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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

The non-adaptation thing is recent. Dig down and you will find every building today stands atop the rubble of many previous that were nocked down once they got too expensive to maintain. The city constantly sinks and readily adapted to this. Some might say that need to constantly adapt made venice great. But at some point in the 1950s/60s the "greatest generation" decided to protect the old at all costs. Nothing is ever knocked down and so within only a couple generations everything is in crisis at once.

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Sources? What I know doesn‘t fit your story. The most of the traditional houses aren‘t on the rubbles at all but on the water tanks, which are at least a few hundred years old.

Many buildings in Venice are hundreds of years old. If the cycle involves replacing, say, 1% of buildings every 5 years then that isn't necessarily in conflict. Most of the buildings would be hundreds of years old, but after 50 years of an effective moratorium, 10% would need to be replaced despite the fact that most buildings are hundreds of years old and don't need to be replaced.

That's a little different from saying the entire city needs to be rebuilt, but it will eventually.

The "greatest generation" name applies to Americans not Italians. They earned that title by winning World War II, rebuilding Japan and Germany, and creating the richest society in the history of the world.

That same generation of Italians embraced fascism, followed Mussolini, allied with Hitler and got their ass kicked in World War II.

I'm not sure if shitting on Italians adds anything to this discussion.

That same "greatest generation" of Americans wrongly imprisoned American citizens of Japanese descent during the war, and turned a blind eye to Jewish refugees for an embarrassingly long time before grudgingly entering the war. None of us are perfect.

No. It is just a label. No different than gen-x or millenials. It is a description of people born during a paticular period. What those people did in other context, for good or ill, is beside the point: they did do something to venice that broke from previous practices.

They also sold half of Europe to the Soviets, started a war in Vietnam, and nuked Japan.

See? Goes both ways.

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