Oceans Yet to Burn

mitigatedchaos

@argumate is this your thing now

WE WILL CONTINUE TO POST PIXELATED ART OF QUESTIONABLE QUALITY (AT RANDOM INTERVALS BETWEEN TWO HOURS AND SIX MONTHS) UNTIL OUR DEMANDS ARE MET

DONALD TRUMP WILL IMMEDIATELY STEP DOWN AND BE REPLACED AS PRESIDENT BY A WORKING GROUP OF SELECTED PERSONNEL FROM GOOGLE, AMAZON, AND IBM’S MACHINE LEARNING DIVISIONS, AND THE RAND CORPORATION, WHO WILL BE DIRECTED TO GOVERN IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST. A $1 BILLION DATACENTER WILL BE CONSTRUCTED TO FULFILL THEIR COMMANDS
MILITARY-GRADE POWERED EXOSKELETONS WILL BE IMMEDIATELY LEGALIZED FOR CIVILIAN OWNERSHIP
DETROIT WILL BE DECLARED A SPECIAL AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT ZONE AND PUT UNDER THE IRON HAND OF A CEO FROM ASIA BACKED BY HEAVY MILITIA FORCES, PAID AS A PERCENTAGE OF DETROIT REAL GDP ANNUALLY
MARTIAL ARTS TRAINING WILL BE MADE A MANDATORY COMPONENT OF THE HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM AND AN ANNUAL TOURNAMENT WILL BE HELD TO DETERMINE THE ‘MOST BADASS HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR IN AMERICA’

mitigatedchaos

ADDITIONAL DEMANDS

THE GAZA STRIP WILL BE YIELDED TO EGYPT, THE WEST BANK WILL BE YIELDED TO JORDAN, THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY WILL BE DISSOLVED, AND EVERYONE WILL SHUT UP ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST FOR A PERIOD OF NOT LESS THAN TWO (2) MONTHS
CALIFORNIA WILL BE SPLIT INTO FOUR ADDITIONAL STATES AND WESTERN CALIFORNIA WILL BE PROVIDED 5,000,000 PERMANENT RESIDENCY PERMITS TO ASSIGN AS THEY SEE FIT ON THE CONDITION THAT THEY ARE PROHIBITED FROM VOTING ON IMMIGRATION MATTERS AND JUS SOLI IS ENDED
MUNICIPAL POLICE WILL BE REORGANIZED INTO AUTONOMOUS AGENCIES THAT COMPETE ACROSS MULTIPLE METRICS INCLUDING RATE OF FATALITIES AND DONUT CONSUMPTION AND MAKE METRIC-WEIGHTED BIDS FOR ACCESS TO MUNICIPAL CONTRACTS. A SOFTWARE-MANAGED EVIDENCE EXCHANGE WILL BE BUILT TO COORDINATE THIS. NO MORE THAN A RUNNING AVERAGE OF 1.2 DONUTS PER DAY PER OFFICER WILL BE PERMITTED.
THE REPUBLICAN AND DEMOCRATIC PARTIES WILL ABANDON THEIR IDEOLOGIES AND ADOPT THE IDEOLOGIES OF NATIONAL POPULISM AND GLOBAL TECHNOCRACY RESPECTIVELY. DEFECTORS WILL BE CONSCRIPTED TO SERVE AS EDITORS FOR THE NEW FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF CLICKBAIT FOR A PERIOD OF NO LESS THAN FIVE YEARS

mitigatedchaos

Now, the original posts here are a joke, but…

(1) A group selected from such high IQ people, including one pool that has direct experience with US politics, would probably outperform Donald Trump, and they could do some real data-crunching using all that computer hardware to develop the kinds of new policies we need. Of course that’s not an actually practical hiring-for-President mechanism, but performance in other sectors of government might be improved by such things.

(2) Access to defensive military hardware is relevant to the 2nd amendment and will continue to be as we go farther into the 21st century. Part of the very idea of arming the populace is that it introduces last resort accountability.

(3) Detroit being put under the rule of a gifted businessman with flexibility in policies could radically alter its economic fate in ways that, under the current path, are not feasible.

(4) Martial Arts training as an option would likely increase interest in Physical Education and help lower obesity, in addition to increasing national defense readiness.

(5) National identities being useful doesn’t mean they’re immutable and vice-versa. The entire political infrastructure in Palestine has this whole opposition to Israel element built into it, and I’m not sure who the Palestinian identity is really benefiting anymore. Jordan and Egypt are both faring better and would likely improve overall conditions in those areas without them being owned by Israel. Of course, there’s probably some reason this won’t work / catch I’m unaware of.

(6) California isn’t actually a monolithic blue state, and if they want to have sanctuary cities and the like so much… why not let them kinda do it, but torpedo the effect on voting demographics so there’s no incentive to undermine the national immigration policy just to win more at politics?

Actual racists won’t like the policy, but the opposition to immigration is not driven purely by racism despite what many proponents say.

(7-1) A lot of policing police focuses on individuals, however, if the entire police department could be effectively fired at once, that provides organization-level incentives to use best practices better policy. Costs of externalities, and public benefits, are worked into the bid so that it isn’t flat lowest-cost. For instance, add $500,000 virtual price to the bid for every police-related fatality provides organization-level incentive to provide more training / be less gung-ho about the use of guns.

Alternatively, just make them take out insurance that pays into an offset fund.

(7-2) Cops need to be physically fit for their jobs, even though counting individual donuts is overkill. If a cop in this country is bulky, it should be because he’s built like a weightlifter.

(8) If this shift occurred, it would make both of their policy angles less stupid.

politics

altrightbot

it was the best of timelines, it was the worst of timelines

chronofelony

“Picking nits is an accepted group bonding activity!”

“Yeah, in orangutan culture, maybe!”

“Hey, orangutan culture is valid!”

shtpost

collapsedsquid

politics shtpost

collapsedsquid

Source: afloweroutofstone politics the invisible fist the red hammer

argumate

Source: grumsal shtpost

mailadreapta

tanadrin

Not a huge fan of the writing style, but this article makes a solid underlying point: whatever the other incentives for building high-rise residential buildings, they’re terrible if you care about the social health of your city. I’m sympathetic to motives like decreasing housing prices in general, but if the tradeoff is between inexpensive housing and annihilating the social fabric, I’m not sure you’ve actually made any improvements to the situation. We’ve known more-or-less how to build healthy cities for decades now, thanks to the work of people like Jane Jacobs; that that Le Corbusier shit still seems to exert a powerful influence over urban planning should be a civilizational embarrassment.

tanadrin

@jadagul replied to your post:

I suspect most of the action is less in building high-rises–though I like high-rises–and more in moving single-family deatched homes into three- and four-story residential complexes. Which are exactly the sort of thing that happened in the areas Jacobs celebrated. I’m not sure even high-rises are anti-Jacobsian if you still have plenty of ground-level retail etc.

Yeah, that last point is part of it; it’s not the density, it’s that isolating neighborhoods or regions of a city to be purely residential or purely commercial makes them either commuter neighborhoods where everyone spends their time bottled up in their personal living space bubble, or sterile wastelands where nobody can just wander down to a cafe for breakfast on a Sunday morning if they feel like it (or, for a less furiously bourgeoise example, you don’t have to spend an hour going to and from work every day).

And the thing is, on some level, developers must know this is a terrible way to design cities: think of how many shopping malls in America are designed to imitate the mixed character of a major thoroughfare of a small town or a cozy European neighborhood: it’s like they see the benches and the wrought-iron lamposts and think they can, in cargo-cult fashion, summon the necessary spirit to make this a desirable place to pass the time, but they’re not actually investigating what makes a street pedestrian-friendly. The clearest memory I have of this is a street in I think Sydney, which tried to do inviting shopfronts and cafes with outdoor seating and all that, but was otherwise surrounded by blank flat walls, and was devoid of any other visible human life besides me and the person walking next to me.

I think I am far from alone in thinking that a neighborhood where I can walk downstairs to the shop, buy some stamps, then post a letter, all over such a short distance I question whether it’s really worth it to even put on shoes, is far more pleasant a place to exist than one where I trade that for a half-acre of lawn and slightly less traffic noise. You could build a futuristic arcology-style high rise like that, that packed together a lot of different types of residential and commercial spaces, but it seems like zoning laws and practical considerations mostly prevent that in reality.

I am almost as anti single-family homes as I am high rises; urban sprawl is as ruinous to a healthy, livable city as artificially separating residential and commercial areas, and insisting every house be an island surrounded by its sea of grass sort of necessitates that kind of segregation anyway. The really crazy thing is that it feels like the U.S. has only been living this way from, like, the end of World War 2 or so, so it’s not like we’ve irreversibly committed our civilization to this path. At the very least, not actively punishing that kind of mixed development would be a start.

jadagul

Huh, so I associate “no high-rises” with “no mixed-use”. As you point out they’re obviously separable. But the sort of zoning regulations that bar the one often also bar the other.

Whether or not most people would, in practice, enjoy mixed-use development, a lot of people are very vociferously opposed to it. Which is part of why it’s illegal in most places.

mailadreapta

Who are these mixed-used haters, seriously? This is an honest question; the advantages of medium-density mixed-used development are praised in literally every media source I see and by 100% of my peer group, so I have a very hazy notion of who opposes it and what their real or supposed motivations are.

jadagul

People who want to make sure no one is on the streets outside their house ever.

Like, the reason a lot of people dislike mixed use housing is pretty much exactly the same Jacobsian reason it’s a good idea. There’s always people on the street and things happening. People who want not-that find it unpleasant.

mailadreapta

Okay, this gives me at least a vague idea of the reference group: people who are aesthetically pleased by the suburban notion of vast regions of Just Houses.

People are allowed to have that preference; but why are they allowed to oppose the existence of mixed-use even if they don’t have to live there?

mitigatedchaos

And could they be bought off by an alternate strategy?

Source: tanadrin urban planning policy

mutant-aesthetic

Am I on Papatulas’s bad person list? That might make some sense as to this morning’s barrage of anon hate

mitigatedchaos

I keep wondering how long it’s going to take before a Crusader for Justice comes to raid my ~~supervillain lair~~ blog and ~~seize my killer robots~~ send anon hate.

I am being followed by over 70 carbots for some reason

I’m still not sure what their purpose is, because most of them don’t have any advertising, so the experiment of gathering them instead of blocking them all hasn’t yielded much useful information for the field of carbotology.

Also there were a few pornbots I didn’t block last time. Imagine being someone who really hates porn, man, it must seem like a conspiracy that those things are everywhere.

collapsedsquid

blogs.wsj.com

Amazon Basically Just Bought Whole Foods for Nothing

Amazon.com Inc.'s stock is up 3.3% Friday morning. One way to look at that: The e-commerce giant basically bought Whole Foods Market Inc. for nothing, according to Bespoke Investment Group.

Ben Eisen

collapsedsquid

Amazon stock gained enough after the Whole Foods purchase that they were effectively paid for acquiring it.

mitigatedchaos

Beats the alternative in which some amount of economic value was destroyed, tbh.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

I am being followed by over 70 carbots for some reason

Amazon Basically Just Bought Whole Foods for Nothing