1,527 karma · joined May 30, 2013
Recently Supervisor Peskin apparently reached a deal to impose a "net fares" tax on the TNC's. I wonder if they will consider differentiating it by neighborhood: imposing larger charges downtown. Peskin has also lobbied for downtown congestion pricing although that is harder to implement, politically and technologically, than such a tax.
I recall in grad school being in an econ
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/di...
It made an interesting point about English:
"English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on “intelligibility”...But because of quirks of its history, English happens to lack very close relatives, and the intelligibility standard doesn’t apply consistently beyond it. Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of speaking, which one might think of as “dialects” of one language, are actually treated as separate languages. At the same time, some mutually incomprehensible tongues an outsider might view as separate “languages” are thought of locally as dialects."
This is spot on. The first thing I did after reading the article was go to Scots Wikipedia. I could read the articles pretty well after a minute, since there seems to be a nearly one-to-one mapping between the Scots words and English words, and so I thought "this isn't a language." The grammar was different than standard english, but similar to the way some southerners talk. But had I grown up speaking another language maybe I'd have a different instinct about whether that intelligibility made it a language. Moreover, says something I chose written language for deciding whether it's a language or not: all english speakers are used to not being able to understand spoken english from other places and classes.
In the end, I suppose the whole difference is socially constructed and involves politics mixed with what people regard as common sense.
Random sample ("featured article") from the scots wikipedia: "The testicle (frae Laitin testiculus, diminutive o testis, meanin "witness" o virility, plural testes) is the male gonad in ainimals. Lik the ovaries tae which they are homologous, testes are components o baith the reproductive seestem an the endocrine seestem."
If they're so unlivable then why do so many people want to live there that they're crowded? Especially when the country is full of suburbs...suburbs, where, in fact, most people live.
Our cities are way less dense than many European cities. In fact they are way less dense than they used to be in many cases.
Also interesting the US seems to have a sort of fertility zone right down the middle https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/84g2n5/states_and_...
"Net vehicle miles traveled (VMT) changes are unknown."
"While this data provides initial insights into the travel behavior changes associated with ridehailing, it is still limited in that it does not provide a complete picture of individual travelers’ trip generating activities, the modes they used before ride-hailing services, and the potentially new patterns of behavior that have since emerged."
Meanwhile, here is coverage of this study: "Lyft, Uber increase traffic 180 percent in major cities, says report" https://sf.curbed.com/2018/7/27/17622178/uber-lyft-cause-tra...
That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But I’m surprised the study gets so much press because some guy published something on his personal website.
Off to refactor...
glad yall are still enjoying it.
This is exactly what I like about Julia. Even though getting started in Julia was tough (esp the older versions), once you get off the ground Python starts to seem like a very hard language, in that Python requires you to use these special libraries to run fast code. In Julia, the most obvious way to do something (e.g., for loops) is perfectly fine.
The main thing Julia lacks, for me, is an equivalent to Pandas. The DataFrames library lacks many very useful features of Pandas. But I am sure someone will tackle that.
In general though we should expect building roads to reduce travel time. The fact that driving increases following road-building is evidence of this: why would driving increase if travel times between all origins and destinations stayed the same? Validated models of travel demand all depend on travel time, not the existence of roadspace. Just because driving increases upon building new roads does not mean it does so to the extent that travel times are unchanged.
For the record, I do not support building many more roads. They have become very expensive to build and maintain, the maintenance backlog in some places is severe, and in a thick network like many US cities have they do little good. In some cases the pollution they create is severe and disproportionately impacts poor people. But I still feel compelled to nitpick this common misunderstanding about induced demand.
As an example, Singapore accepts a lot of Malays and Chinese every year (and most people are Chinese), but the country has "an obsession with queueing" (https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/no-time-wait-line-star...) and is very orderly w/r/t traffic laws and such.
I like to distinguish between "culture" and something vaguer, which is what type of equilibrium someone is trapped in. I started to think this way when I lived in Argentina. Argentina is very corrupt, but just across the river is Uruguay...the least corrupt country in Latin America by some metrics. Argentines and Uruguayos are culturally quite similar (the relationship is analogous to that between the US and Canada), but one country is much less corrupt. I mused about this to my Argentine friend and he said "The difference is that in Argentine politics, if you're not corrupt you'll get destroyed." (This is kind of exaggerated but it gets the point across.) So while the cultures are similar, individuals in each country find themselves in different equilibria: if you're the only corrupt person in a group, you'll get caught and ostracized; if you're the only uncorrupt person, you'll get forced out (the same thing happens to police departments in the US). It is impossible for an individual to change the equilibrium.
Likewise with standing in line: Chinese immigrants to America preserve much of their culture for a while but don't cut lines; if they did they would be called out for it, being among the few who do so. But if everyone around you is blatantly cutting, then maybe you'll do it, too.
"Most of them [the people living on RSA] indeed live out of poverty, but they are no incentivized whatsoever to get any extra training or even to find a job." This is a plain lie and, besides, has nothing to do with UBI. Regarding, the RSA, it diminishes more slowly than labor earnings (as you can see simply by reading the chart on its short Wikipedia page), so the more money you earn, the more money you get to spend. So there is an incentive to get training and a job. But in any case it has nothing to do with UBI proposals: the UBI idea is that your benefit wouldn't diminish at all as you earn more money, so the incentive to get a job and earn more is even stronger under UBI than under RSA. I think the reason this guy is surrounded by unemployed people living off RSA is that he lives next to defunct villages with high unemployment; these people can't get jobs because they aren't available. Thank god for the benefits then.
"I doubt they ever drove a couple of days in the backcountry." Blah blah some ad hominem about tech people being elite nerds that doesn't relate to the efficacy of UBI. I love the implicit claim that this dude gets it because he spends time at his summer home in the rough and tumble "backcountry" of the Loire Valley.
"To do so, it must take the long view and start to care about its stakeholders and not only about its shareholders. " Blah blah some word salad that doesn't mean anything specific about policy.
Paul Krugman has a theory that the recession has made companies averse to raising wages, because it's hard to claw wage gains back if there's a recession. So instead they are offering bonuses, because if a recession hits you can just say "we don't have money for bonuses this year" which is a lot easier than saying "everybody's salary is going down." I'd say, while the cause (recession) is right, the companies are doing even more than switching to bonuses: it's also aggressive recruiting, allowing remote work, making workplaces cool, inflating the job's prestige, etc.