admiralteal @ admiralteal @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

The federal aid highway act.

The broken modern urban planing pattern did not predate it. Period. The suburban experiment is post war.

The rest of the 5000+ years of traditional urban design were overturned.

My assumption is that it's almost certainly the other way around. Ads visible surrounding you in your life work their way into your head and make it to your conversations. At that point it stops being subliminal and you're thinking about it and notice the ads.

My entire theory is hinged on the idea that advertising works. That all these companies spending millions and billions on ads fundamentally know what they're doing and that you're being hacked in an insidious and grotesque way by them.

My worldview still makes it a duty to protect your own goddamn soul by installing as many ad blockers as possible though

Our current model of urban planning has only existed since the middle of the 20th century. Only really got started in around 1960s.

I think it's important to point out that it is definitely under 100 years. On the scales of human urban policy it is the brand new experiment. And it is a disaster. And we're still throwing bad money after good on it in huge quantities.

Cities are already remodeling themselves, small bits at a time, to start fixing these issues. There is no choice in the matter here. They have to do it or else they're going to find themselves with roads full of potholes that they can't afford to fix and failing water systems and all those other modern signs of decay growing worse and worse until they basically aren't a town anymore. As someone in the Bay Area you should know this well, because that City both has some disastrous symptoms and is building policies to this effect.

Literally everything you've written here is premised on the idea that people have a choice. That both kinds of living arrangements are equally available and people are choosing one over the other. That and a mistaken understanding of density that so many people have, where you think only Metropolis style apartment blocks could possibly be walkable when really the small town Main Street has been the icon of walkability for basically all of human history.

It's such a fundamental error that I'm comfortable dismissing pretty much everything else you wrote based on it. There's a reason almost the entire world and human history has cities that generally follow the same pattern. Walkable, modest density communities with a mix of uses that grow organically.

And there's a reason those don't get built anymore in the US. It's not because people hate them. People love them. The ones that do exist are some of the most desirable places to live based on so many metrics. Particularly price, which is the true story - the supply on these kinds of towns is unbelievably tight and so people can't afford to live in them. They're forced by factors outside of their own preference and control to instead live in places that 100% require a car for all day today life activities with absolutely no mix of uses and where it is only legal to build single-family detached homes. Because these places are way cheaper. Even though they shouldn't be. They absolutely and objectively should cost more to live in because it costs more for the municipal government to service you living in them. You consume more public resources living in them. But we subsidize them so much that they magically get cheaper even inclusive of one or two $10,000 a year cars.

The reason suburbs show so much clear growth is because we subsidize them intensely in so many ways.

And it wouldn't even matter if you were right and people genuinely preferred suburbs because they're not financially productive they're not financially sustainable and they're an environmental disaster. Just having a preference for something doesn't mean that the government should tax everyone else and subsidize it for you.

I don’t think that introducing electric motors into the mix is going to be the factor that drastically changes the above ratios.

Very confident you're wrong in that sentiment.

American urban design is awful. It's really bad. And I would feel safe claiming that most Americans who might consider bikeped commutes rule it out because it is just not practical with our sprawling, idiotic suburban model.

That electric motor decreases your delta with prevailing traffic substantially and massively expands your range both as a function of literal distance and as a function of how far you can get in a given time. ebikes have absolutely HUGE potential to act as a transition as US urban planners (hopefully) get their act together and stop building financially and environmentally unsustainable, ugly, unsafe cities -- and start opening the door to the kind of infill needed to fix the already-busted ones.

Especially re: road safety, this is the American approach. Build with unsafe designs according to decades out-of-date engineering practice and design philosophy. Blame enforcement when things inevitably go wrong (which they are doing -- most American towns are heading towards financial insolvency because of their idiotic design and planning patterns and American roads are among if not the least safe ones in the developed world).

In threads about roads, people will inevitably bring up two pieces of perfectly-harmonized bullshit. First, that the drivers are just particularly bad in their context. Second, that there is way too little enforcement. Both are total bullshit. Drivers are basically the same everywhere. It is literally not possible for the police to enforce enough to make a dent on road safety.

When some municipality decides they want to get serious about safe roads, they do so primarily through better engineering of the roads. It's proven effective. And bonus points: the same design practices that make roads safer encourage better development patterns creating safer and more pleasant streets for EVERYONE. Especially people outside of cars. Which creates a virtuous cycle of multi-modal development patterns. Safer streets mean more people are on them, and not just in cars. This leads to lower crime, more productive neighborhood businesses, more aesthetic neighborhoods (since people are actually there to look at them, they care how they look now). Everything just gets better when you use better road engineering.

But no, we still rely on AASHTO standards and their ilk which rate roads according to "level of service". They literally put everything, including safety, as secondary to how many cars the road can move.

And that's not even jumping down the rabbit hole of what it means for my country to be a police state. How insane it is that we have laws that criminalize completely mundane, normal, predictable behavior that can be selectively-enforced or used as pretexts for unnecessary violence.

To be clear, he wasn't "praying on the field". He was leading the whole team in prayer as part of the school event, at the 50 yard line, with the audience watching, inviting others to participate, apparently creating an atmosphere of pressure to participate, etc.. He was using his role as a coach and as faculty of the school to formally endorse and encourage his particular religion as part of the identity of the team.

And the stupid fucks at the SCOTUS thought this was not an establishment violation based on lies. Kavanaugh literally repeatedly lied in his opinion on it, claiming repeatedly that it was a private prayer instead of a giant, intentional public spectacle.

Anyone who looks at the photos of clips of the prayer will have ZERO illusion that this was a small private prayer on the field. It was a megachurch-inspired moment.

All the other corruption and such aside, imagine how terrible this is for the urban development of your town.

The municipal government has no incentive to invest in forward-thinking policy that will lead to healthier and more economically sustainable communities. If they invest in any kind of maintenance or developments that increase road safety - and thus decrease fines - it hurts the government's ability to operate. Indeed, they have direct Financial incentive to make the roads less safe. Not to even mention that they have no incentive at all to do things that improved the city in ways that won't affect their traffic fines.

They've committed to giving up on good governance of their small town. They found a way to function by just parasitizing others. They've given up.

No one wants a more intrusive and powerful government than the modern Republicans.

They just don't want it involved in any form of governance. They want it to be used to murder trans people, enforce evangelical christian dogma, and make them rich. They want it to look like Hungary or Russia.

The mentality of people who just hate and drag anyone who identifies dem, in this day and age, drives me crazy. Because "democrat" is just not a political identity. The only core philosophy behind being a democrat is belief in evidence-based policy, fairness and justice at least some of the time, and that government should fundamentally be allowed to do the work of governance. Any political view that fits in that framework can make it under the tent.

To be distinguished from the modern conservative wing, who think government should be butchered and sold off to the highest bidder, that fairness and justice are part of the woke mind virus, and evidence is conspiracy.

About 50 cubic meters. An Olympic-sized swimming pool is 660,000 gallons, so it would take over 50 of them to produce that much water in a day.

If the water cycle shuts down to such a degree that the desalinated water is not making it back into the oceans, we have planetary-scale problems far more worrisome than a slightly elevated ocean salinity.

If you had an absolutely huge number of these in a small area, I'm sure you could probably create a localized disturbance in the salinity. But 13k gallons is a pretty trivial amount. That's a 50 meter cube of water per day... in the ocean.

You also need a permit to buy a gun. Shall-issue for most of the guns I'd categorize as more reasonable, but still need to put in for the permit. Automatics have quite stringent requirements on their may-issue permits. High-cap magazines are not available. Universal registration & background check and "red flag"-style blocks on any purchases.

Ammo is also included in these rules, essentially.

Second-hand sales require a paper trail conforming to many of these rules with a decade-long statute of limitations to prove legitimate transfer that is also reported to the state authority.

Storage methods are regulated. Failure to report a lost/stolen weapon to police is bad news for you.

You need a permit to carry which is mostly only given to people who have occupational need to carry -- like the old NYC law where you have to state a plausible need. Otherwise, when and where you can carry is limited to basically sport or similar events.

And there's more. Not to mention their culture of training and safety around it because of their military and militia requirements.

I'm all for imposing Swiss-style gun rules on the US. It would restrict guns a lot. The people who appeal to how great they are with guns and how it is "proof" that gun restrictions aren't a good solution just haven't even done basic research about what the gun situation actually is in Switzerland.

More and more of the US is going to be a tropical climate and will have to deal with tropical diseases in the coming decades. We'll need to stop pretending the Gulf is substantially different than Central America in ecology pretty soon, including for diseases.

The best time to get serious about fighting back against these diseases was generations ago. Of course, capitalist systems didn't care about suffering and death that didn't effect the bottom line, but as the threats loom closer they finally get off their haunches. Any progress on it is good.

What do you mean? Surely any company announcing layoffs will include reductions to executives their pay in the same announcement, proportional to the amount of layoffs. Businesses are ethical and doing otherwise would just make no sense.

Probably invented, but it's worth pointing out that Socrates did not write. Most of his stuff came from Plato or others.

The Ancient Greeks also had a fundamentally different idea of what it meant to be a historian. It wasn't a fact and evidence-driven field, as it is thought of today. Herodotus, for example, regularly wrote stuff in the framing of "I wasn't there and it was many scores of years ago, but if I HAD been there this is what I would've seen happen", so to speak. Assuming he was a real person and not an invented personality.

They were told the other acceptable courtesy titles were Mrs., Ms., or Miss. Using "teacher" was also out of the question.

After being denied Teacher, Professor, or Dr. as the title (the last because they did not have a PhD even though evidently others in the school go by Dr. without a PhD without discipline). And note that "Mr." was apparently not an option?

The school's hands weren't tied. They appear enthusiastic.