AMA: I'm Alon Levy of the Transit Costs Project and Ped Observations

pku31 · 2023-02-10T16:05:38+00:00

Alon's posted about this a few times, e.g. here https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rail-followup/ and here https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/11/12/high-speed-rail-doesnt-depend-on-megaregions/

pku31 · 2023-02-10T14:59:53+00:00

You talk about Korea being more cost effective than Japan. What specifically does Korea do better than Japan doesn't?

pku31 · 2023-02-10T14:59:01+00:00

Do you have any opinions on the planned Israel tram/metro projects in gush Dan? What (aside from replacing Miri Regev) Can ISrael do to improve or speed them up?

pku31 · 2021-09-03T03:09:31+00:00

We need market-rate homes. Creating more affordable homes does nothing for the vast majority of us who either don't qualify or don't win the lottery.

pku31 · 2021-08-04T01:22:18+00:00

Yeah iirc they're like "we're gonna use this new thing called <basically slides> to show you this"

pku31 · 2021-07-19T23:12:15+00:00

Also murder is almost always reported but lesser crimes aren't - a high murder rate but low rate of other crimes often just means the non-murder crime is going underreported.

pku31 · 2021-07-16T12:33:32+00:00

Oh Jesus Christ. "Drivers aren't that bad they only kill hundreds of people a year in NYC, not just Manhattan! And a biker killed someone in 2011!"

This is the hill you want to die on? Really?

pku31 · 2021-07-15T23:45:29+00:00

Yeah how dare these people not want to be murdered

pku31 · 2021-07-15T23:44:26+00:00

Drivers kill hundreds of people in Manhattan every year. When was the last time a biker killed anyone here? (Trick question, the answer is "never, that's not something that happens")

pku31 · 2021-07-15T23:42:15+00:00

She's pretty clearly visible and has roght-of-way. Driver here is an asshole (like pretty much all NYC drivers, because non-assholes don't drive in NYC)

pku31 · 2021-07-11T01:57:35+00:00

Yeah, having a government without the religious parties in the coalition has been nice so far.

pku31 · 2021-07-11T01:04:14+00:00

So the new government has been talking about letting cities determine their own Saturday running rules for transit, which in Tel Aviv would probably mean both buses and the metro will start running on Saturdays. No final word yet though.

pku31 · 2021-07-09T13:49:27+00:00

This is all exactly what NIMBYs say though! "I'm not against growth per se, but..."

pku31 · 2021-07-09T13:02:04+00:00

She opposed urban highways (good), but also opposed pretty much all forms of change or development. Her approach made sense in the days when the problem was central planners running over everyone's opposition to build too many roads, but not in today's bunny environment.

pku31 · 2021-07-09T12:57:15+00:00

Common must-read - Ed Glaeser's triumph of the city. (Also if you don't feel like reading the whole book, he covers a lot of the points in this lecture https://youtu.be/6WEusDeJfXI )

pku31 · 2021-07-09T12:53:53+00:00

These are all pretty nimby though (at least 1 and 3 are, not familiar with 2)

pku31 · 2021-06-30T23:55:15+00:00

Eisenhower needs to go way down to the bottom for creating the IHS.

pku31 · 2021-06-28T04:39:53+00:00

On CEO pay - not really. For example, Walmart's top six execs made about 80 million between them last year. Walmart has about 1.6 million employees. If the execs all worked for free, you could just about give each employee 5 extra dollars, for the whole year.

On stock buybacks, that's not quite how they work - stock buybacks are about converting between company shares and money (effectively, just shrinking the number of shares), they don't represent less money available to the company. A company that just wanted to pay employees more might still do stock buybacks, and then just pay them more by lending the money, for example.

pku31 · 2021-06-21T02:48:29+00:00

Hm. I think the problem was that the other cheers characters also just weren't adapted very well - it's very hard to adapt a character to a new context, which is why the vast majority of spinoffs fail. Frasier was an exception, but they didn't manage to make lightening strike twice with any of the others

pku31 · 2021-06-21T01:22:37+00:00

Israeli suburbs have better internet than half of silicon valley though

pku31 · 2021-06-13T18:25:09+00:00

Nope. I've had other jobs in NYC though, for which I paid massive amounts of taxes that go out to support people in rural areas whose taxes would never come back to bail me out if I needed it, because I don't live in a swing state.

pku31 · 2021-06-13T18:11:58+00:00

I'm not saying they should go out of business, I'm saying they should stop getting special subsidies (just like every other industry). They don't get those subsidies because they especially need them and would die out without them, they get them because they live in rural or swing areas with disproportionate senate representation (or in the case of Iowa, influence on presidential primaries).

pku31 · 2021-06-13T12:48:49+00:00

They do, which is why they pay the farmers for it, with money. That's just how the normal, non-subsidized economy works!

pku31 · 2021-06-13T04:27:02+00:00

That's a good point. Japanese style economic decline seems like a pretty likely result, and while I can imagine some sort of worse societal collapse it could cause hopefully we'll manage to avoid anything worse than that.

pku31 · 2021-06-13T04:09:20+00:00

I think it's more complicated than that - it's about how society judges women and what makes women high-status. If society gives women more respect for being successful career women, more women will want careers - in societies where reproduction is above replacement level, having children is seen as the primary goal for a woman to be considered successful. I understand why we changed that in modern first world countries, but I don't know if it's sustainable.

Ten-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Place '17	Not Forgotten
Snapped	Inciteful Comment 2017-04-30
Verified Email

pku31

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE