what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Poorly designed transit is slow. Walking is slow when things are far apart. You can absolutely design cities so that other options are faster than driving... especially since if everyone is driving, you inevitability face heavy congestion, especially within cities. When I was in Switzerland the trains ran beautifully (even during construction) and were probably much easier than driving would have been.
Cars are useful for some things but it would be nice if I didn't have to own one just to get around town, and could get by using one rarely enough that I could make do with the various car rental apps.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Suburbs are very old, but the cities they surrounded were never rebuilt to allow the suburbanites easier access to the detriment of the city's inhabitants. Certainly the streetcar suburbs we just discussed did not do that and did not require that. Cars' mere existence are not the problem; it's enforced car dependence: Knocking down urban neighborhoods to build highways to the suburbs (which already couldn't handle all the traffic even back in the 50s), building suburbs that can literally only be accessed or traversed in a car, preventing the building of any housing other than sprawling and expensive single family homes, etc.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Pack too many people in too little space.
...this is what makes a city, a city. Are you just opposed to the existence of cities?
Cities aren't built to walking scale.
I think it's clear from the other poster's previous comments that they mean a combination of walking and transit; not that you can walk literally everywhere. No one who lives in NYC would walk all over the entire city. I think you can understand this and are trying to make gotchas rather than engage in good faith.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
This is obviously hypothetical, but I disagree. Taking a streetcar (or tram, bus, light rail, whatever) into the city, and walking to your final destination, is very different from living in a far-flung exurb that, at best, involves commuting for work (and by the 80s, often didn't even involve that much). And building such places is far less destructive to the city itself. One could argue this just subjects the middle class to the awful conditions of the cities in the 70s without any alternative; on the other hand, maybe if they stay, they vote for better crime policies, provide stabilizing social forces, don't displace lots of inner-city residents, and improve the tax base in the city. (My inner libertarian is outraged at that last one, but usually whenever the urban/suburban arguments start to happen on TheMotte, someone tells me that it's ok that car-dependent suburbs are subsidized because one function of government is to provide public goods for the benefit of all, so I figure what's good for the goose is good for the gander).
As far as I can tell, this "long-term decay" lasted a few decades and has generally been on the reverse since the 90s (in general; obviously some cities continued to decline, but e.g. NYC has had increasing population over the past few decades.)
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
You can continue to try to be overly literal for the sake of scoring fake points, or you can address the substantive argument being made. I'm not sure what you think you're accomplishing with the former.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
That would be my guess as well. In addition, these likely reflect reports rather than any sort of confirmed illness (edit: I would guess coming from https://vaers.hhs.gov/). In attempting to make its point seem stronger, in my opinion, it actually makes it weaker: how could a single vaccine (not even a new idea, just a different way of making them) causes eye injuries (something the article itself admits is unusual for a vaccine), vascular disorders, skin and tissue, ears, respiratory, breast or reproductive... the list goes on. It also is clearly doing the thing of "Big! Numbers!" by pointing to the number of different categories, even though looking at the list a "category" may be extremely specific, such as differentiating "vaccination site pain" "...swelling" "...discomfort" and then repeating them all for "vaccination site joint X".
Oh yeah, and the author is also advertising their book, which looks like a very reasonable and dispassionate review of scientific evidence.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I'm no doctor, but this claim doesn't explain anything to me. The spike protein is in COVID, that's the whole point. AFAIK COVID doesn't cause anywhere near this range of symptoms, and if it did, it would be vastly more dangerous than most vaccine skeptics seem to think. Just because something is "toxic" doesn't mean it causes literally every symptom imaginable.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
It makes sense to me that the vaccine could cause very different symptoms than COVID itself. It's not the most intuitive, but it wouldn't be the weirdest fact about biology by far. However, I'm still very skeptical that the vaccine could cause hundreds of different syndromes covering every single system in the human body. Is there any single cause that causes such a wide variety of medical symptoms?
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Intelligence is helpful, it just isn't sufficient. African kingdoms have been prosperous before (at least in a similar way to other old civilizations, which is to say, they had rich rulers and impressive art, even if the average person's life sucked). But building truly prosperous societies, in the sense of benefiting a large portion of the people, is incredibly difficult. What many African countries have now--a strong man extracting wealth from an oppressed populace--is probably closer to many ancient societies that we now glorify as being important steps on the road to civilization, than the latter are to what we have today.
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
Ok, but the Northern part of Africa is still incredibly dysfunctional and poor today, so it still seems to present a question about what makes people capable of building civilization which can't be answered by reference to inherent intelligence. I don't know enough about the ancient history of sub-Saharan Africa specifically, but I do know that Botswana has seemingly dodged most of the problems plaguing its neighbors and is substantially richer than Egypt today.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
But the ancient Arab world didn't lack large and rich cities, centralized empires, writing, art, mathematics, etc. either. Even today some Arab countries have most of those things; yes, it's unsustainable decadence due to oil rather than true economic development, but they still managed to maintain a reasonably stable government, something resembling property rights, etc.
Actually, Arabs are Semitic, so yes the current inhabitants of North Africa are not directly descended from pharaohs or Carthaginians, but they aren't that distantly related either.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Income isn't just skewed, it has a very long tail. Many variables have much more compact distributions. Happiness doesn't have natural units and could be distributed however you want depending on how you measure it, although it would be weird to me if the range of feelings human brains were capable of expressing spanned such a wide distribution (also something something CLT handwaving arguments, emotions are the sum of many small features).
1 SD can be a substantial impact, but if the result above is correct, it would be very difficult to obtain by increasing one's income from typical means (promotion, career change, getting an advanced degree, etc).
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
To go from median to +1SD requires that you jump past 34% of the population, no matter how compact or spread the variable is
I'm pretty sure this is not correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule only applies to the normal distribution and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality gives no minimum at all for the portion of the distribution within 1 SD. And of course, this is all assuming that the standard deviation is even finite, which it may not be.
inherently by talking in standard deviations, we are talking in ordinal terms not absolute terms.
I don't follow. Ordinal data can't have a SD, since it by definition corresponds to an ordering or categorization of data, without meaningful numeric values assigned.
Yes, which is mostly a remark on just how huge 1 SD is
But 1 SD income seems like a lot, while 1 SD of height (about 2.5 inches) seems like it's not a lot. I don't think it's meaningful to talk about 1 SD being intuitively big or small since it depends on the variable in question.
Those things aren't typically enough to move you up by 1 SD of income. So even postulating a perfect correlation between the two you wouldn't expect a sub-1-SD rise in income to yield a 1SD+ rise in happiness.
That's fair (although the correlation isn't even defined if income has infinite variance).
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
The obvious counter-argument to me is that the trend of sprawling, samey, car-dependent, SFH-only suburbs started in the 40s and 50s, when crime was generally at a low and prior to the riots mentioned by Kulak. The crime wave may have accelerated this trend, but it didn't start it.
The planners who built these places also had no issue planning and building similar developments for blacks, though they were separated because those people believed it was just the natural order of things for races to be separate, not that blacks were inherently incapable of civilization.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
The Amish strike a different balance between 1800s living and modern living. They do fine, although they also give up a lot of modern amenities that many people don't want to live without. These things cost money, but trying to compare the cost directly to the past is pointless because they didn't exist at all.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
The website seems to have eaten my comment, so I'm going to be lazy and summarize a bit. Feel free to ask for more details.
Yes, for all of these categories, you could consume them at an 1800 level for relatively cheap (I could pedantically debate this, but I won't because I don't think the overall point is affected). However, we consume vastly more per person. We use more energy per person, for controlling the temperature of our buildings, for transportation, for shipping goods all over the world. We have more advanced medicine. Yes, some additional cost is artificial, but some of it is because people want things that didn't exist in 1800. Building the same building now is probably easier than in 1800, but we're not talking about that, we're talking about replacing a one-room log-and-thatch cabin with a multi-story structure with many rooms, electric wiring, plumbing, glass windows, etc.
And, even if it were legal to raise a child in 1800s conditions, most people would freely choose not to, I think. Of course, there's also no need to have 12 kids, since survival rates have improved (one of the effects of consuming more per child!). Overall, I don't think there's any confusion as to what people mean when they say that kids are expensive, or why this is the case.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
The central point of my argument is that these additional costs are massive, mind-boggling, enormous
Sure, but I think even in the hyper-competitive world you describe, raising each child would still be much more expensive than it was in the 1800s. I suspect that if you freed up that income, most people would default to using it on more consumption for themself and their few children, rather than having many children.
It's a pity that the verbose version of your comment got lost because I think this difference in worldviews can be only productively discussed in details, diving deep into a particular industry, dissecting it's practices, costs, regulations, etc.
I can recreate most of what I had, I just don't know if it answers your particular questions:
electricity
Energy is very cheap, and we consume a lot more of it. Do you want to drive your kids to school, activities, a friend's house? Do you want goods from all over the world shipped to your local stores? Do you want heating, cooling, electricity, hot and cold water running water on demand? It could be even cheaper, yes, but would that result in people having more kids, or using more energy on what they already have?
medicine
Yes, many aspects of medicine are cheap, and the industry as a whole is massively regulated with tons of waste and bullshit. But A) most of the expensive things are still things that people want, even if the marginal value per dollar is less than the basics (medicine is probably a luxury good, and B) I once again suspect that additional income would mostly not go toward having more children.
running water
Did the Romans have hot and cold running water, under pressure, in every house and apartment?
Now to the rest of this comment:
These things aren't that hard, I could literally do most of them on my own..
You may have these skills, but most people don't, and in any event doing them for an entire house is time consuming.
Probably the hardest part is to build the structure itself, but it is my understanding that the modern tech allows to do that really fast and cheap too... especially if you design a building once and mass produce it.
Sure, and many of the early Levittown suburbs were built this way, effectively on a production line. Why did we stop doing it? I would guess because once people could afford it, they wanted homes that were more custom, although I have no data here. Home construction is labor-intensive and thus subject to Baumol's cost disease.
The fact that a so-called "middle class" man often needs to work several years to buy a property that's barely suitable for a family with e.g. 3 children, is obscene by itself. On the other hand the construction industry is regulated to hell and back, not to mention their suppliers, which is the one and only real cause of high housing costs.
I agree that this situation is obscene, but it is absolutely not the only cause, unless you are including all of the restrictions on what you can build where (zoning, environmental review, parking minimums, etc.)
Why didn't they choose that back then, in such case?
I have no idea what you're asking. In 1800 most people had no choice.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Why would it be much more expensive, or indeed more expensive at all, if every single thing a child needs can be done both massively cheaper and better in modern times?
I feel like I've already expressed my answer to this question: Because of a combination of wanting to advantage their children (which in the modern world means substantial education among other things), preferring high consumption to themselves and a small number of children to having more children, and of the existence of many things which people want (or at least, are willing to buy/do) that didn't exist in 1800.
Kulak has already prescribed a medicine.
Well that's a fairly horrifying way of thinking
If energy is cheap then how come they have an "energy crisis" in Germany (a supposedly first world rich country)?
Cheap is relative. What did energy cost in 1800? What did it cost compared to the median salary? The median German is still going to consume vastly more energy in total this year than his great-great-great-grandfather did in his whole life. In any event, Germany right now is clearly an outlier both compared to other developed regions and compared to its own recent history.
you get the idea. It's not just your 100$ monthly electricity bill.
Yes, I'm well aware, and this is my point. Total energy consumption has vastly increased. We could choose not to travel outside walking distance, but people like the ability to quickly and conveniently travel, provided by trains, planes, cars, etc. We could choose to sit in the dark after sunset, but people like having lights. We could choose to only buy goods from the immediate vicinity of where we live, but we like that we can buy a computer from Korea, get fresh fruit from South America in winter. And we like to provide all of these same things to our children.
They provided water to public bath, fountains, and to private houses whose owners paid for that service, yes. Sure that may be far from every house, but remember that the tools and knowledge the Romans had, were laughably inferior to what we have now.
So every home in the US today, except maybe the very poorest, has what only rich Romans did. Tools and knowledge makes this possible, but it doesn't make it free.
Thus I find your assumption hard to accept, especially so without evidence.
As I said, this is a guess. There's probably multiple reasons. Many houses pre-date the aforementioned process, and it is not cheaper to demolish and rebuild them. Maybe the production lines are not viable in areas that are too spread out, or have varying/hilly geography or other physical complications, and we've already exhausted locations that are amenable. Maybe they're in more use than I think they are (although I suspect that plenty of people are willing to overpay for their "dream home").
"Cost disease" is just another way of saying "bureaucratic overhead in adjacent industries".
No, these are different. The latter increases costs as well, but Baumol's cost disease is simply the observation that if the productivity in some industries increases, then prices will increase in industries that don't see the productivity increase (or see less of one). The textbook example is a live band, which requires the exact same number of people for the same time to play one concert as in 1800, but the salary for musicians has to increase or no one will be a musician when being an unskilled laborer suddenly gets you 10x the income.
I am deeply convinced that this is the only real cause. Prove me wrong.
It sounds like we don't disagree that much here. I think there is a case to be made that there are financial and/or cultural, although the ways these manifest is often as supply regulations (e.g. local zoning gets imposed because existing homeowners want to make more of a return).
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
The moment you no longer have free trade with the entire US (and its trading partners) you find that what you thought was your strong economy was actually one cog in a giant machine that no longer has a reason to exist. The UT system? No longer attracting talent from around the world or students from other states. Those big tech offices that have been popping up all over Austin? They're all out. The energy industry in Houston? Some presence will remain but they know they're not hiring Americans from other states if it requires them moving to a new country. All those farmers and ranchers in the Western and Northern parts of the state? Now might have to pay extra to ship their goods to Colorado, New Mexico, etc.
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
10mo ago
The "spirit of this place" (as well as the written rules) require the previous commenter to be clear about what they mean in the first place.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Now sure, normal people with normal social skills could figure this out.
I'm no lawyer, but is this the point of the "objective person" standard which is common across many issues in law? A very wide range of behaviors could effectively become legalized if you can just say "I didn't know/couldn't tell that what I was doing was bad" and the prosecution would somehow have to prove you knew it was bad? (While trying to find an answer to this question, I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person#Mentally_ill, which says "The reasonable person standard makes no allowance for the mentally ill."
(For what it's worth, I agree that it seems fairly weak to convict someone of a crime when the most explicit message they were given is being unable to see the profile and when they did nothing beyond send facebook messages.)
If the street cars are gone (and not replaced with some other transit) it's not really a streetcar suburb anymore.
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