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The dictatorship of the articulate

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Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#321

Post by ABeeSea »

jfoster wrote: post #309
ABeeSea wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever mechanism the government uses to “ensure affordable access” would be a regulation. We’ve seen what fully unregulated healthcare looks like and it’s people dying in the streets.

Agree that it would be a regulation. I'm suggesting that this be the goal of regulation, though. Instead, many regulations seem to be focused on improving quality without regard as to how that affects access.

That is the goal on the Dem side though. Universal healthcare isn’t picky on the how but on the outcome. That was a core theme of the failed “Hillary Care” bill in the 90s.

The Republican EMTALA bill solved access. Every ER is required to treat everyone regardless of their ability to pay. The republicans didn’t fund this particular bit of regulation so the costs flow into the outsized bills hospitals charge.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#322

Post by cactacea »

fluoridation wrote: post #292
thrown_22 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because that's other people dying. My first job out of high school was on an old school oil rig: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Jn2BU4eyVHQ What worried me about it wasn't the fact I could lose a hand, but that more than half the chemicals we were getting smeared in daily weren't properly tested for their long term effects on humans.

The distinction you're trying to draw seems unclear to me. Why is bodily harm from chemicals worse than bodily harm from mechanical forces?

Worse isn't the distinction, clarity of danger is. If your hands didn't get crushed at work that day then you can stop worrying about your hands when you go home. Not the case with whatever he was swimming in.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#323

Post by namlem »

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…

Clearly there is a middle ground. Japan has this problem too, with real estate. So they reformed their zoning and permitting laws to make building easier, and it worked. Housing prices came down, and the negative effects were minimal.

Once upon a time, during the Lochner era, it was almost impossible to regulate in the US. While that environment had advantages, it clearly had many downsides. Since then, we have overcorrected, and made it too easy to regulate. We need to pull things back a little.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#324

Post by drewbeck »

kansface wrote: post #319
rwl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But it's hard for me to see that as a bad thing I'd buy this argument so long as you actually sit down to do the math at hand. Did you add up the man years we now spend waiting on safety? How does that compare to the lives we saved waiting, or the money we spent doing so? I'm personally guessing a very large amount of the required waiting exists chiefly for bureaucratic needs, not human. How much of that extra 6T$…

In your mind how many man years of savings do you think is worth one human life? Let's say we can save half the time on a big project but periodically one random person is killed. Worth it?

I'm being glib here and/but/also we need to be talking about this directly. There's a spectrum of possible responses to the question and we need a language to discuss risk intelligently.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#326

Post by namlem »

pif wrote: post #287
_fat_santa wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I'm sure SF has a ton of regulations around building housing. Which only affect those builders who keep wanting to build in San Francisco. Just go and build somewhere else, that's the entire point of San Francisco regulation! > massive disservice to the community by driving away affordable housing and business. I don't agree with you. SF regulations are working exactly fine for SF community: they are preventing the…

"Somewhere else" but not in South SF or Millbrae or Belmont or Redwood City or Atherton or Palo Alto or Mountainview or San Jose. Because while other towns and cities in the Bay Area might not all be quite as bad as SF, they all still impose extremely limits on building anything. And what's the point of building something in the middle of the desert, away from anyone who might benefit from it?

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#327

Post by altruios »

luma wrote: post #237
secretsatan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was going to say this, human life was cheaper. It's quite worrying to see now a trend trying to praise this attitude as fearless workers, where as the ones we have now are all wimps, views usually espoused by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous

This has never not been true, capitalists or politicians have always been happy to send someone else to be injured or die to make themselves rich. The article in the OP is shockingly ignorant of how regulations come to be, which makes sense as the author is just another hopeful capitalist willing to throw us all in the fire if he can make a buck.

It's amazing how vapid their thinking can be when they do nothing but chase their goddamn money.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#329

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

seydor wrote: post #274
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…

Would you say european cities are a pile of crap? most of them were not built to plan

there used to be an aesthetic which, if not followed, would lead to a certain level of ostracism.

these days, the edge-sprawl of many european cities is almost as bad as some of the worst in the USA, because there is no aesthetic anymore.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#330

Post by namlem »

kranke155 wrote: post #186
hahaxdxd123 wrote: post #109

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 peo…

Pretty much. It’s amazing the author does not realise he is just doing the work for the extractive institutions when he asks for less voices at the table. And that in fact a lot of what passes for regulation is just those same extractive institutions protecting themselves.

Local community input isn't really "more voices". You're only counting one small group of voices, and those voices are mostly used to rent seek. I'd argue that the Japanese system of national streamlined zoning incorporates far more voices than local community input, since it represents the whole country instead of just the neighborhood.
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