Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The dictatorship of the articulate

florentcrivello.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 409 posts

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#101

Post by timkam »

mrwh wrote: post #90

I do have some sympathy with the general idea that we should be able to build a whole lot more than we are. The article takes some odd inspiration though. Marc "build but don't dare build near me" Andreessen. And Uber, which is a bonfire of money and has an infamously wasteful eng culture. Perhaps there's a meta-point being made that this is the best we can show in today's world. I hope not though. Surely there are b…

I also like the general idea, but there seems to be a weird underlying motivation. For me Uber is the prime example for bullshit (in the technical sense of the word) innovation. Stuff like Uber should be considered infrastructure so that the profits can go to the drivers. Perhaps the actual reason for lack of 'real' innovation is that it's not what's the most profitable? After all, nobody became a billionaire because the writer's grandma's town/village got running water and a sewage system.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#102

Post by EdwardDiego »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #91

There's a reason we don't just "let the builders build". We used to do that (certainly to a massively greater extent than we do now), and the result was that although a few of them managed to construct monuments we can all be proud of, most of them built a pile of crap and/or damaged the places they built in and the people they nominally built for. This is true of literal buildings, but it's also true of a great many…

Indeed. As the saying goes, legislation is often written in blood.

Like how the Triangle fire led to a rule that "you can't lock all the exits of a building, even if you're worried your workers will take unauthorized breaks".

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#103

Post by coding123 »

> Subject line: IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development!

    I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.
-- the Andreessens

This was AFTER he wrote the build article.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#104

Post by hackerlight »

briandon wrote: post #88
MarkSweep wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the wait list for public housing would be longer or shorter if the government enforced your esthetic preferences on apartment construction? Or to say it another way, your posting claims that HK housing is both too expensive and too low quality. If the government solved the low quality problem by banning it, it would probably make the expensive problem worse. I’m not saying that housing quality should nev…

The aesthetics of public housing in HK is not a factor in the pace of public housing construction or the amount of public housing made available. Appearance and supply are completely unrelated. Supply is maintained at an always-woefully-inadequate level and many are allowed to live in squalor. This, purely by happenstance, ensures a market for new and used low-quality, cramped private dwellings. In turn, everyone's d…

> Appearance and availability are completely uncoupled here.

Your evidence for this is that prices are extremely high. But you have no evidence that prices wouldn't be even higher if purely aesthetic constraints were imposed on development that had nothing to do with utility or quality.

Moreover, that's not even relevant to the main problem with the focus on aesthetics. You're right I don't know much about the HK situation, but where I'm from, aesthetics is one of the top two excuses that landowners use to lobby the government to block new housing.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#105

Post by yarg »

I don't think the problem is articulate people; I think the problem is people who know how to sound like they are saying something.

I've met a lot of them, and some of them are disturbingly successful.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#106

Post by zuminator »

hackerlight wrote: post #13
caseyross wrote: post #11

If we want progress, it's important to draw a distinction between the different effects of regulation. Some regulation enforces the status quo, by helping entrenched interests use their power to crush potential innovators. Other regulation restricts big players from abusing their dominance, and helps create a level playing field where innovation can succeed on its merits, no matter who's behind it. It's not helpful t…

Exactly what I arrived at, but I use the word better instead of fairer , since a regulation can do net harm without being unfair. It annoys me when the right just wants to deregulate and the left just wants to regulate. It's ideological possession. Implement more good regulations. Eliminate the ones that are doing more harm than good by adding too much red tape, or entrenching interests, or having too many unintended…

> Eliminate the ones that are doing more harm than good

Easier said than done. When people have fundamental differences of opinion on what's "good and bad" how can we mutually agree on which "bad" regulations to eliminate? Even worse, we might not even agree on who's doing the regulating.

For example, let's say me and my neighbors dislike Veltian immigrants, and we get our local homeowner's association to set up a restrictive covenant that nobody can sell or rent in the neighborhood to Veltians. Then along comes the government and strikes down our covenants as against the Constitution. To me, the meddlesome State is unjustly trying to regulate our freedom of association. But someone else might see our homeowner's association as acting as a regulatory body and preventing the Veltians from engaging in commerce with local residents.

>It annoys me when the right just wants to deregulate and the left just wants to regulate.

So, while that might be the case when it comes to offshore drilling and gun rights, it's arguably not the case when it comes to abortion and trans rights. It might be more accurate to say that everyone generally wants to minimize regulations that prevent them from achieving their personal, social and political goals. And conversely we want to enact regulations that facilitate our achieving our goals, and that furthermore prevent our ideological opponents from achieving their objectionable goals.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#108

Post by loxs »

1dry wrote: post #63

Unspoken and underlying the author's entire worldview seems to be, "the more new things, the better," a not uncommon tunnel view in the engineering world. The purpose of regulation, ideally, is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people. Defining those terms and making that decision is precisely the job of regulators, who are ideally accountable to a de…

Did you miss the part where exactly these things suffer the most from regulation? How long until we mostly cannot afford healthcare for the middle class? Aren't we already somewhat there?

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#109

Post by hahaxdxd123 »

The same Marc Andreesen who complained that there shouldn't be housing built near him because it would lower his property prices?

How can someone who has read Why Nations Fail miss the point? We don't build for the same reasons that we didn't from the year -2000 to the Enlightenment. Because it's now better and easier in so many cases to just rent seek. Why bother constructing housing when you can just have other people's labour increase your land values? Why should I increase the supply of residency spots when constraining that supply increases my salary by $100k? Why bother with bold bets when you have net work effect monopolies? It's not talkers standing in the way of builders, it's leeches.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#110

Post by zzzbra »

> It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones.

type of pithy observation that sound reasonable (even smart) until you think about it for two seconds, or do even a modicum of historical research on. the graph supplied is so misleading I can’t read further. I hope the author manes to make some good points tho.

Post reply on HN