Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

This should be interesting to watch, as others have noted on the 30 story building they did it is both 'boring' since the floors are mostly identical, and largely built off site and then simply erected. I'm sure The Register will call it the "worlds fastest erection" :-).

At the MIT affordable housing design competition there were some entrants that had similar features. (pre-fab sections, erected on site relatively rapidly) By pre-wiring/plumbing the walls and floors you cut out a lot of things that slow people down. Having watched Hotels get built in Las Vegas really rapidly (for them, which is 18 months, ground breaking to opening night) you could see there are lots of things that can be disrupted. Staging carpet for example, when you start carpeting its rolls and rolls and rolls of carpet, lifted by crane to various floors, and later cut to order. If you install the floor with all the carpeting already installed at the factory you've managed to parallelize floor construction and finishing. That is a huge savings.

This building will house 31,400 people, (@ 11M sq ft that is like 350 sq ft per person so not really roomy) But an interesting way to throw together shelter. Building these things for Haiti could do wonders for that country, assuming they don't burn down.

I don't know if building cheap housing really solves any problems however. C.f., the famous housing "projects" in Chicago. You can replace those with any low-income housing project anywhere in the world and see the same effects. You might put roofs over people's heads but you create a new set of problems by throwing all of those marginally functional people together. I imagine increasing population density would just amplify those problems.

This building is supposed to have a mix of low and high income housing (how does that work?) as well as schools and other social services. Given that space in China is not at a premium I don't think you can call this anything but a social experiment. Maybe if it works they can export it to HK where it might actually be useful. (Though it does conjure images of a sort of neo-Walled City.)

Given that this type of construction produces boring, utilitarian space I don't understand why they're not using it for offices. I imagine this would be much more tolerable as office space and the footprint / usable space ratio would make sense for commercial districts.

I think it may be worth considering that the discipline and follow-the-herd mentality of Chinese people is a lot different than those of Americans who would qualify for "the projects" style housing.

You may not have intended it that way, but I do find this comment to be rather racist. The stereotype that the Chinese are "follow the herd" is both untrue and damaging. Us Chinese have a hard enough time being taken seriously in the West, what with stereotypes of a hive mind and mindless obedience to authority, and this doesn't help.

I definitely didn't mean it that way but if thought it was "racism" you should read up on what racism is. To call out the differences between two cultures is not racism. Having said that, Asian culture has been, and is still very much, strongly influenced by the ideas of honor and shame. That's much less the case here in the US and that is what I was pointing out.

I find it interesting that you didn't take offense to my generalization of the "Americans who would qualify for 'the projects'". Why is that?

You may wish to follow your own advice there. Calling out the differences between cultures is a fundamental part of racism - "we're better than them and their funny ways". Yes, it can be done in a non-racist way, but the way you've phrased it is just plain wrong.

I find it interesting that you didn't take offense to my generalization of the "Americans who would qualify for 'the projects'".

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Oppression%20...

I recently started thinking about this the other way - that it's actually more racist to accuse someone making statements about group differences of attributing them to race - rather than culture.

It's a fact that the way people are raised has a huge influence on how conformist they are as adults; in a conversation about the average level of conformity between two different cultures, someone who comes along and brings race into it is the one who is lowering the tone.

Culture is important and heritable, let's just talk about that!

What?

It sounds like you've really misunderstood my comment(s).

I'm saying that you have a peverse understanding of what racism is, and that you should 'read up on racism'.

Your first paragraph is saying that calling out differences in two cultures isn't racist. This isn't true. Yes it can be done differently, but if you start talking about 'fried chicken and watermelon' (as an example), you're talking about the difference between two cultures, yours and the stereotyped one you're referring to.

The second paragraph was a straight-out derailment:"oh, if you're really against racism, why aren't you against this other kind?", the subtext being that the speaker is biased or selfish because they didn't evenly address the other potentially racist stuff.

Seriously, if you're going to be correcting others on 'what racism is', you do need to spend some more time reading up on it. There's a few subtleties that have bypassed you, from your comment above.

> Asian culture has been, and is still very much, strongly influenced by the ideas of honor and shame

Regardless, 'follow-the-herd' doesn't neccesarily follow from it. You seem to have very simplistic views of 'asians', who make up many different cultures and people. This kind of generalization is usually a prerequisite of racism - it makes it possible to broadly criticize an entire group of people because of their race and ethnicity.

What a joke.

the reason your comment about Americans is not racist is because you are not talking about Chinese People and American People at all. you are talking about Chinese People and People of Low Income who Live In America. you used a qualifier for the latter, but not the former. when you don't include a qualifier, the implicit one becomes "all".

yes, i realize changing your wording does not change your argument. but no one seems to be saying that you are a racist person or have a racist argument. they simply seem to be saying you said a racist thing.

and this is why delicacy is important when dealing with race. not just for sensitive audiences, but literal ones as well. ironically, if you take this perspective, "it's racist" actually seems less emotionally provoked than "it's not racist".

One aspect is priority: How much important house styling is for you? May be some cultures have low priority for it.

So far the herd mentality is concerned, being different than others just because everyone is trying to be different (identity crisis?), is the same herd mentality.

In the UK, we tend to mix the social housing with private housing. Seems to work - everywhere is uniformly shitty :)

There are places where social housing works. In the Netherlands social housing is often quite pleasant, especially if it is centrally/well located. A difference might be that there is much more of it in the Netherlands, so the middle-classes also often live there (especially early in their careers).

Assuming that a family will have 3 or 4 people, 1050 sq ft to 1400 sq ft isn't bad at all in any big city in Asia. In Bangalore for instance, such an apartment would cost around $200k in a decent location.

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