Jamie H

People persistently believe that crime is going up, but it actually peaked in the UK (and also the USA) in the 1990s, and has been falling since. This is actually a pretty good era of British history in terms of violent crime, burglaries, and similar policinginsight.com/feature/anal...

Price is also a reasonable way to judge revealed preference too: how much are people willing to pay to live in a given home? Does a four bedroom apartment in a city centre cost more or less than a four bedroom house in suburbia? (assume equal floorspace).

I'm a passionate urbanite but, if you take cost out of the equation, and ask me whether I'd prefer a five bedroom detached house in central London or a two bedroom flat in London, then obviously I'd prefer the former, but you can't actually take price out of the equation in reality.

Key issue here: revealed preference through trade-offs: for a given location (and it's proximity to jobs, shops, and services), apartments in a dense walkable neighbourhood will be cheaper than low density sprawl houses, which is a big factor in what people 'prefer' in practice (not hypothetically)

If the suggestion is that such dense walkable neighbourhoods wouldn't be popular with people looking to move, then we would expect to see less private investment in creating them in the first place, and you wouldn't need a zoning code to prevent such neighbourhoods being created.

I think that if America invested in more dense walkable neighbourhoods, then that would become an affordable option for more people, and more people would see the merits of it, but American zoning instead prevents the creation of such neighbourhoods.

I think the normative aspect comes in when zoning/planning law favours one hypothetical preference over another. I'm not sure I've encountered anyone saying that Americans should be forced into dense walkable neighbourhoods, just that it ought to be an option that people can choose if they want.

One way to find it out would be to reform zoning codes so that cities could develop more naturally, and people would have a choice of living in dense urban neighbourhoods or lower density suburban areas. Let people have a choice and follow their own preference.

Hypothetically, we can imagine a society where developers were allowed to build tall dense walkable neighbourhoods in established urban places, and also suburban sprawl outside the city, and people could vote with their wallets. That's not true of America.

You can build generational wealth by buying urban housing, but the main reason why people think it's 'forced' (to some extent or another) is because American zoning does in fact prohibit the creation of mixed-use walkable neighbourhoods, which wouldn't be necessary if it was just preference.

I suppose the factual disagreement here is the extent to which American preference for suburban life is a natural preference or an artificial one (i.e. one created or exacerbated by bad zoning/planning)

A short summary of my argument that using ChatGPT isn't bad for the environment To share with anyone still worried

People who dislike AI have a variety of reasons for doing so. The water/energy waste objection specifically does not make sense when you dig into the numbers though. Other objections require their own discussion, but the environmental objection is misplaced. andymasley.substack.com/p/a-short-su...

(In the UK): From 1968 to 1988, the richest in society got more rich quicker than the poorest of society. From 1988 to 2024, the poorest got richer faster than the richest. ourworldindata.org/grapher/thre...

Some people are using the flag as a symbol for being anti-refugee and anti-migrant, but there's nothing inherently hateful or callous about the flag. The flag is nothing more or less than the choices that we make as a nation, so let's make choices that we can be proud of.

Modern life could and should be better. We've put too many roadblocks in the path of our own success. However, modern life is also better than what we had before. Pre-industrial society was a nightmare of death, misery, and poverty.

You shouldn't avoid saying true things out of a
concern that others might use those truths to promote political views you don't agree with, but I don't think that applies here anyway: materialism is not a threat to Liberalism.

Thanks google AI but I meant to type “shut”…

My liberalism and support for human rights has nothing to do with whether LLMs can achieve consciousness or what human consciousness is.

Even if we could conclusively prove that human thinking is mechanistic and reducible to physics, or that consciousness is an illusion, I'd still be a liberal.

Whatever we think about dualism, materialism, philosophical zombies, and similar... the idea that any stance on philosophy of mind is 'inherently fascist' is a bit odd... you can't predict people's politics from their stance on philosophy of mind?

Calculating national/global scale consumption/emissions and then comparing it to something human scale seems really common in environmental messaging, but it distorts our perceptions of what is and us not high impact andymasley.substack.com/p/my-can-of-...

That's not to say that we should all give up YouTube though, just that I worry that we're repeating the plastic straw problem: we're focusing on the things that would be easiest to give up rather than the things that will actually make a difference andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sh...

I've seen multiple content creators on YouTube complain about the environmental cost of ChatGPT and I suspect they are unaware that the are throwing stones in glass houses? Streaming is much more energy intensive than ChatGPT? andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sh...

That whole section is odd: reads more like a memo to employees to convince them that the funds spent on rebranding was a good idea rather than information put together for prospective students?

Not sure if this is true anymore?

www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/wi...

The topic is the WFA, who gets it, and who doesn't get it.

I don't think it's whataboutery to note that very wealthy pensioners will get WFA, but low-income working families with children won't get it (despite working families having a higher poverty rate than pensioners).

I think there are advantages to a universal benefit system that doesn't means test, but if we're giving cash welfare to rich pensioners, we should be giving it to poor working familiws with children as well (i.e. A UBI)

Do you think that working families should get help with heating homes in winter?

Would you accept the same tax rationale for giving it to working families with over £70k income?

A key fact here is that working families have a higher poverty rate than pensioners.

Do you think that WFA should be given to pensioners with a combined income of over £70k?

(sorry, that's phrased incorrectly: Two pensioners living together with a combined income of less than £70k but with their income split exactly evenly between them would get the WFA allowance).

An income of less than £35k is the criteria for receiving winter fuel allowance.

This is per person btw, not per household. Two pensioners with a combined income of less than £70k would also get winter fuel allowance.

www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/wi...