This sort of citizen engagement is cute, naïve and ultimately pointless. Where I live in the US the major landowner(s) and local billionaire(s) ultimately controls these things. I’m not being sarcastic.
Glendale, Colorado is the quintessential example of this. Like 2,000 people live there due to insane gerrymandering, but there are tons of businesses and money moving around. The mayor gives crazy zoning benefits to his wife (strip club and dispensary on the main road, right next to target and chikfila) among other controversy. Dunafon controls the county with the help of other powerful players.
Lack of engagement in local elections and politics is a major issue in the United States, there is a huge amount of low level corruption like this because its really easy to game things when 20 people vote.
Yep, largely the same for me. Half the city council and most of the planning commission seats are held by real estate people or developers. The state government is heavily influenced by the Realtors Association, and will frequently override local ordinances at the state level when they don't go favorably enough for the real estate industry. It was pretty disappointing to discover.
> Where I live in the US the major landowner(s) and local billionaire(s) ultimately controls these things
Idk exactly what you mean by `major landowner(s)`, but where I live, zoning and permitting is controlled by retired people who own homes and have all the time to show up to 2pm meetings on Tuesdays and demand nothing new get built to "preserve character". They are landowners, but they're certainly not billionaires. The young people who need housing are working and thus can't show up, thus nothing gets built, creating a flywheel of stagnation and price increases.
The point of the OP post, AFAICT, is that even in places where there are no powerful billionaire-backed campaigns and lobbying, and people can have their way with simple, effortless voting, too few people even care! And those who act, do so cluelessly, or in a narrowly selfish way.
The most powerful weapon the powerful have against the majority of "ordinary people" is to propagate the idea that all this local stuff is boring and ultimately decides nothing. To make people stop caring.
I find it curious that I earned -2 points. Perhaps my points in the post were too pointed for some people. That, or some people really love civics theatre.
"We can't do anything because the billionaires" is such dumb cynicism. Actually, local government has a say in zoning almost everywhere in the US. If more people participated, they could make a real difference.
But seriously, why is it that mainstream press avoid reporting on these kinds of situations / movements? I assume they run risk of retribution if they do?
Or the media may be unwilling to report on potential corruption within parts of the Greenlandic government, because that would blur the clear-cut narrative: Greenland as the good side, Trump as the villain.
If only they’d make the T fare free and run more frequently and later into the night. The C line in Brookline has the potential to be extremely convenient, but at present most of the time it’s easier to take an Uber, or drive.
Probably not. For most people cost is not the issue of why they don't ride. Free would increase a little, but most people are not riding because the service isn't there. Service can be one of Frequency, speed, or ability to get to the destination.
Transit needs to: Get you from where you are, to where you want to be, when you want to go, in a reasonable amount of time, for a reasonable cost. If you lack any of those things and transit isn't useful. Generally cost is the only part of transit that is reasonable (but not always) and so it isn't something to focus on.
People who ask for free transit are really saying transit is for the poor and "normal people" should just drive.
Worse, free fares can cause undesirables to cluster and abuse the system.
Transit begin able to be paid with a phone has removed most or all the "friction" arguments, the need is to make it reliable (arrive on time) and frequent (so you don't have to meticulously plan your day).
> Transit begin able to be paid with a phone has removed most or all the "friction" arguments
That's the sort of thing that would get many people to avoid using it because of the growing (and accurate) sentiment that anything that requires you to use your phone is using it as a tracking device.
Transit should accept lots of options. Your credit card, a phone, or a pass. Modern e-readers can read all of the above and are very cheap so there is no reason to refuse any (unless they charge too high of a fee)
If you want to remove friction set a way such that a family has a maximum monthly charge they will pay. It does mean you need to track people, but if you a careful in how this is done it is worth it since cost for frequent travelers could be an objection and you want this peace of mind that your max cost is known.
> Modern e-readers can read all of the above and are very cheap so there is no reason to refuse any (unless they charge too high of a fee)
Nearly all of them will have some recurring service fees and paying ~3% to process credit card payments is fairly unavoidable, but those aren't even the biggest costs. You have to install card readers everywhere, which is not just the equipment cost but also the labor to install them, and maintain them, and keep them networked with all the costs of that. If any of it fails it's a service interruption which means you need redundancy and overnight support. People call you with billing problems or commit fraud and have to be investigated.
What's the point of any of that when the fares are generating less than 1% of the state budget, have privacy issues and deter people from doing something you want to encourage?
A familial "maximum charge" would be so nice, simplifying things and meaning you don't have to worry about it.
The only time you should really be worried about limiting rides on transit is if the system is already overburdened (perhaps as the proverbial Japanese trains with shovers).
> Free fares would significantly increase ridership, no?
It's not just about that. Higher transportation costs are heavily regressive. People with less money can't afford to live in the city and have to commute and then anything they pay to commute is independent of their wages, so $100 in fares is $100 whether you make $200k/year or $20k, whereas even the taxes like sales tax labeled as "regressive" would have the former person paying ten times more than the latter.
Moreover, fares are often heavily subsidized to begin with -- in large part because of the above -- but then not zeroing them out requires you to still pay the full cost of the collections infrastructure. Which is actually really expensive, because then you need turnstiles, payment processing equipment, security to prevent theft or card skimming, billing departments to deal with credit card fraud or chargebacks, customer service when people have problems, enforcement against people who skip the fare, etc. None of those costs go away if the fare is even $0.01, but they all disappear when it's actually zero.
And people who have never used it before then wouldn't have to figure out how to set it up, which is a significant source of friction independent of the fare and can cause people to just get an Uber (which they've already set up) or rent a car etc. Which causes people to never even try using mass transit, and then regard it as that thing they never use so why is the government spending money on it, instead of that thing that was convenient to use when their car was in the shop and made them realize that they can get by as a one-car household instead of two, or at least something worth supporting because they remember actually using it.
On top of that, removing the fares is better for privacy because then you're not tying your movement history to your payment card.
Speaking generally, free fairs also provide various benefits to a community such as reduced use of cars and easier access for lower income access to jobs and services.
you probably dont live in Boston, because there is no one on the planet that drives into boston rather than taking the T because its too expensive. people drive downtown and pay $40 for parking instead of taking the T.
That's assuming there is nothing else on the ledger.
Suppose you have to choose between a suburban house without any convenient access to mass transit (i.e. you're going to have to drive everywhere) or a more expensive unit which is closer to the city and is near a transit stop. Paying $40 for parking is going to offset the cost advantage of the less expensive housing and leave a lot of people near the breakeven point, and then a $100/mo difference in transit fares could be the deciding factor.
theres plenty of essentially free park and ride stations. theres commuter rail access in basically a 1 hour drive radius of the city. nothing about what you said is relevant.
rich people (of which boston has plenty even in the burbs where average house prices are 800k+) pay to avoid existing near poor people. they think they are going to get stabbed on the subway.
if the subway was faster, safer, cleaner, but more expensive, more people would use it.
> theres plenty of essentially free park and ride stations.
Which is a huge pain, because now you need to have a car, and already be in it to drive to the park and ride. A drive on which there could be traffic. Which means you could miss your train unless you leave early, but then you're standing around the train station doing nothing (and not getting paid) even when there isn't traffic, instead of spending that time either at home or at work. Whereas if you lived near the train stop you wouldn't have to leave early to not miss your train.
Meanwhile if you already need to have a car, and you're already in it and driving it, most people aren't going to drive northeast to the park and ride and then take a train southeast to their destination instead of saving time by just driving directly east all the way to the destination. So the thing that gets them on the train is not having to drive to get to it.
> theres commuter rail access in basically a 1 hour drive radius of the city.
There's commuter rail lines that go an hour from the center of the city. That's not at all the same thing as there being a stop within walking distance of every suburban home.
> they think they are going to get stabbed on the subway.
The people who think they're going to get stabbed on the subway are not going to use the subway. We're talking about the people who might actually use it.
> if the subway was faster, safer, cleaner, but more expensive, more people would use it.
The way you make it faster is to get more people to use it so you can justify more frequent service, which eliminating fares facilitates. The way to make it safer and cleaner is to get more people to use it, so there are more people who care if it's safer and cleaner because they're using it. Which is again facilitated by eliminating fares.
The only thing fares get you is an amount of money that represents less than 1% of the state budget, and then you lose a significant proportion of that to the cost of collecting the fares. It's taking a privacy-invasive deadweight loss to create a deterrent to something you're trying to encourage people to do.
There is nothing convenient about doing park and ride. It's something you do because whatever your other options are suck worse. Commuter rail inevitably dumps you somewhere you don't need to be so then you have to take the T from there. There is no way not to make it a slog of a commute with that many transitions.
Rider fair is only one way to fund transit. My city (Corvallis, OR) provides free bus service city wide since 2011. The newest addition is free bus service to surrounding cities (up to McMinville and down to Eugene).
It's paid for with state and federal grants, university (OSU) contribution, as well as a utility fee.
Because governments aren't allowed to simply provide services for free anymore. It is inconceivable that something like moving around on mass transit would be free at point of use.
brother the MBTA arleady bleeds money at an astounding rate despite a large budget and fairs.
Why would your solution to be to make the rest of the state pay more for services they cant even use rather than make the people that use it pay the true cost it take to run it?
People that drive cars actually pay most of the cost to upkeep car infrastructure. people that ride the T dont.
Call me crazy, but maybe mass transit doesn't need to make money to be useful. Maybe the entire point of government is to provide services to its citizens. I mean, I don't pay $2.40 every time we drone strike some Yemeni wedding, right? Why should I have to pay to take a train in a city, which is about a thousand times more useful to me?
>People that drive cars actually pay most of the cost to upkeep car infrastructure. people that ride the T dont.
This is... so ridiculously untrue. Most car-dependent infrastructure is funded with federal dollars, the vast majority of which are conjured up out of thin air and vibes.
You can say the same thing about most federal spending.
Car and truck owners pay fuel tax and registration tax (hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, especially heavy trucks) which all ostensibly goes to road upkeep and related infrastructure. It may not cover all the costs but neither do transit fares.
I don't know anything about Boston's system but most transit agencies would need to have fares in the tens of dollars per ride, at least, to come anywhere close to covering their costs. This is much closer to the costs of using a car, probably not coincidentally. Getting from point A to point B has a value that is independent of the transport mechanism.
> Call me crazy, but maybe mass transit doesn't need to make money to be useful.
This is such a heinous non-sequiter i dont even know where to begin. Government services take money to operate. Government services are paid by taxes. In a democracy, you need to make people agree that they want to pay taxes for particular services.
The 60% of massachusetts residents who dont live in teh greater boston metro area do not want to pay for a service they dont use, so it is nearly politically impossible to raise the budget of the MBTA.
So if you are a massachusetts state legistlator you have a couple options. you can allow the MBTA to continue to deteriorate while also going over budget every year (current state) or you could increase the fare to compensate for the actual cost it takes to run the service, or your third option, which is to decrease the amount of money that goes to an already deteriorating public service.
edit: 50-55% of car related infrastructure costs are paid by gas taxes, tolls, excise taxes etc. currently <30% of the mbtas budget is covered by fares.
Services have costs. They don't lose money. No one says the US military "loses hundreds of billions of dollars a year" or expects them to cover it back.
the MBTA already absolutely bleeds an incredible amount of money. No businesses in Boston are even open late, theres no night life. 90% of the young people in the city are nerds doing Phds.
I loved living right on the red line, but its just not worth it unless we figure out how to make it not cost a fortune.
What counts as a “disorder” is often not based on empirical evidence but on what is determined as undesirable, maladaptive, or outside the social norm…by Americans. The DSM in many ways represents the worst of so-called social science.
But conceptually in the DSM most disorders are defined by whether they cause hardship in the patient's life. Whether that means some disorders would not have to be considered disorders in an ideal society is irrelevant for this context, because people need help navigating the society we have.
Reading your linked article, it's clear that this was viewed as absolute quackery even back then, and is about as conflict-of-interesty as you can get: commissioned by Louisiana at the height of the Civil War, and proposed by a doctor who served in the Confederate Army [1]. His suggested treatment for Drapetomania was "whipping the devil out of them".
This was proposed a decade before the war started and was reprinted widely in the Southern States. That the North found it ridiculous is a bit like saying that because the Chinese Academy of Sciences says there is no such thing as autism then it's obviously viewed as quackery in the West too.
Are you able to tell us a bit more about the Chinese Academy of Sciences saying there is no such thing as autism? I was curious but cannot find anything about this.
There's none lol. I may have participated in studies as a researcher partially funded by Chinese academy of sciences because we had Chinese collaboration, and some studies involved autism biomarker research.
Slaves wanting freedom is a mental disorder if it is maladaptive, debilitating, and infeasible in their circumstance, no? Being crazy doesn't mean you're wrong, it could mean you are right in a world where you must be wrong to survive.
> Fate, which takes away healthy, free, young people, never pardoned me once. It has let me live all this time, quite lucid, but closed up in here ... since I was ten years old .... eighty years in psychiatric hospital for a headache
Surely you’re not trying to draw some conclusion between an entire countries modern day medical field and a theory a person proposed in the 1800s, right?
Hi, not the parent poster here. I believe the argument being made is that diagnostic criteria, and diagnoses themselves, can be shaped by cultural norms. As the Overton window shifts, so do the thoughts and behaviors that we deem pathological.
> Surely you’re not trying to draw some conclusion between an entire countries modern day medical field and a theory a person proposed in the 1800s, right?
That would depend on whether anything has changed since the 1800s. But that's very clearly not so -- consider that recovered memory therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy), based on as much science as drapetomania, was practiced in the 1990s, and still has adherents today.
Also, for human psychology to be regarded as a medical field, it would have to be based in science. But human psychology studies the mind, therefore by definition it's not based in science.
Im not arguing people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder shouldnt get benefits.
Its that the spectrum isnt as related enough that insividual disorders would make more sense. But that would require getting the health insurance industry to do more adjustments.
How else would you do it? Unlike an e.g. viral infection there is no positive test you can look at. Generally a disorder is considered something that significantly impacts someone's life, getting in the way of things like working, social life, life enjoyment. I don't think you can be totally objective about this, and you get into things like if i.e. autism is mild is it a disorder? It's pretty clear to me it should be considered as such after a certain level of severity, but maybe it shouldn't always be if it has minimal impact on the person
> Generally a disorder is considered something that significantly impacts someone's life, getting in the way of things like working, social life, life enjoyment.
With the same argument, we could arguue that working and social life are getting in the way how I am, thus working and social life should be considered disorders.
These reductio ad absurdum arguments are wholly unpersuasive. The fact that there are some debatable gray areas in the DSMs seems like poor reasoning to throw the baby out with the bathwater. E.g. things like schizophrenia, OCD, major depressive disorder, etc. are so highly disruptive to the individuals involved that arguing that they shouldn't be disorders (or, contrary, that anything else is a disorder) feels like an unhelpful semantic game.
A ridiculous argument. Most often a disorder will impact activities you enjoy just as much as those you don't. Very broadly speaking, if all of your symptoms go away when you get home from work then you don't have a disorder, just a demanding, stressful job. That's certainly true for disorders like ADHD and ASD that are under attack these days.
A "disorder" is just a collection of symptoms that have been empirically shown to benefit from certain treatments. If someone doesn't think they have those symptoms then they can just not seek a diagnosis or treatment. Nobody is forcing a diagnosis on somebody who doesn't want it.
If you look into the history of psychiatry I think you’ll find quite a lot of examples when diagnosis and treatment was forced on people who didn’t want it. It’s not hard to find contemporary such examples either.
Yes, that did unfortunately happen in the history of psychiatry. I am talking about modern American psychiatric practices (say, the last 10-20 years).
If the proposition here is that mental health disorders are fabricated maliciously in order to sell more medication or enforce some sort of social order, then I don't see how the very rare court-ordered enforcement of short-term stays at psychiatric institutions could be the mechanism for that.
The vast majority of people in the US who receive psychiatric care do so voluntarily, because they experience real symptoms that really affect their life, for which they need real treatment.
> The vast majority of people in the US who receive psychiatric care do so voluntarily
That's true, but that's not what the parent comment claimed. They didn't say a majority receive psychiatric care involuntarily, they said it's not hard to find examples who receive it involuntarily, and that's true. Lots of people are forced to take psychiatric medication right now, in developed countries including the US.
> Lots of people are forced to take psychiatric medication right now, in developed countries including the US.
Just as an example, in the UK the verb "to section" is shorthand for "to commit to involuntary confinement in hospital under the legal authority of one or more sections of the Mental Health Act"
>> Nobody is forcing a diagnosis on somebody who doesn't want it.
Ahh, you sweet summer child
Tell that to all multiple sclerosis patients that were tortured by psych departments of hospitals before (and after) the MRI machine was created.
Tell that to sleep apnea patients (especially the women, especially especially the younger thinner women in whom they say “it cannot happen to”) that are given a psych diagnoses for seeking treatment for symptoms before sleep disordered breathing issues are ever even brought into question.
The main problem is that DSM diagnoses are indeed forced on people. Usually highly incorrectly, too.
>What counts as a “disorder” is often not based on empirical evidence but on what is determined as undesirable, maladaptive, or outside the social norm
What's the alternative then? What would "empirically" determining what a "disorder" is look like?
>…by Americans
Most of the world outside of the US uses the ICD, not the DSM.
Agreeing that social science is harder than most, I see these definitions as “circle around a set of presentations / symptoms / behaviours “. As somebody who has several circles around them, it doesn’t bother me overly. Historical enforced procedures / incarcerations did, but I understand value of “common language”. In a wildly different area that may or may not resonate with HN, I find similar value in PMP or ITIL - it’s not the One True Way, it is not necessarily a permanent scientific best approach… but it does give people of today a way to communicate with each other across domains, companies, cultures and experiences .
> The DSM in many ways represents the worst of so-called social science.
No. You need to read the thing.
The DSM only aims to be a tool to help standardize communication of often nebulous and otherwise ill-defined entities. It says so in the introductory pages.
People shouldn’t treat it like a biology textbook, it’s a self-described ontology at most.
But people do. Psychology courses do, with a similar "tool to help standardize communication" line recited robotically and then practically ignored. Most practicing psychologists do as well, to only a somewhat lesser degree.
You cannot have an authoritative textbook proscribing definitions, and then expect people to treat them as just "a self-described ontology" with all the nuances and caveats around that just because it says so somewhere in the introduction. Psychology of all fields should know that.
> But if you’re going to judge the book, judge it by how it presents itself, don’t judge it by how a third party misrepresents it.
As long as the boards don't go after the shrinks who "misrepresent" the DSM, I would claim that this misrepresentation is systemic of (and possibly even intended by) the psycho-industrial complex.
Boards are expected to “go after” professionals who do not provide a certain standard of care, but that has very little (if anything) to do with the DSM.
I think this comment just reinforces a misunderstanding of what the DSM actually is.
If the DSM merely described sets of symptoms and gave them names, I'd buy that. But by also mentioning (e.g. suggesting) specific treatments, the book is used as a prescription tool, not just a diagnostic tool.
> But if you’re going to judge the book, judge it by how it presents itself
Quite so. I just as we judge people by their actions, not their words, I judge the DSM by how it's actual content is structured, not by its introductory quip.
Why shouldn't it include a bunch of treatments if they've been shown to be beneficial? How would it be better if people had to go to some other book and look up those same conditions using the names listed in the DSM in order to find out which treatments might be useful?
Doctors (at least the good ones) aren't usually going in blind and just doing whatever the DSM tell them to as if they were following a flowchart or checklist. The DSM (which I'm not even fully defending here, I personally it feel has all kinds of problems) is just a guide. It's not the only tool in a doctor's arsenal and they aren't obligated to follow it.
> Why shouldn't it include a bunch of treatments if they've been shown to be beneficial?
It most certainly should, I'm not saying it shouldn't. My argument is that, by suggesting specific treatments, the DSM is a prescription tool. Not merely a diagnostic tool.
Oftentimes in psychiatry the treatments are just as important as anything else in establishing a diagnosis.
There’s a well-known concept of “diagnosis by treatment” because unfortunately that’s often the best we can do in practice. It sounds backwards, and yeah, it is backwards, but oftentimes it’s the best we’ve got.
At the same time you want treatments and clinical presentations to be somewhat coherent, and you don’t want practitioners going totally rogue and deviating from the standard of care in a way that could harm people, so yeah the conditions and their potential treatments are associated.
Most discussion of treatments in the DSM are various forms of therapy. Most pharmaceutical treatments that are mentioned are about broad classes of medications, and they’re all old drugs with generics on the market. It’s not a book you consult for pharma info.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you say, although I did not know the concept of diagnosis by treatment is actually formerly recognised. That is exactly why the DSM is a prescription tool, not merely a diagnostic tool as reading of the introductory text would have one believe.
> What counts as a “disorder” is often not based on empirical evidence but on what is determined as undesirable, maladaptive, or outside the social norm…by Americans.
I've seen that used before to dismiss the severity of conditions like autism and especially ADHD. It's often coming from a well-meaning place, and sometimes it's just a comforting story people tell themselves in order to not feel as deficient ("The problem isn't me, it's the system!").
It's also absolutely true that the demands society places on all of us are unnatural and often excessive, but the fact is that even absent all external expectations some people with mental illness will be unable to accomplish what they themselves want and should be able to accomplish.
Even the most utopian, accepting, accommodating society it wouldn't be enough to make up for some people's inability to function.
I feel the same about a lot of the "super power" talk when it comes to mental illness. There are advantages and disadvantages to just about anything, but on the whole conditions like ADHD or autism tend to do way more harm than good.
My inability of being in nature without a feeling of being tortured comes from my brain not working correctly and it's not "undesired behavior". Luckily, my ADHD meds are able to fix that.
The exercise and food science people are the worst of social science buddy. Or just “social” something, because it’s not science. “Science-based” always makes me laugh.
The DSM only matters if somebody is actively seeking treatment for something that they have a problem with in their own situation. So what’s in there is totally irrelevant for the public at large. It’s only if somebody shows up and says there’s something going on that they don’t like. It’s really just billing codes, man. The reality is far different anyway, and it just gets distilled down to these primitive codes.
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