what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Although taken for granted by millions of Americans, the choice to obtain a college degree mystifies economists
Wait, what? Most economists are firm believers in the benefits of college. Even Bryan Caplan agrees that lots of people face a pretty good individual ROI on college. It's definitely not a slam dunk for everyone once you account for the cost, risk of not finishing, opportunity cost, etc. But if anything, most economists are biased towards "more college."
For the bubble to burst would require that one of these fail. Somehow employers would have to realize that they are vastly overpaying. But given how obsessed companies are with profits, makes this even less likely.
Speaking of Caplan, he spends a substantial amount of time in The Case Against Education arguing against arguments like this. Companies do face principal-agent problems, and a manager who knows you might develop some sort of personal attachment. Firing someone because you realized they're not as productive as you first though seems very rare. Firings are mostly for egregious behavior (not working at all, harassment, theft, etc) or because a whole team or division is the victim of higher-level, strategic issues. Also, college need not be a perfect signal to be useful. If getting a more precise signal would be more costly than what it saves in costs, then it still makes sense to have degree requirements. If most of the people who would pass your interview have degrees anyway, then using the degree filter mostly saves you time. Missing out on a potentially good employee is probably less costly than hiring someone mediocre (see above discussion of firing).
It seems obvious to me that the college wage premium has to top out somewhere: Companies can't pay infinite amounts of money for a degree. However, even once we we get there, that doesn't mean the bubble will pop.
Hence it’s not surprising that most good-paying jobs have not embraced certificates or other alternatives.
Again, Caplan also discusses this. He claims it's worse: Employers are looking for conformity, which by definition can't be signaled by something new and innovative.
I do think that making college degrees protected like other things (so you have to proactively show it's relevant) could help, but the big thing is student loan reform. Make them dischargeable in bankruptcy and don't subsidize them. Then private lenders will have to actually evaluate which students are likely to graduate college and get a good enough job to justify the loan, and colleges will have to care about that stuff as well.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
On the other hand, Indian law protects muslims with rights that exceed those of the resident majority hindus. The percentage of muslims in India keeps rising and even the idea of equal-laws-for-all (uniform civil code, equal regulation of all religious institutions) are abandoned by both the Congress and the so-called-fascist BJP.
Somehow, lobbying for issues of muslim concern is not considered Islamist, but lobbying for hindu concerns is actively considered far-right-hindu-extremist.
This paper points out that most of the Indian elite have been educated in Anglosphere (American and British) universities. And these ideas that you mention sound suspiciously familiar to the social justice ideas, common in those universities, that the majority (White in the West) is the oppressor and it is good to advocate for the minority or encourage them to operate as a cohesive group, but fascism to do the same for the majority. It sounds like the same principle is just being applied to Hindus and Muslims.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Do you know why investors are requiring parking? Are they assuming it's required to have some in order to be successful? Is it to avoid future backlash if street parking becomes an issue? Did any of them say they won't require parking at all?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I think the reaction to these events demonstrates it's clearly not socially acceptable. Even under the highly individualistic, "WEIRD" morality (in Jonathan Haidt's terms) both cheating at a competition and cheating on your spouse are wrong.
If anything, I would suggest that these things are actually more likely to generate condemnation than in the past. Sports and other competitions have a long history of cheating scandals, from the Black Sox to Congressional baseball steroid use hearings to the early days of Magic: The Gathering when effectively the only rule was "if you got away with it, it wasn't cheating" to the 1904 Olympic marathon, one of the most bizarre competitions in sports history, in which the original winner was disqualified for cheating and the eventual winner should have been, given that he didn't complete the race under his own power.
The other kind of cheating was also quite common, at least among nobility and rulers. TBH, it's unclear if many civilizations even had the idea that monogamy applied to rulers, but even if it in theory was supposed to, for example after the Christianization of Europe, it doesn't seem to have impacted their ability to rule (well, social condemnation didn't matter; the practicalities of having many competing possible heirs is another story). For example, William IV of Great Britain had 10 illegitimate children in the early 1800s, and as far as I can tell, history is full of kings and emperors with mistresses, concubines, and lovers from the Andes to China to the Mediterranean. Probably the average person was subject to stricter monogamy norms.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I just had a conversation like this with a friend. She was convinced the city she's lived in for years was 90% white. Spoiler: It was less than half (non-Hispanic) white. I think she was used to being in Southern cities which are plurality black, but still; that is an impressive amount to be wrong by.
how is it that in a community that has been self-enclosed for thousands of years only two people are black?
Wheel of Time did this as well. Two Rivers is an isolated farming village surrounded by mountains, several days away from even a moderately sized trading down. But some of the main characters are white (Rand, Mat), some are mixed (unsure, but Perrin is from the UK so I'm guessing white and black) and others indigenous Australian/New Zealander (Egwene and I believe Nynaeve). They also made Lan Asian, which works well IMO except he's supposed to be 6'5" but is shorter than literally everyone else.
For some characters it probably doesn't matter, but throughout the books characters' appearance indicates where they're from (the main region where most of the book series takes place, nicknamed "Randland" by readers, is roughly the size of the US and has everything from lily-white to extremely dark-skinned character, but each country has very distinct appearances and accents). In addition, Rand's appearance is totally central to the entire plot and if the Aiel don't have a consistent appearance, then lots of things don't make sense. But they've already changed the story by quite a lot, so I maybe it won't end up mattering.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Find a thing you want to eliminate (single family homes, meat, cars), attribute everything bad in the world to it (climate change, cancer, inequality, racism, etc), and then work make those things worse (endless bureaucracy and permitting, dysfunctional layouts, taxes) so that eliminating it looks like a viable option.
I find this kind of a bizarre position to hold, because several of the alleged (and, in my opinion, quite possibly real) downsides of all of the 3 things you mention are the exact thing you claim are trying to be achieved.
Car-dependent sprawl and single-family-only zoning means nobody walks or bikes, which causes obesity. It also makes children less independent and capable, both physically and emotionally/psychologically. If someone is trying to make you more dependent on the government and less capable of being independent, then getting you away from a sprawling suburb is mostly counterproductive. Meat is more debatable, but meat with a high fat content is probably not great for you and at the very least we could use fewer agricultural subsidies. Moreover, getting completely rid of cars and single family homes is a weakman of most urbanists; to the extent that anyone is trying to achieve that, they're about as close as conservatives are to taking over academia. Right now, the overwhelming majority of bureaucracy, permitting, and taxes is applied to everything except single family homes and car infrastructure.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I've found single-family zones to be much more active.
I can't speak to your experience, but I think the available evidence says that people are generally more active in walkable places. e.g. https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/activity-inequality-nature17.pdf
See also this video more generally.
But people feel less and less safe in high density urban environments.
Being near other people makes things safer. Think about an empty parking lot compared to a town square full of people. Which is safer? Urban environments only feel unsafe to walk in when everyone except the poor and homeless are in cars.
I wouldn't ever consider someone who grew up in a city to be more independent or capable. My experience has been the opposite; people in cities are highly dependent on others, and far less capable. They have to rely on others, because they have less experience having to depend on themselves.
Again, I can't speak to your experience; perhaps we're using different definitions of "independent." In my experience, there are a lot of these people, who now live in the city as a young adult, but grew up in suburbs.
Being able to walk to school is one of the best things for children's independence and growth; see e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494402902434 or https://www.utoronto.ca/news/why-walking-school-better-driving-your-kids. And as one would expect, walking to school is correlated with living near school and low car traffic.
But those living with yards can be independent by growing their own food.
Ok, but what portion of them actually do this? It seems like you're using notions of independence that most people don't actually experience or engage in, regardless of whether they theoretically could or not. I grew up in the suburbs and I doubt anyone in my neighborhood could grow more food than a handful of tomato plants. Not one of them would survive a zombie apocalypse; to the extent they had extra space for storing things, it went to holding the kid's car, or a lawn mower, or useless old crap, not canned food and jugs of water (and I'm not sure anyone other than our family had ever even fired a gun).
The notion of independence I'm thinking of is making people capable of making their own decisions, evaluating and dealing with risks, handling disagreement, controlling their emotions, etc. But mostly in the context of every day life; I think a lack of independence in this sense is largely at the root of recent spikes in childhood depression and anxiety, in anti-free-speech behavior, in refusal to engage with the outgroup, etc. Being driven everywhere until you're 16 and not being allowed out on your own prevent children from developing these skills.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
FWIW, I was glad when an apartment building started going up near the place I owned in my previous city.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
[citation needed]
That's not a citation, you have to be more specific, like providing a link to a paper or report and, if it's long, preferably quoting the relevant section. For example, the first citation I found while googling was this paper, which says, under "Adverse Events":
Two BNT162b2 recipients died (one from arteriosclerosis, one from cardiac arrest), as did four placebo recipients (two from unknown causes, one from hemorrhagic stroke, and one from myocardial infarction)
So I would conclude that your claim is simply wrong until you provide actual evidence.
edit: someone linked numbers above. 15 vs 14 deaths out of a population of almost 22,000 in each group is obviously noise. You cannot consider a "primary end point" which you do not have the statistical power to measure.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
You're just blanket assuming one side in a generic conflict is in the right.
Well, rampant NIMBYism results in enormous transfers of wealth based merely on who got into an area first (primarily a function of age), massively infringes on private property rights, tremendously stifles any sort of economic development or indeed change of any kind, results in huge negative-sum costs paying lawyers, grants lots of power to the kind of sociopathic busybodies who want to control everything around them, makes moving into economically dynamic cities infeasible for the kind of young workers that they need, cripples economic mobility, and generally enshrines into law the kind of development and transportation (sprawl and cars, respectively) with by far the largest externalities and costs (people dying in car crashes and car/bike or car/pedestrian collisions, pollution, noise, congestion, etc.)
In this silly scenario you've concocted to try to prove your point, the first guy is the NIMBY, the established interest with existing skin in the game, who doesn't want to lose sunk costs for existing benefits to some second person whose main justification is "but it would be good for me".
Have you heard of a thing called "property rights"? The NIMBYs are the second guy, they just already took the donkey and the YIMBYs would like it back.
it's still valid to not want to eat the costs of externalities for things that benefit other people.
NIMBYs are already capturing massive positive externalities due to the increase in the value of their land because other people made their city desirable to live in. To then act like a victim because your house will be slightly shaded by a small apartment block is reminiscent of the story that defines the word chutzpah.
But since you're opposed to externalities, you must also be on board with efforts to ban cars from the city? After all, why should pedestrians and cyclists eat the cost of the noise, danger, and pollution caused entirely for the benefit of drivers?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
That's not a transfer of wealth, that's just the existence of wealth. Your take here is just reversing causality; NIMBYs want the status quo, YIMBYs are the ones who want a transfer of wealth (to themselves).
NIMBY policies allow the people who happened to live in an area extract massive economic rent--pretty much unbounded rent, in fact, for doing absolutely nothing. Actually, it's worse than that. It's even worse than merely speculating on land you bought, because at least a pure land speculator doesn't actively screw over all of the economic development on surrounding land for their own benefit.
Property rights are literally the basis of NIMBY arguments.
What conception of property rights means that your neighbors have arbitrary authority to determine what you can build on your land? That's the opposite of property rights.
And note how you acknowledge that point about the status quo versus change?
What does the status quo matter here? Are you confusing it with property rights? Are we supposed to assume that the current state is just always good or something equally nonsensical?
You don't get to just assume that the change you want is a good thing, and you don't get to just handwave away the costs you dump onto others in the process. Maybe it is! Maybe the utilitarian calculation comes down on the YIMBY side! But don't act like this is altruism instead of competing interest groups fighting over their own benefits.
I gave a bunch of reasons why YIMBYism is beneficial, and is beneficial to many people who are not involved in these political fights.
Do you know what property rights are?
Yes, but apparently you don't, since you think owning property actually means everyone else can ban you from building a second house on it or whatever.
See, this is the kind of absurd rhetoric that makes it clear you're not even trying to reason, just doing a tribalism. NIMBYs are the people who are already there, dude. They're the ones who made the area desirable and full of positive externalities. YIMBYs are the ones who want to eat that for their own benefit.
Interesting attempting at projection, but no, merely living in a place does not mean you contributed to making it desirable. Places like the Bay Area generate a tremendous amount of wealth because of the efforts of tech workers, founders, and funders, not random suburbanites who happened to move there in the 1960s. And even with pro-development policies, those people would still see substantial returns on merely owning a house, which is not actually normal. It just wouldn't be the case that they can capture huge amounts of it.
Cars are incredibly useful
So are apartment buildings, they just don't kill 30,000 people a year (40,000 during covid). But thank you for making it clear that you are just in it for naked self-interest, with 0 regard for anyone else, which is why you are forced to resort to shitty projection to make everyone else seem as narcissistic as you and justify controlling what other people do with their own land.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I was accused of "LARPing as an economist" and "pulling these numbers out of my ass", so I thought I'd post them here for the Motte to give me a more rigorous examination.
If true, that still only makes you like most redditors. On a legitimate econ sub (and I'm really only thinking of Badeconomics here) you would probably at least get people giving you some counterarguments if you posted something with this much effort. You might be overconfident but there's nothing wildly wrong at my initial read.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I don't think any amount of statistics would allow for fraud on that scale. At that point, you're either throwing out data as it's being collected, or completely fabricating it when you go to do the analysis.
Economists think about this all the time--see, for example, this video from David Friedman, but it's also one of the first things that are discussed in introductory Econ right after the perfect competition model. But I don't think this post does a great job of identifying such cases; the video I linked has what I consider to be better examples.
How much I'm having a hard time finding evidence on; maybe because it's unpopular to be seen as an apologist for alchohol consumption.
For the most part, it's up to each person to determine if the benefits outweigh the costs. Most people can determine how much they like drinking; an estimate of other people's preferences won't help you much. But... what does this have to do with diffusion? Generally, each person experiences the costs and benefits of their own drinking. If anything, the cost of drinking is more diffuse, since health care costs are often socialized even in the US, so non-drinkers will pay for drinkers' drinking-related health care.
Induced demand: Among urbanists and YIMBYs, the concept of induced demand is often used to argue against increased road capacity. If people just drive more when new roads are added, what's the point? As /u/freet0 notes, of course there is value in driving beyond just driving fast. You actually get places! The fact that people drive more when there are more roads indicates that there were places that weren't worth driving to before, but now they are. Those roads opened up access to useful places to go2.
Again, I'm confused as to what this has to do with your general thesis. Generally, both the benefits and the costs of more road space are relatively diffuse, at least in North America, since most people drive most of the time (edit: this depends on the road/project; for one road serving one area, what I said is wrong. For expanding many roads serving many areas, it's more correct, although there still will probably be some agents with more or less benefit and cost). If anything, since many more people drive than bike, the costs are concentrated and the benefits are spread around (sanity check: if the benefits were concentrated, it would be easy to privately fund roads; this almost never happens).
(On a side note, IMO, this is a strawman of why urbanists care about ID. "Reducing traffic" is an explicitly stated goal of a lot of road construction and urban and suburban design, so the fact that congestion isn't actually reduced is an important counterargument. Moreover, the fact that people want to go places but currently can't is not an argument in favor of building more roads: It is impossible to build enough roads to not have consistent congestion in any reasonably populated area. You can certainly reframe ID as "lots of people want to go places but the current infrastructure doesn't allow it" but all this tells you is that roads are an inefficient use of space in populated areas).
And yet people continue to support suburban zoning restrictions in their voting choices. There is a cost that proponents of development and public transit (basically, of making it easy for poor people to get around) are missing though: poor people are bad (on average) to be around
I can't tell what this has to do with costs or benefits being diffuse at all. It sounds like you're just dropping an argument for zoning into the post at random. A zoning law has a very clear, concentrated cost (someone who would like to build a different type of housing unit on their land) with diffuse benefits (spread across all of their neighbors). (edit for clarity: Zoning, like many policies, can have both concentrated and diffuse costs and benefits. I was trying to get at the point that there's nothing particularly concentrated or diffuse about the particular argument you mentioned).
Where I live, the city has been building "road diets", where general traffic lanes are removed in favor of bike lanes and center turn lanes. This reduces collisions, especially with pedestrians, at the expense of making every single trip longer for everybody in a car. I did the math, and the reduction in trip times for my family's typical commute (2 minutes) is almost exactly the same as the expected loss in life-minutes from all the risk due to riding in a vehicle (1.46 deaths/100m miles, times ~5 miles, is 1.92 minutes).
First, I think your math is wildly off. 1.46 looks to be roughly the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, while 5 miles is, presumably, the distance of one commute. So 1.92 minutes is the risk due to your car making 1 commute, which means that these values are actually extremely similar.
But also, where are these numbers coming from? If people are biking or walking instead of driving, then congestion will go down and you won't take more time (certainly the converse, where adding road capacity does not reduce congestion, has been consistently observed--see the ID argument just above; you don't seem to dispute that ID occurs, simply how to interpret it).
That estimate of vehicle risk is probably way off, though, since these are city streets at speeds where vehicle passengers are in no danger.
I really want to emphasize this point, though. By driving, you expose other people to danger while slightly reducing your own exposure to danger and increasing your convenience. This is a highly negative externality and deserves to be heavily "taxed" to discourage it, or you should be forced to negotiate. If the math does work out as you claim, it should cost an absolutely trivial amount for you alone to pay off all of the cyclists and pedestrians in the city to keep the roads.
Also, from a more dry utilitarian point of view, expected amount of time is not the only relevant variable. A small risk of dying increases the variance a lot, and is something that people definitely care about. In this case, downweighting the diffuse costs is entirely appropriate.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
That seems dubious to me. What portion of most people's drinking involves getting that drunk? We have a lot of mechanisms for signaling and trust; large amounts of alcohol consumption as a way to demonstrate trust seems likely to be limited to frats, gangs, and similar groups.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Only ones to drink together? Of course not. Only ones to drink together enough to get drunk, often enough for it to be a significant contributor to trust? Could be. I've been in a lot of contexts where people get drunk (including sports and theater) and can't say trust ever seemed to come from drinking. It came from working together. If anything, excessive drunkenness was associated with less trust ("do they have enough self-control to help the group succeed?", "they did something inappropriate while drunk").
I'm not biased against alcohol. I drink and have gotten drunk. Making such an accusation is a waste of space, and I may as well just accuse you of being biased towards alcohol. Does doing so further the discussion in any way?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
One of the causes of market failures is diffuse costs or diffuse benefits. Some examples in the video include tariffs and drug regulation.
The specific examples are just examples of the "missing" costs and I wasn't trying to do a full accounting of all the costs/benefits in each example... I will state that in a full cost-benefit accounting, the road diet might make sense. No one did that analysis though; it was all one-sided statistics and aesthetic judgments.
There are theoretically infinitely many costs and benefits to any policy (or if not, far more than could be feasibly thought of and estimated, especially once you start taking into account 2nd order effects, or 3rd order effects, etc). I don't think the process of choosing what to ignore is really related to whether the costs and benefits are diffuse or not, except to the extent that diffuse costs and benefits may be harder to see. For the most part, I think whether someone thinks of a diffuse cost or benefit is, like most other arguments, related to their bias or personal experience rather than anything else. Like with the travel time example, both of the things you mention are somewhat diffuse (exactly how diffuse depending on how many people cycle or walk vs driving, which depends on the policy itself, which makes it even more complicated). Someone advocating for reducing traffic volume is probably going to focus on cyclist and pedestrian deaths because (depending on how charitable we're being) deaths are more important than commute time and/or they have ideological preferences for bikes over cars.
If you want to say an argument is being unfairly ignored, I think you do have to show that it is at least plausibly of the correct scale to be relevant.
I used expected life-years lost for driving 5 miles, which is approximately 1.46/100m * (5 miles) * (50 years of life left), which multiplies to about 2 minutes.
Ok, but then I think your interpretation is off: Both numbers apply to 1 single trip. Every other person who does the same drive will face the same delay and also increase risk by the same amount (glossing over any issues with induced demand, assuming marginal = average, etc).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Yes, I assumed more than 3-4. That isn't a lot for people who consistently have several drinks at once.
Personally, at 3-4 drinks I certainly will say things I wouldn't be willing to say when sober. Does this reflect increased honesty? Is inhibition due to consideration of social rules dishonest? This seems like a philosophical question; I like to think that who I am sober, including the System 2 considerations, is a more useful picture of "who I am" than drunk-me saying the first thing that comes to mind, like how my choice of hobbies is more reflective of who I am than my reaction to jump scares.
If specifically you mean "are people more willing to say thing they think are true but unpopular" that might be true at 3-4 drinks, but I've been in a lot of situations where people drink that much and it doesn't seem like they say things they wouldn't say normally. Like, I'm more likely to ask someone out, maybe do Karaoke. In my experience I'm not any more likely to say controversial things. It might theoretically have this effect, but as I've said all of the groups I've been in seemed to build trust primarily in other ways.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Yep, congestion pricing plus non-driving alternatives is the correct solution to traffic, not building endless roads.
Interestingly, in cities with successful, widely-used public transport (which includes all European and 1st-world Asian capitals), you see induced demand effects on public transport as well. For whatever reason, the anti-transit-funding libertarian crowd don't normally raise the induced demand objection, and when they do the "unsuppressing suppressed demand is good" response normally is raised, loudly. Whether the transit case is really different depends on what you think about the social costs of overcrowding on roads vs. transit - it feels different because overcrowded tube trains get you where you are going roughly on time, but overcrowded roads cause severe delays.
There's a great youtube video on ID applied to transit: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8wlld3Z9wRc&ab_channel=OhTheUrbanity%21
They make similar points. In particular, it's much easier to both increase capacity (increase frequency of trains, signal priority, etc. which also improves the experience of riding rather than worsening it) and apply congestion pricing (since they already have ticketing systems). It also has a lot fewer externalities, and in the case of walking and cycling, has positive knock-on effects (people getting more exercise).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
AI is pretty much only going to harm visual artists. It's not going to "help them make better art", it's going to replace them, because people used to need artists to draw X and now they don't. One guy might get a productivity boost from using AI, but that's not going to do much for the other 10 people who got laid off.
That sounds like how every advance in technology works. 200 years ago 90% of the population worked in agriculture, now it's 1% (in industrialized countries), but we produce more food because of fertilizer, tractors, etc. What used to be a factory worker screwing a car together is now a factory worker monitoring a robot.
But, you forget that there's some demand effect: If the price of art goes down, more people will buy art. A lot of "putting art in your home" is actually "choosing from what's available." If there's near-infinite AI generated art, then this problem becomes harder, and the best examples of art and text still come from generating a bunch of options and choosing the best.
It may be the case that a lot of "artists" find themselves experts in less "create new art" than "combine creating new art with AI tools and helping people select something that they like and fits in their space." Even providing a good prompt is probably a difficult skill.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
That seems like a highly uncharitable description of nudging. The whole point of them is to preserve choice for anyone who actually cares. But in many cases most people either don't seem to care, or don't know about the decision they're trying to make, and therefore just stick with the default. Knowing this, it is inescapable that whoever is providing the choice (a company offering a 401k, the government asking if you want to be an organ donor, etc.) is creating quite a large impact on the outcome simply by the way in which choices are presented. There is no "neutral" way of doing it for most people.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify? What CW issues feels like molten hot war to the hilt, where your instincts fight to throw aside all reason and charity? Any thoughts about why?
Maybe not super popular here, but NIMBYism. IMO, the level of entitlement of certain suburbanites rivals that of woke college students. You don't have the right to arbitrarily control land you don't own. You don't have a right to consistent and large increases in property value. You had kids and now people need somewhere to live. Your neighborhood is not "full" it has fewer people than it did 50 years ago. Your car creates tremendous costs on other people that you don't even acknowledge, and your way of life is incredibly subsidized. You don't want the gas tax to go up, even though that was originally how the federal government was supposed to pay for those highways you need. You do everything possible to reduce traffic in your own neighborhood while driving to everywhere else and objecting to anyone else who doesn't want you to drive in their neighborhood.
Environmental review gets used as a bludgeon to stop anything that might help the environment, or is applied wildly inconsistently. Half the land area of downtowns, the most valuable space in the country, is devoted to highways and parking lots. We can find money and space to make 6 lines of roads for only cars, but bikes get to stay in an 18-inch space between stripes of paint which oh by the way regularly crosses over turn lanes or is next to the line of cars whose drivers will door you without a second thought. Our engineers design infrastructure that is simultaneously something cars are expected to hit, and pedestrians are supposed to stand next to.
Why we ever let this sort of thing become normalized is beyond me.
Also, opposition to nuclear. We might never have heard the phrase "global warming" if "environmentalists" hadn't thrown a fit in the 70s.
In my opinion, nothing (and it's not limited to conservatives either--I'm libertarian and it looks to me like Rittenhouse was fairly clearly acting in self-defense). Self-defense is a basic human right. But even basic human rights are politically charged these days. While I don't think I can steel-man the case that Rittenhouse was definitely guilty of murder, let me offer a few observations:
From the liberal point of view, carrying a gun is itself an aggressive act. There was a lot of this at the time, people desperately trying to make legal (or debatably technically illegal, but not in a way that is relevant to self defense) open carry into a provocation. This is one of those things that is just invented and has no basis in law.
2 of the people Rittenhouse shot were not carrying guns. If you are not familiar with guns except from movies and think of a gun as a magical death machine that mows down all opposition no matter what, and don't realize the damage that a blow to the head with a skateboard (or being jumped on while on the ground) can do, then using a firearm in such a situation is a substantial escalation. I think this is mostly a factual mistake, supplemented by tribally targeted sympathy. Relatedly...
There was probably a lot of tribalism. AFAIK, no one who thought Rittenhouse was guilty also thought that the McMichaels engaged in reasonable self-defense against Ahmaud Arbery, even though in my opinion Arbery and Rittenhouse were in fairly similar circumstances. Again, much was made of Rittenhouses's alleged connections to "militia groups" and his alleged political opinions were supposed to be evidence that he went looking for protesters to shoot. So they assumed, based on those things, that he was more likely to be the aggressor.
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