wlxd
11mo ago
Sorry, the comment search functions both here and on Reddit are terrible, such that it would be too much work for me to track down that comment thread.
A few weeks ago, in order to get some hands on experience with this whole AI thing, I build a search engine that finds Motte comments by content. It works moderately well, e.g. for the above one, I put your name and "being assaulted on subway" as search query, and it was the top result (neither "assault" nor "subway" actually occur in this comment). When I put the same query and my name, it finds this one. I really need to polish it and publish, it's pretty useful.
wlxd
11mo ago
Indeed, in the country where I went to school, the idea of university being an arbitrator in the personal relationships between the students would be rightly seen as ludicrous. This simply never happens, except, maybe, when you get a criminal conviction (in which case being kicked out of school is probably least of your problems). Even when you get a disciplinary sanction by a university, you can appeal to a regular administrative court (i.e. one ran by the state, not by university) as part of normal process.
wlxd
11mo ago
Are you referring to the completely made up and fake story about Brian Sicknick being hit with a fire extinguisher? Well, if your point is that people can lie to provide fictional evidence in favor of their policy goals, you certainly have made it.
wlxd
11mo ago
How would visit from the police stop him from murdering the family, exactly?
This is, of course, completely ignoring the fact that your top policy suggestion, taken in the most charitable light, would do absolutely nothing if he was shooting a gun in his back, not front yard (because then there is no way to see it as open carry).
Really, your comment is an extremely clear example of how the policy proposals of gun control people only serve to annoy the out group, and have very little effect on actual criminals.
wlxd
11mo ago
shrinking populations are bad, but producing vastly more welfare recipients is perhaps even worse
Shrinking population produce a lot of welfare recipients. These are typically called “retirees”. Unlike the young welfare recipients, the retirees cannot be made to work very effectively.
wlxd
11mo ago
What if you look at AP math class literally anywhere else in the country other than New York? How Jewish is it? Does it also have 1400% overrepresentation?
wlxd
11mo ago
Prison doesn't work if all that happens is you scoop someone up, dump them in there, do nothing about reform, then let them back out to resume their interrupted career once the sentence is served.
This is not so. Men achieve peak of their criminal career between 16 and 30, after that they naturally become more placid. If you keep the worst offenders in prison during that time, you physically prevent majority of the crime they’d ever commit, even if you do absolutely nothing to rehabilitate them. In short, they do not exactly resume their career.
wlxd
11mo ago
I do not, in fact, care about them being highly productive members of society. I am not going for some sort of grand society improvement project. I just want them to stop committing crime.
wlxd
10mo ago
Yet it doesn’t stop people from joining and working for the companies which espouse views they consider false. When I worked at FAANG, I knew plenty of people who were quite based in private, and ridiculed the letter religion. Obviously they considered it false, but nevertheless they stuck with their job and didn’t rock the boat. Sure, you can say they were in there just for the money, but so what? You can join the Mormons just for the wife, that’s not any different. This is exactly what I would have done myself if I needed.
wlxd
10mo ago
I am totally fine with innocent people occasionally being killed by justice system, yes. Fortunately, this is extremely rare. Justice system almost never snatches and imprisons totally innocent people for violent crimes. When people are released from prison or death row, it is almost always a case of prosecution screwing up some procedural stuff, or defender being deemed lousy years later, or activists pressuring critical witnesses to recant the testimony years after.
You’ll find it extremely hard to find a case where a person without prior criminal record being imprisoned for many decades or put on death row, who simply had absolutely nothing to do with the crime they have been accused of. On the other hand, for every person like this, I will find you ten people who should have been put to death for their crimes, but haven’t, and killed more people after being released.
wlxd
10mo ago
Sometimes they work very well, sometimes they work very poorly. There is a great channel on YouTube, PoliceActivity, where you can watch first hand what it is that police has to deal with.
Here are some examples of taser use:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=slgCVJLYP-c Taser temporarily incapacitated the guy, but then he removed the taser probes, recovered and took off.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xcAorLQAqW4 Here the taser has been very effective.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pGEp4EArrHA
Here it was somewhat effective: it made the guy compliant, but not incapacitated.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6w7ARs9qdP4 Here it was only marginally effective: it temporarily incapacitated the guy and caused him to drop his knife, but then it stopped being effective.
Point is, if you watch these videos, you’ll find that the effectiveness rate is more like 50% than 95%.
wlxd
10mo ago
I may be weak-manning it though.
Yes, you missed the argument I make, though to be fair, I did not put it at the front and center:
I will find you ten people who should have been put to death for their crimes, but haven’t, and killed more people after being released.
It's not that I'm fine with "innocent people dying". What I said is that I am "fine with innocent people occasionally being killed by justice system", because the alternative is that we let people who are know are bad go out and commit more crimes. I am not arguing for knowingly killing innocent people for some sort of utilitarian purposes. What I am arguing is that, occasionally, mistakes will be made despite adequate efforts, and this should not prevent us from achieving greater good, which is protecting totally innocent people from becoming victims of crime. Think of it like, say, doctors making a treatment decision, following all the appropriate procedures and standard, but which nevertheless is incorrect in the particular patient's case, leading to his death. Should we prevent doctors from practicing medicine, just because some people will die from wrong, but reasonable decisions? No.
wlxd
10mo ago
US probably has better law enforcers, but as a whole, Europe has better law enforcement. This is because they have more cops than US, but less crime. Because of this, when American cops must heavily prioritize their efforts, European cops are under much less pressure, and can afford to spend their time on investigating and prosecuting much more trivial offenses. The result of this is that all crime is at risk of being prosecuted; shoplifters know that if they get caught, they face jail, and so do people who do drugs (yes, simple possession is illegal and heavily enforced in huge swaths of Europe). This makes people respect law much more, which feeds the virtuous cycle of less crime -> more time to enforce the law -> more respect for law -> less crime.
wlxd
9mo ago
One component of this is that US households are highly degenerate. We have insane levels of single parenting, and old-age divorcees relative to Europe, which does a lot for the median household income. For example, if you restrict yourself to households of married parents with children, the median jumps from $70k to $100k. We also have huge underclass which pulls the median down substantially.
wlxd
9mo ago
The physics we know doesn’t support the idea of ships fast enough to make interstellar travel plausible without generation ships.
For big, wet sacks of thinking meat, maybe, but you can posit many theories of interstellar travel that are congruent with physics.
wlxd
8mo ago
What do Europeans have to do with the discussion? Are you under impression that Europeans ride bicycles a lot, including to work? They don’t, except of couple of places, which is no different than in US.
wlxd
8mo ago
Not really, though I understand how one might get this impression if one is very online and frequents places like Reddit or HN. Most of Europe is unlike Amsterdam, and even in Netherlands, last I checked, majority of commuters drive.
Yes, you are confirming what I said: Europeans don’t cycle to work a lot. Overall, maybe something like 10% does. Large majority of them drives. Sure, the split between driving and cycling is only slightly less lopsided towards driving, but whether 5% cycles or 10% is not substantial difference.
wlxd
8mo ago
Yet there was also much more time in general to be devoted to childrearing, since there were clearly more children back then.
You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. US Census has been running time use surveys for many decades now, which give us good data on what people actually spend their time on.
The trend is obvious: people spend much more time on active childcare today than they used to. Today, a mother working full time spends about as much time on childcare as stay at home moms used to 50 years ago. Hard to believe it, but it’s true.
In my personal experience, time spent on childcare doesn’t scale linearly with number of kids, and indeed plateaus pretty quickly. For example, when I visit my friends who also have kids of age similar to hours, I basically don’t need to do any child caring at all, they just play together and don’t need anything from me aside from occasional conflict resolution. This is a huge glaring contrast compared to times when we only had one, and it demanded constant attention, because it simply did not want to be left to play alone. As you get to 4-5+ kids, I imagine the older ones can be very helpful in caring for younger ones.
wlxd
8mo ago
One can quite easily tell that you’re responding to a woman by the writing style.
wlxd
8mo ago
California mid century population was a third of today’s official population, probably a quarter of actual one. Moreover, during mid-century, there were more people per housing unit on average, and there were far fewer single person or two person households.
This means that the mid century California housing stock is pretty much irrelevant for the discussion of today’s housing woes, because it’s only a small fraction of today’s housing stock. The working class neighborhoods of 1950s California are places like Santa Clara or Fresno today.
wlxd
8mo ago
As much as I sympathize with your individual plight, I don’t think it counts into the “homeless problem” in the society’s view. Shelters or non-profits or churches might be interested in helping you, but people like me (normal, well-off, employed people with families and mortgages) do not care about you much. Indeed, there are a lot of poor and struggling people on this planet, and I can’t spare too much energy or emotion on you.
Instead, what I see as an actual problem is crazy, unpredictable, aggressive hobos taking over the commons, and making the city dangerous and unlivable for normal people, while collectively consuming more government resources per capita than the poorest working people actually subsist on. This is the problem for me, because it actually affects me in a substantial and negative way.
My point here is that you are or were not like them, and it is unlikely that any solution that applies to one group will also apply to the other. The hidden homeless are overlooked on purpose, because they are only a problem to themselves, not to anyone else.
wlxd
8mo ago
all this while ignoring the context of the 1% having stolen all the economic growth of the last 40+ years for themselves
This is a popular claim, but I don’t think it is true at all. People today are more prosperous than similar people 40 years ago, comparing like for like, ie. comparing non-divorced, employed, married people 40 years ago to similar people in same age range today.
See this, for example: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A794RX0Q048SBEA Top 1% of population is physically unable to consume so much.
Housing in Europe is much more expensive than in US, so this is hardly a reason to stay in Europe.
For a concrete example, apartments in Paris are something like 12k EUR/square meter, so a one bedroom 600 sq ft (55 m^2) apartment will set you back 660k EUR. Meanwhile, in NYC, you’ll pay something like $1500/sq foot, so comparable apartment will be $900k.
Now let’s compare wages. A postdoc in Paris will be lucky if he makes 30k EUR a year, so it’s 20 years of toil to buy a one bedroom. A full professor will take 50-70k EUR, so that’s 10 years for 1 bedroom apartment. Meanwhile, in NYC, a postdoc will make at least $50k (typically more like $60k), and full professor will make at least $100k.
And that’s the worst place in the country! Most places are much cheaper than NYC, whereas most European cities have atrocious ratio of pay to housing cost.
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