twblalock

Culture matters too. Americans want different things than Europeans and Japanese people. We see this in most areas of life and it's not always because of marketing.

There are also an increasing number of SUVs and automatic transmission vehicles on European roads compared to a decade or two ago...

Yes, if you want good people you have to pay market rates.

Some people in the medical profession may be willing to work for less money for a charitable cause, but not enough to run entire hospital systems.

Saying things doesn't make them true. He does not make a convincing argument.

Trucks are much nicer than they were 40 years ago and our culture has changed as a result. 40 years ago few people would have considered driving a truck, they were all basically farm trucks with limited creature comforts. Now they are luxury vehicles.

The article splits out stats for urban and rural areas for all vehicle types.

Notably all vehicle types become more dangerous in urban areas but even buses on rural roads are more dangerous than light trucks on urban roads.

> If we leveled the regulatory playing field trucks wouldn't be nearly as popular.

Yes they would. People aren't buying big trucks because they have no choice. Very few people would cross-shop trucks and small import vans. They want the big trucks.

Look at the F150 or the Silverado. They are bigger than they used to be. Import restrictions cannot explain that. They are bigger because every time they grow, customers like it.

Maybe the urbanism fight is tiring because people realize what they would have to give up in order to achieve the urbanist vision -- especially their trucks and SUVs.

Selling a positive vision rather than shaming people and trying to take things away from them would help.

It's not the government's job to fix everything or engineer a perfect society, and personal choice and freedom matter too.

This YouTuber, like many other people who favor a denser urban lifestyle, looks down on people who disagree with him and wants the government to coerce them into living the way he wants them to. "Externalities" are just an excuse for that, and even if those externalities were removed he would find other justifications because the root cause is that he doesn't like the people who prefer a different lifestyle than him.

Plenty of people in Dodge Chargers behave the same way. Idiots are going to be idiots no matter what they drive.

This is just culture war dreck dressed up as an argument.

The phrase `pathetic suburbanites` even appears in the video description. The anti-truck stuff is really a proxy for hating a lifestyle and the people who live it.

It's funny to see how people who hate trucks are now carping about things like parking space now that electric trucks make gas mileage and emissions irrelevant.

It's not wrong to like trucks.

> We take the incomes away from people who are willing to do the job but aren't licensed to drive.

You can't take something away from someone if they never had it.

I also know freelance photographers who were impacted by AB5. AB5 is a stupid law that was clearly designed to target Uber, and even though lawmakers tried to pack in a bunch of exemptions, it impacted a ton of other people. Prop 22 was largely driven by the backlash against it.

Who is being crushed? The drivers signed up for this. They could also get other jobs or collect unemployment. The people who decide that this work is better than doing that should be respected for their choices and we shouldn't try to take their incomes away by killing the companies they work for.

To put it simply, taking peoples' income away by killing their employers does not help them; it hurts them.

This is hand-wavy and assumes that investment in business is zero-sum. It's not, because our economy works on wealth creation not wealth extraction. The existence of Uber is not preventing anyone from investing in other things.

Would you be better off if the rideshare jobs didn't exist?

Is a bad gig job worse for you than no job at all? (If it is, then why are you doing it?)

These are serious questions, because rideshare jobs would not exist if you were compensated as a full-time employee with benefits. Uber and Lyft have never made a profit as it is, and increasing their costs would make the business simply impossible to sustain.

Yeah now it's going to be a reliable charging network with hour-long lines to get a spot.

Median rent in Brooklyn seems to be ~$3200 which is not a lot lower. Queens and the Bronx are a bit cheaper.

More regulation doesn't help. More of a bad thing is still bad. Better regulation helps. We need to question why the regulators didn't see this coming.

The problem is that when you sell shares denominated in monopoly money (e.g. shares in a private company) you have no idea if you get a fair price. There is no market to provide the signals.

At what price? Certainly not a market price. A contrived price in a private sale is usually going to screw the seller.

One of the nice things about being a public company is that you can give employees RSUs for a public company's stock that they can sell whenever they want, rather than options which are very limited.

If they had gone public they could give their employees a much more flexible stock compensation.

Exactly. It's also unfair to say VCs and depositors should have noticed the problems when regulators didn't see them either.

Banking has been a quasi-government-operated industry since 1933, and even more so since 2008, and we need to make sure that the government does not dodge blame for the failure of SVB. Government regulators are supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and they didn't prevent it. You can't as deeply involved as the government is in banking and not be complicit in the outcomes of banking.

People will try to blame "lobbying" for this but let's be honest, even if regulators were looking at every bank in the US with a microscope no matter how many deposits they held, those regulators probably would have missed this. Hey, government bonds are a great investment! Duration risk is sneaky.

Who caused that duration risk to actually manifest as a real problem? The Fed! The same people who are supposed to run the banking system in a stable way have contributed to the instability of the banking system by trying to squash inflation. If the Fed hadn't raised rates so much everyone would be praising SVB for doing so well.

People have an impression that banking is a private industry and the government comes in to bail it out, when really the government was involved the entire time. If we don't understand that, we won't be able to actually fix the problems.

One of the things that made it harder to convince other banks to buy SVB is the memory of 2008 when banks who bought other banks inherited all their liabilities and lawsuits.

> Why isn’t Dimon buying S.V.B.? He has complained about the headaches of buying Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual at the government’s behest in 2008, having spent years fighting litigation and paying fines for those firms’ bad behavior. Bank executives who were around back then remember that.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/se...

It's good to want banks to be punished for causing problems, but if that punishment also applies to people who try to rescue the bank, then nobody is going to try to solve the problems.

Cities don't produce wealth. People produce wealth. Many of the people who work in cities to produce wealth actually live in suburbs. For example, many of the people who drive NYC's economy live in New Jersey, Long Island, and the suburbs north of the Bronx and commute to work. It's wrong to give the city full credit for that wealth creation, which is the fundamental mistake that Strong Towns makes when they assert that cities subsidize the suburbs.

The letter U in UBI means something. Social security is not universal. It's not even universal for retired people -- you have to pay into the system while you work to get the benefits when you retire.

It is becoming increasingly tiresome to see any benefit touted as UBI. UBI mean universal benefits. If there are any criteria that prevent a person from receiving a benefit, it's not UBI -- it's just another benefit of the sort we've had for decades.

Housing.

NYC median rent this year is $3350. That's over $40k per year. On a $100k salary, which is about $60k after federal, state, and local taxes, rent is 2/3 of the take-home pay for someone making $100k.

More concretely, if you get $60k take-home pay per year after taxes, that's $5k per month, and if you pay median rent that leaves you with $1650 for everything else, and that rent price does not include all the utilities! That is pretty hard to live on if you have dependents. If you have to feed and clothe multiple people on $1650 a month you are going to feel pretty poor, even if you don't own a car!

Yeah but were you raising a family on that money? Living alone, or as a childless couple, is remarkably cheaper than having kids.

Looking at where the money goes would make you think everything is fine. Most of it seems to be dedicated to good social outcomes. But in reality that money is being wasted and the services we get for it are a total joke.

You can also go to prison in a number of EU countries for possession of marijuana.

> Addiction, homelessness, and antisocial behavior are problems on the public transit of every major city

Mainly in America. I never saw that kind of behavior on any transit I ever took in Europe or Asia. They simply would not tolerate it there. Yet again this is our government in the United States failing to control something that other countries can deal with.

In quite a few places in NYC, including the subway, it actually feels like a crazy person could stab you at any moment.

When people leave the city and feel an unanticipated sense of relaxation, it's because they were used to living in fear and looking over their shoulders all the time, and they don't need to do that in their new surroundings.