I wonder who Andreessen thinks is responsible for all the ridiculous zoning laws… wonder what sort of means he may consider if his letter asking not to build near him isn’t successful…
For those out of the loop like I was:
> I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.
> Everywhere I look, I see the rise of talkocracy — others have called it the dictatorship of the articulate. Talkers standing in the way of builders; offering we ponder, analyze, investigate, research, dissect, agonize endlessly over plans before we lay a single brick.
Ok, so how do technologically-minded folks learn to talk better than anyone else, to hack that system and make it work again? Is there a system for it?
Whilst it's true that there are a lot more rules, there are areas that have been largely without them (crypto comes to mind), and outcomes are still often not so good. With as many people as there are on this Earth, packed as densely as they are, there are increasing amounts of commons, and also increasing numbers of tragedies occurring in these myriad commons as well.
I'm not sure getting things done for the sake of it is desirable if it means we have an ocean of copy-pasted apartment buildings like Hong Kong, or unprofitable bullet trains running empty like China, or asbestos products or other things. The notion that we must “move fast and break hearts" on failed ideas is kind of fanciful, because in practice in society we don't often have a clear figure elected to do that; we don't live in a dictatorship where a flick of a finger can end a project after all. Councils and groups of talkers coming together are presumably trying to perform this actual function, and I think we don't necessarily give them credit for that.
Fundamentally, some of that articulate class is trying to preserve some kind of life style that they perceive is rapidly evaporating in the face of cheaply built things built purely for profit.
> we don't live in a dictatorship where a flick of a finger can end a project after all.
Sure we do: they're called planning, zoning, or environmental review boards. And process by which they operate has been engineered to make it increasingly easier to stop projects. In some states like California, any random person (they don't even need to live in the community!) has the power to stop projects for months, if not years, all but guaranteeing either failure or massive budget expenditures.
Your argument is basically a Slippery Slope argument. The flaws in Slippery Slope are well known, but the mentality is so very attractive to the way humans think. See, e.g., Prospect Theory. As a community becomes wealthier, more people have more to lose, and they will predictably become ever more cautious about change--any kind of change, even change that on its face is positive and enriching. In the back of their minds they're thinking, "But what if this, or what if that, later on down the road, causes the loss of what I already have." Everything begins to look like a zero-sum game.
Perhaps the only thing worse than this state of affairs is the complete opposite state of affairs, where most people are desperately poor. They have nothing to lose so they're happy to leap from radical project to radical project chasing a parade of cheap promises made by snake oil men. See, e.g., most any poor country.
Potentially, but I think we have actually slipped down a lot of these slopes at one point or another. These negative possibilities are not just hypotheticals, they are informed by actual failures. I'm not going to argue that there aren't people defending their interests selfishly in such arrangements, - there definitely is, as well. Maybe such councils should be filled with non-affiliated neutral parties that are randomly elected?
"an ocean of copy-pasted apartment buildings like Hong Kong"
That's an incredible way to frame place for people to live. You may find that aesthetically disgusting, that's your right, but I find the legally mandated suburbs of an expensive city to be morally disgusting given the impacts on the environment and poor people.
This isn't a discussion about housing availability. You should make a new submission about that if you want to go into that topic in depth. There are facets to this discussion that your post is glossing over; it's not a binary choice between HK style apartments or suburban sprawl.
I don't really accept any discussion of reducing subjective eyesores when it comes to housing. It's always used as a political weapon against housing. Someone's ability to have shelter always beats out the other person's subjective aesthetic tastes that they have no right to impose on anyone.
I would suggest this speaks to the weight of your experiences coloring your view. It doesn't have to be this way, though, yours are just one set of lived experiences, and the systems you live in are not necessarily objectively the best ones.
The issue you're discussing is that aesthetic objections are being used as a hard roadblock to progress. This suggests that aesthetic input needs to be received without them being an opportunity to derail a project if the projects is passing all other measures it has been evaluated on. It could be said that such input should have achievable criteria for success/passability without being significantly at odds with the premise of the exercise.
Anyway, I would encourage you to make a new submission about it as this is a pressing and heated american issue, and it's clear that you feel strongly on the matter.
> I would suggest this speaks to the weight of your experiences coloring your view.
> Anyway, I would encourage you to make a new submission about it
This is extremely condescending and unnecessary. There is no reason for the other poster to “create a new submission” for their points.
If you disagree with them that is ok, feel free to respond to the points. If you’re having difficulty responding to their points, don’t respond. However, as far as I can tell their points are on topic for the example you provided and shouldn’t be dismissed in the way you keep trying multiple times.
There's no point going into the weeds in a discussion ten posts deep when we deviate from the broader topic. It discourages community engagement from the discussion we're having and the main thread and derails the thread as people have to scroll past it to see other comments. This is not why people are here, even if we feel passionate about the topic.
> There's no point going into the weeds in a discussion ten posts deep when we deviate from the broader topic.
That is up to the other person and what the downvote button is for.
> It discourages community engagement from the discussion
Then the community can vote via the down button. Meanwhile, you do not need to be condescending or singly try to shepherd a group conversation.
> This is not why people are here, even if we feel passionate about the topic.
I’ve been using HN for 10 years, other than trying to shut down the other commenter, the back and forth and deviation/tangentiality in this thread isn’t different than I normally have seen on HN.
The only way that community input into aesthetics won't be used against housing is if land is decommoditized. Until then the financial incentives are such that this will be used as a weapon, as we've seen happen repeatedly. The hypothetical universe where aesthetics can be regulated and that government power isn't abused by the landowner lobby doesn't really exist pre-decommodification.
Hi. Longtime Hong Kong resident here. Public housing and private housing in HK could both be described, in terms of appearance, as copy-pasted. Quality of construction is exceedingly poor (to get the flavor, you could watch this new-build home inspection video from local TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShJtbmkjKG8) and backwards (e.g. single-pane windows are the norm, walls have zero insulation, etc.).
The wait list for public housing is many years long. Depending on whose numbers you believe, between 100k and 200k people are living in subdivided apartments (which, in some cases, translates to a bed inside a literal metal cage -- hence the term "cage apartments"). Private housing costs have gone down very slightly thanks to political developments and purported pandemic control policies, but prices for badly-built, tiny, puzzle-piece-shaped apartments in huge copy-pasted high-rises are eye-wateringly high.
Saying it's copy-pasted is a criticism of the aesthetic, not the build quality. Copy-pasting designs is just economies of scale and should lead to cheaper construction and design costs, all else held equal.
I have no problem with regulations of apartment quality. Those are usually too lax.
This is a point made elsewhere in the thread. We need more good regulations and less bad regulations. More regulations of build quality (e.g noise transmission, double pane windows). Less zoning and aesthetic regulations.
There's technically no reason that copy-pasted skyscraper apartment buildings can't be built to a high standard, quality-wise, and it certainly may yield savings to the entity commissioning the project.
But there's no reason they can't be built to a low standard (and this subthread is about Hong Kong, where that is certainly the case) and there's nothing preventing cheaply-built, shabby, cookie cutter housing from being sold at exorbitant prices (ditto).
Your statement, in taking issue with someone else's completely accurate description of HK buildings as copy-paste jobs, that you "don't really accept any discussion of reducing subjective eyesores when it comes to housing" in tandem with an invocation of "ability to have shelter" signaled a deep lack of understanding about HK's housing situation.
I'm telling you that HKers aren't seeing any of the "ability to have shelter" benefit you seem to be imputing to ugly, identical tower blocks. The wait list for copy-paste public housing is years long and it's a byzantine process to get into an apartment even then. Private copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg for cubby-hole sized micro-apartments, so much so that 100-200 thousand people at any given moment are living in desperate conditions under spalling concrete, with rats and bedbugs, and shared toilets and "kitchens" that I suspect would give you the dry heaves if you were to take a tour of such places.
Do you think the wait list for public housing would be longer or shorter if the government enforced your esthetic preferences on apartment construction?
Or to say it another way, your posting claims that HK housing is both too expensive and too low quality. If the government solved the low quality problem by banning it, it would probably make the expensive problem worse.
I’m not saying that housing quality should never be regulated. I’m saying that regulation can have side effects policy makers need to consider.
The aesthetics of public housing in HK is not a factor in the pace of public housing construction or the amount of public housing made available. Appearance and supply are completely unrelated. Supply is maintained at an always-woefully-inadequate level and many are allowed to live in squalor.
This, purely by happenstance, ensures a market for new and used low-quality, cramped private dwellings. In turn, everyone's dream is to manage to get a second apartment to lease out and/or emigrate so that they can retire in, for example, Canada, the UK, or the United States on the proceeds of the sale of their small, poorly-built apartment in a copy-paste high-rise.
Coincidentally, in HK, the government owns literally all of the land except for one or two tiny freeholds (e.g. a very old church is one that comes to mind) and derives a great deal of revenue from land sales (selling long-term leases, really, rather than the land) to property developers. The money from land sales is earmarked for infrastructure projects.
To reiterate: the notion that slapping together near-identical residential skyscrapers in HK helps make housing more accessible is incorrect. Appearance and availability are completely uncoupled here.
> Appearance and availability are completely uncoupled here.
Your evidence for this is that prices are extremely high. But you have no evidence that prices wouldn't be even higher if purely aesthetic constraints were imposed on development that had nothing to do with utility or quality.
Moreover, that's not even relevant to the main problem with the focus on aesthetics. You're right I don't know much about the HK situation, but where I'm from, aesthetics is one of the top two excuses that landowners use to lobby the government to block new housing.
What he is saying is, there is no point in turning San Francisco into Hongkong. If you don't find affordable housing in SF, move somewhere else. It's not the only city in the world.
> There's technically no reason that copy-pasted skyscraper apartment buildings can't be built to a high standard.
> But there's no reason they can't be built to a low standard.
That's my point. Apartments being copy-pasted implies nothing about the build quality, so it's therefore a criticism of the aesthetic, which is what I took issue with.
> I'm telling you that HKers aren't seeing any of the "ability to have shelter" benefit you seem to be imputing to ugly, identical tower blocks. The wait list for copy-paste public housing is years long and it's a byzantine process to get into an apartment even then. Private copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg for cubby-hole sized micro-apartments, so much so that 100-200 thousand people at any given moment are living in desperate conditions under spalling concrete, with rats and bedbugs, and shared toilets and "kitchens" that I suspect would give you the dry heaves if you were to take a tour of such places.
If you want to add more good regulations that enforce build quality, I'll be right there with you. I haven't seen a country or locale where the building code regulations have been good enough.
> being sold at exorbitant prices
> copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg
Okay, so decommodify land, build more good public housing, and allow more private housing by reducing zoning restrictions. But "ugly" and "cookie cutter" and "identical" should not feature into the criticism.
>This isn't a discussion about housing availability
Down-talking dense, quickly built housing because you don't like how it looks IS making it about housing availability. Those buildings were built to quickly get people housing in a reliable way. Every month they waited was a worse housing situation.
There is a deep irony in writing an over-worded essay that effectively says 'I don't like it when people outside my profession regulate my actions'. Keep It Simple, Stooge.
I definitely think that the wake left by crypto steaming by and then striking multiple successive icebergs demonstrates that regulation is crucial and that unregulated fields with potential profits very quickly become a hell dominated by huge corporations who start to dictate the terms of the field.
True. Almost as if the regulations... Protect? The... Consumers?
No no, its the 'talkers' ruining it for the 'builders', surely. Not like people in a given industry ever want regulations. Please don't look up Louis Rossma-
So the more stringent the local housing regulators are, the more I should be able to find safe, decent, affordable places to live. Whereas in a place where the average project goes through fewer hearings, where the words "affordability" and "equity" rarely cross planners' lips, the housing should be poor quality, unsafe, way too expensive, only the rich living there. And if I go to a neighborhood that violates every principle of current housing regulation, it should be an unlivable blighted hellscape. Right? How's that consumer protection working out?
For specific instances of corruption relating to construction, this is detailed across a few FriendlyJordies videos but I'm strung for a link right now. Will comment if I find it later.
You can have good and bad regulations, and too much and too little regulation.
The only really dumb position is that fewer regulations = better always.
For example, there are tons of building codes that keep houses from falling down, and make them livable in many other ways. Those seem good. Others that say that we shouldn't poison the air or water too much. Also good.
So yes, much of the consumer protection is working very well thank you. There are a few places where we went overboard and need to cut back.
Yes, Germany and Austria and Singapore and places like that are doing better at this than America.
But you're probably thinking about communist California that passed prop 13 and a bunch of other regulations in the decades before it even became majority Democrat.
Some regulations help people, and some regulations hurt people.
Regulations that usually help people:
- anti-dumping and pollution regulations
- regulations that mandate disclosing added sugar on packaging labels
- regulations that protect workers in endogenous bargaining disputes.
Regulations that usually hurt people:
- single-family zoning
- price ceilings
Regulations are just laws that force businesses to behave a certain way. And laws can be good or bad, because lawmakers can be corrupted by money or ideology, or because laws can have unintended consequences. Regulations are not good or bad in the abstract.
The mindset that all current regulations are good is quite toxic, actually, because there are quite a lot of bad regulations that would improve regular people's lives if they were removed or refactored.
Yes everyone is aware that regulations are laws and can be implemented maliciously. We still need regulation despite those shortcomings.
Regulations give people who have a stake in a given resource a seat at the table, even if they're not part of the regulated business' plans. The examples you gave have negative effects, but they also highlight how ill equipped the industries that have them are with dealing with some problems.
The correct response to seeing that some regulations are malicious is to fix the regulations and to address the ways that affected parties were not adequately represented before the regulation was ratified.
The correct response is not to take a philosophical stance against regulation. Taking the philosophical stance conflates a data point with a trend, and also means we get to question the idea of representation at all in a Democratic system (which, if you're against Democratic processes, that's a whole different kettle of fish).
I see that we agree. Like you, I am a proponent of good regulations.
My issue is with extremist views on regulations, which I now see that you don't hold. I rarely see people on the populist left advocating for specific bad regulations to be repealed or even refactored, unless it happens to clash with a hot button social issue they care about such as discrimination. It's the pragmatic center-left neoliberals who are doing that job. The populist left's entire focus is on adding more regulations, and often bad ones such as price ceilings (mixed with some good ones, of course). Don't get me started on the populist right who are only interested in regulating other people's private social choices. The Texas GOP platform is effectively ancap + social conservatism. And I'm not trying to draw a moral equivalence between the populist left and the populist right in the current moment - the populist right is significantly more insane right now.
While its common in the US and similar environments, I think that's not a helpful framing of political interests.
To be explicit, I think pinning things on the left or right gives people a way to characterise a problem which should be inspected analytically.
For example, painting climate change as a 'leftist' cause is not ideal. That's because calling it leftist is common tactic to paint climate scientists as comparable to marginalised groups (who are seen as easier to tease).
The issue here is that it detracts from the practicality of the climate action discussion (what are the bottlenecks for each option, vested interests and what to do, etc) and its in poor taste to the marginalised groups.
It really is a great phrase. I think there's some truth to it. As someone who can be very articulate at times, the influence it lends me isn't always commensurate with my actual skill in that area. Put another way; I've found if you use enough big words and say enough clever things, people will treat you as if you're smart even on unrelated matters.
More broadly there is a thread to pull there about the overwhelming power of narratives- in all forms, words, pictures, sounds- in human- only human- affairs.
Power in every other species on the planet is measured in physical and sometimes mental/tactical capabilities. Only in humans are stories dominant. Of course there is violence in the human world, but the most boldly violent devote the most care to their narratives.
Framing that state of affairs as dictatorship is a brilliant and ironic insight.
I went into the piece expecting more. Instead I got blather about bureaucracy.
I’m constantly impressed by how much people nod when I spout some nonsense. It’s dangerous, especially if you’re prone to believe every praise you receive.
I was similarly disappointed. The phrase "dictatorship of the articulate" brings to mind a passage from "Dawn of Everything", by the recently deceased David Graeber. It's a thick, meandering book, with a lot of hits and misses, but it's still an engaging read.
An excerpt from Chapter 10, subtitled "IN WHICH WE LAY OUT A THEORY CONCERNING THE THREE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF DOMINATION, AND BEGIN TO EXPLORE ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR HUMAN HISTORY":
"""
So does that mean property, like political power, ultimately derives (as Chairman Mao so delicately put it) ‘from the barrel of a gun’ – or, at best, from the ability to command the loyalties of those trained to use them?
No. Or not exactly.
To illustrate why not, and continue our thought experiment, let’s take a different sort of property. Consider a diamond necklace. If Kim Kardashian walks down the street in Paris wearing a diamond necklace worth millions of dollars, she is not only showing off her wealth, she is also flaunting her power over violence, since everyone assumes she would not be able to do so without the existence, visible or not, of an armed personal security detail, trained to deal with potential thieves. Property rights of all sorts are ultimately backed up by what legal theorists like von Ihering euphemistically called ‘force’. But let us imagine, for a moment, what would happen if everyone on earth were suddenly to become physically invulnerable. Say they all drank a potion which made it impossible for anyone to harm anyone else. Could Kim Kardashian still maintain exclusive rights over her jewellery?
Well, perhaps not if she showed it off too regularly, since someone would presumably snatch it; but she certainly could if she normally kept it hidden in a safe, the combination of which she alone knew and only revealed to trusted audiences at events which were not announced in advance. So there is a second way of ensuring that one has access to rights others do not have: the control of information. Only Kim and her closest confidants know where the diamonds are normally kept, or when she is likely to appear wearing them. This obviously applies to all forms of property that are ultimately backed up by the ‘threat of force’ – landed property, wares in stores, and so forth. If humans were incapable of hurting each other, no one would be able to declare something absolutely sacred to themselves or to defend it against ‘all the world’. They could only exclude those who agreed to be excluded.
Still, let us take the experiment a step further and imagine everyone on earth drank another potion which rendered them all incapable of keeping a secret, but still unable to harm one another physically as well. Access to information, as well as force, has now been equalized. Can Kim still keep her diamonds? Possibly. But only if she manages to convince absolutely everyone that, being Kim Kardashian, she is such a unique and extraordinary human being that she actually deserves to have things no one else can.
We would like to suggest that these three principles – call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power. The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree. Even in societies where interpersonal violence is rare, one may well find hierarchies based on knowledge. It doesn’t even particularly matter what that knowledge is about: maybe some sort of technical know-how (say, of smelting copper, or using herbal medicines); or maybe something we consider total mumbo jumbo (the names of the twenty-seven hells and thirty-nine heavens, and what creatures one would be likely to meet if one travelled there).
"""
That assertion doesn't stand up when relatively simple equivalent things like bridges and bus lanes are built slower and more expensively in certain regions compared to the 1930s, which is a main premise of the article.
This is because the author and many others make the trivial error of not measuring how many people it cost to build those bridges. And when I say cost, I don't mean headcount.
11 people died building the Golden Gate Bridge. Safety does cost more time. But it saves people.
There are many places in europe and asia that build faster, cheaper and safer or just as safe as modern standards today. There is specifically something very wrong with north american infrastructure capabilities.
If we want progress, it's important to draw a distinction between the different effects of regulation.
Some regulation enforces the status quo, by helping entrenched interests use their power to crush potential innovators.
Other regulation restricts big players from abusing their dominance, and helps create a level playing field where innovation can succeed on its merits, no matter who's behind it.
It's not helpful to say that what we need is more rules, or less rules. What we need is rules that create a fair playing field.
Exactly what I arrived at, but I use the word better instead of fairer, since a regulation can do net harm without being unfair.
It annoys me when the right just wants to deregulate and the left just wants to regulate. It's ideological possession.
Implement more good regulations. Eliminate the ones that are doing more harm than good by adding too much red tape, or entrenching interests, or having too many unintended consequences.
> Eliminate the ones that are doing more harm than good
Easier said than done. When people have fundamental differences of opinion on what's "good and bad" how can we mutually agree on which "bad" regulations to eliminate? Even worse, we might not even agree on who's doing the regulating.
For example, let's say me and my neighbors dislike Veltian immigrants, and we get our local homeowner's association to set up a restrictive covenant that nobody can sell or rent in the neighborhood to Veltians. Then along comes the government and strikes down our covenants as against the Constitution. To me, the meddlesome State is unjustly trying to regulate our freedom of association. But someone else might see our homeowner's association as acting as a regulatory body and preventing the Veltians from engaging in commerce with local residents.
>It annoys me when the right just wants to deregulate and the left just wants to regulate.
So, while that might be the case when it comes to offshore drilling and gun rights, it's arguably not the case when it comes to abortion and trans rights. It might be more accurate to say that everyone generally wants to minimize regulations that prevent them from achieving their personal, social and political goals. And conversely we want to enact regulations that facilitate our achieving our goals, and that furthermore prevent our ideological opponents from achieving their objectionable goals.
> When people have fundamental differences of opinion on what's "good and bad" how can we mutually agree on which "bad" regulations to eliminate?
Yes, some kind of moral system and political goals are presupposed if we want to start classifying things as good or bad, and not everyone will share these subjective goals. But every political project already has such presuppositions built in, this one being no different.
My point about ideological possession is that the purist "more regulation" and "less regulation" perspectives are logically inconsistent with the other principles that these people profess to hold. So I'm more pointing out the moral incoherence.
> it's arguably not the case when it comes to abortion and trans rights.
So this is interesting. The dichotomy breaks down (or even actually reverses) when it comes to regulation of social issues. But it seems to hold true when it comes to industry regulation, where the only exception to that is when social issues and industry collide. I can't remember a time when a far-left politician has proposed a bad industry regulation to be stripped (unless it clashed with the social sphere, e.g. discriminatory policies). I can't remember a time when a far-right politician has proposed a good industry regulation to be implemented (unless it clashed with the social sphere, e.g. social media). So I do believe there is ideological possession there. Have a read of the Texas GOP platform, it's a mix of anarcho-capitalism (remove all industry regulations and government bodies) and social conservatism.
The world is complex now, it was simple back then, let me explain. I was thinking the other day, in 1950, you could drop a kid randomly anywhere on the map (say the U.S. but not necessarily), he would easily find its way: to the farm, to the factory, to the military or to the church. Everything would be ok for the 1950 kid youd drop anywhere. He would be fine and happy. Drop a kid nowdays and youd be dropping a body, virtually. Very little chance the kid would end up ok, employed nor happy. It's certainly exagerated but you get the idea.
> Everything would be ok for the 1950 kid youd drop anywhere. He would be fine and happy.
Sure. It was a happy and golden time for everyone.
So, one of the amazing things about the modern world is that actual information is at everyone's fingertips, which I find is better than anecdotal conjecture. A quick google away, I can find this document: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1380550/pdf/amj...
From this we can learn that since 1950 the mortality rate among 5-14 year olds has declined at an average rate of 2% per year, largely due to reductions in accident rates (particularly motor vehicle accidents) and deaths due to disease. Of any group of random kids of that age in the US, in 1950 pretty much twice as many of them would be dead by 14 than in the present day. If they were black and male, in 1950 their mortality rate from 5-14 was one in a thousand. That it's only half that today is... still pretty shocking.
And that's just the changing rate for kids encountering the worst possible outcome, during their childhood. What other outcomes have changed? Well, drop a boy randomly in the US in 1950, and from 1964 onwards there's about a 10% chance he gets drafted and sent to Vietnam. Or we could look at the other end of the outcome scale: If your hypothetical kid was a 5 year old girl dropped in 1950 America, she'd have very different opportunities compared to a modern child - she'd be 24 before the first women were admitted to Princeton or Yale, for example. If your 1950 experiment dropped a gay kid into America, well... if they're lucky, they're in Illinois where homosexuality becomes legal in 1962. If they're in Texas, they have to wait until 2003.
About a third of kids in 1950 lived in poverty in the US. That improved a lot over the 60s and 70s. Nowadays it's... around a fifth. Still shocking, but again, your odds look better today than 70 years ago.
And let's not get into the ethical issues of your 'drop a random kid somewhere in the US' plan where that might result in dropping a black child in Mississippi before the Civil Rights act of 1964, where they would grow up under Jim Crow. This kid would spend 4 years in segregated schooling before Brown v Board (and probably years after that waiting for desegregation to actually happen), and our hypothetical 1950 5 year old would turn 18 two years before the Voting Rights act.
Youre twisting my point. Im not saying society was better then. Im saying it was simpler in its structure and certainly more predictive for a given person. Maybe a little bit happier on average even but if we disagree on that no need to break bad about it I can be easily convinced of the contrary.
Don’t mean to twist your point; I’m just putting some statistical information out there that I think suggests a more hopeful picture than your assertion that a random kid in 1950 had pretty good odds of a positive outcome compared to a modern kid having ‘very little’ chance of being happy.
I don’t think it is fair to gloss over the large number of people who were children in the 1950s for whom their chances of happiness were limited from the start, and to hold out some hope that maybe actually on the population level the odds for kids today are slightly better.
your assertion that a random kid in 1950 had pretty good odds of a positive outcome compared to a modern kid having ‘very little’ chance of being happy.
Didnt say a random kid. I said a kid randomly air dropped with no resource nor parenting. I didnt say what kid. I actually dont think he'd end up easily okay today, I could be wrong. Anyway my point was more about illustrating the complexity of society today compared to before, its not about sheer accuracy.
Wow. So let’s unpack that a little more shall we? A kid with no parenting in the 1950s? Maybe they’d find their way into the care of the Catholic Church, where approximately 1 in 10 of the priests were abusers. Or perhaps to a residential school like the ones Canada where 1900 kids wound up in unmarked graves.
Can you please be more specific about what ‘complexity’ in the modern world you feel would contribute to it being so much harder for a kid to survive?
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.
It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones.
---------
As Marc Andreessen remarks, in every case, the culprit is regulation.
Ho hum. And the 5 year old AEI chart that's been bumping around awhile.
IIRC TVs are so low because they use a trick called 'hedonic averaging' where a 27 inch TV at the same cost of a 19 inch TV actually costs 1/2 as much, since you get twice as many square inches. Even though, you know, you still are only watching 1 TV at a time and looking at 100% of the screen on both. Whatevs.
The funny thing about ridesharing is that the "innovation" is literally just circumventing regulations designed to stop independent depression-era drivers from filling up the roads (e.g. medallion and licensing systems). If those regulations didn't exist, it wouldn't take a massive company to get them changed, and we might have ended up with distributed local markets for drivers rather than a few competing multinationals.
'It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones.'
because the causation is the other way around mostly
This is what you get when you have "grassroots democracy," when any unemployed busybody can show up at a council meeting and demand a new rule or a new vote.
Fareed Zakaria has commented on this problem extensively.
After playing around with GPT-3 a bit, I've started to suspect a lot of humans are actually very good at manipulating semantic sentences, without necessarily understanding their content.
It would explain why so many "smart" people will often speak long sentences that sound right, but have zero information content in them.
Maybe it's just not that hard to construct grammatically and semantically correct, but zero information gain sentences, paragraphs, speeches (as in, very hard, but much much easier than thinking new novel thoughts).
As a former technical writer for a major health insurance company, I can attest to this. After writing hundreds of massive documents, guides, tutorials, call scripts, policies and the like, I still had only a tenuous understanding of all the complex bullshit I was writing about.
For that specific industry, the convoluted and needlessly complex garbage is absolutely by design, but it’s a similar concept, I think.
Well, Devil's advocate, i think it's good to talk about stuff you don't understand. It's useful to practice declarative knowledge and hedging ignorance, in front of others, that we might tune into the useful level of understanding.
Just to know what words are relevant, what biases are appreciated, what ignorance is allowed.
We might even begin to understand the counterpoint for the OP: it takes time to digest change. Not everyone sees change the same.
Maybe we've had enough radical futurism coming to roost; I think it's weird that dystopian sci-fi now feels normal and I can't watch old movies. Maybe you haven't had enough.. commute to manifest a heretofore only simulated job on Mars in your Tesla Boring Machine.
According to the PIAAC, 54% of Americans are illiterate. That is, they are able to read simple things like menus, but they are not capable of synthesizing new information from multiple texts, or understanding the nuance of an authors argument. If I recall correctly, Americans scored an average of around 275/500, while the best scoring country, Finland, scored an average of 300/500. (This is a statistically significant jump, and causes a huge portion of those in Finland to not be considered illiterate, but they just begs the question of why the literacy cutoff is where it is.)
Functionally illiterate and illiterate are different concepts. If you can read a menu the thing that’s stopping you from reading and understanding a complex text isn’t about letters and sentences; it’s the inability to recurse on abstract thought and build complicated thoughts that depend on a body of knowledge.
Eliding the difference between functional illiteracy and illiteracy confuses unnecessarily.
> If you can read a menu the thing that’s stopping you from reading and understanding a complex text isn’t about letters and sentences; it’s the inability to recurse on abstract thought and build complicated thoughts that depend on a body of knowledge.
I can often do a decent job reading a menu in Chinese. A complex text would take hours per page and be totally opaque in many parts. (And partially opaque in probably the majority of the text.)
I would argue that in fact what's stopping me from reading complex texts is lack of knowledge of the letters, the words, and the correct structure of sentences.
It’s not just easier than constructing novel thoughts - it’s safer, too. You get to leave the impression of being an eloquent, persuasive intellectual without any of the risk that comes with actually expressing something that people might then dislike.
> It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones.
Well. This is insinuating that more regulation reduced innovation. But it's confusing correlation with causation. The things that are the most regulated are also the ones with failure is more costly. So maybe _that_ is the reason why innovation is worse there.
That argument may work with something like medical care, but housing and college tuition don't fall into that category as cleanly.
With medicine, the cost of failure is everything up to and including death.
With housing, the "cost of failure" is not having a house. Similarly for college, the cost of failure is not graduating college. Neither of these are good outcomes, obviously, but the solution to not having a house isn't to regulated away the possibility of building more houses.
Firstly, the cost of not having a house for a prolonged period in the north half of the US is death (in the winter). Secondly, there are a lot of other really bad failure cases. For example, houses burning down, poisoning people (via lead, asbestos or others), destroyed in earthquakes, etc. A lot of these can have immediate and severe negative costs for both the people living in them and for society as a whole.
While I was hyperbolic in diminishing the cost of not having a home, my point of regulating any new housing to the point it costs more to build than can ever be made back is a direct cause to the fact many areas no longer have sufficient housing for residents and the housing that does exist costing more than it's worth.
Running water, and sewer pipes, of course were and are provided by government. So, too, electricity. It’s fun for the author to highlight all the progress of the 1930s.
When you’re a billionaire, every year you can keep government regulators and trustbusters at bay, whether in the 1870s (a lot of historical parallels) or today, the annual returns are material. They at least know their history, and know that sooner or later the jig will be up, but with a bit more time, maybe their names will go along with Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Frick, Mellon, Huntington, etc. In the meantime, for a few million, you can get the founders of portfolio companies to carry water for you about the importance of keeping regulation away from innovation.
Meanwhile, about that Triangle Shirtwaist factory…
the article is certainly "Articulate", and i'm sure its content and message is agreeable to many in the community (myself included). no doubt that it speaks to the day-to-day chafes of working engineers and other technical folks in a corporate environment.
taking a look at the author's startup[1] is interesting. it seems clear that he's trying to collapse employees' personal slack afforded by remote/async work. that makes sense in terms of boosting butts-in-seats accountability, and i guess by some draconian measure that could translate to "productivity" (read: answering random interruptions to deep work). but i worry that the very dynamic he's espousing would itself kill builder culture. you can't think deeply about a problem when you have people bombarding your attention based on their own whims. from the company's landing page:
> Actually talk with your coworkers. Walk over to your teammate for a quick question. 10x faster than sending a zoom link.
also, i guess this is more aesthetic, but the skeuomorphism is super weird. i would be super suspicious of a work environment that requires this sort of SIMS-like virtual environment. it seems like a half-assed, 2D version of VR workplaces that are crawling their way out of R&D departments at certain advertising companies (looking at you Meta(verse)).
I think we can all agree that we would like less regulation on us when we are trying to do something, but I wonder how much less regulation we would accept on others who are trying to do something we don't like? I don't think many want to live in a world with no regulation, because some idiot would dumping old cars in the river by our house. I don't know if we're over-regulated or that the world has become more complicated. Sunshine rights over buildings is a good example of an issue that didn't exist years ago. You could make the case that we're under-regulated in an area such as crypto finance.
Those regulations can stay. If you ever worked on a complex highly regulated space such as architecture/construction; there are lot of things that get piled up that make no sense whatsoever even diving into the history and context of why it was written.
For example, Oregon's gas pump law (you cannot fill your own gas), I remember diving into the actual law and reasons behind it said something along the lines of "Because it is dangerous to walk outside in rainy weather and fill your own gas". It was a while ago and I can't find the text, but it was something absurd like this, I'll edit the comment with the factual info. Anyhow, legislators write laws to fulfill their campaign promises and they may not be in the interest of the benefit of the society, especially in the long term.
Edit, I found it:
ORS 480.315(4)
The dangers of crime and slick surfaces described in subsection (3) of this section are enhanced because Oregon’s weather is uniquely adverse, causing wet pavement and reduced visibility;
ORS 480.315(15)
Self-service dispensing at retail presents a health hazard and unreasonable discomfort to persons with disabilities, elderly persons, small children and those susceptible to respiratory diseases;
Caveat that the text of the laws is often disconnected from what they are there for.
For instance I've seen many local laws explained as "preserving local heritage and historic places" when their actual intended effect is to block affordable housing.
I assume you also see specific building rules that increase the building cost for seemingly no reason, when in practice it helps ruling out low income people moving in. That's from the top of my head, but I'd expect most laws going further that "don't kill people" to be at least half motivated by something else that the stated intent.
Say what you will about politics in Texas, but one thing they do that seems really right is institutionalized de-institutionalization via the Sunset Advisory Commission [0], whose job it is to periodically review government agencies' efficiency and relevance etc and provide a recommendation as to whether the pre-planned, automatic abolition of each agency should go forward or should be stayed another 12 years.
I lived in Oregon for awhile and it was commonly said that this was a make work program for reformed felons trying to turn their lives around, like a starter job out of prison.
The need for regulation is directly relation to population size, which is ironic because many of those who are in favor of deregulation are also in favor of unlimited "growth". If you are the only person on the planet, you don't need laws and you don't need regulations - they are moot by definition. If there are 10 people on the planet, they could each have a coal burning power plant that is 1% efficient and still have no measurable impact on the environment. The number of people you jam onto the lifeboat is directly proportional to the number of rules and regulations you need to manage the interpersonal relationships, scarcity of resources and the consequences of behavior on the finite environment.
Unspoken and underlying the author's entire worldview seems to be, "the more new things, the better," a not uncommon tunnel view in the engineering world. The purpose of regulation, ideally, is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people. Defining those terms and making that decision is precisely the job of regulators, who are ideally accountable to a democratic base. In the worldview where all that matters is "growth," people suffer. Running water is a huge quality of life win for EVERYONE. If you ask most people what would really help make their lives better, it's not gonna be colonizing mars, building tunnels under LA, whatever, it's gonna be access to resources we already have. Healthcare, clean water, clean air...perhaps we should think more about engineering as it can be applied to expanding access, and not so much to "making new things," which most people don't need or care at all about.
Not to mention that giving healthcare, clean water and clean air to people who don’t have it will increase “growth” in long term, probably more than anything new.
Is access to these resources really an engineering problem, rather than a matter of political fact? The people with the power to expand access, politicians, don't have any real incentive to.
It's definitely a political problem more than any other, yes. What would give politicians more incentive to operate this way would be real campaign finance reform. Check out represent.us
Underlying the political will to do something would be the implementation of that thing. To continue the running water example, you can imagine many technical challenges to distributing fresh water to the parts of the world that don’t already have it.
This undoubtedly needs talented engineers across the disciplines, definitely not just software.
I would argue that its an engineering/technology problem at heart. If access to those things was easy and cheap politicians would have no/less incentive to hold it back. It's probably not the same if it's a limited and restricted resource.
If we had more people trying to optimize food production, water distribution, Healthcare scaling and management etc, those things would become materially better, fast.
But we are more concerned with optimizing ads so we can buy shit we don't need so..
Did you miss the part where exactly these things suffer the most from regulation? How long until we mostly cannot afford healthcare for the middle class? Aren't we already somewhat there?
We can always go back to letting insurers deny health care based on “pre-existing conditions.” I’d rather regulators deciding people shouldn’t be priced out of the healthcare market for having asthma or diabetes.
Or go back before the (unfunded) EMTALA bill where uninsured people were told to just die in the hospital parking lot.
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.
As you talk about the affordability of healthcare, I assume that you're talking about the US system. Consider this: is US healthcare more or less regulated than that of the rest of the developed world?
A more suitable comparison would be whether the US's (or Germany's) healthcare system is more or less regulated compared to 50 years ago. Now also look at the pricing.
>>> it's not gonna be colonizing mars, building tunnels under LA, whatever, it's gonna be access to resources we already have. Healthcare, clean water, clean air...
This exactly ... incremental improvements on existing infrastructure, increasing access etc would benefit more people than big bang, sexy stuff like hyperloop.
Let's be clear about one thing: The hyperloop was intended to cast suspicion on infrastructure investments, primary rail. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe low pressure tubing will rule and no one will use rail? Then your investment will be for naught!
It's an age old method, the same as used in telecom to justify not spending on fiber infrastructure. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe wireless? Look at this idea what a future wireless service might bring!
(Completely ignoring the fact that fiber is what drives economy and innovation. Wireless is just a question of capex, if the fiber is already in place. Quite similar to how low pressure tubes have physical limitations that makes it unrealistic to replace rail.)
This is not only an obvious observation by now, as Musk has been pretty clear about what risks he saw with rail investments, particularly in California but also across the country.
> It's an age old method, the same as used in telecom to justify not spending on fiber infrastructure. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe wireless? Look at this idea what a future wireless service might bring!
With SpaceX's immediate success in becoming a global ISP, this turned out to be true.
Except in practice regulation increases cost and reduces access, particularly of anything new. Regulation has made building so difficult in the UK that oligopolies have formed and 90% of the young will never be able to buy a house unless they inherit.
Personally I blame Right to Buy for the collapse in building new homes, as this graph [1] neatly illustrates; Local authority building collapses, Housing association building is a trickle by comparison. Private housebuilding has remained relatively stable since 1955 by comparison.
The financial crisis also has a notable effect, but it's small by comparison.
The cost of housing is fuelled mainly by lack of social rented supply, and the high cost of land with planning permission. It's also to some extent a consequence of political service to the baby boomer generation, who got high house building when they needed it, had the heyday of BTL and have constrained house building since to preserve the value of their investments. The size of houses is decreasing [2] and I can't find a source for it, but certainly anecdotally plot size is decreasing too. The young are paying more for less.
House size decreasing makes sense as people become more urban.
Everything else you said is exactly spot on though.
It was regulations intentionally written to make the rich richer and keep the poor poor that caused the issue. It wasn't a mistake, or an unintended effect of the nanny state going too far, quite the opposite.
The reason I mentioned it as such is that it's not really regulation, as much as the effects of the right to buy policy causing the public sector to stop building houses; reversing this wouldn't really be 'deregulating' but would actually be involving government to address a market failure.
The original idea of right to buy, as discussed by Labour, in the late 70s was to reinvest the money from sales in building new council houses.
The Tory policy implementation sold them off cheap and slowly ratcheted down the amount of the sales price going to that purpose and the building dramatically slowed. Again, not an accident or unintended effect.
Basically bribing the better off council house owners into voting conservative (and for policies that cause the housing crisis) at the expense of the poor.
It sounds callous, but even if those 72 deaths could be attributed to regulation on houses (they can't, that's apartment blocks), it would still be an acceptable price to pay. It costs less than a million to save a marginal life, housing regulations have cost north of a trillion (comparing total cost of housing stock then to now adjusted for inflation), so unless those regulations have saved a million lives? They aren't worth it.
Humans are really bad at thinking at scale, but this is essential for good pubkic policy.
So you are splitting hairs by, after the fact, by distinguishing between "houses" and "housing"; making up numbers of what regulations cost (not the same as the total cost of housing, right?) and insisting that fireproof cladding just isn't worth it in purely monetary terms.
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.
Humans did not “need” things they lacked, and live to tell about it. Every age could see itself as complete. We’re fortunate that it took until the mid 20th century to freeze everything in amber. Unfortunately, the mid 20th century left us some really problematic stuff that wouldn't pass regulatory scrutiny today - like car dependence - and now we can't get rid of it.
> is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people
Ideally yes but in reality it ends up being a way for trolls to hang out under bridges and take their cut or to block new things to protect existing interests.
Is more housing in the best interest of the majority of people? Public transit? High speed rail? Better energy systems?
Totally agree. I think the issue here though is not with regulation itself, but with corrupting influence that we as constituents allow to infiltrate our regulatory bodies. I'd hope campaign finance would help solve this issue too – harder to pull a " Greg and Co. gave me $x so I'll appoint Greg jr. to this sweet regulatory position where he will inevitably act in his self-interest" kind of thing if the public has full view of Greg and Co.'s campaign contributions in the first place...
"let builders build" and bemoaning regulations while celebrating Uber seems absurd when you remember how Uber's self driving car program ended and how their finances look.
What the author meant by innovation seems to be limited to world-changing innovation like the telephone or internet. Following that, I’m unsure if world-changing innovation is slowing down primarily because of the talkocracy. The issue is not exactly about innovation slowing down because of X or Y, but as more and more innovations are made, the time needed to get to the next innovation will potentially increase. Each innovation introduces yet another complexity we need to handle, and unless we can keep up with the new complexity on top of the current set of complexities, we’ll just have to contend with the slowness.
It’s possible at some point that the complexity is too big, no amount of talkocracy purge can allow us to replicate the innovation speed of the past.
right, it's the fault of regulators that every major industry has come do be dominated by a small handful of conglomerates that survive by mimicking each other and consuming every smaller challenger that might one day, through the power of innovation, grow and compete with the existing monoliths.
oh wait, that's the opposite of regulation that caused that. my bad.
This in my opinion was an anti-regulation tirade masked as a call to action to makers. I’ve worked now for a while with physical product development, and had worked before with web development. The main difference is that physical products have an ability to kill/maim/hurt you if not properly designed. I welcome regulations on electrical, mechanical and anything that will hurt you if improperly used. Most websites or consumer software in general won’t hurt you much.
I would appreciate more discussion on the nuances of design and working with limitations; from the brief, from the target, from the regulatory and compliance landscape. The great innovations come in satisfying all those constrains , and end up with a great product at a great price
I do have some sympathy with the general idea that we should be able to build a whole lot more than we are. The article takes some odd inspiration though. Marc "build but don't dare build near me" Andreessen. And Uber, which is a bonfire of money and has an infamously wasteful eng culture. Perhaps there's a meta-point being made that this is the best we can show in today's world. I hope not though. Surely there are better examples?
I also like the general idea, but there seems to be a weird underlying motivation. For me Uber is the prime example for bullshit (in the technical sense of the word) innovation. Stuff like Uber should be considered infrastructure so that the profits can go to the drivers. Perhaps the actual reason for lack of 'real' innovation is that it's not what's the most profitable? After all, nobody became a billionaire because the writer's grandma's town/village got running water and a sewage system.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 417 ms ] threadhttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...
Ok, so how do technologically-minded folks learn to talk better than anyone else, to hack that system and make it work again? Is there a system for it?
I'm not sure getting things done for the sake of it is desirable if it means we have an ocean of copy-pasted apartment buildings like Hong Kong, or unprofitable bullet trains running empty like China, or asbestos products or other things. The notion that we must “move fast and break hearts" on failed ideas is kind of fanciful, because in practice in society we don't often have a clear figure elected to do that; we don't live in a dictatorship where a flick of a finger can end a project after all. Councils and groups of talkers coming together are presumably trying to perform this actual function, and I think we don't necessarily give them credit for that.
Fundamentally, some of that articulate class is trying to preserve some kind of life style that they perceive is rapidly evaporating in the face of cheaply built things built purely for profit.
Sure we do: they're called planning, zoning, or environmental review boards. And process by which they operate has been engineered to make it increasingly easier to stop projects. In some states like California, any random person (they don't even need to live in the community!) has the power to stop projects for months, if not years, all but guaranteeing either failure or massive budget expenditures.
Your argument is basically a Slippery Slope argument. The flaws in Slippery Slope are well known, but the mentality is so very attractive to the way humans think. See, e.g., Prospect Theory. As a community becomes wealthier, more people have more to lose, and they will predictably become ever more cautious about change--any kind of change, even change that on its face is positive and enriching. In the back of their minds they're thinking, "But what if this, or what if that, later on down the road, causes the loss of what I already have." Everything begins to look like a zero-sum game.
Perhaps the only thing worse than this state of affairs is the complete opposite state of affairs, where most people are desperately poor. They have nothing to lose so they're happy to leap from radical project to radical project chasing a parade of cheap promises made by snake oil men. See, e.g., most any poor country.
The issue you're discussing is that aesthetic objections are being used as a hard roadblock to progress. This suggests that aesthetic input needs to be received without them being an opportunity to derail a project if the projects is passing all other measures it has been evaluated on. It could be said that such input should have achievable criteria for success/passability without being significantly at odds with the premise of the exercise.
Anyway, I would encourage you to make a new submission about it as this is a pressing and heated american issue, and it's clear that you feel strongly on the matter.
> Anyway, I would encourage you to make a new submission about it
This is extremely condescending and unnecessary. There is no reason for the other poster to “create a new submission” for their points.
If you disagree with them that is ok, feel free to respond to the points. If you’re having difficulty responding to their points, don’t respond. However, as far as I can tell their points are on topic for the example you provided and shouldn’t be dismissed in the way you keep trying multiple times.
That is up to the other person and what the downvote button is for.
> It discourages community engagement from the discussion
Then the community can vote via the down button. Meanwhile, you do not need to be condescending or singly try to shepherd a group conversation.
> This is not why people are here, even if we feel passionate about the topic.
I’ve been using HN for 10 years, other than trying to shut down the other commenter, the back and forth and deviation/tangentiality in this thread isn’t different than I normally have seen on HN.
The wait list for public housing is many years long. Depending on whose numbers you believe, between 100k and 200k people are living in subdivided apartments (which, in some cases, translates to a bed inside a literal metal cage -- hence the term "cage apartments"). Private housing costs have gone down very slightly thanks to political developments and purported pandemic control policies, but prices for badly-built, tiny, puzzle-piece-shaped apartments in huge copy-pasted high-rises are eye-wateringly high.
I have no problem with regulations of apartment quality. Those are usually too lax.
This is a point made elsewhere in the thread. We need more good regulations and less bad regulations. More regulations of build quality (e.g noise transmission, double pane windows). Less zoning and aesthetic regulations.
But there's no reason they can't be built to a low standard (and this subthread is about Hong Kong, where that is certainly the case) and there's nothing preventing cheaply-built, shabby, cookie cutter housing from being sold at exorbitant prices (ditto).
Your statement, in taking issue with someone else's completely accurate description of HK buildings as copy-paste jobs, that you "don't really accept any discussion of reducing subjective eyesores when it comes to housing" in tandem with an invocation of "ability to have shelter" signaled a deep lack of understanding about HK's housing situation.
I'm telling you that HKers aren't seeing any of the "ability to have shelter" benefit you seem to be imputing to ugly, identical tower blocks. The wait list for copy-paste public housing is years long and it's a byzantine process to get into an apartment even then. Private copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg for cubby-hole sized micro-apartments, so much so that 100-200 thousand people at any given moment are living in desperate conditions under spalling concrete, with rats and bedbugs, and shared toilets and "kitchens" that I suspect would give you the dry heaves if you were to take a tour of such places.
Or to say it another way, your posting claims that HK housing is both too expensive and too low quality. If the government solved the low quality problem by banning it, it would probably make the expensive problem worse.
I’m not saying that housing quality should never be regulated. I’m saying that regulation can have side effects policy makers need to consider.
This, purely by happenstance, ensures a market for new and used low-quality, cramped private dwellings. In turn, everyone's dream is to manage to get a second apartment to lease out and/or emigrate so that they can retire in, for example, Canada, the UK, or the United States on the proceeds of the sale of their small, poorly-built apartment in a copy-paste high-rise.
Coincidentally, in HK, the government owns literally all of the land except for one or two tiny freeholds (e.g. a very old church is one that comes to mind) and derives a great deal of revenue from land sales (selling long-term leases, really, rather than the land) to property developers. The money from land sales is earmarked for infrastructure projects.
To reiterate: the notion that slapping together near-identical residential skyscrapers in HK helps make housing more accessible is incorrect. Appearance and availability are completely uncoupled here.
Your evidence for this is that prices are extremely high. But you have no evidence that prices wouldn't be even higher if purely aesthetic constraints were imposed on development that had nothing to do with utility or quality.
Moreover, that's not even relevant to the main problem with the focus on aesthetics. You're right I don't know much about the HK situation, but where I'm from, aesthetics is one of the top two excuses that landowners use to lobby the government to block new housing.
> But there's no reason they can't be built to a low standard.
That's my point. Apartments being copy-pasted implies nothing about the build quality, so it's therefore a criticism of the aesthetic, which is what I took issue with.
> I'm telling you that HKers aren't seeing any of the "ability to have shelter" benefit you seem to be imputing to ugly, identical tower blocks. The wait list for copy-paste public housing is years long and it's a byzantine process to get into an apartment even then. Private copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg for cubby-hole sized micro-apartments, so much so that 100-200 thousand people at any given moment are living in desperate conditions under spalling concrete, with rats and bedbugs, and shared toilets and "kitchens" that I suspect would give you the dry heaves if you were to take a tour of such places.
If you want to add more good regulations that enforce build quality, I'll be right there with you. I haven't seen a country or locale where the building code regulations have been good enough.
> being sold at exorbitant prices
> copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg
Okay, so decommodify land, build more good public housing, and allow more private housing by reducing zoning restrictions. But "ugly" and "cookie cutter" and "identical" should not feature into the criticism.
Down-talking dense, quickly built housing because you don't like how it looks IS making it about housing availability. Those buildings were built to quickly get people housing in a reliable way. Every month they waited was a worse housing situation.
No no, its the 'talkers' ruining it for the 'builders', surely. Not like people in a given industry ever want regulations. Please don't look up Louis Rossma-
For specific instances of corruption relating to construction, this is detailed across a few FriendlyJordies videos but I'm strung for a link right now. Will comment if I find it later.
Edit: there's also this https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/n...
The only really dumb position is that fewer regulations = better always.
For example, there are tons of building codes that keep houses from falling down, and make them livable in many other ways. Those seem good. Others that say that we shouldn't poison the air or water too much. Also good.
So yes, much of the consumer protection is working very well thank you. There are a few places where we went overboard and need to cut back.
But you're probably thinking about communist California that passed prop 13 and a bunch of other regulations in the decades before it even became majority Democrat.
Regulations that usually help people:
- anti-dumping and pollution regulations - regulations that mandate disclosing added sugar on packaging labels - regulations that protect workers in endogenous bargaining disputes.
Regulations that usually hurt people:
- single-family zoning - price ceilings
Regulations are just laws that force businesses to behave a certain way. And laws can be good or bad, because lawmakers can be corrupted by money or ideology, or because laws can have unintended consequences. Regulations are not good or bad in the abstract.
The mindset that all current regulations are good is quite toxic, actually, because there are quite a lot of bad regulations that would improve regular people's lives if they were removed or refactored.
Regulations give people who have a stake in a given resource a seat at the table, even if they're not part of the regulated business' plans. The examples you gave have negative effects, but they also highlight how ill equipped the industries that have them are with dealing with some problems.
The correct response to seeing that some regulations are malicious is to fix the regulations and to address the ways that affected parties were not adequately represented before the regulation was ratified.
The correct response is not to take a philosophical stance against regulation. Taking the philosophical stance conflates a data point with a trend, and also means we get to question the idea of representation at all in a Democratic system (which, if you're against Democratic processes, that's a whole different kettle of fish).
My issue is with extremist views on regulations, which I now see that you don't hold. I rarely see people on the populist left advocating for specific bad regulations to be repealed or even refactored, unless it happens to clash with a hot button social issue they care about such as discrimination. It's the pragmatic center-left neoliberals who are doing that job. The populist left's entire focus is on adding more regulations, and often bad ones such as price ceilings (mixed with some good ones, of course). Don't get me started on the populist right who are only interested in regulating other people's private social choices. The Texas GOP platform is effectively ancap + social conservatism. And I'm not trying to draw a moral equivalence between the populist left and the populist right in the current moment - the populist right is significantly more insane right now.
To be explicit, I think pinning things on the left or right gives people a way to characterise a problem which should be inspected analytically.
For example, painting climate change as a 'leftist' cause is not ideal. That's because calling it leftist is common tactic to paint climate scientists as comparable to marginalised groups (who are seen as easier to tease).
The issue here is that it detracts from the practicality of the climate action discussion (what are the bottlenecks for each option, vested interests and what to do, etc) and its in poor taste to the marginalised groups.
Andreesson capitalism build worship supplemented by for instance American Enterprise Institute propaganda that does not reflect reality.
Would downvote if I could.
More broadly there is a thread to pull there about the overwhelming power of narratives- in all forms, words, pictures, sounds- in human- only human- affairs.
Power in every other species on the planet is measured in physical and sometimes mental/tactical capabilities. Only in humans are stories dominant. Of course there is violence in the human world, but the most boldly violent devote the most care to their narratives.
Framing that state of affairs as dictatorship is a brilliant and ironic insight.
I went into the piece expecting more. Instead I got blather about bureaucracy.
Cheers.
I’m constantly impressed by how much people nod when I spout some nonsense. It’s dangerous, especially if you’re prone to believe every praise you receive.
An excerpt from Chapter 10, subtitled "IN WHICH WE LAY OUT A THEORY CONCERNING THE THREE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF DOMINATION, AND BEGIN TO EXPLORE ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR HUMAN HISTORY":
""" So does that mean property, like political power, ultimately derives (as Chairman Mao so delicately put it) ‘from the barrel of a gun’ – or, at best, from the ability to command the loyalties of those trained to use them?
No. Or not exactly.
To illustrate why not, and continue our thought experiment, let’s take a different sort of property. Consider a diamond necklace. If Kim Kardashian walks down the street in Paris wearing a diamond necklace worth millions of dollars, she is not only showing off her wealth, she is also flaunting her power over violence, since everyone assumes she would not be able to do so without the existence, visible or not, of an armed personal security detail, trained to deal with potential thieves. Property rights of all sorts are ultimately backed up by what legal theorists like von Ihering euphemistically called ‘force’. But let us imagine, for a moment, what would happen if everyone on earth were suddenly to become physically invulnerable. Say they all drank a potion which made it impossible for anyone to harm anyone else. Could Kim Kardashian still maintain exclusive rights over her jewellery?
Well, perhaps not if she showed it off too regularly, since someone would presumably snatch it; but she certainly could if she normally kept it hidden in a safe, the combination of which she alone knew and only revealed to trusted audiences at events which were not announced in advance. So there is a second way of ensuring that one has access to rights others do not have: the control of information. Only Kim and her closest confidants know where the diamonds are normally kept, or when she is likely to appear wearing them. This obviously applies to all forms of property that are ultimately backed up by the ‘threat of force’ – landed property, wares in stores, and so forth. If humans were incapable of hurting each other, no one would be able to declare something absolutely sacred to themselves or to defend it against ‘all the world’. They could only exclude those who agreed to be excluded.
Still, let us take the experiment a step further and imagine everyone on earth drank another potion which rendered them all incapable of keeping a secret, but still unable to harm one another physically as well. Access to information, as well as force, has now been equalized. Can Kim still keep her diamonds? Possibly. But only if she manages to convince absolutely everyone that, being Kim Kardashian, she is such a unique and extraordinary human being that she actually deserves to have things no one else can.
We would like to suggest that these three principles – call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power. The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree. Even in societies where interpersonal violence is rare, one may well find hierarchies based on knowledge. It doesn’t even particularly matter what that knowledge is about: maybe some sort of technical know-how (say, of smelting copper, or using herbal medicines); or maybe something we consider total mumbo jumbo (the names of the twenty-seven hells and thirty-nine heavens, and what creatures one would be likely to meet if one travelled there). """
The title got me, the article lost me. Typical capitalist worship, government regulations bad drivel.
11 people died building the Golden Gate Bridge. Safety does cost more time. But it saves people.
Some regulation enforces the status quo, by helping entrenched interests use their power to crush potential innovators.
Other regulation restricts big players from abusing their dominance, and helps create a level playing field where innovation can succeed on its merits, no matter who's behind it.
It's not helpful to say that what we need is more rules, or less rules. What we need is rules that create a fair playing field.
It annoys me when the right just wants to deregulate and the left just wants to regulate. It's ideological possession.
Implement more good regulations. Eliminate the ones that are doing more harm than good by adding too much red tape, or entrenching interests, or having too many unintended consequences.
Easier said than done. When people have fundamental differences of opinion on what's "good and bad" how can we mutually agree on which "bad" regulations to eliminate? Even worse, we might not even agree on who's doing the regulating.
For example, let's say me and my neighbors dislike Veltian immigrants, and we get our local homeowner's association to set up a restrictive covenant that nobody can sell or rent in the neighborhood to Veltians. Then along comes the government and strikes down our covenants as against the Constitution. To me, the meddlesome State is unjustly trying to regulate our freedom of association. But someone else might see our homeowner's association as acting as a regulatory body and preventing the Veltians from engaging in commerce with local residents.
>It annoys me when the right just wants to deregulate and the left just wants to regulate.
So, while that might be the case when it comes to offshore drilling and gun rights, it's arguably not the case when it comes to abortion and trans rights. It might be more accurate to say that everyone generally wants to minimize regulations that prevent them from achieving their personal, social and political goals. And conversely we want to enact regulations that facilitate our achieving our goals, and that furthermore prevent our ideological opponents from achieving their objectionable goals.
Yes, some kind of moral system and political goals are presupposed if we want to start classifying things as good or bad, and not everyone will share these subjective goals. But every political project already has such presuppositions built in, this one being no different.
My point about ideological possession is that the purist "more regulation" and "less regulation" perspectives are logically inconsistent with the other principles that these people profess to hold. So I'm more pointing out the moral incoherence.
> it's arguably not the case when it comes to abortion and trans rights.
So this is interesting. The dichotomy breaks down (or even actually reverses) when it comes to regulation of social issues. But it seems to hold true when it comes to industry regulation, where the only exception to that is when social issues and industry collide. I can't remember a time when a far-left politician has proposed a bad industry regulation to be stripped (unless it clashed with the social sphere, e.g. discriminatory policies). I can't remember a time when a far-right politician has proposed a good industry regulation to be implemented (unless it clashed with the social sphere, e.g. social media). So I do believe there is ideological possession there. Have a read of the Texas GOP platform, it's a mix of anarcho-capitalism (remove all industry regulations and government bodies) and social conservatism.
Sure. It was a happy and golden time for everyone.
So, one of the amazing things about the modern world is that actual information is at everyone's fingertips, which I find is better than anecdotal conjecture. A quick google away, I can find this document: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1380550/pdf/amj...
From this we can learn that since 1950 the mortality rate among 5-14 year olds has declined at an average rate of 2% per year, largely due to reductions in accident rates (particularly motor vehicle accidents) and deaths due to disease. Of any group of random kids of that age in the US, in 1950 pretty much twice as many of them would be dead by 14 than in the present day. If they were black and male, in 1950 their mortality rate from 5-14 was one in a thousand. That it's only half that today is... still pretty shocking.
And that's just the changing rate for kids encountering the worst possible outcome, during their childhood. What other outcomes have changed? Well, drop a boy randomly in the US in 1950, and from 1964 onwards there's about a 10% chance he gets drafted and sent to Vietnam. Or we could look at the other end of the outcome scale: If your hypothetical kid was a 5 year old girl dropped in 1950 America, she'd have very different opportunities compared to a modern child - she'd be 24 before the first women were admitted to Princeton or Yale, for example. If your 1950 experiment dropped a gay kid into America, well... if they're lucky, they're in Illinois where homosexuality becomes legal in 1962. If they're in Texas, they have to wait until 2003.
About a third of kids in 1950 lived in poverty in the US. That improved a lot over the 60s and 70s. Nowadays it's... around a fifth. Still shocking, but again, your odds look better today than 70 years ago.
And let's not get into the ethical issues of your 'drop a random kid somewhere in the US' plan where that might result in dropping a black child in Mississippi before the Civil Rights act of 1964, where they would grow up under Jim Crow. This kid would spend 4 years in segregated schooling before Brown v Board (and probably years after that waiting for desegregation to actually happen), and our hypothetical 1950 5 year old would turn 18 two years before the Voting Rights act.
Yeah. They'd be fine and happy.
I don’t think it is fair to gloss over the large number of people who were children in the 1950s for whom their chances of happiness were limited from the start, and to hold out some hope that maybe actually on the population level the odds for kids today are slightly better.
But still not good enough, for sure.
Didnt say a random kid. I said a kid randomly air dropped with no resource nor parenting. I didnt say what kid. I actually dont think he'd end up easily okay today, I could be wrong. Anyway my point was more about illustrating the complexity of society today compared to before, its not about sheer accuracy.
Can you please be more specific about what ‘complexity’ in the modern world you feel would contribute to it being so much harder for a kid to survive?
Not if the kid was black. Just ask Emmett Till, a kid from Chicago ‘dropped’ into Mississippi on vacation.
Or if the kid was a woman. You think she would have no problem finding a job in the 1950s?
Or if the kid was a Muslim. Or gay. Or disabled.
Even if you were a straight white male, your mortality rate was a lot higher in the 1950s than today.
---------
As Marc Andreessen remarks, in every case, the culprit is regulation.
Ho hum. And the 5 year old AEI chart that's been bumping around awhile.
IIRC TVs are so low because they use a trick called 'hedonic averaging' where a 27 inch TV at the same cost of a 19 inch TV actually costs 1/2 as much, since you get twice as many square inches. Even though, you know, you still are only watching 1 TV at a time and looking at 100% of the screen on both. Whatevs.
Fresher info here https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_08102022.htm#c...
Oh you mean a scheduling app that's lost billions of dollars via explicitly lawless business practices? Yes, it sure is no running water
because the causation is the other way around mostly
Fareed Zakaria has commented on this problem extensively.
It would explain why so many "smart" people will often speak long sentences that sound right, but have zero information content in them.
Maybe it's just not that hard to construct grammatically and semantically correct, but zero information gain sentences, paragraphs, speeches (as in, very hard, but much much easier than thinking new novel thoughts).
For that specific industry, the convoluted and needlessly complex garbage is absolutely by design, but it’s a similar concept, I think.
Just to know what words are relevant, what biases are appreciated, what ignorance is allowed.
We might even begin to understand the counterpoint for the OP: it takes time to digest change. Not everyone sees change the same.
Maybe we've had enough radical futurism coming to roost; I think it's weird that dystopian sci-fi now feels normal and I can't watch old movies. Maybe you haven't had enough.. commute to manifest a heretofore only simulated job on Mars in your Tesla Boring Machine.
Life is short, life is long.
Eliding the difference between functional illiteracy and illiteracy confuses unnecessarily.
I can often do a decent job reading a menu in Chinese. A complex text would take hours per page and be totally opaque in many parts. (And partially opaque in probably the majority of the text.)
I would argue that in fact what's stopping me from reading complex texts is lack of knowledge of the letters, the words, and the correct structure of sentences.
"I have to listen carefully to <m> out of every <n> words they say."
I particularly admire people for whom n is small and m/n is close to 1.
Well. This is insinuating that more regulation reduced innovation. But it's confusing correlation with causation. The things that are the most regulated are also the ones with failure is more costly. So maybe _that_ is the reason why innovation is worse there.
Dictatorship of the articulate indeed.
With medicine, the cost of failure is everything up to and including death.
With housing, the "cost of failure" is not having a house. Similarly for college, the cost of failure is not graduating college. Neither of these are good outcomes, obviously, but the solution to not having a house isn't to regulated away the possibility of building more houses.
When you’re a billionaire, every year you can keep government regulators and trustbusters at bay, whether in the 1870s (a lot of historical parallels) or today, the annual returns are material. They at least know their history, and know that sooner or later the jig will be up, but with a bit more time, maybe their names will go along with Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Frick, Mellon, Huntington, etc. In the meantime, for a few million, you can get the founders of portfolio companies to carry water for you about the importance of keeping regulation away from innovation.
Meanwhile, about that Triangle Shirtwaist factory…
taking a look at the author's startup[1] is interesting. it seems clear that he's trying to collapse employees' personal slack afforded by remote/async work. that makes sense in terms of boosting butts-in-seats accountability, and i guess by some draconian measure that could translate to "productivity" (read: answering random interruptions to deep work). but i worry that the very dynamic he's espousing would itself kill builder culture. you can't think deeply about a problem when you have people bombarding your attention based on their own whims. from the company's landing page:
> Actually talk with your coworkers. Walk over to your teammate for a quick question. 10x faster than sending a zoom link.
also, i guess this is more aesthetic, but the skeuomorphism is super weird. i would be super suspicious of a work environment that requires this sort of SIMS-like virtual environment. it seems like a half-assed, 2D version of VR workplaces that are crawling their way out of R&D departments at certain advertising companies (looking at you Meta(verse)).
[1] https://www.teamflowhq.com/
It's possible for a person to be wrong on one thing (though I'm not taking a view on whether they are) and right on another thing.
For example, Oregon's gas pump law (you cannot fill your own gas), I remember diving into the actual law and reasons behind it said something along the lines of "Because it is dangerous to walk outside in rainy weather and fill your own gas". It was a while ago and I can't find the text, but it was something absurd like this, I'll edit the comment with the factual info. Anyhow, legislators write laws to fulfill their campaign promises and they may not be in the interest of the benefit of the society, especially in the long term.
Edit, I found it:
ORS 480.315(4)
The dangers of crime and slick surfaces described in subsection (3) of this section are enhanced because Oregon’s weather is uniquely adverse, causing wet pavement and reduced visibility;
ORS 480.315(15)
Self-service dispensing at retail presents a health hazard and unreasonable discomfort to persons with disabilities, elderly persons, small children and those susceptible to respiratory diseases;
https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_480.315
For instance I've seen many local laws explained as "preserving local heritage and historic places" when their actual intended effect is to block affordable housing.
I assume you also see specific building rules that increase the building cost for seemingly no reason, when in practice it helps ruling out low income people moving in. That's from the top of my head, but I'd expect most laws going further that "don't kill people" to be at least half motivated by something else that the stated intent.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_Advisory_Commission
This undoubtedly needs talented engineers across the disciplines, definitely not just software.
If we had more people trying to optimize food production, water distribution, Healthcare scaling and management etc, those things would become materially better, fast.
But we are more concerned with optimizing ads so we can buy shit we don't need so..
Or go back before the (unfunded) EMTALA bill where uninsured people were told to just die in the hospital parking lot.
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.
This exactly ... incremental improvements on existing infrastructure, increasing access etc would benefit more people than big bang, sexy stuff like hyperloop.
It's an age old method, the same as used in telecom to justify not spending on fiber infrastructure. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe wireless? Look at this idea what a future wireless service might bring!
(Completely ignoring the fact that fiber is what drives economy and innovation. Wireless is just a question of capex, if the fiber is already in place. Quite similar to how low pressure tubes have physical limitations that makes it unrealistic to replace rail.)
This is not only an obvious observation by now, as Musk has been pretty clear about what risks he saw with rail investments, particularly in California but also across the country.
With SpaceX's immediate success in becoming a global ISP, this turned out to be true.
Starlink is twice as expensive for a tenth the bandwidth as when I had fiber in a modern apartment.
That kind of 20x factor is presumably what the other person meant.
Personally I blame Right to Buy for the collapse in building new homes, as this graph [1] neatly illustrates; Local authority building collapses, Housing association building is a trickle by comparison. Private housebuilding has remained relatively stable since 1955 by comparison.
The financial crisis also has a notable effect, but it's small by comparison.
The cost of housing is fuelled mainly by lack of social rented supply, and the high cost of land with planning permission. It's also to some extent a consequence of political service to the baby boomer generation, who got high house building when they needed it, had the heyday of BTL and have constrained house building since to preserve the value of their investments. The size of houses is decreasing [2] and I can't find a source for it, but certainly anecdotally plot size is decreasing too. The young are paying more for less.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_the_United_Kingdom#... /File:Dwellings_completed_in_England_1946-2015.png 2: https://www.labc.co.uk/news/what-average-house-size-uk
Everything else you said is exactly spot on though.
It was regulations intentionally written to make the rich richer and keep the poor poor that caused the issue. It wasn't a mistake, or an unintended effect of the nanny state going too far, quite the opposite.
The Tory policy implementation sold them off cheap and slowly ratcheted down the amount of the sales price going to that purpose and the building dramatically slowed. Again, not an accident or unintended effect.
Basically bribing the better off council house owners into voting conservative (and for policies that cause the housing crisis) at the expense of the poor.
Lack of appropriate regulation allowed Grenfell tower to burn down. 72 people died. (1) The case for "deregulation" of UK housing is a grotesque joke.
1) How lax building rules contributed to Grenfell disaster https://www.ft.com/content/bf6bcbd0-5b35-11e7-9bc8-8055f264a...
Humans are really bad at thinking at scale, but this is essential for good pubkic policy.
You're right though, it does sound callous.
Part of why they're threatened is due to lackluster planning and future mugging economics.
I remember the thing with women voting rights differently.
Ideally yes but in reality it ends up being a way for trolls to hang out under bridges and take their cut or to block new things to protect existing interests.
Is more housing in the best interest of the majority of people? Public transit? High speed rail? Better energy systems?
It’s possible at some point that the complexity is too big, no amount of talkocracy purge can allow us to replicate the innovation speed of the past.
oh wait, that's the opposite of regulation that caused that. my bad.
Mark 'not in my backyard' Andreessen*