@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Alon

@Alon@mastodon.social

I write about public transport and do research for NYU's Marron Institute. I've previously lived in Tel Aviv, Singapore, the Riviera, New York, Providence, Vancouver, Stockholm, Paris.

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Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Why are people boosting reactionary "medieval peasants actually were freer than modern office workers" shit into my feed? And why is it from kolektiva.social of all places? No, people, peasants who owed a heritable debt and had to give their best animal to the lord when the head of the household died and couldn't leave the farm were not actually free. Stop acting like your boredom at meetings is oppression and stop doing reactionary socialism.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Special demerits go to the line about how taxes then were lower than today. Taxes in absolutist regimes are lower than in democracies, because democracies first of all have rule of law making it possible to charge taxes without turning that into threat of extralegal extraction, and second because they have redistribution. Taxes in Hong Kong are much lower than in Sweden; where are workers freer?

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

The point Debin Ma makes in his papers is that in Qing China, taxes were low as a strategy to permit magistrates to take money from the commoners extralegally, for example by demanding bribes. This way, the magistrates got paid in a way that the emperor could not know in enough detail, guaranteeing them a measure of security since the emperor could otherwise expropriate them at will. Manorialism worked the same way; the exploitation is just invisible to people who don't care to look into it.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

This is homophobic.

photos_floues, to random
@photos_floues@bagarrosphere.fr avatar

Roger Waters' claim to immortality is "The Wall".
A good part of which is essentially a whining, self-absorbed and paranoid nightmare, and thin pretext to dress up as a Nazi — rather suspiciously so.
It amuses me to no end that the high mark of the whole opera is "Comfortably Numb", whose inane lyrics by Waters merely support David Gilmour's music.

Pink Floyd's "Sex": "Stuck Zipper", "Condom wrapping" and "Shower" by Roger Waters; "Orgasm" by David Gilmour.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@photos_floues Yeah, The Final Cut was the rejecta from The Wall. But note that the Fletcher Memorial fantasy does include Brezhnev - the full tankieism only came later.

F100, to Russia
@F100@mastodon.social avatar

A reminder that the current Russia is not a country but the remnants of an empire and as the man says, all empires fall eventually. Ask the British. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Russia?wprov=sfti1

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@F100 I think it matters that while the UK had faster per capita growth in 1945-65 than in any 20-year period from the Middle Ages to WW2, Russian growth was infamously shit in 1988-2008, while the Warsaw Pact vassals grew quickly. (Ukraine grew even slower after the USSR's demise, but it was atypically militarized during the USSR - it was politically colonized but economically part of the core, unlike Poland.)

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@F100 Yeah, basically. It's remarkable how all these colonial mass starvations and war crimes didn't actually produce value for the metropole. They didn't even produce value for the specific social classes that pushed imperialism, i.e. the idle landowners.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

In a city with a metro system, each trainset should be painteed a separate theme, both for the art and for passenger recognizability ("I lost my bag on the train with the sunflower scenery"). If the lines have separate fleets (as in Paris and London but not Berlin), then the art could even be color-coded, so the Central line gets paintings with reds, the Piccadilly with dark blues, etc. What are some examples of themes for such painting?

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

This should also include some limited amounts of advertising, using brands that can expect to last for the lifetime of a trainset, or at least until mid-life refurbishment (20 years). For examples, Pokemon, Star Wars, the Disney Animated Canon, Barbie, Super Mario, DC and Marvel superheroes, and Hello Kitty - anything else I'm forgetting? These should be a minority of paintings, maybe 15-20% maximum.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@ostrich At stations, yeah. But trainsets need paint.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@DiegoBeghin @pony Why? New York manages with 10 colors including shuttles, London manages with 11, Tokyo with 13.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@bluGill @pony @DiegoBeghin Yeah, color always reinforces other things, including line names, numbers/letters, or both.

With thematic colors, the color reinforces other things as well. So a red line would have red-themed paintings: a bed of roses, Mars, a volcano, Cupid with a red heart, a cityscape with red brick buildings, the Sith, Super Mario, Spiderman. And then a green line would have different paintings, not the same ones but with a palette swap.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Gurre I don't even think it should be full wraps. Paint the interior and exterior, keeping the windows clear.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

I read recently (maybe yesterday?), I forget where, that Biden has been quietly doing a good move on immigration - using executive power to give hundreds of thousands of refugees legal status, such as Ukrainians (including a couple that I know), Venezuelans, and Afghans. It's mostly going under the radar, but in 2021-2 the US took in more refugees in absolute numbers than Germany (but not per capita), which wasn't true throughout the 2010s.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@VE2UWY It's not about corporate media; the Republicans are not attacking Biden on this either, preferring to focus their Two Minutes' Hate on teachers who mention to children that queer people exist.

kklevine, to random

I am thinking about writing/blogging again. Like about how academic libraries are made in the image of colonialist enterprises, and it will take more work to rectify than LibGuides.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@kklevine Can you explain how they're like colonial enterprises? I haven't heard this criticism of libraries before, only museums that hold on to artifacts dug under colonialism (like the British Museum but also many others). Is it the same issue for academic libraries, or is it something else?

adamgurri, to random
@adamgurri@mastodon.social avatar

Bryan Caplan on Nelson Mandella: "Like virtually all politicians, he measures up poorly against the standards of common decency." https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/01/mandela_reckles.html

Bryan Caplan on Christopher Rufo: "The least we can do is thank him from the bottom of our hearts." https://betonit.substack.com/p/what-should-i-ask-chris-rufo

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@adamgurri He's one of those pro-immigration-but people who I've seen multiple people cite as a reason they came to believe something negative about immigrants (e.g. that we are criminals) but never as a reason they came to believe something positive (e.g. that we deserve path to citizenship).

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Reactions to a video of a Meitei mob parading two naked, gang-raped Kuki women on the streets of Imphal:

Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud: "We are expressing our deep concern."
Modi: "My heart is filled with pain and anger."

You see? India and the BJP are assimilating to European values just fine. Modi would make an excellent UN secretary-general.

https://www.dw.com/en/india-supreme-court-modi-express-deep-concern-over-manipur-violence/a-66291966

pony, to random
@pony@blovice.bahnhof.cz avatar

Why is Hřib.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@pony Hey, he's better than anyone we've had as mayor in a while.

capntransit, to random
@capntransit@urbanists.social avatar

It's even hard to get transit advocates to talk about slashing highway funding!

RT @yfreemark Somehow in the name of fiscal responsibility it’s always possible to slash funding for rail, never possible to envision slashing (the much larger) slush fund for highways

RT @tonyromm This year there have been 2 major train derailments & the collapse of a piece of I-95. Yet Republicans are looking to slash funding for infrastructure as part of a package to fund the government.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/18/republican-spending-bills-infrastructure-cuts/

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@capntransit Don't blame me, at ETA we're hitting the new highway access + EV parking at JFK for the absurdly high costs.

interfluidity, to Economics

Meeting fixed overhead, with special attention to price discrimination, dominates how firms think about prices and wages, rather than the marginalist analysis of economic theory, writes https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-marginal-revolution-is-dead

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@interfluidity Overheads are not fixed costs - for example, subway operating costs, which are very overhead-heavy, display remarkably constant returns to scale. Many overheads grow proportionately to firm size, e.g. tax compliance is harder the bigger you are, CEO-line worker distance is larger and this requires better management techniques, etc.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Reminder, re the tankie meme about Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis: all occupied countries in WW2 had collaboration. South Korea was even run by collaborators like Park Chung-hee. Some countries had more collaboration with war crimes (Lithuania), others less (Italy). Russia and Ukraine were both pretty bad, if not Lithuania-bad. The main difference is, Russian nationalists play down the role of their collaborators where Ukrainian nationalists used to play it up in opposition to Russia.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Best I can tell, the focus on Ukrainians is because they alone didn't really get to tell an imagined story of resistance after the war. Hiwis and Trawnikis came from the entirety of occupied Eastern Europe plus some from Western Europe - plenty of concentration camp guards were Slovak, Russian-Cossack, etc. But after the war, Czechoslovakia got to rewrite its history and so did Russia, but Ukraine had its history written by Russia, which turned OUN into a much bigger and more unique thing.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@citykidPVD Austria has the absolute worst we-are-the-real-victims syndrome. They're even worse than the Poles (who suffered horrific abuses and had relatively little collaboration) or the Lithuanians (who, for all their enthusiastic collaboration, were still brutalized, if less than the Poles or Ukrainians or Belarusians). They were an integral, enthusiastic part of the Third Reich; the von Trapps famously left the country, and less famously could do so easily, unlike in the film.

DiegoBeghin, to random French
@DiegoBeghin@mastodon.social avatar

The Francophone right-liberal MR is the lone party of a 7-party coalition sabotaging the negotiations over a tax reform that would ease the burden on low wage earners.

They're really going full populist-accelerationist, even refusing to hand a win to their fellow right-wing moderates from Flanders. Open VLD and CD&V are under heavy pressure from the Flemish nationalists and if they collapse in the elections next year this country will be hard to govern indeed.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@DiegoBeghin Or the Gilets Jaunes - yeah, they're racist (because all white populist protests are racist, regardless of original topic), but the motivations were the fuel tax and the speed limit.

ww3real, to random
@ww3real@mastodon.social avatar

Gao reassures the rest of the Central Military Commission that after the PLA wins in Burma, India will not be able to threaten a first strike - PLA air supremacy will ensure only the submarines are a threat and they'll cause less damage than the PLA has taken conventionally.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@sfsworms @ww3real All? Probably not. Enough, between ABM and air supremacy, to make this comparable to the existing death tolls inflicted by conventional bombings (so far by China on India, Thailand, and Burma, not the reverse)? Sure. As soon as it's not MAD, the side that's winning conventionally can credibly threaten one-sided extermination if the loser strikes first.

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