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The room the economy can't see

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Re: The room the economy can't see

#171

Post by amanaplanacanal »

bluGill wrote: post #83
cousin_it wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom. Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a re…

I place strong restrictions on what I allow my governments to control. You get a say in your local government, but that government only has limited things it is allowed to control/do.

Allowing local government to restrict what can be built and where has been a double edged sword. Yes it's good that you can't build noisy, smelly, or potentially polluting activities near where people live. But we have gone far beyond that, in ways that harm our communities, require people to own a car to get through daily life, and leave people sleeping in the street.

Some places are taking baby steps in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#172

Post by AndrewKemendo »

cogman10 wrote: post #96
bluGill wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless. I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property…

The primary issue is the people that live in "no poors allowed" area can literally push the poors out of a voting area and thus use their "no poors allowed" policies to take over local governments. Which ultimately allows them to expand the "no poors allowed" zones. Another major issue is there's a false impression about what's profitable when it comes to property ownership. That, in turn, drives up the price of prop…

You got the diagnosis right but I’m not convinced voting would change anything - even though it’s definitely true that it could matter, most of the structural issues are upstream of the ballot aka who gets to be on the ballot in the first place is the real problem

“If voting changed anything they wouldn’t let us do it” - Emma Goldman

Re: The room the economy can't see

#173

Post by the_sleaze_ »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #165
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #162

This is what religion is for, and what you refer to as THE ECONOMY is simply the hard wired human precondition stand in when you decide there is no God(s). "The Market" (God) would never have built such a place! The market (God) punishes any behavior that is outside its predilections! We must sacrifice to appease the The Market in order to gain its favor! Back to the 3rd space for teens. What is the first issue you t…

There should be a place for people, especially teens, to gather without a bunch of woo woo baggage. I found church incredibly isolating as a kid because we weren’t there just to be, we were there under this expectation that we were partaking in some superstition. The article already points out a room that the kids were enjoying without religious crap imposed on them. We need solutions beyond bolting on these things t…

I think you misunderstand, the 3rd space should be at a church. One in my community does this for teens where they just hang out and do homework after school for 2 hours.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#174

Post by nicbou »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #5

It is clear that having that room exist is a priority for some people. The market doesn't have a will of its own or compels people to be efficient and produce returns (which, by the way, this room surely produces down the line). The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want f…

> The market doesn't have a will of its own

Of course it does! It is possible to have a system where everyone is unhappy, yet incentivised to keep making things worse.

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

or https://genius.com/John-steinbeck-chapter-5-the-grapes-of-wr...

Re: The room the economy can't see

#175

Post by amanaplanacanal »

admjs wrote: post #76
kubb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors. I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.

What's an example where central planning outcompetes the market?

Electric service to the home, streets, policing, fire and rescue.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#176

Post by mindslight »

skybrian wrote: post #160
mindslight wrote: post #138

The act of visiting grandma doesn't need to be legible to the economy, rather the time that might possibly be used to visit grandma needs to be illegible to the economy. Speaking from a US perspective, the straightforward solution to this was defining full time work as 40 hours per week, and then incentivizing companies to not go over this (by automatically increasing pay rates). In addition, the setup where men work…

Part-time jobs are available and they are often taken by people who work multiple jobs.

Sure, that is another avenue of economic erosion but I didn't focus on it because the "exempt" dynamic would seem to be the stronger dynamic. But if we actually fixed the flaws I listed, we would likely have to plug that hole of multiple jobs not counting towards the full time limit, especially if full time employment were defined as 15 hours per week (leaving plenty of time to stuff in a second or even third job in place of "visiting grandma")

But in general here we're talking about the common case. There's no real way to stop an entrepreneur from dumping 80 hours per week into their own profitable business. The important part is that such things not be common, to prevent the result of many things just being bid up in price and making that amount of time spent de facto mandatory.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#177

Post by un-diletante »

Is the problem really the economy when these types of places were more prevalent in a time of even less economic regulation than we have today? I don't think that these "third spaces" really ever existed as the intentional stimulators of social interaction that they are conceptualized as today. Rather, I think that they were established in order to complement already existing social structures.

These structures no longer exist, and my conjecture as to the cause of that, especially in the US, is cultural fragmentation. Almost half of this country believes that the other half of the country is evil, or at least hold profoundly evil beliefs. Why would someone want to spend time in a place where there is a 50% chance that the next person you run into is evil? Why would you want to take your children to such a place?

And if you want to establish a place where you can spend time with just the 50% percent of people who are good, it's not gonna be a public space. If it is, you can't prevent the evil people from coming, and once they do, all the good people will stop coming. Public third spaces existed in a time of greater cultural homogeneity, where it was more likely that the people in your general area held more or less the same beliefs as you do and much more importantly, had more or less the same standards of public behavior.

This is all to say, I believe these spaces are diminishing because there is not a real desire for them, even in the people who claim to desire them. There IS a desire for a place where you can gather with people who are either in your subculture or in one that is not antagonistic to it, and who behave in a way that you believe is appropriate. This is not possible in a public space of today. To apply the regulation and exclusion required, a majority with enough power to apply it legally needs to be established. And in the case where you have such a majority that agrees on standards of public behavior, you again have a sort of cultural homogeneity.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#178

Post by miyoji »

mym1990 wrote: post #122
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way you say "outcompeted" makes it seem like you're evaluating efficiency in both cases, but isn't direction the more important criteria? It doesn't really matter if a car without a steering wheel can be faster than one without on account of being lighter. One is going where you want it to, and the other is crashing into things. The economy, as we're practicing it today, is a car without a steering wheel.

Somewhat of a weird example…the one without a steering wheel could be autonomous, or the place you want to get to is in a completely straight line from where you start. Also in your example you have both cars without steering wheels.

> the one without a steering wheel could be autonomous

How silly, even autonomous vehicles have steering. They may be built without the wheel, but they have some kind of steering mechanism

> or the place you want to get to is in a completely straight line from where you start

I hope your wheels never lose alignment and that you're pointed exactly where you want to go at the start.

It's not a weird example at all if you don't come up with crazy unrealistic situations that don't match actual cars or the metaphor.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#180

Post by swid »

bluGill wrote: post #114
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I'm not questioning that at all. I'm just saying if they aren't really your choices, why is making them valuable to you? Sure, you have 30 different choices of peanut butter to pick from, but you always pick the same one, because it's what your mom used when you were a kiddo, or because you don't like the oil separating ones, or because the chunky makes you feel like it's healthy even though it's loaded down with…

I have changed my peanut butter choice - when science started realizing trans fat was a problem I switched before the law changed to reflect science. I have also tried various of the 30 different options in other situations and found the one I personally like best. The value isn't just that I can make a choice, it is also that other people really do make different choices. You are forgetting about the time factor. I…

It’s funny you defend your independence by giving explanations of how you changed your peanut butter buying habits. The point was we don’t care what kind of peanut butter you buy; it’s not a meaningful kind of choice to have.
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