what_a_maroon
No bio...
User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Appeasing dictators is the kind of thing that sounds good in the short-term, but can wind up being very bad later. It's also very easy to say "oh just let Hitler have Czechoslovakia" when you are British and not Czech. The strategic problem in WW2, of course, was that Hitler was never going to stop there, and letting him do what he wanted mostly just made Germany stronger. Making it easy for dictators to achieve big wins easily, just by threatening war, even encourages other dictators to threaten war and try to invade other countries. A short-term victory, but long-term loss. The humanitarian problem was that Hitler was now in charge of more people, which is obviously bad; this badness might have been more insulated from British politicians than a war involving Britain would have been, but it was still there.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
You made a big deal about the severity of the punishment. Whether his actions were justified is not dependent on whether someone died, but the level of punishment, if a crime was committed, very much does depend on whether someone died. Why did you bother to make a big deal about the size of the punishment? Either he was justified and there will be no punishment, or he wasn't and is guilty killing another person, in which case a significant punishment is clearly appropriate.
The question is whether Penny's actions in putting him in a chokehold and thereby risking Neely's death were justified, not whether Neely's death was justified.
I think this is just semantic games. We have legal standards for when civilians can use lethal force (for what I hope are obvious reasons) which amount to "it is justified to kill this person." Using lethal force does not always result in death, but death has to be a justifiable outcome in order for the use of deadly force to be legitimate.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Well, many of the stuff they champion as improving the QoL of non-cars also just happens to worsen the QoL of car users, e.g. Oxford's traffic filters plan.
If you look at the video I linked, he makes the point that requiring cars to sometimes take a slightly longer route makes it faster to drive, since some people won't drive, reducing congestion.
Ironically, sprawling suburbs often have these exact same limitations. Cul de sacs are very popular, and suburban roads are often windy rather than direct, because everyone realizes that having cars go through your neighborhood sucks--but for some reason we don't think about these forms of road design as "limiting freedom to drive" or whatever.
NJB's argument about pedestrian bridges seems to focus entirely on how they lower QoL for pedestrians, in direct contradiction to the claim that "so much effort is spent trying to reduce the quality of life of car owners, and not in improving the quality of life of non-car owners." You say this doesn't make sense, but he makes several specific arguments and you don't offer any explanation at all, you just make an assertion about his state of mind.
There might be people who hate all driving and want to ban cars, so fine, it's not a "pure strawman." I still think it's a weakman to boil all arguments in favor of urbanism down to "they just hate cars" so all arguments can be ignored.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Isn't this hellscape exactly the product of government regulation? I.e single-family zoning (with a lot of additional bizarre rules) in the US? Doesn't sound very libertarian to me... Single-family suburbs wouldn't dominate a libertarian economy even if people really wanted it.. because they are grossly economically inefficient if not net burdens and when there are no subsidies you either abandon your white picket dream or pay a hefty price for it, most won't consider it worth bearing that additional cost.
Yes, although IMO a lot of self-described libertarians seem fine with them for various reasons, mostly around the (IMO false) feeling of freedom that comes with cars.
The rest of your rant is about how the moral failings of libertarians can be disregarded based on its shoddy premise.
I don't get this claim at all.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I never heard of the law that mandates people buying a car. What is this law?
Buying a car is not literally mandated, but it's the only way to get around after zoning, parking minimums, lots of big roads with no alternative infrastructure, etc. (Actually in some cases, cars are literally the only legal way to get certain places--there's no sidewalk, bike lane, or transit, and the surrounding land is all roads or inaccessible).
Nobody ever "pays all the costs" in our society.
Whether or not this incredibly vague statement is true, it still remains that "some people find that cars have more utility than costs" doesn't mean anything. The extent to which cars are subsidized could easily vary by quite a lot. If they were subsidized less then fewer people would use them. The reverse is also true.
sprawled, low-density environments
That isn't what I said. I very specifically used some important words.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I think your post is very good. It flowed well and the order of presentation made sense to me (setting the legal context up first--it could have been shorter but I greatly appreciated the history lesson; it's funny how much understanding you can get from finding out that things used to be done very differently, or are done differently in other places).
FWIW I'm not sure that asking everyone for more explicit feedback is worthwhile. I think there are multiple comments in this thread that are really desperately scrounging for a criticism and aren't engaging in good faith. Asking them what they want is pointless, because what they really want is for their opponents to go away, but they can't really say that.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
None of this ranting repeat of what you wrote above changes the fact that you have yet to provide any actual evidence of your proposed causal process. Based on some recent discussion in the CW thread (I believe), it seems like a lot of the specific issue of "pushing people in front of trains" is schizophrenics going off their meds. Their behavior is not based on a logical reasoning process and therefore cannot be influenced by a cultural more that (allegedly) allows some people to get away with such behavior.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
certainly one that produced demonstrably better results.
Is there any evidence for this claim anywhere?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Like, going to large superspreader events before vaccines are available? What's the confusion, are you just pretending not to know how covid spreads?
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
The sidewalks are largely irrelevant, since at the time walking in the street was much more common and generally not illegal. Removing the streetcar is a substantial loss. The buildings on the left have been replaced with a parking garage, so the loss of street parking isn't very relevant either. This example is not as bad as many cities in the US, but it's certainly no improvement for pedestrians.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
It's not a perfect substitute for I-35 because it doesn't parallel it
Yes, it's not nearby for most of its length, and even the closest stops to where it crosses aren't very close to the highway (except for the very last one, I think).
2.5M, if you include the whole metro area
That definition requires you to go halfway to San Antonio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Austin
The plans I've seen are divided into an 8 mile stretch in the center of the city
It may stretch along a large distance, but it's still a small portion of the total area--or road mileage, but those are roughly proportional.
Also, if you're going to use the whole Metro area for population to split the cost of a road, you should then also use the whole metro area for the number of roads that have to be paid for.
you slog through I-35.
It will still be a slog, that's the whole point of induced demand! Those other cities, as I've pointed out in this thread, have much better loops. If your primary concern is thru traffic, then look at the loops on the edge of the city.
The expensive new lanes are slated to be HOV-only
That's an improvement; we'll see if it turns out that way.
which you might interpret as "non-car-users are heavily subsidized", to be fair
Depends on the details. Probably yes, in practice, but it is possible to have transit pay for itself--Japan, most notably, has private train lines, and NYC used to have private subways. But if you're going to subsidize one form of transportation, transit has fewer externalities and higher capacity.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Based on the descriptions I've seen, Jordan Neely was not actually behaving in any sort of violent way. That's why Hoffmeister has to resort to "statistical reality" about black people, to claim that agitated, annoying behavior can be construed as violent. This is not allowed as part of a legal argument for self-defense, with good reason, just like a woman walking alone can't turn around and shoot a man for following her on the public sidewalk and then make an argument about "statistical reality." A "good bayesian" can conclude anything they would like, given limited evidence, if their priors are sufficiently bad. This is why the law does not tell everyone to act like bayesians.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
It definitely does not match my experience that most American suburbs allow kids to bike 15 minutes to a store. Like, it might be possible but it's not particularly safe, there's not usually infrastructure for it, etc.
DC is one of the least car-dependent places in the US. According to this, it has the lowest car ownership rate outside of the NYC metro area. The White House and immediately surrounding area is very bikeable, in my experience--it's right in the middle of the city! It seems like a weird choice to focus on. What about a city like Houston, LA, or Miami?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
This seems like a pure strawman. The bulk of the urbanist content I'm aware of is focused on things like "make walking safe", "have stuff closer together", "run more frequent trains" etc. that all are based around improving the QoL for non car-users. And you even have https://youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k which is about how driving is better in the Netherlands! What, specifically, are you referring to?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
As token_progressive mentioned, there are wildly different "suburbs." Urbanist youtube channel NotJustBikes has a video praising a suburb of Toronto known as Riverdale: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&ab_channel=NotJustBikes
It differentiates between "streetcar suburbs" or similar, and "car-dependent suburbs" and explicitly states that suburbs are not inherently bad.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
How often do most people actually need that much carrying capacity at once? What's the cost of owning a car vs renting one for those specific use cases (or paying for delivery?)
"What if nobody could drive" is a weakman. Being able to drive is an increase in freedom, in this sense. Being required to drive is a reduction in freedom.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Yes, and why AM I paying for these schools when I don't even have any children?
I unironically agree so I'm not sure what your argument actually is here.
"If you can't drive, you can at least rely on other people to drive you around" is not what I would call "freedom."
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
an you point to a metropolitan area in the US that successfully implements YIMBY principles,
I'm not aware of any that do a good job over the whole metro area, no (good enough to evaluate their effects in this way, at any rate). You could probably point to individual towns or neighborhoods, but these would probably be A) subject to selection bias because they're rare, B) too few in number, and C) surrounded by other places with different policies. Not Just Bikes made a video about a streetcar suburb of Toronto which seems pretty nice, and if there are any crowds of druggies, they haven't stopped housing prices there from rising faster than in the rest of the city (because of course, such places are mostly illegal to build now, so the supply is constrained).
However, I think you've misunderstood the point of this sentence. Policies generally associated with NIMBYism are not just about keeping vagrants or other obvious problem-causers away. This is clear from looking at the policies themselves, as well as NIMBY arguments, which involve things like property values.
Here's one example: The ski resort town of Vail has been fighting to keep the ski resort of Vail from building employee housing. The reason they give is bighorn sheep range, but they've approved several regular homes to be built in the area and didn't care about any measures the resort offered to protect the sheep. And I think it's pretty clear that resort employee housing is not going to suddenly attract homeless people to one of the most expensive resort towns in the world!
Similarly with opposition to e.g. a duplex or retail or a school. A neighborhood full of million-dollar homes is not suddenly going to be crawling with hobos and criminals because someone put a duplex up going for half a million each side or a small elementary school.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I do some back of the envelope arithmetic here, based solely on example numbers involving many crimes/criminal, and get totally different results
At any point, did you google to see if there is any empirical research on what deters criminals? This is an empirical question. All you have done is model the direct effect of incarceration, without accounting for whether the threat of punishment (or the memory of past punishment) might prevent a crime from taking place to begin with. In fact, you explicitly assume these effects to be 0. If you had searched around, you might have found something like https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/670398 which summarizes a bunch of research, and which says in the first sentence of the abstract:
The evidence in support of the deterrent effect of the certainty of punishment is far more consistent than that for the severity of punishment
If you tweak the parameters of your napkin math, how much does the conclusion change? What if you assume that a criminals' chance of being caught is not independent for each crime (i.e. some criminals are better at getting caught)?
If as you say they have a "rap sheet many pages long", that means we did in fact let them off too easy the first time. How could a crime be on their rap sheet if we didn't find them earlier?
-
A rap sheet includes arrests, which doesn't mean there was enough evidence to convict. If you get arrested for 20 different crimes in 2 years, it's likely you're guilty of at least some of them, but you may not be able to be convicted of any one of them.
-
The distribution is probably similar for crimes where no arrest is made, which is most of them. Smarter serial criminals may even be able to avoid getting arrested entirely, which of course only makes it easier for them to commit even more crimes.
The paper you link is entirely unrelated to the question I'm asking, namely "how fat tailed the distribution of number of crimes per criminal?"
The thing you linked to is primarily about recidivism probability. What is its relevance in this context? And why is it evidence for your hypothesis?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
A lot of people might have been gleeful. I was not one of them; I'm asking a serious question because it seems like, potentially, a pretty big own goal to encourage your constituents to do things that are fairly risky. If a lot of people ended up with felony convictions because the Dems encouraged them to riot, for example, that would also be a pretty big own goal.
given what we no about Covid-19's lethality (or rather relative lack there of), and the long term damage done by the lockdowns.
I'm not really sure how either of these points are supposed to be relevant. For races that aren't very close it obviously doesn't matter, but it isn't hard to look up actual COVID deaths by congressional district and compare it to the margin. Saying "the lethality is low!" is completely irrelevant. And you can oppose lockdowns without telling people COVID is just the flu (which isn't even a nontrivial risk for the elderly).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
And this is where the "pretense" comes into play. If you agree to something devastating just by impulse of clicking the bright green button as opposed to hidden white button, you can pretend that the target made the choice. Like "nudging" natives to write X on some paper in exchange for some beads in order to save their immortal souls of course - as all learned people know. What a novel, Nobel prize winning idea we have here. Until you are proven otherwise by getting a bullet in your head by some outraged individual at the most extreme.
This is an utterly wild leap of logic. Is there any actual connection here? Tricking or coercing natives into signing treaties they didn't understand (or had a different conception of) is absolutely nothing like the economic idea of nudging people by having a 401k plan be opt-out.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
This is more questionable
I can only assume that you don't consider Egypt to be "Africa" if you are questioning the impressiveness of African art and architecture.
It takes a lot of organization and manpower to extract rents from the poor.
Rulers have been extracting wealth probably since rulers and concentrated societies existed. This review agrees with you that it is difficult, but it seems an exaggeration to say that Africans couldn't figure it out until the past few centuries. Unless I'm wrong, but if Africa also lacks anything worth anything worth stealing, maybe that contributes to its lack of developed nations?
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
There's not "no evidence" in the sense that you can certainly find papers claiming narcissism has decreased over time. However, you can also find ones saying that it is flat over time, or has increased over time. E.g. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_surprisingly_boring_truth_about_millennials_and_narcissism
In a foundational 2008 paper, Jean Twenge (coauthor of The Narcissism Epidemic) and her colleagues reviewed 85 studies that surveyed more than 16,000 college students between 1979 and 2006... The researchers found that college students were becoming more narcissistic—by a full 30 percent from 1982 to around 2006. UC Davis’s Kali Trzesniewski and colleagues responded in 2008... The results indicated no change in narcissism... In yet another 2008 paper, Twenge and Joshua Foster re-analyzed data... they found that narcissism rose among both whites and Asians from 2002 to 2007. But because Asians tended to have lower narcissism scores in general, and the Asian population at UC campuses increased during the time period under scrutiny, the overall trend may have been obscured. Twenge and Foster also objected to the data that Trzesniewski and her coauthors had used... Further studies in 2009 and 2010 found no rise in narcissism. But a 2010 paper by Twenge and Foster objected to their methods... “The debate on changes in narcissism [is] seemingly settled,” Twenge and Foster wrote in 2010. “Seemingly” being the keyword: In late 2017, a new study appeared in Psychological Science that called all the previous ones into question... They found a “small and continuous decline” in narcissism throughout that time period.
The actual section is several paragraphs with a lot more details, but you get the gist. It then points out that the instrument used has a constant wording, which may be interpreted differently. Other sources don't provide a single simple answer, either, such as https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191210111655.htm or https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171115-millenials-are-the-most-narcissistic-generation-not-so-fast (which I think summarizes some of the same evidence as the first article).
Crime by native whites is low
It looks low in comparison to the AA rate, but the US white-offender homicide rate is still higher than most developed European countries' total rate (and many of the poorer ones as well). Even if you assume that none of the "unknown" in the first link below are white, it's still 2.1 per 100,000. If you use the distribution of victims as an estimate (2nd link) since most murders are same-race, you get 2.5; if we assume the unknowns are distributed the same as the knowns (41% white), then we get just under 3. Countries such as Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, France, the UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands are all below 2, as well as Poland, Spain, Albania, and Croatia, among others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Vital_statistics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Maybe part of the reason the average American is obese is because they drive everywhere, and walking 30 minutes a day would have tremendous benefit.
More options
Context Copy link