erispoe

If you look at the facial landmarks figure[1], it seems that the main difference between a "gay" and a "straight" man is how fat/thin their face is. Maybe gay people are on average less overweight? That's possible, but that's hardly an intrinsic characteristic. Eyebrow shape is not intrinsic either.

[1]: https://imgur.com/zs8RWIz

There's plenty of research on the "entity theory" bias, mostly applied to gender. I.e. if you tell girls that they're bad at math, on average, they will act as if they are.

Unfortunately, framing math as hard or scary only serves to reinforce stereotypes and bar people who do not have the keys to defuse that framing from advancing. It's not the rich male kids who are told math is hard and scary.

> Retrofitting modern (past century technology) transport systems onto cities that are a ~ 1,000 years old is things that many cities have managed to do. Almost any capital city in Europe would make a good example.

These cities have always been pretty dense. Density around transit stop is the critical dimension of successful transit systems. Building infrastructure is a pretty trivial problem in comparison of changing the density distribution of a whole metropolitan area.

It can be done, however, with enough political clout. Many American cities have a big advantage: large straight streets. Car lanes can be converted to transit lanes for cheap, but it's politically very hard to do.

Because it's proposed out of prejudice towards these immigrants, and not out of a rational argument. Germany has a demographic problem and needs these people.

And what problems are they exactly? Are they making prior residents worse off? Or are we talking "cultural danger"?

There is no evidence of the former. In fact, a large part of why Germany has taken so many immigrants compared to other european countries is that the german workforce is stretched thin and needed an influx of young workers. Plus Germany has more infrastructure in place to integrate foreign population.

If we're talking the latter, then that's irrational fear.

It's the same problem with proposals for radical direct democracy (i.e. without representation). You'll probably end up with very, very low turnout.

That relies on the premise that immigration of "ordinary" people is somehow detrimental to the existing US population. This is, to my knowledge, not supported by any fact or study.

Governments take thousands of decisions. Can we really expect people to dedicate their time to vote all the time on these decisions? We risk ending up with a "democracy" where the power is really in the end of people having enough time and / or skin in the game to actually vote.

Voter fatigue is already a known effect where places that vote the most are also the ones with the lowest turnout. California and Switzerland vote twice a year, they barely ever go above 50% turnout.

That kind of system would be interesting for signature collection, however. It would then be easier, more fair and more secure to collect signatures to put something on the ballot. Today you really need money to do that.

But how do you know it's a new problem? You can always fake a little struggle and thinking your way to the solution for a problem that you know the answer already.

SF city occupies approximatively the same area as Paris, with only a third of the population. Most of Paris is developed with a 37m ceiling, hardly skyscrapers.

Cost of land goes up with density, but that's the point. You build more and spread that cost among more units. Up to a point, it is economical to build higher in that situation (then for skyscrapers you start to see cost per unit going up again). Look at all the 3 or 4 stories apartment buildings sprouting in the city right now. Most of them could be double the height without increasing construction costs per unit.

If your artificially reduce the number of units that can be built on a plot of land, you're forcing to spread the price of land among fewer units and you increase their cost.

All these effects are the product of workers being stuck in their jobs through the H1B program. Give H1B workers the same rights as American workers and they will compete on the same terms, getting a competitive salary and not bringing wages down.

If someone's got an H1B, it's because there's demand for the job, unsatisfied by US workers, wether at the original company requesting the visa or in the industry in general. Companies will pay them correctly when foreign workers are free to leave for the competition. And when they do, they're not unfair competition for locals anymore. With equal pay, companies will prioritize US workers over visa hassle.

Also, ban H1B outsourcing.

> The property rights in this case are clear: the plane belongs to United Airlines, and the passenger’s ticket does not entitle him to a seat on the airplane in a situation like this where he is commanded to give it up due to overbooking.

It is exactly what booking a seat is: buying an entitlement to seat in that plane for that specific flight. Otherwise what's the point? I understand that overbooking can be useful for companies, but in that case they should just buy back the service they oversold. That's how markets work.

Property rights are not everything. What is protected in a market economy is the free transaction between two economic actors. United's property rights of the plane, of course (even though it's likely to be leased, anyway), but also the rights created by the contract between the carrier and the passenger. If you don't protect these rights, you have nothing like a functioning market economy. Capitalism relies on social structures able to protect rights.

The way we do it now: redevelopment. If you remove obstacles to redevelopment, you can easily do it.

The hard part is not where to put all these people, but to invest in the infrastructure to serve them.

The city is not full. Cost indicates that supply has been artificially restrained for a long time. San Francisco has the same size as Paris for a third of the population.

Pro-independence has risen in the polls since Brexit. It's enough to give the SNP enough political clout to push for another referendum. Brexit was a remote possibility during the IndyRef campaign. On the contrary, Cameron said multiple times that Scotland would have no guaranteed place in the EU as an independent country, making thinly veiled threats of opposing Scotland joining the EU. Cameron was backed in this by the conservative Spanish government who would very much like to prevent Catalonia from holding its own referendum.

How did you conclude this? Through experimentation or reasoning?

How do we know that? I'm not sure identity as we know it is required for intelligent life to develop. We know other mammals share it but they're pretty close to us evolutionary speaking. Eusocial intelligence (ant-like) wouldn't need that, because they're not individuals, and each colony or group of colonies form one big organism. Could eusocial intelligence develop to the point of being capable of interstellar travel? It seems plausible under the right circumstances. Such an intelligence probably wouldn't understand the concept of individual identity...

Were you on the last season of the pitch?

https://thepitch.fm/episode/sudden-coffee-season-2-episode-2

What is the alternative hypothesis?

You leave out the critical question: how do we best protect society? The cycle of abuse, and circumstances that explain how abusers become abusers, does not absolve us from the necessity of protecting potential victims. It does, however, forces us to treat inmates humanely and to not engage into pure 'retaliation'. There's little evidence that punitive sentences actually do anything for preventing crimes. You can acknowledge the dangerousness of specific individuals and the necessity of preventing (further) crimes, while understanding how they got there.

It's also critical to intervene early. By the time they're adults, or have started a criminal career, it's much more difficult for someone to change. At this point potential sentences, however 'punitive', do very little dissuasion.

There's no consensus on that, compared to other areas where there is consensus that immigration, as a whole is either a net benefit or, at worse, neutral. There are, however, individual cases where native born individuals will suffer losses. The answer is better access to retraining.

> the problem is that we can't afford to "let them all in"

Why is that? I'm genuinely curious. Are you making an economic or a cultural argument? On the economic side, there's no evidence that immigration, even mass immigration, has any negative consequences, apart from some more competition at the very low end of salaries, which should obviously be addressed. By and large, immigrants are net contributors to the economy.

> On the other hand, brain drain.

We can hypothesis that tight immigration policy actually creates more brain drain. It's so difficult to come to the US that you're not likely to go back, even for a few years, once you're here. If you can easily move between your country of origin and your country of immigration, you can probably alleviate the brain drain somewhat. Easy come, easy go.

Basic support to prevent people to go homeless is not only more moral and more humane, it's also cheaper. In California, I'd start by rebuilding mental health support. The State should do it.

If only the market was working as you think it does. If you remove regulations getting in the way of building faster and denser, I bet you that San Francisco would see a construction boom and prices go down significantly over time. Prices are way up precisely because housing is no free market and we created a lot of barriers to new supply. The fact that so many people want to live here despite such crazy prices is a strong indication that there's a lot of demand to live in the city.

And that's perfectly fine. The only question is who should pay for the externalities of your lifestyle? Now that point is contentious, how much exactly does that amount to? Regulation distorts competition towards your lifestyle, by mandating large amounts of parking, for instance, or by letting cities bear the cost of what suburban dwellers simply do not want to see in their backyard, or by subsidizing your mortgage.

As for 'human feces', it's not a problem of cities so much as lack of safety net. It's not because of cities that people are homeless, it's because we removed the infrastructure that prevented them to go homeless in the first place (social support networks, mental health support...). They are more tolerated in cities and cities typically invest in basic services for them, so that's where they congregate. Your ability to not step in human feces in your suburb is directly dependent on cities' willingness to provide services for this population (or they'll simply die).

Complexity counters incentives, though. Unless the only incentives you care about are the ones available to wealthy individuals and large corporations with tax lawyers. If you burry the incentive in a pile of complicated forms, it's not an efficient incentive anymore.

Undocumented immigrants do not "suck the system dry". They pay taxes, for the most part, and because they are undocumented, are unable to benefit from most of the services available to legal residents (citizens or immigrants).

I said greater LA, whereby, to be precise, I meant Los Angeles metro area. The density of LA metro is 2,702.5ppl/km2, compared to 2,053.6ppl/km2 for NY metro. LA metro is denser by a good margin.

NY metro area includes a lot of very sparse suburbs. LA is mildly dense all over.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar...

http://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/ua/ua_list_all.txt

Yes, the US Census supports that. See this table on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar...

This table is directly extracted from census data: http://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/ua/ua_list_all.txt

LA is actually very suitable for public transit: it's a city with multiple, reasonably dense urban centers. The greater LA as a whole is also pretty dense, denser than NY metro area. And the city is investing like crazy in new transit infrastructure. Give it 20 years and, at least in the central parts of LA metro, it will be much more convenient to move by transit.