9 ms·

These regulations are the results of social evolution, and explain why it's so hard to be a young adult today, across all industrialized societies. I believe t

• s_q_b 10y ago
  "The first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the third generation blows it." Digression: Interestingly, this adage about hereditary rule is one of the loan phrases brought back after the First and Second Anglo-Afghan wars. Primarily these were from the language of the ruling Pathans (as we would call them Pashtuns.) The original Pashto, more literally translated: "The grandfather was born in a tent. He remembers living in a tent. He will lead the people well. The father was born in a tent. He remembers both living in a tent, and living in a palace. He will lead the people well. The son was born in a palace. He has never lived in a tent. He will not lead the people at all." There are several of these Afghan sayings, from both the Pashtunwali and folk-wisdom, that the British officers brought back home. The most well-known of these most don't realize is an Pashto loan phrase at all: "Revenge is a dish best served cold."
  • nickonline 10y ago
    It's really not some crazy idea. I'm sure you've heard "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel,"
    • s_q_b 10y ago
      Yeah, it's so common as to have become a television trope. It's not difficult to see how a life of luxury can cause one to divorce the notion of wealth (or power) from the hard work necessary to obtain it.
    • nxzero 10y ago
      Formal name for the pattern is regression toward the mean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
    • antisthenes 10y ago
      That reads more like a joke about Land Rover maintenance costs.
    • gohrt 10y ago
      that quote is just about oil running out.
      • gozur88 10y ago
        The source of the quote, Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, died in 1990. By my reckoning the last Land Rover generation will have been born by now.
  • ef4 10y ago
    It's much more universal than that. Variations on this proverb occur in many, many cultures and languages: there’s nobbut three generations atween a clog and clog dalle stalle alle stelle alle stalle quien no lo tiene, lo hance; y quien lo tiene, lo deshance 富 不过三代 (wealth does not pass three generations)
    • spullara 10y ago
      Probably wishful thinking. Here is an analysis done that shows wealth lasting 7 centuries http://www.vox.com/2016/5/18/11691818/barone-mocetti-florence http://www.vox.com/2016/5/18/11691818/barone-mocetti-florenc...
      • Retric 10y ago
        Alternatively, 7 centuries without new lasting wealth / dynasty's. Clearly, some groups understand how to maintain wealth, but for most newly wealthy it's easy come easy go.
      • ef4 10y ago
        That doesn't necessarily contradict the proverb. It's saying that somebody who starts out poor and then rises is still likely to have descendants who are poor. That is actually a statement that social classes are sticky.
      • Hermel 10y ago
        No, the study shows that similar families are rich today as back then. It does not say what happened in between. It could well be that these families lost and regain their fortunes multiple times.
        • boxy310 10y ago
          Strictly speaking, the aphorism relates to the nouveau-riche. Old money may have other aspects of social entrenchment to wealth, which is only disrupted by major social disasters like World War I or the Black Plague.
      • 10y ago
  • ChuckMcM 10y ago
    And this precisely defines the reason for the existence of institutions, which can continue the execution of a set of values longer than a single lifespan of a human. A well designed institution can continue to amass wealth and power throughout its multi-generational existence.
    • beamatronic 10y ago
      I'm fascinated by this topic. How do the legacy-type families do it? I'm talking your Kennedies, your Bushes, etc. Preserving wealth and power for generations?
      • mrcsparker 10y ago
        Education
      • ChuckMcM 10y ago
        The same way "legacy type" universities, or "legacy type" companies do it. An institution is a set of processes, governing rules, and feedback mechanisms which serve to reinforce the core mission. Individual (fallible) control is ceded to the rules and processes in exchange for ensured existence. Harvard University is a good example of a durable institution, look at how its bylaws and processes protect its mission, but more importantly how its feedback mechanisms try to identify and purge potential threats to the institution. In a lot of ways it is similar to programming, only with people who can be modeled as unreliable computers which don't always follow their instructions. So you need interconnected missions of individuals to support the institution's mission. At some point if you have enough individuals who are off script the institution will fail, but with clever process and incentive one can minimize that risk.
      • pstuart 10y ago
        W.R. Hearst set up a family trust with limited control by family members.
      • billmalarky 10y ago
        An excerpt from http://www.forbes.com/sites/carlodonnell/2014/07/08/how-the-1-billion-kennedy-family-fortune-defies-death-and-taxes-3/#126ba756238d http://www.forbes.com/sites/carlodonnell/2014/07/08/how-the-... "Joseph P. Kennedy’s choice to place his fortune in trusts is possibly the single most critical reason why the family wealth is still around today. The most obvious benefit was to protect the fortune from the prying fingers of ne’er-do-well heirs, said Laurence Leamer, who wrote three Kennedy biographies. Trusts often prevent beneficiaries from tapping more than 10 percent of principal, said Rick Kruse, principal at Kruse and Crawford, which offers estate management advice. The trusts also protect the family assets from another set of prying fingers: Uncle Sam’s. By holding assets in so called “dynasty trusts,” which are passed from heir to heir for decades, if not longer, the Kennedy family fortune is largely insulated from the estate tax, Kruse said. Handled correctly, a dynasty trust could potentially maintain an un-taxable fortune indefinitely. The oldest Kennedy trust on record dates back to 1936."
• akgerber 10y ago
  Many urban building typologies are effectively illegal in nearly all of the country (but not Manhattan below 110th Street) due to parking minima, even in supposedly-unzoned Houston. One of my great hopes for autonomous vehicles is that they will finally break the political logjam where existing neighborhood residents demand new housing/businesses in mostly parking-free neighborhoods require offstreet parking to preserve their own access to street parking. (And that bike lanes/pedestrian space/etc that require taking back some of the land that car owners usurped at midcentury become possible.)
  • mjevans 10y ago
    For dense city cores I'd prefer parking at the edges (part of the city) and forms of people movers (think caves of steel / tomorrow land belts). For other places I agree that eliminating street parking is ideal, but believe that more underground/in-building parking is necessary, with enough space for useful vehicles to park safely.
    • anamoulous 10y ago
      Honestly, in Manhattan they should eliminate automobile access to a great deal of the streets and avenues.
      • AJ007 10y ago
        They are in the process of doing it, at least slowly. There still needs to be some sort of delivery truck access, irregardless. Parts of downtown Chicago provide an interesting example with multi-leveled streets, the big deliveries and trash collection can be all be done out of sight. I suspect very soon we will see a city, or multiple cities, start blocking off certain streets and then neighborhoods to non-autonomous vehicles. Maybe it will be Manhattan, maybe it will be another city. This lowers the bar for how advanced the self driving tech needs to be by a lot. You can have 100% traffic enforcement. Pedestrian deaths should almost be completely eliminated short of some very unusual edge cases.
        • 10y ago
• home_boi 10y ago
  NYC is still very cheap. With roommates and an hour long commute, you will be looking at $700-800/month rent.
  • nxzero 10y ago
    For how many square feet of non-shared personal space?
  • JDiculous 10y ago
    Why is an hour long commute considered acceptable? If you value your time at $50/hr, a daily 1-hr commute equates to an additional $2,000/month
    • jonknee 10y ago
      People who live with roommates an hour away to save money almost certainly don't value their time at $50/hr.
      • ghaff 10y ago
        In addition, it may be useful to have some sort of mental model of how you value your time. "Seriously, you make six figures and spend an hour a week doing some task you despise to save $5?" However, most people aren't in a position where they can directly trade in, say, an hour of commuting time for a check.
      • hx87 10y ago
        I value my time much more than my space. Hence living with roommates close to work.
    • grillvogel 10y ago
      what's so bad about sitting on a train for an hour? its some nice personal time to do whatever you want or just space out and relax.
      • JDiculous 10y ago
• rcthompson 10y ago
  I've recently been musing on a similar theory, but for safety regulations, redundancy, and preventable disasters, for example at nuclear power plants, or the recent example with the Washington DC subway system shutdown. Initially, there are lots of safety regulations and redundancy, and the power plant goes for a while with no accidents. Then, either the people working there fall into complacency and get lax on the safety regulations, and/or politicians or higher-ups looking to cut costs cut some of the redundancy, in either case thinking "it'll be fine, there's never been an accident". Then the inevitable happens, and suddenly there's a renewed interest in safety and redundancy. Rinse and repeat. The implication of this is that while it might be theoretically possible to operate a nuclear power plant safely for an indefinite period, the inevitability of relaxing safety regulations after a long period of no accidents virtually guarantees an accident after a certain amount of time. I'm not sure if there's any empirical (i.e. non-anecdotal/confirmation biased) evidence to support this theory, or what could be done about it if it were true. See also: The resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases every few generations, because parents who never experienced the disease since their generation had the vaccine decide that their kids don't need the vaccine.
  • akkartik 10y ago
    I've been thinking along similar lines for many years, though with the language of externalities. For example, here's a comment of mine from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596 I haven't thought about safety like you have, but my bias is to wonder if part of the reason regulations get lax is that they first get complicated due to the influence of people motivated by their own selfish interest. Perhaps over time people add crap to regulations, which makes it hard to sift wheat from chaff, and this leads to backlash? With the final sin being to forget Chesterton's Fence? That would fit with my experience. One thought-experiment idea I had was a society governed not by rules but by unit tests for rules. That would allow any cop or citizen to globally change a rule if he found an exception that didn't violate existing tests. See the final section of http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff. Of course then the problem is that people would start gaming the tests rather than the rules. That's as far as I got.. :) These days I try not to think about the hard instance of this problem, and instead focus on an easier problem: avoiding externalities in software projects using more thorough tests. That's going a bit better.