Why is traffic so bad? The one-word answer is “government.” The three-word solution is “the free market.” Here is libertarian Drew Carey with ReasonTV explaining why:
The Web Home of Shane Killian
Education, Liberty, Skepticism – For our minds, for our freedom, and for our future
At this point I don’t think it’s possible to have competing “road services”. The infrastructure is already there, and businesses, etc, have propped up and so on.
The most I think we could do is have the state contract out companies to build and design public roads for them, though we could (of course) certainly let private companies build new roads as well.
By the way, shane, I just decided to browse the JREF board the see what’s up there and was quickly reminded of why I hate even browsing that place (well, the politics section). You give up on them?
Yeah, not because of the content of the discussions, though; I can handle that. Essentially, the rules allow people (like you-know-who) to levy personal abuse and character assassination against others, but don’t allow for the natural response of others condemning the person for doing that. In other forums, that causes the abusers to either change their tune or leave; the JREF forum is thus farm more abusive than even unmoderated forums.
Example: you-know-who kept falsely accusing me of a very serious crime, one that, if convicted, is punishable by up to 20 years in Federal prison. The mods said there was nothing they could do about it. When I attacked his character, saying that he was lying and desperately trying to avoid the consequences of the discussion (which he was), I was modded.
Now compare that to, say, the Free Talk Live forum, which is mostly unmoderated (modded for spam and child porn, basically). Abusers are put in their place fairly quickly and it doesn’t last. With the JREF forum, this natural mechanism against abusers is prohibited, but is not replaced by any moderator action against the abusers. It is by far the worst place for discussion I have ever experienced in 20 years of internetting–including on UseNet and free-for-all BBSes.
It’s ridiculous. Unless the rules change, having a proper discussion would be impossible.
Oh, I know what you’re talking about, that’s the reason I e-mailed you way back when; I was amazed at how blatant the bias was; I couldn’t PM you naturally as I was… forced to lurk, but nevertheless I was pretty disgusted.
The place is absolutely terrible; not the worst place I’ve ever been to, but it’s pretty damn bad. They’ve got little cliques there and they selectively enforce rules based on who is popular and who isn’t, probably without even realizing it. I’m worse about that stuff and react far more…viciously, especially as I don’t particularly care for getting booted for forums like that anyway.
Since you write on occasional topics, will you take a request? I’m interested in your perspective on (government-mandated) net neutrality, particularly because you’re a tech kind of guy.