The Good Post Gallery

[traininthedistance]

I don't understand why people get their knickers in a knot about gentrification by itself.  Gentrification is the market working, it's not possible to stop.  If people are willing to pay more money to buy a house or rent in a neighborhood, how or why stop them?  We're not going to have some utopia where everyone can afford to live wherever they want. 

The debate we should have is about housing codes, zoning, economic opportunity and the environment.  People should realize that the current geography of bad/good neighborhoods is largely the product of failed government policy.  For years government has actively subsidized the suburbs, leading to an inefficient use of urban space and undervalued neighborhoods like those in North, central and South Brooklyn.  The goal ought to be, every neighborhood is livable, with a mix of uses and space for different kinds of people, not the status quo for every particular neighborhood.

[traininthedistance]

I think he means this:

Naw, man, clearly Oldies has this map in mind:

Most of the Romney states lean blue here instead!  What's not to like!

[traininthedistance]

Why attack Ben? We should welcome him.

[traininthedistance]

it is when you aggressively recruit them to come to your country, force integration (although in the context of the us, i do think that 'civil rights' legislation was a necessary evil given the likely alternatives...), give them political power, etc. that is all very radical and hasn't really been done before the last 50 years or so. beyond that why shouldn't nations get to pick and choose who enters their boundaries? isn't that the whole point? what makes national borders any different than a community or land owner refusing admittance? to me the principle behind border control isn't really much different than that of private property rights. it's just on a more massive scale. that isn't to say i don't think property rights can't be abrogated or want total isolation. but the burden of proof should be on those demanding change.
***
my position has nothing to do with supremacism. i don't view israeli or japanese or any number of more insular cultures as superior. but i'm not going to say i have a right to immigrate there. that they're wrong to want to preserve their roots. i find that to be arrogant.
***
frankly i would understand your position more if you were denying that. as opposed to what you're doing now. you seem to think people have an obligation to relinquish political power and resources. that they must let in foreigners regardless of the consequences to themselves out of humanism or egalitarianism or.. something. but okay then, let's assume wanting to preserve culture and/or demographics is illegitimate as an immigration restriction. what should be the basis of immigration laws in your view then? purely material things like economic or environmental considerations? or are you for totally open borders?

anyway, think of it this way: would a group like the democratic party be talking nearly as enthusiastically about a 'pathway to citizenship' if it didn't benefit them politically? or would they be in a situation like the republican party now where the corporate donors cheer it on but much of them are leery? i find that doubtful (though again, i couldn't careless if the republicans won at this point. they are largely the problem).

I don't know what you mean by "aggressively recruiting" immigrants. In the case of Britain and France, if they didn't want legions of Mohammedans descending onto their shores, maybe they shouldn't have colonized them centuries ago and permanently entangled their histories and futures with one another. Integration is certainly not being forced and if anything that's part of the problem. These people have essentially been ghettoized in these impoverished suburbs. And if by political power, you mean the fact that the ones who are citizens are allowed to vote, I'm not sure what your alternative is - dark-skinned people can't vote? Non-Christians can't vote? People with non-Anglo-Saxon surnames can't vote? The fact that you describe our civil rights laws as a "necessary evil" suggests you don't really understand why they were necessary and that they were enacted to address the "evil" that was already present - racism, discrimination and marginalization.

Israel and Japan are poor examples. Israel was founded by immigrants and they aggressively court more of them. There's nothing homogenous about that country - how much do a semi-literate Mizrahi Jew from Yemen, an Ashkenazi Jew from America by way of Germany and a Russian Jew have in common? Very little. You can find newspapers in Israel in Hebrew, English, Yiddish, Arabic, Russian. They also have more patents issued per capita than any other country on Earth. I take serious issue with their treatment of the population that was already there when they founded their country, but immigration policy is not a fault of Israel's and it's one of the reasons they've become such an economic success story. As for Japan, are economic stagnation and a falling and rapidly aging population not enough to convince you that shutting your doors in favor of ethnic purity is a bad idea in the long term?

I'm not saying culture isn't important. I'm saying it's not the government's job to enforce a standardized culture because if you do that then it's the government that gets to decide what the "common culture" is going to be, rather than the aggregate decisions individuals make on their own.

The reason immigration reform is benefiting the Democrats is because they're the ones who want to do it. It's not benefiting Republicans because they've hemmed and hawed about it for years. That dividend won't last forever. When Republicans pushed through an end to slavery, they had blacks in their camp for roughly 75 years. It doesn't last forever. But it was obviously the right thing to do in and of itself.

Sure, it's social engineering. But it's typically social engineering that pays off for the vast majority of society, in the case of the latter. Governments should have the right to patrol and define their own borders and choose who they let in. Nations are country clubs, they're not public parks where just anyone can come in. From a left-wing perspective, the idea that we should allow mass immigration into and out of a country is abhorrent in that mass immigration tends to be mass unskilled, low-wage immigration, which ultimately erodes the wage base and undermines the welfare state of the receiving country. Plus there's the problem of undermining the existing sense of social solidarity that already exists in the state and tearing, allowing very right-wing parties to come to power and breeding all sorts of extremism.

***

That's the liberal/libertarian argument, but it's a nonsense argument that even the most liberal/libertarian nations on the Earth (read: the West) don't accept. American citizens want immigrants to integrate themselves with the wider society and assimilate themselves within it. That's why we promote ESL education and why we do so much in the way of making prospective Americans learn our history, take civics courses, and learn English. We understand that in order to have a functioning society, you must have a society that is monocultural. A bicultural or multicultural society produces dictatorship and makes it pretty much impossible for democracy to work.

And I should note that immigrant populations, by and large, do want to assimilate and integrate into mainstream society and don't have a problem with learning English, adopting American social norms, etc. If they didn't, they wouldn't have left their home countries in the first place.

***

Now, I don't favor a return to the 1925 Immigration Act (because it, in and of itself, was racist in limiting immigration to only Northern Europe), but I do favor reducing the amount of unskilled labor coming into the country. If we drastically reduced the number of immigrants we allow into the country every year, as well as reformed our system to promote highly-skilled immigration, we would speed up the integration of recent immigrants from Latin America, boost wages, and allow for unions to make a comeback, which would also make wages go up and everyone's standard of living with it.

Most immigrants are going to want to learn the de facto language of their new home because it will likely be difficult to get a job otherwise. But again, languages have network effects. English isn't the official language of the US; it's just the language most of us speak. We as a country have no inherent reason for speaking English other than the fact that that's what the founders spoke. But there are parts of the country where that isn't the case. Go to some parts of South Texas and Spanish speakers will feel no more obligated to accommodate you as an English speaker than most English speakers feel the need to accommodate speakers of other languages.

People want to assimilate for economic reasons; they want to be able to market their skills and function in their business environment. Beyond that, I see no reason they should be compelled to do so. It behooves immigrants to learn English and have an understanding of how our government works and of American history. I have no patience with people who are offended by the fact that some people choose to be Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist because that's not "American enough" for them. Or with people who complain about people's names being too difficult to pronounce. Or with people who seem inherently annoyed by an abundance of people with different skin tone and bone structure than themselves. That's simply ignorant.

We saw what happened in Alabama when they more or less got all the illegals to self-deport. Crops rotted in the fields because there was no one to pick them. Do that on a nationwide basis and see what happens. Who is going to cook our food and mow our lawns and build our buildings? You talk about raising wages as if that solves everyone's problems. People's living standards don't increase unless labor and capital become more productive. If you simply mandate union wages for everyone, you're raising the prices of the things those people by and it ends up being a wash or worse. How does me having to employ a white guy to maintain my yard for $25 an hour instead of the guy who previously did it for half that raise my living standards? How does everyone having to pay more every time they go eat at a restaurant or stay at a hotel raise their living standards?

[traininthedistance]

Oh God.

This is one of my problems with Atlas (and with the news media, though that's a whole 'nother rant). Instead of discussing what Senator Davis did or the merits of the bill she was filibustering, we make a thread for whether she's physically attractive. Unless we make equivalent threads like this for male politicians, this is really a sexist double standard to judge female politicians on their appearance. I'd have expected political junkies to be the sorts who could think with their brains as opposed to just their cocks.

[traininthedistance]

You're advocating major tax hikes on the poor... and then when people, who have a genuine concern in lifting the poor out of poverty, bring that up... you claim it's a "populist move" you'd expect from the Koch brothers?

Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?

Beside the fact that you would just alienate the poor and cause a backlash.

Way to completely ignore my second-to-last paragraph.

I definitely skimmed over that part.  But trust me... TNF is not in the pockets of the Kochtopus

He, like me, has a genuine concern for the poor that correctly comes before concern for the environment for one reason:

Poor people are terrible for the environment. 

Once people are fed, clothed, and sheltered... THEN they have the time to worry about the environment.

And if it takes more fossil fuels being burned to raise the poor out of poverty... then so be it.

As a society, we decide to tax and subsidize all kinds of things.  These choices always have a larger impact on people who are on the bottom rung of the ladder because they have no economic cushion. So, a tax on fuel is not at all unique in that respect.  Rather, your argument is an argument against taxing anything.       

Yet, burning fossil fuels produces negative externalities.  When someone drives a car, they don't adequately pay for the pollution they produce.  Thus, we have subsidized fossil fuels in this country so as to lead to non-socially optimal overuse and overproduction.  Gas taxes don't even lead to internalizing the cost of fossil fuel use because we use them to build free public roads for private cars.  So, really we're in effect subsidizing fossil fuels when we should be pricing the negative externalities from their use. 

We could gradually allow our taxes on fossil fuels reflect their actual negative externalities and subsidize other goods required by poor folks so as to leave them no worse off.  And perhaps some poor people would be worse off, like those who commute long distance via car.  But, that's just how the cookie crumbles.  Nobody has a right to have their specific inefficient lifestyle subsidized by the rest of the country.

[traininthedistance]

The road is designed to safely transport cars at the posted speed limit.  It is a bit disingenuous to call all roads a "multi-use corridor" on a road that sees 99.9% autos or trucks.

The law treats almost all roads other than limited-access highways as multi-use corridors, and plenty of people - primarily children, the poor, and the elderly, in many places - use them in this fashion. Motorists just cannot assume the road is theirs exclusively.

We're not just talking about bike-riders and pedestrians, either. I grew up in a rural area where four-wheelers, snowmobiles, farm equipment, Amish carriages, and even lawnmowers and golf carts were common on many of our roads (although the last two obviously aren't street legal). You can complain about them as much as you want as a motorists, but they'll still be there, and you need to watch out for them unless you want to have blood on your hands.

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Very few American cities offer enough bike infrastructure that it's convenient for a cyclist to get around while avoiding areas of high automobile traffic. (And believe me, almost all cyclists will do so if they can.) But it's unreasonable to expect that high-traffic locations, other than limited-access highways, will ever be free of everything other than automobiles.

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What is a "second class form of travel"?

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I don't have to drive often, but it's still an occasional routine for me. I do my best to minimize the amount of driving in my life, of course, and I've made real sacrifices to achieve that, but doing without it completely would be highly inconvenient. I'm not living in the automobile slums (and I realize how fortunate I am not to be), so it's possible to get around without one most of the time, but living without a vehicle is not easy or efficient by any measure. (Although plenty of people here - again, mostly the poor and not some imagined carless hipster aristocracy - do manage to do it.)

I realize that most people can't give up their cars, and I don't expect them to. But most people could be making choices that lead them to drive less. Most people could behave more respectfully toward cyclists, pedestrians, and other drivers when they're behind the wheel. Most people could be driving a smaller vehicle, and many people could afford to have only one or two family vehicles rather than two or three. Behavior can only ever change around the margins.

[traininthedistance]

Regarding the matter of using regions to take cognizance of them, I was never clear how using regions worked mechanically to force/influence changes in maps (just as I am not clear exactly how to measure erosity except by eye, even though I keep asking that we work on  that issue, and try to agree on the best approach that makes stuff look appealing to the eye, and  on that one I need your mathematical mind to help me), as opposed to just being a useful tool to find micro-chops, whatever one might want to do with them. Perhaps you might explain that.

On the issue of compactness, maybe there is no good solution, but it is a negative for a CD to just wander all over the state, like that AZ CD that went from Sedona to Snow Low via the Indian reservations. Maybe erosity measures that we have not yet defined, is the best that we can do. Sometimes unfortunately the mind of man is just too inadequate to fashion rules that really work on a global basis. Such is life.

One of my observations from public discussions of gerrymandered maps is that what bothers people are the really gross shapes that have nothing to do with natural geography. They don't mind river bends and modest deviations from a straight line. They do take offense at shapes that create unnatural deviations from regular shapes. In a sense the public has a threshold where a district is shaped well enough, beyond which they'd rather concentrate on effects other than the shape such as geographic integrity or competitive districts. Most mathematical models of compactness continue to reward improving the shape ad infinitum with no natural threshold. One goal is build in a sense of a threshold based on the shape of the underlying geography.

Let's use pentonimoes as counties with uniform population in a perfectly rectangular state. Here's an example I found at random on google search.



Now suppose we have to divide this into 4 districts. Clearly there are a wealth of ways to group these 12 counties into contiguous groups of 3 pieces each. Since the ideal division without counties would be four rectangles that are 3 x 5, most compactness formulas are going to reward whatever mechanism gets you there. If the formula entertains chops then it would force so many chops to get those rectangles that I expect the public would be hugely unhappy. So we recognize that something has to be traded between the shape and the number of chops.

Traditional formulas that try to work with the compactness of an area would generally consider a district made of the magenta, blue, and light blue counties in the NW corner more compact than the pink, purple and orange district in the NE corner. That's because it's more square or circular in shape than the elongated district I describe for the NE. Yet, I contend most ordinary observers would say that the elongated one makes the better district. We would describe it as less erose, and from that I conclude that one has to look more at the perimeter than at the area. In particular the internal perimeter is what matters to the public observer, because they will always forgive erose shapes due to the external border of their state.

For this simple example one could start by finding the division that minimizes the total perimeter of all districts. The outer perimeter is the same for every plan so that can be subtracted from that total. The difference that is left counts for each district on the boundary so it should be divided by two to get the unique amount of perimeter created by the division into districts.

This works well when all the boundaries that are under consideration are built from straight lines. But suppose that the boundaries are sometimes straight and sometimes winding rivers. A pure formula like the one I just described is going to be strongly biased towards avoiding putting winding county edges on the perimeter of the district because it adds to the length without changing the area. Yet my experience is that the public sees no reason not to treat the county river boundary as equal to the straight line segment as long as there's a bridge across the river on that segment.

My solution for this is to count segments instead of the actual distance. Each boundary between two different counties on either side of the district boundary count as a segment. On the average for the straight line pentominoes it is equivalent to the actual length, but it has none of the problem of biasing against naturally wiggly county lines.

In an upcoming post I'll address the connection between this type of erosity and chops.

[traininthedistance]

In this thread, like every other one about gender on this forum that devolves into guys arguing about why they don't have girlfriends, misses the quite simple truth: there's a difference between wanting to have sex with a girl (and having the confidence to say so) and treating all women like they're just walking pairs of tits. The former is a good thing, because, believe it or not, women actually like sex (I know, crazy right!? ), while the latter is obviously not.

I hate how every thread on this issue turns to posters' lack of success with women, although I guess it should be expected given the readership of this forum. But if you absolutely must debate this, the answer is really obvious. The men who have the most success with women aren't ones who live their lives in the he-man woman hater's club and venture out occasionally to collect a living f**ktoy, nor the ones who place women on a pedestal and talk about how they're so nice for not just wanting to have sex with them. It's those who understand that women are people and so are able to actually to just talk to them them without getting caught up in all this crap.

Came here to post that.

[traininthedistance]

Agreeing with this will probably get me pilloried in some quarters, but whatever.

Joe Lhota is the only candidate who would prefer kittens being run over to delayed subway trains so far, for the record.

Good for him. We're talking about a city where millions of people rely on public transportation to get around every day. The alternative is routinely stranding thousands of people for long periods of time (in the case of the kitten-herding incident earlier this week, at least ninety minutes). This isn't a decision that the mayor would make, but it's disappointing to see that only one candidate would put keeping the city functioning ahead of pandering.

[traininthedistance]

Agreeing with this will probably get me pilloried in some quarters, but whatever.

Joe Lhota is the only candidate who would prefer kittens being run over to delayed subway trains so far, for the record.

Good for him. We're talking about a city where millions of people rely on public transportation to get around every day. The alternative is routinely stranding thousands of people for long periods of time (in the case of the kitten-herding incident earlier this week, at least ninety minutes). This isn't a decision that the mayor would make, but it's disappointing to see that only one candidate would put keeping the city functioning ahead of pandering.

But kitties... T___T

Seriously, though, if Americans learned to be less uptight about keeping to a rigorously scheduled and overworked life this would be much less of a problem. Americans desperately need more relaxation time, people should be celebrating the extra hour and a half to just chill. I don't think there would be such uproar if this happened in the Paris Metro for example.

The fact that Americans' lives are on average overscheduled and overworked really can't be an excuse for saying that it's okay to shut down crucial public services.  Down that path lies... nothing good.

(Two big reasons: while I'm sure some folks can just "chill out", it's quite presumptuous and I'm sure wrong to assume that nobody who was inconvenienced by this didn't have a genuine emergency to attend to, or wasn't materially harmed by missing work, doctor's appointments, flights, etc. etc. etc.  Secondly, I really don't like how this line of thinking can be extended to become a justification for poor/shoddy/spotty service in general.)

[traininthedistance]

I'm not advocating letting general public transit standards decline

I understand that's not your intention; but unintended consequences must be taken into account.

but I do believe that the lives of animals deserve moral consideration;

Agreed in the abstract; though I suspect we are not particularly close when it comes to the details of that.

and pointing out that the inconvenience caused by this was overblown

I couldn't disagree more.  Of course, quality of public transit is one of the issues I care most deeply about.

symptomatic of a much larger problem

Care to elaborate?  I think this episode is in fact symptomatic of a much larger problem, but I'm quite certain I'm thinking of a very different problem than you are.

and miniscule in comparison to the harm that is caused by ending a creature's life even when multiplied out thousands of times is absolutely relevant to the utilitarian calculus here.

So are you suggesting we stop the trains for pigeons, rats, squirrels, etc?  That seems to me the logical extension of your argument, but doing so would of course quite literally end all functioning public transit (among other things), pretty much forever.  (Of course, these animals don't actually get run over all that often, since they can get out of the way.)

[traininthedistance]

Well, as bullying is often caused by the victim not fitting the things the society expects it to be, I'm not sure than social conservatism and anti-bullying is compatible.

^This comment is a perfect example of bullying people in the minority, in this case, conservatives on this site. What a close-minded thing to say. I expected better of you.

Only in this place would people bring up making fun of other people's political views on the internet as a relevant counter to an argument about bullying in schools

I think you misoverestimate humanity.