Living through the Cold War brought us a constant and very close awareness of the potential for a nuclear extinction event so I don’t think it’s climate change. If anything it was scarier then because there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random error in a highly complex socio-technical system.
I’m of the opinion that much of the change in our culture was driven by a concerted pushback on the part of the “straights” to reassert the primacy of their worldview. The threat felt by those in power by the rise of the civil rights, anti-war and nascent environmentalist movement was a direct threat to business as usual. So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan, we have adopted a worldview that for decades has told us that happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial success and conventional career paths.
> there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random error
Agreed, I was there and watched the "Duck and Cover" films in school. That only stopped when leaders realized that surviving the initial blast was one thing, and surviving a month later for most urbanites was unlikely.
> So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan ... happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial success
I don't see a coherent argument here.
You can ignore Thatcher, since she was the head of a bankrupted, hapless country (Britain had food rationing for 9 years after WW2.)
Reagan was one of the most powerful leaders in world history. He wanted a strong America, both domestically and overseas. Can't really argue with that. We don't like people who utter words like "Evil Empire" [see Prof. Victor Davis Hanson], but somebody has to say it. Just be glad Reagan was on our side.
Whose side was Reagan on? He certainly wasn't on the side of a lot of gays, blacks, or the other minorities his administration threw in jail, poisoned, or just let die through inaction.
Re. gays, Mr. Reagan signed into law federal outlays of $5.73 billion for AIDS research and treatment and he opposed California Proposition 6, which would have fired public-school teachers for advocating homosexuality.
Re. blacks, his administration did push hard for tough-on-crime measures — measures which were supported by black groups in the 80s. They may or may not have been wise in retrospect, but they were a well-intended attempt to support black communities and black people.
Where does $5.73 billion come from? I searched and found figures in the hundreds of millions [1] along with other evidence of the Reagan administrations indifference to AIDS [2]
It's not as black and white as that. Reagan was probably the last conservative president that made an effort to work with groups opposed to his own ideological positions.
For example, have a listen to his 1983 Address to the Nation.
Be careful, also, to view him in context of the era he was active in. It's tempting to judge historical figures' actions in a modern context, but that dramatically alters the nature of what they did and why.
In Catalunya we’ve had such a network for many years and it is specifically used for providing connectivity to rural parts of the country. It’s called Guifi.net and has over 30,000 nodes. I was surprised it wasn’t mentioned in the article actually.
> While there are mesh networks dotting the U.S., she says the best working example of what mesh technology can do is in Spain. Guifi.net has more than 34,000 nodes covering an area of roughly 50,000 square kilometres across the Catalonia region.
Half Bakery is some awesome old-skool internet stuff. Back in the late 90s it was one of my favourite haunts. Sadly they lost all their content somehow and didn't have a full backup so, funny though it is now, there was some epic stuff on the old site that is lost forever.
Very old school indeed! From the about section: "The halfbakery software is implemented as one big C CGI program, edited with vi, compiled with gcc, invoked by an Apache http server."
Only to then realise that naive flock() won't cut it on your basic NFS setup so you resort to bizarre tricks like using hard links to the lock file to emulate proper locking on NFS because they can tell you which of the racing clients won.
Those were good times... right?
cgic was a great library, even if it was still excruciatingly tedious to write. I'm not entirely certain whether I discovered cgic or Perl first, but I know which one I preferred writing.
For all the gripes about cloud computing, the fact that amateurs can set up a website but also have one-click backups and redundancy is worth something. There’s a lot of offbeat web history that’s gone forever because someone’s hard drive crashed.
Always loved "Film Noir House" where every room was wired such that it narrated whatever you were doing around the house, but in the style of a Film Noir movie... "He walked into the bedroom... switched on the light..."
I was under the impression I was responding to the question
>> How have slaves ever historically created leverage?
They do it in all of the ways that other people do.
> Because what you just wrote sounds an awful [lot?] like a defence of slavery.
I will note that in another thread from today, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14651019, you can see people speaking with approval of a company that funds training for its employees with a provision that, should they leave the company within a longish period of getting the training, they owe a large lump sum to repay the training costs. This differs in no way from a traditional contract of slavery, under which, if you want to leave your current employer, you must pay them a large lump sum.
Owing someone money if you stop working for them is in no way equivalent to being required to pay them money in order to be allowed to stop working for them.
We don't say someone who has taken out a loan is a slave to their lender. And giving that person the option to pay that loan off more efficiently via labour doesn't make it slavery.
The cost of flat rental has risen enormously here in the past 18 months. €800 will not get you a nice flat in the centre any more. If you're lucky, you may get something OK for about €950. Lunch menus at 10 euros are not that common anymore either. €12-14 is more usual.
That said, it's the only city in the world I want to live in. I came here for a month in 2002 and never wanted to leave.
I can agree with that! It's been about two years since I looked for a flat in downtown, the same goes for lunch menus. I guess it will also depend on the area someone's looking for. But I can agree with those numbers.
I live and work in Poble Nou and I checked out the Superille. It was marvellous.
It is (I believe) a temporary project to explore how it all might work. In that sense, it's prototype and that's in fact really cool too. Basically they did an MVP of a Superille - low cost and very fast - in order to validate their hypotheses.
They mocked up the place to give people a feel of how living in this way could be. And they spent as little as possible - using old tyres and paint and recycled plywood to mark out spaces and make them feel "owned" by the people. Placing large lots of (quite big) trees and plants in pots on the car-free streets to see how it felt to walk down a street that was leafy and spacious and open.
The amount of extra space feels inspiring and liberating. Walking is faster if you want it to be - you can cut across streets and don't need to wait at stop signals. A lot of people riding bikes. A lot of smiles.
They definitely could have done a better job explaining it though. I have friends who support the idea but felt they could have been better informed. It felt like they didn't give enough warning.
However, what is interesting and cool is that once it was in place they did their best to engage residents in a dialogue about the proposal - they painted markings on the tarmac of the streets to lay out spaces for people to assemble and discuss. They had a soapbox platform for people to rant from, and a bunch of chairs scattered around the street for people to sit and discuss. They had walls for comments to be posted.
I certainly hope they go ahead with making it permanent and making more of them.
Cities without care are very different and much more humane places to live. Scale matters and cars warp the scale of a city in ways that are counterproductive to vibrant urban life.
I'm pretty sure we can overcome the technical issues that restrain us from our inevitable transition away from routine private car use in cities. Problems like what to do about parking are a legacy of the current broken system, not a fact of nature. The economic incentives to car ownership and the infrastructure that supports it are baked into cities right now. But this can change - but not by solving parking but by solving the underlying system and that includes pressuring the system to change through initiatives like this.
I don't think there's much doubt about how awesome it is to live a trivial distance from everything you need. This much is clear from the extreme premium that housing in such places commands compared to freeway-connected suburbs of US cities. It's not surprising that abundance of public space and a lack of through traffic would make them even better.
Cars and their infrastructure are indeed ugly and dangerous, but we have them because they so drastically increase the quality of life available to those who can't or won't pay the rent in the same superblocks as their jobs (or move to tenements).
Increasing the luxuriousness of this kind of premium housing would seem to come at the cost of extracting yet more free time from those who need to come into or through these areas but can't live in them, or yet more money from those who decide to stretch their housing budgets. It'd be entirely appropriate coupled with a massive increase in rail infrastructure or something, but on its own is concerning.
I'll be very interested to see whether US cities that adopt this model can add supply faster than people who used to commute can bid up the price of close-to-everything housing. My guess is no, not even close, a few elites get great lives and everyone else is driven to exurbs.
With a bit of planning, there is no difference in quality of life for able-bodied people living in communities from "town" up to metropolis:
Center of large city (i. e. new York, Paris):
Above a certain density, public transport becomes the norm across all income levels (cf. bankers in New York).
Suburb of large city down to towns:
For commuters coming in from the suburbs, there are hundreds of cities that show that rail is an option that's affordable and it usually takes 1/2h to the city center.
What motivates people to buy cars seems to be mostly daily life within the suburbs: shopping, getting children to school etc. This is a failure of city planning, because it's perfectly feasible to combine the density of a suburb with local subcenters that provide all daily needs (schools, shopping, medical etc.) within walking distance (let's say 1.5 miles).
Taking the worst as an example, the density of Atlanta's suburbs is about 1000/sq mile (http://www.city-data.com/forum/attachments/city-vs-city/6570...). Meaning there are 7074 people within a mile of any given point. That's plenty to sustain the infrastructure to provide for daily needs, although it may mean a need for more, but somewhat smaller schools/shops etc. (If this isn't convincing, consider that Atlanta is the worst of the worst in terms of waste of space. You can easily fit 10000 people within a mile^2 and still have backyards for everyone).
It's only rural living that requires a car. The quality of live in large cities will dramatically increase in the next few years, if only because self-driving cars and car sharing require far fewer parking spots. These make up about half of the space required for cars right now, meaning their abolition could double the space available for pedestrians.
I do like the idea, but there have been some problems[1].
Miscommunication, neighbours not knowing about the change or what it entailed.
Worse trafic on the main streets out of the superblock, with people that are thinking about leaving.
Having to train children to act differently on the main streets than in the ones in the superblock, as on the later streets they can be more oblivious, like in the park, but all look similar.
Bussinesses loosing tons of bussiness, a couple of bussinesses have reported losses of 40% and 50%.
All this while we know that drivers use the car because they need to, not because they want. Yes, there are alternatives, but you use the car when the alternatives are worse.
So, as I said, I like the idea, but we have to work in the implementation.
If we are to cite articles here, let me get one from Quim Monzó (a reputed catalan journalist) [1]. I'm pasting a Google translation directly here:
""
Noone can stop it
The latest rumors report that, after the first days of confusion in which many people (myself for example) had just did not understand the superblock Poblenou is so successful that the council considers mounted another even fatter. Instead of the nine islands now recovered and released to the public, the new superblock, which would be the Eixample district, in aggregate compensar- eighties. Sepúlveda go to Paris and Rocafort Aribau, including the four islands of the Clinic. The proliferation of space-and the undeniable fact that trim the circulation paths as important as Roma Avenue, the street Aragon and Great fea- would be a traffic calming infinitely superior to that now allows Poblenou.
In addition, it could hold more activities, not just those that are in the Poblenou. Convert planters of trees of the streets in small urban gardens so residents are planted to tomatoes from parsley. Every afternoon at five, would mime workshops all corners of the street Villarroel. At the intersection of Valencia Viladomat, barbecues because residents can cook sausages grilled tofu and mushrooms in which they exist. Years rain soon, like this, if the mushrooms are imported (Soria, Romania ...) it is verified Mushroom Fair Trade. Without this accreditation we are not allowed to use the picnic tables that are installed because citizens can enjoy these products along with their children. Saying that both barbecues and picnic tables would be designed for students and students of architecture, in a gesture of solidarity and protest sustainable. Once a week, the space freed Gran Via Casanova push forward the Factory of Ideas: a neighbor or neighbor tells a thought that has had this thought and then under discussion between all. It also may explain dreams, which are analyzed equally between everyone.
I can not conclude without noting that bus routes to be amended to avoid going through this supersuperilla would not be fixed. Each driver is free to choose what you want, you also can change from one day to another. This will not only encourage the creativity of colleagues and drivers but the genius of passengers and passenger. That could be targeted opening in September 2018, coinciding with the Feast of Mercy. And I forgot: stretched between the buildings around this area and recovered released settled zip, overflying stops caramelized apples that would allow it (the zip, no stops) than boys and children and adults, and adults could interact with each other and vice versa.
""
Quim Monzó is also a quite humorous writer, and this writing is full of his humour. He's making fun of the superblock, an 80 blocks superblock and random bus routes? You can't be fully sure whether he is for or against it, but one tends to make fun of things he disagrees with.
I know a little about Pier 01. It's full of Barcelona and international startups, and I believe it's part of the Barcelona Activa city project to develop entrepreneurship. There's a French accelerator called Numa opening there and a bunch of other companies. I can find you someone to talk to there if you want.
I was really pleased to see that Epson have now done this. They sell a range of printers with the ink in tanks. Instead of the homeopathic quantities of ink you get in normal disposable cartridges, you buy the new ink in bottles and refill the tanks. 40 bucks buys you a complete set of CMYK inks that print 8000 pages (or so they say).
Either way the per ml price of ink is several orders of magnitude below even refilled cartridges, and since it's legit Epson ink, (hopefully) it won't screw up the print head.
Of course, the printer purchase price reflects the actual cost of making the printer as there is no cross subsidy but I am happy to pay 250 euros for the printer, in the knowledge that I won't be paying extortionate amounts for cartridges every month or two.
I also like not throwing out the used cartridges which always seems a huge waste.
>If you want to work in an environment full of rowanmannings, that is your prerogative
I have worked in an environment with one rowanmanning in it. It was awesome.
A more open-minded, funny, smart and generous guy you couldn't hope to meet. More to the point, he was one of the best coders any of us had ever worked with.
A company full of rowanmannings would therefore be a chilled out place where we'd learn from each other while having a laugh and turning out enough quality code to crush an army of pizza-fuelled dinosaur brogrammers waving their false-victimhood like a banner.
Boycotting the Nature Publishing Group
The Nature Publishing Group publishes not only the
prestigious journal Nature, but also many others. When this
company bought Scientific American, it raised the
institutional subscription price seven-fold. Now they are
insisting on quadrupling the fees for 67 journals to which
the University of California subscribes.
Right now, we pay them an average of $4,465 per year for
each journal we subscribe to. After the increase, this
would soar to $17,479 per year. In response, the University
of California is considering a system-wide boycott of the
Nature Publishing Group — for example, cancelling
subscriptions to all their journals.
Rowan Manning works for a gang of monopolistic rent-seekers who currently have the scientific community over a barrel. His salary comes from a closed-access model which is soon to be obsolete. Thus "cutting-edge" technology is actually highlighted as a fail!
I’m of the opinion that much of the change in our culture was driven by a concerted pushback on the part of the “straights” to reassert the primacy of their worldview. The threat felt by those in power by the rise of the civil rights, anti-war and nascent environmentalist movement was a direct threat to business as usual. So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan, we have adopted a worldview that for decades has told us that happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial success and conventional career paths.