The British arrest stats subsume DV harassment cases, and the original Times reporting quoted a police officer stating that they are the bulk of these numbers. I haven’t found an apples-to-apples comparison in the US, but the FL number gives a point of reference.
Addressing the hypothetical person you’re describing: car infrastructure may solve some needs, but it is in direct conflict with other needs. Give every adult a guaranteed parking space just at home and at work, and the physical space required for that alone is an unbelievable double-digit percentage of the city area. Cities are so valuable because they pack a lot of amenities and markets (including your family’s schools and workplaces) in a compact area. Place everything significantly further apart, add more concrete and noise, and you’ve lost on all fronts: safety, charm and efficiency.
> car infrastructure may solve some needs, but it is in direct conflict with other needs
True for all infrastructure choices
> the physical space required for that alone is an unbelievable double-digit percentage of the city area
True, and I do miss big city life, but all the major cities have been captured by anti-development fanatics of a particular political bent vehemently opposed to me, people like me, and our priorities.
Conclusion: double-garage areas work best for my mix of requirements.
(Maybe I’m reading too much of a narrative into what you wrote, but–) I don’t think it’s causal like that; it doesn’t have to be. In particular, “wealthy, modern urban cores” tend to be self-sustaining economic force multipliers rather than parasitic resource sinks or vanity projects. Each specific megaproject might be one of the latter, of course. In general, however, I’d be careful about mixing up different public choice failures. How easy it is to: (agree on a fair way to) collect public money, identify and agree on some kind of public benefit, allocate resources to further that interest, execute projects without snags – etc.
AI CoT may work the same extremely flawed way that human introspection does, and that’s fine, the reason we may want to hold them to a higher standard is because someone proposed to use CoTs to monitor ethics and alignment.
It does not come about magically from monetary or even fiscal policy. The demand for housing (and other construction) was and is real. People find use for, and like having much space, while being close together. What was and is lacking is supply.
It was never implied that this mechanism was magical.
If you reread the original post, the claim being made is:
> The idea that an average person, working hard, can eventually own part of a nation's land and resources, [...] was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing.
This is manifestly not the case. My response was that, insofar as a pyramid scheme exists, it has nothing to do with some fundamental Malthusian limit on how many people can fit in a given space; this limit exists, but is not the reason that the rich are getting richer, which instead has to do with monetary policy.
You make cheap money available to those with good credit. These people take out loans and use the money to buy real property with the expectation that they will be able to rent it out for more than the carrying cost of the loan. This causes the price of real estate to rise artificially beyond what it would if the cheap credit had not been made available. The key issue here is that this credit isn't being made available to everyone at once - you have to qualify for the loan first.
>This makes me think that our formal [definitions] of "intelligence" […] and what we intuitively look out for, are really two different things.
Just two? You can name so many more terms in this concept cloud, e.g.: personhood, moral agency, consciousness, self-awareness, processing power, wit, autonomy, feeling-and-experiencing capacity, and so on… We don’t seem to agree on what’s separate from what, and yes, it would be useful.
“Transparency” as leaks from abuse is very, very different from transparency as a policy of easy access – and neither makes you necessarily better informed. In short, a biased selection of information can leave you worse off than having no information.
For one, finance is a macro force multiplier; it can make or break entire other industries. There’s also a bit of selection (global top) and survivorship (plenty of less visible non-success stories) in the wild money stories you can see out there.
To expand just a bit more, the map is very blurry. Nation states tap into some real and old sentiments, but are not just a translation of those to a modern political language. They are their own new political projects, with a shape that is a result of historical happenstance and personal ambitions of specific people. It is surprisingly malleable – depending on what common enemies appear, what leaders and writers become popular, etc.
The British arrest stats subsume DV harassment cases, and the original Times reporting quoted a police officer stating that they are the bulk of these numbers. I haven’t found an apples-to-apples comparison in the US, but the FL number gives a point of reference.