Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

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?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

In the Suburbs of Flatsville, Arkowa

Our field trip to the suburbs continues in our One Thousand Villages series of wildcat city planning.

Arkowa is a state in the American Midwest, where the legislature has graciously agreed to give our new Metropolitan Planning Authority control over an area of land to build a new city, off of a major highway.  According to the news this is somehow tied into a scandal involving a group of climate vigilantes holding thousands of tractors hostage using a backdoor in hacked Ukrainian tractor firmware, but the news hasn’t been very reliable lately, so such suspicions can be safely disregarded.

Here we have a suburban klick, broken into four quads of various densities.

With American development comes the American love of the automobile.  Many of our new residents are commuting to the neighboring city of Springfield for work, travelling along the highway, and there are limits to just how far we can stretch our city’s public transport infrastructure!  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

One Thousand Villages

@wirehead-wannabe I recall you talking about wanting a college-campus-like environment with activities and whatnot as a living area, but outside of a college campus.

@mailadreapta I recall you talking about the difficulty of getting people to go for medium-density housing.

And I guess @bambamramfan I think I’ve mentioned a similar idea already.  (Though it was a low-trust mechanism, I’m of the opinion that high trust is an equilibrium state which can be achieved through various mechanisms.)

There is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, which is to borrow an idea from computer science for resolving the challenges of urban areas by recursively reducing the size of problems until they can be adequately resolved.  Thus, the city is reduced to a bunch of villages/towns.

The above render is for a rough sketch design that spans one kilometer and houses a population of around 5,000 or more, assuming an apartment is about 100 sqm (based on the size of an average apartment in the US).  After reviewing it, I can’t help but think it should perhaps be about ¼ the size, but ah well.  Grey is civic buildings, light green is residential, light blue is commercial, and light brown is footpaths.

• Mixed use development has a lot of advantages, including reductions in commuting, but for various reasons people don’t like it.
  
• People seem to find themselves feeling less connected to, and less trusting of, others.
• Crime continues to be a problem for many cities.
• Childhood obesity is on the increase, and children most likely need to get outside more.
• Police violence is a problem in many cities.
• Greenery is important for human psychological health.
• High levels of traffic congestion.

My proposal, then, is to create a smaller community within the city with several key elements:

• Semi-permeable membrane - Outer wall reduces noise.  Security and level of surveillance can be adjusted according to local crime levels.  As crime rises, all visitors can be tracked, or access can even be limited.
• Quick access to public transportation (orange areas) - the average human walks at 5kph, and is therefore never more than about 700m and ~10 minutes from a public transport stop.
• Quick access to local shops - reduce unnecessary transport usage and make goods available easily to the locals, also it’s directly next to the transit stop.
• Community Center - Common facilities for exercise, social clubs, social events, and so on are near the center.  All residents own a share of the Community Development Board (or something) which hires personnel to clean up the neighborhood, maintain the facilities, and puts on community social events on the regular.  This is very local, direct political involvement with a high share of control per person.  
• Community Support Officers (CSOs) - (I only recently discovered UK has something with the same name.)  Trained not only in police work, but also emergency medical care, fire suppression, and social work.  Part of the idea here is that CSOs will engage almost entirely in foot patrols when not doing other support work.  They will know who is an actual threat, vs who is mentally ill, possibly be able to deflect bad paths before they become permanent, and pick up on crimes using high-context detective work.  The people of the block will be real people to them and they will see their consequences as they happen.
• Low-velocity roads - Borrowed from Barcelona, encourages and enhances walking, discourages car use, but still lets cargo move in and out.  Safer for children.  
• Ample foot/bicycle paths, ample green space for exercise, sports, and letting children outside to play.

Probably this needs to be revised a lot more, starting with a reduction to 500m.

I think something like this might have the potential to lower crime and police violence, while reducing the opposition to medium-density living and increasing psychological and physical health.  

But you know, I’m not an expert.  There’s probably something terribly wrong with this.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Alternative Fact: Japan isn't a real country. It didn't exist before 1853. The illusion of Japan is created by successively more dedicated layers of weebs. Images of Tokyo are filmed on a series of large-scale movie sets with CGI composites. Japanese people abroad are nothing more than paid actors, hired by the anime industry to protect its profit margins. There's no way it could be a real country - it's almost as ridiculous as Australia! Lol, like the platypus is even a thing. WAKE UP SHEEPLE

argumate answered:

That’s why most Japanese stuff is anime instead of live action: too expensive to fake the backgrounds and keep finding Chinese actors who can pretend they speak “Japanese”.

[mitigatedchaos]

I can’t believe you would publish such a slanderous ask against the country that was once the 大日本帝国, you treacherous kangaroo farmer, the light of their mighty rising sun nearly covered all of Asi–

* gasping *

* coughing * 

* wheezing *

Phew, don’t know what came over me, there.  One moment I was just reading Tumblr and then I just… blacked out.  It was almost like that time a foreign hypernationalist ideo-virus got past my memetic barriers and infected my cyberbrain.  But fortunately I got that removed.  No traces left.

A-argumate, why are you looking at me like that? 

Argumate-kun?  Is something wrong?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@the-grey-tribe

Please remind me to not give @mitigatedchaos any formal power if I ever become King of The World or something. Maybe I can bestow a purely ceremonial title like First Lady of The Republic of Cascadia or Vice Antipope. Grand Ideas should be kept in their ivory towers where they belong.

[mitigatedchaos]

Back Side (Track Listing)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@the-grey-tribe

Please remind me to not give @mitigatedchaos any formal power if I ever become King of The World or something. Maybe I can bestow a purely ceremonial title like First Lady of The Republic of Cascadia or Vice Antipope. Grand Ideas should be kept in their ivory towers where they belong.

@argumate

I dreamt I was a superhero could fly etc. but I kept getting captured and killed by gangsters so I got irritated and started pushing a drug decriminalisation slash harm reduction program to destroy their business and I got so bored I woke up so I guess they won this round

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

“Dude, how many layers of Weird Near-Future Sci-Fi Politics are you on right now?”

“I dunno, let me go consult the chart.”

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

collapsedsquid said: What about Criminal Country?

believe it or not, this is actually hot discourse right now:

土澳 or TuAo: Is this Chinese popular term for Australia affectionate or condescending?

Taken literally, TuAo means “unrefined, backwards Australia”.

…

Wai Ling Yeung, a former Chinese studies professor at Curtin University, points out that many Chinese-Australians use the character for village when referring to suburbs.

“Because of that, many China-based netizens think all Australian cities are like country towns, but this is in fact not what Chinese-Australians mean,” she said.

She contrasts TuAo with humorous slang used by Chinese abroad in other countries, including FuGuo for Britain, meaning “decadent country” — a coded term believed to refer to the UK’s attitudes towards homosexuality.

The US is also sometimes referred to online as MeiDi, meaning “American empire”.

[mitigatedchaos]

If the Chinese call it an Empire, who am I to disagree? The largest military budget in the world, culture and commerce spreading out over the Earth, a currency used as a reserve everywhere else and as real money by entire foreign countries, and partial responsibility for the growing global obesity epidemic - who is to say that a Republic can’t be an Empire?

Now,

* inhales *

* coughing *

you know what actually nevermind the rest of it

* coughing *

this pipe gimmick was a bad idea

* wheezes *

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Current Political Mood (Past 24h)

@the-grey-tribe

All Issues Are Wedge Issues

Years ago, a government minister was asked why he proposed to increase welfare while raising taxes at the same times. The welfare money did not actually help to the people in need. He answered on an accidentally hot mic “You see, Iwan, wages and pensions have been stagnant for two years. This scheme will raise average wages on paper and divert welfare money into pension funds. Retirees are our base. We can’t not raise pension in an election year. It would be political suicide!“

I have a friend who sometimes volunteers for a left-wing party. He’s friends with many activists and left-wing think tank pilots. I asked his party friends at his birthday party: “Why don’t you support the elimination of welfare cliffs, or simplifying tax law, or a version of the paperwork reduction act, or a version of FOIA?“ They agreed that all of these were sensible ideas with potentially broad popular and multi-partisan parliamentary support. That was precisely the problem: “Why would anybody vote for us specifically if we just did the same shit as everybody else. Why not let the conservatives spend their political capital on bureaucracy? What if we make a big deal out of this and then moderates agree and steal our votes? If conservatives or moderates proposed this, we would have to oppose on principle. If social democrats proposed this maybe we would support it. If Marxists come out against bureaucracy we will be surprised. But why waste time on this instead of minimum wage? Our constituents are all poor people anyway. The middle class and self-employed people are affected by complicated taxes. They don’t vote for us anyway. It would be political suicide!“

* hissing sounds *

We will CRUSH the pathetic legislature and their traitorous, kakistocratic political parties by rolling over them with a column of actual tanks 

think-tanks nerf bats redundant unpruned regulations 

We will REPLACE the treacherous legislature with voter-delegate think-tanks that are funded according to their percentile standing on a legislative prediction market times their number of votes! DEATH TO THE TREASONOUS INCENTIVE SYSTEMS!  LONG LIVE THE UNION!