If you don't want to live in a place with 50-story buildings, don't do things that create demand for them. For example, you can discourage business investment in the area. Funny how no municipality ever does so.
No, you can just let home prices inflate, or force everyone to commute from 2 hours away. The parent's point is that increased density often follows increased demand; and increased demand often follows a productive economy.
Another issue is water: the more people, the more water. No one in California wants that. so the farm lobby can paradoxically be incentivized to vote for housing regulation as long as it doesn't affect their labor costs inland.
Labor is the biggest cost in almost any enterprise and your labor's housing is their biggest expense. But that doesn't mean the farmer actually has to eat that burden. And, geographically, farm areas surely have less population pressure for housing space.
If there's no market for them, they won't get built. But people want to live in places like NY and San Fran for the economic opportunities they provide, not just for "the character of the neighborhood".
> If there's no market for them, they won't get built.
That's something else, isn't it? The people who already live there might not want 50-story buildings, even if there are other people who would move into them if they were built.
That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? How much right should I have to control what other people do because it might bother me? I think that currently, we err way too much on the side of letting people block things, here in the US.
> How much right should I have to control what other people do because it might bother me?
That's a valid question for every law or other governmental decision. But we can think of an idealized case, where an entire town, or state, or country, agree that they don't want 50-story buildings, even if there exists outsiders who would like to move into such buildings. In this case, we need only recognize the right of the local people to decide what happens in their area, even if it is against the will of people from elsewhere.
Why do the rights of the local people trump the rights of people from "elsewhere"? The major question is what harm is being done to the local people by the existence of 50 story buildings, vs the harm to people that find an ideal job in SF but can't afford to take it?
> Why do the rights of the local people trump the rights of people from "elsewhere"?
On at least some level, I find it reasonable that the people who live in a certain place decide over that place. In any case, that is rather conventional, isn't it? It's particularly clear on the level of countries, which is why I mentioned it in my comment. Only citizens or residents of a country, not the rest of the world, get to vote in elections.
> The major question is what harm is being done to the local people by the existence of 50 story buildings
That's really a matter of their personal opinion. Some of us find such buildings repulsive.
> That's really a matter of their personal opinion. Some of us find such buildings repulsive.
I find lip piercings repulsive. I wouldn't want them made illegal. The country would be in a better place if people hadn't decided that there's a 0th amendment saying they had the right to never be offended by anything.
> What if an entire town decides they don't want to allow minorities to live there?
Yes, what if they do? Should they not get to decide because they might haver the wrong opinion? Who should decide instead? What if they have the wrong opinion?
> Why is xenophobia and NIMBYism acceptable in one case and not the other?
What two cases are you referring to?
Also, it's not obvious that NIMBY, as in "yes, do thing X, but not in my backyard", is relevant here, because it's not necessarily so that anyone is saying "yes, do thing X". For "NIMBY" to be a meaningful concept at all, it really needs to be about a situation when someone is pushing X onto someone else, while refusing to accept X in their own lives. If "NIMBY" used simply to describe a position of "no X, please", or even "no X, please, at least not in my backyard where I might have a say in it", then it's not useful, because those are perfectly reasonable positions to have about things.
> Most people would think an entire town deciding to exclude minorities is morally repugnant
What? I'm not saying I don't. It's just irrelevant to the issue.
> shouldn't be allowed.
That's like saying that "these people over here cannot be allowed to decide over their own neighborhood, because they might decide things that I find repugnant". Well, who are you going to trust with the power?
When the economic opportunities overrun the "character of the neighborhood", neighborhoods get destroyed and people get priced out of their own homes. It's called gentrification.
Wrong. Adding supply lowers prices, not increases them.
The fact that wealthy rentiers in the Bay Area have somehow convinced activists that they should oppose new development is farcical. Liberal activists are literally protesting to enrich capitalists.
Your home can be seized by eminent domain as was done by the town of New London a few years back. They did so in order for a private developer to build more expensive housing on that property and generate higher property taxes for the city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
How would more affordable housing (by replacing single family homes with high-rise complexes) increase gentrification? If anything, people are getting 'priced out' because of the absurdly high housing prices right now.
Uh, if you have been following along, you may have noticed that most people cannot afford the bay area as it is. Adding some supply might help things, rather than make them worse.
Before you say that, read up on "really narrow streets" -- it's quite possible to make a place that's both very dense and very liveable. Of course, there are very few such places in the US...
I recently returned to HN, having read it a little a few years back. I remembered it as a low-volume, high-quality feed, where I was hesitant to speak, because all the other comments were so full of knowledge.
Now, HN seems to have become like any other place, full of noise like politics, social commentary, and just regular news. I guess the commenters are still knowledgeable about technological subjects, though.
The inevitability of every good site is that it will eventually grow, and with it, the diversity of the interests of the user-base. While I come to HN mainly for the technical news, I find it convenient that it also keeps me in the loop about a wider variety of topics I would surely miss otherwise. Your preference may obviously vary.
Cool! I've been wondering if there is a feed of only the good stuff. If HN itself doesn't provide one, maybe there should be a separate site that does that filtering. I was thinking it would be manually curated, but maybe a list like yours would work as well.
Maybe you should set up such a site. All it would have to do is link to the articles and to the corresponding HN discussions.
Most but not all politics and social commentary gets flagged pretty quickly. Some tech news also gets flagged. It would actually be interesting to have a page for flagged stories for transparency.
Getting responses from people actually involved in making tech decisions (like Gratilup here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12113571, and recently one of the original authors of Excel CSV export) is part of the appeal of this site to me.
Thanks. Some show up as flagged, some show up as dead, but lots of live stories in between. I'm more interested in the ones where they had lots of votes in a short time but didn't make it past the flag process.
Then maybe http://hnrankings.info/ is what you're looking for? Front page articles which get "flagged off the front page" don't end up [flagged] or [dead], instead they drop in rank quickly. You can often see that quite well from the charts on that site.
That would probably be closer and I suspect they have the data to get what I want, which is more like a list of flagged stories to understand some of the inherent bias in the site.
Is michaelochurch still getting upvoted there? I used to enjoy lobste.rs, but seeing yet another heavily upvoted rant about "open-plan agile mouthbreathing drones" or similar would ruin my whole morning.
I am confused. You seem to be saying that the law had negative consequences for you and that you therefore think the cost needs to be increased to correct you into the intended behavior.
The goal of the legislation was reduced use of plastic bags. I am saying that at the rate we accumulate reusable bags, the price of 10 cents is simply too low to force people to remember to carry a reusable bag when visiting the grocery store.
for me this is correct.. now me the consumer simply pays more.. once as a supermarket doesn't pay for it and does not lower their prices and twice as I as a consumer now pay for a rubbish bag.
no reduction in plastic bags, but usually more plastic waste as as they are bigger.
supermarkets, plastics manufacturers, and oil companies get more profits, ordinary consumers pay more, mother nature a slap in the face..
He is saying that the result is the opposite of the intent of the law. Telling a single individual to stop using the bags shows it doesn't work. It's like yelling at a user during user testing that they should just click the obvious button.
Laws should have A/B testing before rolling out to everyone.
In that plastic bag bans with the same basic parameters were applied in a few cities before spreading, in this particular case there was a kid of A/B testing before they were applied to everyone (actually, still pretty fast from everyone).
The argument upthread is that one household's behavior wasn't what the law intended, which is hardly a compelling counterargument.
> Ireland did something similar years ago and the results were incredible. An almost overnight transformation of the cleanliness of the cities and countryside. Nobody would like to reverse the decision now despite significant opposition before-hand.
Are you suggesting that the issue of debate was whether it would lead to less litter? That's almost obvious, isn't it? Surely, the question must rather be whether it is morally acceptable for us to impose such a rule on other people.
Have you ever been to Kathmandu? Non-degradable rubbish is problem in many places, but I don't remember one where there would be so much of it littered on the side of roads for kilometers at end.
I'm trying to nail down what the actual issue of debate is, or should be. You are merely sharing your opinion on that issue. That is fine, but beside the point I was getting at.
Yes, deciding what others are allowed to do is something I am morally uncomfortable with. That is not to say that I have come up with something else that is not also questionable.
In any case, I do think that we should strive toward having just a bare minimum of laws. However, it seems to be too much fun to make laws, once you get in a position to do so, for people to abstain from it.
What are you talking about? Do you wish to live in a human society? Litter of plastic bags is an externality - all this law does is to impose the costs on those who incur it.
I think this is pure free markets are the only moral structure, coercion is immoral, etc. ideology. I do not find it compelling because adherents' apply the "coercion is wrong" absolutely when it comes to governments enforcing it through fines, but deny economic coercion applies when e.g
a bank charges overdraft or late fees no matter how ludicrous.
There is a suggestion that ultimately a bank doesn't put you in jail, where governments can do that if you continue to not pay fines. But increasingly governments take unpaid fines from income tax refunds or other mechanisms for collection rather than consider outstanding fines a criminal offense rather than civil.
Also most free market adherents opposed to government coercion forget that contractual obligations are only enforceable through government coercion (unless they would like to go back to the time of private armies).
As far as I can see, that is orthogonal to the issue at hand.
> all this law does is to impose the costs on those who incur it.
We might consider littering to be immoral, and might therefore feel that we have a right to prohibit others from doing it, but it does not follow that we have a right to prohibit people from using, selling, owning or manufacturing bags (or fine or tax them for doing those things).
I would say your moral failing is thinking that "others" is somehow separable from "self" in the abstract. If I can decide for myself, then I can certainly decide for others: that's the whole reason I want to be good at making decisions. If I'm only allowed to decide things for myself, then what's the point? I'm basically a corpse who hasn't gotten cold yet. In what way should I contribute to the betterment of human life, if I can't tell other people what I've learned that they should do?
You are an individual. But you're also a member of your family, a member of your country, a member of your species, and a living creature. Your identify is not confined to your individuality. You speak English not because of your individuality, but because of your culture. It is as much a part of you as you of it.
With that said, you have a responsibility to decide what others should do. You have a responsibility to make sure those decisions are correct, and a responsibility to enforce them insofar as they are correct and such enforcement doesn't undermine our humanitarian goals. And instead of being overly-conservative in the face of the possibility that you are mistake, take comfort in knowing that experiments can fail, and that this doesn't mean they shouldn't be undertaken. Make decisions, enforce them, and if they're wrong, you change your mind later. The only alternative is stagnation or 'progress by accident'.
>In any case, I do think that we should strive toward having just a bare minimum of laws.
Why should this take priority over having the most correct laws?
> Surely, the question must rather be whether
> it is morally acceptable for us to impose such
> a rule on other people.
When people are not considering the effects of their actions and possible harm done by them - litter, environmental - because it doesn't benefit them to do so, then it's the elected government's duty to step in and impose such rules. People have already made clear through their actions that in the absence of those rules, they won't behave on the best interests of the community.
Because I think you shouldn't take deciding what other people are allowed to do lightly. Such things should only be done in extreme cases, like self defense or, perhaps, to prohibit ruining nature through littering.
Scotland has a similar system. It has also worked well; I'd conclude it had not worked well if there were ongoing serious complaints, or the litter problem of carrier bags continued.
What? Absolutely not. I'm just saying that it sounds reasonable to believe that burns increase with temperature, as opposed to being high in a range of temperatures and lower below and above that range. Figure 4 in your first link agrees with this common-sense guess.
The guy said "in a temperature range where burns are more likely". I'm not sure why you're objecting; there are certainly ranges where burns are less likely; that's what the paper I posted is about.
I think it's also pretty clear just from the burn time curve. If it takes you a second or two to notice the heat and move away, then anything above ~155F is going to make a burn much more likely. At 180F, the burn is basically instantaneous. Whereas at 140F, having five seconds to respond gives you a lot of time to move, shake off the liquid, et cetera.
Not to me, so I'd say it's more "your issue" than "the issue". Industry articles on serving temperatures are all about ranges, so I presume he's just talking about those.
But even with your interpretation, it's true. The upper bound is 212F. A cup of steam is not a significant burn risk, that being something like 0.16 ml of water.
That might be part of it, but it's not exactly obvious that you'd want to live in a place with 50-story buildings either.