You are arrogant and have no self awareness of how condescending you come across

> In that case, the company "developing" it was a person who had some non-tech affiliation with CMU (a friend/acquaintance of Bill's)

No. Priya Narasimhan is a professor with a PhD in computer science

https://www.ece.cmu.edu/directory/bios/narasimhan-priya.html

> and a student who was trying to run an access database on a PC he had literally in his dorm room.

No. We had an office with a rack full of Dell servers and we used Microsoft sql server MySQL. I can’t remember which we used on iBurgh. The memory that sticks in my mind vividly is the city used an old version of the database software and wouldn’t let us use a newer version.

You have some misunderstandings about the that project and exhibit the same condescending attitude I remember the city employees had at the time.

I don’t think CMU deserves the bad reputation some people have about them. I think politicians use the school to get publicity. The panther hollow project was goofy and I don’t think the school even wanted it as much as Bill did. But I also think the outrage against that project was simple NIMBYs and opportunistic activists riding on the hate toward Upmc which is a much bigger problem with abusing their nonprofit status, low pay and poor working conditions

Could have fooled me with your condescending attitude. I wrote the iburgh software while a student at cmu. The city tech department obviously had no interest in the project being a success. The outdated software stack they insisted on us interfacing with was a major issue. The professor at cmu in charge of the project had no experience working with government contracting and was in over her head but what she learned was government contracting is just not worth the trouble in most cases. She focused more on the sports apps for the penguins at the time bc the team was just more interested in trying new things. Clearly you just don’t like Peduto bc he dared to try to push the city to change its outdated ways. This is the problem every mayor faces when they get into office. Every department is a fiefdom and resist any change.

Stop harassing me and get a life.

https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2010/01/02/iBurgh-app-takes-its-place-at-last-on-iPhones/stories/201001020208

https://www.wpxi.com/news/local/pittsburgh-snow-plow-tracker-location-website-city/46364243/

What are you even trying to argue about? Here are some more news articles but it’s hard to get go as far back as when he was city council because there are so many more news articles form when he was mayor.

https://www.wesa.fm/national-international-news/2016-10-10/interactive-website-maps-and-tracks-city-building-permits-in-real-time

https://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/news/2017/06/19/peduto-administration-overhauling-city-s.html

http://otma-pgh.org/news/community/city-pittsburgh-offers-more-online-permitting-options-latest-phase-onestoppgh

https://pittnews.com/article/22908/archives/councilman-bill-peduto-marches-to-his-own-drumbeat/amp/

https://bikepgh.org/2006/11/28/thank-you-councilman-peduto/

https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/faculty-research/profiles/peduto-william/

https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-pittsburgh-building-inspection.html

Everything is a profit grab in a capitalist economy. I think putting up barriers to constructing new housing serves to benefit existing landlords. I disagree with anything that makes it harder or more expensive to build more housing. More supply will lower prices. There is localized gentrification when developers build new expensive housing. I worry about low wage workers being pushed further away from employment and good transit. Requiring developers to provide a percentage of housing for low wage workers is possibly a good solution but it may lead to a little less housing being built overall.

> all city mayors are criticized constantly

that was my point I was attempting to make

Peduto was a city council member for 12 years. He was hands on in the technology departments at the city and worked on updating systems. His downfall was embracing technology when he supported Uber and other automated driving tech. He also wasn’t as tough on UPMC as activists wanted. In retrospect he wasn’t good at keeping bridges in good shaped.

Gainey spent some time in random jobs at the city level and was a state level politician for ten years. I feel like the local news was critical of gainey from the start and hasn’t given him a chance

Ravenstahl was a joke. He grew up in cranberry, went to college in Washington, and was elected to city council less than a year after moving to the city.

Yeah I agree. With so many people in the room, the end product ends up as a strained compromise that looks nothing like what anybody wants. It’s just so hard to trust the developers to do the right thing. Look at how the news segment uses the old renderings for walnut capitals Oakland crossing project. The current project looks nothing like the pictures they showed originally and people are going to shit a brick when they see that thing built. They got an exception to build a 400 foot long building when they were showing two separate buildings for a long time. I though it was very important urban design principle to not build monolithic super-blocks like this building. The zoning only slows 250 feet which is the average block size in the area. Walnut capital gets whatever they want from the city and I can’t think of a zoning variance they didn’t get so it’s just obnoxious of them and shows how entitled they have become to getting their own way. I can just never tell what is reasonable to bring down costs of housing and what is a profit grab

https://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/news/2023/03/01/oakland-crossing-walnut-capital-zoning-plan.html

https://nextpittsburgh.com/city-design/how-one-pittsburgh-developer-wants-to-fix-oaklands-dead-zone/

https://www.utimes.pitt.edu/news/oakland-crossings-what-it

Your using a statistic about how much the fee went up to get sympathy for developers. What is percentage of the development cost? Is the fee really the impediment to development or is restrictive zoning, excessive litigation and lengthy revisions the real issue? Can these developers discuss logistical issues to speed up reviews instead of just being money grubbing cry babies anytime they have to part with a believed dollar. A lot of the mega developments that pay the most fees get huge tax grants anyway. I’m looking at you walnut capital and piatt esplanade.

Peduto was constantly criticized. He knew the city inside and out and could pull levers to get things done but that always manages to piss off some group of vocal people. It’s a lose lose situation running a city. The best we can hope for is a dialogue and constant refining and improving. We especially shouldn’t jump to conclusions from a poorly written obviously misleading local news story. The fees are still a small percentage of total development cost. We could to study how other cities do this and the news should be giving us comparisons of what the going rate is for these sort of things

City mayors are put into a circular firing squad on day one. Few people want that job. We have to try to work with what we have instead of constantly whining about every little issue stoked by local news

Most of the anti development campaigns are just neighborhood nimbys and sometime worse, landlords astroturfing to reduce competition. Which developments have been blocked by actual housing equity activists?

Lefty activists aren’t against development in most cases in Pittsburgh. Most of the anti development campaigns are just neighborhood nimbys and sometime worse, landlords astroturfing to reduce competition.

The new rate is 0.3% of development cost.

How much they raised it by is irrelevant.
Throwing around random dollar amounts is annoying at best and being deceptive at worst. These buildings will stand for 50-100 years and should be reviewed thoroughly by the city.

Nimbys and astroturfing shills should be the focus of our outrage at reasonable developments being stymied

> No, all killing of innocent people is murder.

Imprecise and ambiguous use of words

>There are degrees of murder, but involuntary manslaughter is both illegal and immoral.

Is manslaughter murder? It might depend on context.

> Homicide occurs when a person kills another person.[1] A homicide requires only a volitional act or omission that causes the death of another, and thus a homicide may result from accidental, reckless, or negligent acts even if there is no intent to cause harm

> Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human with malice aforethought

> Manslaughter is a common law legal term for homicide considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes said to have first been made by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th century BC.[1]

> To say it's inferred by design is to say it's designed to be flawed.

Laws are subject to modification. Nobody would have assumed social security law as written in 1935 would not need to be updated as life expectancy and birth rates fluctuated. The 1935 law didn’t have any adjustment for inflation until COLA were added in 1975. I think that is going to be a fundamental disagreement between us which is fine. There is value in nailing down the exact and precise disagreement.

> They're saying it's murder by analogy. Murder is the immoral killing of someone, and are implying it should be illegal.

I find that deceptive because not all killing of innocent people is murder. Depends on intent.

> It was not designed for the tax rate to slowly increase over time.

That could be inferred from its design. Tax rate has changed 20 times already to account for life expectancy and birth rate.

That’s fair but ambiguous to me. how am I supposed to know if they are inferring immoral or illegal. But it begs the question, is it unsustainable by design. It was designed from the beginning for the tax rate to slowly increase over time as needed based on life expectancy and birth rates. The initial tax rate was only 1%. Birth rates were declining in the 1930s.

Because they want to persuade people to believe the actions are illegal. So my question is are you making the argument that social security is illegal bc it is unsustainable? Because it is strongly implied by asserting the analogy to Ponzi scheme just like murder and theft

> Except it isn't a false analogy simply because it doesn't have all the qualities of a Ponzi scheme.

I agree

> Thinking analogies are lazy is misunderstanding their purpose. Analogies are the very means of illustrating a concept by means of comparison.

I find them lazy when used in debate bc they are usually used to over simplify differences .

> Ponzi schemes are inherently unsustainable, but they're not inherently forced.

I think whether social security is sustainable or not is the question that has to be agreed upon or else we are at an impass.

> I can have objectives to it on forced participation grounds too, but I wouldn't call it a ponzi scheme to do so.

I agree but that wasn’t my point. My point was if social security has questionable legality, it is less misleading to use an analogy to other illegal topics even if the reason they should be illegal is different

> Which fallacy would that be?

False analogy

> It's not a material difference, because the problematic element I'm referring to is unsustainability, not whether it's fraudulent or not.

Thats a reasonable argument on its own but that’s cherry picking one aspect and using the analogy to be lazy or worse persuasive. That’s assuming it was promised the tax or age would never change. It was designed from the beginning to benefit earlier generations. I think the forced participation argument is a better leg to stand on than sustainability for the analogy due to the debatable justification of government confiscation

> It's like saying "well the police unjustifiably killing someone isnt murder because they have qualified immunity and murder means an unlawful killing", completely ignoring what informs what the definition of murder is.

Qualified immunity is civil liability. But regarding the point of the analogy, I’m not asserting that something being legal or illegal is the only consideration. I’m more simply asserting using an analogy with something that is illegal is lazy or dishonest. Generally I find analogies lazy and more often dishonest on purpose. Especially in the area of law they are very tricky and mainly used when the law is unclear

Depends on whether the differences are material to the conclusion. Drawing any inference from an analogy that cherry picks the similarities to infer a conclusion is a fallacy. I might entertain the analogy multilevel marketing is to pyramid scheme as social security is to ponzi scheme or Ponzi schemes are analogous to pyramid schemes because they are both fraudulent. But whether something is fraudulent hasn’t been proved, it’s a material difference that allows the analogy to be persuasively deceiving. I think you need to make the that argument forced participation or redistribution or insolvency is deceptive in order to support the analogy as a honest logical argument rather than a persuasion

> No, it was sold as individual workers contributing to their retirement later on, which isn't how it works.

I think it was obvious from the start the first generation of beneficiaries were gifted into the program

> It's not a progressive redistribution program either.

Not sure what you are getting at

>That's a legal distinction, not a structural one.

True but still a significant distinction rooted in transparency versus deception

> Yeah it's just a ponzi scheme in all but name.

That’s just lazy or dishonest

> Do you not see how you are fixated on the part that isn't required of a ponzi scheme, and ignoring the very argument being made that it is structured by one? You are wishing to maintain a rhetorical air about it, and avoid the actual argument.

You are wishing to portray a negative connotation with an unlawful deception to a transparent program with structural debt due to life expectancy and birth rates and immigration rates

> Economic bubbles aren't fraudulent either, but they're also ponzi schemes

They have similarities but that’s also a false analogy.

> No, it's a ponzi scheme. Calling it a tradeoff by society doesn't preclude it from being a ponzi scheme.

But everybody knows why it made the trade off and it wasn’t intentionally deceptive

> If it took your money and actually invested it in something, then I wouldn't call it a ponzi scheme.

Is the intention of social security to invest money? Is it being intentionally deceptive paying out benefits from tax revenue?

> I take issue with forced participation, but that doesn't mean all forced participations are ponzi schemes.

Obviously. Ponzi schemes are fraudulent. Social security isn’t fraudulent

> Think of it this way: if it's not a ponzi scheme, then you wouldn't need to increase the rate or the cap to keep it solvent.

That’s not fraudulent.

Forced participation or variations in benefits due to life expectancy isn’t deceptive. It’s a trade off made by society to give a gift to earlier generations. Calling it a Ponzi scheme is a rhetorical ploy to disparage something you don’t like for other reasons because you think people will believe your false analogy more than they will your real issue which is forced participation