Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of May 24, 2021
Good journalism/Cool shit
My weekly article about terrible zoning laws.
The trouble with parking requirements is twofold. First, they don’t do what they’re supposed to, which is prevent curb congestion. Because curb parking is convenient and usually free, drivers fill up the curb first, no matter how much off-street space exists nearby. Second—and more consequential—parking requirements attack the nature of the city itself, by subordinating density to the needs of the car…
Because parking requirements make driving less expensive and development more so, cities get more driving, less housing, and less of everything that makes urbanity worthwhile. This process is subtle. Many mayors today declare their support for walkable downtowns and affordable units. But cities are built at the parcel, not from mayors’ podiums. And parcel by parcel, the zoning code quietly undermines the mayors’ grand vision. A commercial requirement of one parking space per 300 square feet means developers will put new retail in a car-friendly, pedestrian-hostile strip mall. And a requirement of one parking space per 100 square feet for restaurants means the typical eating establishment will devote three times as much space to parking as it will to dining. America did not become a country of strip malls and office parks because we collectively lost aesthetic ambition. These developments are ubiquitous because they are the cheapest way to comply with regulations…
None of this is an argument against parking. It’s an argument against required parking. In an age of ostensible concern about global warming, it shouldn’t be illegal to put up a building without parking and market it to people without cars. If neighbors worry that people will move in and park on the street, cities should meter their streets. Curb space is valuable public land. Parking requirements or no, cities will have curb shortages as long as they give the curb away. [The Atlantic]
Vaccine Lottery Tickets Are Sad, but Also Perfect (ed. note: disagree on this title, I don’t find it sad at all)
I love these Ohio vaccine lottos: nudges and using how terribly people judge small probabilities for vaccinations:
If behavioral economics is to be believed, people can be prompted to do things by way of small reminders known as “nudges.” These are meant to be gentler and more palatable than rules or requirements. There’s something darkly paternalistic about the term nudge, which makes me feel like I’m being manipulated into walking off a cliff. [ed. note: being paternalistic is 100% the point, Thaler literally called it “libertarian paternalism”] But in the classic example, nudges do things like get people to register as organ donors, by making organ donation the default. In marketing, similar approaches are used to drive sales. For example, restaurants may include certain menu items that are deliberately overpriced in order to nudge people toward an option that’s meant to seem reasonably priced in comparison…
But even if they become annoying or eerie, nudges can feel justified when they’re used to help us sidestep distractions or misinformation. They can help people decide to do vital, prosocial acts—such as getting vaccinated to help end a pandemic that has brought life to a standstill and killed millions of people—that they wouldn’t have otherwise done. Everyone needs nudges sometimes, and no one more so than doctors themselves. A medical-record system that prompts doctors to ask every patient if they’ve gotten a vaccine—and, if they haven’t, to whip one out and offer it on the spot—can eliminate simple oversights. This sort of prompt pairs well with easy, ubiquitous access to vaccines. People could be offered a vaccine every time they walk into a pharmacy, or in places where they have time to kill, such as an airport. The goal would be to reach everyone who’s ambivalent or feels they’re too busy to get one, by making vaccination so convenient that they don’t have to go out of their way at all to get vaccinated. Instead, they’d essentially have to go out of their way not to. [The Atlantic]
The Texas Mask Mystery (ed. note: these titles are freaking terrible this week)
One particularly important passage from this article (emphasis both mine and the O.G. author’s):
In early march, Texas became the first state to abolish its mask mandate and lift capacity constraints for all businesses. Conservatives hailed Governor Greg Abbott’s decision, while liberals predicted doom and death and President Joe Biden disparaged it as “Neanderthal thinking.”
Nine weeks later, the result seems to be less than catastrophic. In fact, in a new paper, economists at Bentley University and San Diego State University found that Abbott’s order had practically no effect on COVID-19 cases. “The predictions of reopening advocates and opponents failed to materialize,” the authors concluded.
How could a policy so consequential—or at least so publicly contested—do so little?…
Yet another explanation is that Abbott’s decision didn’t matter because nobody changed their behavior. According to the aforementioned Texas paper, Abbot’s decision had no effect on employment, movement throughout the state, or foot traffic to retailers. It had no effect in either liberal or conservative counties, nor in urban or exurban areas. The pro-maskers kept their masks on their faces. The anti-maskers kept their masks in the garbage. And many essential workers, who never felt like they had a choice to begin with, continued their pre-announcement habits.The governor might as well have shouted into a void.
And on how the guidance has been so poor, that we’ve all become our own experts:
I’ll first answer for myself: Skeptical of some official narratives from the Trump administration to the CDC, I’ve become my own private investigator on all things COVID-related. (It helps that I’m paid to be one.) I track what public-health officials say about the pandemic, but I don’t wait with bated breath for their pronouncements. Months before the CDC acknowledged that surface transmission of the coronavirus is vanishingly rare, I wrote that surface transmission is vanishingly rare. Weeks before the CDC acknowledged that outdoor mask mandates make no sense, I wrote that outdoor mask mandates make no sense. I’m not bragging; I’m … well, all right, I’m bragging a little.
But my private-detective work isn’t so special. At at time when citizens don’t trust their government and when information is abundant, anybody can, like me, become their own sleuth on all things COVID-related, piece together their own theory about what this virus is and how it spreads, and come up with their individual risk level. Many remote workers, hunched behind their laptops for 16 months, have had the opportunity to steep themselves in modern epidemiology. Meanwhile, a lot of essential workers never had a choice: They were flung into the teeth of the pandemic, without the protection of a computer screen, and some of them have developed their own general theories of risk and resilience. [The Atlantic]
Health, politics, and academia
Stop Worrying and Love the F-150 Lightning
Honestly what impresses me the most is that this truck makes me want to get a stupid truck. High praise. [The Atlantic]
On why masks even after the pandemic would be good and how many Americans are being dumb about it.
But now that we Americans have all learned how to wear masks, my question is: Why not adopt the Japanese custom? Mask mandates are unnecessary outside of a pandemic, but Americans who are sick with the flu or a cold can still voluntarily choose to mask up on public transportation or in crowded places, to keep from spreading their germs around. It would be a nice thing to do.
Unfortunately, some Americans are not big fans of doing nice things. When I suggested on Twitter that mask-wearing by sick people could become a normal part of American culture, most people were highly supportive, but there was ferocious pushback from an outspoken few.
For whatever reason, some people are in a mood to inveigh against masks. For some people, fighting against the last remnants of the social norm of mask-wearing probably feels like a way of reasserting control over their lives. Yascha Mounk, for example, wrote a recent blog post urging people to take off their masks in order to “resume normal life.”
For these people, the notion that the pandemic could permanently change something in our society might feel like a defeat or surrender. So I expect some of them to vigorously resist the idea that Americans should now start wearing masks when we’re sick. A few will probably even harass and ridicule those who choose to altruistically protect others from their germs.
But this is a misguided impulse Sometimes crises have a silver lining; they force us to learn better ways of doing things. COVID-19 taught us the value of mRNA vaccines, for example, which may now be used to vanquish a large number of other diseases. It also taught us the importance of keeping supply chains for crucial medical equipment in the United States.
How it prevents the flu:
In a normal year, somewhere between 12,000 and 60,000 Americans die of the flu. That’s no COVID-19, but if the practice of wearing masks when you’re sick could prevent even just a thousand deaths a year, it seems like it would be worth it. And what’s the cost, really? Masking up is mildly annoying, but for someone already sick with the flu it’s not much additional pain. And we already wash our hands and avoid sneezing or coughing in other people’s faces; how different is this?
And on American lack of social responsibility:
Finally, I think adopting a practice of wearing a mask when you’re sick, to protect other people, would be a good way for Americans to practice pro-social behavior.
Many of the people who responded negatively to my tweet declared that they weren’t scared of the risk of cold or flu. This is an inherently selfish perspective; infectious diseases are infectious, and masks are for reducing your chances of making someone else sick. That some people didn’t seem to grasp this speak to the toxic selfishness that has pervaded parts of American culture.
Thinking only of yourself is not a healthy form of individualism; instead, it is a toxic abdication of your personal responsibility to protect other people. Healthy individualism should emphasize not just freedom to do whatever you feel like, but also the individual’s duty to others. [Noahpinion]
Your Butt Is Getting in the Way of Science
Hello. Would you like to read about anuses? (Legit an interesting story about evolution though)
In the beginning, there was nothing. The back ends of our animal ancestors that swam the seas hundreds of millions of years ago were blank, relegating the entry and exit of all foodstuffs to a single, multipurpose hole. Evolutionary echoes of these life-forms still exist in corals, sea anemone, jellyfish, and a legion of marine worms whose digestive tract takes the form of a loose sac. These animals are serially monogamous with their meals, taking food in one glob at a time, then expelling the scraps through the same hole. (Contrary to what you might have read, not everyone poops.) These creatures’ guts operate much like parking lots, subject to strict vacancy quotas that restrict the flow of traffic.
The emergence of a back door transformed those parking lots into highways—the linear “through-guts” that dominate body plans today. Suddenly, animals had the luxury of downing multiple meals without needing to fuss with disposal in between; digestive tracts lengthened and regionalized, partitioning into chambers that could extract different nutrients and host their own communities of microbes. The compartmentalization made it easier for animals to get more out of their meals, Andreas Hejnol, a developmental biologist at the University of Bergen, in Norway, told me. With the lengthening and uncorking of the end of the gut, he said, many creatures grew into longer and larger body forms, and started to move in new ways. (It would take several more eons for true buttocks—the fleshy, fatty accoutrements that flank the anuses of some animals, such as humans—to evolve. Some researchers I talked with are comfortable using butt to mean any anal or anus-adjacent structure; others are purists, and consider the term strict shorthand for buttocks and buttocks alone.)
And some of these lines are freaking poetry:
One unusually aerated specimen, a type of polyclad flatworm, sports multiple anuses that speckle its backside like feces-spewing freckles. Two others, a pair of sponge parasites called Syllis ramosa and Ramisyllismulticaudata, will twine their body through host tissues like a tapestry of tree roots, with each tip terminating in its own proprietary butthole; they have hundreds, perhaps thousands, in total. (It’s not totally clear why these animals and others spawned an embarrassment of anuses, but in at least some cases, Hejnol thinks it’s a logical outcome of a branched digestive system, which can more easily transport nutrients to a body’s every nook and cranny.) [The Atlantic]