I thought that DST was dumb until I moved to Tokyo and find it sad that sunset is at 4pm in the winter
2,958 karma · joined December 27, 2012
They think that personal acts of minor inconvenience like tolerating soggy paper straws saves the environment while fighting things that actually make a difference, like blocking transit to save a nest of bats; or blocking urban development to provide an extra 3 minutes a day of sunlight on a surface parking lot; or that somehow them flying across the USA to visit a national park and connect with nature or something is offset ecologically by token actions like reducing how many plastic grocery bags they use throughout the year. Most ordinarily people don’t understand the tradeoffs of their choices in the slightest.
And on top of that culture wars and geopolitics is getting in the way of progress - we could be blanketing the world in solar panels and batteries and EVs on the cheap right now, but it’s dominated by enemy #1, China, so we won’t; not to mention that the right in the USA seems to think that renewables are for girly sissies. And the alternatives we have, like nuclear power, are being shut down across EU countries because people have no idea of just how self sabotaging that action is, given that the alternative is going to be fossil fuels coming from Russia and the Middle East. They’d rather die of heat stroke than use energy efficient air conditioning, so the powers of most people’s imagination are shockingly weak.
Popular opinion wants to blame everything on capitalism when the reasons for these problems don’t actually stem from there. Capitalism will be the way out if it’s given the chance, but it’s not popular to say that, so it won’t.
Plus they also don’t have to be polished. Don’t bother cleaning up the house and order a pizza, and everyone will still have a good time. Or just go out to a restaurant and not worry about any of that.
I’m an American living in Japan, I’ve always felt a great sense of liberty because of how safe it is here; I can live a lifestyle that would get me robbed pretty much immediately in the USA. While crime rates have always been relatively low here; part of that is because Japan got tough on crime around the turn of the century, and one part of that was pervasive rollout of automated license scanners used for reconstructing vehicle movement, like Flock. I suspect that Japanese people didn’t accept this because they don’t care about privacy - they absolutely do - but instead because they have a healthy enough social context to be able to consider the tradeoffs, and a government responsive enough to design around those tradeoffs; rather than immediately flying into a rage and vandalizing their cities like some angry Americans are doing now.
The same thing plays out for other things that would pretty clearly be a good thing, like having a real secure national ID instead of relying on social security numbers for identity verification (terrible). Can’t do it, people (as well as criminals) value the liberty of being difficult to trace far more than the liberty of not being defrauded regularly, or having a civil service that is able to do basic functions like authenticating you for benefits efficiently. Sigh…
More examples include how crime has gained San Francisco an image something like the land of the walking dead, where progressive governance treated homelessness and mental addiction as a problem of equity of opportunity - which in the super long run is perhaps true, but doesn't lead to any good short term outcomes. It's only now that some blue city mayors realize that, actually, order might be kinda important.
As well as the inability for these cities to maintain and improve their transit systems, usually because they can’t focus on cost and service quality and instead try to make their transit projects be about irrelevant things like income inequality, protecting obsolete jobs, saving random endangered species or whatever, so you end up with the NYC MTA being unreliable, filthy, and hopeless to expect anything positive to come out of it. Red cities just sidestepped it by organizing around the car, I don't love it but at least you can get around places instead of relying on the worst transit systems on earth.
American progressives seem to have a hopeless zero-sum mentality, where the only way the common man can experience a better life is at the expense of some rich person, and perhaps that is related to the fact that many live in American cities, for which daily life continually has gotten worse because of how incompetent their governance has been.
I can't really talk though. I just gave up on the USA and moved abroad since it was too hopeless for me.
The progressive wing seem irrationally tied to whatever Bernie Sanders claims is the best healthcare arrangement, and think that insurers are the source of all problems, when they actually are terrible from a business standpoint, they barely make money, and the cost of healthcare isn't from them but rather from other fundamental issues that have little to do with them. The result of this is that they land on a policy that half of America doesn’t want, and are too stubborn to budge on it, which means the United States will never get a rational healthcare system.
Housing & transportation - get rid of restrictions that reduce the ability of developers to actually build housing, from zoning restrictions to environmental legislation that is weaponized by NIMBYs to block development, to union labor requirements that send costs of building transit and housing through the roof, to affordable housing requirements that make projects not pencil out. Commercialize and densify areas in and around train stations as much as possible, specifically with for-profit developments, not trying to turn prime real estate into low-income enclaves because they hate gentrification more than they like progress (failing to think critically about what would likely happen if a poor and dangerous place became less poor and dangerous, or the people within such a place made some money to have the option of living elsewhere...).
I am partial again to the Japanese model where the available zones are set nationally, the rules for whether or not you get a permit is basically a checklist, if you check all the boxes you can build what you want, it doesn't discriminate on who's doing it, and for transit in particular, the train companies are literally private real estate companies that develop stations to the maximal extent possible because they make money from it. If you've visited Japan, did you think Shibuya felt awful because it was largely developed by Tokyu Corporation? Or that neighborhoods lack character and energy because the architecture is designed by a small handful of mass-manufactured modular home developer companies?
Progressives seem to think that supply and demand doesn't apply to their beloved cities, corporate landlords are the source of all evil when it comes to housing problems, and that private transit companies are not even a possible option because capitalists are greedy (when in reality they're more motivated than any of these activists are to actually do things that affect change on communities). My lived experience tells me that what I consider to be the greatest housing and transit successes in the world often come from large private developers who are incentivized well, because I've been places and observed how they function.
Also, we should be switching to land value taxes to incentivize efficient use of land, by making vacant lots expensive to hold, while also raising huge amounts of money, because the logic is simple enough for a 3 year old to understand - we have a lot of land and it is expensive. I haven't heard a single progressive even mention the idea despite being a great way to tax the wealthy while providing a strong incentive for better outcomes in cities, because they haven't thought about the root causes of why their cities feel like dumpsters long enough to care, and instead want to protect the historic laundromat and parking lot. Instead they harp on about wealth taxes that will mostly be evaded, and in the end net out tiny amounts of money that don't affect the economy as a whole and have no effect on the quality of their communities besides driving out economically ambitious and successful people.
I can keep going. I'm not a Republican, I'd much rather have the moderate Dems who actually think about the causes of issues to win primaries rather than populists who just try to get everyone pissed off (and probably are lying to their constituents anyway once they moderate as soon as the primaries end because they realize how unpopular and irrational their ideas are), but that isn't where the country is going these days. People are more interested in ideological purity tests than they are about substantive argument, in this sense the leftists aren’t any different than the MAGA people. Instead people like you already decided that people like me have no substantive opinions - very in line with the political zeitgeist these days where everyone's angry all the time and can't have rational conversations or learn from anyone else's experiences in the world. So, idk, enjoy your life.
Personally I think the USA's problems go much deeper than some vague sense that rich people are the source of all problems. Compared the whole US economy, they're a drop in the bucket, and they're not the reason that American institutions are dysfunctional; those dysfunctions were present long before Trump took power and Google got rich.
My opinion is that progressive populists don't know how to fix our problems, let alone have they even come close to identifying them, so they just focus on everything as "us vs the elites." You can see this simply by observing that the actual places that are progressive controlled - major blue cities - are the most dysfunctional places in the country. The solution? Wealth taxes that will cover a tiny percent of expenditures for a year or two tops, and no mention of why things are so expensive and slow in the first place, which has almost nothing to do with those rich guys, and have a lot more to do with dumb bureaucratic requirements; irrational procurement processes; capture from groups that sometimes are tied to wealthy interests but also come from the people like unions, neighborhood and environmental organizations; watering down every project by lacking focus on what they're actually meant to solve; procedural issues that allow cynical political actors to selectively interpret and enforce laws; and so on.
I'm sympathetic to the feeling of unfairness, but I want actual solutions, most of which are too boring for the populists on either side to stay focused on.
Which makes it clear that service is not necessarily a function of compensation, and that eradicating tips does not necessarily make wait staff economically better off.
I find the benefits of lightweight backpacking type optimization overblown for my travel style. Maybe it’s important if you’re speed running 20 destinations in a single trip or are incredibly unlucky with checked bags getting lost, but especially with kids now I just don’t really see much benefit.