The honest usage of “it turns out” is usually to gloss over an unnecessarily tedious argument that the author doesn’t want to waste your time with. And I think this is a fair characterization of even the use that the author criticizes here:
> When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It's an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn't like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York. It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown by air.
In principle, it’s entirely possible that pg kept a detailed diary of his attempt to find a community of intellectual peers in NY that compared to the one he found in Cambridge, and if you read the entire diary you would be satisfied that he carried out an exhaustive search. But even if that were the case (I wouldn’t expect it to be; who keeps detailed diaries documenting every opinion they ever form), that would dominate the length of an essay that was supposed to be about how cities work as focus hubs for specific types of ambition.
That’s not to say pg can’t be wrong about this point; it’s still a statement of opinion. What “it turns out” really signifies is that the author made a serious effort to investigate the question prior to forming the conclusion. They might be lying about that, but they can also lie about facts.
I guess I just consider it an insult to the reader’s intelligence to say that ‘it turns out’ is a particularly deceptive way to sneak in an unsubstantiated conclusion, because it’s not very sneaky. If I said “it turns out the moon really is made of cheese”, nobody would be fooled. If Buzz Aldrin said it, a few people might be fooled, but only because they already know he’s actually been there.
On the other hand, we routinely accept “it turns out” reasoning all the time, in the sense that we generally trust other people to come to conclusions that we don’t feel the need to audit. If I get labs done at the doctor’s office and it turns out I have high cholesterol, I don’t have a particular need to audit the lab’s methodology. You can’t rigorously audit all of the information in the world and if a writer you reasonably trust writes “it turns out” that X, you are reasonably justified in updating your certainty that X is true.
It’s possible to build mechanisms for this. Not perfect or foolproof ones. Maybe your phone stores a digital ID for its owner and sets a cryptographically signed “IsAdult” header. If you pull the signing key from the phone you can spoof that, but you can bring a fake ID to the bar too.
The problem is that the people who want age verification don’t really care about the technical details of how it’s implemented and the people who oppose age verification just want unfettered online pornography out of principle, so no one is actually thinking about how to implement age verification in a way that protects privacy.
Where are these emissions coming from? For instance, if this is counting the emissions involved in logistics, none of that inherently or necessarily requires greenhouse emissions—you can electrify trains, tanker trucks, and refrigerators.
If this is counting the methane emissions of the cow itself, that’s not a fair or complete accounting. The cow produces methane in her digestive system after eating grass, and the grass grows by, among other things, extracting CO2 from the air. Then the cow burps methane, the methane combines with atmospheric oxygen and breaks down to CO2 and water, and you have a closed loop; the cow cannot belch more carbon than she eats, and that carbon came from the air in the first place.
That doesn’t change the fact that you’re selectively counting only one side of a closed loop process. Methane may be a more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2 but if that effect dominated, we would expect to see the global warming trend start with the evolution of ruminants, not the Industrial Revolution (a time when the North American ruminant population actually declined a significant amount!)
Private car ownership is a better everyday solution for almost anyone who can afford it, which includes the vast majority of Americans. If buses tried to compete with cars, they would lose. The only remaining niche for the bus is as a public accommodation for the poor, disabled, and elderly, or occasionally in dense city centers.
At least that’s what I think. But if you’re right, and there’s a version of bus transport that’s viable without subsidy, then there should be a market opportunity for a private business to provide that type of bus transport. This actually exists for long range intercity buses already, but you’d think it should be possible inside of some cities. I haven’t looked into this in a lot of detail but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was effectively impossible to try and start a private bus service in most cities, specifically because that would reduce ridership of city transit and threaten all of the unionized public sector jobs in that system. In which case the bus system isn’t really even for the poor and elderly anymore; it’s for the transit workers union, which undoubtedly is a player in city politics.
But this comes down to how your city is planned. Amsterdam and the Netherlands in general is making it much less attractive to be a driver, for example. Public transportation has its own dedicated roads and even entire regions where cars aren't allowed, bicycles are first class citizens that take equal if not more consideration when streets are designed, streetside parking is limited and getting even more so with basically every city having as a goal the reduction of the number of parking spaces.
Of course, there's still plenty of drivers, but the nice thing is that you have options here. Why would I want to drive if I can just take the metro, or tram, or train, or hell just cycle? Within Dutch cities cycling is often much faster than any other mode of transport, and the great thing is that everyone uses the cycling infra, young or old, rich or poor, able bodied and otherwise.
I think it isn't as absolute as you suggest, and that it depends on city planning. I own a car but in the city I live it is not a better solution for everyday trips. Walking, cycling, or bus/tram are all far more convenient - it is only when leaving the city that the car becomes better.
(Even then, it depends on the destination - if it's to another city then the intercity trains are still better but for 2+ people it ends up being the premium/expensive option and the car is cheaper.)
If people without cars could stop subsidizing those with one i would agree (and include the lost land to mandatory parking places in your account). Car driver should pay a specific tax for that. A bus just need a lane on every road direction and no parking (and use it less than hundred of cars).
Private car ownership is better everyday for suburbs and rural areas but in cities that is not true. Public transit can improve downtown access and reduce congestion. You need some density for transit.
Buses are implicitly subsidized by road maintenance spending. Road wear and tear occurs according to the fourth power of axle weight, which effectively means almost all of the wear and tear is incurred by the heaviest vehicles, which include buses.
Roads still need maintenance even if nobody uses them, so a significant portion is split evenly across all traffic.
Busses are light compared to 18 wheelers and other heavy equipment, they also replace many cars and SUV’s which keep getting heavier.
Finally that rule of thumb isn’t really that accurate, “A 1988 report by the Australian Road Research Board stated that the rule is a good approximation for rutting damage, but an exponent of 2 (rather than 4) is more appropriate to estimate fatigue cracking.” Rutting really isn’t that significant in most cases, but can instantly destroy road surfaces when fully loaded construction vehicles etc drive over something once.
> Roads still need maintenance even if nobody uses them, so a significant portion is split evenly across all traffic.
Your former doesn't imply the latter. Here in Seattle we even still have cobblestone roads without heavy traffic and they spend very little money on them.
We have extensive rutting damage on the lanes use by busses and requires more expensive, deeper road base when they get replaced. This cost is due to the heavy traffic.
Even if squared, the buses are still 22 tons instead of 2-3 tons. 49 times more damage isn't good.
22 tons are huge busses and overkill unless you actually need that much space, and tend to have 4 axles. ((22 / 4)/(3/2)) ~= 13.5x a heavy SUV but could be replacing 30+ vehicles.
Also that visible ware is noticeable because it hasn’t been replaced. Looking worse when you resurface on the same schedule isn’t an actual cost.
But those are what we have and they have 3 axles, not 4.
We also have many concrete roads and closely-spaced axles, if they had them, would not help.
> Looking worse when you resurface on the same schedule isn’t an actual cost.
I addressed this: they have to dig much deeper and replace with much thicker road. Much more expensive. It's not "looking worse", it's actively dangerous to cyclists and other road users, so the surface must be replaced more often too.
Closely space axels work fine for road surfaces they don’t help on bridges but that’s a separate concern. You can see a plethora of heavy military vehicles etc which use extra axles to avoid getting stuck in the mud due to plastic deformation IE rutting. EX: The 22 ton KTO drives has to deal with rutting on vastly worse road surfaces like mud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KTO_Rosomak
But this is where you need to do a deeper analysis than just a simple rule of thumb. Even adding extra wheels to the same axle makes a big difference to road surfaces.
> so the surface must be replaced more often too.
Level of ruts you see are considered acceptable or they would be replaced.
However, ultimately the same entity is paying for the busses and road maintenance. If lighter busses saved taxpayers money that’s what they would use which is a major sign your analysis is inherently flawed.
> Level of ruts you see are considered acceptable or they would be replaced.
I guess you don't know how the USA works, and Seattle in particular. We are spending a fraction of what is necessary to keep infrastructure from failing. We had a major bridge nearly collapse and was out of commission for years. https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-dep...
Many of our roads are not what we call acceptable.
> However, ultimately the same entity is paying for the busses and road maintenance.
Hahaha nope. We have so many different organizations with their own funding sources. Roads come from State and local funds. Metro is primarily funded with dedicated sales tax.
> If lighter busses saved taxpayers money that’s what they would use which is a major sign your analysis is inherently flawed.
Sorry, but this is possibly the most naive thing I've ever heard.
> We are spending a fraction of what is necessary to keep infrastructure from failing.
I can’t help but chuckle at the idea you actually believe that. Stop reading headlines and do some actual research into what’s actually going on.
If the US was utterly failing in maintenance you’d see ~6,000 random bridge failures per year based on the number of bridges in existence instead they are incredibly rare showing that we are actually doing a great job overall.
>They don’t replace nearly enough cars and SUV’s to make up for the difference in fourth power of axle weight
A modest bus holds 40-50 people. Most commuter traffic is single driver, single vehicle. I don't know to which power the difference in axle weight would have to be to surpass the efficiency gains of replacing 40 to 50 American sized SUVs with a city bus, but I suspect it's more than four.
At the heavy end, SUVs weigh about 3 tonnes, while at the light end buses weigh about 12, a 4x difference. 4^4 = 256. So if the claim about the fourth power is true, you'd need to replace 256 SUVs to break even on wear, which is obviously impossible.
(I don't really understand how the fourth power of axel weight thing can possibly be true, though. Why would joining two vehicles together into a mega vehicle with double the weight and double the wheel count suddenly cause the combined vehicle to inflict 16x more wear than before you joined the two together? It makes no sense.)
A Ford F-150 weighs about 2 tons and has two axles, for an axle weight of 1 ton. 1^4=1.
A garbage truck weighs maybe 30 tons and has three axles, for an axle weight of 10 tons. 10^4=10,000.
So if you drive an F-150, you’re doing as much road damage driving down the street 10,000 times as the garbage truck does once. Rural areas that don’t have garbage trucks and just expect everyone to haul their garbage to the dump in the back of their pickups are onto something.
Ah, right, sorry, I misunderstood the definition of "axle weight" I got when I hurriedly googled it even though the name should've made the meaning obvious.
The classic British Routemaster double decker weighs 7.5 tonne and can be configured with 72 seats. Newer double deckers weigh 12.5 tonne and have a capacity of 60 seated and 20 standing.
Doubling the weight and doubling the wheel count leaves the axle weight unchanged.
Plus the SUV is usually point-to-point, leave home, go to work, come back. Whereas the bus is going back and forth ten times per day.
In Europe, the numbers differ even more. Lighter weight cars typically 1.5-2 tons, a new London bus can be upto 18 tons when loaded - that's ~5-16 units of wear for the car to 104,976 units for the bus...
But this is all supposing we're optimising for road wear, which isn't really the point of a bus system.
Axle weight and vehicle weight aren't the same (or even very closely correlated). A bus will weight ~3-4x more than a car, but has wider tires, and carrying far more people. As such the weight of a bus is likely similar to or lower than an equivalent number of cars.
Here in Seattle, the busy roads with older lanes used for buses are obvious, because they have two deep canyons while the lane next to them is fine. In fact King County Metro has to pay millions in fines to the state because the buses are excessively heavy.
No roads without bus traffic have the same type of damage.
Which is part of the reason to know that axle weight alone isn't a sufficient scale. If you connect 2 cars axle to axle, they won't start doing 8x as much damage. What matters is axle weight divided by tire width.
Nope, that's not correct, except that two cars would be spread across two lanes. PSI is not the only factor. Take, for example, our concrete road panels here in Seattle. The weight on one end forces that side of the panel down, stressing the connection to the previous panel, and also lifting the panel from the front. That force is not significantly changed by tire width.
I wish you did a little more studying before talking so authoritatively.
By 1066, not quite. That was an invading army led by the King of Norway to press his claim on the throne of England. I’m sure many of the soldiers in that army had been Vikings but at that time they were soldiers of a Christian king, which would have been considered much more legitimate than being a heathen raider.
I guess the Normans were also of Nordic descent but they had given up the Viking way of life a century before.
“Viking” isn’t a matter of heredity though. If your grandfather was a bricklayer, you’re not a bricklayer as a matter of heredity, you have to actually lay bricks. Likewise, if your grandfather was a viking, you have to actually go raiding and pillaging to be one yourself. Which is not something you’re likely to do if the king of France gave your grandfather an entire duchy in exchange for a promise to stop doing that sort of thing.
Much like pirates and gangsters, Vikings are cool if you consider them from an aesthetic as opposed to moralistic perspective. Everyone has evil ancestors, but some of them were cool.
The samurai didn’t survive the Satsuma Rebellion but they were admired and respected even by many of the people who fought against them in the following decades. You don’t even have to be Japanese to think samurai are cool, they just are, even if, in practice, you wouldn’t want to actually live in a society with them.
One of our big exports. Germans were obsessed with American outlaws (Karl May). And I am of the opinion that this is what the Nazi's were thinking when they invaded Poland and Russia. They wanted to create and settle their own variation of the "wild west". Hard to explain to people in 2025 how captivating the American frontier was to a European in 1910.
This piece seems a little confused about what it’s actually reporting on.
It’s well known, to the point of near-cliche, that the word “Viking” didn’t refer to a nationality or ethnicity. It meant something akin to “raider”. The ethnic group is usually referred to as the Norse, at least until they start differentiating into the modern nationalities of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.
The actual finding here seems to be the discovery of the remains of some Viking raiders who weren’t ethnically Norse. Fair enough. There are also examples of Norse populations assimilating into other cultures, such as the Normans and Rus. Likewise, the traditionally Norse Varangian Guard accepted many Anglo-Saxon warriors whose lords didn’t survive the Norman conquest. So it’s not too surprising that someone of non-Nordic descent might be accepted into a Viking warband.
> When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It's an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn't like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York. It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown by air.
In principle, it’s entirely possible that pg kept a detailed diary of his attempt to find a community of intellectual peers in NY that compared to the one he found in Cambridge, and if you read the entire diary you would be satisfied that he carried out an exhaustive search. But even if that were the case (I wouldn’t expect it to be; who keeps detailed diaries documenting every opinion they ever form), that would dominate the length of an essay that was supposed to be about how cities work as focus hubs for specific types of ambition.
That’s not to say pg can’t be wrong about this point; it’s still a statement of opinion. What “it turns out” really signifies is that the author made a serious effort to investigate the question prior to forming the conclusion. They might be lying about that, but they can also lie about facts.
I guess I just consider it an insult to the reader’s intelligence to say that ‘it turns out’ is a particularly deceptive way to sneak in an unsubstantiated conclusion, because it’s not very sneaky. If I said “it turns out the moon really is made of cheese”, nobody would be fooled. If Buzz Aldrin said it, a few people might be fooled, but only because they already know he’s actually been there.
On the other hand, we routinely accept “it turns out” reasoning all the time, in the sense that we generally trust other people to come to conclusions that we don’t feel the need to audit. If I get labs done at the doctor’s office and it turns out I have high cholesterol, I don’t have a particular need to audit the lab’s methodology. You can’t rigorously audit all of the information in the world and if a writer you reasonably trust writes “it turns out” that X, you are reasonably justified in updating your certainty that X is true.
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