personally don't see any problem with them, and in fact there are a few people in the comments section who like them too. But then there's these urbanist types who say things like the following:
It's kind of hard to tell with the Japan example, but it looks to me like there could have easily been crosswalks on the road below. If I'm just trying to cross one of the roads, say on the left, then a crosswalk would be something like 1/4 the length and not require walking uphill. But it looks like it might be connecting to a higher building on the right? I can't really tell.
The one in China looks like a good example of the urbanist complaint. Why is there such a massive road there to begin with? (Also, does this picture look digital to you? Something about it seems off). There's absolutely no way it's feasible for all of the people who live/work in all of those huge buildings to get in and out by car. It already has crosswalks and an intersection, so it's not like it's preventing traffic from having to stop. Replacing some of the car lanes with bike lanes and a train or dedicated bus lane would make the road easy to cross at street level and increase capacity.
At the end of the day, if I think that these complaints come from a place of actually caring about car-centric infrastructure, I get confused and start wondering why people would complain about something that seems perfectly fine and usable.
Is this just a question of what one is used to? Without the alternatives being pointed out to me, I would have never thought about many of these things. For example, why are crosswalks at street level, requiring you to step down from the sidewalk? That seemed obvious to me, but in some places the crosswalk is raised and cars have to go over it. This has a number of advantages (forces cars to slow down at intersections and in places where pedestrians are likely to be, makes the trip smoother for those with disabilities, makes children more visible to those in high vehicles, etc.) but seems to be practically unheard of in North America. To someone who's used to it, narrow car lanes and limited road and parking space might seem "fine and usable." Or maybe "fine and usable" is just a low bar for a major city in a country as rich as the United States, which spends lots of money on infrastructure, but still manages to be full of congested and crumbling roads.
It seems to be from a dislike that car traffic gets to flow unimpeded.
Car traffic already doesn't flow unimpeded in cities, because of congestion.
Again, "annoy drivers" is not the end goal. The goal is to make walking, cycling, and transit easier. The problem is that these alternative modes all get vastly fewer resources and consideration than driving, which makes them much worse and makes driving slightly better (well, in the short term). If you theoretically could have a pedestrian crossing that was as easy as a crosswalk but didn't require cars to stop, that would be fine. But we don't have that--we have to tradeoff between these things. That's what the complaint means: Drivers are not being asked to make any compromise or sacrifice while pedestrians are being asked to make a very substantial one.
Doesn't that lead to the logical conclusion that a city should basically ban almost every car?
The center of a city should have the absolute minimum possible number of vehicles. As you move to a more spread out area, cars make more sense.
How about the things they do disavow? All those channels exist on a sliding scale of more or less car hatred, but some of the more car-hatey ones hate the YouTube channel Road Guy Rob, who notably does not hate cars and says himself he is pro-car while recognizing that many of the Dutch infrastructure NJB champions as being great for bicycles are great for cars alike. However, despite his numerous videos about infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists, he gets called a "car apologist" by Alan Fisher. This is a sentiment that NJB shares. In RGR's latest livestream, he mentions that NJB may even be mad at him.
The Alan Fisher video is literally an entire video of jokes, come on now. Without knowing more about Road Guy Rob or what exactly NJB's issue is, which isn't explained, I can't really comment.
I think you weren't sure about what constitutes the "worst NIMBYs." By coincidence this video just came out, and I think it provides a decent example. There's no issues of pretending that zoning is a property right, it's just very obvious that the neighbors are claiming the right to prevent anything from being built on some nearby land the city already owned because it might be slightly inconvenient for them. There's a good kafkatrap as well (opposing having too many affordable units and then opposing too few affordable units, and also all the time demanding the market-rate units are "luxury"). The already-existing taller building got in on the action as well. It also points out that several of the representatives claimed to support affordable housing... just not in their district, I guess. To paraphrase you, if I wanted to spread the message that I cared about anyone other than myself, or supported affordable housing, I wouldn't do, well, any of those things.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Personally, I would do my best to avoid any voting for candidates that have either "takes covid seriously" or "covid is a nothingburger" as a brand. I think you can easily strike a balance between "extreme lockdowns are stupid and tyrannical" and "yeah you should get the vaccine and not do dangerous things."
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
No, they were actively proclaiming for assimilation and suppression of foreign cultures and foreign tongues, if not explicitly foreign people.
Some people certainly wanted this, but did it actually happen? Or rather, did it actually happen any faster than it does now, or would have happened anyway? German was actually a very popular language in the US, with German newspapers in many towns, until the world wars. Lots of other diaspora communities persisted as well, like Celtish in the Carolina lowlands. My impression is actually that a lot of nativists did the opposite, and wanted the immigrants to remain separate in their own enclaves indefinitely--"No Irish need apply" doesn't seem like it encourages assimilation.
There were never as many Italians or Irish then as there are Mexicans and assorted CA hispanics now.
Do you have data to support this claim? Raw immigration numbers peaked in 1990, with the second peak being 1900-1920:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_United_States#/media/File:Immigration_to_the_United_States_over_time.svg
Adjusting for population, it's clear that we're in a pretty low spot historically (excepting the Depression and WW2)--adjusted for the 4.3x population difference, even the low point in 1900 is equivalent to well over 800,000 today. In fact, even going purely by raw numbers, "the last 60 years" is largely not that high!
Things have changed, and those changes have destroyed the mechanism for the assimilation that you take for granted. Hence the sneering. That machine's broken, it's not going to be rebuilt, and anyone who wants to do so is pilloried.
I don't see much in the way of evidence for any these things. I think people who say this don't sufficiently grapple with the history of assimilation, which I only know a little bit about, but I know enough to know that it's complicated.
This won't happen, because that goose is cooked.
Well, this is a testable prediction, at least. I think it's rather early to conclude it won't happen, when large-scale hispanic immigration is, what, 30 or 40 years old? German language newspapers existed as far back as the Revolution and was quite popular throughout the 1800s, only really declining because of WW1. Do you think that, say, the grandchildren of early hispanic immigrants (so, the children of people born in the US) don't speak substantially more English than their grandparents?
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Man, that's an awful lot of euphemism, nonsense, and irrelevance crammed into such a short post.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
You can have decentralized legal systems, but there still has to be some sort of widespread buy-in (or what we might call meta buy-in, where different groups have their own legal system, but still with some other authority to resolve inter-group disputes, and each group still experiences buy-in from its own members). If you could get that level of buy-in, you could probably just make the city government of New York actually enforce laws, and it would be much easier, and with many fewer nasty side effects.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
justified by statistical reality
On the other hand, assuming you're a man, you are still much more likely to be violent than much of the population. It seems to me that in order to justify your position, you have to rather arbitrarily draw a line right where it benefits you the most (you get the benefit of the doubt if you are doing something suspicious or disconcerting, but you don't have to extend the same benefit of the doubt to the group most likely to be able to harm you).
People really should be less scared of me than they were of Jordan Neely; if they assumed he had a long rap sheet and was capable of violence, they were right to assume that - not only because we know that it’s true, but because people who look and act like him are, statistically, far more likely to have that be true of them than people who looks and act like me are.
The base right of violent criminal activity is low, so even a substantially increased probability may still be low. And no, making a bad assumption and having it turn out to be correct is not right. It's lucky. Our legal system strongly discourages this form of argument--you cannot use information you did not have access to at the time in a self-defense argument, because it is very bad to encourage vigilantism with low standards. The legal system is surely far from perfect at determining guilt but it's a hell of a lot better than letting every random person off the street just decide that they think someone else did something wrong. I don't know the details of your encounters, but there are violent attacks that happen where the aggressor thinks they're completely in the right because they didn't understand the situation, or felt insulted, or think they have a right to other people's stuff, or whatever. Encouraging such behavior is likely to result in more public violence and should be a last resort at best.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
How much would you spend to be able to walk 500 miles? How much would you spend to be able to walk with a ton of load?
I'm not doing either of those things on a regular basis, and 500 miles is by definition outside of my metropolitan area and thus irrelevant to the question of city design. I don't really see why it makes sense to spend thousands of dollars a year on a car if the reason to do so is things that I do maybe once per year, but you do you I guess.
Was everything accessible to a person in medieval city within a 15 minute walk?
Most people did walk, yes. Your average person probably could not afford to take a horse everywhere. But do you think that history jumped straight from the middle ages to 1960? Why not at least try to make the best comparison possible, and look at what cities were like, say, after the invention of trains and street cars?
The point was to show the original argument wasn't good.
The statement I made was true, so I don't know why you think making an incorrect statement shows anything.
Okay, this makes more sense than the assertion that they are over-consumed. Which was in contrast to the many tales of Americans actively refusing medical treatment because they'd rather die than pay the medical bills.
There is over-consumption, because it's subsidized, which is why it's expensive. The case where it isn't subsidized then become ruinous.
Yes, if your only metric is capacity, then a single light rail track wins hands-down over a 3-lane highway. However, there are usually other factors people consider in efficiency, such as the amount of people who actually use it, plus other harder-to-quantify factors like the fact that people using the highway can get off and on at any on/off-ramp, and can thus easily make journeys with a wide variety of starts, destinations, and stops, whereas people with the light rail must get on or off at specific stations, and the more stations you add, the slower the light rail becomes, and this limits the amount of starts and destinations people can get to.
Transit becomes very flexible when you add in multiple forms of transportation, such as a walk or cycle near the station. Roads have plenty of their own issues, and will also slow down and/or run much below theoretical maximum capacity, for example due to lights, congestion, and crashes. In the cases where transit exists but is unused, it's usually because the city is designed to prioritize cars and so transit runs rarely, buses don't have their own right of way, it doesn't go lots of places, etc. Yes, there are reasons to have cars. But they're only necessary (edit: this should say, "only necessary for every trip") because of the specific way in which North American cities have been (re-) built since the end of WW2.
I judge each project on a case-by-case basis; I personally wouldn't make generalized statements like saying a mode is inefficient "for any sort of populated area", and in the real world urban planners consider more factors than just capacity.
Who are "real world urban planners"? In much of North America, they consider car capacity and congestion, and basically no other factors. I stand by the statement that cars are, as a general rule, inefficient for populated areas, because they take up so much space.
As for your claim that the Katy freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, is this actually true? The most lanes I could find at any point were 6 lanes each direction. I'm not counting ramps or tollways here, and I don't count frontage roads either since they have stoplights, bikes, and sidewalks, and freeway lane counts elsewhere don't include any parallel roads either. As for the congestion today, that can easily be explained by the fact that Houston is one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the US, and when the expansion was completed in 2011, congestion was definitely reduced, only to slowly be undone by the growing population. I think it makes intuitive sense that any significant population growth or density would put a strain on the transportation system; compare this to the trains in Mumbai which are packed full of people, because so many people live there in such a small area.
This is the description I found:
2 main lanes (six in each direction), eight feeder lanes and six managed lanes. The managed lanes carry mass transit vehicles during peak hours and are only made available to single-occupancy vehicles for a toll-fee during odd-peak hours.
I think however you count it, it's already a lot of capacity, and yet it's still congested, even though Houston is, as you point out, growing, with space for lots more people. Increasing capacity will temporarily improve congestion, but unless maximum demand is capped, it will never last. A combination of induced demand and population growth will put strain on any system if it can't adapt, but transit gives you much much more room to carry people. I mentioned light rail, but a full underground subway line can carry dozens of times more people than a lane of car traffic. It's also standard for transit to have the ability to implement congestion pricing, which is rare on roads.
What, like Tulsa, Oklahoma (pop. 413,066)? There are plenty of buses there and they're pretty empty. And not for a lack of trying; the city keeps running the empty buses under the assumption that if they're there, people will use them, when that's clearly not the case.
That's barely more than the population of Zurich, which has a ton of great transit options which get used by lots of people. I agree that simply running buses in an area that's not designed for it is unlikely to generate much ridership. There are several issues here. One is land use, where transit is often surrounded by parking and empty lots, on the expectation that people will drive to the station, rather than stores and homes. Another is inconsistency. If there's 1 bus or train every hour and it's always late, people won't bother trying to use it. Running more frequent service encourages ridership, and Zurich is probably running dozens of times more trains, trams, and buses than Tulsa, but they're still full. A third is traffic priority--in many cities outside the US, bus-only lanes are common, so buses can avoid congestion. Transit also often gets priority at intersections. These things make it faster than driving in traffic, even with stops to pick up and drop off passengers.
But even assuming that the pole and shear are mounted at ground level, I guess the argument is not-even-wrong? I don't think it necessarily makes drivers safer, though. If the pole breaks away, then that will bring down traffic lights onto the ground with it, which can crash onto drivers on the roadway below. In fact if the driver isn't stopped by the pole then there's also the possibility that they will continue and crash into other vehicles too, if they're approaching from a side road heading towards another side road. If they're approaching from the middle of the intersection, then the pedestrian would be injured anyway (and maybe even pinned against the pole if it didn't break away).
Breakaway infrastructure is substantially safer for drivers who hit in than a solid post or pole in the same location: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RCErGL2WIto
Any combination of events/circumstances is possible, but breakaway poles are beneficial to the driver in the most likely situation and so represent a net benefit. That's why they're very common.
I think the point of the argument is that engineers know that cars regularly drive into the area that pedestrians wait at high speed, but haven't done anything for the pedestrians, and in fact encourage them to stand in this exact spot.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
You never addressed any my points in detail.
Your points prove too much, namely that any such system should instantly become full of shell companies filing free lawsuits against their competitors. Every other country's legal system has not immediately become overwhelmed by these 0-risk lawsuits, so clearly there is something you're missing. I'm not going to address every one of infinitely many hypothetical situations. TBH, these sorts of schemes seem like they have plenty of trivial solutions which you can probably come up with if you gave it an honest thought, rather than just deciding this idea is bad and then writing any argument that supports one side.
Obviously no system is perfect, but we know for a fact that the American system is very abusable so simply saying "the other system might have this hypothetical problem" isn't convincing.
There lead isn’t even that promising. These countries have lower gdp per capita. So a lot of this is just those countries being poorer. About 70% of US gdp. After adjusting for this Germany 1.4 x US and UK/France are 2.
You can't just take random numbers and multiply them together. The ratio given was already a percent of GDP, so why is this a valid comparison?
Also an argument that is rest of the world does things in way X and US does things Y is on its face a bad argument. We are massively wealthier than those countries. Shouldn’t they consider in business doing things our way on most things.
Your post has a lot of spelling and grammar errors throughout, most of which I can still parse, but this paragraph isn't even comprehensible.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
So then is the level 3 skeptic the one who points out that the answer to the coin problem depends on your prior? The answer given, where the probability of success follows Beta(successes, trials), is more rigorously derived by taking Beta(1,1) as the prior (which is the same as the uniform distribution); see mathematical details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_succession. The upshot is that if you have seen many coins before, and they resemble the coin you have right now, then that is evidence that the probability of heads is similar to the probability of heads for those other coins, so the prior is different.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
I don't really see a better proxy for judging a sense of duty to others than blood/nobility.
I have a hard time thinking of a worse one. The history of "nobility" is largely one of forcefully looting as much wealth as possible from what are effectively slaves, held in place with military force. What was the nobility's reaction to the peasantry being able to demand higher wages after the Black Death, or move to cities for the same end? Was it to encourage this natural economic development which improved productivity even at their own cost? Of course not, they passed laws prohibiting peasants from leaving so that they could not get those higher wages.
The feeling of societal obligation you're talking about--and in particular, a feeling of societal obligation that actually helps other people and does not consider the rigid maintenance of the existing order for the sake of "stability" to be the primary obligation--is extremely rare.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
For most of that time, when people had lots of children, many of them died in said wars, famines, and plagues, or just from everyday diseases. The mother often died in or after childbirth as well.
not a single thing related to raising children should be expensive given the capabilities of modernity.
What is the saying? Consumption always expands to meet the income available? Children are just one example of this--possibly one of hte clearest examples, in fact. Obviously calories are cheap, and people are rich enough to afford much more space per person. But if you tried to raise a child like an 1800s farmer (minimal or no schooling, having them work on your farm from a young age, 12 people in a 1 room house, everyone sleeping on the floor, no electricity or running water, letting them walk to a neighbor alone, etc) you'd be locked up for child abuse (and they wouldn't be set up to do very well in the modern world).
Even if you think about these labor saving devices... many of them correspond to tasks that weren't done at all or were much easier in the past. When your house is small and 1 room, cleaning is much easier than when it's large with many rooms. A simple wood floor is easier to sweep than if you have a mix of tile, wood, carpet, etc. You don't need a dishwasher or laundry machine if you have the absolute bare minimum of dishes and clothes. Or take medicine: If the only medicine you could possibly access is what you can make from herbs, well that's certainly cheaper than buying something expensive at the pharmacy! It just might be completely useless and your child might die.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
God I seriously wish that some of these anti-car people could just spend a month actually living in the "car free" cities that they think everybody wants so they could realize how terrible it is.
A lot of them have done so, probably most notably NotJustBikes, who moved to Amsterdam.
Most of these problems seem to be unrelated to the extent to which a city is walkable. Car-dependent American cities still have homelessness, crime, and drug use, while many walkable ones in Europe or Japan have much less. Walkability does not mean doing nothing about social problems; Amsterdam did a lot of work (see section 9) to clean itself up.
This idea that "boomers like cars and ruined everything by making car centric cities" is absurd and I can only assume is parroted by people who never leave their goon caves.
This is unnecessarily rude, but also seems to neglect history. Were cities already plagued by the same issues after WW2, when the exodus to car-dependent suburbs began, and is that why people started to leave? Have the policies imposed to make cities and suburbs more amenable to cars, such as knocking down urban neighborhoods to make way for highways, or preventing any housing from being built, contributed to these social problems?
(The actual thing to object to is that boomers aren't responsible for these policies for the most part--it's actually Silent and Greatest, until more recently.)
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Travel blogger Jake Nomada affectionately refers to the “lack of common sense found in many areas throughout the region” as “the Latin Hammer.” Some examples he lists include getting stuck in traffic for hours because road workers were on a siesta break, getting scammed by landlords, and bribing narcos.
Is there anything in this section (other than time-period specific technology) that would have been out of place in the US 100 or 200 years ago? For example, the behavior of early Mormons makes it seem like skepticism and common sense literally hadn't been invented yet:
Unlike the story I've [the author] been taught in Sunday School, Priesthood, General Conferences, Seminary, EF Y, Ensigns, Church history tour, Missionary Training Center, and BYU... Joseph Smith used a rock in a hat for translating 2 the Book of Mormon. In other words, Joseph used the same magic device or “Ouija Board” that he used during his treasure hunting 3 days. He put a rock – called a “peep stone” – in his hat and put his face in the hat to tell his customers the location of buried treasure on their property. He also used this same method for translating the Book of Mormon, while the gold plates were covered, placed in another room, or even buried in the woods. The gold plates were not used for the Book of Mormon we have today.
One of the key witnesses is described as:
The following are some accounts of the superstitious side of Martin Harris: “Once while reading scripture, he reportedly mistook a candle’s sputtering as a sign that the devil desired him to stop. Another time he excitedly awoke from his sleep believing that a creature as large as a dog had been upon his chest, though a nearby associate could find nothing to confirm his fears. Several hostile and perhaps unreliable accounts told of visionary experiences with Satan and Christ, Harris once reporting that Christ had been poised on a roof beam.”
Among other fantastic claims. There's a lot of crazy stuff in that link. And this wasn't the Borderers in Appalachia--Joseph Smith's ancestors were definitely Puritan and Mormonism began in upstate New York.
Safety is expensive. Car seats, climbing harnesses, etc. If something has to be done, and you're poor, then you'll just have to do it in the unsafe way. How many Darwin Awards went to hillbillies using guns for things they shouldn't have?
Overall I don't see a good reason to believe that these are problems inherent to a particular ethnicity of people rather than contingent on education, wealth, and possibly culture.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
What trades are you talking about? What does any of this have to do with the subject at hand? I'm well aware of what utility is and the fact that people have preferences, but you haven't explained how any of it relates to roads.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I don't think you've really thought about it if you consider such a question to be obvious.
They were developed very quickly--I believe the first ones in January of 2020. They were approved "quickly" in the sense that a new medicine getting approved in less than a year would be unheard of in normal situations. They were not approved quickly in the sense that quickly by FDA standards is still glacially slow by any reasonable person standards. Also, the testing process was delayed--they were allowed to do phase 2 and phase 3 trials at the same time, IIRC, but those trials took a lot of time because most people weren't getting covid in the course of a month and you need a lot of people in the control group to get COVID in order to have enough data. This could have been worked around with challenge trials, which people even volunteered for, but we can't have that. People might get hurt!
Edit: Since I'm being sarcastic, I should say that manufacturing might have slowed down the process of getting vaccines out anyway. But even with a small number of doses you could prevent a lot of deaths by vaccinating old people and other at-risk groups, which is what we did, so I would guess challenge trials still end up saving lives on net.
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