When London’s Dragons Ruled Before Skyscrapers | Hacker News Reader

When London’s Dragons Ruled Before Skyscrapers

cnu.org

31 pointsdangerman18 comments

This is a very strangely written article, like something churned out by an SEO mill.

It half-way alludes to - and then shies away from - a bunch of potentially interesting things, then wildly changes direction in the last paragraph and ends abruptly. I wonder if the person who wrote it has ever even visited London? Most of it seems to be a near-direct lift form the Wikipedia article on the City of London.

I also thought so. No pictures and it was not clear from the article if thus sculptures were still standing.

A quick search turned up an article with pictures: https://www.aperturetours.com/blog/dragons

> The American Conservative

> We want a federal government that restrains itself from intrusive forays into the lives and businesses

> Unfortunately, these well-intentioned dragons at the thresholds of the City of London have been unable to guard against the onslaught of hubristic architects and developers

Wow, that's hard to conciliate! A limited-government conservative who is also a NIMBY and in favor a strong-government urban planning.

Perhaps Mr Thadani is merely expressing a personal opinion here.

> Dhiru A. Thadani is an architect

One may reasonably disapprove of something, even to the extent of quite literally saying out loud that it is a bad thing, and yet still think that government enforcement is unnecessary.

For example, Javascript.

There is no contradiction in wanting a small federal government and being in favor of local governments making rules to better the daily life of citizens, or accomplish any other goal. It’s well in line with the concept of subsidiarity, a hallmark of most strands of conservatism.

Not when you want this:

> authentically free markets

Heavily regulating land markets is as far away from a free market as you can be.

It's not quite the same, but Georgists consider land, in general, and not entirely without reason, as a special case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

American conservatives (as opposed to libertarians) aren't particularly for limited government, they are for government doing conservative things, and for limited US federal government, because the US federal government has been, from time-to-time, known to step in with great force to stop subordinate governments from doing things American conservatives quite liked.

Are boundary markers really completely deprecated in much of the world? Here in Finland, private properties still commonly feature them, and it's illegal to move them.

Not sure. I know one corner of my parent's land in Montana has a physical marker. Maybe because it's a joint boundary between state, federal and private land. It is also really hard to find, as it's in the bottom of a ravine in heavy brush and it's a ground level bronze (I think) spike like an oversized nail hammered into the ground. You really have to know where the boundary is within a few feet already to have even the slightest hope of finding it.

I found it once as a teen, but 2 decades later, I'd be hard pressed to find it.

That might also be a USGS reference marker, used for topographic surveys.

Did it look like one of these? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survey_marker

Could be. On further reflection, I also recall small plastic spikes that were significantly smaller (about an inch in diameter) on the private boundary. Only found one or two of those.

Nope. They're still used at the very least in the US and Germany.

There are different versions of it - most common are probably a metal nail (if you have stone or something else to anchor it in), a metal pipe (if dirt is all you've got) or a massive, pain-in-the ass to lug around stone. (My dad's a surveyor, and in my youth I was cheap labor. I still hate boundary marker stones :)

It's AIUI not _necessary_ to have them, but if you have a property dispute, they come in handy.

URL for the original article source: https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2018/12/27/dragon-boundary-...

Thanks! Changed to that from https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/when-londons-dr....

This is really one of the worst articles I've ever read, ever.

Not only because it baits you with an interesting introduction suggesting that we'll get a really neat history lesson, but because it ends abruptly with wildly irrelevant, unsubstantiated opinions.

Why are big glass towers bad? Who have they harmed? Why is new development bad? Is there any evidence to show that these buildings are not as energy efficient as they claim to be? Which landmarks have been destroyed? In what way are buildings designed to make money bad? None of these questions are answered and we're expected to assume that the author's opinion comes from some position of authority.

It truly is conservative in the most primal sense: I don't want things to change, I don't know why, and I'm upset about it.

I can’t prove to you that Venice is more beautiful than Manhattan.

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