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The dictatorship of the articulate

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Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#341

Post by bwanab »

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…

It's telling that one of the examples given supporting the case was Marc Andreessen who, along with his wife, recently led a NIMBY revolt against a housing project in their posh town. Let them build, indeed.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#342

Post by lordswork »

dane-pgp wrote: post #215
concordDance wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially the more people have veto power or require consultation the harder it is to get anything done. The more policies and rules there are (particularly once uncertainty about what the rules are creeps in), the harder it is to build. If you've worked in a large corporation and a 10 man startup this should be obvious. In the latter you can spin up a new service in a couple of hours. In the former a couple of mon…

> In the latter you can spin up a new service in a couple of hours. In the former a couple of months is a blistering pace. In the latter you can harm society in ways that take a couple of hours to fix. In the former, you can cause harms that take months or years to fix (and, with enough lobbying, you can make taxpayers foot the bill).

>In the former, you can cause harms that take months or years to fix (and, with enough lobbying, you can make taxpayers foot the bill).

I don't think "years" is enough to convey the potential damage unregulated businesses can cause. The time and resources to fix issues can scale well beyond human timescales. This is clearest when environmental damage is involved, whether it be CO2 emissions that will exist for O(100) years in the atmosphere or loss of biodiversity that took O(10,000) years to evolve.

Here are a couple of concrete examples of companies inflicting eternal costs onto society that were covered well in Tom Scott videos:

The Pumps That Must Run Forever, Or Part Of Germany Floods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LseK5gp66u8

Freezing 200,000 Tons of Lethal Arsenic Dust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4nZDSLdIiM

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#343

Post by noobker »

busyant wrote: post #303
edmundsauto wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You start with a truism/No True Scotsman, then overlay a theory of everything without any evidence to suggest how construction deaths Are comparable to natural selection. I don’t disagree with you - but it would be worth revisiting how you make this argument. You took all this time to write a nice comment! & here I am, criticizing it, but I think you may need some refinement.

I think, like you said, the comment needs refinement, but I get the point. Basically, if you lean against regulation, clever/imaginative/quality building will flourish, but the price you have to pay is that cheap/shoddy building will flourish, too. The problem for me is that even though I can see the tradeoffs associated with regulation, it's difficult to determine where to set the regulatory "dial." And even if I co…

> it's difficult to determine where to set the regulatory "dial."

I think about this a lot and have come to this thought: you - specifically - won't get to set the dial at all.

Too many political philosophies completely ignore the other for the sake of a perfect solution. This framing of a knob to dial extended imagines a whole switchboard of regulations that can be tuned or turned off. The Democracy video games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_(video_game)) use this metaphor as their core game mechanic.

But the reality is that the Other(s) gets to act during and in response to your actions.

All this is to say that if politics is setting a knob on a control panel with a precise tuning in mind, reality is an annoying rodent running behind the panel and swapping wires with reckless abandon.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#344

Post by notahacker »

thrown_22 wrote: post #275
notahacker wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like someone who didn't read the comment properly, or at all. Building a big red bridge quickly isn't that much of a testament to the ability of people in the 30s to get stuff done if people in the 30s also spent their entire childhood drinking dirty well water because in many parts of the US people hadn't got around to implementing the ancient technology of piped water Not going to lie, I'd pick the society w…

There's a difference between flowing piped water, which is a technology as old as Rome, and static piped water, something that was figured out only in the 20th century.

Water towers and pumping were not twentieth century technologies (and nor were water closet toilets and sewerage). London had steam-pumped water supply two-hundred years earlier, and those pesky regulators forced every multi-storey building in NYC to have them during the 19th century. Piped water wasn't the future in the 1930s, it was just unevenly distributed.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#345

Post by notahacker »

coldtea wrote: post #248
notahacker wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a certain irony in looking favourably at the building speed and cost of an era when Depression labour oversupply could get a bridge built quickly and cheaply (with only 11 construction deaths!) but the longstanding invention of running water didn't find its way into grandma's house until well into the second decade of her life. And even people with running water saw it collected straight from the same ri…

> but the longstanding invention of running water didn't find its way into grandma's house until well into the second decade of her life. His point still stands, as it would go went beyond the fifth or more decade of her life and cost 10x more if we had to lay such pipes, build the original dams, etc, from scratch, today. And that's even considering todays advanced technical means...

Would it? New houses always get indoor water supplies when they're built in the developing world, even if it's a new suburb in the middle of nowhere (those pesky regulators usually force it!). And it certainly doesn't take property developers fifty years to build.

Of course, building houses without utilities was quicker still, if you wanted to make that tradeoff...

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#346

Post by sidcool »

The article is mainly about regulations. I understand the OP's sentiment. However, the tobacco industry, the sugar industry, the opioid industry, the oil and gas industry etc have made me very sceptical of private corporations. Governments cannot and should not give a free hand to private companies. Regulation has to be there.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#347

Post by seydor »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #329
seydor wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

aesthetic is defined by the wealth of people living in them. Rich people change decrepit areas to expensive urban centers. Medieval italian cities must have looked like crap, literally, with all the dung in the streets, but look at them now. And venice was not all palaces when it started.

american cities were optimzed for the car, but what about now that the car is receding and business districts will cease existing? Organically-grown cities adapt better to the passage of time

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#348

Post by cortesoft »

selimthegrim wrote: post #315
cortesoft wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure where you got the idea that I was saying a Muslim wouldn’t have agency. I am only saying that if a Muslim was dropped in the middle of the country in the 1950s, they would likely encounter difficulties that a white man wouldnt, and that assuming you could just go anywhere in the 1950s and be easily successful is not equally true for everyone.

Muslims can be white too. Muslim isn’t a race.

You are right, I should have said Christian.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#349

Post by [deleted] »

drewbeck wrote: post #324
kansface wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#350

Post by ZeroGravitas »

dionidium wrote: post #340
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #156

This is what I consider the modern face of Fascism. I know you're not supposed to use that word, because it really upsets Fascists. But really, long passionately argued essays about how democratic governance is stopping us from returning to the good old days and we should let the powerful do whatever they want. Using dubious emotional arguments like laundromats can't be historic buildings? Calling things dictatorship…

> Using dubious emotional arguments like laundromats can't be historic buildings? Ironically, the state preventing people from demolishing irrelevant structures to build housing that will exist entirely on their own private property is actual Fascism . I suspect it's a Fascism you're sympathetic to, but it's much more literally Fascism than the alternative.

But the state didn't do that.

He's just misrepresenting it

> The building’s sardonic “historic laundromat” nickname stems from a 2018 study the city conducted to determine whether the property should be preserved as a historic asset.

> The concern at the time was not that the building itself might have historic value, but that as the building’s onetime offices of certain local activist and nonprofit groups it might be worth preserving.

> This did not turn out to be the case, and the contemptuous shorthand term has stuck with the building ever since.

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