If lights that are turned off are flickering, I recommend getting an electrician in to look at them. That's clearly not supposed to happen (should be impossible, actually), and might be an indication of a potential electrical fire hazard. Just curious, does this house often blow breakers?

We are quite young (at least the regulars), but you'll fit in fine.

At least come once and see if you like us!

ask a specialist why the dreams of urban planners so often die.

I'm not a specialist, but the reason is obvious. Their dreams require other people to conform to the planners' dreams. And most peoples ideas and dreams don't. Urban planners are an extreme example of Thomas Sowell's Vision of the Anointed.

I can't think of any particular reason why urban planning need to suck - the problems with it seem to be based on historical happenstance, not structural necessity.

That's interesting though - are there any fields are that suck purely out of necessity? What's the mechanism that causes it?

I hate pdfs. There's no way to make the pages fit the computer screen as conveniently as html does.

I have to keep moving my viewpoint in a way that jolts my attention.

Recently, instead of having a control bar for the pdf at the top of the page, there's a appear/fade away control bar which is affected by the cursor, and IT'S ON TOP OF THE TEXT.

Of course, I have no way of knowing whether any of this is why Solvent hasn't liked them.

"most of the time you’ll end up doing more harm than good",

its the most of the time assumption that I have the most difficulty with, what's your base rate?

"and the next time won’t be much different from the last time." seems like an arbitrary application of the planning fallacy, why is it any different if you do or you don't?

These statements from Eliezer's piece are empirically based (he says so in the piece). So the short answer is, that's where the base rate comes from and that's why this isn't the planning fallacy. (You could challenge the empirics of course).

(I was carefully trying to not sound like "us vs. them." Did that not come through?)

The only reason I think I partially disagree is that the reason many of the people who are against regulation are actually, well, against regulation, isn't because they've thought about the potential negative consequences. They'll cite things like freedom or a disdain communism, etc. And on the opposite political issues (e.g. military interventionism) they are more likely to be in favor of government heavy solutions.

With that being said, your point is duly noted. There are probably more people who are against regulation because they see potential negative consequences than my comment acknowledged.

(Why has no one developed a democratic corporation?)

They're called cooperatives.

and old retired guys, see you there

that was really good