A BIT OF SYMBOLIC GENERATIONAL WARFARE has always suffused American politics, with various cliques of self-appointed “adults in the room” dismissing challengers to the status quo as immature, idealistic, or juvenile. But when it comes to figuring out what This Whole Trump Thing really means, actual juveniles are reading at several grade levels above the sophisticated adults. While editors send reporters to do anthropological fieldwork in the Rust Belt, and Democratic senators from red states fret over precisely how many unqualified ideologues they must confirm for lifetime seats on the judiciary in order to win re-election, teenagers have had the whole deal figured out from the beginning. They present their findings regularly, if you know where to look.
Tuesday, May 07, 2019
Today's Long Read
Pareene.
Making Peak Travel Time Worse
The first dumb paper I wrote for a grad school class was related to this (it was a dumb class paper so I was not INNOVATING in this area).
People who hate spending money to widen highways love to talk about "induced demand" which is how those improvements just bring more cars onto the highway as people switch to highway travel.
But it's actually worse than that. People don't just switch to highway travel from other roads and modes, they switch their travel times. And because congestion is an externality they do it in particularly infuriating - for everybody else - ways. You get more cars on the road all day, and you especially get more cars at rush hour. So, yes, widening highways can, actually, make your rush hour commute worse.
Immediately after it opened, a report commissioned by Metro found that, while the number of hours per day when peak traffic conditions existed had declined, rush hour commute times on the freeway were up compared to 2009—prior to the start of construction.
People who hate spending money to widen highways love to talk about "induced demand" which is how those improvements just bring more cars onto the highway as people switch to highway travel.
But it's actually worse than that. People don't just switch to highway travel from other roads and modes, they switch their travel times. And because congestion is an externality they do it in particularly infuriating - for everybody else - ways. You get more cars on the road all day, and you especially get more cars at rush hour. So, yes, widening highways can, actually, make your rush hour commute worse.
When You Spend A Lot Of Time On A Post, Decide It's Dumb, Then Trash It
Think about how dumb all the posts you don't see are!
Monday, May 06, 2019
Did They Game This Out
I'd like to think the Dems thought of "what if they won't release Trump's tax returns" and got further than "oh well, we tried."
Foul Sports
I didn't watch the big horse race and have no knowledge about horse racing and do not know if I agree with My President that what happened was a very politically incorrect travesty (likely not, but he gets it right occasionally!), but as for other sports I am slightly more familiar with:
I do not like games where too much of the game revolves around fouls and penalties and whatever they are called in your favorite sport. The game of football has long had too much to do with whether penalties are called, and (I am certainly not the first person to observe) that every touchdown now seems to depend on some rule requiring an instant replay to decipher (I forget, why, precisely, I am not that big of a fan), has taken the excitement out of the important moments.
They are much less important in soccer, which makes all the "flopping" (OWWW REF HE HURT ME SO BAD I FELL AND AM CRYING ok gonna get up now) that much more unforgivable. It barely matters most of the time and they do it anyway!
Basketball is half a contest about putting the ball in the hoop and half a contest of convincing a ref that the other guy touched you when he wasn't supposed to. "Drawing a foul" should not be a key game strategy.
I don't watch enough hockey to know anything.
Baseball seems ok. Can always quibble about the institution of instant replays, but at least they do seem to make correct calls more likely instead of just conforming to a different arbitrary judgment, as is often the case in football.
I am not a big sports fan so real sports fans can tell me I am wrong.
I do not like games where too much of the game revolves around fouls and penalties and whatever they are called in your favorite sport. The game of football has long had too much to do with whether penalties are called, and (I am certainly not the first person to observe) that every touchdown now seems to depend on some rule requiring an instant replay to decipher (I forget, why, precisely, I am not that big of a fan), has taken the excitement out of the important moments.
They are much less important in soccer, which makes all the "flopping" (OWWW REF HE HURT ME SO BAD I FELL AND AM CRYING ok gonna get up now) that much more unforgivable. It barely matters most of the time and they do it anyway!
Basketball is half a contest about putting the ball in the hoop and half a contest of convincing a ref that the other guy touched you when he wasn't supposed to. "Drawing a foul" should not be a key game strategy.
I don't watch enough hockey to know anything.
Baseball seems ok. Can always quibble about the institution of instant replays, but at least they do seem to make correct calls more likely instead of just conforming to a different arbitrary judgment, as is often the case in football.
I am not a big sports fan so real sports fans can tell me I am wrong.
A Future I Can Get Behind
I was looking for something randomly and came across the hilarious picture which sits on top of the linked article. The article - which I didn't even read except the headline - is about self-driving cars, but notice something about those glorious highways.
There. Are. No. Cars.
Beautiful! Now tear them down.
Minimizing the number of cars in renderings of all kinds of roads and other construction projects (this is just concept art as far as I can tell) is pretty standard, but I was impressed by zero!
There. Are. No. Cars.
Beautiful! Now tear them down.
Minimizing the number of cars in renderings of all kinds of roads and other construction projects (this is just concept art as far as I can tell) is pretty standard, but I was impressed by zero!
Ex-Airplane Manufacturer
Concern for safety is so poor, and presumably affects everything in the company, that it's not too hard to contemplate the possibility, if not current reality, of being down one major commercial airplane manufacturer that can be trusted to make airplanes that won't fall out of the sky. And that would means there was only one left.
I'm making a general point about the fragility of these kinds of things if we put too much power in private hands without appropriate regulation and safeguards. The world won't collapse tomorrow if we couldn't make anymore airplanes for awhile, but it would be a bit of an issue.
As for the specifics, a bunch of people (not sure who! just sure there are a bunch) should be in jail and no one thinks they will go because the planes weren't operating from countries "we" think matter. I'm not sure anyone thinks they would go to the slammer if planes operating from domestic carriers fell out of the sky, either.
Boeing Co. knew months before a deadly 737 Max crash that a cockpit alert wasn’t working the way the company had told buyers of the single-aisle jetliner.
I'm making a general point about the fragility of these kinds of things if we put too much power in private hands without appropriate regulation and safeguards. The world won't collapse tomorrow if we couldn't make anymore airplanes for awhile, but it would be a bit of an issue.
As for the specifics, a bunch of people (not sure who! just sure there are a bunch) should be in jail and no one thinks they will go because the planes weren't operating from countries "we" think matter. I'm not sure anyone thinks they would go to the slammer if planes operating from domestic carriers fell out of the sky, either.
Fascism
Imagine pretending to take this stuff seriously.
You can't really imagine the liberal mirror image of these people (I'm gonna leave aside the Farrakhan issue, but no he isn't a liberal), but imagine if a bunch of libturds got banned by Facebook and started whining about fascism? No one, including other libturds, would take them seriously. Sure they might criticize Facebook for sucking, but that's it. Also imagine President Obama making a statement and anybody in the press doing anything other than laughing at him.
Sure there are legitimate issues about the importance of social media and what it means to hand over such power to private entities, but these are, you know, the kinds of issues libturds bring up regularly, and not because a bunch of D-list internet weirdos got banned for being a bit too, well, fascistic.
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Who knew fascism could be so chirpy. Groups that do things that are dangerous. What exactly does that mean? Dangerous like hurting other people? Or dangerous as in saying things that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't like or considers bad for business? Well yesterday we found out. Facebook released its latest enemies list. Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Louis Farrakhan, Laura Loomer - all of them were designated dangerous individuals and banned from Facebook and from its subsidiary Instagram.
You can't really imagine the liberal mirror image of these people (I'm gonna leave aside the Farrakhan issue, but no he isn't a liberal), but imagine if a bunch of libturds got banned by Facebook and started whining about fascism? No one, including other libturds, would take them seriously. Sure they might criticize Facebook for sucking, but that's it. Also imagine President Obama making a statement and anybody in the press doing anything other than laughing at him.
Sure there are legitimate issues about the importance of social media and what it means to hand over such power to private entities, but these are, you know, the kinds of issues libturds bring up regularly, and not because a bunch of D-list internet weirdos got banned for being a bit too, well, fascistic.
Anybody Else?
Sometimes our elite press tells on itself too much.
One doesn't have to have Tom Friedman's "anything called free trade is good" view to get that in the short term, at least, a few proles might have some job problems, also, too.
Trump’s Trade War Threat Poses Problems for China and Investors
One doesn't have to have Tom Friedman's "anything called free trade is good" view to get that in the short term, at least, a few proles might have some job problems, also, too.
Sunday, May 05, 2019
Sunday Afternoon
We have a big dumb race here every year and I ran it and now I am in pain.
I did not win.
I did not win.
Saturday, May 04, 2019
Edge Cases
One annoying thing about the self-driving car conversation is even relatively smart people (ones who agree with me about stuff) are always evoking the concept of "edge cases." The idea is that there's a level of normal driving which is a solvable problem, and then there are finite number of weird situations, like recognizing that a deer is going to jump out in front of you, or the lines on the road suddenly disappear or are wrongly striped, or you hit a construction zone, or the stop sign is posted upside down, and once you just teach your computer about this finite number of situations, you're all set.
But this isn't really a finite problem. It's a "need a human brain problem" and for all of the talk of AI, there is no AI. The argument is that on balance you can make it safer than a human driver, or as safe, so isn't that good enough? Even if true, safety is the wrong measure. It has to be as useful a human driver. I'm pretty sure you can program these cars not to hit things reasonably well, but it's much harder to program them to just not get confused in a parking lot. I mean, I can't imagine a car managing to navigate its way into, say, a stadium parking lot at game time. Or out again. Again, the problem isn't safety. They can usually manage to avoid things or pull off to the side of the road and say "wtf, man, help me out of this shit." But that won't be very useful. Niche limited applications might work, but they won't be very useful either.
But this isn't really a finite problem. It's a "need a human brain problem" and for all of the talk of AI, there is no AI. The argument is that on balance you can make it safer than a human driver, or as safe, so isn't that good enough? Even if true, safety is the wrong measure. It has to be as useful a human driver. I'm pretty sure you can program these cars not to hit things reasonably well, but it's much harder to program them to just not get confused in a parking lot. I mean, I can't imagine a car managing to navigate its way into, say, a stadium parking lot at game time. Or out again. Again, the problem isn't safety. They can usually manage to avoid things or pull off to the side of the road and say "wtf, man, help me out of this shit." But that won't be very useful. Niche limited applications might work, but they won't be very useful either.
So What Are You Going To Do About It
For various reasons Trump is less concerned about constraints on his tantrums every day. The Dems don't have infinite power but they need to use what they have and "just hoping this all goes away soon" is not good enough and nor is hoping that Joe Scarborough gives a teary speech about democracy and suddenly all the Republicans come around.
Democrats could easily avoid this trap by initiating impeachment proceedings now, not just on the basis of this new reporting, but the conduct detailed in the Mueller report, and the more quotidian and routine ways Trump flouts his oath of office.
They have instead chosen to communicate to Trump that all of these improprieties are acceptable—and less than a month after the Mueller report became public, their paralysis has uncorked Trump’s authoritarian desires. On Wednesday, Barr revealed that he and Trump have discussed at least some of the criminal investigations Mueller spun off to other components of the Justice Department—investigations Barr has refused to recuse himself from. Barr has also conscripted the department’s inspector general into a “review” of the origins of the Russia investigation that Trump clearly expects will yield criminal charges, however frivolous. If Democrats are too helpless to help their own candidates, how are they to help people caught up in that investigation, or the victims of the criminal behavior Mueller referred out to other prosecutors? And the worst part is that Barr has been Trump’s attorney general for only two and a half months—which means they’re just getting started.
Just Another Normal Saturday Morning
I knew of right wing nutter Prison Paul years go when he was just an internet weirdo in the UK but hadn't made the jump here.
Now we get to write things like, "President Trump praises Prison Paul on Twitter" and this novel is getting ridiculous.
Now we get to write things like, "President Trump praises Prison Paul on Twitter" and this novel is getting ridiculous.
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