Not sure if 'aware' is the right word. More like anxious.
Kidnappings and murders are exceedingly rare, even more so by strangers. Abuse primarily occurs at home, with acquaintances and at places of education. Moving a child from free form play to structured classes is moving risk around, but isn't reducing it.
When there is a big community of kids, there's safety in numbers. Highly supervised play reduces the kids involved, and takes away safety in numbers in exchange for constant vigilance.
An aware person would see the numbers and Calibrate risk accordingly. There is risk involved in everything and helicopter parenting has done little to reduce it.
Unlikely. He was killed in the foyer [1] of his building in an exceedingly safe city (Brookline, MA).
In a neighborhood with mixed SFHs and condos, it makes little sense to target a condo. Makes even less sense for someone to break in, but to shoot the victim outside, in the foyer.
Yea even in the US where there's a rather lot of home invasions (~million/yr), even amongst the ones where the occupier is injured-or-worse (~250k/yr), very very few of them are fatal (<500/yr).
Other possibility; a disgruntled investor who poured millions into dead-end fusion research and now wishes they had invested in AI research instead? Blames the professor for persuading them to invest in fusion.
There are no material conditions that would convince me to live in a cold, dark and culturally introverted place. Anecdotally, my tropical peers agree with this opinion. Seasonal affective disorder plays an outsized role in my ability to like a place. On the flip side, I've heard many people describe living in warm & humid weather as torture.
My point is, aggregating factors for happiness to find the best country is like aggregating people's favorite colors to find the best color. Each individual's needs and circumstances are unique, and what will make them happy will vary widely as those needs and circumstances vary.
Some interesting (suspect?) findings from the quoted 2023 paper: (2008 - 2017 data)
* Somaliland had the 4th least worries
* Russians were the 7th least angry
* Chinese were the 8th best rested
* Icelanders did great on every metric, but felt very tired (rank 190)
* Venezuelans smiled the 12th most (Panama, Paraguay, Costa Rica did even better)
* Laotians smile the 3rd most, but are also among the angriest (202) !!?
> Laotians smile the 3rd most, but are also among the angriest
From "Be Careful Where You Smile: Culture Shapes Judgments of Intelligence and Honesty of Smiling Individuals"
Although numerous studies confirm that positive perceptions of smiling
individuals seem to be universal, anecdotal evidence suggests that in some
cultures the opposite may be true. For example, a well-known Russian proverb
says ‘Улыбкa, бeз пpичины - пpизнaк дypaчины’ (smiling with no reason is a
sign of stupidity). The Norwegian government humorously explains nuances of
Norwegian culture by indicating that when a stranger on the street smiles at
Norwegians, they may assume that the stranger is insane
I grew up in a very warm place, then moved to a very cold place and was miserable. I’d never done a winter and every year I was deeply unhappy for huge spans of the year.
But then I moved to Denmark from that cold place and found myself very happy! Of course circumstances change and a single account means little but I definitely believe some societies lend themselves to greater happiness than others, even in the very developed world.
> This means that they should never be used in medicine, for evaluation in school or college, for law enforcement, for tax assessment, or a myriad of other similar cases.
If AI models can deliver measurably better accuracy than doctors, clearer evaluations than professors and fairer prosecutions than courts, then it should be adopted. Waymo has already shown a measurable decrease in loss of life by eliminating humans from driving.
I believe, technically, moderns LLMs are sufficiently advanced to meaningfully disrupt the aforementioned professions as Waymo has done for taxis. Waymo's success relies on 2 non-llm factors that we've yet to see for other professions. First is exhaustive collection and labelling of in-domain high quality data. Second is the destruction of the pro-human regulatory lobby (thanks to work done by Uber in the Zirp era that came before).
To me, an AI winter isn't a concern, because AI is not the bottleneck. It is regulatory opposition and sourcing human experts who will train their own replacements. Both are significantly harder to get around for high-status white collar work. The great-AI-replacement may still fail, but it won't be because of the limitations of LLMs.
> My advice: unwind as much exposure as possible you might have to a forthcoming AI bubble crash.
Hedging when you have much at stake is always a good idea. Bubble or no bubble.
Much like the Hyperloop before it, the core assumption of the Boring company is ill-conceived. Tunnel boring isn't a bottleneck.
The costs of surveys, hvac, seismic research and maintenance required to keep a deep-underground tunnel going are much higher than cut-and-cover. So, even if tunnel boring was free, it still wouldn't make sense to prefer it over other options. There are very scenarios where deep-tunneling makes sense (dense cities, across rivers when bridges are infeasible), but they're the minority.
In most transit projects, cut-and-over is blocked not because it's a bad technical option. It's because NIMBYs refuse to permit on-the-ground disruptions or noise of any type. San Jose is the canonical example. It's a political problem, not a technical one.
I checked them for a few nations where I had solid on-the-ground knowledge, and the ranks and full-profile descriptions are straight up false. Usually propaganda involves lying by omission or hyperbole. In this case, it is just wrong.
It is a little bit wild that 3/5 all came from the same country. Without the partition of ‘47 - India would have by far the largest group of about 600M a full a third of the global Muslims and also at the same time be only a minority in that hypothetical country with 1.1B Hindus
University Education programs and as a result teaching bodies have been taken over by ideology.
I believe it is in part because all the teaching low hanging fruit has been established for centuries. So the only 'novel' things the programs can do is talk about discrimination, disparate outcomes and hand-wavey ideas about improving education. The departments have some of the lowest bars for academic professorship and as a result, the quality of research is similarly bad -> terrible.
The war on phonics is the canonical example.
The fault doesn't lie with 'people'. The above mentioned institutions are squarely at fault for making education ideological, and they should explicitly be blamed for the deterioration in student performance.
The sad thing is that I saw that standardized tests were being blamed based on a certain ideology, when the proponents of the ideology should've realized that their own goals are better served by using standardized tests.
It shouldn't be controversial, and in some sense it isn't (in another sense it is, because people confuse themselves), that everyone should be given the opportunity to develop and perform at their full potential. I could name multiple different ideologies that oppose this in some way, though.
No, Europeans will recognize NYC's policies as normal, Zohran or not. Afterall, It's one of America's only European-ish cities.
NYC has subsidized world-class transit, rent-stabilization, high taxes and free-childcare. Pretty European.
Zohran is classic of case of 'the dose makes the poison'. Instead of subsidized buses, he wants free buses. Instead of rent-stabilization, he wants rent freezes. He wants to increase an already high tax rate in a city that's bleeding billionaires to Florida. NYC spends an eye-watering billion dollars on child-care subsidies, and Zohran's intended expansion will add billions more in costs.
NYC has European public services with American over-regulation. It would be untenable unless it were the world's richest city. Thankfully, it is the world's richest city. But, that doesn't mean that NYC's systems are efficient. It means that the city hopes to get away with policies (some forcefully imposed on it by the state) that no other place would because it assumes the money train will never end.
NYC is better run than American suburbia and California. But, NYC doesn't have California's infinite money glitch or the ruthless demographic segregation of suburbs. So, efficiencies must be found in policy making.
I think Abundance does a good job of summarizing the problems (over-regulation) and suggesting solutions (de-regulation). But for some reason, democratic socialists refuse to engage with the book earnestly.
> But for some reason, democratic socialists refuse to engage with the book earnestly.
You're not as informed as you think you are, probably because you're not an NYC resident and have no actual stake in this election. We successfully passed 3 ballot proposals that reduce regulation and review time for building certain housing units. Mamdani voted for all 3 also. More deregulation is needed and expected under Mamdani - not to the tune of enriching developers, but for building actual affordable units.
Side rant: A lot of people on HN talk about building more supply. And we do - if you've lived in NYC for an appreciable amount of time, you'll know how different LIC, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Downtown BK, and Gowanus (among others) look like after 10 years of intense development. Despite receiving tax breaks (421a), most units are not affordable. They're also incredibly cheaply built and generally unpleasant places to live, chock full of excessive amenities that drive up the rent. There's a balance here between freeing developers and allowing them to run buckwild with "affordable" 5k/mo studios. It's easy to quote Paul Krugman on HN about supply side housing and rent regulation but there's more to the story here than just "build more".
Not sure why you make that assumption. In fact, I live in NYC and that's exactly where I see the abundance vs dem-soc tensions. This includes friends who were early canvassers for Zohran. It includes Zohran's loudest public supporters such as Mehdi Hasan and Hasan Piker. I have listened to hours of long-form interviews by Zohran. I am admittedly a sceptic, but I have earned my right to this skepticism.
I know that Mamdani is more than the 4 policies he's championed as part of his social media campaign. But, he has championed those 4 policies a disproportionate amount - free buses, free childcare, freeze rent, raise taxes. A man must be judged by what he says. I judge him by what he says the loudest.
______
For your side rant, I don't agree. New builds in gentrified neighborhoods aren't perfect, but they're significantly better than the brick kilns that came before them. I've crashed at friends houses in Gowanus before the gentrification boom, and it was miserable.
Williamsburg & Bushwick should be seen as a triumph. It went from a dilapidated industrial zone where my friends dad 'got beat up by gang members when he was growing up' and now it is the thriving center of the American hipster movement. Domino Park is triumph. It is noticeably better maintained than parks elsewhere in NYC, and that's thanks to the public-private partnerships.
New build units aren't affordable because those are the only new builds coming up. When supply is low, there is no govt intervention that can give a good outcome to the majority. If those builds hadn't come up, prices would've gone up further in other places or worse, people would have moved out of the city. It's a math problem. People need homes. There aren't enough homes.
That's the whole point of abundance.
There is no such thing as an affordable & scarce resource. It doesn't matter is the scarcity comes from over-regulation or impractical building costs. You can artificially make it affordable by rationing it to the lucky few. But, its limited availability means that a small group gets all the benefits (see classical rent control in NYC) while the majority in the same socio-economic class is left subsidizing their life style.
I can give real examples.
Take Chicago for instance. New affordable housing is more expensive than market rate housing due to over-regulation. [1]
Take Austin. It reduced regulation and zoning rules. Rents went down. [2]
Take Amsterdam, Rent control has taken a bulk of apartments off the housing market, making new builds eye-wateringly expensive. [3]
I concede that Mamdani may still endorse a de-regulatory policies. However, the left has historically leaned pro-regulation. I will maintain this prior until proven wrong. I desperately want to be proven wrong, because I want to continue living in NYC. If Mamdani had gone around saying Rezone, Deregulate and Build, then I would have expressed confidence. But he has been quite evasive about these policies when asked by various interviewers over hours of listening to him.
Economic historian Trevor Jackson engaged with Abundance (together with eco-radical book Overshoot) in the September issue of the American left-ish publication NYRB, if you're curious about an earnest essay [0].
Since it's behind a paywall and the Overshoot book also gets reviewed, I picked out the most substantive quotes to highlight the actual critique:
> The evidentiary core of each chapter consists of a summary of the academic work of a few experts, usually economists, with frequent and lengthy quotations, as well as the occasional interview, whose conclusions are repeated uncritically. (To take one example, they quote without scrutiny the claim of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan that he is requiring employees to work in person in order to foster trust, rather than to impose discipline or to recoup the costs of commercial real estate.) They give no sense of the unruly literatures on their subjects, the ranges of disagreement, the difficult problems and mutually exclusive solutions. They claim to set an agenda for a new liberal political order, but what they have done is read some economists and argue, again, for deregulation.
> Klein and Thompson are opposed to redistribution, which they refer to as “parceling out the present” and which they claim is “not enough,” and instead of imagining “social insurance programs,” they propose that we make “technological advances.” [...] Klein and Thompson do not seem to realize that their proposals would also entail large-scale redistribution and that the ills they seek to cure are the result of inequality rather than regulation, because they do not seem to understand how prices and property work in capitalism. Translating higher profits to shorter workweeks would require a scale of redistribution that far outstrips anything Bernie Sanders has proposed. Claiming that profits will be shared because they are based on “the collective knowledge of humanity” opens up a wider set of imperatives than they realize. Most profit, labor, and technology is in some way built on the collective knowledge of humanity, in the sense that education, work, and knowledge are shared, social, and cumulative, and all workers are the result of collective social reproduction.
> They devote no serious thought to the basic political problem that homeowners are a large and powerful constituency, especially at the local level, who are likely to oppose (or already do oppose) the reforms Klein and Thompson suggest because driving down the cost of housing will drive down the value of homes. That constituency has produced undeniably regressive politics—which is a political fact to be reckoned with. So must the fact that homeowners organize to protect their asset prices because decades of American policy have used mortgages to substitute for the welfare state and wage growth. Any plausible agenda to drive down the cost of housing is going to require things like social housing, rent controls, and some mechanism to keep Blackstone and other private equity giants from buying up all the new housing and holding it empty until prices rise. Housing abundance calls for redistribution, in other words, as well as an aggressive state willing to confront property owners ranging from homeowner coalitions to asset managers.
> Klein and Thompson likewise seem unaware that technologies are owned by people. Despite an entire chapter on the problems of scaling technologies to mass consumption, they do not pause to consider that the self-driving cars, the lab-grown meat, and the solar electricity of their imagined future will be property, whose owners will have an interest in higher profits, higher rents, and higher prices. Klein and Thompson’s agenda is predicated on avoiding distributional conflicts by increasing supply so as to lower prices, yet they do not address the problem that lower prices are good for buyers but bad for sellers, and therefore are themselves a kind of distributional conflict, though one mediated through markets instead of politics. Their faith in markets is axiomatic. In passing, they describe “modern liberal politics” as an effort to “make universal” a set of “products and services.” Not justice, equality, dignity, or freedom, but products and services. This is the vision of the future that has attracted millions of dollars to remake the Democratic Party.
> Klein and Thompson do not cite but bring to mind John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which also imagined a future of abundance and shorter workweeks. Keynes predicted future GDP almost perfectly, but he thought economic growth would be widely shared, and his future included a solution to technological unemployment as well as the end of the accumulation of wealth as a source of social importance. Klein and Thompson do not consider why this future was superseded, and now, ninety-five years later, they set out to imagine it again, believing the past is a long trajectory of technological progress temporarily held back by regulation and social protections enacted by procedural liberals. For them, the relation of the past to the future is part of a story of overcoming, not a tragedy of lost possibilities. They are right that much of the blame for our current predicaments can be traced to the forms of liberal governance since the 1970s, but they are mistaken to blame, more specifically, its predilection for environmental regulation and building codes. Rather, it is the way liberal politicians have either acquiesced to or actively encouraged the rise of an unaccountable tech and finance oligarchy that now threatens the continued existence of democracy itself and that claims a monopoly on the capacity to imagine and create the future.
Kidnappings and murders are exceedingly rare, even more so by strangers. Abuse primarily occurs at home, with acquaintances and at places of education. Moving a child from free form play to structured classes is moving risk around, but isn't reducing it.
When there is a big community of kids, there's safety in numbers. Highly supervised play reduces the kids involved, and takes away safety in numbers in exchange for constant vigilance.
An aware person would see the numbers and Calibrate risk accordingly. There is risk involved in everything and helicopter parenting has done little to reduce it.
It's an anxiety spiral.
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