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I would add that an architect’s job is to find the little details that make your big investment better. One thing I associate with off the rack house plans in big developments is having the shades drawn all day because otherwise the sun will shine right in your face. An architect looks at the site and the sun and adjusts window heights and overhangs to suit. Amongst many other details. A house being such a big investment, hiring an architect seems wise.

In reference to the cmip model, the article says:

> There are, however, model biases toward overestimated stability of the AMOC, both from tuning to the historic climate record, poor representation of the deep water formation, salinity and glacial runoff.

The article goes in to say why they disagree with the cmip assessment, and rather believe it could happen “around mid century” of the current century.

Home prices are likely to go down over the course of the summer in the US, driven by the increasing costs of financing. But macro factors (demographics driving up demand for a limited and slow to expand housing supply) are still present so the price relief could be short lived. Or we could enter a recession that drives home prices down to historic lows, nobody knows.

Mortgage rates are likely to stay elevated for a year minimum, so that’s just reality if you need a place to live in the meantime. Paying the extra monthly cost until rates drop and you can refinance probably still beats renting for that time.

A few friends of mine have bought houses in the gentrifying parts of port richmond over the years, and I've biked through several of the intersections in that video. Yeah parts of Kensington Ave are open air drug markets, you avoid those spots. The surrounding neighborhood is run down and pretty low income, but mostly quiet and residential. I assume SF is similar in that outside of downtown you can find a path to anywhere you want to go that avoids the most obvious dangers. Similar to the parent comment, the grocery store I walk to in west philly always has a homeless woman out front and the interactions aren't scary. She says hello to me and my dog who she recognizes and asks for change, I typically say "no but have a nice day" she says "god bless" and that's that.

Speaking as a non-parent, if I had a kid near kensington ave and they walked to school (which they mostly do) I would just tell them to walk down Frankford Ave a few blocks south, which is much less scary. Teaching kids those basic "street smarts" is one of the objectives of having "free range" kids. Although I would also add that living a little ways away from the street infamous for being a drug market is within the means of the majority of the Philadelphians, and the vast majority of the hacker news crowd.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics actually employees quite a few people to call stores across the country and get prices. Planet money interviewed one such person not long ago. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015804773/how-do-you-measure...

Not a farmer, but alfalfa can be grown many places. I watched a gabe brown video where he mentioned growing it for cattle grazing in North Dakota, which is basically a cold desert. Presumably US farmers in wetter climates like the upper midwest and southeast are capable of growing more profitable crops than cattle feed.

Just one example: If we switched to electric cars and eliminated the need for the midwest to grow corn for ethanol, then a tremendous amount of farmland would open up. So you're right to ask the macro question, it's just that the answer is complicated.

Just guessing but I can't imagine they use as much salt as northern cities put on the road when it snows (dump trucks worth of salt). There's information for that at my local extension office [1]. The TL;DR is that plants don't love it, but they tolerate it. Grasses are especially tolerant.

[1] https://plant-pest-advisory.rutgers.edu/impact-of-road-salt-...

Have you tried it? How was it?

If a drive down a highway cost as much as a train ticket, I think US cities would indeed be very different. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/10/think-buses-an...

I'm definitely a city person, and there have been some well-meaning comments from non-city people wondering why people like me are opposed to their lifestyle. I don't mind people choosing to live in the suburbs or rural areas, I just want them to pay for the giant ugly highway that lifestyle requires. I want my taxes to go to city parks and schools and streetcars.

Side note - I am aware that state and federal DOT funds most highways, but the city has to pay for the induced demand for car infrastructure that those highways create downtown. On the flip side, the state and federal DOT contribute minimally to the cost of me taking the subway.

That announcement excluded the mustang (and one trim of the focus). They will continue building the mustang as a gas-powered sport coupe, but will stop producing Fusion/Taurus/Fiesta.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/25/17282562/ford-focus-musta...

I think everyone is eager to escape poverty. But to your point, poverty and homelessness are the visible symptoms of a whole web of problems. There are those who were temporarily nudged into poverty by misfortune, and those that are bound to it by addiction and mental illness and much more.

All that to say, I think we as a society should offer the most compassionate programs that we can to anyone experiencing homelessness or poverty. I started supporting my local chapter of pathways to housing, which provides condition-free housing, stipend, and medical care to homeless people. That large upfront investment - giving people space to sort out their underlying issues - leads to 85% of participants having homes 5 years after entry. It's a cool program that I'm still learning a lot about.

Don't let plastic recycling get you down, recycling aluminum is a great way to help the environment. Paper and cardboard are also good. Glass is just ok. Reduce your consumption where possible, and make sure that non-recycleable materials make it to a landfill where the environmental impacts are contained. Our individual efforts have a small impact, but it's a small effort and it does matter.

While there are some uses for recycled plastics, I fear that we'll likely continue to see a lot of single-use plastics until some economic force makes plastic unprofitable. Maybe public anger drives new regulation, maybe we use up all the oil, maybe we ween off of oil and it's too expensive to pump oil just to make plastics. In any case, I think we need to embrace some short and medium term solutions to mitigate environmental damage from single-use plastic.

I prefer walmart for the same reason, I have a lot more trust in their supply chain. And the free delivery times are about the same, coupled with easy returns to the store. I would guess my Target and walmart online orders are 10x my Amazon orders. But I wouldn't pay for prime or walmart plus simply for the faster shipping, the free tier is already plenty fast

I tend to think that the outcome of removing zoning in the US would be very case-by-case. In a desirable urban neighborhood with height restrictions and a historical building commission, it might be possible to add a lot more density and storefronts without zoning. On the other end, I don't think a developer would add a story to a suburban olive garden along a busy road. If anything it might be cheaper to build sprawl without zoning.

Try to find a survey paper or review article [1] on the field you're interested in. They summarize the current state of the art in a field and link to the relevant papers. If the linked papers are behind a pay wall then you can use arXiv as recommended in another comment by searching the title/authors. The field usually wouldn't be as broad as "databases" but you could probably find one on "distributed wide column stores". I think they're usually published by grad students before they pick their thesis topic.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_article

EliottM is right, the delta in land and population between the city and county is significant. Over 900K people in the county and 241 square miles compared to 96 square miles in the city.

Some contextual data from US cities in 2018

City – City Population (Metro Area Population), City Density per Square Mile, City Traffic Fatalities

Oslo [1]: 690,335 (1,588,457), 3,938, 1

Nashville [2][3]: 692,587 (1,930,961), 1,374, 82

Portland [4][5]: 653,115 (2,478,810), 4,911, 34

Milwaukee [6][7]: 592,025 (1,572,245), 6,155, 68

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville,_Tennessee

[3] https://data.nashville.gov/Police/Traffic-Accidents-2018-/8k...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland,_Oregon

[5] https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/74093

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee

[7] https://wisconsindot.gov/Pages/about-wisdot/newsroom/statist...

> When a train is going 400kph, you can't share track.

Correct, you would be traveling at normal train speed on shared track. This is workable in some systems because you can build cheap (relatively) rural segments of high speed rail without needing new right of way through urban areas. Obviously wouldn't work everywhere, and maybe it's not the right solution here. But it is done some places, and places like California are considering building new blended systems [1.

[1] http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...

Not from the PNW, but it sounds like amtrak rents track from a freight line to run this route. So it works in the sense that they got something resembling inter-city rail service for a tiny fraction of the capital costs up front.

Even so, I'm guessing that there are options other than $50B of high speed track to improve the route. Maybe there's a few segments of track where a large fraction of the delays happen, and 30 miles of amtrak-owned track would really improve on-timliness. Just getting it from +hours to +minutes might draw some new users.

High speed rail could share track with commuter lines in some cases, as acela does in the northeast corridor. And building through the rural parts of the state is generally easier, California essentially decided to only build the rural segment of their high speed rail due to cost.

But in general you're correct that projects requiring new right of way are very challenging and expensive. Especially high speed rail with limited turn radius. Since the article mentioned a low-usage rail link between the cities, I would prefer to see a campaign to increase ridership. Maybe you could incrementally upgrade segments of that route that could support high speed rail.

> serious injury rate of 26 per 100 workers

Do you know the time period for this stat, I couldn't find it in the linked article.

I just rewatched the battle scene from the movie, and the wraiths took out a few trebuchets and a decent number of soldiers on the wall. They weren't effective against soldiers under any sort of cover, but picking up and dropping soldiers on the city would be a good psychological warfare technique. Gandalf is seen riding around the city telling soldiers to return to their posts.

And the communication and intelligence that flying wraiths would allow is no small asset. Part of the advantage of a walled city is a view of the enemy approach while hiding your own formation. Good areal surveillance eliminates that advantage for the defending side.

What about pedestrians?

I think there's some value in hyping up a new technology, trying to apply it in a lot of places, and settling on a smaller number of logical applications. I think that's what happened with VR [1] and 3D printing [2]. Self-driving isn't as far along, but the Waymo videos I've seen make me pretty sure it will have it's place in our future.

[1] https://www.superdataresearch.com/superdata-xr-update/

[2] https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2018-07-11-Giant-Satellite-F...

> education is a mess, so smart critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach

I'm not sure I agree with this. If our schools were 10x as effective and we produced 10x as many smart people, I think we'd be having the same conversation. It would just be about how hard it is to recruit people to teach quantum computer programming when you can make 5 times as much working in the teleportation industry (facetious example, please don't debate the physics of this).

Had the same question, the answer is yes BUT you would have to accomplish the following:

- reflect every part of the spectrum that the laser can produce (idk if military lasers operate in the visible part of the spectrum)

- keep the coating clean enough throughout flight to maintain reflectivity

- meet the same requirements as the current coating which probably includes aerodynamics, heat resistance, etc.

Idk if such a material exists, but I'm sure every country building lasers is also working on the defensive side as well.

can confirm that defense people are terrible about spilling a lot of details in public, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard an actual classified piece of info spoken in public

> convenience for family

As a late-20s person living in the city, this is a thing I've been pondering. I grew up in typical suburban sprawl living "close" to school, soccer practice and friend's houses... but "close" still meant entirely dependent on my parents for rides to each place (less the 5-10 children my age within a 1-mile walk). It was a huge time sink for the family, and having to be driven everywhere felt isolating as a child (i.e. can't hang out because mom is too busy to drive me). Not every urban neighborhood is inherently walkable, but many cities have inner ring suburbs (usually within city limits) where all of those amenities are at most a 20 minute walk away. Would this type of neighborhood be livable with your requirements?

Part of the problem around light rail is that it's so broad. Just looking at the range of meanings of light rail in Philly, I have no idea how anyone talking about "light rail" could say that their argument applies to all of the forms it could take.

Also I can confirm that Philly's combination of light and heavy rail will get you from many places in the city and suburbs to downtown faster than driving. Buses do an adequate job of last mile in the suburbs but even several miles outside the city there's still a good fraction of the population within a half mile of a rail stop. My point is that this system exists because rail lines were built through the middle of nowhere by the steel industry 100+ years ago. The tracks, rail cars, stations, and signals have all been replaced but the right-of-way remained. The author focused too much on the method of transit and not the long-term strategic benefits of a city owning a dedicated transit route to allow for future growth.

edit: added 2nd paragraph responding to parent comment

The first four block 1 varients deployed to Afghanistan were pretty widely publicized. After that you can find public references to test events throughout the 2010s, the manufacturing of a few block 2 varients, and stated interest from more than one agency. But no there aren't a lot of hard numbers to be found in a Google search. Presumably you could learn more by looking through the actual contracts, but that takes some time and effort.

For a completely new military program, that's close to your best case scenario. Most new programs get dropped after the first prototype.

https://www.auvsi.org/arms-armed-and-armor-lockheed-martin-p...