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

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
multiheaded1793
the-grey-tribe

If I ever meet @mitigatedchaos in the year 1995, I’ll buy her a beer.

multiheaded1793

Past-her might probably be more thankful for a dire warning about the horrors of Shakira Law and no-go zones overtaking Europe. Eh? Eh? Wouldn’t you be, @mitigatedchaos?

mitigatedchaos

Your mind jumps to this, and not 9/11?

Either Osama Bin Laden was breathtakingly stupid or delusional, or his goal wasn’t to just get the West to quit interfering in the Middle East.

9/11 is what creates the political capital necessary for George Bush to launch his Iraq War, even though it isn’t tied to it, killing thousands of Americans and over a hundred thousand Iraqis.  It cost two trillion dollars, the entire lifetime economic output - total, not profit - of over five hundred thousand people, and is likely to cost an additional $4 trillion over time.  This is in addition to the two trillion dollar cost of the 9/11 attack itself and its effect on the economy and the American psyche.

Before that, Islam was just considered a Weird Foreign Religion.

Of course, this would do nothing to prevent what happened at Rotherham.

However, what happened at Rotherham required the Left to jump to the defense of a designated politically-favored group when it was not justified.  A lot of the Left’s sudden fascination with Islam is due to the right’s opposition to it - no 9/11 means there’s less right-wing opposition, which means there’s less left-wing counter-opposition in favor of a religion that is worse on most axes the Left says they care about than the fundamentalist Christianity they happily opposed before.

Which means “holy sht we need to do something about this systematic child sexual abuse” doesn’t get met with “SHUT UP YOU EVIL RACISTS!”  

And with the other pathways in this timeline, perhaps Libya doesn’t get destabilized, or Syria doesn’t get destabilized, so there is no migration crisis.

More US military power conserved means more leverage against China and the ability to topple North Korea before the Kims get nuclear missiles.  There’s a reasonably high probability that Saddam’s regime doesn’t collapse and so there’s no DAESH.

The benefits just keep going and going.

You don’t seem to understand me as well as you think you do.

Source: the-grey-tribe politics

Bus Tracks

The One Thousand Villages series continues, as we return to the suburbs of Flatsville, our new town in the state of Arkowa.

Wanting to avoid the sins of past American cities and avoid creating a sparse and energy-inefficient sprawl that we may become unable to maintain, our Metropolitan Planning Authority has decided to plan with an eye towards public transit from the beginning.

At this point it becomes very tempting to just put trams in everywhere.  They’re reasonably quiet, they don’t emit fumes, people love riding them, and property developers view them as a long-term investment.

Unfortunately, trams are quite expensive.  And, quite frankly, it would be highly irresponsible for the MPA to build such heavy public transit without knowing where the densest areas of the city will be!  We can’t just dedicate an entire zone to only hotels - what do you think this is, Brasilia?

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argumate
argumate

But there’s definitely a strain of revolutionary that wants a more explicitly fascist or feudal adversary, not this wishy washy liberal centrism rubbish.

It takes a villain to create a superhero.

mitigatedchaos

This is why Leftists should support my rise to power in order to feel revolutionary zeal and increase their social status through righteous indignation. It’s true, I may not be a feudalist or a fascist, but they’ll get to call me that a lot which gets the same social points, right? And what I have in mind is less wishy-washy than the current dominant paradigm…

politics shtpost supervillain
funereal-disease
unknought

If you’re arguing about whether the U.S. should weaken protections of freedom of speech, I’m likely to find you a lot more persuasive if you examine other Western nations with weaker free speech protections (i.e. most of them) and the observable consequences of that, than if you expound on the most horrifying dystopia that you can imagine resulting from the opposing side.

femmenietzsche

Yeah. As someone who’s innately a free speech absolutist, it’s hard to admit that moderate limits on speech aren’t necessarily very onerous and can be maintained for decades (at least) without spiraling into anything much worse, but it’s pretty obviously true. Doesn’t mean the restrictions pass a cost-benefit test, but it’s pretty obviously true.

rendakuenthusiast

I do actually think that European and Canadians restrictions on speech are already onerous, and American 1st amendment jurisprudence is the one major thing that is genuinely politically superior about the US compared to those countries. I keep seeing stories about the cops being called on people for hate speech tweets in the UK that would be unambiguously constitutionally protected in the US, and thinking I’m glad my servers are here and not there.

If I lived in one of those counties I would consider it politically important to move local law more towards the US model, or barring that preventing effective enforcement of censorship law; since I live in the US, I consider it politically important to prevent the state of 1st amendment law from moving even a little bit in the direction of Europe and Canada (which I agree are not dystopias).

Source: unknought politics
collapsedsquid
argumate

god it’s way past time we dissolved Western Australia

either get rid of all the states entirely and give more authority to local councils, or get rid of the federal government and let states print their own currencies, but the current split between state and federal is incredibly irritating.

collapsedsquid

That’s the part of the world @mitigatedchaos can be in charge of.  It’s mostly uninhabitable, so who cares if it’s fucked up?

mitigatedchaos

I know, you’re probably thinking this is a safe idea.  “Let’s exile that lunatic to the vast desert of Western Australia.  No matter how many bizarre plans they have, the collateral damage cannot possibly escape to the rest of the developed world.”

And of course, this seems perfectly reasonable.  The diagonal of Western Australia is literally over two thousand kilometers in length.

It’s just over two point six million square kilometers in size.  Even the construction of a Special Economic Zone kept wet by a nuclear-powered desalination plant would be dwarfed by four orders of magnitude by the shear scale of Western Australia.

But did you realize it’s possible to terraform the Outback with existing technology?

Who would fund such a thing?  Well, multiple nations are looking to meet their climate commitments, and the newly-formed state of Technocratic Western Australia would be in a position to supply.  A new city would need to be built to accommodate the infrastructure necessary to oversee this enormous project, along with a series of smaller and more temporary towns, allowing a great degree of flexibility in urban planning.  

The scale of the project would ensure funding for the new regime for several decades, while power was consolidated and a new culture was forged across multiple immigrant groups brought in to provide the labor for the project.  A tiered citizenship system, including education and service to advance up the hierarchy, with special status reserved for national heroes and more voice available in the National Delegation for loyalists, would place long-term political power in the hands of those committed to the new Western Australia.

As the trees spread across the continent, new development opportunities and industries would open up as the temperatures and local climates changed, paving the way for a nation of twenty million by the mid century.

The only thing preventing this future is that I am not in charge of Western Australia.

Source: argumate supervillain mitigated future politics

One Thousand and One Villages

Follow-up to my post One Thousand Villages, separated out so Tumblr won’t harm my precious, precious PNGs, so let’s tag some people from the last one. @wirehead-wannabe @mailadreapta @bambamramfan Let’s also tag @xhxhxhx in case he finds it interesting or discovers some glaring flaw or something.

We’ll borrow Mailadreapta’s word here and refer to the new model as a Quad - it’s a 500m x 500m area as part of a larger 1km x 1km pattern.  I decided to revisit the subject and get a better sense of the scale and proportions, and in doing so, I realized that 1km x 1km is just too big for a single unit (and also too big to start with as an experiment if someone were to attempt this).  We’ll call the collection of four quads a Klick.

In the above images, green is residential, blue is mixed-use/commercial, yellow is light industrial, white is civic buildings, and orange is public transit.

Noting some feedback from @mailadreapta

I think the biggest problem is employment: there’s just no way you can ensure that everyone works in their own quad, so most people will still need to leave in order to work. I assume that a high-speed thoroughfare lie along the boundaries of the square (with transit) to accommodate this.

For a similar reason, I would put the commercial and civic buildings (except for the school) among the edge: these are these are places that will be visited often by people from other villages, so keep them away from the residential center.

This is, in fact, roughly the plan.  Although I did have the civic center in the middle last time.

Now then, now that that’s out of the way, let’s do some uncredentialed urban planning!

EDIT: Got a couple of numbers wrong.  That’s what I get for being so desperate to post this at 5AM in the morning.

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ranma-official

Anonymous asked:

I like the thing I've heard the British do where the choice of celsius vs. fahrenheit for describing weather is a function of "how impressive does this number sound"

ranma-official answered:

I HATE everything the British do. The sun never sets, more like the empire that never stops eating SHIT

mitigatedchaos

Pip pop, cheerio, Ranma old bean!  
Long live Britain and God save the Queen!

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