Competition is not one thing. For a producer of widgets, competition means that there is immense instantaneous leverage if you can reduce the price, because buyers will switch to you, increasing your market share until your competitor can match - if they can.
A landlord is usually in a different position. If their personal costs drop (eg, they paid off their mortgage) but the market price stays the same, how do they benefit by reducing the price they offer? Only by reducing the time it takes to rent out, which isn't a significant factor in exactly case when tenants would most like rents to go down - when prices are high because of demand.
The details of these mechanisms matter. Market can be out of equilibrium for a long time; maybe indefinitely.
I remember when Prop 13 was on the ballot. The newspaper reported that if it passed, it would eviscerate the police and fire budgets. It passed, and nothing happened to the budgets.
For a site populated by people that deal with complex technical systems on a daily basis, the idea that systems also exist and shape our outcomes in every day life seems to frequently be a foreign concept.
That sounds like you were shaped by your upbringing. And honor itself is subjective and shaped by the social context it exists in. I don't believe killing to maintain honor is moral and there are millions of people out there who do because of the context they exist in. Likewise, I do not think it is honorable to make prisoners suffer (such as from excessive heat) when it's something in your control while others do because they were raised to believe that once you have wronged, your own worth as a human is diminished.
As humans, we have the capacity to hold multiple concepts like honor and contextual awareness at the same time when adjudicating a crime. Someone who stole to feed their family when they were in a dire situation should not be given the same sentence as someone who stole for personal gain. Our ability to acknowledge complex situations and deal with them also separates us from animals.
Not sure I am following your point. You commented that people have choices, good and bad. I presented you with a story where a good boy was watering his mother's yard and he was thrown in prison (28 yrs) for a murder he did not commit. I guess the only choice to be made was the corrupt police employees?
I think you and I will go around and around in circles on this. I wish you well.
Is your entire line of thinking about crime and punishment not entirely dependent upon laws and punishments, as they exist right now, being perfectly just?
Because otherwise, “they knew the law and chose to break it, therefore they get what’s coming to them” is a bit Javert from Les Mis.
> "People have free will. Bad people know what right and wrong is, and they chose wrong."[0]
Broader Context:
In response to a commentary on how 'good and bad' can be complicated:
> "It's always someone else's fault."[1]
Broader-broader Context:
Prison is punishment, etc.
So, a reasonable chain of thought here and paraphrase of what you've said is:
"people know right from wrong" -> we're in the context of crime and punishment, so this is operating as a substitute for "they know what's legal and illegal". If it's not, it doesn't belong here, because at this point we should all know that legality != morality.
"and they chose wrong" -> therefore they chose the consequences - they chose punishment. The colloquial way of saying that is "they get what's coming to them".
So, while those weren't your words, was that your implicit statement? And if not, what is the implicit statement?
I ask because the people in those cells are real, and 23 of them died of heat.
> People have free will. Bad people know what right and wrong is, and they chose wrong.
The context being that the "bad" person is such simply because they chose to break the law. Even if it doesn't match your thoughts, surely you can see how one might read your comments as both claiming that laws are not morals, and also that those who break the law made the "wrong" (moral) choice (put another way: laws are morals).
Breaking the law is not strictly a moral failure. It can be, but they have an "orthogonal" relationship. To that point:
> I did not say there was no injustice happening. Nor did I say that all laws are just.
Choosing to follow an unjust law is a moral failure. That moral failure is baked into the word "unjust". This blanket statement that the choice to commit a crime is a choice to be "bad" is not self-evident (or it's laughably tautological) and, regardless, is contradicted by the assertion that not all laws are "just".
Of course, one can assume you have more nuanced thoughts than that; the point of my coment is that you've not communicated that nuance here, so you appear to be contradicting yourself: saying both that laws are morals and that they are not morals.
Please do define free will, and try to do so in a way that a) gives people actual agency (define that while you're at it, and b) compatible with the available evidence of how the universe works.
No, I don't know it. In fact, I don't think there's any kind of evidence to suggest "free choice" is even possible for any kind of definition of "free choice" that doesn't make a mockery of the idea it is "free".
I'm still waiting for a definition that could even suggest otherwise. I know I won't get one, because nobody I have this discussion with is ever capable of coming up with one.
If you can't even define the terms, why do you imagine I should "know" it to be true?
Not really. The precolonial southwest was fairly densely populated, with some areas exceeding their modern density. Population density grew sparser for various reasons after the mid-14th century until Spanish colonialism created some dramatic demographic changes. The southwest remained a pretty lawless place on the frontiers of empires where armed conflict was commonplace for the next few hundred years, until after the turn of the 20th century. Would you want to move into a civil war even if it had AC?
AC was coincidentally invented as all of this was clearing up, but it wouldn't become ubiquitous until decades later after the major cities had been established with large populations. And even then, I'd blame cheap accessibility of long distance transportation more than AC for the modern state.
What parts of the pre-14th-century american southwest corresponding to modern Arizona were more densely populated than they are today? I'm a bit skeptical of that claim, given how much more human density is possible under conditions of technological modernity compared to anytime prior to the 14th century.
Bits of Mesa that are now extremely low density suburban development were at one point large Hohokam pueblos. It's not an entirely fair comparison because it's essentially comparing high density midrise apartments to some of the least dense suburban sprawl in the US, but it's not wrong.
At a more regional level, the area around Cortez, CO is less densely populated than it was simply because virtually no one lives there now. Kayenta, much of the Navajo nation, the upper Gila region, etc are similar.
In my college daze, Chuck Jones dropped by to give a talk to a packed auditorium. Of course, what he showed was What's Opera Doc. We all loved it, and Chuck enjoyed our enthusiasm.
I had a conversation with an engineering manager a few years ago. He told me his daily job was to visit each engineer report, and ask them what they were working on. Then he'd gently guide them back to what they were supposed to be working on.
A business has limited resources, and somebody has to decide which hill they're going to conquer.
The reason managers make more is because their decisions can make more / lose more money than the workers.
BTW, in every company I've worked for, all of the workers thought they were smarter than the manager (including yours truly). The funny part would be when one would be promoted into management, and instantly became incompetent in the estimation of the other workers.
Clashing priorities. Generally speaking, workers want the business to work, i.e. to do the thing for which it was ostensibly created. (If they didn't want that, they would go work somewhere else.) Management wants the business to make money, which is increasingly poorly aligned with the business fulfilling it's ostensible purpose well.
Now, without money, the business stops working. But increasingly - by which I mean, every for-profit business for which I've worked in the last 25 years - what I see is management trading the long-term health of the business for short-term profit, trusting that they won't be the ones to face the consequences.
It's the officers of a ship who are only interest in getting this cargo to its destination (after which they'll move to a different ship or retire) no matter how badly the ship and its relationships are abused in the process vs. the crew, for whom the ship is their life and their home.
One of my main motivations as a leaf node in the org tree is to try to make my job the least annoying possible. Meaning spending time making sure things don't annoy me in the future (like cleaning up code, updating legacy systems, fixing bugs in ways that ensure they won't happen again).
Not necessarily so I can work less (afterall there is always work to do as a developer). But so I don't get annoyed.
Usually that ends up saving time for the company, but not always.
Not always, but overall having cleaner code with less bugs, more documentation and tests, is not just an annoyance to you. It's a money-maker for your employer as well in the long term by virtue of reducing burnout rate, decreasing onboarding time, making any improvement possible at all...
I get it, but my incentives are deeply misaligned with the company's in this regard, I prioritize things that annoy _me_ directly or indirectly (through not having to troubleshoot bugs made by other people).
On a ROI and prioritization metrics I put myself first, co-workers second, product third, company bottom-line fourth. Part of putting myself first is delivering things mandated by management (so, you know, I don't get fired) which skews to product and company bottom-line, but things I do of my own volition is definitely not going to the bottom-line/product.
I am lucky I am not time tracked aggressively and that my immediate superior lets us work on things out of our own volition. The fact that some of the stuff I do benefits the company indirectly is secondary to my motivation to do it.
> Generally speaking, workers want the business to work, i.e. to do the thing for which it was ostensibly created. (If they didn't want that, they would go work somewhere else.)
Or workers don't care where they work as long they get a pay cheque. If management wants to do stupid things sometimes it's not worth the fight as long as payroll is made.
Take a look at the long term results in the stock market. It's pretty hard to argue that all those successful companies, growing year after year, are actually choosing short term profit over long term success.
Survivor bias. Unsuccessful companies aren't on the stock market long term. And companies' life on the S&P 500 has been steadily dropping for decades. (Setting aside that the stock market largely is vibes-based greater-fool gambling.)
>The funny part would be when one would be promoted into management, and instantly became incompetent in the estimation of the other workers.
This isn't such an unexpected outcome. Junior & senior dev roles rarely prepare staff for the type of meta responsibility that's involved in managerial work, and there's almost no exposure to the majority of your manager's duties. It's typical that the only exposure a non-manager gets to their manager's role is a 20 daily minute standup, some tickets shuffling around a Jira board, and a fortnightly 30-45 minute catch up. Then when your mastery of .NET/python/K8s/whatever is sufficiently well established, the business takes that as evidence that you'll be an adequate manager of humans, and promotes you with little additional training, and you often stop doing hands-on dev work.
Meanwhile, if you're a junior staff member at a supermarket, you're doing managerial-type work daily, and throughout your time, you get exposure to low-stakes managerial responsibility. You work alongside your manager for 9-12 hours/day, and you see pretty much everything they do. Over time, you're given more and more of the meta-managerial work, and when you finally get promoted, it's because both you and the business already have evidence that you can do the managerial work. You then continue stacking shelves 9-12 hours per day, as a manager.
I think there's something the software industry could learn from the supermarket industry's approach. They have a much smoother gradient between non-manager and manager.
"One million dollars will be set aside for the theft and upgrades, which are backed by Seattle Police crime data that is helping determine which stores get the funding."
Transit source seems fine I think you're just misinterpreting it. That first source says about a third board without paying, not 90%. The 90% number you're quoting is I assume from the <10% farebox recovery which is a different metric from fare evasion. North America generally has low farebox recovery (car centric development therefore transit needs bigger subsidies to compete) and the pandemic made it worse. Don't get me wrong the numbers aren't good but I don't think it's evidence that Seattle is an especially low trust society like you're implying, I think it just indicates a lack of enforcement - a third is in line with fare evasion problems in other places in the world when they lack enforcement. People in Seattle behave no different from people in other places - they estimate risk vs reward in a free ride and some fraction of people lack a moral compass or are so poor that the benefit is significant. There's a reasonable line of thinking that 0 fares are best for society as a whole and I've heard this promoted among PNW urbanites so it wouldn't surprise me if enforcement is intentionally low to make it a sort of sliding scale farebox recovery, in which case a high fare evasion is not evidence of low trust, just of a highly progressive political culture, and something opposing propaganda will not hesitate to harp on.
Theft rings are pretty common in bad neighborhoods throughout north american cities. The existence of a policy to help grocery stores in high crime areas doesn't support your thesis since it's going to be used on a vast minority of stores, not indicative of "rampant" (most stores in Seattle seem fine in my experience), and not indicative of a broader trend in trust.
And here is some data counter to your thesis https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on...
It seems to me that Seattle is an especially high trust society by US standards (largely due to high income I suspect), and the things you're pointing at are evidence of the opposite of your thesis - more likely to be symptoms of high trust than low trust.
> The existence of a policy to help grocery stores in high crime areas doesn't support your thesis since it's going to be used on a vast minority of stores, not indicative of "rampant" (most stores in Seattle seem fine in my experience), and not indicative of a broader trend in trust.
Grocery stores in Seattle are shutting down, and looting is a major contributing factor to it.
That 14% describes farebox recovery which is mostly low due to subsidized transit, not evasion. They say that number is "funded x% by riders paying fares" which is not the same as "y% of riders pay fares" that you interpret it as. The former is called farebox recovery while the latter describes fare evasion. 14% farebox recovery is not out of the ordinary in north america where we need to subsidize transit more than other countries due to car oriented development. If you subtract 33% fare evasion (from the article) from that 14% recovery you will still be at about 21% farebox recovery and that's on the low side but not out of the ordinary for western North America (it's better than most California systems for example where we usually get 10%). 20% farebox recovery is just fundamental to our transit and urban planning, nothing to do with fare evasion or trust level. Whereas 90% fare evasion would be highly highly unusual, which is why I wanted a source and now I can see where your misunderstanding comes from. In your defense I do think that article is intentionally eliding the two by not explicitly defining terms - maybe deceiving the reader makes the article hit harder. Anyway very few places have fare evasion over 50% since the majority of people will pay based on morals (and their income level) even against zero enforcement whatsoever.
I'm open to the claim that looting -> grocery store shutdowns, especially in bad areas, I just dispute it being "rampant" based on my lived experience, and I dispute that there's a causal link instead of correlation with a low income/low traffic/low staffing death spiral. I did not feel your source adequately supported this claim, and what you say here is a walked back claim from "rampant" to at least one store? I am not convinced Seattle has it worse than other metros (similar things happen where I live in California in bad areas too, and it's been shown to be stores that were underperforming and due to be closed regardless of looting), and I am not convinced this supports your thesis that Seattle has become a low trust society against my counter evidence from Pew.
I know. I’m willing to bet the first thing they’d do after seizing the guns would be to stop unfriendly media from first hand reporting of events in the White House.
Then, when they know they’re proof against an armed citizenry, they’ll start running government policy as a way to line their own pockets. Why, it wouldn’t surprise me if a sufficiently emboldened crook, safe in the knowledge, that you personally cannot stop them by armed force, started to flout the laws left and right.
Put it another way. I never fail to be amazed by the fantasies that govern significant chunks of American thought. People who’ve lived there, and also in other places are able to figure out pretty quickly where they’re actually safer, and more respected by their government, and able to live a decent wholesome life.
I’ll note in passing that there are other countries with similar levels of gun ownership but less suicide and violence. Perhaps the first is because they have slightly more left leaning social policies. I’m all but convinced that the second is because they aren’t driven to a frenzy of terror by their local media. Maybe that cat has escaped its bag and isn’t ever going back. A shame. To live one’s life in fear of angry frightened people with guns sounds awful to me.
Last thing. I’ve had guns pointed at me twice. Once by an infant British soldier in 1990s Belfast. And once by a robbing bastard in a very wealthy part of Los Angeles. Neither was fun, but at least the soldier was predictable in the then prevailing circumstances
Seems like the first amendment has been bypassed for quite a while now. Recall the creation of 'free speech zones' and "first amendment areas". We keep telling ourselves that the Constitution applies everywhere in the US, but that is clearly not true.
The White House has always chosen which press could be on the grounds. It's not a 2nd Amendment issue.
Do you think you or I, frequent posters on the intertoobs, would be allowed into the press room under any Administration? There's no right for us to be there.
Of course it does. The landlord's costs factor into the supply made available by landlords.
> When landlords' costs drop, do they drop the rent in response?
Competition says they do.
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