yesfitz

I think we have a disagreement in terms beyond "density". I'm talking about bicycle as transportation, and I believe you may be talking about bicycle as recreation.

To clarify, transportation is a means to get you to a destination. I don't know where you live, but I haven't lived in or ever even seen a suburb that provides all the destinations that a child (assuming they're old enough to ride a bike alone) would want to bike to.

Friends live in different neighborhoods. The mall certainly wasn't in my neighborhood. The video store, my church, the woods, the local pool, the public library, all required crossing streets which have become busier and busier.

All right:

As an average person, I've observed that both my childhood and current neighborhoods (Mid-Atlantic and Midwest respectively) have increased in the number of cars present, and that's within and between neighborhoods. I have also observed more in-fill subdivisions between neighborhoods. Since the '90s, I've seen just the bike ride that I'd take multiple times a week in my Mid-Atlantic suburb yield one acre lots turned into 8 homes, a small office park being converted into multiple 5-over-1s, a country club being turned into 400 homes. In the past decade in the Midwest, I've seen 2 single family homes torn down to make 8 units with an 8 car garage and 8 more spaces out back, multiple small businesses torn down to make way for "luxury" student housing with a parking spot for every bed room, a shopping center and apartment complex torn down and turned into an even bigger apartment complex with parking for every bedroom. Many of these are on my block or on the bike path around town.

There are more cars. There is more density.

So there you go, I've provided census data, I've provided observations from my own life across multiple geographies that backs up the data.

If you're claiming that there aren't more cars in neighborhoods, please back up that claim.

You must have misunderstood my comment as something other than interpretation.

>it's an impressive, forgettable spectacle.

I provided a handful of other possibilities, but in the absence of any statement from the creator, my interpretation stands.

No one asked that question except for you.

The other commenter and I were talking about cars.

Car ownership rates increased slightly, number of households nearly doubled, and average population density went up in every state except DC. There are more cars. Cars do not stay in one place, especially in the case of suburbanization.

Also, I'm not sure why/how the DC piece is intellectually honest. The Washington Metropolitan Statistical area has more than doubled in population since 1970[1]. Do you think all of the people who moved to PG County stay out of DC? That must be why the beltway is so easy to maneuver!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area

What's the point?

Without any context, these transformations are pure spectacle. And it's bad when you take something that had meaning and turn it into a spectacle.

This site could be a commentary on the frivolity of AI, a takedown of "great" art, an attempt to make art more approachable, or a tech demo. But without knowing which, it's an impressive, forgettable spectacle.

Fantastic news, population density has increased substantially![1] 57.5 average people/square mile in 1970, growing to 93.8 in 2020.

1: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/density-d...

If you live anywhere like Houten[1] anywhere in the US, please tell me ASAP because I'll move there tomorrow.

From my area of the Midwest around Iowa City, there are decent paths that connect the local towns, but intra-town cycling is far less supported. We have bike lanes (good), on some streets (bad), they're unprotected (bad) and they close on Sunday (bad, also what?). The car-free bike path along the river is shared with pedestrians, and some spandex-festooned idiots don't understand that it's not the place to go fast.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFEfr7Amn6U (5 minute overview of Houten)

Based on the census, cars were NOT just as plentiful. The number of cars per household has risen slightly[1] (although they stop keeping track after 3 cars), but the number of households have doubled[2] between 1970 and 2020.

As for the bikes, it's a vicious cycle compounded by distracted driving via cell phone. Less bikes means less drivers expecting to see a bike, making it more dangerous for bikes, meaning less bikes.

1: https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/passenger_travel_20... 2: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TTLHH

Does your house stop being a house if the price goes down?

Does your car drive worse if no one will buy it?

I'm not saying it doesn't suck to overpay for something, but you can't expect too much pity when you lose money speculating.

Something that's not addressed is how this situation plays out for 5-over-1 development[1] that's becoming the norm (or other mixed-use buildings).

Basically, the buildings cashflow solely on the residential, but the commercial space is/was valued optimistically (especially leading up to the 2020 pandemic). So a building's owner isn't in a financial bind, and if they were to lower rent on the commercial space, even if they didn't lose the building, it would be much harder to refinance the next time their loan matured. (Commercial loans are frequently "balloon" loans that have payments like they're amortizing over 30 years, but they mature before then, meaning the borrower either has to pay the remaining amount of the loan, or refinance.)

Possible Solution:

I've been thinking about a cumulative vacancy tax that increases every year a space is vacant (and decreases for every year it's occupied). So a building owner or loan underwriter could project when a vacancy would become more costly than lowering rent.

You could charge the tax on the assessed value of the vacant space. Increase it by 100 basis points for every year that a space is vacant. Decrease it by 200 basis points for every year that it's rented.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1

Since you brought up treasury bonds, during the 2023 Banking Crisis, the Federal Reserve created the Bank Term Funding Program[1] that let banks borrow against the par value of bonds, rather than the market value.

I thought it was a really elegant solution, and has made me wonder if a similar program could be used for vacant Commercial Real Estate in the cast of a national vacancy tax, land value tax, or similar value-lowering event.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Term_Funding_Program#Prog...

Archived Page: https://web.archive.org/web/20250707142246/https://folk.comp...

The paper cited only studied software engineers at one Fortune 500 firm over 5 years, but the article states (emphasis mine), "[The paper] found that younger workers suffered career-wise by working from home, receiving less training and fewer opportunities for advancement."

It would be less disingenuous to suggest all workers wear hard hats citing a study of construction workers. At least that has been replicated.

"Cheat" might not be the most helpful way to think about this particular situation. More like a glitch in a multiplayer game.[1]

It's not "cheating" in that players are using the system as-is, and after a critical mass of people adopt it, there is no way to play competitively without it.

The simple answer becomes to patch the behavior out of the system, although that is rarely popular with the people who have adopted the strategy and invested a lot in the system.

1:https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Bunny_Hopping

I like the idea, but I think the game progression needs another pass from a designer.

I started on "Level 1" and got 2 things wrong (both false positives if it matters) and instead of feeling like I learned anything, I felt as though I was set up to fail because the image prompt was missing sufficient context or the text prompt was too simple to be human. Either I was dumb or the game was dumb.

Maybe I'm just too old and 8-11 year-old kids wouldn't be so easily discouraged, but I'd recommend:

1. Picking on one member of the "slop syndicate" at a time.

2. Show some examples (evidence) before beginning the evaluation.

Models are typically smaller scale/scope... So a "real urban center" could probably easily provide service that smaller cities can't.

As to why Iowa City doesn't run on Sundays and Federal Holidays:

The University is about half the population of the city. The University runs a separate "Cambus" system[1] (that the community can also use) and after-hours routes for students[2].

We're also still in relatively early days of finding out how Iowa City residents use public transit when there's no barrier. For instance, they stopped running the downtown shuttle and reduced the number of stops downtown[3] because downtown is relatively dense, walkable, and student-heavy (i.e. mostly young, healthy, ambulatory people) and served by the University.

There's also a growing interest in adding service to nearby towns and adding Sunday service, even if it's in a limited capacity.

1: https://transportation.uiowa.edu/cambus/cambus-service-calen... 2: https://safety.uiowa.edu/nite-ride 3: https://www.icgov.org/Home/Components/News/News/2165/390

Could you provide the steps you take to use LLMs as a tool?

I'd like to compare them to the steps I would take to delegate a task to another human.

Skill to effective output quality.

I'm sure there are people who are more skilled at using a cell phone than I am. It doesn't matter.

Similarly, we all have had co-workers or friends who aren't very good at using search engines. They still use them and largely still have jobs.

Now that I think of it, most regularly-used technology is like this. Cars, dishwashers, keyboards, electric shavers. There is a baseline level of skill required for operation, but the marginal benefits for being more skilled than the baseline drop off pretty quickly.

Exactly so. If I'm going to do anything with it later, I'll have to read it again anyway.

It's self-culling with time. I've got unread messages deep down on the list. Things that I wanted to do something about months ago, but never did, and they weren't important enough to come up again. And if they ever do come up again, I can see that I received a message and didn't do anything with it.

I'm an unrepentent "neither".

Trash, Archive, Folders in Folders, Tags, forget it!

Where is it? In the Inbox. If it's unread, I need to do something, if it's read, I don't.

Although if my clients start to slow down, I will export and delete the oldest year from my personal email. So I guess I do technically archive. But only in bulk and begrudgingly.

Anyone able to feel the dots could learn to distinguish bills this way without learning braille beyond that, regardless of their vision.

Anyone who didn't find the feature useful could ignore it.

Video, roughly 2.5 minutes long.

Summarized for those already familiar with al-Shara: "He disavowed Al-Qaeda in 2016".

The video itself is propaganda because the West wants new Syria to align with them instead of Russia and Iran. (Putin's also met with al-Shara.) You can tell because it's free, edited for mass distribution via TikTok and Instagram, and the controversies/ongoing criticism is vastly understated, while still being present. A kind of innoculation of the mind to soften the blow of future, harder criticism.

Even the long(er)-form article from yesterday is outside of the paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/world/middleeast/syria-al...

This is not to say that al-Shara is worse than al-Assad, but this video is shockingly reductive.

The same can be said of any tax meant to curb a behavior (sin tax).

What traffic-reducing policy would you suggest such that all people are affected equally?

Most recently you said, "I agree it’s worth comparing beef sources!"

So is there any hypothetical harm reduction that you believe is too small to be worth your time to encourage?

I hesitate to use the word "quibbling" now, but it seems like a poor use of time to compare beef when even the most environmentally-friendly beef is multiple times worse than alternatives.

I think this harm-reduction approach might make more sense from a governmental policy perspective, but is otherwise silly for us to take as individuals because we have such comparatively little influence over each other's choices. I wouldn't waste that small influence encouraging someone to make a slightly less bad choice.

The comparison of food to transportation is a bad one. Nutrients are nutrients, and everything else is personal pleasure. In other words, you can easily hit your same macros by replacing animal products with plant products without even having to change grocery stores. You cannot easily transport a mattress on a bicycle instead of a car.

If you wrote a post (or posts) like this one detailing your reasoning, I'd like to read it.

It's not "quibbling" to correct your mischaracterization of the truth.

If you'll forgive me borrowing your logic: "I'm not saying that people should eat beef, but many people do eat beef, so it's worth comparing which beef sources are better than others."

Plant-based diets are a very good answer to the problems caused by animal agriculture. If someone takes issue with that answer, I'd need a better reason than their personal pleasure to take them seriously in the conversation.

Why do you say that a vegetarian/vegan population is a fantasy?

"...among the most..."

According to your source, there are 15 sources of protein that emit less greenhouse gases (GHGs) per 100g of protein than farmed fish, including poultry and eggs, and 16 sources that emit more (including items that are not known for their protein content like coffee, apples, and dark chocolate). Being highly charitable, farmed fish is squarely in the middle.

Additionally, farmed fish emits twice the GHGs of tofu, and almost 22 times that of nuts. So just comparing placements on the list paints a misleading picture.

As for "not willing to go full vegetarian": you may as well say "not willing to stop eating fish", because they are equally unserious limitations when discussing these topics. "Not being willing" is only a slightly more mature version of a child saying "I don't want to".

The lack of large apartments in the US is at least partially caused by building codes requiring two means of fire egress (meaning two separate stairwells in taller buildings) which limits the size and layout of individual apartments.

Here’s a video on the subject: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iRdwXQb7CfM

Long story short though, modern fire mitigation techniques (materials, sprinklers, fire doors) greatly reduce the risk posed by having just one staircase, which would open up a wide array of apartment layouts.