Why would Amazon want to invest in AI, which would help their customers find what they want to buy, when they make all their profit from showing their customers what they don’t want to buy with monetized search?
“ I love Disney and I love Dolly Parton, but it says something deeply broken about our national priorities when their theme park trains outclass public infrastructure in billion-dollar economies. Be serious.”
Europe has lots of train infrastructure because it was very poor after WW2, and its people could afford nothing but train fare.
America has lots of car infrastructure because it was very rich after WS2, and its people have the freedom to choose personal transportation.
Over 90% of American households have at least one car. It’s not because American government doesn’t invest in public transit. It’s because Americans, even poor Americans, overwhelmingly choose personal transportation.
Certainly there's an element of personal choice. I currently live in a town of 3,000 in a rural state that was previously served by trains. Once cars became accessible to the masses, that train service was no longer sustainable.
But in actual US metro areas where much of the country lives, land use choices were made to enhance moving cars at the expense of other modes of transport. Urban areas were bulldozed to funnel cars into downtowns from far-flung suburbs. Amsterdam, on the other hand, was once a car-loving city, but has chosen to redevelop streets for transit and active transportation. Personal choice matters, but how much is driven by incentives?
>its people have the freedom to choose personal transportation.
A lot of American choice is an illusion. The national expressway network was created to serve national security purposes. Beloved trolley systems in medium density cities were unceremoniously ripped out. Car and tire companies pushed the bus-ification of public transport in order to kill any notion that it should offer comfort and reliability.
The American government refuses to invest in density because its sees sprawl as a deterrant against nuclear threat. (A threat that it takes an active role in escalating, mind you.)
>It’s because Americans, even poor Americans, overwhelmingly choose personal transportation.
If you take notice, much of the most expensive and valuable property in this country is in dense regions where it is possible to live without a car. If Americans truly had a choice, they'd pick the kinds of walkable communities they can only experience now on university campuses and in theme parks.
> It’s not because American government doesn’t invest in public transit. It’s because Americans, even poor Americans, overwhelmingly choose personal transportation.
If there is no usable public transit then people have to use cars. But if they have cars then there isn't the will for the public transit. A vicious circle.
Public transit does need to be built somewhat on a "if you build it they will come" philosophy, which is hard when people want immediate returns on investment.
Again, you have it backwards. Penn Station went bankrupt in the 1960s because rail passenger volume didn’t match the projections made in the 40s and 50s. Most American, even poor Americans, could afford cars, so they bought them. The only way mass transit (it doesn’t have to be public) works is either in dense urban environments or with a society too poor to afford alternatives. I’m not making a pro car argument or anti transit market. I’m just pointing out the actual forces that influence the creation and usage of all transit.
It is built in major metro areas, and requires endless subsidies to stay afloat in all but one of those areas.
Public transit cannot compete with private transit outside of cost unless you have a very, very high population density, which makes it unpopular with people who can afford alternatives (i.e. almost all Americans).
> It is built in major metro areas, and requires endless subsidies to stay afloat in all but one of those areas.
So how do you thing roads are build? Is that not a subsidy? Especially out in rural areas where people always complain the loudest that public transport doesn't work because it requires subsidies. If you would make people pay for their road use, rural living would very quickly become unsustainable for most.
Let's not even talk about all the externalities like land cost of those roads especially in metropolitan areas.
> So how do you thing roads are build? Is that not a subsidy?
No? In my area, new local roads are normally built by developers and maintained by HOAs, with fuel taxes covering most state and federal road work (I think it should all be covered by fuel taxes personally).
> Especially out in rural areas where people always complain the loudest that public transport doesn't work because it requires subsidies.
Public transportation makes absolutely no sense in rural areas, so I'm not sure what your point is here.
> If you would make people pay for their road use, rural living would very quickly become unsustainable for most.
People do pay for road use, via fuel taxes, so again I'm not sure what your point is here.
> Let's not even talk about all the externalities like land cost of those roads especially in metropolitan areas.
Feel free to talk about it in detail, instead of playing the usual "Oh, the externalities! Why won't anyone think of the externalities!" game I see over and over from public transit advocates.
> > So how do you thing roads are build? Is that not a subsidy?
>
> No? In my area, new local roads are normally built by developers and maintained by HOAs, with fuel taxes covering most state and federal road work (I think it should all be covered by fuel taxes personally).
>
> > Especially out in rural areas where people always complain the loudest that public transport doesn't work because it requires subsidies.
>
My point is, even if roads are build and maintained by fuel taxes only (as you point out they usually are not, and in most countries much of the road network was build using other income sources), those fuel taxes are a not local (happy to be corrected though), i.e. rural roads get massive subsidies from metropolitan areas.
It absolutely can compete with cost, we just have to not cheat.
Often when we compare transit to automobiles we don't take into account the cost of roads (???). Interstates have cost us over 25 trillion by now. That's just the interstates.
First of all, I don't know who is comparing the two and ignoring cost, so you can put away that strawman.
Secondly, road costs are mostly paid for by fuel (i.e. use) taxes, and I think the fuel tax should be increased to pay for all of it personally. What percentage of public transit costs are covered by use taxes? In my area (which is a major city that is not NYC), it's around 10%, and it still makes little financial sense to take public transportation if you value your time at all or are traveling as a group (which families do regularly) and look at out of pocket costs.
Third, you (as with other transit advocates, which I will assume you are based on this comment, feel free to correct me) completely miss the point even though I explicitly stated it. Even if roads are significantly more expensive, Americans can afford it and are willing to pay for the massive increase in convenience. If that changes, then spending patterns should change as well.
And I say all this as someone who prefers living in a walkable area and lives close to a public transit and uses it when it makes sense (which is not often, despite my work also being very close to a stop on the same line I live on).
Use taxes cover about 36%[1] of road construction and maintenance, the rest comes out of the general budget. If they were raised to cover all of the costs driving would be unaffordable to many people. Or at the very least Americans would suddenly be interested in small cars again. Some other countries do push more of the burden of road maintenance onto drivers and those countries tend to have far more robust public transit systems.
That's only for state and local government from what I can tell, and they could offset increases in fuel taxes by reducing things like property taxes if desired. Federal highway spending has almost entirely been covered by federal fuel tax revenue, but a recent ramp up in spending without increasing revenue now has the put the trust fund at risk of depletion.
Americans would suddenly be interested in small cars again, which seems like a win to me, because there's almost nothing that will make them desire public transit despite what some hope for.
There is another monkeywrench in road funding. Use taxes are mostly from fuel taxes, which electric vehicles don't pay. As the vehicle fleet electrifies that gap will need to be covered somehow.
It's a bit more complex than "Americans were rich". Whether they were rich or not:
* the US Federal Government gave returning servicemen a lot of money, including low-cost mortgages and loans, which resulted in huge housebuilding programs that created huge suburbs and exurbs (because it's much cheaper for the housebuilder): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill
* huge swathes of the USA enacted zoning laws so that the only type of house that could be built was single-family homes with huge gaps between them, creating the lowest possible density neighbourhoods, effectively requiring a car to get around (whereas higher density housing could have the same number of residents and be walkable) -- there's a strong likelyhood this was done to allow white flight to neighbourhoods that keep the socioeconomically deprived out, and until the 1960s it was completely legal to say "you can't rent or sell this house to black people" (it was only made illegal in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act):
These components very much add up to incentives to build widely and sparsely and to rely on cars to make it work. It didn't happen because Americans were rich, but because rich Americans wanted to exclude poor people from their lives
I don't know why public transit nerds can't accept that their preferences are wildly unpopular with the American public at large, why they can't understand that public transit is a substandard option for anyone who isn't a single, healthy individual of limited means in a relatively urban area (which in case it's not clear, is a tiny percentage of the US population), or why they ignore that almost every human on Earth chooses to buy a private vehicle as soon as they can afford it.
FSD is worse than autopilot, and makes autopilot worse. When you enable FSD, it turns on the cabin camera and applies the same driver attention standard to autopilot. Autopilot is really good! But if FSD is on, it becomes next to useless. You actually have to look at the road all the time!
Ban all health insurance. And Medicare. And Medicaid. Require all healthcare services be transparently and consistently priced in cash. Transform the IRS into an insurer of last resort by providing 100% tax credits for all medical care in excess of 8% of income. Fixed.
Health insurance is good, as long as it remains actually insurance - that is, risk pooling. Over the past few decades, "health insurance" transformed into "healthcare subsidization" - which caused costs (and complexity, and fraud, and many other bad things) to skyrocket. Insurance should not be used for routine doctor visits - it should literally be "insurance" against catastrophic events like getting your spine broken.
The combination between pricing that is completely invisible to the buyer (which you mentioned) and "insurance" that is really just spreading costs around (instead of risk pooling) is one of the biggest reasons why healthcare is so expensive. If the price for a CPAP machine was as transparent as that of an iPhone, and you had to pay 100% out-of-pocket (because sleep apnea is not a catastrophic event and your insurance wouldn't cover it), then we'd very quickly see the prices of CPAP machines plummet (as well as every other piece of medical equipment and procedure) because of how price-sensitive consumers are, and because now they'd have the ability to use that price-sensitivity.
Would you keep or get rid of EMTALA in this scenario? What would happen with medical debt? I'd hate my healthcare options to be tied to my credit score.
Every financial institution has its own credit file on you. They don’t need the third party services at all. Credit profiles can be created easily from any number of public data sources. These companies exist because we wrote laws requiring them to exist, and for no other reason.
If you don't like the terms with your current bank, how would you apply for a loan with a different one [that doesn't know you]? People need the ability to shop around.
a) I take out a credit card at a new bank, spend the balance, and never make a payment.
b) I bounced a check, don't remedy, and owe money to a furniture store.
c) I move a random amount of money each month to a separate account and make loan payments from there.
d) How far back does someone need to account for their spending in order to get a loan? People complain about mortgage applications, but this is a whole new level.
Access to credit gets more expensive without a 3rd party aggregator.
I feel like at some point we just have to accept that the only system of credit that is actually fair is the one that is explicitly run in the interests of society by said society (i.e. in practice, its government). It's not that private banks shouldn't exist; but there should be a bank that anyone can go to and get a loan on conditions that actually reflect their credit risk, and take into account their life situation etc.
Yes, it does mean that there will be a certain amount of defaults that we will all be paying for. I'd rather pay for that than for another yacht of some rich finance bro.
The reach of a per financial institution credit file is different. I’m also not sure how much that is true or practical without a Pre-existing relationship with that particular institution but when your credit is polled for things that aren’t about even obtaining credit (renting/employment) what matters is the FICO Scorsese from the big 3. They have an outsized importance in functioning in society and deserve extra scrutiny.
I don’t have an inherent problem with having a broadly accepted and comprehensive credit-risk profile, but the way we do it and the institutions who profit off of it are disgusting.
Apart from friend discovery, group chat pretty much fills that niche. It has the advantage that you are more likely to get normal social feedback (don't be a dick, or shit thats nice)
Old facebook is a function of its time. Like london coffee houses were the ferment of social, commercial and political change, they were only that because of time, place and social conditions.
New facebook will need to be mobile first, more about personal connections than one sided showing off.
Yes the culprits are industry and not local government who giggled with piggish glee to set up meaningless and costly recycling and compliance regimes which generated them billions
Are there any studies that locking down has long term cognitive decline? Generally most of the time when I’m locked down I’m chill energy but as soon as I’m regularly out and about I’m back to normal within weeks. I’ve never heard of being unable to do extremely basic exercises after the lockdowns (which were maybe 2 weeks actual isolation if you were exposed, every other time you could still spend time outside, get groceries etc). I’ve never heard of being unable to think of words or program a single line months after a 2 week isolation.
