Oceans Yet to Burn

ranma-official

mitigatedchaos

It isn’t as dangerous, but also the number of police shootings is lower than some people expect, if I recall correctly.

But then, I’ve generally lived in areas where the police would actually come and intervene if there were a problem. That varies a lot in my country though, by area.

Lately, in developing a hypothetical/fictional country, I’ve been pondering foot patrol officers assigned to specific neighborhoods (rotated on a five year basis), trained in EMT stuff as well, with the different role of “Community Support Officer”. Separate out the heavy guys for use solely on bank robbers.

Edit: The idea being that you want someone who can use discretion, who lives nearby and is more of a part of the community than an occupying force within the community. All sorts of contextual information. But you don’t want them to stay so long that they set up a bribery network or something. You’d have to combine this with a whole bunch of other stuff to make it work, though. It isn’t so helpful if your CSO arrests some kid for vandalism after several warnings and the prosecutor sends him to prison in order to max his “woo, tough on crime!” ratings. (Instead of, you know, making the kid clean up the spray paint.)

the iron hand policy

formerbishie

genderfight

It was fun reading through that OP thinking “well, this seems like a cool way to just remove poor people from an area while possibly dodging regs about affordable housing, but I will withold judgment until I see what benefits you think that captures” only to to realize that those were the benefits.

Imagine being so evil that you spend your days thinking up cool new ways to help the wealthy avoid contact with the poor while simultaneously saving them (the wealthy) money (which they, definitionally, have plenty of).

Fuckin’ imagine.

wirehead-wannabe

I think there’s a difference between wanting the rich to segregate themselves off vs accepting that it’s going to happen and trying to minimize the damage.

genderfight

Unless I’m missing something, the proposal at hand exactly and only minimizes damage to the wealthy? And for a value of “damage” which means “spending money on housing?”

Come at me with a solution that helps those already subject to disproportionate risk and we’ll talk, I guess.

mitigatedchaos

Become Singapore.

Oh, sorry. Let me try again. You can give people money, but you have to actually take it away if they misbehave. A good program would be to lower the minimum wage while issuing hourly direct-to-employee wage subsidies - thus making the effective wage received higher while simultaneously increasing available jobs and negotiating leverage for low-income workers. This has some backing from economists and can be rolled out and tested incrementally. The Democrats should be hype for it but the Democratic Party is dumb.

There are other factors, like dealing with the simultaneous under/overpolicing, punishing wayward children *before* the end up on the wrong end of a police officer, and so on. Get crime under control and you can fix the zoning laws. Fix the zoning laws and you can build cheaper housing where it’s needed.

None of this will actually happen though because the Democratic party is about as much about helping the poor as the Republicans are about saving money.

Source: genderfight politics policy

ranma-official

Hot take: the problem with homelessness does not boil down to “count amount of homeless, count amount of houses, if the latter is larger, then capitalism is intentionally making people homeless and will collapse if they aren’t, therefore get rid of capitalism to instantly solve homelessness”.

Pay attention to the fact that there are much more homeless people per capita in cities than in half-abandoned villages, and you will realize that the problem isn’t just not having a home, but not having a home where you want to have a home, to the extent where they would rather be homeless in a city than landlords in a village.

There are obvious easy solutions, like falsely reporting that you have solved homelessness while carting people out of the city (adjusting visibility), or forcing people to live in certain places regardless of where they actually want to live (adjusting mobility), but they don’t fix the actual underlying issue.

Policy changes to address this are going to be very expensive, unless you want to reduce safety restrictions for houses, which you should not.

And not expensive because robber baron capitalism pigs, but expensive as per LTV - construction is a man hour hungry process.

mitigatedchaos

You have to make other changes that allow you to fix the zoning laws, but even that only gets you so far, so basically this.

policy politics

thefutureoneandall

dataandphilosophy

Things I wish existed: apartment buildings with a “mandatory savings clause.” Add in whatever is needed to make it palatable, but fundamentally make people contribute to a savings account each month an amount equal to their rent (increase or decrease by factors required), and that savings account can’t be withdrawn from such that it would fall below min(“months paid in * amount per month”, 24) before the person retires or leaves the apartment building.

Why on earth would this be a good idea? Wealthy people may be assholes in many ways, but they aren’t going to be obviously dealing drugs in the corridors, they will be more considerate about loud music and parties, and they generally prefer being around other wealthy people for this and other reasons. Traditionally, we’ve kept poor people out of places by actually charging them money, but this results in low savings, insecurity, and much more being spent on wasteful housing than needs to be spent. This method allows for individuals to live cheaply without having to suffer the injury of dealing with low-income people

wirehead-wannabe

@athrelon

mitigatedchaos

This is a good idea, but it won’t happen because it isn’t market-competitive. Only a Rationalist apartment building owner actively trying to help the country would do this.

dataandphilosophy

It’s not obvious to me why it isn’t competitive. If A makes 10 per month and spends 4 on housing, 2 on saving money, 3 on taxes, and 1 on other (clothing, food, etc), they could move into this place instead, spend 3 on housing, and put 3 on savings. My implicit proposal is that a lot of what the fourth dollar spent on housing actually buys you is “the benefit of living with people who can afford to spend the fourth dollar on housing”, and this ensures that you’re only around people with at least six spare each month after taxes and necessities, a better deal than your original, while costing you less. For the landlord, meanwhile, this is probably competitive with just charging 3 a month, with benefits flowing from things like “middle and upper class norms involve less wanton destruction of property”

This is all partly inspired by @sinesalvatorem’s struggles on BART, which suffers from the problem that poor black people can use it. The benefit of tripling the price mostly wouldn’t be in getting more frequent service or better seats or whatever, but in not getting blatant transphobes, who are shunned in the bay area upper and middle classes. In my home of Boston, I ride both the commuter rail (expensive) and the T (cheap). People are quieter and behaviour is generally more in keeping with my preferences in the former.

mitigatedchaos

The market of people that are openly aware of this and will admit to it and express preference for this as a solution probably isn’t that big, and people would instead either spend less on rent and more on other financial instruments (with a higher RoI), or spend more on the housing and gain more comfortable housing and more status.

I know it’s tagged as “#mostly a joke” but it really does get into a whole bunch of issues related to why housing is so expensive and things we normally aren’t supposed to talk about that are undermining modern Liberalism.

Also now that I think about it, despite this whole thing sounding positively Singaporean, eventually you’d get sued by self-identified civil rights lawyers for being exclusionary.

thefutureoneandall

Huh, this dovetails really nicely with my comments on how this actually happens in practice.

Because doing this openly would be a flaming disaster: lawsuits, public shaming, no tenants, everything. But at the same time, doing it stealthily is actually really common!

Security deposits often don’t need to be super high. First/last rent isn’t necessary for people with great jobs and credit scores in easy-eviction states. Assorted ‘signing fees’ and ‘key fees’ and the like are often pretty much unnecessary when they could be bundled into rent. But they’re all plausibly (and genuinely) self-defense for landlords against bad tenants.

And so no one has to talk about the de facto outcome of driving out people who can pay rent, but lack the cashflow or support network to pay up front. After all, most Americans can’t front an unexpected $500 bill - charging three months rent up front is an easy way to price out people on the edge of affording a property.

Source: dataandphilosophy policy

dataandphilosophy

Things I wish existed: apartment buildings with a “mandatory savings clause.” Add in whatever is needed to make it palatable, but fundamentally make people contribute to a savings account each month an amount equal to their rent (increase or decrease by factors required), and that savings account can’t be withdrawn from such that it would fall below min(“months paid in * amount per month”, 24) before the person retires or leaves the apartment building.

Why on earth would this be a good idea? Wealthy people may be assholes in many ways, but they aren’t going to be obviously dealing drugs in the corridors, they will be more considerate about loud music and parties, and they generally prefer being around other wealthy people for this and other reasons. Traditionally, we’ve kept poor people out of places by actually charging them money, but this results in low savings, insecurity, and much more being spent on wasteful housing than needs to be spent. This method allows for individuals to live cheaply without having to suffer the injury of dealing with low-income people

wirehead-wannabe

@athrelon

mitigatedchaos

This is a good idea, but it won’t happen because it isn’t market-competitive. Only a Rationalist apartment building owner actively trying to help the country would do this.

dataandphilosophy

It’s not obvious to me why it isn’t competitive. If A makes 10 per month and spends 4 on housing, 2 on saving money, 3 on taxes, and 1 on other (clothing, food, etc), they could move into this place instead, spend 3 on housing, and put 3 on savings. My implicit proposal is that a lot of what the fourth dollar spent on housing actually buys you is “the benefit of living with people who can afford to spend the fourth dollar on housing”, and this ensures that you’re only around people with at least six spare each month after taxes and necessities, a better deal than your original, while costing you less. For the landlord, meanwhile, this is probably competitive with just charging 3 a month, with benefits flowing from things like “middle and upper class norms involve less wanton destruction of property”

This is all partly inspired by @sinesalvatorem’s struggles on BART, which suffers from the problem that poor black people can use it. The benefit of tripling the price mostly wouldn’t be in getting more frequent service or better seats or whatever, but in not getting blatant transphobes, who are shunned in the bay area upper and middle classes. In my home of Boston, I ride both the commuter rail (expensive) and the T (cheap). People are quieter and behaviour is generally more in keeping with my preferences in the former.

mitigatedchaos

The market of people that are openly aware of this and will admit to it and express preference for this as a solution probably isn’t that big, and people would instead either spend less on rent and more on other financial instruments (with a higher RoI), or spend more on the housing and gain more comfortable housing and more status.

I know it’s tagged as “#mostly a joke” but it really does get into a whole bunch of issues related to why housing is so expensive and things we normally aren’t supposed to talk about that are undermining modern Liberalism.

Also now that I think about it, despite this whole thing sounding positively Singaporean, eventually you’d get sued by self-identified civil rights lawyers for being exclusionary.

policy

wirehead-wannabe

dataandphilosophy

Things I wish existed: apartment buildings with a “mandatory savings clause.” Add in whatever is needed to make it palatable, but fundamentally make people contribute to a savings account each month an amount equal to their rent (increase or decrease by factors required), and that savings account can’t be withdrawn from such that it would fall below min(“months paid in * amount per month”, 24) before the person retires or leaves the apartment building.

Why on earth would this be a good idea? Wealthy people may be assholes in many ways, but they aren’t going to be obviously dealing drugs in the corridors, they will be more considerate about loud music and parties, and they generally prefer being around other wealthy people for this and other reasons. Traditionally, we’ve kept poor people out of places by actually charging them money, but this results in low savings, insecurity, and much more being spent on wasteful housing than needs to be spent. This method allows for individuals to live cheaply without having to suffer the injury of dealing with low-income people

wirehead-wannabe

@athrelon

mitigatedchaos

This is a good idea, but it won’t happen because it isn’t market-competitive. Only a Rationalist apartment building owner actively trying to help the country would do this.

Source: dataandphilosophy policy the invisible fist

Missing Scarcity?

A number of the “No Robot Jobpocalypse” arguments seem to hinge on the idea that as productivity increases, the costs of goods and services will approach zero.

But this seems based on the assumption that resources are effectively a function of labor. However, if base resources are largely fixed after some level of labor (e.g., there are only so many iron atoms in a volume of dirt), and there are other potential uses for those resources than feeding the proles, then the laborers must competitively bid for the resources.

In that bidding, they may have to bid with someone several orders of magnitude more productive than they are (either due to owning the robots or just being that much more skilled/productive). What guarantee is there that, even as the price of goods produced from the resources decreases overall, they are not bid out of the reach of the low-marginal-production workers?

@collapsedsquid

politics policy economics robot jobpocalpyse

nuclearspaceheater

alexyar

anthropicprincipal

Nativism is bipartisan.

sinesalvatorem

Oh, huh, a Democrat who thinks that raising the minimum wage at which (foreign) workers can be hired causes less of them to be hired? I don’t think they got the memo about how price doesn’t actually affect demand and economics was an inside job.

nuclearspaceheater

The system does need to be reformed, but a better way would be to replace the lottery system with a blind auction rather than setting salary requirements.

mitigatedchaos

Yeah, an auction would price it more accurately. Other interventions include making it easier for H1Bs to change jobs - thus if they really are worth more than the lower wages that are claimed, they won’t stay at the company. Making it easy to deport but hard to change jobs is just begging for corruption and replacing the native labor pool with labor that can be credibly threatened with being kicked out of the country.

Though, I admit my first instinct was to limit the number of slots and auction them off. “Oh, it’s so important to you? Then clearly, you’ll be willing to pay the necessary amount of money to show it’s important.”

Source: alexyar politics policy

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

'Star Trek' Fan Film Lawsuit Boldly Goes Where No 'Star Trek' Lawsuit Has Gone Before

Missing Scarcity?