Testing just now, it appears to not route through private roads unless it needs to (e.g. destination is on the private road) when you have that setting on, but it might just heavily down weight it so that if the public route is long enough out of the way, it will use it?
Every time I look at a city/county budget, the schools absolutely dwarf everything else (it's not quick to disentangle different levels of government, but roughly speaking, it seems like schools are usually roughly the same cost as all other services combined where I've looked), which makes it hard for me to take seriously the idea that it's infrastructure like roads and sewage specifically leading to unsustainable budgets. e.g. if I remember correctly, special ed programs cost more than roads when I looked at the previous metro I lived in's budget, and sewers were revenue neutral with a county sewer fee.
Strongtowns seems a bit motivated in their analysis, to put it mildly.
This looks at current costs. The school is a cost every year, so every year that cost shows up on the budget. The problem is that road/water/sewer maintenance often doesn't show up on these budgets because these systems are usually built all at once. Because of this they usually also need to be replaced all at once. To see those costs before they happen, you need to use accrual accounting:
The entire message from Strong Towns is exactly that because cities often use cash accounting instead of accrual accounting in their budgetary processes these lingering issues of deferred maintenance don't show up until they do, and when they do, those costs will simply be too large for the city to cover without very politically unpopular interventions.
Capital improvements don't need to be paid all at once; that's what financing is for. And debt service does appear on budgets. In any case, why are we to believe that e.g. $1B in maintenance that's been deferred for decades is "the" problem when the school budget is $500M/year?
You’re making an argument about school budgets being too high. That’s fine. I’m arguing that, our school budgets are set, in large part, by our available resources. Viewing our resources from a long run perspective helps us set our current budgets.
If we cut the school budget only when we need to repave roads, we are playing fast and loose with our children’s future. When we set our budgets to be sustainable, we don’t rug pull parents who are trying to build a life in our cities.
I'm not even saying school budgets are necessarily too high. I'm just saying that if someone is claiming that what amounts to 5-10% of the budget is why cities go bankrupt, and that's why they need to entirely reshape how they develop to fit some idyllic vision of a pedestrian city, then I'm going to go ahead and doubt their analysis.
Like I'm happy that my (suburban) city requires new developments to connect to a city-wide bike trail network. That's great. I just don't think Strong Towns/Not Just Bikes presents a realistic mental model of the world. They seem to clearly be pushing for a specific vision regardless of facts.
I'm not sure I understand your argument. You can defer maintenance but school, police, firefighter, etc spending is constant. If your infrastructure is in trouble and your budget can't pay for the maintenance, you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying.
Los Angeles has about 7500 miles of roads. At a reasonable cost of $5 million per mile that is 37.5 billion USD. Assuming a lifespan of 35 years, that is basically a billion USD per year spent on servicing road infrastructure costs. If they don't spend that billion every year or put it aside for future repairs, their road infrastructure is going to decay. It might not sound like much in comparison to the full budget, but since the road network is the largest man made structure in the city, it will affect everyone and be the most noticeable failure on part of the government. Lack of police or fire fighting can show up in the form of stochastic damage that doesn't necessarily impact every citizen directly.
Sure, if you treat all other things as impossible to tweak except the thing you want to argue is the problem, I guess. But taking a quick look at the city budget, I see they spent $200M on overtime for police. So there's a place where they could save like $70M with no change to service with correct staffing? I'm sure there are other places where they are not currently 100% efficient. Or, since they have ~4M residents in the city, they could raise taxes by $250/person-year. That doesn't sound unsustainable to me. Certainly not a "suburbs are a fundamentally broken model" level problem.
Lots of suburban cities in the US are really nice, well run places. LA even as an example of a poorly run area doesn't actually seem to be in much of a financial pickle.
The point is
> you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying
Is just confused. The $1B/year you came up with as sufficient is ~7% of the LA city budget (~$14B), and that's excluding major expenses like schools since that's the county budget. If you look more holistically at just "what's the local government spending", the amount you say is needed to properly maintain the roads is more like 3-4%. Roads are just not a financial problem. Strongtowns guy just doesn't like them.
Overtime for police can often be largely attributed to special events or occasions; for example, the city might have an entirely correct amount of officers for most of the year, but then during superbowl, presidential visits, Fourth of July parties, Pride, etc. They have a much higher need for patrol units, escorts, traffic management, etc. for those denser areas with more going on. They can't simply transfer officers around because that would leave other areas of the city under-patrolled, which runs the risk of unacceptably higher response times.
As a result, officers that worked Saturday through Thursday might also come in for a shift on Friday/Saturday, or might work a longer shift or split shift that day.
So the problem might not be that the police force needs 30% more staffing, but that the police force needs 80% more staffing on extremely rare occasions.
Just a note about police overtime: The correct amount of overtime for a union employee is not zero. Paying overtime for a few weeks each year to cover vacation can absolutely be cheaper than funding a pension and other benefits for several decades.
This is how lobby groups in general operate. They have settled on a solution and work backward from there to develop a problem that only their solution can fix and if other citizens and voters don't like it, they are the problem (NIMBY, greedy, selfish, populism, etc).
That’s absolutely untrue. The only reason companies track depreciation as they do is because it allows them to defer taxation. Public works projects are not paid out of current cash.
Strong Towns makes good arguments about certain things and are critical in a reasonable way of how civil engineering organizations rate the need for more civil engineering works. But the budget discussion makes zero sense.
The biggest expenses for county, city, town, village government are: schools, police & fire, Medicaid share in states that do that, and employee retirement and health. A small/midsize city spends 60% of its budget on police.
Capital projects are capitalized with bonds. Governments have the lowest bond expenses due to tax exemptions. Roadwork is not done in a cash basis. It’s bonded for 10-30 years depending on the job.
Yes, the problem is that our cities are already leveraged up to their eyeballs. At some point, the actual humans buying those bonds start becoming skeptical of the city’s ability to pay them back.
LA currently has about a billion dollars of outstanding general obligation bonds (edit: but that does not include all their future liabilities). They're still rated AA, but I presume that is because the credit writing agencies understand how many untapped revenue streams LA has, but again, those will require unpalatable political change. You can’t keep refinancing forever.
Philadelphia, Miami, and Chicago are getting close to junk bond status, and when that happens, the option to refinance starts evaporating very quickly.
I also think LA will be fine in the long run, I just think that their tax structure will force significant changes. The tax base is able to cover the cities liabilities, it's just that the residents don't want to pay those extra taxes, and don't want to change in ways that let other people pay them.
The city has a billion dollar deficit right now. Trivial for residents to afford ($83 per person), but difficult to actually implement politically.
Wikipedia says the GDP of the LA metro is ~1.5T. I think they could handle 1B in bonds. If they choose not to, it's not because it's some impossibility. Certainly not because roads are impossibly expensive.
I said general obligation bonds, not general liabilities. These technically are what makes this discussion so difficult.
My point is that much of what the city can tax has little to do with the city's GDP. Either the landscape of the city will have to change or the current taxation paradigm will have to change.
What they can tax does have to do with the GDP though. If they have a 1B deficit, they need to somehow tax <0.1% of activity (or cut services), whether through property tax, income tax, sales tax, corporate tax, or some other scheme. What they don't need to do is radically increase density, and since almost all of the costs scale with population, not area, density wouldn't even help that much (or might hurt if it leads to a lower percentage of net contributors).
Again, putting $1B in some perspective, the LA Unified School District budget (which is county-level, so not directly comparable to the city, but anyway) is just under $19B. Maybe someone else can ballpark how much of that is associated to the city. Or look the other things that scale with population: police, medical, waste, social programs, etc.
Again, they have $1B in the current deficit. The have $1B in outstanding bonds. They have myriad other outstanding obligations that won't show up on the balance sheet for 20+ years.
Okay, but relative to their resources, that's nothing. So they can just pay for those things. It's like worrying about a water heater replacement when you make well into six figures. At a macro level, it is obvious that the suburban model itself is not somehow financially unsustainable.
The city budget is $14B. So they need to make a ~7% adjustment somehow, which amounts to less than a 1% tweak to the local economy. That's not a broken system. It's not a ponzi scheme. It just means they should pay their bills and maybe reduce some waste. You yourself said it's trivial for residents to afford to just pay for the deficit.
So you get 40 years of "sewers cost us almost nothing to maintain woo" and then five years of "sewer maintenance is costing us hundreds of millions of dollars this year".
Take a look at LA’s budget then, it’s literally all police and police liability payouts which are already hundreds of millions of dollars over the budget for them.
DNS can be thought of as a distributed KV store with built in caching suitable for low write high read use cases, so TXT makes sense for that. e.g. basic feature flagging can be accomplished that way with basically no work to set it up assuming you were already using DNS.
While I don't appreciate the implementation of "security" generally involving monopolization, I think it's important to note that you only need age verification for things that are irrelevant to children. In fact the entire point is to exclude children. So a non-Google/Apple device is still perfectly usable for them if (or even specifically because) it cannot pass age verification/attestation. Really the main concern should be use of attestation for banking/government stuff.
DNS blockers only work if the device/application is not adversarial or if you also have a smart enough firewall to block DoH, which is designed to blend in with web traffic. Once ECH is widespread, you'd likely need to MitM the device (so you need to install your CA, which is intentionally made very difficult and you might not even be able to do across all apps anymore on mobile devices? At least without enterprise MDM. And as was observed elsewhere[0], apps like spotify can contain a web browser), or perhaps use DNS requests as a trigger to briefly open a default deny outbound firewall.
Things have definitely been converging toward making it impossible for non-corporations to manage the devices they own, the network they run, etc.
I agree that ECH is perhaps a stumbling block although as you say MitM, this is indeed possible to pursue considering the whole set up child account on device thing going on with many of these devices.
On the rest of of your points fair enough, but again I ask is it actually proportionate?
Are we talking about children or black hats?
The black hats in this case are the software vendors. If your software prevents any ability to inspect any of its traffic (so you can't use external filters), and the OS doesn't offer ways to override/hook into that, and if the inbuilt parental controls are insufficient, you can't do much.
What are you going to do when every application (including web browsers) simply ignores and bypass your DNS filtering "for security" and every site is opaque (e.g. wikipedia looks just like pornhub to your router and every site is using one of a small number of major frontend proxies like cloudflare that's actively specifically working toward traffic opacity)? It happens that every major commercial non-server OS vendor (except Redhat?) is an ad company now, so they all have a reason to block your ability to filter traffic/restrict your configuration to only what they allow. And they're all working toward that.
To me it seems similar to the + C on an antiderivative (or more generally, quotient objects). Technically, you are dealing with an equivalence class of functions, so a set. But it's usually counterproductive to think of it that way (and when you study this stuff properly, one of the first things you do is prove that you (usually) don't need to, and can instead use an arbitrary representative as a stand-in for the set), so you write F(x)+C.
I think the Landau notation is a bit more finicky with the details. When it's really a quotient (like modular arithmetic) I'm with you, but here $O()$ morally means "at most this" and often you have to use the "direction of the inequality" to prove complexity bounds, so I'm more comfortable with the set notation. But again, it's just notation, I could use either.
It's actually a linear (more generally, abstract) algebra thing. (All, Differentiable, Smooth, or all sorts of other sets of) functions form a vector space. The derivative is a linear operator (generalized matrix). If you have a linear equation Ax=b, then if you can find some solution X, the general solution set is X+kerA, where kerA (the kernel or nullspace) is the set of all v where Av=0. What's the kernel of the derivative operator (i.e. what has 0 derivative)? Constant functions. So the general solution is whatever particular antiderivative you find plus any constant function.
You can do this sort of "particular solution plus kernel" analysis on any linear operator, which gives one strategy for solving linear differential equations. e.g. (aD^2+bD+cI) is a linear operator (weighted sums and compositions of linear operators are linear), so you can potentially do that analysis to solve problems like af''+bf'+cf=g. In that context you say the general solution is to add a homogeneous solution (af''+bf'+cf=0) to a particular solution (my intro differential equations class covered this but didn't have linear algebra as a prereq so naturally at the time it was just magic, like everything else presented in intro diffeq).
The analogous action is to only require age-restricted sites (or parts of sites) to check ID, not the entire Internet. e.g. no one is calling for mathisfun.com to check ID. I'd expect most parts of the web are child-friendly and would not be affected. Just like how almost all locations in physical space don't need to check ID.
Additionally, the laws I've read mandate that no data be retained, so you have stronger legal protections than typical credit card use, or even giving your ID to a store clerk for age restricted purchases (many stores will scan it without asking, and in some states scanning is required).
This might have the benefit of reversing the trend where everything on the internet was rolled in to social media. If social media is age restricted, news, announcements, etc will have to break out to dedicated websites if they want to be accessible by all ages.
just ban kids from the internet already. if a parent allows the kid to have a full function smartphone and the kids get caught with it then throw the parents in jail and kids in an orphanage. people will catch on.
I don't see why that would be the case. It's reasonable to allow services that have a policy forbidding such content and make good faith efforts to moderate and remove it promptly. Seems analogous to e.g. a building being vandalized with lewd drawings. Or laws about user submitted child pornography.
I expect most forums or discussion groups in practice actually don't have child-inappropriate content, and already moderate such things because the members don't want it.
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