We almost certainly have opposing ideological views, but something I said a lot during this era (that I'm happy to see you hinting at) was that if you come into office as a progressive prosecutor without any plan to deal with the people in your office or in law enforcement who aren't on board, then that's really the more immediate failure. You can't just say, "I would have been successful if not for my detractors," because the detractors are a totally predictable obstacle for which you need a plan.
In big systems you can't always just do whatever you want!
> How did Uber somewhat break even? They lost $34b before making a profit.
It took them ~14 years to lose that $34 billion. Some projections suggest that OpenAI has lost a third of that in a single quarter. Even the most optimistic projections indicate that they're losing that much every 2-3 years. There's talk that they might lose ~$150B before profitability.
These are just numbers on a page to regular people, but $34 billion and $150 billion are very different numbers.
> We can produce enough food for everyone on earth to eat,
Who is this "we?"
There's a kind of circular complaint built into all such endeavors that goes like, "we can do this, but unfortunately we as a group don't want to, but we could definitely do it if we wanted, but sadly we currently have the wrong opinions, but we can definitely do it, if only we weren't inclined not to, but we should and we will, as soon as we all come around to the truth."
Your "we" doesn't seem to want to do what you want them to do, which is why communists so often end up thinking that the real problem is the existing populace and maybe what they really need is to be re-educated or even replaced.
It's kind of darkly funny that NIMBY ever came to refer to housing in the first place. The term was originally meant to apply to stuff exactly like this -- i.e. genuinely noxious uses that most people nevertheless agree are necessary somewhere. Almost everybody is a NIMBY in this sense.
Yeah, that's how I knew that he was born 13 years after the establishment of the city's modern borders and that your original claim is incorrect (and, incidentally, not corroborated by the result of your quick google search, which doesn't even attempt to suggest that he had anything to do with the city's "ring suburb design").
> A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design
Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.
It also annoys me when somebody is moving too slow in the aisle at the grocery store, but I've literally never once seen someone flip out and yell at or physically push past someone for moving too slow in that context.
We've had 100 years to examine the effects of driving on people's brains and it's...deranging, clearly.
> Either you want traffic laws to be obeyed or you don't.
In fact, no, it isn't binary. Driving laws are written in blood. When a driver speeds or runs a red light they massively increase the chance of severe injury, death, or catastrophic property damage, for both themselves and everybody around them.
This is just simply not the case for all other modes of travel. So, no, I don't want the laws to be either "enforced or not." I care way more about enforcing laws on the drivers of multi-ton machines traveling at high rates of speed than I do the guy on a bicycle or the pedestrian.
This frustrates drivers, who demand that everybody be treated the same. But it's absurd to treat all modes of travel the same, which is why a ground crew isn't required for you to back out of your driveway, even though it is for commercial jets.
I actually do think people should take your point seriously, even as I disagree with your conclusions. When you make a law you are always doing it with the implied violence you highlight. The law itself is an escalation, in a sense. If someone refuses to follow the law, then society has to ask itself what it's willing to do about it. If nothing, then the law is meaningless. To make the law is to decide that you're willing to enforce consequences for violating the law. And furthermore (and probably much more important, in the long run) you're willing to enforce even harsher punishments on those who refuse to accept sanctions for violating the law.
A society should be careful not to have too many laws; on an individual level one should understand clearly what it means to want something to be illegal (and what it means to refuse to obey the law, should you find yourself in a situation where you might be tempted to do that).
> There are some good reasons to escalate a situation. I'm not of the belief that a noise disturbance is one of them.
This mislocates the point of escalation. The first point of escalation occurs when you arrive and the resident doesn't say the words "I'm sorry about that" followed immediately by turning the music down. The second more serious point of escalation (if there happens to be one) occurs when the police arrive and the same thing happens. In both cases the epicenter of escalation is within the person who won't turn their music down when lawfully required.
Everyone else has behaved reasonably and within the law and so can't meaningfully be said to have escalated the situation.
This doesn't actually make sense. Of course it matters how likely the outcome is. We all routinely engage in behaviors for which the worst possible outcome is certain death and we do so because that outcome is rare enough that the benefits outweigh the risk.[0] The base rate matters a lot.
[0] Many of these activities, like, say, driving a car, are probably orders of magnitude more dangerous than, ahem, talking to your neighbor.
> If they were reasonable people and considerate of others they wouldn't be doing that in the first place.
Respectfully, you're probably giving yourself too much credit here (and your neighbors not enough). It's almost certainly the case that you (and me and everybody else reading this) has done something that annoyed a neighbor. You either just didn't realize it or you were tired or stressed and slipped up. But the odds are exceedingly good for any of us that we've had our music too loud, or our stomping was bothering the people downstairs, or we parked somewhere that annoyed somebody else.
If you'd react reasonably when called out for any of these behaviors, then give your fellow man the benefit of that doubt.
Whenever I think that I remember that I've been the recipient of snarky notes about this or that and while it's possible I'm an irredeemable reprobate, I'd prefer rather to think that like most people I'm sometimes not as considerate as I might be and open to polite feedback.
> Heck, my upstairs neighbor complained about my music on the weekend during the day without introducing themselves and not diplomatically.
Tangential (and probably just a perennial old guy complaint), but it seems like people have forgotten how to do this. If you have an issue with something your neighbor is doing, then go talk to them. Don't leave an aggressive note. Don't let it boil over until you're so upset you can't talk to them rationally. Living next to other human beings is a negotiation. You can't make a set of rules that cover every possible scenario and then ask police to enforce them. Just go talk to people!
New construction in San Francisco (and basically everywhere else in the United States) is constrained primarily by policy. If it were legal to build more, then developers would surely build more.
This SO answer is posted every time this topic comes up, so I've seen it many times (and, in fact, I provided one of the answers there, too) and it's still the one and only place I've ever seen "functional" used as a noun like that. I'm always tempted to edit it, but maybe I'm missing something?
Sorry. "Urban core" is ill-defined enough to be almost meaningless and I was using it alternately to mean Downtown and to mean it in the sense you do, which was bound to cause confusion. I was trying to point out that the St. Louis Downtown isn't even dense by the standards of other places in its urban core (in the sense you mean).
People have been moving out of the urban core in U.S. cities for the last 50 years. This has hit mid-sized U.S. cities particularly hard. While enough businesses may have stayed behind to maintain a central business district, the residents chose to live elsewhere and commute in.
The St. Louis region, where I live, has nearly 3 million people (about half of which are inside the I-270/255 loop, for some context on a map), but only around 3000 residents in its primary Downtown neighborhood (and another 4000 or so in the adjacent Downtown West). These two neighborhoods have a population density that's lower than the city average (and much lower than in the most dense neighborhoods).
By the way, this actually represents a bit of a comeback for the neighborhood. There were only 800 residents Downtown in 2000. Warehouse-to-loft conversions became popular about 15 years ago, which has reversed the trend, at least for now.
In big systems you can't always just do whatever you want!