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The dictatorship of the articulate

florentcrivello.com

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Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#401

Post by HomeDeLaPot »

>It's no running water

So what would be running water? What's the next leap forward in terms of basic human needs? I can think of a few possibilities:

- Cheap housing

- Cheap medical care

- Dramatic reduction of modern diseases like obesity & heart disease

- Less social isolation

- Dramatically reduced working hours

- Dramatic increases in happiness/life satisfaction/optimism

- Reversal of climate change/resilience to environmental disasters

- Dramatically improved stewardship of the environment (part of resiliency)

But I'm not sure there's any product that can be developed by a corporation to bring about these changes. I think we have the physical abilities/technology to accomplish these, but we're lacking the social/psychological/political ability. Much of the population could indeed lower their working hours if they weren't so busy paying for large houses, stuff to fill them up, cars, etc. And replacing those things with skills (cooking, repair) and physical activity (walking, biking) again could reduce housing costs, health care costs, and obesity/cardiovascular disease while hugely reducing our environmental impact. Cutting out TV/digital addictions, playing sports instead, and going car-free/walkable/bikable could give us more socialization, satisfaction, and health. Have we as a society bargained with the devil, forgoing these advances for ever-increasing consumption, productivity, and the hedonic treadmill?

(I've been reading Early Retirement Extreme and thinking about what to do with my life.)

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#402

Post by pas »

wizofaus wrote: post #353
pas wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoning regulations mostly hurt the poor, even if lifting them would directly make profit for real estate developers. That said there is a big difference between zoning and EPA regulations. The only interesting thing in this article/blogpost is the 30 day limit of prop H. It's a good thing. Every kind of bureaucracy should have cost-benefit analysis integrated into it. It's ridiculous that government agencies can deci…

> It's ridiculous that government agencies can decide critical things about people's lives but the decision framework is totally arbitrary. Arguably that's what we elect governments to do. And if they're doing a bad job of it, they get voted out. Obviously it's not a very fine grained system and there's an argument for a constitutional requirement for legislation to be reviewed periodically but that carries the risk…

I was sloppy in my phrasing, I mean building approval/permitting. A bunch of local delegates are required to meet to have a new simple building (whatever the neighborhood a bit bigger denser is simple) erected? And we are surprised that housing costs are outpacing inflation?

"urbanization" is ongoing for decades and density is not the default? and people are surprised that suburban sprawl is the result?

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#403

Post by lesuorac »

refurb wrote: post #391
lesuorac wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? If you're working on a project and 5 people have died so far and you've still got a lot more to do I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that more people will die. So, if you're going to continue the project you're considering it acceptable that somebody else will die as well.

I don't follow, but just FYI, if 5 people die on a project it's usually shut down. This isn't 1930 anymore.

Sure, you shut it down for awhile and then just let it start back up again and after the next death shut it back down and rinse-repeat. If it was the 1930s you wouldn't have to bother taking the break in between deaths but the rinse-repeat means we have a non-zero tolerance for death.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/30/us/nyc-construction-death...

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#404

Post by wizofaus »

pas wrote: post #402
wizofaus wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's ridiculous that government agencies can decide critical things about people's lives but the decision framework is totally arbitrary. Arguably that's what we elect governments to do. And if they're doing a bad job of it, they get voted out. Obviously it's not a very fine grained system and there's an argument for a constitutional requirement for legislation to be reviewed periodically but that carries the risk…

I was sloppy in my phrasing, I mean building approval/permitting. A bunch of local delegates are required to meet to have a new simple building (whatever the neighborhood a bit bigger denser is simple) erected? And we are surprised that housing costs are outpacing inflation? "urbanization" is ongoing for decades and density is not the default? and people are surprised that suburban sprawl is the result?

But areas with higher densities tend to have more regulation than those without, so I'm not sure what your argument is? I totally agree suburban sprawl is the really of poor government policy but I'm less convinced it's an issue of building permits being overly restrictive. It's not hard to envisage high levels of regulation that are designed to make sprawl unprofitable - e.g. a maximum distance between residences and retail/industrial developments or PT facilities, or even regulation that prevents provision of ground-level parking etc.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#405

Post by pas »

wizofaus wrote: post #404
pas wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was sloppy in my phrasing, I mean building approval/permitting. A bunch of local delegates are required to meet to have a new simple building (whatever the neighborhood a bit bigger denser is simple) erected? And we are surprised that housing costs are outpacing inflation? "urbanization" is ongoing for decades and density is not the default? and people are surprised that suburban sprawl is the result?

But areas with higher densities tend to have more regulation than those without, so I'm not sure what your argument is? I totally agree suburban sprawl is the really of poor government policy but I'm less convinced it's an issue of building permits being overly restrictive. It's not hard to envisage high levels of regulation that are designed to make sprawl unprofitable - e.g. a maximum distance between residences an…

My argument is that those areas would be even denser, more walkable, would support more people, better infrastructure (thanks to more people bearing the costs, plus economies of scale). Would be even more engines of wealth generation, would benefit more people overall.

Regulations are obviously necessary to coordinate large populations with some decent throughput, but they need to be optimized for legibility, efficiency. (Eg. self-service portals, understandable - easily human computable - conditions, the less need for domain experts for regular business as usual things, the more transparent and standardized the decision making of bureaucracy is, the less waste there is in the coordination system.)

Therefore for housing, which is as basic a function as it gets, ought to be as easy to add more as it can be. Eg. copy paste an existing building.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#406

Post by kansface »

bumby wrote: post #362
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$…

What's missing in this utilitarian perspective is the idea that a safe workplace isn't an economic good but a right within the US codified by law. We can go through the list of the Bill of Rights and probably point out how they don't make economic sense. But they make an abundance of moral sense.

What is a safe workplace? Is it one in which we expect a workplace accident every year, decade, century, or millennium? The costs in terms of time, labor, and budget are not linear - that is money and man years that would be better spent elsewhere. The thing is that I think me mostly agree here as a society but most of these decisions are never actually decided in the first place.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#407

Post by kansface »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #338
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$…

This is a perfect example of the bourgeoisie complaining that worrying about Proletariat lives is harming their ability to optimize profit. One wonders how they feel when the proletariat decide to optimize their own lives and rise up against the bourgeoisie.

Why do you think this is a bourgeois sentiment? Do you think the Proletariate never have their lives wasted, waiting endlessly because of safetyism or that the budgets that we devote to enforcing kafkaesque requirements wouldn’t better serve them put to productive use. If life is sacred, then it is just as immoral to waste it to no end as it is to end it via other means.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#408

Post by ghastmaster »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #386
bumby wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time. Doesn't this neglect the deaths in the short term? If we remove all speed limits and safety regulations on cars, there will likely be a spike in deaths. Maybe there will be enough public sentiment to change that, but there will be a lag that creates an awful lot of death in the near term. (I'd also argue that regulation is one of the main mechan…

yes, it's a very cynical argument along the lines of "abolish the FDA and people will learn how to deal with food and drugs that negligently cause death we did find a way to deal with it, it's regulation. if the regulation is too slow, fund more people doing the work.

There are non government regulatory bodies. Underwriters Laboratories comes to mind.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#409

Post by edmundsauto »

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…

Perhaps biological population macro models make sense - let things bloom, then cull the ones that don't meet societal goals. Regulation is the pruning factor, in great times, things bloom but the critical work is aligning the pruning shears with goals.

This perspective implies there is no right setting across time - the variance between permissive and restrictive is the value.

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