Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Bus Tracks

The One Thousand Villages series continues, as we return to the suburbs of Flatsville, our new town in the state of Arkowa.

Wanting to avoid the sins of past American cities and avoid creating a sparse and energy-inefficient sprawl that we may become unable to maintain, our Metropolitan Planning Authority has decided to plan with an eye towards public transit from the beginning.

At this point it becomes very tempting to just put trams in everywhere.  They’re reasonably quiet, they don’t emit fumes, people love riding them, and property developers view them as a long-term investment.

Unfortunately, trams are quite expensive.  And, quite frankly, it would be highly irresponsible for the MPA to build such heavy public transit without knowing where the densest areas of the city will be!  We can’t just dedicate an entire zone to only hotels - what do you think this is, Brasilia?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

how do I sign up for your politics

If funding could be secured, it would be possible to start a think tank, because there is a lot of work to be done.  These ideas are exotic, they escape the Overton Window by travelling orthogonal to it, but they have to be refined, tested, and experimented with.

The goal would be to synthesize a new scientific art of organizational design and policy incentivization from a diverse group of fields, including political science, economics (particularly behavioral economics), psychology, philosophy, and mathematics.  Most existing organizations and politics are running on pre-digital organizational technology, and very few people even think of “organizational technology” as even being a concept.

Various proposals would be drafted, analyzed, refined, and then simulated using human testers (against competing speculative policies) before being refined again cyclically and suggested for institutions smaller than the US Federal Government.  To improve efficiency, various competing domain experts would be hired for short periods of time.

Actually improving governance in the United States would require doing things that deeply offend both the Democratic and Republican parties and which are at odds with their ideological pre-commitments.  Formation of a political party is right out due to the First Past the Post System which makes success with policies that are only inspiring to the kinds of people that read this blog extremely improbable.  Policy advocacy should therefore focus on attacking avenues which are not sufficiently defended by partisan trench warfare, municipalities, and shifting politicians on individual issues through lobbying and electoral guides, functioning as a Special Interest Group.

---

Until then, one can follow this strange political time travel blog and dream of the future, if one wishes, in addition to whatever political activity one normally carries out.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[ Values, Efficacy ]

To jump off of @the-grey-tribe‘s joke post:

I think one of the key discoveries of the 20th century that has not yet been realized is that, contrary to the beliefs of many factions, including the globalist liberals and the Communists, there is not one right way to live, one set of laws which is the correct one for all people and all groups, and that all alternatives must fall away and either die off or be destroyed.  

We must recognize that political policy is not a strict hierarchy of better/worse left/right, but a vector with two components - values (or terminal goals), and the means or effectiveness of means by which those values are to be realized or achieved.

Often, the failures of politics are not the result of terrible values, but ones of effectiveness.  And some of the failures of modern, “rational” planning would be mitigated by the recognition and inclusion of alternate values, alternate ways to live.

If we design the political system from this perspective, I believe we could create substantial improvements, and also, perhaps ironically, a diversity of communities which are specialized according what best fits given populations without trying to transform them all into one homogeneous mass.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[the-grey-tribe]

Please remind me to not give @mitigatedchaos any formal power if I ever become King of The World or something. Maybe I can bestow a purely ceremonial title like First Lady of The Republic of Cascadia or Vice Antipope. Grand Ideas should be kept in their ivory towers where they belong.

[mitigatedchaos]

Ah, but by becoming World Emperor you already broke the first condition holding back those ideas - the inability to designate successively larger geographical areas to test them on live populations before larger-scale rollouts, arising from the necessities of political rivalry.

Victory for National Technocracy begins in the town of Whozawhatsit, Arkowa.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[the-grey-tribe]

One of the weirdest policy proposals is where you put an expiration date on cash, to encourage spending.

[argumate]

ooh I’ve played with that one, it also fits well with some basic income proposals

[obiternihili]

inflation

[collapsedsquid]

All the kool kids nowadays are talking about negative interest rates.

[mitigatedchaos]

They’re not yet talking about forming quasi-autonomous state agencies that compete for assignment of implementing government programs, with contracts that can be renewed, but

Shhhh, they aren’t supposed to know about it yet.  I only know because I’m from the future.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@argumate

essentially privatising the FAA and NTSB, although the NTSB already seems to do really good work and it’s unlikely quality would improve with privatisation.

Though really, I wanted to use aircraft to talk about building safety.  The field of aircraft is already pretty safe in general.

What I’m thinking with this building materials issue is that in addition to the Executive Todd Problem being worse (because the real estate will change hands more often than the aircraft and the builders will too), and there being no insurance requirement, a lot of problems (like asbestos, or that cladding) were either known beforehand, or would not have been that difficult to figure out if someone had bothered to check first.

Additionally, the insurance company, the builder, or the owner would be losing money for every month that problem was not repaired.  So instead of fighting a long legal battle and not fixing it, it’s more likely at least one of them would fix it now, then have the long legal battle about who finally gets compensated.

That would be the plan, anyway.  I have other insurance-based plans to distort the markets as well.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@argumate @collapsedsquid

The thing I like about the idea of mandatory safety insurance is that it introduces a new actor with new incentives into the problem.

Let us return to aircraft.

The State has determined that every airline company must carry two million dollars in insurance per passenger per flight, to be paid out in the event that the plane is destroyed and they die.  It has set certain rules, for instance that the insurance company must be sufficiently well-capitalized and it can’t just waive paying out because the company did something stupid.

Executive Todd has plans to reduce the maintenance on Tumblr Airlines aircraft.  He will be at the company for five years.  There is a 90% chance that if he does this, there will be no crash, and he gets a million dollar bonus and leaves.  There is a 10% chance that a plane will crash before he leaves and he’ll only have a personal fortune of ten million dollars and a mansion on Hawaii left, which he can retire to.

So Todd orders that the maintenance should be cut.

However, Blue Hellsite Insurance, Inc., Tumblr Airlines’ insurance company, depends for its funding entirely on carefully calculating risk and then charging a bit more than that, on an ongoing basis.  To do so, as part of their contract (and thanks to provisions passed in law by the State), they can set insurance agents out to inspect processes, planes, and so on.

BHI’s reaction to a plan that results in a 10% chance of a plane crash is “you WHAT?!”  Whereas the risk isn’t necessarily quite so visible or quantified to all others in the organization, or else they may have motivations to ignore it for the same reason as Executive Todd.

So BHI come back and say that either Todd’s plan isn’t going to fly, or the insurance rates are going to go up.

So what was an invisible cost that could have gotten kicked down the road to a successor is transmuted into a stubborn operating cost right now.

Tumblr Airlines makes less profit (upsetting shareholders), raises ticket prices to compensate (thus pricing the risk into the market and making them less competitive), or else doesn’t go through with the plan.

The State could even require that the portion of the cost which is the risk premium is printed on the ticket, informing consumers of roughly how dangerous a given flight is.  This is actually an enormous information gain by consumers, who as non-experts find it very difficult to not only judge airline safety, but obtain inside information about aircraft maintenance procedures.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

All the NTSB recommendations are technically trade offs that have costs; consider American Airlines Flight 191 which crashed on take off killing everyone on board and two people on the ground after an engine separated from the wing due to improper maintenance procedures had cracked the pylon.

While 273 people may have died, the improper shortcuts taken during engine maintenance saved 200 man hours per aircraft! Why, the meddling FAA banning this procedure may have done more harm than the original crash!

[mitigatedchaos]

Nah it’s alright fam,

If we assume that the GDP per capita is $55,000, and that the typical passenger has 35 working years remaining, we can just have the state bill the company and its shareholders $525,525,000 and put them into debt bondage and sell off their assets if they are unwilling or unable to pay.

Now you may object to the state rolling around and charging huge sums of money as payment for accidental deaths, but I have it on good authority that everyone signed over their trusteeship to the state rather than get kicked into the ocean, entirely of their own free will.  Quite remarkable, really.  So I assure that this plan is entirely Capitalist.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[tanadrin]

Not a huge fan of the writing style, but this article makes a solid underlying point: whatever the other incentives for building high-rise residential buildings, they’re terrible if you care about the social health of your city. I’m sympathetic to motives like decreasing housing prices in general, but if the tradeoff is between inexpensive housing and annihilating the social fabric, I’m not sure you’ve actually made any improvements to the situation. We’ve known more-or-less how to build healthy cities for decades now, thanks to the work of people like Jane Jacobs; that that Le Corbusier shit still seems to exert a powerful influence over urban planning should be a civilizational embarrassment.

[tanadrin]

@jadagul replied to your post:

   I suspect most of the action is less in building high-rises–though I like high-rises–and more in moving single-family deatched homes into three- and four-story residential complexes.  Which are exactly the sort of thing that happened in the areas Jacobs celebrated.  I’m not sure even high-rises are anti-Jacobsian if you still have plenty of ground-level retail etc.

Yeah, that last point is part of it; it’s not the density, it’s that isolating neighborhoods or regions of a city to be purely residential or purely commercial makes them either commuter neighborhoods where everyone spends their time bottled up in their personal living space bubble, or sterile wastelands where nobody can just wander down to a cafe for breakfast on a Sunday morning if they feel like it (or, for a less furiously bourgeoise example, you don’t have to spend an hour going to and from work every day).

And the thing is, on some level, developers must know this is a terrible way to design cities: think of how many shopping malls in America are designed to imitate the mixed character of a major thoroughfare of a small town or a cozy European neighborhood: it’s like they see the benches and the wrought-iron lamposts and think they can, in cargo-cult fashion, summon the necessary spirit to make this a desirable place to pass the time, but they’re not actually investigating what makes a street pedestrian-friendly. The clearest memory I have of this is a street in I think Sydney, which tried to do inviting shopfronts and cafes with outdoor seating and all that, but was otherwise surrounded by blank flat walls, and was devoid of any other visible human life besides me and the person walking next to me.

I think I am far from alone in thinking that a neighborhood where I can walk downstairs to the shop, buy some stamps, then post a letter, all over such a short distance I question whether it’s really worth it to even put on shoes, is far more pleasant a place to exist than one where I trade that for a half-acre of lawn and slightly less traffic noise. You could build a futuristic arcology-style high rise like that, that packed together a lot of different types of residential and commercial spaces, but it seems like zoning laws and practical considerations mostly prevent that in reality.

I am almost as anti single-family homes as I am high rises; urban sprawl is as ruinous to a healthy, livable city as artificially separating residential and commercial areas, and insisting every house be an island surrounded by its sea of grass sort of necessitates that kind of segregation anyway. The really crazy thing is that it feels like the U.S. has only been living this way from, like, the end of World War 2 or so, so it’s not like we’ve irreversibly committed our civilization to this path. At the very least, not actively punishing that kind of mixed development would be a start.

[jadagul]

Huh, so I associate “no high-rises” with “no mixed-use”. As you point out they’re obviously separable. But the sort of zoning regulations that bar the one often also bar the other.

Whether or not most people would, in practice, enjoy mixed-use development, a lot of people are very vociferously opposed to it. Which is part of why it’s illegal in most places.

[mailadreapta]

Who are these mixed-used haters, seriously? This is an honest question; the advantages of medium-density mixed-used development are praised in literally every media source I see and by 100% of my peer group, so I have a very hazy notion of who opposes it and what their real or supposed motivations are.

[jadagul]

People who want to make sure no one is on the streets outside their house ever.

Like, the reason a lot of people dislike mixed use housing is pretty much exactly the same Jacobsian reason it’s a good idea. There’s always people on the street and things happening. People who want not-that find it unpleasant.

[mailadreapta]

Okay, this gives me at least a vague idea of the reference group: people who are aesthetically pleased by the suburban notion of vast regions of Just Houses.

People are allowed to have that preference; but why are they allowed to oppose the existence of mixed-use even if they don’t have to live there?

[mitigatedchaos]

And could they be bought off by an alternate strategy?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

how do buses and tracked trams differ significantly? ability to route around obstacles?

mmm, tracked public transport

[mitigatedchaos]

Was this an anon?

The big difference is actually political - it costs more to set up tram tracks so AFAICT governments are less willing to shut them down or move them.  This means that, unlike bus lines, which could radically change across the entire city in a month, you can build apartment buildings next to tram tracks and trust that there will still be trams there if the ridership is high enough.  The routes are also going to be better defined, say if you’re an employee wanting to move somewhere you can easily commute to your place of employment from.