glompers

I am pretty certain the parent's analogy was that (the non-Paris) French cities typically can fund bus service routes just as widely convenient as (the non-Amsterdam) Dutch cities typically can fund train services.

It was not at all a putdown of France, which, after all, does fund many more long distance TGV routes out of geographic necessity; just a favorable comparison of how conveniently widespread the medium-speed train routes are in the average Dutch metropolitan region.

Nice comment

The problem is that a single-party propagandist republic is effectively a separate type of government than a representative republic and makes it harder to distinguish the will of the population.

The policies could be hidden from the vast majority of informed public opinion in a way Western conspiracists or whataboutists alike can only dream is really correspondent or directly analogous to mainstream media manipulation.

It can still be true that China’s no one’s enemy except that the Party is everyone’s enemy (while the Chinese population will be the last ones to realize it).

The 31st person dressed up and walking behind the painting may have had something constructive to say about the situation

Haha look Hold my beer

Yes but to many it is a relaxing form of work, just like a better form of mental and physical workout combined with “forest bath” or “bird song bathing” — depending on the local biome and season of course

No offense intended, but the second leg of cyberax’ point still stands — quoted below — higher percentages of the total jobs in a metro area are within the average range of an average US metro dwelling household also, as long as they don’t have to worry about costs of car repair and insurance.

If Paris’ airport built two new runways and they both filled up with international flights immediately, would this be taken as evidence that their construction was an irresponsible waste of scarce public investment? It would rather be celebrated as a validation of forecast utility to the public and to the economy. Same for urban condo buildings filling up. Yet American traffic jams are gross and different from runways? How so?

> Affluence definitely followed [as well as preceded; but, in any case, a set of feedback loops, not simply affluence preceding networks’ construction —-Ed.] the conscious policy decision to build a network of freeways and highways, with a focus on suburban lifestyle.

> To expand a bit on that, car-oriented cities allowed US citizens to:

> 1. Have shorter commutes than Europeans. This _still_ holds true!

> 2. Be able to access more businesses within the "reasonable commute" range.

Neither companies nor families go around looking to share their responsibilities (product or personal) with third parties on terms chosen and reneged by the third party whenever the third party wants to do so. If they share their responsibility for something it is not consensual, it is explicitly on the basis of terms they propose, and thereafter owed to them by someone.

I generally like the comments posted here by DoreenMichelle. I would cite the historic cobblestone or quarried Belgian Block pavements in American port cities like Philadelphia and Savannah as examples of locally available materials that were not local materials (many arrived as ballasts unloaded from the hulls of ships that were departing town heavier and more stable than they had arrived) but economic afterthoughts. Is it still a vernacular practice of local knowledge and local conditions that prevail in the built environment, if instead the citizens had simply used them as earthfill rubble to create new land out of wetlands? I would say no; practices that have left a trace only in being cheaper than other methods of earthfill don't meet my criteria for a vernacular practice, although they may have still been performed by some of the same families who would be continuing to pass down that pattern of form in that same tradition.

On the other hand, if forestry and agriculture oriented areas of the USA find their local furniture and textile manufacturing tooling falling out of demand as furniture production goes offshore, is it possible to call it local knowhow if they repurpose those manufacturing plants to produce wood-framed, furnished turnkey mobile home trailers? It is still vernacular practice but at one remove, its nature changed by one layer (at least) of abstraction from a vernacular /tradition/, and its patterns denatured by that change as much as they were denatured by mass financing of managed mass production.

You can still do it without doing it well. That's probably not at issue so I think the parent is not false

I like your comment and not because I polemically see this as correct compared to the other people who disagree with you. I think it is a good comment although I don't agree with you, so thanks, and (on second thought I suppose you comment frequently so I am not referencing any other comments in general but) happy to hear more of your sensibility in various threads.

> “ In 1969, Reuters needed money to further expand in the Middle East and Western powers such as Britain wanted to bolster their influence against the Soviet Union by expanding news services across the world, the documents showed.

The secret government financing of Reuters - as set out in the documents - amounted to 245,000 pounds ($317,838 at current exchange rates) per year before 1969 but then reduced to 100,000 pounds per year in 1969-1970 and nothing in 1972-1973.”

I don’t grasp what the article’s writer meant by “current exchange rates” and “before 1969” here, but in any event it sounds like only a few million real constant 2023 dollar equivalents, total, were involved, which is less like a secret think tank and more like travel and bureau support, which is basically what is being admitted to.

I suppose I see the axes quite differently! If a city is going to be there, there are going to be a bunch of costs; but I don't want built space to be constrained and crummy for people by being either (A) favela/bidonville/slum decrepit and pest-riddled (if versatile)

(B) manicured like a plywood subdivision to maximize resale value, at the expense of freedom to add on and be playful, cf Daniel Pinkwater's classic book "The Big Orange Splot"

(C) homogenized by high design prefabricators "because people don't mind having identical phones if the phones are cheap but good, so, people won't mind having identical homes on that basis either"

(D) unwalkably sited

(E) arrayed in vertical cul-de-sac residential stalks with no personal private space to sculpt at ground level or (F) mass-customized for them by AR/VR&cement-extrusion-robot-rental prefabricators and perhaps well-meaning building code officials who will find it much safer to pre-warranty the strength of such homes than try to verify the safety of people's own manually cobbled-together creations

I'd rather suggest that the downsides of B thru F can be avoided if (A) were pursued in the absence of economically, legally and politically marginal conditions that usually are its handmaiden and raison d'etre.

A neighborhood where everyone is well-housed but often inclined to iterate their physical surroundings and contribute to greater building skills and greater building beauty would be a pretty interesting environment in which to raise a family...

> should be more widely understood and, IMHO, criticized. I think this is almost as bad as the Nazis.

Cultivating too exalted a view of our human potential/destiny -- Modernism and some postmodernisms both following in a long line of philosophical aspirations to transcend internal issues as well as exterior ones -- and having too low a view of human potential/destiny each lend themselves to evil, for sure.

Immoderate moderation in all things, on the other hand, can be no less proud of its profound public-spiritedness though.

Author Leopold Kohr's twentieth century books argued that bigness and scaling are a major problem for freedom, and so insoluble that it's better not to keep attempting to manage bigness. Riversflow was arguing here, correct me if I'm wrong, that some nations find it insoluble to unwind various kinds of bigness, and that none of those nations can make an attempt to emulate a nation that has managed its society without the scale factor at which they, USA included, already exist.

Shenaniganically, I'm just pleased that the rat that scurried across my pillow at midnight in an Airbnb (that the host and company have both decided to continue right on doing nothing new in response to my reporting) decided not to bite me.

Mind you, rat bites can be pretti nästi...

Good perspective for businesspeople who tend to create a false equivalence between being a successful fast follower in the market and being a successful innovator, as though the market oxygen which fast followers seek were simply something that would still be 'in the room' without innovators' R&D and commercialization first putting it there.

> an alternative to the anglo compromise (dont behead the king but clip its wings) and at most blew the mind of all who thought that having a divine omnipotent ruler was a fatality.

Do you mean, all who were fatalistic about the divine right of royalty being an inevitability?

The English regicide had already been done in 1649, and some form of large representative republics with or without a monarch were already governing in Venice, Poland-Lithuania, the Netherlands, America, and possibly other populous societies that I don't know about.

Good post. I haven't used Carto, Every Door, nor StreetComplete, but some of the consistency and non-ESRI-ness that OP is seeking seems to me to be present in Regrid fka Landgrid:

https://regrid.com/why-regrid

Well, because even from commentators who justly praise LeBron, you find acknowledgments that, for instance,

"And then there's D'Angelo Russell, who, in short, is a valuable defensive player only when he isn't really tasked with guarding anybody. Last season, the Timberwolves were surprisingly effective defensively because they used Russell on the worst opposing perimeter player and allowed him to serve as a back-line communicator. That's a valuable role. The Lakers know this because that's how they use LeBron. Unless James is willing to take on a higher-effort defensive role with Russell easing his ball-handling burden, Russell is going to have to start playing some point-of-attack defense."

https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/russell-westbrook-trade-g...

> The thinking seems so alien that it's hard to really put myself in their shoes. Even the vast majority of the modern religious, and certainly the elite religious, at least in the US, don't act as if they truly believe like the barons and dukes of Europe did. The only place you see that kind of self-sacrificial dedication to religion these days is what we'd call cults.

Right and it _should_ seem so. Faith is a gift, received without any prior claim on it; otherwise those who get it sooner would have a legitimate reason to think themselves more capable than others. The faithfulness that ought to result in active love is going on all over the place, including in the white collar workplace, but it goes on irrespective of other factors, including being seen, let alone being transmitted to history.

side note, the TPU acronym is already taken by tensor processing units so Tetris GPUs will have to be something else…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_processing_unit

But as lanrei comments, "When bees sting other insects they can sting them multiple times, like a wasp."

We tend to think of risk management and secondarily the cost horizon of [re]building eroded technical competence, in the West, but hn commenter User23 also makes a point that is incredibly important and less often mentioned:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33939692

> " 'Indeed, besides the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, and the Parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man, every organization [of 60+] in the western world that's been continuously operating since 1530 is a university.'

-- https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/E...

I believe this is why it's critically important that universities remain focused on their timeless mission rather than chasing secular fads. The Buxton index, described in the [link], is an incredibly important concept."

It's natural that we would think technology startups compelling due to the way they succeed with difficulty and risk management competence. But if their Buxton index of planning horizon is limited by their runway, and a decade is considered an Uber-long horizon, how futuristic and exceptional are we ultimately talking? I agree with the parent commenter that the eggs in two baskets serve separately appropriate purposes.

The walkways there _are_ paved in easy-to-level asphalt rather than, you know, cobblestones

I don't know if that interest rate was specific. But there is a family in Missouri that receives a couple of percent of the NBA's television deal revenues annually to this day despite never owning a basketball team that played an NBA game.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975–76_Spirits_of_St._Louis...

> The Spirits were not included in the ABA-NBA merger, but the Silna brothers nonetheless managed to turn it into one of the greatest deals in the history of professional sports. In June 1976 the ABA owners agreed, in return for the Spirits of St. Louis ceasing operations, to pay the St. Louis owners $2.2 million in cash up front in addition to a 1/7 share of the four remaining teams' television revenues in perpetuity. As the NBA's popularity exploded in 1980s and 1990s, the league's television rights were sold to CBS and then NBC, and additional deals were struck with the TNT and TBS cable networks; league television revenue soared into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

That fact about Harvard sounds like multiple urban legends. For one thing Harvard began in the 1630s, yet in 1684 the King dissolved Massachusetts Bay Colony's 1628 royal charter because of their bad behavior (hanging of Friends). Anything about eminent domain would have had to be put in a 1691 new charter:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Charter

Multiple urban legends reported as fact. Massachusetts Bay Colony lost its royal charter anyway for hanging Quakers.

Edit: wiki reference added in following comment