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The dictatorship of the articulate

florentcrivello.com

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Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#141

Post by concordDance »

geraneum wrote: post #99

Yes! I propose we start with the aviation industry which is in dire need of innovation. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a new type of airplane with pointy nose or funky looking wings. We need more new stuff and we need it now. We should regulate it less. Or better, let the manufacturers do it themselves. They build the thing and they know better after all. What could possibly go wrong?

We might get the price of small planes back down to their former glory?

Did you know a 1970s blue collar worker could afford a house, a plane and two cars?

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#142

Post by V_9 »

concordDance wrote: post #132
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…

The costs of doing things the slow way as we do now hugely outweigh the benefits. Yes, buildings fall down less but they're so much more expensive that if you detregulated and put that money in healthcare you'd save an order of magnitude more lives than you lose. A big factor is the costs of regulation and the fragility of innovation are both hugely underestimated. Every little form or permission slip is massively mo…

"Yes, buildings fall down less but they're so much more expensive that if you detregulated and put that money in healthcare you'd save an order of magnitude more lives than you lose." And "Every little form or permission slip is massively more costly than it would intuitively seem"

Genuinely interested, do you have any sources for this economic analysis?

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#143

Post by V_9 »

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…

I also thought this was going to be an article on the power of language

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#144

Post by spoonjim »

gentoo wrote: post #137
spoonjim wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge which is fewer than the number of people who jump off of it every year.

what is the acceptable number of people to die during bridge construction

If you set it at zero you will never build anything

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#145

Post by thaumasiotes »

barry-cotter wrote: post #69
throw149102 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the PIAAC, 54% of Americans are illiterate. That is, they are able to read simple things like menus, but they are not capable of synthesizing new information from multiple texts, or understanding the nuance of an authors argument. If I recall correctly, Americans scored an average of around 275/500, while the best scoring country, Finland, scored an average of 300/500. (This is a statistically significan…

Functionally illiterate and illiterate are different concepts. If you can read a menu the thing that’s stopping you from reading and understanding a complex text isn’t about letters and sentences; it’s the inability to recurse on abstract thought and build complicated thoughts that depend on a body of knowledge. Eliding the difference between functional illiteracy and illiteracy confuses unnecessarily.

> If you can read a menu the thing that’s stopping you from reading and understanding a complex text isn’t about letters and sentences; it’s the inability to recurse on abstract thought and build complicated thoughts that depend on a body of knowledge.

I can often do a decent job reading a menu in Chinese. A complex text would take hours per page and be totally opaque in many parts. (And partially opaque in probably the majority of the text.)

I would argue that in fact what's stopping me from reading complex texts is lack of knowledge of the letters, the words, and the correct structure of sentences.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#146

Post by geysersam »

> funny coincidence things most regulated increased most in price

That's too simplistic. Another correlation is that things requiring US labor or land increased a lot in price.

The thing that's become cheaper is imported goods manufactured in Asia. Everything else has become more expensive.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#147

Post by kortilla »

rwl wrote: post #120
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…

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 wo…

False dichotomy. Look at the delays and cost balloons of the HSR project. They have nothing to do with safety of workers.

You can adopt modern safety standards and still wipeout a ton of roadblocks to actually get started much sooner by just generally using eminent domain more freely and not empowering people to so easily stop projects with lawsuits.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#148

Post by rib3ye »

Some people might call "talkocracy" simply communication skills, and some of us here (possibly evident by this comment) don't have them. As we go more WFH, comms skills are going to get more and more important, so if we're going to have to suck it up about anything, it's probably improving our ability to sell a hard-to-grasp explanation, or, dare I say.... "vision".

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#149

Post by jfoster »

ABeeSea wrote: post #118
loxs wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps the primary goal shouldn't be regulation or de-regulation, but ensuring affordable access?
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