The Immobile Masses: Why Traffic Is Awful and Public Transit Is Worse - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-immobile-masses-why-traffic-is-awful-and-public-transit-is-worse <comment><USER3> Two footnotes on this article:

1\. The problems it highlights can be reduced to low tax revenues. Our infrastructure is crumbling because we do not collect enough taxes to subsidize it. Things like roads and trains cannot (and should not) pay for themselves---they are a public good. The train might be empty at night, but the ability to take a train home prevents drunk driving, for example. One cannot put a monitory value on services like that, they speak to our collective quality of life. The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth.

2\. Re: the conversation about walk-ability of cities. The key concept here is _density_. We need to value density as it allows for more compact living. Instead, municipalities in places like the Bay Area consistently vote against new construction and against zoning laws that would allow for taller, more densely populated buildings/neighborhoods. The law of supply and demand says increase the supply of housing to make something affordable. This is not some mysterious process: there's simply no political will on the part of existing inhabitants to "devalue" their residences by increasing the supply in the housing market.

<comment><USER4> > We need to value density as it allows for more compact living.

rack em and stack em, eh?

recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all.

[http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11673](http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11673)

We can promote more "compact living" but the data shows it degrades human happiness.

<comment><USER5> Serious question, why do rural areas have higher suicide rates per capita?

<comment><USER6> Arguments presented without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. The guy you're responding to cited his, please cite yours.

<comment><USER7> [http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/04/rural- suicide.aspx](http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/04/rural-suicide.aspx)

[http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/the- growin...](http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/the-growing-risk- of-suicide-in-rural-america/387313/)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/16/rural-youth- suicide...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/16/rural-youth- suicides_n_6867420.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is not at all illuminating and is just a typical advocacy piece for more transit funding.

Like most of these pieces, it compares road spending and transit spending as though this is somehow a useful comparison. It isn't. For rail transit systems, spending includes all labor and capital expenses--train operators, cars, electricity, etc. Road spending does not include the enormous capital investment that citizens and businesses spend for motor vehicles.

Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road.

Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point.

To top it off the piece says nothing about "why traffic is awful".

<comment><USER9> Yeah, the article points out that only 20% of our federal and state transit budgets go to transit, implying that it's underfunded. But it lacks the context that only 5% of Americans use transit...

<comment><USER10> It is a chicken and egg problem:

Transit sucks, so no one uses transit. No one uses transit, so funding is sub- optimal. Funding is sub-optimal, so transit sucks.

This cycle can be broken by funding transit properly. I have been to plenty of cities where transit was cheap, convenient, and useful. And before someone trots out the density problem, I have been to plenty of places that are far less dense than LA and have far better transit.

<comment> jim-greer I'm curious about the sparse places that have good transit... Where do you mean?

<comment><USER10> Europe, mostly, where what are essentially small towns and villages are often connected by good train or bus service to each other. You may consider it inter-urban rather than intra-urban, but the distances would easily fit within LA, and the density is clearly lower (because there are farms in between).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The best method of transit is walking. A lot of the problems with traffic and public transport are solved when we invest in walk-able cities. Cities where you can live close enough to work to walk there, close enough to your friends, close enough to the grocery store, your neighborhood bar or your kid's school.

No discussion of Mass transit or "giving up your car" is completely without discussing the walk-ability of cities.

<comment><USER12> Tangent but:

I live in SoCal, and I can't get my head around the car culture mentality. Of all the places that should be walkable, one that is 80 degrees and sunny 90% of the entire year should rank very high on the list. But nooo.... the walkable cities are in places that get run over by a glacier every six months. Go figure.

<comment><USER13> Because it's large?

I'm all for public transportation and LA used to have the best in the world 80 years ago. But, a large city as large as LA is never really going to be completely walkable unless everyone always moves close to their job. That would mean moving away from friends and family because of a job change rather than just commuting a little further. I suspect most people would chose to stay near their friends and family rather than move closer to their job.

You can compare Tokyo which is large like LA but which has excellent mass transit and yet the average commute is 80 minutes each way. Why? People can't or won't uproot their families for new jobs. Also housing close to a job is probably also often either too expensive (downtown) or undesirable (industrial area).

<comment><USER14> Also, the popularization of two-income households complicates this quite a bit. How often do you see partners that work near each other?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can we just come out and admit something ?

Buses are terrible. They are terrible functionally, they are terrible aesthetically, and they are terrible logistically.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that across a broad spectrum of preferences, you _would be very hard pressed_ to find anything worse in the urban, built environment than some big, loud, lumbering, clumsy (and usually) sooty bus bungling about the place.

I love good public transit. I love light rail. I love the subway. I will _do anything_ not to ride a bus. I am reminded of that quote from steve jobs about the touchscreen phones and the stylus:

"if you see a (bus), they blew it."

<comment><USER16> Well the reason light rail and subways are so good isn't because they're on rails, but because they get their own track. If you put a bus on its own street, suddenly they're not as bad anymore: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit)

<comment><USER15> I agree that BRT (which I have a lot of experience with)[1][2][3] does make things a bit better. However, the successful BRT I have seen is always in very specialized circumstances, while the proposals I have seen for BRT in (for instance) San Francisco have been so full of weird compromises and bizarre edge cases that I am not optimistic they will make anything better.

[1] Hop/Skip/Jump buses in Boulder

[2] 16th street mall shuttle in Denver

[3] "VelociRFTA" BRT in Aspen/Basalt/Glenwood

<comment><USER16> Did they change the Skip? I used to take that and it was just a normal bus in the normal street as far as I recall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Costs are a major part of the problem. US rail construction costs are by far the most expensive in the world [1]. Other countries are able to build rail at costs in the $100-250 million per km range (even in dense cities). The East Side access project in NYC has costs around $4 billion per km. Los Angeles has much better costs in the $400-500 million per km range [2]. Its hard to imagine the US will be able to build much transit at those costs.

From 2012[3]: "When asked by transit blogger Benjamin Kabak about its high construction costs, Michael Horodniceanu, president of the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority's capital construction division, gave a two-word answer: "work rules." Citing the example of the city's revered sandhogs, he said the MTA employs 25 for tunnel-boring machine work that Spain does with nine."

[1] [https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...](https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us- rail-construction-costs/) [2] [https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp...](https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transportation/construction- costs/) [3] [http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-27/labor- rules...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-27/labor-rules-snarl- u-s-commuter-trains)

<comment><USER18> There's problems on the operations side too. The same agency that is building that East Side Access (LIRR) still does fare collection by sending well compensated employees walking up and down every train to punch paper tickets twice per ride.

I don't know if it's an urban legend or not, but I've been told that one of those conductors punching tickets on every train is technically designated and paid as a "fireman" i.e. person responsible for shoveling coal into a boiler because the collective bargaining agreement forbids them from eliminating the position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Cities need to prioritize walking, biking and transit. What this means is that, these modes of transportation need to be made safer and faster. Currently walking through a major city is bogged down by the number of intersections you have to wait at. One idea would be to make intersection movement faster for pedestrians and transit during all hours except the morning and evening rush hour, during which vehicle movement should be prioritized to get cars off the roads as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER20> With the exception of areas where it's impossible (NYC) IME the majority of pedestrians and cyclists simply do not care about the crosswalks/laws/etc. Jaywalking is constant as is crossing in the crosswalk against the signal.

What I'm saying is outside of structural changes to the roads themselves (like you mention, eliminating some intersections) I don't see much change happening.

<comment><USER21> The very concept of jaywalking or dedicated crosswalks is a symptom of the car-first mentality.[0] If pedestrians and cyclists had the right of way as they should, this wouldn't be an issue.

[0] [http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention- jaywalking/...](http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention- jaywalking/1837/)

<comment><USER22> Crosswalks are awful. Outside of the ones where there is an actual traffic light, they are always placed in terrible locations. Moreover, they are just about the worst place possible to try to cross a street. I've been doing a lot of walking around the medium sized town I live in the past year, and I've had to get very good at looking away from the road when I want to cross, otherwise vehicles that have a quarter-mile of empty space behind them will come to a stop, and make me feel like I have to rush across, when they could have just kept going, and we would have both been able to go about our business at our leisure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Traffic is awful because road owners aren't charging for access.

From an Economics standpoint, congested traffic is the same phenomenon as the old Soviet bread lines. A underpriced good is inaccessible in practice, since supply is way lower than demand at that price.

The solution is "Road Pricing", where drivers pay to drive. The price varies depending on what road, time of day etc. Maximum revenue should coincide with maximum throughput, giving everyone (ready to pay) a smooth and fast commute. It also provides incentives to build more roads where they are mostly needed.

<comment><USER24> Isn't this the point of the gas tax? For every mile you drive, you use more gas. The more gas you use, the more you pay. Tracking which roads people are driving on would also require massive infrastructure investment, and have significant privacy implications.

<comment><USER25> The gas tax doesn't take time (or supply and demand) into account. Driving during rush hour should cost a lot more than driving at 3AM on an empty street. Sure, you use more gas sitting in traffic, but it doesn't make that much of a difference.

<comment><USER26> Tesla can solve this. They know when and where the car was driven, and each time it's charged, the charging station can interrogate the car and compute the appropriate congestion surcharge.

<comment><USER27> Singapore is now developing a new congestion charge system based on GPS that will have high granularity. We'll see how that works... [http://www.lta.gov.sg/apps/news/default.aspx?scr=yes&keyword...](http://www.lta.gov.sg/apps/news/default.aspx?scr=yes&keyword=ERP2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> To expand upon the specific discussion of the OP, I feel we are witnessing a historical pattern: urban-flight -> under-valued urban real-estate -> then urban renewal and economic opportunity -> influx of homeless and criminals since high-population density is good for both -> then public criticism that the cops are too heavy handed -> cops less likely to enforce + strain on infrastructure and services (like mass transit) + urban unrest due to economic disparity -> urban-flight -> ...

If the problem is that the BART is operating beyond capacity, adding capacity might not matter if the population is set to decline for the other reasons stated.

</comment><comment><USER29> The declining gas tax problem is going to get worse as electric cars increase in popularity. The solution is comprehensive road pricing, where a larger share of the real costs of road infrastructure and parking infrastructure are borne by the users.

The added benefit of correctly pricing driving is that people will make more informed decisions about where they live and how they get to work, that will result in more compact communities and less urban sprawl.

<comment><USER30> Another option would be pricing by weight. Big trucks currently get giant subsidies from the rest of us, just measuring by how much they damage the roads. Fixing that would probably drive up the costs of many goods that are transported by truck, although it would also probably cause a redistribution of which goods are sold, to favor lighter or more local goods. In any case, it would keep the roads in better condition. On the interstate near where I live, it's often a 10:1 ratio between trucks and cars.

<comment><USER26> Big trucks do pay a substantial road use tax. I don't know the specifics, but they don't get to drive for the same cost as the passenger cars. On toll roads the trucks pay a lot more too.

<comment><USER30> They don't pay 40 times what passenger vehicles pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I live in Minneapolis, we have the light rail in the downtown area that runs all the way down to the Mall of America and the airport. It also runs to St. Paul. We subsidize it heavily, but it is also an honor system for paying for it (no turnstiles). We also have a pretty decent bus system.

Problem is the further away you get from the city center the worse it gets. They've talked about putting in a light rail line to the southwest suburbs at a cost of billions of dollars, meanwhile the core roads don't get additional help and are perpetually bad because of the winter.

It's a balancing act, and at some point everyone needs to decide who's lifestyle is more important from a priority perspective IMO. If I decide to live in the suburbs, and commute an hour a day, is a dollar more important for that person? Or the person closer to the city core that wants more mass transit options?

Honestly I can go both directions. I currently have a 10 minute commute (by car). But I've also had the 60+ minute commutes for jobs. I also use the light rail to get to the airport pretty frequently. However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work.

<comment><USER32> > However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able > to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work.

But that's possible in cities with working transit.

Take Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Tokyo.

You can get a bus/train/tram to anywhere from anywhere at any time.

<comment><USER31> I haven't been to any of those cities, so you might be right. Just working in my own frame of reference.

<comment><USER30> I worked in Tokyo for a while. If you don't take cabs, you end up doing a fair amount of walking. There _are_ a lot of trains and subways, so there is a limit to how much walking you have to do. Even if your origin and destination were both right next to a subway station, however, you could expect to do a lot of walking underground, since there is a _lot_ of stuff underground in Tokyo around which subways have to be routed.

I think walking is great, and frequently I would figure ways to skip a subway line by walking a bit more, but I thought I'd mention this just to give a more accurate impression.

<comment><USER32> I live in Kiel, a 280k city in Germany, with a mediocre transit system.

I can get from anywhere to anywhere with, at maximum, 800m walking and 2h by bus, but frequently I walk directly instead of taking transit.

Which is possible, since Kiel is small enough that you can get anywhere within the city walking within of about 5h (one end to the other).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd really like to know what the true costs are.

Are Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore all massively subsidizing their mass transit? Do they have enough riders that they're profitable? Are they more or less efficient in how the manage them?

How about Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Antwerp, Koln, Barcelona, etc... which are all an order of magnitude smaller than the previously mentioned cities but all have pretty good public transportation.

These last cities are all on the same order of size as SF. About 1 million people each and yet they have vastly better public transportation than SF

<comment><USER33> London Underground funding info is here:

[https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we- ar...](https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we-are-funded)

About 40% comes from fares. About 25% is government subsidies. The rest is a mixture of borrowing, advertising/rental income, a central London road tax, and 8% is funding for Crossrail (but this represents pure infrastructure investment so does not affect the steady state).

I have to admit, having reviewed the figures, I am a bit surprised and concerned at the level of borrowing involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> One of the biggest issues is that we force businesses and housing to have ridiculous amounts of free parking, which means that instead of dense areas where buildings can be next to each other we have a sea of asphalt with a building sprinkled here and there. In central areas these minimums amount to parking welfare for suburbanites.

People say to me "but it takes 90 minutes to go 15 miles on transit!!" \- the problem isn't that transit should be faster, it's that you shouldn't have to go through 15 miles of primarily asphalt hellscape to get to basic amenities!

The core of Dublin is less than two miles across. I used to live in the middle of it and never missed a car. The core of San Diego.. well it's not really a core, and even then it's routine to have to travel several miles for basic errands, even if you live fairly close to downtown. A downtown that is prevernted from growing by parking minimums. Of course, if you ask a potential employer about transit access they look at you like you're from Mars (and, of course, choose to move on to a less hippie-ish applicant)

<comment><USER35> Interesting observation, is there some data showing this?

<comment><USER17> RE parking minimums: [http://graphingparking.com/2013/01/25/residential- parking-re...](http://graphingparking.com/2013/01/25/residential-parking- requirements/)

A similar issue is street sizes in the US are much larger than in countries with good transit and walkability. Anecdotal, but compare image searches for "American Street" and "Japanese Street". Not only is the driving area of the streets much narrower, on street parking doesn't really exists in Japanese cities. This contributes alot to the walking experience.

"japan street" [https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+street&espv=2&biw=1440...](https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+street&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=801&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjgrLPzj9rLAhXGs4MKHeNxBKwQ_AUIBigB)

"american street" [https://www.google.com/search?q=american+street&espv=2&biw=1...](https://www.google.com/search?q=american+street&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=801&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwicu__4j9rLAhXmloMKHbQBDqgQ_AUIBygC)

<comment><USER34> We put 25mph signs and crosswalks across ridiculously wide streets that encourage people to do 40+mph and wonder why so many people die.

Of course, auto safety standards that worry only about the occupants of the vehicle, and not whoever they hit, don't help either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> article is written in absolutes (talking about public transit and traffic in general) but happily ignores the fact that there is a world outside of america. maybe looking at places that are better commute-wise than sf despite being a lot poorer would be a start?

<comment><USER37> Of course. Because no one likes to mention that there are countries with far better infrastructure, free education and health care, better quality of life thanks to higher taxes.

Anything that suggests higher taxes are necessary seems to get ignored in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Nearly perfect for me are (1) a city with great light rail, and (2) a Brompton folding bicycle for the first & last miles. I realize that this combination isn't available to all, but it's awesome.

<comment><USER39> Counting the days until my b-spoke Brompton arrives.

Folding bicycle is a life changer.

<comment><USER34> Congratulations on a whole new world of convenient transport!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> We created this wonderful thing called the Internet that allows us to work and collaborate with each other from anywhere in the world, yet we all still cling to the silly idea that we need to continue to expand and repair our physical transit infrastructure so we can all travel two ways every day to sit next to somebody in some office to... stare at a computer connected to the Internet for 8 hours. It becomes even more absurd in areas like San Francisco where there literally isn't even enough housing to fit everyone.

We could solve our transit infrastructure woes overnight with policy. Give a tax break to companies who have remote workers. Either that or charge people to use public transportation infrastructure on a supply/demand basis. If more people use a freeway to get to work, the cost to use it goes up, and if you don't use it at all, you don't pay a dime. This would force companies who require their workforce to be physically present to pay higher salaries to cover the cost of commuting, which may cause them to re-evaluate remote work.

Commuting to and from work really only makes sense if you are interacting with things you can't take home with you.

And before you jump in and start spreading FUD about remote work, consider this: if it suddenly became illegal to require employees who could do their work remotely to come into a physical office every day, would businesses simply shut down? Or would they figure out a way to make it work? I'm guessing they would figure out a way to make it work.

<comment><USER33> It's going that way anyway.

I work for a company in London, but I work remotely from Switzerland. Many of the people who _live_ in the UK but work in the London office only come in a few days a week because their commute takes a long time, and if there's any kind of transit disruption at all that automatically means a WFH day.

It's not a big deal. Modern comms tech is really good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Beside everything else, i can't get a dog or cat on public transit here. Thus i have to have a car. In Russia, when i wasn't able to afford car, my cat rode bus, train, subway with me when we had to get him somewhere. Of course, i'd get a car there too the moment i could afford it, yet public transit was a feasible alternative when i didn't have a car.

<comment><USER15> "i can't get a dog or cat on public transit here."

 _Thank God._

<comment><USER41> it is hard to understand that knee-jerk reaction to animals in US ( personally i think it is rooted in basic Puritan habit of blaming somebody else [government, immigrants, regulations, dogs, ...] for your own problems). I understand that Russia isn't a good example of civilized society. Well, in France you can take your dog or cat into any restaurant, cafe, bar, etc ... pretty much everywhere. The public and personal health situation in France is among the best in the world. Sanitary rules in US prohibiting dogs is just red-herring.

<comment><USER42> I look at it as choosing to ban animals over choosing to ban humans with allergies.

<comment><USER41> Do you seriously mean that France thus banned humans with allergies? It is false dichotomy. Completely fits pattern of blaming somebody else.

To the comment below:

"but allowing animals that spread dander everywhere makes the environment hazardous to anyone with serious pet allergies."

unfounded BS (sounds very similar to industrial bread producers propaganda 100 years ago about those dirty immigrants touching your bread with their dirty hands in their dirty bakeries). Until it is a sterile OR, the surrounding environment is full of living matter. Dog or cat in a cafe doesn't change the situation. Or do you seriously mean that France doesn't care about such dangerous hazard to people's health?

<comment><USER15> (parent here)

I have no allergies at all. I was not thinking of allergies at all when I expressed my gratitude that your "dog or cat" is not allowed on public transportation in the US.

You shouldn't bring cats and dogs onto public transportation because it's rude, immodest and impositional. I have the same objective to your bringing a cat on the train as I do to your boarding the train without pants on.

Grow up.

<comment><USER34> You shouldn't bring _children_ onto public transportation because it's rude, immodest and impositional. I have the same objective to your bringing a _small, poorly trained animal_ on the train as I do to your boarding the train without pants on.

FTFY.

<comment><USER41> Unfortunately, even the pretty unhealthy and disturbing content of the "modesty" standards of those types like the parent isn't the biggest problem here. After all, people do have different opinions. Education, exposition to facts and reasonable discussion are known tools in dealing with it in normal case.

The biggest problem though is the underlying egocentric worldview of the likes of the parent that the other people do something, like in this particular case bring a dog or a cat on a public transit, with the specific goal of offending those "modesty" standards. That immediately makes them feel offended and under attack. It doesn't cross their mind that a dog or especially cat owner would take the dog or cat on public transit with just the goal of getting to some destination (especially when the public transit is the only realistically feasible option in the given situation). It is the same situation like with same-sex marriage - people marry same sex partners because of love or taxes/finances/etc., and not because of the goal to destroy the "marriage must be heterosexual" standard of and thus offend the "modesty"/"values" types. Such deep-gut egocentric worldview - people is out there to get me - <USER2> drives the aggressiveness with which they attempt to impose their "modesty" standards upon the others and makes the things like education/enlightenment, reasonable discourse, exposition to facts, etc. pretty ineffective, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Let's not forget that BART also made bad engineering choices, like non- standard tracks and trains that probably cost a lot of taxpayer money...

<comment><USER44> BART is the only transit system in North America that uses the Indian gauge. The wider gauge also contributes to the noise it generates and the wear on the track around turns.

<comment><USER45> Why should the wider gauge do either?

Noise: It's just steel wheels rolling on steel rails. Why should the distance between the rails change the amount of noise it generates?

Wear on the track: Presuming that the turns aren't too tight a radius (which may be larger for the larger gauge), and the superelevation is correct (which probably has to be larger for the larger gauge), why should wider track mean greater wear on curves?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> _The money that funds mass transit [...] comes from a mix of four sources: [...] On the federal side, most of that money comes from the federal gas tax: 18.4 cents on a gallon of regular gas 24.3 cents on the gallon for diesel, [...] 19 percent going to mass transit. That's right—mass transit depends on people driving cars for a significant portion of its federal funding._

I don't find this counterintuitive: the more people use their car, the more the mass transit system is strengthened and more capable to ease car traffic. Maybe it's far fetched, but it's like tax on cigarettes to finance lung cancer research.

</comment><comment><USER47> I find it interesting that the article points out that neither mass transit riders nor automobile drivers pay the full cost of their trips. Yet it never asks the obvious question: couldn't that be the main reason why both forms of transportation are inefficient?

<comment><USER48> There's a difference though: If it were politically feasible, a marginally higher gas tax could fund all road construction & maintenance. People might drive a little less, but the system wouldn't go into a death spiral.

If mass transit riders had to fund the system purely through user fees, the result for most systems would be a collapse, as fewer riders would require higher prices leading to fewer riders...

<comment><USER34> At least in the US, the gas tax would need to be substantially higher.

If we accounted for the externalities (dead people hit by cars, mostly, and perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable) the gas tax would rise even more.

If anyone asks I'll dig up the math because citation is important (and I'm not sure I did it right years ago), but I remember doing some calculation a while back that we could pay to remove the carbon emitted by gasoline with a tax that made it around $15 a gallon. That doesn't seem bad, really. Perfectly happy societies function with $8-$11 a gallon gas, and not destroying civilization seems worth it.

Edit - though I realize that by the latter argument, reducing the population is, in a horribly macabre way, a positive externality. It's not one I support, though.

<comment><USER47> _> perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable_

The problem with trying to base taxes on something like this is that you would have to be really, really sure this consequence was unavoidable. I certainly am not convinced that climate science is accurate enough to support such a claim (or economics, for that matter, since part of the claim is really about the economics of adaptation to climate change vs. mitigation of climate change).

<comment><USER34> "you would have to be really, really sure this consequence was unavoidable"

Why? Wouldn't we actually need to be really, really sure this consequence was extremely unlikely? If an asteroid had only a 50/50 chance of hitting Earth would we be wise to disregard it?

<comment><USER47> _> Wouldn't we actually need to be really, really sure this consequence was extremely unlikely?_

No, because that would imply a level of predictive power that we do not have in climate science and economics. Basically, with the accuracy of prediction we currently have in those fields, it is impossible to be sure that the impact of climate change will be extremely unlikely to cause severe disruption of our civilization. And the key point is that that is true _regardless_ of whether or not we spend trillions of dollars on trying to mitigate climate change.

So the only real choice we have is adaptation; any resources we spend on getting better at adapting to climate change will at least move us in a positive direction, whereas we can't be sure of that with regard to resources spent on attempts at mitigation. In order for adaptation to not be a rational response, we would have to be so sure that climate change _was_ going to cause severe disruption that it was worth trying to mitigate the change even though we can't predict what specific actions would do that. In other words, we would have to be so desperate that it was worth trying whatever mitigations we could think of without even trying to predict their effects. Climate change alarmists would like us all to believe that we _are_ that desperate, but the case for that does not stand up to scrutiny.

 _> If an asteroid had only a 50/50 chance of hitting Earth would we be wise to disregard it?_

If an asteroid had a 50/50 chance of hitting the Earth, we would be able to predict that specific actions we could take could reduce that probability to something negligible, because we have very accurate predictive power with regard to the orbits of astronomical bodies, at least on the relevant timescales (years to decades). Given that, of course we would not be wise to disregard the prediction.

But, as above, that argument does not apply to the climate, because we can't predict the effects of any specific actions well enough to know how, or even if, they will reduce the probability of a severe disruption to our civilization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> The fact that we don't have a couple operators instead of a driver for each individual train on BART is beyond me. Look at all the private companies (Magic Bus, etc) that are sprouting up because of how terrible our public transportation is.

BART essentially holds a monopoly on our transport. I believe their contract states even during a strike, new drivers have to be trained for 6 months before they are allowed to drive BART trains. There is absolutely no way that it takes 6 months to learn how to drive an AUTOMATED train. There should be public bids submitted from private companies to run on these railways, which would lead to better service and lower costs.

</comment><comment><USER50> I read someplace that a large part of the budget that is allocated to local government agencies in SF goes to pay pensions and very generous benefits of its employees. How true is that?

</comment><comment><USER51> Public transit sucks because the quality of governance has corkscrewed down as the media gets weaker and dumber. This is literally the best time in history to be an inept and/or corrupt politician -- nobody is watching.

Roads suck because capital is easy to come by, so real estate squatters control central business districts. It's cheaper/easier/more convenient to build commercial space in he burbs.

</comment><comment><USER52> The solution in the future will be driverless cars, shared driverless vans, etc. These should improve overall commute times, since there will be fewer accidents and denser transportation. Also people will be able to spend their commute time reading books/news, doing work, watching videos, or other recreation, rather than driving the car.

<comment><USER53> Sure, I mean if you want a WALL-E vision of the future. Personally I'd prefer a Netherlands/Denmark present day kind of future, where people live within 5-10 miles of their place of work and cycle or walk. Less apathetic fat people and psychotic auto-pilots.

<comment><USER54> I go by bike from west to east Copenhagen every day, a 25 minute ride, and it's awesome. I wouldn't trade it for any perk.

<comment><USER26> What do you do when it's raining or snowing? What do you do when it's hot, can you shower at work?

<comment><USER55> I think this is like asking a Texan how they cope with rain (turn the wipers on) or heat (turn the A/C on). Imagine getting the same puzzled look.

Rain/snow: wear a coat, optionally overtrousers.

Hot: go slower if you normally race in, and it doesn't get much above 20 degrees anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Provide free public transportation. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window)

</comment><comment><USER57> More human life-years get wasted every day in Europe's traffic jams than we lost in the Brussels attacks. Maybe we should rethink our priorities.

</comment><comment><USER58> > _Public Transit Is Worse_

Depends on the country. In some places it is excellent.

</comment><comment><USER59> Power assisted bicycles that take minimum effort to go 20mph would be amazing

</comment><comment><USER60> > In fact, planners and economists call road building "induced demand" because > it encourages people to hop into their cars instead of walking or taking > mass transit.

In the Bay Area, building transit infrastructure is expensive and time consuming.

Case in point: a five mile extension including one new train station of an existing BART line costs $890 million and took seven years to build. [1] The resulting extension is expected to increase in ridership by 5000 to 7000 daily trips in the next decade. [2]

There are currently 400,000 daily automobile trips from East Bay to and from Santa Clara County. [2]

[1] [http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx](http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx) [2] [http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx/chronology](http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx/chronology)</comment>


The Greatest Risks Cities Face - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/30/biggest-challenge-american-cities-policy-experts-215308 <comment><USER2> It's nice that we get glimpses from many different people in this article on what they believe is the greatest risk cities face. It's important to contemplate what future cities will look like, and especially important for us to be critical (but not rejecting) of the negative impact of technology on our lives so we may have time to divert some of those negatives.</comment>


Google Is Already Late to China's AI Revolution - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/06/ai-revolution-bigger-google-facebook-microsoft/ <comment><USER2> Eric Schmidt said "All of them would be better off if they used TensorFlow" \- talking of the three largest Chinese AI companies.

That statement may be a bit if a reach. I used TensorFlow on a customer project last year and have several TensorFlow examples in the Cognitive Computing book I wrote last year, but, TF is one of many fine tools for deep learning.</comment>


DIY MacBook Stand - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ergenekonyigit/diy-macbook-stand <comment><USER2> I just love how github ends up being blog, forum, wiki, disqus-clone etc. for us tech people.

As for the stand I used this cheap ikea-hack: [https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c7/c9/a0/c7c9a072c328a3596186e1b71...](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c7/c9/a0/c7c9a072c328a3596186e1b711b65bf6 --laptop-storage-laptop-desk.jpg) (can't find the original post sry)

<comment><USER3> I actually dislike that fact very much. Oh, I don't disagree that github is that for so many users...and i can not disagree with the convenience of what github provides...I simply dislike that it is all controlled/owned by github...a single point of technical/infrastructure failure, and a single corporate entity where so much content (content beyond raw code, that is) is hosted...not unlike the facebook effect. I wish people hosted their content in a more decentralized fashion.

<comment><USER4> Well, at least you can easily get your and other people's data out of GitHub (unlike e.g. YouTube and Facebook).

It would be easy to create a giant mirror of GitHub, for example (once you have a distributed storage system).

Also, GitHub doesn't control what users are viewing (unlike YouTube and Facebook), which makes the platform less of a threat to internet freedom.

<comment><USER5> I'd consider Youtube to be one of the top easiest sites to get one's data (or someone else's!) out of. Why do you think it's not?

<comment><USER6> Do you mean downloading using unsupported 3rd party tools? Because those have to be regularly updated to ensure they even work and could some day stop working entirely if Google decided to care about blocking such tools.

In comparison, GitHub offers a simple clone button (among ways) which gives you everything.

<comment><USER7> Youtube-dl?

I mean I get your argument but op isn't wrong. YouTube is reallly easy to rip content from.

<comment><USER8> And the point of that argument is that youtube-dl only works because Google doesn't care, and the need to patch it regularly is only caused by the incidental changes in the service. When Google starts caring for some reason, it'll be a difficult battle.

<comment><USER7> I haven't updated mine in ages and it still works...

<comment><USER6> I've had to update several times in the last couple years due to some YT links not working. Updating always helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The diagram of the center spreader piece doesn't make any sense without context. Are the four pieces glued in place? Is there a tab that isn't visible in the picture which allows it to be sandwiched between the other two pieces?

What materials? Is there a cad save file for cutting it ourselves?

<comment><USER10> Agreed it is confusing, the JPEG "is" the CAD file (although there is a DXF file as well) but laser cutters will often use a JPEG as the profile image.

Here is my guess, you laser it out of acrylic, you slot the two large parts together to form an 'X' (looking down from the top) and you glue in the four wedges using solvent glue to stabilize the X shape of the two pieces.

<comment><USER11> > laser cutters will often use a JPEG as the profile image.

Laser cutter operator here. Never heard of laser cutter, plasma cutter, or oxy cutter (our company has all three) accepting a JPG as the input file. I've spoken to two other local operators and they all require a DXF / DWG or some other type of NC (Numeric Code) file as input.

<comment><USER9> I'm guessing it's a reference to GlowForge, which can cut based on pictures or drawings on the material itself.

<comment><USER10> And a bunch of the inexpensive Chinese laser cutters, some of which provided a pirated copy of Corel Draw to do your designs in.

<comment><USER11> CorelDRAW is a vectors graphics program.

I often use Inkscape for text I'm going to laser cut because it does a proper job of creating text outlines compared with Draftsight which manages to bork the text when I run explodetext command.

What I don't understand using a vector graphics program to generate CNC cut items is how do you specify dimensions? CAD files have dimensionality inherent.

How does that aspect work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What makes this a MacBook Stand and not a general notebook stand for any other 13" notebook?

<comment><USER13> Two guesses:

1\. Adding "Macbook" to the title increases the chance of getting to the frontpage (like some sort of cheap SEO).

2\. People starting to use "Macbook" when they mean "notebook" like when you use the verb "google" instead of "search on the internet".

<comment><USER14> I can agree about 1 and the last part of 2. But I am willing to bet you people'd say "laptops" to refer to any non-Apple laptops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I recently released a stand I made for my ThinkPad Yoga. It'd probably work for a Macbook too. They're very close in size. I like mine a little better because I can put the dock and cables under it.

[https://github.com/KeenRivals/ThinkPad-Yoga-Laptop- Stand](https://github.com/KeenRivals/ThinkPad-Yoga-Laptop-Stand)

<comment><USER16> Nice, thank you for sharing!

I'm curious, which 3D printer did you use?

<comment><USER17> It looks laser cut, most schools would have a laser cutter nowadays because they're stupidly easy to use.

It would be difficult, and inadvisable to print something this large on a regular 3D printer.

Thingyverse is literally full of designs like this and often much better.

[https://www.thingiverse.com/search/page:1?q=Laptop+stand&sa=...](https://www.thingiverse.com/search/page:1?q=Laptop+stand&sa=&dwh=125a30729324def)

<comment><USER15> It's not laser cut. I used a MakerBot Replicator 2. It was actually quite easy to print. I designed it roughly two years ago after browsing thingiverse and getting bad print results with the larger stands. The smaller single-piece stands were too flimsy/unstable. I also wanted the stand to be just big enough to fit a Lenovo docking station under it.

<comment><USER17> So you printed it in pieces and assembled it?

I'm sorry to be harsh but this is the kind of thing we get undergrads to do on day one of an internship. Why do you feel it was worthy of posting on HN?

<comment><USER18> But I like the simplicity of the design, the poster's first hand experience, mentioning other designs, and the idea of leaving usable room underneath the laptop. Further, it's nicely illustrated with a photo.

Not, perhaps, a mathematical tour de force but useful information. Just like the numerous reports on HN of IKEA products used to prop up monitors. These ideas won't win a Turing Award but are often clever and give me ideas to try out myself.

<comment><USER17> I see your point but from my experience this is closer along the spectrum to 'hello world'.

<comment><USER19> I don't see what you are contributing here either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I use this: [http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20302596/](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20302596/) . Works great at the desk for me since I don't use an external monitor.

<comment><USER21> Isn't the screen still pretty low when you use that? (That's actually my gripe with most laptop stands, come to think of it.)

<comment><USER20> For me, it was a good improvement compared to the stock laptop position (13" MBP). I guess it reduced the angle of neck-crane by half so for the price, I was pretty happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's nice but a Samsung FullHD 24" PLS (Samsungs IPS) cost about 130 euro's nowadays. The DPI is to cry about but it beats working on < 14" any day for me.

Maybe this solution is nice and useful because you can take it with you together with the keyboard and trackpad and get a reasonable working posture anywhere?

<comment><USER23> Your comment confused me at first, because it didn't even occur to me that people would use this stand to correct their posture when working with the laptop on a desk.

I use a laptop stand (stacked carton boxes) at work to use it alongside my two 24" monitors. If I weren't lazy I would build this stand and use it so my desk would look nicer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've also made my own MacBook stands, but using MakerBeams[0]. After receiving a kit as a gift, I messed around with several small projects and simple things, but I've consistently used the stands since I've built them. Very solid and stable, yet open, and I'm able to use the desk space underneath them for dongles, cables, or whatever. Everything I needed was included in the kit, except for some vinyl endcaps and foam sheet material, both added to protect the macbook and my desk from scratches.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/MakerBeam-Regular-anodized- including-...](https://www.amazon.com/MakerBeam-Regular-anodized-including- brackets/dp/B00BBH3LZC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1513121807&sr=8-1&keywords=makerbeam+starter+kit+clear)

</comment><comment><USER25> I might be missing something, but it looks like it would work with most 12 or 13-inch laptops, not just Macbooks.

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems like a roundabout way to avoid using an external monitor.

<comment><USER13> Much cheaper though.

<comment><USER27> Geez. Spend $3,000 on luxury laptop, can't afford a $100 external monitor.

<comment><USER28> You wouldn't want to use a $100 monitor after that Retina display.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I personally use an mStand[0] by Rain Design. I was using a small cardbox box before that and my employer at the time gifted an mStand to me.

The difference is night and day and it made me appreciate my MacBook's display much more even when it was connected to an external monitor. I also found myself using multiple (virtual) desktops so much more as well.

If you're able to afford it, I really recommend shelling out the extra cash for a proper stand. If not, and you have an employer that might buy it for you, go out on a limb and ask for one. It might really improve how you interact with your laptop.

[0] [http://www.raindesigninc.com/mstand.html](http://www.raindesigninc.com/mstand.html)

<comment><USER30> I'm actually really surprised by this gushing review - I use the same stand at work, but I don't think too much of it. Could I ask you to elaborate? Just curious.

<comment><USER29> A lot of other stands don't have the laptop sitting so high above the desk, making them much closer to the table or even flush but angled upwards from the back.

As it sits now, it is high enough so that it matches the exact same level of eyesight as my external monitor. This makes the external monitor compliment it rather than replace it.

The shape also allows you to move your hands around under it, whereas if it was lower or if the design was different it would interrupt movement and usage of an external keyboard.

Other things I like about it is that it's super solid, it's all just a single piece, made of aluminium (for heat purposes) and the rubber things on it keep the laptop held securely in place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anyone else moving his monitors as far down to the table as possible?

I just use a stand to get more space on my desk by the tilting (on my home setup, where I have one big nice screen). At work it's dual monitors and I keep my laptop shut while docked.

<comment><USER32> Yes, I've never liked elevating the monitor. To me it's uncomfortable and bad ergonomics. I want to avoid tilting my head up to look at the monitor. I want my eyes looking slightly down from a completely level position, and this decreases eye strain. I've never understood why so many people want to jack their monitor up on a box, fat technical book, or stand. The most important thing is to make sure the surface of your desk is at the right height for working while sitting or standing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> No one heard of thingiverse?

<comment><USER34> I think this is great and like the approach to the design! Amazingly it was almost 10 years ago that I put mine up on Thingiverse - thing 32, while we were still testing before making Thingiverse public :) [https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:32](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:32)

<comment><USER35> Does the cardboard version in the photos work, or was that just a prototype?

<comment><USER34> It works great! I had that on my desk for quite a while. Eventually it gets beat up and starts to wobble a bit, so wood or acrylic last longer, and in fact we still use some of these at my office years later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I use this for my MacBook stand: [http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/small- storage-organisers/...](http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/small-storage- organisers/storage-boxes-baskets/dr%C3%B6na-box-black-art-30219281/)

It folds up compactly, is extremely lightweight, and has survived 4 years of almost daily use without complaint. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER37> heat dissipation?

<comment><USER36> Better than sitting on a desk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> My DIY MacBook stand is simply a pile of old textbooks. Gets the job done and comes with the added bonus of adjustable height.

<comment><USER39> ah, the mythical $500 MacBook stand (4 or 5 college textbooks)

<comment><USER11> Sunk cost though. I use parking tickets as bookmarks. At least I'm getting some value out of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I use a roll of toilet paper (not a joke).

<comment><USER41> I use five little 4oz paper cups (also not a joke).

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I like this. I'd like to see more "open source" easy to make by the average person accessories.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is wonderful, and vents the bottom of the laptop

[https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Ventilated-Adjustable- La...](https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Ventilated-Adjustable-Laptop- Stand/dp/B00WRDS8H0)

<comment><USER43> I have this one and the thing that sticks up pokes my wrist all day. I don't think a human tested it for any amount of time.

<comment><USER44> Do people use their laptops when on a stand? I thought they were to keep them off your desk and make room for a full sized mouse / keyboard.

<comment><USER45> I thought it was to bring the monitor to eye level.

<comment><USER46> I'm puzzled by this too, can't people just look down?

<comment><USER45> I had all kinds of neck problems staring down at a 13" laptop on my desk all day. Once I moved the screen up so I was looking straight, the neck problems went away.

It's one of those things where you don't notice it until you do. When you do, it's a big problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I use a couple of kitchen handles connected to a couple of timber angle brackets all from IKEA, cost about $20 I think and lasted me years so far

</comment><comment><USER48> I'll stick with my superior Roost, thanks.

<comment><USER49> The nexstand, although a knockoff, is half the price and more robust

<comment><USER48> It's also depriving the inventors of their return for their excellent invention and the quantity of R&D that went into making it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> A bunch of shoe boxes works fine too

</comment><comment><USER51> I remember building one of these 10 years ago. Nice to see the resurgence

</comment><comment><USER52> Shoutouts to the water bottle acting as an iPad stand.

</comment><comment><USER53> That looks kinda flimsy... I'd be a little scared of putting my (employer's) $3000 Macbook on that.

<comment><USER54> Seriously, are you afraid that your macbook can break falling from 10 cm ?

I'm worried when my thinkpad falls from 1 m high.

<comment><USER55> Apple makes nice but brittle bodies.</comment></comment></comment>


Flesh-Eating Plant Cleaned Junk From Its Minimalist Genome - <AUTHOR> http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/12/flesh-eating-plant-cleaned-junk-minimalist-genome/

<comment><USER2> >And since DNA's backbone is loaded with phosphorus, it's reasonable to think that the plant would have evolved to have less DNA, so it can make do with less of this element.

>But not so. Instead, the team thinks that the answer probably involves recombination[...] Perhaps recombination is exceptionally sloppy in the bladderwort, leading to a natural tendency to delete its DNA.

Why is this presented as an alternative? Surely it makes sense that the low- phosphorus environment would lead the bladderwort to evolve a "sloppy recombination mechanism", that would shorten its DNA without damaging its function.

<comment><USER3> Looking up weights and DNA structures and such things in humans in wiki articles, I have calculated that 0.5% - 2% of the phosphorus in the human body is used in DNA. It seems reasonable to me that it would be at least within an order of magnitude of 1% in plants as well.

For this reason I doubt the phosphorus in DNA would make a significant contribution to evolving a shorter DNA sequence.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The original paper is at [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12132.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> This plant is more interesting and bizarre than any sci-fi writer's imagination, the Wikipedia description is fascinating but also gave me the shivers: "Lloyd devoted several studies to the possibility, often recounted but never previously accounted for under scientific conditions, that Utricularia can consume larger prey such as young tadpoles and mosquito larvae by catching them by the tail, and ingesting them bit by bit."

Think of a mutant variety of this plant with 1m bladders: it can trap a swimmer and ingest them over the course of a few days! I wonder if there's a theoretical limit to how big they can get.

<comment><USER5> > This plant is more interesting and bizarre than any sci-fi writer's > imagination

Eh, not quite: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I disagree. The amount of DNA you have will affect the rate of mutation. Mutations are mostly a bad thing, however, in an environment where a species must constantly create defenses against parasites or disease, it's important to mutate new defenses. As a result, in a low disease/parasite environment it makes sense to get rid of "junk dna" to reduce the rate of mutation, while in a high disease/parasite environment it makes sense to increase "junk dna" to increase it.

Red Queen is a good read on this topic.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis>

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Red-Queen-Evolution- Nature/dp/0060...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Red-Queen-Evolution- Nature/dp/0060556579)

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't it a little too premature to be stating that such item does nothing just because we don't know what it does? I feel like this should be stated with caution after the mislabeling of the tonsils, pineal gland, and thymus as vestigial.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ed Yong has long been one of the best science writers around.

</comment><comment><USER9> DNA is bytecode for some VM, and the junk is uninitialized HEAP. Maybe.</comment>


Artificial Intelligence is stupid and causal reasoning won't fix it - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.07371 <comment><USER2> I recall reading about Searle's Chinese Room argument in Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" about 25 years ago. Maybe the exposition there was more complete than the version given in this article, but the argument of this article is terrible.

The author says that the English speaker who simply manipulates symbols and follows rules will never get the joke written in Chinese, even if the people external to the room understand it and think it was produced by an intelligence that understands the joke.

But that contains the assumption that the human is the consciousness in that arrangement, when in fact the human is just the energy source which drives the hardware. One might as well say that computers can never create a 3D drawing because its power supply doesn't understand arithmetic.

<comment><USER3> Ugh. I remember listening to Searle on the BBC in the early 1980s, and becoming quite irate, as a 17 year old does, at his mistake in defining the boundary within which intelligence should be found as the operator not the whole room.

<comment><USER4> You can make a pretty good argument that the _rulebook_ is the Chinese- speaking intelligence in the room. "But it's an inanimate object, if the human stops following the rules it will be inert". Yeah, and if your mitochondria stop producing ATP you'll be inert too.

Also. People taking Seale's position rarely reckon with just how big that rulebook would be.

<comment><USER5> Daniel Dennett coined the term "intuition pump" for this, which is a great concept to keep in mind so you don't get caught by one. Wikipedia: An argument "designed to elicit intuitive but incorrect answers by formulating the description in such a way that important implications of the experiment would be difficult to imagine and tend to be ignored."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The paper is right, all impressive achievements amount to just curve fitting.

But ... maybe that's why the human brain works so well. The 10s of billions of neurons in your brain are designed to adapt to patterns and adjust to external stimuli from sensory input.

Just like compression algorithms can only compress something so far before losing data, maybe being limited by how much processing we are throwing at this problem limits the usefulness of our solutions.

<comment><USER7> If it was just a matter of horsepower we could perfectly simulate animals with simpler brains already.

<comment><USER8> "why does OpenWorm need a distributed supercomputer when the thing it's simulating needs about 10 millicalories a day" is one of those category of questions people don't like thinking about too much.

<comment><USER9> Are you sure the bulk of it is not emulating physics and environment?

I mean how many resources can you even throw at "302 neurons and 95 muscle cells"?

edit: down the wormhole I go

just look at the screenshots of

the "brain": [https://github.com/openworm/c302](https://github.com/openworm/c302)

and the sim: [https://github.com/openworm/OpenWorm/blob/master/README.md#q...](https://github.com/openworm/OpenWorm/blob/master/README.md#quickstart)

Reading further, more physics:

> Some simulators enable ion channel dynamics to be included and enable > neurons to be described in detail in space (multi-compartmental models), > while others ignore ion channels and treat neurons as points connected > directly to other neurons. In OpenWorm, we focus on multi-compartmental > neuron models with ion channels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Paper rendered as web page:

[https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/2008.07371/](https://www.arxiv- vanity.com/papers/2008.07371/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Speculation in an absence of information. There are definitely biological organisms that suffer the same mistakes as our curve fitting. Eg the bird that pecks the red dot on the mothers beak. Its selected to pick the biggest red dot, so if you put a giant red dot next to the nest they will starve. Seems reasonable to believe human brains are lots of very good curve fitters working together. If anything because this is so successful maybe it's all we actually need. Specific neural nets for specific tasks. Maybe dualism is correct and conciousness is something special, but we have no ideas on how to test that.

</comment><comment><USER12> \- loaded premise (that AI community thinks causal reasoning, whatever form that may take, is the silver bullet)

\- Failure to distinguish b/w narrow and human-level AI

\- Zero mention of attention/transformer models

\- Zero mention of BERT, GPT, let alone GPT-3

Note-to-self: ignore and file away in the gary-marcus box.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, was not impressed. Skipping over the (opinionated) survey of recent AI techniques (and their failure modes) and philosophic theories of cognition that is the bulk of the paper, the only bit that claims to be novel (pp 29-31) is an argument I will summarize as follows:

1) any computational AI can be represented as a finite state machine or FSM (author calls it a finite state automata. Same thing.)

2) when said computational AI performs an "act of cognition" it (as a FSM) will iterate through a defined series of states, based on a defined series of inputs

3) It is possible to build a simpler FSM composed of a counter and a lookup table that would take the same series of inputs + the counter as an input, and produce the same state/output as the original computational AI

4) since the response to stimulus is identical, the 2 finite state machines are equivalent.

5) if the state machines are equivalent, they must be equivalently conscious

6) the counter+look-up table is obviously not conscious ("reducto ad absurdum")

7) from (6) and (5) no computational AI can be conscious

To me, this argument fails in the following manner; the only way to actually construct the "simpler" finite state machine in step (3) above is to actually let the computational AI react with the world first and record its combinations of input and state. There is no way to predict what series of states an arbitrary FSM will go through in response to a particular series of inputs without actually running it. That would be equivalent to solving the halting problem. Any program can be encoded as an FSM. If you could predict the state sequence of such an FSM, you could tell whether the FSM would enter the 'halt' state.

IMO this is analogous to arguing that:

1) the animatronic band at Chuck E. Cheese could be programmed to play identical music to that which has been (previously) performed by a human band (and recorded in perfect detail).

2) because they produce identical outputs the 2 bands are equivalent

3) if they are equivalent, they must equally be said to create original music

4) the animatronic band obviously doesn't create original music

5) from (3) and (4) no band can create original music

He also elides any discussion of whether or not actual human intelligence manages to avoid the failure modes he uses to conclude that neural networks are not intelligent - e.g. he mentions adversarial examples fooling visual classifier networks without mentioning that "optical illusions" exist and people will reliably misperceive certain images in certain ways too.

I actually agree that neural nets as they currently exist are aggressively stupid, but the author concludes way too much.

TL;DR, author starts from a premise that there is something uniquely special about human consciousness that machines can't duplicate, and reaches the conclusion that there is something uniquely special about human consciousness that machines can't duplicate.

<comment><USER13> Also, depending on how physics and the mind works, it's possible that human minds would be representable as finite state machines. If this argument were valid, it's an argument against human consciousness too in that case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To be honest I struggle with causal reasoning myself. I can intuit on some level that one thing causes another, and that in the process of causing the "other" the "thing" itself is reflexively brought about. This leaves me stuck in a place trying to make sense of things infinitely far apart in space and time all influencing each other instantaneously.

<comment><USER15> You can't send information faster than C, so if causality == communication it's not instantaneously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "all the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting"

<comment><USER17> Yeah, and then the same Judea Pearl also admits that "we didn't expect curve fitting to work so well".

<comment><USER18> That's because their mental model of AI is not good enough. Apparently humans don't really 'understand AI', the irony.

By the way, causal reasoning is not the product of just one human, it is based on experiments, observations and careful model building by the whole human society over long spans of time.

We didn't understand even basic things such as infections and the role of hygiene until recently. What does that say about our causal reasoning powers? That we were stupid?

We know how COVID spreads and many people are still exposing themselves without care, sometimes causing their own demise or somebody else's. Why isn't causal reasoning working for us all the time?

I think humans can only do causal reasoning when they have a very good model of the thing they are trying to understand. Causal intelligence is not in our brains naturally, it depends on having access to specific models.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I feel like the author has unreasonably strict expectations with some of his examples. Humans sometimes crash cars, misunderstand grocery lists, or learn to say things just as racist as Tay did - surely he wouldn't argue that any human who does dumb things lacks phenomenal consciousness.

<comment><USER20> Not to say that _any_ dumb person lacks consciousness, but you might be surprised how many cognitive scientists think not everyone is "conscious." There could be zombie/automatons living all around us.

<comment><USER18> > There could be zombie/automatons living all around us.

So now we have 'consciousness of the gaps'. It's an ever retreating concept, as AI advances what we call consciousness recedes into these gaps. Now we're discussing about how some humans are not really 'conscious', what next? Maybe in the end the only remaining 'conscious' people will be philosophers who don't believe in AI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >but that AI machinery - qua computation - cannot understand anything at all

Ugh, here we go. I swear this was all gone over with a very similar post just a week ago where it was pointed out that if an author says physical things can't 'understand' or whatever else, they are implying some non-physical soul- spark in humans.

<comment><USER22> Then it was pointed out wrongly and this isn't some spiritual talk. If you are able to retrofit new knowledge into the observations and categories you've previously formed by correcting what you already know and by changing perspective so that you can have proper inputs without causing contradictions, you understand it. Do you think curve fitting does this?

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure what you mean by "curve fitting" here. I would definitely say that a deep neural net has observations and categories, and I think it's pretty reasonable to characterize the training process as retrofitting new knowledge into it by correcting its knowledge and changing its perspective.

<comment><USER22> This is the reply I was expecting, and I think you are right, but a CNN doesn't take into account any contradictions. It doesn't test the input for correctness, it just tries to categorize and fucked if the results make no sense.

<comment><USER19> I'd agree, but I'm not sure how much this is an inherent problem. To what degree does it just reduce to needing a good conceptual framework for a "makes no sense" category?

<comment><USER22> I would be interested in the kind of model which will tell you something is wrong when you show it a black square and call it a black square, then show it a white square and call it a black square. Not the kind of model which would average the results and adapt to nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can't stand with the unquestioned use of "understanding" here and there - did the author give a more precise definition of that? (I couldn't find any in the paper.) It reads more like a ranty blog piece than an academic article. It's sad that some people will read this and get confused.

</comment><comment><USER24> Thanks for the link. It will take quite a while to read the paper.

</comment><comment><USER25> We all know it but somehow ... 'it is not so much that AI machinery cannot grasp causality, but that AI machinery - qua computation - cannot understand anything at all.'

<comment><USER18> > Figure (8) shows a screen-shot from an iPhone after Siri, Apple's AI > 'chatbot', was asked to add a 'litre of books' to a shopping list; Siri's > response clearly demonstrates that it doesn't understand language

So his conclusion is based on Siri, an AI assistant I would agree was 'stupid', but not representative of SOTA. It's unfair to judge AI by Siri, Siri is a mass produced system with scaling costs, Apple can't host GPT-3 for everyone yet. Not even Google can use the latest and greatest neural nets in mass produced AI systems because they don't have the hardware and it would not make economical sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > the ability to infer causes from observed phenomena

So 'reading the room'. In social settings you can't follow logic and rationale blindly because there are these things on two legs full of meat and organs that don't like it.

</comment><comment><USER27> Relevant: Youtube algorithm blocked a video on a popular chess channel with 1800 videos, supposedly for a "racism" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSjrYWPxsG8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSjrYWPxsG8)

<comment><USER2> What is your point? People make bad calls all the time too. I got a ticket for parking my car behind a sign saying "no parking beyond this point."

As a secondary point, I suspect youtube's classifier is a bag of heuristics they are constantly fiddling with. Any failures of it are no indictment of the futility of developing AGI.

<comment><USER27> 1\. I don't need "a point" to attach a relevant information.

2\. But I indeed have one - giving algorithms so much power without an appropriate checking and appeal process is clearly wrong.

3\. This doesn't imply we shouldn't do science or develop AI systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's like a conspiracy that Americans didn't land on the Moon. Maybe a few decades will pass and people will be surprised to learn that on a leading technical forum people entertained ideas of absence of progress.</comment>


Ask HN: Help me land a job? - <AUTHOR>

A little bio about myself:
Personal: I am a computer science student from India.Completed my undergraduation from a very unknown local college in May 2014.Being from a local college pushes me behind, having no good exposure of software engineering.
Projects/Work Experience: Last Summer, I had done a remote internship on game development. Developed a web-application(game) using web technologies. Apart from being intern for 2 months and developing websites for the college technical fests, I have no work experience or any perfect knowledge regarding a particular domain.
Why unemployed?: I started a startup in my final year of undergraduation and failed miserably. I have no time left to prepare for Interviews or sharpen my programming skills. I thought of to first become expert regarding a particular domain like Web Development, Machine Learning and then apply for a job.
Realization: After 4 months of doing some web development, Machine Learning, MOOC's, reading books,realized that i am no where near perfect in either of them. It just been waste of valuable 4 months of time. I feel work experience is more valuable than reading books alone in home. So, I decided to work on my skills in the coming days/weeks/months to land into a job and then work on to become expert.
Skills: Cpp - Solved around 300 problems in various online judges(ID:kp25). Python - beginner. Javascript - Developed websites, web-application during Summer Internship.
What are the do's and dont's that i should follow in the coming months, What further skills or languages should i learn that helps me in getting close to land into a job?
Willing to relocate for job and join immediately. Ready to learn any further skills if required for the job. If you do think i'm good enough for the job role you've considering please Contact me at the following email id:  prasanth[dot]25k[at]gmail[dot]com <comment><USER2> It looks like you want to be perfect, but you won't, especially not alone and in a small period of time.

Plus it's not like there is a fixed level that you reach and then it's done, you are a master at [insert something here]. People learn everyday, especially in development, and the "right way" today is not the same as tomorrow nor yesterday.

I think you can land a job, I see no reason why you couldn't, but don't expect yourself to become an expert without actually working in a/multiple real(s) project(s) imo.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you got any code examples?

Reading through your little biography, you don't have a lot of experience so you're unlikely to hit the ground running, I'd have worries about giving you a project...

On the other hand, you seem like you're a keen learner and the breadth of topics you've mentioned is positive. Keep a positive mental attitude and highlight some code examples so someone willing to take a punt can better assess your current abilities.

<comment><AUTHOR> apart from competitive programming submissions, i don't have any code examples.. may be should start working on some open source projects

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He prasanth, So we spoke privately by email, and we agreed to do the whole job finding process publicly for everyone to see that it works. If it fails and I walk away I pay you USD $1000. If you walk away or fail to take the steps then the deal is null and void. If you reply to this commment publicly then we have a deal and we will start today.

Thanks Zubair

<comment><AUTHOR> yep go ahead with the search process :)

<comment><USER4> Hi Prasanth, You need to have daily contact with me if you want to find a job. Email me if someone is ill in the family or something and you need to delay this process for a few weeks/months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quick update to everyone. Prasanth has already found something, which will keep him working for the next few keeps, probably end of November. If he is job less again at that point we will continue.... boom, another success! :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I can find you a job, 100% guaranteed, if you are serious, I have helped 100s of other Indians find jobs. Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com. Even better let us blog publicly about my quest to find you a job so people can see that NemCV is 100% effective!

<comment><USER5> Why do you advertise "No signup required", yet require a sign-up?

<comment><USER4> Actually we have since spoken offline and he has agreed to take me up on the offer and the whole job search will be posted to this hacker news thread, so I put my money where my mouth is! :)</comment></comment></comment>


Movement rises to keep humans, not robots, in the driver's seat - <AUTHOR> https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2018/10/16/fighting-keep-humans-not-robots-drivers/1601286002/ <comment><USER2> Ludites.

<comment><USER3> Nope. Luddites (sic) were a social movement, and a pushback against a better, more efficient system.

Whereas pushback against a system that's built on hope and today's slapdash software standards, essentially "you can't make an omelette without killing a few people, but it will be far more awesomer in Our Bright Future, if only you let us run the show" is somewhat different. Your analogy leaks all over the place.

<comment><USER2> I think that people working close to the steam weaver could have been thinking the same about the eggs and the omelette. And yet here we are.

Software is a tool. A really diverse tool. And you can have it written in may different ways; you can have Wordpress or any other buggy system or you can have the software on board of the Voyager probes. There are standards that can be enforced and new 'unknown unknowns' to solve but the technology is here to stay, Luddite.

<comment><USER3> And of course, anybody who doesn't applaud frenetically (mind you: not "who opposes"; merely "not enthusiastic enough") is lumped with the Enemy. Ad hominems mean "I have run out of arguments, now on to insults." Also, can I borrow your crystal ball, if you _know_ that this technology _will_ prevail? I hope you haven't been predicting Betamax with that one...

As for "standards that _can_ be enforced" \- yes, that's where the industry is headed, but we haven't seen a Therac-class disaster in our generation yet. We'll get there...in both cases.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


US accuses Russia of cyber attacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-37592684? <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663383](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663383).</comment>


Show HN: HoboJacket, want to see hobos clad in your rival school's jackets? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hobojacket.tk

<comment><USER2> I can't believe the level of elitism and immaturity that this idea represents. Firstly, homeless are not hobos. Second, you want to give homeless jackets of rivals - why? Because you want to laugh at them. How elitist. An MIT project you say?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this does represent a certain level of immaturity. The idea behind this originated as a prank, but it was meant to be a harmless one. We didn't want to dance around being politically correct so we broke some social norms.

However, we are not giving the homeless jackets because we want to laugh at them. We are trying to put a spin on the gamification of charity to see if we can get people to do more than they would otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> While I applaud clothing the homeless, this kinda struck me as in poor taste (mainly the rival school part).. but in saying that I never went through the US college system so maybe I'm missing some vital context.

It seems tacky, tbh: but if it puts jackets on backs then I'm all for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, you have this enormous amount of energy in the form of college rivalries going towards (in my opinion) a relatively silly ball game. Our hypothesis is that if you could tap just 1% of that energy, you could accomplish something great. This is our first foray into tapping that intensity.

<comment><USER4> Ever heard the aphorism, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"? Your intent is to tap a negative to achieve a positive. Unfortunately, you also reinforce a negative.

Clothing a homeless individual with a rival's garb as a means to insult one's rival reinforces the idea that it is ok to use a homeless person as an instrument of insult. It is not. It is dehumanizing, and treads dangerously close to the line of thinking that leads to projects like Bum Fights [1].

1 - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bum_fights>

<comment><AUTHOR> It is certainly not our hope that people use this as an avenue to dehumanize the unfortunate.

But is it more acceptable to see the unfortunate clearly wearing thin clothing when it's 20 degrees out and maintain the idea that they are people who must maintain their pride, or offer them the chance to sell out? It's a hard question to answer, but I think society has already answered that for us. Fast food restaurants already offer young professionals a chance to sell out by offering higher wages than many starting jobs in alternative industries [1].

1 - [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont- pay-t...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-the- bills.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

<comment><USER4> > It is certainly not our hope that people use this as an avenue to dehumanize > the unfortunate.

There is no way to use a homeless person as a prop that doesn't dehumanize them.

> But is it more acceptable to see the unfortunate clearly wearing thin > clothing when it's 20 degrees out and maintain the idea that they are people > who must maintain their pride, or offer them the chance to sell out?

I wholely reject this line of thinking. Doing one thing right does not absolve a wrong. By that line of reasoning, the people in the Bum Fights videos were better off, because they were paid. Net positive, am I right!?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a really terrible idea. It's not so much "edgy," as heartbreaking. Instead of mocking them, perhaps you can contact any of these Cambridge organizations and do something less dehumanizing that might actually be helpful:

<http://www.horizonsforhomelesschildren.org/> <http://sparechangenews.net/> [http://www.ci.cambridge.ma.us/DHSP/programsforadults/multise...](http://www.ci.cambridge.ma.us/DHSP/programsforadults/multiservicecenterforthehomeless/mscprograms.aspx)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I agree this is a terrible idea in some respects, and we're not certain if we're set on actually donating the jackets. One route we're actively considering is contacting the donors and asking them if they're open to the possibility of us directly giving the funds towards more traditional nonprofits, and refunding those against the idea.

<comment><USER5> I hope you have the empathy to understand how terrible this idea is. Seriously, <3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why not clothe Hobos in your own school's jackets? People should be proud of helping people.

<comment><USER7> This idea makes a lot more sense to me.</comment></comment>


Music Superstars Are the New One Percenters - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/news/2421411/body/ <comment><AUTHOR> WSJ Article: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/music-superstars-are-the-new- on...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/music-superstars-are-the-new-one- percenters-11556962200)</comment>


EuroMOMO (European mortality monitoring) – Maps and Graphs - <AUTHOR> https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ <comment><AUTHOR> _EuroMOMO is a European mortality monitoring activity, aiming to detect and measure excess deaths related to seasonal influenza, pandemics and other public health threats._

 _Official national mortality statistics are provided weekly from the 24 European countries in the EuroMOMO collaborative network, supported by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO)._</comment>


McGee Days Two and Three: Steak, Fish, Burgers and Love «  Cooking Issues - <AUTHOR> http://cookingissues.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/mcgee-days-two-and-three-steak-fish-burgers-and-love/ <comment><AUTHOR> One of my favorite posts on one of my favorite cooking blogs. I'm a particular fan of the computer modeling of the effects of various flip intervals on the cooking time and doneness of steaks.</comment>