domain:city-journal.org
Pasha
Defend Kebab
7hr ago
Is there any reason the test was treated as a holy grail other than the "Turing" name brand? I can't see any theoretical justification for it.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
7hr ago
What do you mean by socialise? I asked it to tell me about the critical and audience receptions of Sinners just now, then argued with it about why historical accuracy is no bar to activists, does that count? Also I made a bot that was teaching me about python and Linux speak as if it was Hastur, because it makes me smile, but I soon discovered that I could much more easily understand it because I could more easily discern the fluff from the substance. If you mean parasocial relationships, the answer is they're parasocial relationships :/
Pasha
Defend Kebab
7hr ago
I cycle through Amsterdam city center very regularly and any part of the city where you might visit as an outsider is totally not representative of a city with good cycling infrastructure (which is almost every Dutch urban area except center of Amsterdam). Narrow 17th century canals with uneven side-streets and rarely any sidewalks wider than 1.5 Americans. It is a city designed for boats and commerce, not for a million tourists strolling around unaware of their surroundings. Also the cars are blocked from the city not for pedestrians but for the bikes. The problems you describe arise because unlike many other old touristic European city centers, Amsterdam is not simply a tourist attraction and has a very dense population who live and work in it. These people go almost everywhere almost entirely by bike. Cyclists you come across aren't a separate breed of people, I have literally never met anyone in this country (except 2 American expats) who don't bike in their daily lives.
Also they shout at you because you are a tourist and they hate you.
There's a difference between aggressiveness and suicidality.
In my small college town, cyclists regularly jump off the sidewalk and cross two lanes of traffic with no indication that they are going to do so. They regularly run red lights, either by suddenly deciding that they're pedestrians and swerving into the crosswalk, or by ignoring the light all together. They regularly drive on the center line of a two lane one-way street, but lack the control to stay there, and end up clipping motorists' mirrors. This is all despite the area having extensive bike lanes that are usually more convenient and direct than the local roadways.
That's not even getting started on the narcissistic fuck-show that calls itself "critical mass".
I frequently debate whether they're really that stupid or it's just an insurance scam.
SkoomaDentist
7hr ago
Scandinavian working class or small business types spend huge amounts of money importing and fueling pick up trucks
These are extreme outliers and really rare for the simple reason that pickup trucks solve the problem of hauling stuff or people around in a very poor way. They’re expensive, huge and heavy (a major problem when trying to drive or park them) and don’t protect the cargo. People who need to haul large amounts of cargo buy either a van or a trailer. People who need to regularly carry people and regular goods buy a station wagon.
SkoomaDentist
7hr ago
In a similar vein I needed a USB isolator. The price from Aliexpress including postage was 7e. From western stores the same product (marginally different plastic case, identical innards using ubiquituous Analog Devices isolator IC reference design, almost certainly produced in China) would have cost me 40e and 10-20e postage. People can talk about undervalued currency but that doesn’t explain the nearly 10x price difference.
Your statement is not supported by your link. The article says:
Barges are less efficient than rail with any appreciable speed.
The graph in the article says that barges still are more efficient than trains below around 10 km/h (6 mi/h).
In Railroads and American Economic Growth, an economist estimated that, if 12-mi/h (19-km/h) railroads had never been invented and instead the Midwest had been connected to oceanic trade with an extensive 7-mi/h (11-km/h) canal network during the late 19th century, the cost of the resulting increased inventory requirements would have been essentially negligible. Most freight transportation does not need to be fast.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
8hr ago
I have before, and it's interesting to me as well why people do it. In my experience the AIs of just a few years ago were very clearly robotic (to use a word that might not fit) in that they would seem to "forget" things very quickly, even things you had just told them. Currently I think they're considerably better, but their popularity suggests that they're still overly positive and loath to criticize or call out the user the way a human might. In other words there is a narcissistic element in their use (the link is an internal link to a recent Motte post) where the user is fed a continual stream of affirmations in the self he or she is presenting to the AI. Hell on Reddit people are literally marrying their "AI boy/girlfriend."
I have a friend who is having issues with his wife, and has taken to interaction with AI in ways that I am not completely sure of except to say he's given it a name (feminine) and has various calibrations that he uses (one that is flirty, etc.) I can tell by speaking to him about this that he is engaging in what I'd consider a certain wishful thinking (asking the AI what it means to be real, to be alive, etc.) but it's difficult in such situations to tactfully draw someone back into reality. So I am untactful and say "It's not a She and it's not a real person, bro." This gets a laugh but the behavior continues.
I wouldn't discount the idea that this (treating Ai as a companion, romantic or otherwise) will all become extremely widespread if it hasn't already. How (and how soon) it will then become acceptable to the mainstream will be interesting to see.
TIRM
8hr ago
Intetesting. I would call out the spandex-clad roadies as the worst of the worst. There's some hills with two lane roads by me. They like riding down hill in the street rather than the bike lane even though they are much slower than cars. I get stuck behind a line of cars following spandex man. I wish those guys were ticketed and had to go to traffic court.
Kids are mostly fine. Maybe ride too fast on sidewalks sometimes. Particularly recently with surprisingly fast electric bikes. But they generally don't suicidally shoot into traffic and they've avoided getting too close to me when walking. They slow down and carefully go around me and my family. Spandex man could learn a lot from middle schoolers how to navigate the world as though other people also occupy it.
LateMechanic
8hr ago
Im not entirely on board with treating a simple dollar bill as an IOU. [...] is not a financial instrument
It's a bit strange to think about, without being redeemable for gold or anything, but that is what it is. Cash notes are financial liabilities of the central bank on their balance sheet: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_frliabilities.htm
The UK pound paper notes even still literally say they are promissory IOUs on them, with the queen or king announcing "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five pounds". You can't redeem that value in the form of anything other than another one, but yeah it's still an IOU which exists simultaneously on the issuer's balance sheet as a liability and on the holder's balance sheet as an asset. You're holding paper evidence of the government's debt relationship to you.
Other question: If the government borrowed in a foreign currency or gold rather than dollars, would that be inflationary?
If by borrowing in a foreign currency you mean they create an IOU promising to pay (for example) a billion yen in the future, and swapped that with some bank like the IMF for actual yen notes or credit which they then spend: I guess it would be potentially inflationary to that other currency. What adds inflationary pressure is any actual spending. I can't think of what borrowing in gold would mean.
I also notice that you never say whether somethings is in nominal or real terms, whats up with that?
Well everything is just nominal in reality and in accounting. Anyone can always inflation-adjust or gdp-adjust any particular numbers when they feel it's relevant to some particular analysis, like doing comparisons over time or across countries, etc.
First, I dont think this leads to full employment necessarily.
Yeah I mean just increasing the deficit on any random spending or tax cuts will probably juice the economy up to a certain point like 1-3% unemployment, but it would take something more targeted to try to even go beyond that, somehow minimizing transitory/frictional unemployment, without generating inflation. Can depend on how strict you want to be about the term full employment.
Second, even if savings increase over the long term, there will be fluctuations. If a lot of people suddenly want to spend money that youve already spent for them, what happens?
Definitely, it fluctuates even daily. By the nature of having decent "automatic stabilizer" fiscal policies, people suddenly choosing to spend down their savings would result in tax payments going up, safety net spending going down, and thus automatically shrinking the government deficit (maybe even driving it into surplus).
Last, people want savings, but why would they want dollar denominated savings over non-monetary assets? If people just buy index instead of sitting on money, does that already do what you want to do?
Yeah personally I have almost no appetite for monetary savings, I dump it all into non-bond index funds. I'm not sure what you mean about what I want, but yeah the analysis would be that incentivizing saving in other assets like stocks & real estate surely ends up meaning the government won't end up running as large of a deficit (no need to counter savings leakages). Again that's mostly value-free, so I don't call it good or bad.
Some people have complaints about asset price inflation, where it's not that the value of money is falling compared to goods & services, but where we're all plowing endlessly into the stock market like a clown car, bidding it up constantly. But I'm not sure about that.
Corvos
8hr ago
Quite possibly - this was in a remote area in the 60s.
Thanks for doing the hands-on research, I’ll give it another go when I can.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
8hr ago
It puts restrictions on shipping as a class of economic activity in moving things around vs other classes of economic activity in moving things around. This means the ancillary things around shipping that would make it more efficient and cheaper over time don't happen because the market for them just isn't there, leading to shipping as a whole (US and foreign) losing out to other means of transport.
Corvos
8hr ago
Its also good at reading my many, many emails and flagging ones where people are asking me to do something specific, or touch on a number of topics I've flagged at important.
Do you use a specific service for this, or something custom?
Ioper
8hr ago
Of course, text chatting and correspondence is no longer very popular except in niche circumstance,
Have you missed the popularity of discord servers?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8hr ago
A friend of mine, who is a retired engineer from PennDOT, said of speed limits that "they aren't suggestions; they're requirements".
As a civil engineer: LOL.
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If a road has a posted speed of X mi/h (Y km/h), its actual design speed on which the civil engineers base all their designs is (X + 5) mi/h ((Y + 10) km/h).
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When a civil engineer designs a curve, he can't make the curve too tight, because the "side friction factor" between the pavement and a car's tires will be too small to provide the required centripetal force, resulting in skidding and loss of control. But the side friction factor that's used in design is based on poor weather conditions—ice, rain, et cetera. I don't have the AASHTO Policy on Design in front of me at the moment for the exact numbers, but friction obviously is a lot higher on a dry road than on a wet road, and therefore you can go a lot faster quite safely.
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A hill, or a roadside forest on a curve, may block your view of an upcoming intersection or crosswalk. You probably learned in your high-school driving class that your "stopping sight distance" increases with the square of speed, so you do want to slow down at these locations. But these claustrophobia-inducing segments don't really have anything to do with your speed on segments of the road that have good visibility.
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Obviously, at high speeds it's harder to keep your car going where you want it to go. I personally don't feel comfortable driving faster than 75 mi/h (120 km/h), or 80 mi/h (130 km/h) if I'm in the left lane of a three-lane freeway and there's somebody right behind me. But I don't bear much ill will toward people who flash past me at 90 mi/h (145 km/h) in the left lane when I'm in the middle lane (of three).
Ioper
8hr ago
I can't remember this ever being a problem and I even tried lighting a lamp i had at home and tried to see if I could detect any notable smell, which there was only a very mild one.
Googling a little it seems like kerosene can have a pungent smell when burning but that the oil that is sold for indoor lamps is purposefully made to smell less.
Perhaps your relative got the wrong kind of oil or used a bad lamp where the oil didn't burn clean?
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
The difficult position goes beyond basic safety concerns. No one wants them on the road, but no one wants them off the road, either. When Peduto was mayor of Pittsburgh, he went on junkets to Europe to look at their bicycle infrastructure and spent a lot of money and political capital trying to build it out at home. This earned him the derisive nickname "Bike Lane Bill", followed by endless bitching about how the lanes and trail improvements were a waste of money and took away valuable street parking and travel lanes. Some of the more astute opponents make the argument that roads are paid for with fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees, and that bicycles should have to be registered if they want to use the road. I usually respond by pointing out that 1. None of the cyclists you're complaining about are going to put their bikes away due to an annual fee that costs less than a tank of gas, and 2. If I'm paying for the whole road, I'm using the whole road.
The second one is a bit of a joke, but it underscores the fact that the whole argument is bogus. People complaining about cyclists aren't really concerned because they're causing wear and tear on the roads or are freeloading. If all the bicycles that regularly use urban roads paid $50/year for the privilege, these people wouldn't suddenly stop bitching.
Corvos
8hr ago
Here we are on the Motte, exchanging tokens with strangers…
There is a certain purity to it.
veqq
8hr ago
While I did not find any neutral specific numbers, my gut feeling is that shipping a container by railway is several times more expensive than by container ship.
Rail is surprisingly more efficient than many forms of shipping (e.g. barges).
Turniper
8hr ago
Steadily making progress editing my first novel, and writing my second and third. Been averaging 6k words a week written for 3 months now. Remarkable how fast 25k words a month turns into books. Excited to get to the point of publishing. My first book is going through the royal road->kindle unlimited pipeline, and the initial reviews have been pretty damn good. I'm quite proud of it. I just need a title, been calling it 'Between Beast and Buddha: Book 1' in my head for ages now.
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
I would take this argument more seriously if there weren't a similar set of traffic laws that most drivers assume don't apply to them. A friend of mine, who is a retired engineer from PennDOT, said of speed limits that "they aren't suggestions; they're requirements". I've since decided I wouldn't exceed the posted limit if I could help it, though I admittedly often can't. This often results in such behavior as tailgating, honking, flashing brights, and passing in a restricted area, all because I have the tenacity to comply with the law. How many vehicles actually come to a full stop at an intersection when they don't expect to be waiting a while? How many people run red lights because they automatically gun the accelerator every time they see a yellow light, even if they can easily stop in time?
I hear a lot of excuses for this behavior, from the practical ("9 you're fine") to the absurd ("speeding is actually safer because a vehicle that isn't keeping up with traffic causes more accidents when people try to pass'). But people keep doing this shit and then complain about a cyclist who doesn't stop and dismount at a lonely intersection. I don't ride in the city regularly, and when I do I'm not going to blow through a red light or switch from the road to the sidewalk depending on what's more convenient. But I'm also going to coast through intersections with stop signs if I'm going slowly enough to see that there isn't any traffic coming and I can easily stop if need be. There's a general social compact that we're willing to tolerate certain rule-bending when it comes to traffic laws, and if you're going to insist on strict enforcement for me then I expect the same of you.
pigeonburger
8hr ago
Yes, that's what is counterintuitive: of course a car is deadlier, but we get more angry at cyclists anyway.
A number of question I have for people with this sentiment:
Do you have a yard?
Do you have a "nice" yard?
How much time do you spend on your nice yard?
Possible question: What climate zone are you in?
I do not define "nice" as being a perfect uniform lawn - there are some amazing "natural" or zero scaped yards - they take 4x the amount of time as my yard. I am not an HOA guy, I don't judge people who don't value a nice yard.
In my opinion the easiest most time efficient "nice" yard is grass. I don't want mud, I want to walk barefoot in my yard, I have a big dog. I don't care what exists in my yard as long as I get the utility I desire as efficiently as possible. Somehow I have ornithogalum umbellatum in my yard and I don't mind it at all. I have oaks from squirrels in my yard and I let those grow to see if I can get a nice one to replace the elms. I would love if I could do a clover yard but it will die in the winter and my yard will turn into a mud pit. Dandelions are not as bad but will still contribute to muddy spots that the dog will expand as he runs around during the winter.
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