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The dictatorship of the articulate

florentcrivello.com

251–260 of 409 posts

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#251

> There is always a loser to any change — even when it’s an otherwise overwhelming net positive. What an insidious argument. It makes the "loser" sounds like someone randomly selected by bad luck, but we all know that when there is lack of regulation, especially in these cases (construction, industry, etc.), who gets the short end of the stick.

We're on that stage of the flat circle again, where people think "survival of the fittest" is the best way to live, that older americans are meaningless and who cares if COVID killed them, etc.

We all know what happened last time these ideologies reared their ugly heads.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#253
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are. Actually both are "future lives" (we're not saving someone we already know is about to die) and both are as easy or hard to quantify. We can quantify average cost of lives in a big building project given X regulations applied (based on past experience with similar projects), and we can also quantify…

They are in no way equivalent in relative ease to quantify. Safety Regulations exist to protect from "known" harms. It is the result of learning from our past and applying that knowledge to our present and future. But anything in the unknown harms category is fundamentally unquantifiable. We know there are unknown harms out there. But we don't know 1) What they are 2) When they can happen 3) How many they could affec…

>But anything in the unknown harms category is fundamentally unquantifiable

The "unknown harms" exist in workplace deaths. In fact many of them come from such factors. It's not just things like "asbestos is bad to work with, you need a face mask and other protection" or "construction debris might fall, workers need to wear a hard hat" and such, but also things like materials breaking under unforseen circumstances, unforseen disasters like earthquakes and fires while on the job, and more...

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not supposed to use that word because Mussolini used to kill political prisoners by feeding them caster oil until they died from diarrhea.

That's not all they did though: https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism/Opposition-to-parli... > Mussolini, a leading member of the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano) before World War I, became a fierce antisocialist after the war. After coming to power, he banned all Marxist organizations and replaced their trade unions with government-controlled corporatist unions. Until he instituted a war econ…

Yes, they also made the trains run on time.

I guess Switzerland is the fascist capital of the world with their perfect time tables.

The reason why fascism is bad isn't because it ignores the trappings of American kleptocracy, it's bad because it kills people.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New was good because humans needed many things (that were new at this point). Now that we got almost everything we need, "New" is no longer good on its own.

There are old things we need that are now threatened: water and food. Part of why they're threatened is due to lackluster planning and future mugging economics.

Add energy there, as the root of the coming scarcity of both. Almost criminal how we have let ourselves become in the verge of energy poor.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#256

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…

> 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

It's not the individual regulations themselves, it's the mass of regulations that's slowing things down. I'm sure SF has a ton of regulations around building housing. You can point to each rule and give a very good reason for why that rule is there. In fact you can go through the entire list of hoops developers go through the justify every single hoop.

And now you have an apartment building that's built to the standards that everyone agrees on, except there's just one problem, no one can afford it.

And that's the larger issue. All these regulations individually and on the surface to a service to the community by making sure that X or Y edge case never comes up. But they do arguably a massive disservice to the community by driving away affordable housing and business.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not all they did though: https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism/Opposition-to-parli... > Mussolini, a leading member of the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano) before World War I, became a fierce antisocialist after the war. After coming to power, he banned all Marxist organizations and replaced their trade unions with government-controlled corporatist unions. Until he instituted a war econ…

Yes, they also made the trains run on time. I guess Switzerland is the fascist capital of the world with their perfect time tables. The reason why fascism is bad isn't because it ignores the trappings of American kleptocracy, it's bad because it kills people.

Ha, I nearly brought that myth up as further evidence:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/

Why do people have such a false, cartoon-like, impression of what actual historical fascist movements did?

But you're right, it's much more important that he killed people:

> Fascist squads, militias inspired by Mussolini but often created by local leaders, swept through the countryside of the Po Valley and the Puglian plains, rounded up Socialists, burned down union and party offices, and terrorized the local population. Hundreds of radicals were humiliated, beaten, or killed. In late 1920, the Blackshirt squads, often with the direct help of landowners, began to attack local government institutions and prevent left-wing administrations from taking power. Mussolini encouraged the squads—although he soon tried to control them—and organized similar raids in and around Milan. By late 1921, the Fascists controlled large parts of Italy, and the left, in part because of its failures during the postwar years, had all but collapsed. The government, dominated by middle-class Liberals, did little to combat this lawlessness, both through weak political will and a desire to see the mainly working-class left defeated. As the Fascist movement built a broad base of support around the powerful ideas of nationalism and anti-Bolshevism, Mussolini began planning to seize power at the national level.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#258
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Obviously more than zero, else we wouldn't attempt to build any bridge (or do anything else, like drive cars or fly planes) lest someone dies in the process...

That doesn't follow.

What's acceptable (i.e. It's ok if 1 person dies on this project) is different than what's the potential risk (i.e. There is a risk that 1 person might die on this project).

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. Airlines do well, and they're heavily regulated. But they don't have armies of engineers doing nothing whilst court cases are worked out. The flip side of that is monopoly. The only recent aviation accidents that have happened, have done so because, put bluntly, the FAA knows they didn't stand a chance if they blocked the only (US) big-jet maker from upgrading its planes. Were there (US) competitors, which on…

That's not really true. The MAX issues were in large part a result of trying to keep the same type rating. An almost entirely artificial requirement generated by the FAA.

In an ideal world Boeing would have said this is the Max, it's slightly different and you need to do a little training to get used to the difference. But that means a new type rating which causes all sorts of operational headaches.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#260

Articulation is a relatively good trait to form a dictatorship on.

Can you provide evidence for that assertion? My read is dictatorships are famous for only letting a small number of people talk and frequently those people are in a risky situation when the dictator changes their mind.
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