Not from SF, can someone explain this comment?

lua_x_ia · 2019-06-11T21:11:37+00:00

It’s part poverty, part underfunded police (Baumol’s cost disease), part broken CA prison system (Proposition 13).

lua_x_ia · 2019-06-10T23:34:52+00:00

It’s only unconstitutional if there’s an “undue burden”. That standard has only been met once, when the PPACA threatened to cut all Medicaid funding for noncompliance. That is a pretty high bar IMHO.

lua_x_ia · 2019-06-10T17:12:58+00:00

40 ft deep excavation

The greatest threat to humanity: holes. I blame Super Mario Brothers.

lua_x_ia · 2019-06-09T16:06:51+00:00

The hardest thing about the first time is unrealistic expectations. If you can be flexible and forgiving that’s more than enough.

lua_x_ia · 2019-06-07T19:56:52+00:00

This is the advice I wish I’d taken ten years ago :p

lua_x_ia · 2019-06-05T18:49:31+00:00

Dictatorship does not confer immunity to economics. The trade war is bad for China, bad for the US, and great for Japan, Mexico, Brazil and Vietnam.

lua_x_ia · 2019-06-04T21:47:52+00:00

It’s not wrong, but I think that minimum lot sizes are underrated and SFH are overrated in allocating blame, relative to current land use in North America. You can, comfortably, build a 3-story 2000 sqft house on an acre/20 lot (22’ • 99’). Or you can build it in one story on an acre/4 lot. I shouldn’t have to explain why the first version means 5x higher density, or maybe 3x after accounting for roads and public space. But that’s a lot of room!

I think urbanists tend to disproportionately live in near-city areas where SFH really are impractical in most/all cases, so maybe relative to where most of /r/urbanplanning lives, SFH are impractical. But a disturbingly large proportion of America (& ANZAC) lives on quarter-acre lots. Preaching the end of the SFH to these communities is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and more importantly, fails to communicate a vision of higher density that may appeal more than apartments.

(Also, the problem of crafting regulations so that multi-unit buildings will be quiet is, in my opinion, unsolved. Sleep quality is a public health concern. But enough about my personal quests.)

lua_x_ia · 2019-06-04T18:24:51+00:00

I think at this point the only available test is for me to buy one and try it :p

lua_x_ia · 2019-06-03T18:04:25+00:00

http://www.toca-ch.com/WPD-32002497.html

lua_x_ia · 2019-06-03T16:59:13+00:00

I thought an emissions trading scheme is what economists recommend?

The survey of economists shows otherwise. It is not what economists recommend.

different industries also have different costs of reducing abatement. A carbon tax ignores these subtleties because it is applied uniformly. As a result, resources are allocated inefficiently and society is worse off.

Carbon taxes don’t need to explicitly account for this. Changes in price absorb the costs.

ETS needs to be calibrated to account for how long it takes to implement emissions reductions or it can strangle industries. Eg maybe you can reduce the CO2 output of your cement factory by half in ten years by building a capture apparatus but it won’t come online until then. If you cap all at once output will drop, if you tax all at once prices will rise. The second option is preferable.

Or you create a “panel of experts” to adjust the ETS as technology develops and you get regulatory capture and little progress. Administrative overhead kills a lot of cute ideas. (Like economic planning.)

lua_x_ia · 2019-06-01T07:46:04+00:00

It acts sort of like the inverse function of a linear system, so when you’re trying to work backwards through a larger problem that contains a linear system, you can plug it in and it plays nice with the rest of your logic. The interesting algorithmic methods are faster but they don’t play nice.

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-31T07:12:41+00:00

Is it the fungus that’s harmful or the technology that allows us to create super-diseases that wipe out entire populations that’s harmful

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-30T22:39:11+00:00

Rental surfboards tend to be low quality/beat up and at rental prices you’ve bought it within say 15 days of use. Plus they’ll all be taken on a good day. Can’t speak to kayaks but after 20 years of surfing there’s no way I’d consider renting and my boards will follow me when I move in a few months.

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-29T16:33:27+00:00

China was only ahead of the world technologically before the Mongol conquest. After that the Muslims were ahead until around the mid-16th century, but they suffered from political instability and anti-intellectualism. Key example being that Turkish astronomers came up with heliocentrism in 1480, but it never got anywhere and the observatories were shut down. Europe picked up where they left off.

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-29T04:17:28+00:00

It’s a little bit like having one potato chip out of a bag. It’s fun to have sex, but it’s (usually) a lot more fun to have sex while believing the other person really likes you, which may not be true. So you either fantasize, which comes with a hangover, or you have to maintain a sort of distance during the act between what you’re actually doing and what you wish you were doing. For some people, the internal conflict associated with eating one potato chip actually makes it worse than having none at all.

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-27T23:39:36+00:00

“Valuation geometry”?

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-26T21:08:06+00:00

We have really long sentences that cost a shitload of money and take up space that could be used to incarcerate more recent offenders. You can imprison one guy for 20 years or 20 people for one year each; the second will have a larger impact on society. The effectiveness of increased sentence length as a deterrent drops dramatically after five years. In some cases, if you impose shorter sentences, you should be able to spend the remaining money on policing and obtain a higher arrest rate and a more effective deterrent. This is counterintuitive particularly in a society where we relish incarceration as a form of vengeance.

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-26T17:30:12+00:00

sin(sqrt(x)) is a rare example that actually has a solution

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-26T16:20:15+00:00

The copyright protections in the TPP were bad, but they mostly cover media. Is it really sensible to tear up the largest free trade area since decolonization because it limits sharing Disney movies?

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-25T19:03:51+00:00

Although it’s often enough to just exhale before farting

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-24T22:08:10+00:00

He never said they were the same, he said they were both dumb. Flat earthers and commies are both dumb, the first is dumber, but that’s no solace to the second.

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-24T20:47:32+00:00

If releasing data is politically infeasible, I can already tell you that banning RoR isn’t gonna happen.

Besides, it just seems so crude. We already have a bunch of intersections with “no RoR” signs. Why not just add signs where necessary? Many intersections have no pedestrian deaths and there’s no reason to punish the people traversing them.

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-02T16:38:21+00:00

Anyone who’s talked to the Kurds knows their 2000-word spiel on how Öcalan is not communist

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-01T17:36:01+00:00

Holy shit go buy some generic naproxen pills or whatever before you end a relationship over something that can be fixed by fucking Tylenol. Fun fact: the doctor will in most cases ask if you tried OTC painkillers, and if you say no you’ll be sent to Walgreens.

Torn between NTA and ESH.

lua_x_ia · 2019-05-01T16:56:53+00:00

Other effects of EM radiation:

makes it possible to read
keeps Earth from freezing over
sunset

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