[HN Gopher] The bulldozer vs. vetocracy political axis
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The bulldozer vs. vetocracy political axis
Author : galfarragem
Score : 131 points
Date : 2021-12-20 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vitalik.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (vitalik.ca)
| saurik wrote:
| What makes the axes everyone normally argues about interesting is
| that people actually tend to have a "position" along them, a
| property that isn't undermined by the idea that there are
| numerous different axes people might choose as long as the
| various resulting axes still allow you to at-least-usually place
| people along them somewhere (see "Phaedrus's knife"). I thereby
| challenge anyone who thinks that "bulldozer vs. vetocracy" is a
| useful "political axis" (I am _not_ arguing that it isn 't a
| useful distinction or even terminology, only that it isn't a
| "political axis" comparable to any of the others presented in
| this article) to answer the question of where Vitalik--someone
| who explicitly tries to argue in this very article that
| blockchain consensus layers should be a vetocracy (which, _by the
| way_ , I would argue isn't actually true in a useful way of
| Ethereum itself, but that's an entirely separate rant) but that
| application layers should actively support bulldozers--falls
| along his own axis, because it would seem like he is a clear
| disproof of his own mental model. I will assert an actually
| _useful_ "political axis" would need to have this I'm-betting-
| extreme _mix of positions_ on one side and _something in
| opposition to Vitalik_ on the other.
| assbuttbuttass wrote:
| The political compass comparison threw me off at the beginning,
| but this piece actually has some good points.
| epistasis wrote:
| I like this axis a lot, and think that it is probably the most
| important political axis at this moment in history (where I give
| great weight to my local and state politics, and to international
| concerns like climate change and global pandemic).
|
| BUT I really hate the term "bulldozer" for the opposite of
| vetocracy, because bulldozers destroy and flatten, they do not
| build interesting and useful things. They might make room for
| something useful, but they may bulldoze something and leave it
| empty.
|
| I'd prefer the term "Do-ocracy" in opposition to "vetocracy." Do
| I have the licenses to do things on my own, or is everything
| forbidden until explicitly approved by the vast majority of
| interested parties? That's the key concern that affects all sorts
| of governance from large corporations to startups to political
| organizations to actual zoning laws.
| ip26 wrote:
| Autonomo-cracy?
|
| _Carte blanche_ seems like the appropriate descriptor, but
| impossible to shoe-horn in.
| hammock wrote:
| There is a brilliant, literal bulldozer story about Chicago's
| lost third airport.
|
| For years there was a busy and successful commercial airport in
| downtown Chicago right on Lake Michigan. At some point Mayor
| Daley decided he wanted it closed for his own agenda, but no
| one else would let it happen.
|
| So, in the middle of one dark night in 2003, he got some
| contractor cronies to go out there and bulldoze the runway,
| damaging it beyond repair. This forced the closing of the
| airport.
|
| >Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley forced the closing of Meigs in
| 2003 by ordering the overnight bulldozing of its runway without
| notice, in violation of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
| regulations.
|
| To this day, the site of the former airport is an undeveloped
| "natural preserve" and most Chicagoans have no idea that it
| used to be somewhere they could fly out of.
|
| Funny story.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meigs_Field
| vilhelm_s wrote:
| Oh wow, that used to be the default starting airport in
| Microsoft Flight Simulator, I must have taken off from it a
| million simulated times as a kid...
| lenzm wrote:
| It's not undeveloped, there's a park and music venue there
| now. I don't think it is a leap to say it is now used by many
| more Chicagoans than the airport for private jets ever was,
| even if most Chicagoans are unaware.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Daley's midnight move: Truly an example of "creative"
| destruction.
|
| Today instead of X's the bulldozers could have engraved an
| acronym, and he could have argued it was for an immediate
| good cause.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Isn't the point that they could potentially do either and its
| any third-party concerns that get flattened?
|
| So something more like a permissive-cracy.
| skybrian wrote:
| I think it's reasonable because bulldozers are often used to
| level the ground when something large is built.
|
| Also, the other end of the axis is also a negative term, so
| it's balanced.
| neilk wrote:
| I understand where you're coming from, but in my experience,
| "Do-ocracy" implies a kind of passive consensus mechanism.
| Let's say we all have collective ownership of a garden, and
| it's starting to need weeding, but nobody's taken the
| initiative to fix it yet. In do-ocratic fashion, someone
| announces that this coming Sunday is Weeding Party day, and
| that catalyzes action.
|
| It's tricky. "Weeding Party Day" will succeed if everyone has
| been made to see this is desirable, and if the person has
| charisma or a track record or seems well organized. But it's a
| dance between collective will and individual will.
|
| With "bulldozery" I think Vitalik is describing an extreme case
| where some entity is completely unfettered. A dictator decides
| it's Weeding Party day, or an all-powerful council, or even a
| single individual goes and pays for a weeding crew and reaps
| the rewards themselves. So at this extreme point we find
| everything from The Great Leap Forward to the enclosure of the
| commons by capitalists or the seizing of lands by colonists.
|
| Action and will for its own sake have long been associated with
| fascism; many people long for a strongman to clear away all the
| objections to "greatness". But the tendency exists in all kinds
| of people, I think, it's just that their desires for sweeping
| reform aren't as violent.
| novok wrote:
| I think bulldozer is a great term, because it also captures the
| 'creative destruction' that occurs when the new better thing
| replaces the old thing, like google replacing altavista /
| yahoo, facebook replacing myspace and so on, the iPhone
| replacing the iPod for the most part and so on.
|
| Also all the other terms I've heard so far are not catchy.
| Pxtl wrote:
| The idea is that bulldozers bash through obstacles. You could
| also use a battering ram as metaphor. The point is that they
| get crap done regardless of what's in the way.
|
| Some red tape exists for good reasons. We always have to
| balance thalidomide vs housing crisis.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I definitely would put myself far on the "just do stuff" side
| of the spectrum, but I think it's fair that the names for both
| sides identify what opponents might not like. "Bulldozer" is a
| very apt name, because one of the key arguments in favor of
| local veto points is the big urban projects of the mid 20th
| century, when lots of interesting and useful neighborhoods were
| flattened to build highway interchanges.
| epistasis wrote:
| I would also argue that it's nearly always legal to bulldoze
| things, and the vetocracy doesn't really care if I bulldoze
| my house. There are only a very very few jurisdictions where
| demolition permits are an impediment. So the vetocracy is
| generally just fine with bulldozers.
|
| It's the actual building of things that the vetocracy wants
| to prevent. For example, check out this comment (whose
| factual basis is quite low based on my knowledge) which I
| think is great example of the vetocracy. If the luxury condos
| in SOMA were bulldozed, that would probably be a good result
| in their eyes!
|
| > The housing market example is bizarre, because if you go
| look at San Francisco, the entire area of SOMA is dominated
| by skyscrapers and luxury condos that are 90% vacant. Office
| buildings are going vacant at an accelerated rate. Salesforce
| Tower has never managed to fill up on tenants. We don't need
| to build new housing, we just need to actually price the ones
| we do have so people can afford them. Stop bulldozing stuff
| built less than 20 years ago to replace it with even more
| shoddily built stuff you can sell for even higher margins. We
| already have the homes, just let people live in them.
| Swizec wrote:
| Judging office tower vacancy during a mass pandemic that
| encourages work from home seems harsh.
|
| And the salesforce tower is only 3 years old. It takes time
| to fill those up.
|
| The original WTC took 30 years (early 2000's) to achieve
| full occupancy[1]. The new WTC was at 90% right before the
| pandemic, 6 years after opening[2]
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center_(1973%E
| 2%80...
|
| 2: https://www.breakinglatest.news/world/the-occupancy-
| rate-of-...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| We could use the terms conservative and progressive, but then
| someone's head might explode when Bitcoin gets called a
| progressive attack on conservative institutions.
| davidw wrote:
| Interesting idea. I would quibble a bit with some of the stuff
| around zoning. There are tons of left-wing places like San
| Francisco that have an enormous amount of zoning and regulation
| around building homes - including areas where it's not legal to
| build anything other than single family units.
|
| One of the things I've found a bit refreshing about the YIMBY
| movement is that it is not really on one side of our political
| "trenches" - things like abortion or guns where the lines are
| drawn and you can mostly predict how someone votes by their party
| affiliation. Means there is a bit of room for some alliances -
| and also that people of your same party won't necessarily "have
| your back".
| epistasis wrote:
| I think that it's important to both separate out the left/right
| axis from the vetocracy axis. But also to realize that even if
| one professes leftism on the National scale when it may not
| affect one's significant privileges, that at the local level
| that "leftism" may dissipate when it results in very real
| dissipation of one's significant privileges that happen only
| locally.
| DarylZero wrote:
| Right. Even most American leftists are much less leftist
| regarding the broader "world system" into which America fits
| -- compare self-professed "progressivism" to something like
| Maoism-Third Worldism.
| cturner wrote:
| "Cryptocurrency proponents often cite Citadel interfering in
| Gamestop trading as an example of the opaque, centralized (and
| bulldozery) manipulation that they are fighting against."
|
| This has an air of mob justice to it. If enough people believe
| it, that does not make it the truth.
|
| It is not established that Citadel interfered and they have
| flatly denied all accusations. Griffin has denied it under oath.
|
| People who are tempted by this truthy narrative should think back
| to the "flash crash" of 2010. For years, the mob treated it as
| common wisdom that the event was caused by rogue high-frequency
| trading. Years later it came out that the responsibility was with
| (1) an unsophisticated trader interacting with a GUI who was
| knowingly and regularly breaking market rules and (2) the
| exchange he was operating on did not have adequate market-abuse
| monitoring.
| maicro wrote:
| Setting aside anything else going on, thank you for bringing up
| and clarifying the 2010 flash crash - I had only ever heard the
| high-frequency trading theory (with a side order of "nobody
| actually understands what the bots were thinking").
| will4274 wrote:
| > Years later it came out [...]
|
| Maybe. Wikipedia has a lot more to say
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash. More than a
| few folks quoted there seem to say that while this is what the
| final SEC report said, it's basically ludicrous to blame an
| individual and doesn't match the data very well.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I think the larger issue (which Vitalik actually mentions a lot
| in this article) is that crypto is also bulldozery and the same
| stuff can happen.
|
| In fact, something very similar _did_ happen when etherium
| forked after the [edit] DAO hack.
|
| At the end of the day, whoever has the resources has the power.
| leppr wrote:
| The Ethereum hard fork was in 2016 after the hack of a
| project called just "DAO" [1].
|
| No other on-chain event since then, including the recent
| BadgerDAO hack, motivated a hard fork.
|
| Vitalk's article is quite precise about these subtleties,
| concluding that crypto is generally vetocracy at the lower
| level and bulldozer-y higher in the stack.
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)
| Ntrails wrote:
| I have explained multiple times why trading got shut down, how
| robinhood got caught short of margin, how we can literally see
| from released data that Citadels flows were not particularly
| sided.
|
| Never the less, the same people who now understand what
| happened continue to use it as a hill to stick an anti
| establishment flag upon
| nceqs3 wrote:
| Meanwhile the PE firms that owned the bonds are now
| converting them into equity, dumping it on retail and cashing
| out.
|
| DUDE WE ARE STICKING IT TO THE MAN SO BAD. SILVER LAKE IS
| JUST LIKE US.
| dvlsadvoxate6 wrote:
| bell-cot wrote:
| Kinda similar is "scaling restriction" - how true it is that "you
| have the right to do X" means that "you have the right to do X,
| repeatedly, at scale, and/or automated". There are a whole lotta
| things (from groundwater extraction to burning fallen leaves to
| sending e-mails) that are pretty harmless _on a small scale_ ,
| but...
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you switch the word "disruptive" for "likely to have negative
| externalities", this seems less like two descriptions of opposing
| philosophies than a single way to lionize the people who support
| the thing you want to do while caricaturing the people who don't
| support the thing you want to do.
|
| 1) There's nobody who supports the idea of letting any idea be
| vetoed by anyone. It's not a belief that people have. People have
| a variety of ideas about how a variety of things should be
| organized, and who should have standing to keep other people from
| doing things. This is the entire purpose of political philosophy.
|
| 2) It's entirely self-serving and situational; the real
| distinction is who the negative externalities will affect.
| "Bulldozers" immediately become "vetoers" when somebody is
| proposing something that might as a consequence keep them from
| driving their bulldozers wherever they want.
|
| You might as well classify the world as "players" and "haters."
| Players are people who let me do what I want, and haters are the
| people who hate on that.
| [deleted]
| com2kid wrote:
| > 1) There's nobody who supports the idea of letting any idea
| be vetoed by anyone. It's not a belief that people have.
|
| No, but many existing systems of governance allow (nearly)
| anyone to raise an objection, thereby delaying the decision
| making process. If a concerted effort by enough "anyones" is
| made, a decision can be forcefully delayed long enough that it
| is essentially halted.
|
| For certain processes (e.g. environmental reviews in certain
| states or municipalities) this entire setup is arguably by
| design.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The problem with "likely to have negative externalities" is
| that if you ask whether something has negative externalities,
| the answer is _always_ yes.
|
| If you carry on breathing, you're emitting CO2 and remain in
| competition for scarce resources with anyone else who is still
| alive. If you take your own life you're wasting the resources
| society invested in your education and causing work for
| emergency services. Both doing and not doing anything has
| negative externalities.
|
| One of the things that has negative externalities is accounting
| for negative externalities. It has transaction costs and
| compliance costs and enforcement costs.
|
| This implies that there is a level of negative externalities
| where the cost of preventing them is more than the cost of
| incurring them. The key is to catch the breakeven point and not
| go too far in either direction.
| philips wrote:
| The breathing thing is a pretty poor analogy.
|
| The problem with climate change is not living things
| breathing. It is the insertion of net new carbon into our
| carbon cycle by digging it out of the ground and burning it.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Not so. You ate food to make that CO2. If you had buried it
| underground instead, that carbon would have remained
| sequestered instead of reentering the atmosphere.
|
| It's a good example precisely to show that you can spin
| anything into a negative externality by comparing it to
| some possible alternative which is better on some possible
| metric. Then if you want to show that the other alternative
| is worse, choose a different metric. No thing exists which
| is more perfect than all other things across all metrics.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > There's nobody who supports the idea of letting any idea be
| vetoed by anyone.
|
| Well, between IBM and Poland-Lithuania, it's not like liberum
| veto hasn't been tried (with moderate intermediate success and
| long-term problems as a result).
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Or, capitalism vs the EU
|
| I don't think it s a valid axis though because it doesn't
| encompass most of the political spectrum. It describes only 2
| flavors of liberarianism, one is completely individualist, and
| the other is slightly less so in an attempt to build consensus.
| Also, what are the intermediate points?
| guerrilla wrote:
| I was prepared to be annoyed, but I think this might have
| actually contributed something. In political science, there are
| many axes/spectrums to grade things on and even more ways to
| quantify them, but I haven't actually heard of this one
| specifically yet. Big fan of the whimsical naming too :)
|
| Also, I love the idea meta-political compass... As someone who's
| been on Twitter, yeah, that's a thing. We need a meta-meta-
| political compass now though. Let's fractal this.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The 100-dimensional political model
| https://youtu.be/UuopBeaUN24
|
| (Satire... I think)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > In political science, there are many axes/spectrums to grade
| things on and even more ways to quantify them, but I haven't
| actually heard of this one specifically yet.
|
| Inventing political axes is an easy polisci game. Pick any
| political phenomenon, now take its negation or inversion, boom,
| political axes.
|
| Descriptively meaningful political axes are derived from
| empirical measurement of political behavior within a domain of
| analysis, but most proposed political axes aren't intended to
| be descriptively meaningful, they are tools for advocacy.
| js8 wrote:
| IMHO this distinction is just conservative vs liberal.
|
| Honestly, I am not a fan of political compass, I think there are
| three independent dimensions based on three major moral values:
|
| - conservativism (value of authority and cultural preservation)
|
| - liberalism (value of individual freedom and meritocratic
| progress)
|
| - socialism/progressivism (value of equal participation in
| society and democracy)
|
| Each of these gives a worldview and a way to address equality,
| freedom, justice, authority; and each suggests what societal and
| economic institutions should look like. They can be also
| combined, they are not always contradictory. And each system has
| its own "vice" - type of selfish corruption.
|
| Left vs right has shifted through history, originally it was
| liberalism+socialism against conservativism, slowly liberalism
| was coopted by the right instead.
|
| That's why the OP's axis is a tension between conservative and
| liberal, because it is missing from political compass. But it was
| always present in capitalism (in fact Marx described it as
| capital accumulation - liberals who accrue property thanks to
| "merit" become conservative incumbents).
| twic wrote:
| > Of course, "authoritarian vs libertarian" and "left vs right"
| are both incredibly un-nuanced gross oversimplifications.
|
| Right, but they aren't chosen at random. These are the two axes
| which empirically fall out if you do principal component analysis
| on people's policy beliefs:
|
| http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/20050415-my_country...
|
| Whereas Vitalik's axes are pulled directly out of, at best, thin
| air.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Isn't that just "wet streets cause rain"?
|
| Once you tell people that one tribe is the Left and the other
| is the Right and they choose one to align with, they're
| inclined to pick up its other positions out of tribal loyalty.
| That doesn't mean they're actually principled policy groupings.
| They're just how a coalition shakes out when you need 50%+1 to
| win.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| The housing market example is bizarre, because if you go look at
| San Francisco, the entire area of SOMA is dominated by
| skyscrapers and luxury condos that are 90% vacant. Office
| buildings are going vacant at an accelerated rate. Salesforce
| Tower has never managed to fill up on tenants. We don't need to
| build new housing, we just need to actually price the ones we do
| have so people can afford them. Stop bulldozing stuff built less
| than 20 years ago to replace it with even more shoddily built
| stuff you can sell for even higher margins. We already have the
| homes, just let people live in them.
|
| "Bulldoze or not" is not a helpful axis, because it implies that
| the new stuff will be better. But that's not a given, and I'm
| very suspicious to trust the people who built apartments which
| are 90% empty. The analogy also helpfully applies to blockchain
| technology.
| kurthr wrote:
| I learned something early this year from a friend in the
| finance industry. Part of the reason you find so many empty
| overpriced new apartments/condos/commercial is that they are
| written into the loan... and if even a single unit is
| rented/sold below the rate that was contracted the entire loan
| has to be renegotiated/paid within the year. If you're
| speculating on price increases, there's no reason to rent any
| of them.
|
| Frankly, when there is so much empty space the desire for
| increased building, higher density, and reduced code
| requirements just looks like what builder/speculators want...
| not what will increase actual affordable housing for people
| with jobs (who need to get there somehow). The whole 22 bus
| line as a "Transit Corridor" is a joke that lets developers use
| public space for private profit... the Safeway parking lot is
| already half full at 3am and apparently they're planning to
| start charging for it!
|
| Why not just do what Vancouver did and put an annual fee on
| empty (no renter on taxes, resident owner on taxes, or going
| concern on rolls) residential/commercial to curb speculation?
| Because the developers who fund local politicians would lose
| money. Further, they would threaten the politicians with "no
| one will ever build here again because of these fees!".
| Jasper_ wrote:
| i do not give a shit if the developers who make houses people
| do not live in do not build here again. neither should the
| politicians. our lives will improve if they go away forever.
| we already have all the houses we need, we just need to stop
| bulldozing them and instead start handing them out.
|
| if they actually do not want to build here, maybe they should
| have thought of that before building houses nobody lives in.
| people should live in the houses.
| kurthr wrote:
| It could be worse:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wehsz38P74g
|
| Billionaires Row is half empty.
| [deleted]
| dvt wrote:
| Every post I read by Vitalik reeks of political science 101. It's
| like these people (I'm including Ezra Klein here) haven't
| bothered to read Plato's Republic or Hobbes' Leviathan. A few
| points:
|
| > The case for vetocracy in these contexts is clear: it gives
| people a feeling of safety that the platform they build or invest
| on is not going to suddenly change the rules on them one day and
| destroy everything they've put years of their time or money into.
|
| This is simply wrong. Vetocracy is the game equivalent of a
| stalemate. It's _definitionally_ an inept form of governance.
| There are no pros to vetocracy, and no case to be made for it. I
| 'm not going to cite the Vox article here, but Ezra Klein has no
| idea what a vetocracy is, either. (Actually, he's a pretty smart
| guy, he's probably just being purposefully obtuse.) Vitalik is
| just messing up _definitions_ here, he 's not saying anything
| even remotely interesting.
|
| > Ethereum protocol research is sometimes bulldozery in operation
|
| This sentence (and the following paragraph) means nothing.
| Research is definitionally done by one dude in his garage
| (barring edge cases like weapons, viruses, human testing, etc.).
| Why would you even need sign-off for it? His point just makes no
| sense.
|
| > The physical world has too much vetocracy, but the digital
| world has too many bulldozers, and there are no digital places
| that are truly effective refuges from the bulldozers (hence: why
| we need blockchains?)
|
| What he's trying to say here is that big actors can act "too
| unilaterally" in the digital space, but small actors can "veto
| too much" in the real world. This is not true. Small actors
| cannot veto in the real world (or in the web2 digital world, for
| that matter), and I'd strongly suggest he reads Madison's
| Federalist 10 (where this is a major worry), but who am I
| kidding, these people think they just discovered sliced bread.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| One of the issues this has missed is whether consent is needed.
|
| Put another way:
|
| Bob lives on 200 acres and wants to construct an apartment
| building on that land. Nobody can really see it, he has agreed to
| provide parking and services, etc.
|
| Sally owns a small residential house in a historic neighborhood.
| She wants to tear down her house and make a narrow four-story
| apartment building. She can't provide any room for parking and
| depends fully on city utilities.
|
| Sally has more impact on her neighbors than Bob does. It's
| reasonable for Bob to merely have a question of general freedom.
| Sally on the other hand is clearly impacting her neighbors - and
| not every neighbor could do what Sally wants to do.
|
| Some freedoms can impact the freedoms of other people, and that
| is when the consent of those other people is needed.
| mbot5324 wrote:
| Choosing to recognize the causal impact of one's actions of one
| type on another's freedom of some type is itself a political
| decision. Being able to argue a causal chain of one action to
| another impact does not make it the sole narrative -- only a
| more likely narrative than some other non-coherent chain.
|
| Your choice of raising your child under one religion directly
| impacts the cultural environment my child enters into at a
| minimum, if not the outright practices my child would be forced
| to participate in. The US government recognizes a freedom of
| religion and therefore _does not_ recognize any impact from
| that freedom as an infringement on others.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| 1. Have all these limitations been known to Sally when she
| bought her house?
|
| 2. Do Bob's rights change if someone builds a historic house
| next to his lot? Or it would be fair to say that Bob came here
| first so everyone else may just gtfo?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| That was sort of the purpose of making his lot so large in
| the hypothetical.
|
| But let's change it. Let's say Bob is running a rather large
| nuclear reactor. Initially this is fine - nobody is around
| him and nuclear power is very environmentally friendly.
| However, time goes on, and after a few years Bob and his
| large homemade nuclear reactor are surrounded by hundreds of
| brand new but very full preschools all bordering his
| property.
|
| Do we have a right to ask Bob to stop running his nuclear
| reactor? Situations change, risk models change. What was
| originally fine is now a hazard to other people.
| magila wrote:
| There's a version of this which has actual played out
| several times in the US: Many motor racing tracks were
| built decades ago in what was at the time the middle of
| nowhere. Over time new developments sprung up around these
| tracks and their residents companied about the noise coming
| from the race cars. In practice the "we were here first"
| defense has proven rather weak as many such tracks have
| been forced to shut down.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| RIP to the Polaris Amphitheatre as well.
| jcims wrote:
| But now we have Top Golf!
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| This seems like something that the market could address.
|
| The new neighbors could come together and buy out the
| racetrack. Take out a mortgage to turn it into an
| apartment building or something, then sell the building
| to pay off the mortgage.
|
| If the value to the neighbors of not having a racetrack
| there is at least as much as the value to the rest of the
| market of having a racetrack instead of an apartment
| building, this should be economically viable. If it
| isn't, isn't that a solid case for leaving the racetrack
| there?
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| The ever-evading part of the brain responsible for ethics
| tells me that if safety models have changed - like they did
| for lead, for example - then yes, it's up to Bob to comply.
|
| If, on the other hand, I've built my house next to his
| plant and now started to complain about the proximity of a
| potentially dangerous thing next to me - well, in this case
| Bob was there first.
|
| And then there are all these questions for extra credit
| like what's gonna happen if Bob wants to put a second plant
| right next to his current one?
| teachrdan wrote:
| I think that's a great extra credit question.
|
| A real-life version is, Bob's reactor was scheduled to be
| shut down in a few years, but now he's applied to extend
| its lifespan by another 20 years. Should that be allowed?
| If so, are there any conditions under which he should NOT
| be allowed further extensions?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| The other set of questions we need to ask for this
| extension:
|
| 1. How many people depend on Bob's reactor for power?
|
| 2. If Bob shuts down, is the replacement something like
| solar or a coal plant?
|
| 3. Design/safety/longevity.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| _Do we have a right to ask Bob to stop running his nuclear
| reactor?_
|
| If it's the same entity that allowed those preschools to be
| built next to a nuclear reactor, then absolutely not.
| arethuza wrote:
| What if Bob is in a country where people have the freedom to
| wander around most of Bob's 200 acres?
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| How does it change the original question?
| arethuza wrote:
| I admit its not a major point - but I guess I reacted to
| the idea that "Nobody can really see it".
| BrazzVuvuzela wrote:
| They don't see it unless they choose to go look at it. I
| can stand on a step ladder and look over my neighbor's
| fence. But if I do that then start complaining that the
| grass in his back yard is too dry and ugly, then who's
| the asshole? My neighbor for having ugly grass, or me,
| who went out of my way to look at it?
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Why do people who live in Sally's city need cars?
|
| It seems like the choice to impose parking minimums on
| apartment and home owners instead of building train tracks is
| one that should be weighed according to its externalities.
| michaelt wrote:
| The problem is: If I build and sell a home with no parking,
| there's no legal mechanism that can stop the new owner from
| buying a car anyway, and parking it on the street.
|
| That might be OK if there's physically no on-street parking
| within walking distance - this is the case in central London,
| for example. Or if I can convince someone on the council to
| pass a new law specific to my building.
| iskander wrote:
| Funny how we interpret these situations differently: Bob is
| going to destroy wildlife habitat, which we should treat as a
| public good. Sally is going to provide additional housing in a
| dense urban area, which we should also treat as a public good.
|
| My ideal would be significantly less interference and oversight
| for Sally than Bob.
| lil_dispaches wrote:
| Bulldoze vs Vetocracy is not an axis.
|
| Left/Right, and Lib/Auth, are axis, of political "persuasion";
| they are suited for Venn diagrammatic overlap. You can be both
| leftist and rightish (centrist).
|
| Bulldoze and Vetocracy are modes (of governance, of process,
| etc). You can't be both bulldozery and vetocratic on a topic. If
| a process is half bulldozer, half vetocratic, the effect would be
| a policy wash, and external factors will decide.
|
| As the article explains, the qualifications of Bulldoze/Veto
| exists on different levels (outside vs inside, level 1 vs level
| 2, foreign vs domestic).
|
| Ergo: Axis are extensive, in that you can parse what is lefty and
| what is righty _about a single part of the system_ (eg. a
| particular law).
|
| Ergo: The Bulldozer system is intensive: you can't pull apart a
| law and say "this is mostly bulldozer, but a little veto".
|
| The intensive applies to processes, the extensive applies to the
| participants and/or the product.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > You can't be both bulldozery and vetocratic on a topic. If a
| process is half bulldozer, half vetocratic, the effect would be
| a policy wash, and external factors will decide.
|
| It's still a spectrum. Take driving. The maximally-bulldozery
| position is that no licensing is required, no traffic
| regulations exist, the ability to drive is gated solely by the
| ability to reach the pedals and even that isn't a law. The
| maximally-vetocratic position is that cars are prohibited. The
| moderate position is that adults can drive if they pass a basic
| driving test and there are fines for risky behavior.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> Bulldoze vs Vetocracy is not an axis.
|
| Indeed, these are just tactics, that can be chosen by anybody
| on any axis.
| rectang wrote:
| My first reaction was that I don't want a bulldozer to be able to
| seize and consolidate power, then to create a permanent vetocracy
| so that their hold on power can never be challenged.
| mbot5324 wrote:
| Bulldozers breed vetocracies which breed bulldozers in turn.
| Stable, long lasting power counter-balances itself with a host
| of ongoing concessions to each side of this coin.
| macintux wrote:
| A very timely concern.
| VictorPath wrote:
| > restrictive housing
|
| I visited San Francisco thirty years ago and surveyed somewhat
| the effects of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Collapsed freeways and
| so forth were still visible. I think of this as I hear the
| Milennium tower is sinking into the sand - and San Francisco has
| not been hit by an earthquake for a while. I don't know what the
| future of building upward in the city will be.
|
| Why not fix up Caltrain? Why not have BART be fixed up and
| something people find safe and convenient instead of curse?
|
| Decent public transportation is not completely absent in the US.
| Decent public transport from the East Bay would fix a lot of
| problems.
|
| I don't think "remove regulation on business" is some stroke of
| genius, it sounds fairly lazy. Real estate developers are not
| some oppressed group, they tend to run local politics in most of
| the country.
| frenchyatwork wrote:
| > Real estate developers are not some oppressed group, they
| tend to run local politics in most of the country.
|
| I think the people who run local politics are often the people
| who own lots of real estate, not necessarily those who build
| buildings/improvements on it. Often, they're seeking to
| maintain or improve the value of their existing estate.
| teachrdan wrote:
| I have an unpopular answer. Back in the oughts, companies like
| Google and Facebook started running charter buses that stopped
| illegally at public bus stops to ferry their employees to the
| south bay. If those people had taken public transit instead we
| would have pumped billions of dollars into Caltrain, enough to
| fund vastly improved services.
|
| There would definitely have been an adjustment period where
| more people would have driven and made traffic even worse. But
| that discomfort would have helped create the political will to
| improve public transit.
| epistasis wrote:
| > If those people had taken public transit instead we would
| have pumped billions of dollars into Caltrain
|
| This denies the actual reality of the situation in that there
| was no public transit that was equivalent, the local
| political power structure is hostile to improved transit, and
| the power structure is in particular extremely opposed to
| transit that might be used by tech workers, much less
| predominantly used by tech workers. During the recent
| Caltrain electrification battle, there was a large anti-
| Caltrain political force because it was seen as "for tech
| workers."
| nitwit005 wrote:
| They blamed the rising housing costs and changing
| neighborhoods on the tech workers. They would have opposed
| public transit alternatives as well. They didn't want those
| people living in SF and working elsewhere.
| skybrian wrote:
| But you might also think of these private bus fleets as a
| reaction to the vetocracies delaying or outright preventing
| significant public transportation improvements. Large
| corporations might be more willing to fund public transport
| if they thought it would work?
|
| For example, many of Google's new campuses are have very good
| connections to public transport, so it's not like they're
| inherently against it.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| If those people had taken public transit instead their
| commutes would have been twice as long innit.
| friedman23 wrote:
| Your comment just doesn't make any sense in the context of this
| article. It almost reads like complete gibberish.
| hash872 wrote:
| Good piece. I'd tend to argue more for mild
| vetocracies/Madisonian political systems with multiple checks &
| balances when we're constructing actual governments. Many people
| heavily involved in politics ("intense policy demanders", I've
| heard them called) are just moderately insane overall, so I'm
| pretty interested in blocking bad ideas and rapid change. I'm
| kind of small c conservative that way. (I agree the US Senate
| should have a supermajority voting requirement, etc.)
|
| One thing that makes some vetocracies illegitimate, however, is
| that a small group of people wield far outsized power relative to
| their numbers. This is the objection to say a tiny group of
| wealthy, usually elderly people who can block new housing
| construction based on complaints about 'neighborhood character'.
| I'm fine with actual gridlock some issues where the US is
| genuinely divided, but I object to a tiny tiny minority with
| outsized power. Contrary to popular belief, James Madison was
| actually against too much minority power and had a few rants in
| the Federalist Papers about how democratic systems should be
| majority rule-only
| clairity wrote:
| an axis is literally dichotomizing, and dichotomies don't aid
| understanding of complex, dynamic systems because of the
| numerous chaotic (i.e., higher order) drivers of phenomena
| within the system. dichotomies provide faux-understanding,
| allowing the speaker to feel esteem for knowing about the
| dichotomy, not the underlying system of which s/he speaks. it
| is literally _bullshit_.
|
| i'll repeat that the only useful dichotomy when talking about
| political systems (practically tautologically) is that between
| the powerful and the powerless. left/right,
| liberal/conservative, even bulldozer/vetocrat are all
| distractions on this fundamental characteristic of political
| systems. it's especially important that when we voters consider
| elections and policy positions, we do it based on a critical
| reasoning of the issues at hand, not a political affiliation or
| chosen dichotomous self-identification.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| One of the problems with supermajorities is that you give
| greater weight to status quo.
|
| With supermajorities required, few countries would ever get rid
| of slavery or the death penalty, give voting rights to women
| etc.
|
| A lot of the grandfathered defaults aren't worth a
| supermajority to overturn.
| hash872 wrote:
| Not sure you picked the best examples there- both of these
| things required a Constitutional amendment, aka had to pass
| both houses by a 2/3rds vote, then be voted in by three
| quarters of the states. That's like the definition of a
| supermajority, so pretty much the opposite of your point. To
| be fair, it was much easier to pass the 13th Amendment when
| the rebelling states didn't get a vote in the matter :)
|
| To your broader point- radical change can just as equally be
| bad as good, so it should require more than a bare majority.
| (Personally I think the US Senate should require 55 votes for
| cloture, not 60). Some pretty radical stuff could have been
| passed in 2017-2018 if we just used a majority in both
| houses. I think with the current level of political
| fanaticism in the US, making it a bit difficult to pass laws
| is a wise choice
| helen___keller wrote:
| > This is the objection to say a tiny group of wealthy, usually
| elderly people who can block new housing construction based on
| complaints about 'neighborhood character'.
|
| Where I live, it's not a small wealthy group blocking new
| construction, it's that the region is already as built out as
| is legal in most places, and updates to municipal zoning is a
| supermajority vote so it almost never happens. Most
| construction happens via petitioning the zoning board for a
| variance
| credit_guy wrote:
| I like to think in terms of checks on the Executive power. It can
| go from virtually unchecked, or absolute monarchy (think Augustus
| of Rome, or Peter the Great of Russia), to virtual paralysis
| (think Poland before it was partitioned by Russia, Prussia and
| Austria). Checks on the Executive power are both good and bad.
| It's tricky to find the right balance.
| yob28 wrote:
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