I don’t think we’ll see Neural Nets creating entire television shows any time soon, in addition to other classes of drawings/images, for two reasons.
1) During the act of creation, human beings are able to constantly evaluate what looks good according to their own tastes, thus acting in a both backwards and forwards search through the content space. A regular neural network which is orders of magnitude less complex cannot accomplish this or logically reason about it.
2) Filling in certain elements requires higher abstract reasoning, which is more complex and also requires a lot more power. (e.g., logically deducing facts about things which are not immediately visible in the scene)
What I think we’ll see instead are patches, filters, and tools. Not “make me a South Park episode”, but “make me a texture of gravel”. An existing one sharpens up pictures of animu girlz, and likely a NN could be trained to, for example, increase the resolution on old 90′s anime.
Look, all I’m saying is that while it isn’t a matter of systematic oppression for each man to prefer that his girlfriend get the purring augmentation, if the vast majority of men have a strong preference, this creates a powerful incentive gradient in which any women who don’t will risk a greater chance of loneliness.
Just because popular VR personas use it now does not justify getting an expensive cybernetic implant, especially since it didn’t really hit the big time until about five years ago.
@argumate I thought you weren’t getting enough Discourse, so I got you some from the future
Look, all I’m saying is that while it isn’t a matter of systematic oppression for each man to prefer that his girlfriend get the purring augmentation, if the vast majority of men have a strong preference, this creates a powerful incentive gradient in which any women who don’t will risk a greater chance of loneliness.
Just because popular VR personas use it now does not justify getting an expensive cybernetic implant, especially since it didn’t really hit the big time until about five years ago.
[Scene:
a nervous-looking older man meets with a millennial in a darkened alley.]
Millennial:
what's the target?
Man:
I don't know if I want to do this.
Millennial:
people don't come to us until they've made up their minds.
Man:
Alright. Styrofoam cups.
Millennial:
Six months and they're gone.
Man:
Can millennials really kill styrofoam cups?
Millennial:
we can kill anything, but not cheaply.
Man:
I can pay. I work for a plasti-
Millennial:
I don't need to know and frankly I don't care. One of us will deliver a routing number to a Zurich account. Two billion euros, then we start.
Man:
Al..alright.
Millennial:
It will be your last chance to reconsider. Once the money is processed you'll have no contact with us again.
Man:
I understand. It has to be done.
Millennial:
then it's sealed. The cups will join chain restaurants and diamonds in the void.
Man:
Thank..thank you.
Millennial:
We don't require thanks. Participation is its own trophy.
North American Mixed Martial Arts Neo-Georgian Light Cyborg Division Semi-Qualifier here. Mostly no co-ed fights until the availability of enhancement evens out the PWR post-war, but the VR stuff before that is plat. Ofc the physical fights are dominated by combat software, but they look spectacular.
Galactic blob of brain tissue vs. Cube of computronium.
Don’t be like that man, you know the hardware is neuromorphic, and even if the kinetic subcomponents are more carefully engineered, the abstract reasoning has to be grown, and the whole thing has to adapt to the user’s body and integrated with the subconscious. A finely-honed Combat Reaction System is a work of art and I will not have you in this blog if you disagree.
North American Mixed Martial Arts Neo-Georgian Light Cyborg Division Semi-Qualifier here. Mostly no co-ed fights until the availability of enhancement evens out the PWR post-war, but the VR stuff before that is plat. Ofc the physical fights are dominated by combat software, but they look spectacular.
I see posts like if you are a WOMAN attracted RUBY ROSE then you are not a LESBIAN because she is GENDERFLUID and I’m like hmm, that creates a weird quantum dependency between attraction and gender identity.
See you in the club and think damn, that person is hot. But wait, I don’t know their gender identity, which means my own sexuality is now a mystery to me!
Awkwardly, you are also attracted to me, and feel your gender identity shifting to take into account this new and unforeseen attraction! Except you don’t know my gender identity, leaving you stranded in ambiguity.
Tragically we lose sight of each other in the crowd, and never see each other again, leaving our sexualities indeterminate for all time.
legitimately could not tell if “ruby rose” was referring to a real person or a gem fusion
I mean if I were in charge of urban planning there would be a trolley track, a median strip, a sidewalk, a cycling track, and NO CARS ALLOWED
the sidewalks are broad enough that there can be a food truck on every corner
and sufficiently dense mixed-use zoning that this is practical for everyone
probably there is a reason no one has left me in charge of urban planning tho
okay but to move goods in and waste out you need either cars or beasts of burden and cars are clearly the far better option, go 2 bob gordon church lol
Pneumatic tubes and drones tho
two trolley tracks, with additional sidings and supply trolleys
about two minutes later you realize it would be more efficient just to use buses and trucks than two have “roads, but only for trolleys”
Oh Em Gee! Trump tweets a stupid edited gif that could have even been slightly funny on reddit or tumblr (but not exactly endorse- or reblog-worty) and every newspaper and TV station on the planet makes a story out of it.
Trump showed poor judgement, but somehow we make a still bigger deal out of this than we probably should.
If I were Trump, I would get a cat and tweet cat pictures once a week, and the occasional cocktail recipe, just to keep people on their toes.
Confusion Politics at work.
He could probably use this to bury an executive order or firing of a staffer or something
That appears to be what’s happening in the general case of Trump Says Something Outrageous. It’s wild to watch.
There’s this massive pool of outrage to be drilled and tapped because the dumber parts of the Left and Liberal political groups have been using offense as a weapon and configured themselves for high offendability and heavy tribal signalling.
I’m hoping our Shitposter in Chief is going to exhaust some of the supply.
What informs your software? What hidden undergirdings are you afraid to look at? In what ways is your IFF calibrated, and by whom? You still have a human heart under there, with a human history.
I have three hearts, anon-san - a primary heart, a secondary backup heart, and an emergency oxygen recirc system for my braincase. My combat software can continue fighting in excess of 30 minutes even in the event of total loss of consciousness, with a banshee switch in the event of brain death. (And yes, I know that firmware modification is illegal.)
Besides, to even get the K-band neurotype designation, my brain is mostly human, I just have a few specialized submodules. Partial-synthetic, not full, and so only subject to limited sanctions under the Human Dignity Act.
I think I’ve figured out how to simulate the “zoning wars between jocks, otakus, and hipsters”. (Which should probably be renamed as Olympians, J-Core, and Fixters.)
I think I’ve also managed to figure out how to do the ask/bid system for labor (and other) prices without exploding the simulation with an 80GB table, for an area about the size of Manhattan.
Later today, I may have a quick sketch on how I want to represent the citizens when not being shown as blocks.
modern game development is all about finding coherent aesthetics that allow you to eschew realism because god damn realism is expensive.
hence MineCraft, the 8-bit retro craze, Undertale, even polished cartoony looks like Witness and Firewatch.
I think stylised game art has gotten significantly better looking since 2015.
Oh man you aren’t wrong, do you know how many hours it would have taken me to “realistically” model those tiny houses? And that would make the renders less understandable instead of more understandable.
Actually, have other people noticed that taking ideologies to weird extremes is a Thing among thirteen to fifteen-year-olds? Because that’s definitely something I’ve noticed. Like, I once new a thirteen-year-old girl who claimed to be uncomfortable watching two women dance together because it “promotes lesbianism,” which is…not something most Catholics believe, I’m pretty sure? (They weren’t even, like, slow-dancing, it was some kind of Scandinavian Traditional Cultural Dance that only women did).
Has anyone else observed this among The Youths?
I think age tends to make ideas more nuanced, because you get more experience and the real world is complicated.
13-15 is when people develop something like an adult political consciousness, and you know what they say about new converts being the most fervent believers.
Heck, I totally did that in my youth. I boycotted LL Bean for promoting lesbianism and objected to CCM for having a beat when I was 13 or so *embarrassed emoji*
I got better, in some cases pretty quickly, but that was my nadir.
Haha, I never had ideological extreme phase, and was contrarian against arbitrary non-conformist teenage rebellion aesthetic as a teenager.
I’m probably at my most ideologically extreme right now, even though it’s orthogonal to the existing factions.
The solution to this, of course, is to just give low-wage workers money instead of making laws that try to force their employers to do it. No one should have to live on the money they can bring home from $9/hour? Agreed! Give them money.
What will happen as a result is, of course, that companies will routinely underpay their employees, effectively outcompeting companies that pay fair wages purely on the taxpayer’s dime, which is by the way what already happens when people who work are paid low enough to be eligible for welfare.
This is a fact.
Factual solutions only. No pandering.
Do you actually disagree with any factual statement Kelsey is making here? All I see are value disagreements about “underpaying” and “fair wages.”
A factual statement is what I said.
When companies underpay the employees and you pay those employees instead, you reward companies for underpaying employees.
The correct course of action is to force companies to pay fair wages to employees. The incorrect course of action is to provide companies with more market incentives for not doing so.
That is a factual statement also.
A value judgement would be if you’d disagree with me that people like me are not literal subhumans (which is by the way the universal opinion of people who endorse underpaying as much as possible).
It depends - do we have individuals paying the low wage workers and not a subsidy to all low wage workers by the State? Then the problems with the libertarian plan will ruin it, that’s how the economics works. Do we have state action instead? Then the leverage of all low wage workers will be increased by other economic effects.
Honestly, from a business perspective, it’s a totally reasonable and justifiable thing to do. Many of the biggest business costs are tied to peak rather than average throughput, and the previous attempt to solve this, JIT scheduling, was drastically awful. I think the market-wisdom rationale for Uber’s surge pricing was mostly bullshit spin, but in general, you do kind of need to be able to raise prices when there’s excessive demand for an inflexible supply. So my take on it isn’t exactly “oh those capitalists sure are cartoonishly evil.”
But it’s a good example of how capitalism as a whole – and, let’s be honest, most if not all of the alternatives – is kind of horrible even when everyone is behaving reasonably. It’s economically rational for the wealthy and privileged to be charged less for most things and extended advantages others lack, and for the poor and underprivileged to be charged extra and denied opportunities. The natural effect of everyone doing the sensible thing is to exacerbate inequality in a vicious cycle, so it’s little wonder that policies that aren’t sensible have perennial appeal.
I think a lot of such issues could be managed if “we” were more clever about it. (And also had the political will.)
There are a lot more market-flexible initiatives that could be done but which simply aren’t.
We could change the overtime laws so that everyone gets overtime and it ramps up with each additional X hours over, so that businesses can push but are incentivized not to. Or a big city could auction off business start and end times over a two hour window on each side in a revenue-neutral way, spreading out the incredible load on our transit infrastructure from businesses all opening and closing at the same time.
Plans like those don’t say “you cannot,” they say “you can, however-”, which lets the effect be allocated in a more market-efficient way. Friction, rather than a hard wall.
“What is your alternative? The iron law of Python, where the curly boys are no longer seen, but everything must be exactly in line and know its place else the whole edifice crumbles?”—@shieldfoss (via poipoipoi-2016)
I understand the arguments for giving nazis free speech, and indeed, at least as far as the us state is concerned, I’m in favor of it being content-neutrally restrained from infringing on political advocacy of almost any kind
but I can’t get too high and mighty about this, because it isn’t my bottom line. if I thought that nazism had a chance of taking real political power I’d endorse it being banned, its leaders extrajudicially shot in the middle of the night, and before rather than after it got too large
what’s the worst that can come of abandoning free speech? let’s say a corrupt authoritarian government with policies I don’t like. Is this a price worth paying if it were the price? yeah, sure. Dollfuß is obviously better than Hitler, Carol is obviously better than Codreanu, Horthy obviously better than Szalasi, etc. obviously we can and should want to aim higher but the whole “banning nazis makes you as bad as nazis” thing doesn’t even apply among right-wing dictatorships, and “how much risk is too much?” is obviously a hard to quantify and partially empirical question
my counterpoint to any argument from “how much worse could it be?” is “you are not imaginative enough”.
that’s true, but trivially so for all decision horns, isn’t it?
if you make a law that says “literally zero human rights apply to any nazi, because nazis are uniquely bad”, the first thing everyone will start doing is try to expand the definition of “nazi”.
your theoretical question is “just get rid of freedom of speech, how bad can it be?“ and my response is “really fucking bad my dude”.
imagine: the worst possible authoritarian government but they’re not calling themselves nazis.
yes, worse than nazis. Hitler had to rely on people snitching who is and isn’t a Jew. the American government knows the exact shade of my nipples
okay, my phrasing earlier “what’s the worst that can happen?” obviously invited this kind of response.
it would be better to speak of the worst plausible consequences that flow from accepting strong versions of the pro-free-speech argument: hence, a government that is extremely corrupt, authoritarian, etc. it having a teleological drive to be as bad as possible is compatible with this but much less a foreseeable consequence; and we can see this by the fact that strong free speech protections are relatively rare but fantastical dystopias are even rarer.
I’m drawing a path from no free speech to fantastical dystopias for a reason here. Taking away free speech is specifically a catalyst because it prevents people from criticizing other authoritarian policies that get implemented. Authoritarianism opens the door to more authoritarianism.
And, unlike imminent Nazi takeovers of entire countries, this is actually happening.
It’s why I don’t trust any kind of Communism that doesn’t start with a small voluntary settlement and expand outwards nonviolently because people just like it that much.
Revolutionary Communists don’t believe in free speech, not just in the sense of free speech as a human right, but even in the sense of “removing free speech is exceptionally dangerous”. The first thing that will happen is the forcible shutting down of all outside criticism, which will lead to the shutting down of real internal criticism. Freed from feedback to prevent it from going off the rails, whatever Communist body was created to bring about the Revolution will then do terrible things.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a badder guy with a gun.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a bad guy with a bigger gun.
The only thing that can stop a nice guy with a gun is the friend zone, apparently.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is agents of the state monopoly on legitimate violence, who have legitimate-violence-guns.
If guns are outlawed by the state asserting a monopoly on the use of force, then only outlaws and agents of the state whose sworn duty is to oppose outlaws will have guns.
If states are outlawed, only outlaws will have states
Alright, well if I do build that city sim, I think I know how I want to do pathfinding and some other elements. Still thinking about a computationally efficient way to simulate the residents bidding on housing and developers bidding on properties and then deciding what to build there.
The idea that the government is not evil and incompetent… yet. The higher up you go, the more the risks of bad government get skewed. At low levels and in local government, evil bureaucrats are commonplace and we must live with them. At the top, they are black swan events: Rare but disastrous.
You need to limit the power of any future crazed despot. vindictive bureaucrat, law firm with deep pockets and too much time on their hands, corrupt sheriff, or rogue analyst abusing his security clearance to pick a stock portfolio.
I thought that was pretty clearly what many Libertarians are running around on, or close to it?
There is a vulnerability (yet another one anyway) in the wokeosphere open for a troll to exploit: simply running around claiming people are white.
Because in practical terms standpoint theory means your race determines your speaking value in the progressive stack, and because bad SJ types will be more likely to believe this kind of accusation, it would be quite dangerous to one’s social standing. I won’t go into further details because I don’t want to encourage it, but defense on this would not be easy.
For my part I see this kind of vulnerability as an indictment of the system itself. Its axioms and patterns make it essentially unsolveable without either tight restriction of access or changing to something else.
The irony that the opposite probably wouldn’t work on White Nationalists isn’t lost on me.
The irony that the opposite probably wouldn’t work on White Nationalists isn’t lost on me.
It does not work to call certain hard leftists, especially Antifa, cuckolds. It literally does nothing (I think I wrote about this before). Fatherhood is a social construct anyway, and if you think paternity tests matter, then you are a MRA. So on some level, it makes sense and cancels out.
Some people also don’t take bourgeois as an insult. Some people don’t mind being called plebes.
It’s almost an inverted shibboleth. Those their enemies would want to insult most with it are most likely to remain unfazed by a word.
That they don’t see anything wrong with being “a cuck” and don’t see fatherhood as real - by Alt Right standards, it’s the most damning indictment of all. I don’t think they call them cucks because the insult has the most teeth. Most people don’t even know what it means. I think they call them cucks because it expresses just how lowly they are (in Alt Right terms).
I’m not of a pure liberal mind myself. I can see the value in a man raising another man’s child, but I worry what it might do to the gene pool.
I think that you’re paying an interesting, perhaps useful, amount of attention to envisioning a dense way of life aligned to the felt and latent needs and wants of suburbanites, but that you’re focusing on them to the point of more or less ignoring the needs and wants of urbanites, as well as ruralites. (Horrible lexicon but eh.) What you’re creating looks to me emphatically like a suburb, not a city; no city-dweller would want to live in it; there’s no there there. It is interesting though!
Blogger Infuriates Urbanites With This One Weird Trick! You Won’t Believe It!
That might be it. I am a suburbanite at heart, and when I did live in the city, it was on an American university campus - which I liked - and American university campuses are often little medium-density villages within the city, taking up about 2km2 of space, permeable along the edges and with a self-selected population, a civic center for social clubs to gather, park areas throughout, predominantly moved about through walking.
If I were British, I might live in Milton Keynes entirely unironically. Many of the residents love it there, even though it’s derided as a “non-place” by outsiders. It just seems like a strange objection to me, and my intuitive response - to give different areas unique architecture or let them dynamically cluster businesses on some purpose - is probably not what the urbanites are looking for.
What I’m focusing on are, yes, questions of how to convince suburbanites to leave the sprawl and live more densely, without using social, economic, or governmental power to force them to do so.
What is a suburb? It’s somewhere safe, with ample trees, grass, forest, where you can walk the streets at night. You can ride your bike recreationally right from your house. On the fourth of July, everyone has a cookout outside and the smell of food wafts through back yards (but otherwise you aren’t flooded with food smells). Sometimes the neighborhood will put up a tent in a cul-de-sac and have a block party. Children run free to play with little need for adult supervision. Wild animals sometimes wander through yards.
People sometimes talk about those suburbanites and their darn autos and wasteful lawns (though it’s less wasteful if you don’t live in Arizona or California!), but there’s a real appeal there, something that has to be acknowledged and transformed in order to win people over.
How can I make the city safe like a suburb? How can I make it green like a suburb? How can I make this dense enough to pool resources for various goods and hit the threshold for public transit like a city? So that they can hang out with people and walk to shops, fixing the sins of the suburb?
It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise for the result to be a densified suburb.
Though, perhaps you can help me to understand. What does it mean for there to be a there?
Broadly speaking, I align with Andrew Alexander Price on what makes a city feel real and vibrant and interesting and comfortable and livable as opposed to exhausting and dreary and alienating and frightening and dystopian, and I’m on the Jane Jacobs side of the Jane Jacobs/Robert Moses fight.
But yeah, you’re asking a specific question that needs an answer, and I’m not sure how to answer it even though I think about this a fair amount. FWIW, I live in NYC, and I’m actually pretty jaundiced about it, I’m not a total cheerleader for city life and I see the appeal of suburbs. Good suburbs. Like I personally would only consider walkable places with shops and restaurants and good transit and manageable commute times. (I don’t have kids and loathe driving so obviously that’s going to be how my priorities shake out; I wouldn’t want to impose that specs list on like everyone in America because clearly a lot of people here feel very differently than I do, but also tbh they’re Wrong.) But the rub is that those characteristics I just listed are not! actually! sufficient to define a good place, a real place, a place that’s got a there there. New prefab suburbs do get built on all the right principles of walkability, etc, by people who think like me – didn’t they do something like that in Alexandria? Do I care, and would I move there? Not just hell no but feh.
So there’s something more to it. I’m on mobile or I’d go through some of the Price blog looking for better language or more specific specifics; he’s the clearest thinker I’ve ever come across in amateur smart as fuck urban planning (buries face in hands over own brain’s filing system) and what I want may be in there somewhere.
My irrational gut feeling, I’m afraid, is that it has something to do with the literal age of the place., which is the one thing you can’t address.
There’s a gravitas to older cities that only a very few places in the U.S. have anything of – parts of Boston and New England in general have some of it, TriBeCa in New York has a little, New Orleans has quite a bit. None of it is close to what you get in an older European city. When I go to Europe, I breathe more easily, I feel awake, it’s as if I suddenly realize, wait, what, have I literally been dissociating for the past several years, what did I miss. And it absolutely has something to do with the buildings being several centuries old, the older the better — I can tell by the PK/PD curve, so to speak. (The new part of Ulm, for instance, is no better than Boston; an intact medieval university city is pretty much an antidepressant-nootropic miracle.) Conversely, most of California doesn’t feel real at all to me, not even the objectively breathtakingly lovely parts, to the point that I’m low-key uncomfortable and conscious all the time of a slightly dissociated feeling whenever I’m there. The overnight fake Rock Ridge in Blazing Saddles comes to mind. This is unfair and irrational, but I’m sorry, I’m just like this. (I don’t even want to talk about Dallas or Salt Lake City.)
It’s not primarily about density for me, for what that’s worth. I like cities for all the reasons people like cities but my ideal scenario personally would probably be a large village or small town with decent <90m transit to the first or second city in a minor modest-but-functioning European country. My floor for density is basically decent Internet service and no need to own a car, and that means something very different in other countries vs here.
I expect that if I went to one of those foreign cities, I wouldn’t feel a sense of ‘placeness’, though I might be wrong about that.
I suppose I really must travel to London and Kyoto some day.
I know ‘Americans’ is generally understood to have that meaning, but:
a) It is still ambiguous, and that irritates me. How, if this is the nomenclature, are we to refer to ‘people from the continents of America’?
b) The fact that ‘Americans’ and ‘America’ are understood to solely refer to people from the USA seems to me to be part of the ‘we are the only people and place that exists or matters’ thing that US culture can sometimes project, and that really irritates me, which makes the word usage irritating beyond just its ambiguity.
I’d like to say Yanks but apparently it has a different meaning in the USA.
“Yankee” is a kind of complex word.
“For northerners, a “yankee” is somebody from New England. For New Englanders, a “yankee” is somebody from Vermont. For Vermonters, a “yankee” is somebody who eats apple pie for breakfast.“ http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000205.html
Anyway, it would also be nice to have a word for people from North and South America as a group.
Seppos.
americasians
All of the Americas belong to the United States.
Don’t worry, guys. This ends with the annexation of Mexico in 2068 and the formation of the North American Union, at which point we are known as Unionese.
I think that you’re paying an interesting, perhaps useful, amount of attention to envisioning a dense way of life aligned to the felt and latent needs and wants of suburbanites, but that you’re focusing on them to the point of more or less ignoring the needs and wants of urbanites, as well as ruralites. (Horrible lexicon but eh.) What you’re creating looks to me emphatically like a suburb, not a city; no city-dweller would want to live in it; there’s no there there. It is interesting though!
Blogger Infuriates Urbanites With This One Weird Trick! You Won’t Believe It!
That might be it. I am a suburbanite at heart, and when I did live in the city, it was on an American university campus - which I liked - and American university campuses are often little medium-density villages within the city, taking up about 2km2 of space, permeable along the edges and with a self-selected population, a civic center for social clubs to gather, park areas throughout, predominantly moved about through walking.
If I were British, I might live in Milton Keynes entirely unironically. Many of the residents love it there, even though it’s derided as a “non-place” by outsiders. It just seems like a strange objection to me, and my intuitive response - to give different areas unique architecture or let them dynamically cluster businesses on some purpose - is probably not what the urbanites are looking for.
What I’m focusing on are, yes, questions of how to convince suburbanites to leave the sprawl and live more densely, without using social, economic, or governmental power to force them to do so.
What is a suburb? It’s somewhere safe, with ample trees, grass, forest, where you can walk the streets at night. You can ride your bike recreationally right from your house. On the fourth of July, everyone has a cookout outside and the smell of food wafts through back yards (but otherwise you aren’t flooded with food smells). Sometimes the neighborhood will put up a tent in a cul-de-sac and have a block party. Children run free to play with little need for adult supervision. Wild animals sometimes wander through yards.
People sometimes talk about those suburbanites and their darn autos and wasteful lawns (though it’s less wasteful if you don’t live in Arizona or California!), but there’s a real appeal there, something that has to be acknowledged and transformed in order to win people over.
How can I make the city safe like a suburb? How can I make it green like a suburb? How can I make this dense enough to pool resources for various goods and hit the threshold for public transit like a city? So that they can hang out with people and walk to shops, fixing the sins of the suburb?
It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise for the result to be a densified suburb.
Though, perhaps you can help me to understand. What does it mean for there to be a there?
Inner-city crime seems to be an American thing, for Reasons. Here in New Zealand it’s more obvious that the benefit people get from the safe suburbs is simply that filtering on income keeps undesirables out, and opposition to increased density in a suburb is *because* it’ll make housing cheaper and bring in undesirables, in the short term before more complete intensification and urbanisation makes it a place that people also work and do business and eat and drink and so on, and subsequently increases rents because people want to live there. A big part of this is our relatively lax limits on rent increases and evictions, I think, which means you don’t get such chronically entrenched low-income high-density areas.
Does New Zealand have issues with schools and location/community? In America, our inner city schools consistently fare poorly, even though they often have high funding per student.
I can’t imagine Japan has the same school issues Americans do, for instance, since a truly disruptive student wouldn’t be allowed by their schools or culture. But people really don’t want to make the kinds of changes that would bring that situation about in America.
I think that you’re paying an interesting, perhaps useful, amount of attention to envisioning a dense way of life aligned to the felt and latent needs and wants of suburbanites, but that you’re focusing on them to the point of more or less ignoring the needs and wants of urbanites, as well as ruralites. (Horrible lexicon but eh.) What you’re creating looks to me emphatically like a suburb, not a city; no city-dweller would want to live in it; there’s no there there. It is interesting though!
Blogger Infuriates Urbanites With This One Weird Trick! You Won’t Believe It!
That might be it. I am a suburbanite at heart, and when I did live in the city, it was on an American university campus - which I liked - and American university campuses are often little medium-density villages within the city, taking up about 2km2 of space, permeable along the edges and with a self-selected population, a civic center for social clubs to gather, park areas throughout, predominantly moved about through walking.
If I were British, I might live in Milton Keynes entirely unironically. Many of the residents love it there, even though it’s derided as a “non-place” by outsiders. It just seems like a strange objection to me, and my intuitive response - to give different areas unique architecture or let them dynamically cluster businesses on some purpose - is probably not what the urbanites are looking for.
What I’m focusing on are, yes, questions of how to convince suburbanites to leave the sprawl and live more densely, without using social, economic, or governmental power to force them to do so.
What is a suburb? It’s somewhere safe, with ample trees, grass, forest, where you can walk the streets at night. You can ride your bike recreationally right from your house. On the fourth of July, everyone has a cookout outside and the smell of food wafts through back yards (but otherwise you aren’t flooded with food smells). Sometimes the neighborhood will put up a tent in a cul-de-sac and have a block party. Children run free to play with little need for adult supervision. Wild animals sometimes wander through yards.
People sometimes talk about those suburbanites and their darn autos and wasteful lawns (though it’s less wasteful if you don’t live in Arizona or California!), but there’s a real appeal there, something that has to be acknowledged and transformed in order to win people over.
How can I make the city safe like a suburb? How can I make it green like a suburb? How can I make this dense enough to pool resources for various goods and hit the threshold for public transit like a city? So that they can hang out with people and walk to shops, fixing the sins of the suburb?
It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise for the result to be a densified suburb.
Though, perhaps you can help me to understand. What does it mean for there to be a there?
How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?
What’s the purpose of all this Blendering? Are you just noodling around, or are you offering Serious Solutions to Today’s Problems?
I’m not dedicated enough in research to count as a Serious Person, but on the other hand a lot of Serious People have been very wrong lately.
The One Thousand Villages series is part of the general direction of this blog to search for overlooked or uninvented paths for society through an intuitive synthesis across multiple fields. (Also it has some nice art to look at which I’ll be adding to my portfolio.) The intent is that eventually some of these ideas will potentially be refined and studied more closely, possibly by others, helping society to escape a local maximum. This post on a reorganization of how schools work is similar.
In both cases, the small details are less important than overall ideas that break from the consensus. It’s less about the intricate road layout than the idea of building sub-communities within cities, with friction of movement, as a means of overcoming some of the disadvantages of cities. The recent post is more about spreading the idea of guided busways as a concept.
“Okay,” you might say, “but I studied in that field and what you proposed doesn’t work for reason X.”
And that would be a totally valid critique, so if you’re holding back of saying “Actually, that one-way flow through the kilometer was tried in a newtown in Britain and failed,” or something, you can go ahead with it.
Admittedly, it’s also for entertainment, too. I’m on Tumblr as opposed to writing my own SSC equivalent for a reason, I admit.
I have no expertise on urban planning, no. But it strikes me that starting from a blank slate is exactly the wrong approach, and likely to lead you to repeat the same mistakes that plague other planned communities. The world does not need another Brasilia or Salt Lake City.
I think that depends in part on our goals, or we might say that there is a tradeoff. In the United States, we’ve got expensive suburban sprawl as what people do unplanned, and traffic-choked cities with freeways bumper-to-bumper with cars, elevated crime rates…
Once the buildings have been built, it’s an expensive fight to install transit infrastructure, because you have to knock down peoples’ homes and businesses. If a bunch of corridors were left as park land to be converted later, it would be a lot easier.
But we want people to live more densely, right? For environmental reasons and maybe social reasons. How can we get the suburbanites to come in from the suburbs?
It turns out that suburbs have all sorts of nice features that people like, which is why they move out to them when they can afford to. I think those features can be replicated at a higher density, making the suburbanites more comfortable with living in a denser area, saving on carbon, etc if there’s some planning.
Likewise, people fight against density. Why? A variety of reasons, including crime, noise, having to give up their home, etc. But with a different structuring of both land and incentives, that could be changed, preventing yet more resource-consuming suburban sprawl.
Interestingly, replacing all schooling with Khan Academy has one big problem in common with replacing a city with an agglomeration of villages:
You take away common ground, a schelling point to meet. No more class discussion. No more convenient shopping streets. No more pub crawls. No more cultural/literary touchstones. @mitigatedchaos
But all the pubs and shops are on the outside of the village walls, on the more heavily-trafficked streets, and thus publicly accessible, because businesses should be publicly accessible in order to get enough customers.
Even the civic center is on the outside edge so that you can have dudes over for your board gaming group or knitting club if there aren’t enough knitters in your village.
Yeah if you’ve got a city of millions of people you kinda can’t just have those sorts of places entirely centralized, and if you do it’s inaccessible to a lot of people.
Though the disagreement i have is probably something of a similar nature, which is that the discrete and semi-permeable nature of quads sort of adds an insularity that is detrimental to the broad economic benefits of cities, and there are economies of agglomeration which I don’t think get fully captured here. Like, Jane Jacobs would just say the blocks are too big and you need lots of short streets to get the full benefits of a dense city.
It also makes me think of A City Is Not A Tree, actually. I was dissatisfied by that piece on a couple of levels, but I still think it makes some good points which are applicable here.
A prediction market for which identities will be taken seriously 5 years hence, so I know which ones I can claim publicly without fear of future unemployment.
I am long furry, but not all fursonas are created equal.
Surely you meant to say all fursonas are equal, but some are more equal than others?
