By that logic making an area worse deliberately is a win for affordability.

If you make a change in only one school, you end up with selection effects where interested parents move their children into (or away from) catchment areas based on vibes.

Then you can't really measure outcomes, because the strongest predictor of student performance is parents interest and resources.

You also run into issues with teaching skills and standards, you need a high level of planning and adherence to the supplied plan in order to measure outcomes; otherwise it's just vibes based on individual teachers.

Big studies have an important role. Especially for dramatically different approaches, such as the different approaches to teaching reading. The differences are so acute, that careful A/B, or A/B/Control studies are the best approach.

But most improvements in any complex system happen iteratively, and benefit from clusters of subtle changes found to work well together. At some point enough experience is gained to characterize the change, and give others a chance to consider it.

I suggested incremental adoption, and organic adoption, of successful changes, precisely because of this need for significant bottom up testing before spreading something widely. Success at one scale, and location, doesn't always translate directly to another context, or might not work in another context at all.

> You also run into issues with teaching skills and standards, you need a high level of planning and adherence to the supplied plan in order to measure outcomes; otherwise it's just vibes based on individual teachers.

You point out a very important concern. Good measurement doesn't make bottom-up improvement impossible, unnecessary, or any less important. The point of measurement is to make improvements easier to see, and not get in there way.

This is what I was referring to when I said at the top, the job is to create a context where improvements can happen.

One of the simplest ways to balance top-level and bottom-up concerns, is to communicate the actual top-level needs (not just current practices) clearly, then let front line educators propose changes to measurement practices, where they feel the current practice is holding them back. That gets both scales working together to enable improvements to happen, and to be seen. There is no (competent) conflict here, the opposite.

Trains need well behaved people, otherwise they are shit.

I don't want to hear tiktok or full volume soap operas blasting at some deaf mouth breather.

I don't want to be near loud chewing of smelly leftovers.

I don't want to be begged for money, or interact with high or psychotic people.

The current culture doesn't allow enforcement of social behaviour: so public transport will always be a miserable containment vessel for the least functional, and everyone with sense avoids the whole thing.

> everyone with sense avoids the whole thing

Or the majority of the residents of New York City on their daily commute? I like to think I have sense, and I happily use public transport most days. I prefer it to sitting in traffic, isolated in a car. At least I can read a book. If you work too hard to insulate yourself from the world, the spaces you'll feel comfortable in will get more and more narrow. I think that's a bad thing.

NYC people uses it because the alternatives are either slower or much more expensive. I'm sure they'd rather use a waymo if it was as fast and cheap as the subway.

Using Lyft, Uber, or Waymo in San Francisco is slow, especially during peak times. To go across town in NYC by train, it would take 5-10 times as long to go that same distance in SF by car. If you have to cross a bridge or tunnel, it's going to be even longer during peak times.

That's the whole problem. Car transportation simply doesn't scale, so there will never be an option to use waymo that's as fast and cheap as the subway. It's worth calling out that an efficient train system is vital to keeping car traffic moving quickly, because once everyone is in a car, it's gridlock.

I think the point is doubting whether it is ever possible for Waymo to ever be as fast or cheap as public transport in NYC.

The cost of avoiding public transport in NYC is massive compared to most cities...

Living there, without the means to avoid public transport is something I would also consider insane.

> some deaf mouth breather

I quite agree with the overall point but can we leave this kind of discourse on X, please? It doesn't add much, it just feels caustic for effect and engagement farming.

Price helps a whole lot, I think more than you give it credit for. Driving is also an active thing, this also helps.

We also police driving behaviour, in a way that nobody does for public behaviour.

And no matter what I don't have to hear or smell other drivers.

The vast majority of the anti-social behavior on public transit not relevant in automobiles because (1) you can't turnstile jump the gas tank, (2) an automobile is effectively very expensive set of headphones, and (3) you can inhale whatever you want in your vehicle and your neighbor doesn't have to breath it.

Automobiles are a wildly inefficient and expensive form of transportation in urban areas. At the same time, we ought to be willing to ask why a significant amount of our urban population still prefers to pay all that extra money to sit in traffic.

I think they have a point. But the anti-social behaviors in a car on the road are mostly a different set of anti social behaviors than you’d see on a bus or train. But they certainly exist.

Oh, no doubt that people can be anti-social on the road. My only point is that anti-social behavior on the road is different in kind.

I see a whole lot more that end up at libertarianism as almost the default answer to "what philosophy most emphasis less government".

It's a generational thing I think, you see public money being spent on junk, and laws used to entrench and make competition hard; and you think "why do we want the government to do these things at all?". And if you look at common ideas around 20 years ago, the default answer was libertarianism.

Libertarianism doesn't mesh well with reality; the government doing less is part of it, but it also requires a way for people to efficiently protect their property.

So you get to a point where mass surveillance is justified by the anti-crime angle; there is no contradiction, libertarianism logic where you can live and let live requires no crime...

> Libertarianism doesn't mesh well with reality; the government doing less is part of it, but it also requires a way for people to efficiently protect their property. > So you get to a point where mass surveillance is justified by the anti-crime angle; there is no contradiction, libertarianism logic where you can live and let live requires no crime...

Whatever technical definition of Libertarianism you're using is very narrow. Nobody is under the delusion that Libertarianism requires no crime.

It does if you don't want a worse privately owned government. Either the government will stop crime, or Palantir and the Pinkertons will stop anything they seem to be crime, or there never was any crime.

No it doesn't. Libertarianism is just fine with the government working to prevent crimes. That is one of the main roles libertarians feel the government should fulfill!

The definition of crime is anything that libertarian doesn't like, of course.

>technical definition of Libertarianism

You see, that's the great thing about Libertarinaism, it can be whatever you want, and when there's something you don't like you go "but that's not real Libertarianism"

Design of these safety features for euro cars generally aims to be invisible unless active. You don't "feel" the car in control.

The big wins I've seen with llm tools is in translation more than the actual code.

We have been able to move our "low cost" work out of India to eastern Europe, Vietnam and the Philippines; pay per worker more, but we need half as many (and can actually train them).

Although our business process was already tolerant of low cost regions producing a large amount of crap; seperate teams doing testing and documentation...

It's been more of a mixed bag in the "high skill" regions, we have been getting more pushback against training, people wanting to be on senior+ teams only, due to the llm code produced by juniors. This is completely new, as it's coming from people who used to see mentoring and teaching as a solid positive in their job.

Kind of a false statement; on paper it was higher, but the exemptions were also significantly much bigger and more nakedly biased.

So it's not like it was actually a tax on the wealthiest, more a targeted tool to apply state power.

At a very large company at the momen: One of the things I've noticed is as translation has improved, C level preferences and political considerations have made a much bigger impact.

So we will reduce headcount in some countries because of things like (perceived) working culture, and increase based on the need to gain goodwill or fulfil contracts from customers.

This can also mean that the type of work outsources can change pretty quickly. We are getting rid of most of the "developers" in India, because places like Vietnam and eastern Europe are now less limited by language, and are much better to work with. At the same time we are inventing and outsourcing other activities to India because of a desire to sell in their market.

We have a significant number of problems related to housing; generally I would call it a demand side issue not a supply side however.

My reasoning is we have a massive construction sector compared to other nations, with a relatively high productivity in terms of dwellings built per capita. We also have pretty slack standards, with even weaker enforcement.

In addition to that, we have a very weak growth in productivity per capita; and since we are trying to rapidly grow, we have to play catch up to provide the same level of services. This needs to happen while our construction sector is stressed, so the same amount of wealth goes a shorter distance again.

You can also see this in rental prices; negative gearing should allow the capital price to decouple from the rental yield to a larger extent than without it; but we still see high rents...