Clothing and below all have additional leverage through advertising and/or merchandising.
Everything above 0% does not.
The dictatorship of the articulate
111–120 of 409 posts
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#112It’s odd that the author doesn’t mention the string of global conflicts, hot and cold, that drove much of that innovation.
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#113There'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…
I mean, this is purely libertarian populism. Someone quoting “Uber cultural values” should be a dead giveaway that they have no damn idea what they’re talking about.
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. Almost as if the regulations... Protect? The... Consumers? No no, its the 'talkers' ruining it for the 'builders', surely. Not like people in a given industry ever want regulations. Please don't look up Louis Rossma-
So the more stringent the local housing regulators are, the more I should be able to find safe, decent, affordable places to live. Whereas in a place where the average project goes through fewer hearings, where the words "affordability" and "equity" rarely cross planners' lips, the housing should be poor quality, unsafe, way too expensive, only the rich living there. And if I go to a neighborhood that violates every…
You can have good and bad regulations, and too much and too little regulation.
The only really dumb position is that fewer regulations = better always.
For example, there are tons of building codes that keep houses from falling down, and make them livable in many other ways. Those seem good. Others that say that we shouldn't poison the air or water too much. Also good.
So yes, much of the consumer protection is working very well thank you. There are a few places where we went overboard and need to cut back.
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#115There'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…
> seems not to consider Chesterton's Fence at all: before you criticize let alone dismantle regulation, you should be able to demonstrate a sound understanding of why it came to exist in the first place
This should probably be amended to “you should be able to demonstrate that you took reasonable measures to investigate why it came to exist in the first place.” Otherwise you’re likely to select for regulations whose reasons for existing are convoluted or even deliberately obfuscated.
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#116There'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…
What are some specific examples of things the builders went bust on?
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#117There'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…
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Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#118Unspoken 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?
We can always go back to letting insurers deny health care based on “pre-existing conditions.” I’d rather regulators deciding people shouldn’t be priced out of the healthcare market for having asthma or diabetes.
Or go back before the (unfunded) EMTALA bill where uninsured people were told to just die in the hospital parking lot.
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#119After playing around with GPT-3 a bit, I've started to suspect a lot of humans are actually very good at manipulating semantic sentences, without necessarily understanding their content. It would explain why so many "smart" people will often speak long sentences that sound right, but have zero information content in them. Maybe it's just not that hard to construct grammatically and semantically correct, but zero info…
Ha, the ability to toss word salads for a living.
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#120There'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…
There was also a cost in human life.
I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wound. The photos are amazing and beautiful, but they show how dangerous the working conditions were.
When someone fell off and died, the workers would take the rest of the day off, but be back on the job the next day.
We don't accept that kind of risk anymore in the US, which obviously drives up construction costs. But it's hard for me to see that as a bad thing, and I bet that if you went and talked to the "builders" today, they'd prefer those costs to the ones we paid in the 1930s.
[1]: https://museumca.org/exhibit/peter-stackpole-bridging-bay