Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

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-grey-tribe]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[ranma-official]

I’m reading National Review’s What Has Conservatism Ever Done For Us, and in trying to list an ever-growing list of amazing achievements (directly aping the scene from Life of Brian) they accidentally say “made a whole bunch of people suffer actually”

[argumate]

yikes this is a bit of an own-goal, isn’t it

decent healthcare! free college! shift from illegal to legal immigration! tackling climate change! stricter gun ownership! taxing the rich!

these are only some of the nightmares that you have been spared

[mitigatedchaos]

Okay, but

• Typical US assault weapons bans don’t appear to be all that effective
• The democrats are laughably incompetent and cannot be trusted not to accidentally trainfuck one fifth of the economy if they made a single-payer healthcare bill.  (Public Option has a safer failure mode.)
• College is likely in a bubble right now in the US, increasing the size of the bubble is a bad idea, and subsidizing unproductive degrees is a waste of the state’s money.  
• But you can guarantee the Dems wouldn’t break degrees down by actual cost, or fund them based on post-graduation employment levels in the field of the degree, because both would be “discriminatory”
• Amnesty for illegal immigrants encourages more illegal immigration, which aside from its own issues, includes all the excesses of people-smuggling.
• Immigration cannot solve global poverty.  To solve global poverty, the immigration must either crash the fertility rates of underdeveloped countries or somehow increase their production capacity.  I don’t see how it would typically do either.
• Mass unskilled labor?  Do we want jobs for the marginal in our inner cities or not?

I was going to end with saying that large government deficit spending eats investment capital from other sectors of the economy, but the Republicans with their tax cut obsession might actually be worse.  

No one in charge actually knows what they’re doing in the most powerful nation on Earth.  At least, that’s the charitable reading of American politics during my lifetime.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

[mitigatedchaos]

@anaisnein

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?

[anaisnein]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Incidentally is anyone else really annoyed that there is no noun for ‘people from the USA’ that unambiguously means ‘people from the USA’?

[loki-zen]

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.

[thetransintransgenic]

[decameter]

I’d like to say Yanks but apparently it has a different meaning in the USA.

[isaacsapphire]

“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.

[confusedbyinterface]

Seppos.

[cromulentenough]

americasians

[nuclearspaceheater]

All of the Americas belong to the United States.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

[mitigatedchaos]

@anaisnein

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?

[its-okae-carly-rae]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

[mitigatedchaos]

@anaisnein

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?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

[squareallworthy]

What’s the purpose of all this Blendering? Are you just noodling around, or are you offering Serious Solutions to Today’s Problems?

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[squareallworthy]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[the-grey-tribe]

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

[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.

[its-okae-carly-rae]

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. 

[mitigatedchaos]

What do you think of university campuses?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[davidsevera]

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.

[argumate]

I am long furry, but not all fursonas are created equal.

[onecornerface]

Surely you meant to say all fursonas are equal, but some are more equal than others?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Performing gender for an audience of one

[the-grey-tribe]

Women who are egalitarian in the workplace and towards friends might still have very traditional expectations when it comes to sex and dating.

When it comes to actually having sex and relationships that include two people having sex with each other exclusively, sex differences and gender roles are more salient than in any other context.

Women who have traditional expectations from men they’re dating usually don’t communicate these expectations to men they’re not dating.

Is any of this controversial?

[argumate]

Hypothesis: any statement featuring the word “gender” is controversial, including this one.

[audreycious]

Counterexample to hypothesis: “’Gender’ is a word in the English language.”

More seriously: What about the lesbians? :D

[the-grey-tribe]

About the lesbians: I have no clue. I have never been one, or dated one. I’m a man. (full disclosure: Previous blog persona of a male robot was a joke. Am actually flesh and blood guy.)

That said: I have talked to lesbians and bi women about this IRL.

[mitigatedchaos]

Why, it’s almost enough to make one want someone of a differing neurotype.