what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
They are not remotely the same.
The whole point of a nudge is to be small, and for there to be a legitimate choice. If you actually care about your 401k or organ donation, you absolutely can decide. By revealed preference, most people either don't care, or don't know anything about it. The alternative is plainly there, most people just don't bother. A treaty for large amounts of land, probably with each side operating under a different legal framework (not that anyone in history bothered to keep treaties), by people who would take the land by force anyway, is just not even remotely comparable. If you can't see there's a difference between nudges and "lie through your teeth and murder anyone who disagrees" then I don't know what to tell you.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
This is the US, though I believe that Canada and Australia tend to have similar policies.
You can't simultaneously assert the right of one urban demographic to burn down, tear apart, annihilate downtown and then turn around and complain about food deserts, sprawl, bulletproof windows, shrink prevention devices...
I never asserted any such right, and I do believe that people have the right to defend themselves and carry firearms. Also, most of these have nothing to do with policies that enforce car-dependent sprawl, which date back to shortly after WW2 and are clearly not a reaction to the 2020 riots.
Getting pushed onto subway tracks is 'part and parcel of living in a big city', yet it's not everybody's cup of tea.
How often does this actually occur? I'm going to register the prediction "far far far less often than people die in car crashes." Does it really make sense to base your entire urban development policy on events that are so incredibly rare, rather than ones that are common? Most American cities have become a lot safer in the past few decades and there are only a handful that are still very dangerous; the reference to Bernie Goetz is at least 25 years out of date. Certainly places like New York and even Chicago aren't dangerous enough to prevent plenty of suburbanites from commuting in. And "urbanism" can apply to small towns which aren't even anywhere near a big city--Not Just Bikes has videos on the finances of several such small and medium towns.
In any event, non-NIMBYism doesn't mean everyone lives in the inner city. For example, this video praises a suburb of Toronto known as Riverdale, and this video, the people behind an urbanist channel point out they have very rarely lived downtown and prefer to live in mixed-use areas outside of downtown. Perhaps I'd be more sympathetic if so many NIMBY's didn't explicitly cite "neighborhood aesthetic" or "property values" when opposing even the mildest bit of development; most sprawling suburbs are ridiculously far from being downtown and even decades of development into a slightly denser suburb won't make them anything like a big city.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Natives could not have been "bothered" to read the fine print or to ask for the meaning of it all.
...what on Earth? You seem to have some sort of axe to grind and are torturing analogy to attack "technocrats" by comparing them to Christopher Columbus or whatever Dutch explorer "bought" Manhattan. You don't actually have an argument about nudges, you just assert that it's the same thing as some other bad thing.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I think the middle stage was more "Hah, stupid Musk wasn't serious and is trying to back of a deal he can't afford, and he's going to get punished for being arrogant by being forced to overpay." Still cognitively dissonant, but not quite as obviously.
The people living in big cities with the highest population densities, in short 'urbanites' are the ones electing lax-on-crime government, supporting crime and rioting.
I don't think even most city-dwelling Democrats actually supported the riots, but so? What do you think is actually going to happen? Do you think that living slightly closer together would cause suburbs or small towns to radically change their voting patterns?
For the same reason these people pay premium to live in gated neighborhoods, they vote against bus lines.
Voting against a bus line is whatever. I'm thinking about zoning laws that say "you own this land and pay thousands of dollars a year in property taxes, but you are legally barred from building anything except a single family home of this size and which your neighbors have say over how it looks." In my mind that's not the proper role of government. If you want to keep someone out of a space, that's up to the owner. You don't get to buy 1 acre and control everything that happens for a mile every direction.
Riots are not unfrequent. In living memory, notably the 1967 Newark riots, 1992 Los Angeles riots, 2014 Ferguson riots. Unrest also followed the death of Trayvon Martin, in an altercation with a member of a neighborhood watch, just the kind of people that would oppose policies that would help more Trayvon Martins to show up in their neighborhoods.
That's not very frequent at all, especially since you're typically referring to events in 1 city. An individual's chance of being affected by any of these riots is quite small, even among people living in a downtown; for someone living in an outskirt or suburb, the chance is smaller still, and would be unaffected by making that suburb slightly denser (it's not like rioters pause their destruction while they wait for the bus to the outer part of the city).
Millions of people choose to live along the Gulf Coast or the Southeast Atlantic, despite a regular threat of storms that are more destructive and probably more regular than that. For example, Hurricane Ian from this year, which is already passed out of the collective memory, inflicted 50 times as much property damage as the Rodney King riots and killed over twice as many people.
25 this year apparently. But subway-pushers are not the only criminals in NYC.
NYC has a violent crime rate of about 0.005 per year per person, in contrast to the nationwide car crash rate which is about .02 per person per year. Unfortunately I can't easily find good statistics on how bad most crashes are, but even a "small" crash can result in injuries and thousands of dollars of damage.
Focusing on deaths, the comparison is much easier--more than 3 times as many people die in car crashes as in all homicides combined (and that's not counting vehicle crashes that kill people not in cars). You are almost certainly much safer taking the NYC subway to work than driving a comparable commute.
Americans are simply not going to live next to one another without violence, simply because a whole 13% of their population commits a lot more violent crime than the rest.
I don't think that reducing NIMBYism is going to radically alter the demographics of many neighborhoods. Many walkable places are quite desirable, with apartments in mixed-use developments being snatched up by yuppies. Lots of people probably rent in a neighborhood they might like to buy in, but can't afford to. People who are very poor are still not going to be able to afford to live in nice middle-class neighborhoods, and really sprawling areas can still exist for the people who want them.
I went to college on the South Side of Chicago, in a very nice, walkable, dense neighborhood. It reaches a population density of, I believe, 18K per square mile, despite consisting of mostly single family homes, duplexes/triplexes, and small apartment blocks. And despite being surrounded by some of the most notoriously dangerous urban areas in the country (which, by the way, are on the outskirts, not downtown) very little of that trickled in. Yes, sometimes, it does. But for how close it is physically, and how easy it is to walk or bike or take the bus into the neighborhood, it happens pretty infrequently. And, if Zillow is to be believed, it's still very desirable.
This is exactly the opposite than what the urbanites are voting for, so it's not surprising that anybody that gets to work remotely would move to safer, less dense areas.
This I'm really curious about, do you have data? I know many people left the Bay, specifically. And Austin seemed to explode in popularity--not as woke or dense as the Bay, but pretty blue nonetheless, and certainly not a small rural town.
edit: one last thing. Some of the ritziest places in the country are either in cities (NYC's Tribeca and similar areas, Chicago's Golden Mile, etc) or are in small, remote towns but which still manage to be walkable. Fire Island, Vail, Telluride, etc. The former bans cars and the latter 2 are dense, with pedestrian plazas, free buses, mixed-used development, duplexes and apartments, etc. It's entirely possible to build these places without succumbing to urban blight and crime.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I wouldn't be surprised if youtube (and other big platforms like facebook) were refusing to host some Republican/pro-life ads, and they're forced to advertise wherever they can.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
This is my experience as well. I think I know one yuppie (out of dozens) who masks in public barring unusual circumstances like "has a big international trip planned next week."
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
but you appear to just be accusing OP of lying, whereas the failure here is on the part of your reading comprehension.
OP starts by accusing a fairly large group of people to be lying, and does not give any indication that they're interested in arguing for their claim at all. Moreover, when they do get around to making something resembling an argument, it's largely a definitional dispute. Calling someone lying because they might have used a different definition of a word strikes me as less-than-charitable. If anything, it reminds me of radical trans activists who scream their lungs out if you suggest that "woman" is defined by, say, genetics.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
"America is a nation of immigrants" is a thing that a lot of people explicitly say outside the context of a school history class. E.g. https://www.brookings.edu/product/our-nation-of-immigrants/ and https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/03/29/nation-immigrants and https://iamla.org/docs/Nation_of_Immigrants.pdf and you can find lots more examples by Googling. I agree that it's ambiguous and somewhat cliched, but that doesn't make it a lie. It's at least arguably true, I think most of the people saying it believe it to be true, and, in my opinion, it points at something important.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Arguing it would take a fair amount of effort, effort that I have not chosen to spend, and so it behooves me to admit that it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, and not to expect other people to give my gut feelings any consideration. It's an argument I want to make, but it's an argument I cannot actually back up, and so it's not an argument I should expect others to take seriously.
Can we please pin this to the top of the overall board, and put it in bold at the top of every CW thread?
Putin is a terrible man and he is ultimately responsible for his actions, but provocation is real and we have been poking the bear for a long time for no reason other than a deep-seated hatred of Russians swimming in the very DNA of our ruling class.
I find this these a little unbelievable, when just 10 years ago Mitt Romney was being mocked for suggesting to President Obama that Russia might still be a threat. I don't think there's much that's special about Russia from a US point of view. The military-industrial-professional-intellectual complex wants an enemy, and Russia is convenient and certainly deserves plenty of derision. But in an easy-to-imagine alternate world where Putin chokes on his dinner in 2008, I think they would just focus on someone else instead. Plenty of the "ruling class" spent the cold war desperately trying to make the USSR seem not so bad or otherwise simping for communism; I'm sure they would be fine turning the eye of Sauron towards Hungary or Brazil or whatever.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I think in that case opposition to Russia would reflect a valid fear of nuclear war, rather than a "deep-seated hatred of Russians in their DNA".
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I think you're using "nudge" very differently from how economists use it. An EULA is not a nudge. Making a 401k or organ donation from opt-in to opt-out is a nudge. You create analogies that are different from the thing you are referring to, and then use those analogies to justify describing the original (very different) thing.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Sure, but the same is true of Hungary, and it's almost true of Brazil, the Philippines, and probably several other countries I'm forgetting.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
It's not true at all? I agree other countries are not a perfect substitute, but if you have to have an enemy then presumably it doesn't need to be a perfect fit.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Not sure about CA, but all of the "help wanted" signs I'm seeing in the US are advertising bare minimum 16$ an hour, or about 32k a year. That is for starbucks baristas, grocery store stockworkers, etc; if you have any experience, it's probably closer to $18. And I'm not in a city which is particularly high COL (not the lowest, but not like the Bay or NYC either--basically like most growing cities). The average employee making this amount sounds low to me, given recent inflation.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Yes, it would, and it probably often does. Denver has a notoriously unresponsive (and arguably undermanned) police, but just last week there was a video of DPD trying to arrest a woman sitting on the ground because she had a sealed bottle of beer in public.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
"Smart" criminals, to the extent they exist, are probably in charge of drug gangs. Chicago's drug gangs, for example, were notorious for recruiting the few local kids who got into college to be future leaders. These people are likely making much more money than they easily could going straight.
According to Freakonomics, these kind of people are very careful about being arrested (e.g. not carrying drugs, guns, or excess cash), but also have an incentive to reduce violence since it's bad for business.
Of course, the actual answer to most crime related to these gangs is to decriminalize drugs and gambling and help addicts get clean.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Makes sense why the cops would just walk away from him though, he's something of a well known character.
So you agree the police are willing to do nothing if they have to deal with the obstacle of "one dude yelling at them"?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I am aware. I took the converted value of 33K, which is the comparison point I was using, at face value, since recently I've seen more people using PPP-adjusted numbers instead of just conversion rates (and which is also better than just using GDP ratio). If that's only adjusted for currency conversion, I don't know off the top of my head what the PPP-adjusted numbers would be, but I think it's closer than GDP alone would indicate.
(Also I think that's quite a bit less than the American average, google says GDP per capita in the US is close to 70k)
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I think Nate Silver is effectively betting on his predictions, since the only reason his website gets any attention (and therefore makes money) is if his predictions are well calibrated. This isn't always perfect (he got a lot of flak for 2016, based on the mistakes of other people that he deliberately avoided, for example) but I think it's reasonably close.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Oh, I am also officially predicting that Florida will get it's count done (i.e. able to definitely declare victory in all state and federal-level races) on election day or shortly thereafter (before noon the next day), there won't be a need for a recount, and there will be no major voter fraud (defined at 1000 or more 'false' votes in any given county) detected. 90% confidence on all of the above/
They did exactly that in 2020, because they allow counting of mail-in votes early. States which didn't allow such counting took several days. Apparently this was evidence of fraud despite being pointed out by 538 at least a week before the election.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Unfortunately the cake has been baking for a long time. Biden, Trump, and probably Obama have all contributed. But people don't understand this, and so they just blame whoever is in power when it happens. The Fed definitely screwed up not raising interest rates earlier, but making it subject to short-term political whims is not going to be an improvement.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
When I say it was evidence of fraud, I meant it was asserted to be evidence of fraud in other states that went for Biden. One example can be seen here since the original was deleted.
AFAICT whether or not someone claims an election was valid or secure or whatever, is pretty much 100% determined by whether their preferred candidate one. It's just blatantly obvious confirmation bias from every corner, to the point where legitimate concerns probably end up overlooked. I don't have time to read your whole other post now, but "the governor instituted a bunch of election reforms right after almost losing an election" probably doesn't sound like the defense you think it does.
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.
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.
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