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Author Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée  (Read 1544823 times)

Loud Whispers

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9930 on: January 20, 2016, 01:51:59 pm »

Urban sprawl promotes liberty??
Sorry, you probably have a point but this is hard to process.  Sprawl looks awful and makes people drive 30-60 minutes each way to work in many places.
For American cities yes, yours are built upon plans and automobiles. For Western European cities underground railways effectively shorten the distance so you are never more than 15 minutes away from someone, and population distribution has to happen by distributing to smaller towns and villages or outward city zones or else reduction in the city population. London was the first city to have a shit ton of people since Rome and it went from clustering in the city centre to outwards migration. The new modern drive to increase population density and the continual vertical development has been systematically stripping away all the old character of sprawling London, so that Jamaica Road, Canada Water, Russia Docks, St. Olaf's court, Spice Island and so on are all the same, highly efficient and marketable towers of consumer ease with no roots and plenty of resale value. Before they did the same but replaced them with communist architecture, so you either destroy your roots for money or commies, both are pretty shit to be honest. If you're gonna build a tower, build it on some piece of shit no one will miss, and I'm still quite annoyed that London's skyline has been pierced by the Eye of Boris. I mean demolishing the English Heritage HQ to make way for an office, there's a bit of symbolism xD

Also, not sure what this means
No, building sideways impacts the green belt, towers results in the destruction of historical buildings.
Green belts are areas of land we reserve for nothing, essentially keeping them as empty space for wild flowers, agriculture, forestry and hikers / and as a buffer to stop the cities from ever expanding outwards and fusing the whole country into one megacity.
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Poor for human health,
Know what's bad for human health?  Smog.  Know what reduces smog?  Public transit.  Know what funds public transit?  Tall buildings.
Before we had the tallest tower in Europe we still had some of the best public transit in the world, and actually after the Shard was built the smog increased in my area because they had to reduce capacity for the tube going Northwest - which made it even worse, because the increased population in my area from the new high apartments meant there was an increased population with a reduced capacity for the tube and so both factors pushed for more on the road, and we already had problems with congestion on Rotherhithe tunnel.

Because? People who dont give a shit about the environment do give a shit about historic buildings?
Ok we should destroy our heritage just because. Good idea that.

You've got it entirely backwards.  The most cost effective transit is in dense areas.  It's building out that creates infrastructure liabilities that can't be paid.
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/feb/11/tale-four-cities-london-delhi-tokyo-bogota-data
There is no absolute truth to how to plan and build a world class city, the more I look into this the more I realize how different the problems my city faces versus American ones, and indeed how different the problems American cities face from one another. This is very complex, and must be reviewed on a city by city basis.

Um... interesting segue.  And on a very shaky ground, empirically speaking.
How so? Disarmed, poor social group organization, mass surveillance, efficient policing, centralized control of public infrastructure, easier tracking?
One need only look to see how quickly Hong Kong has had its will broken to see where the ground lies

mainiac

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9931 on: January 20, 2016, 01:58:43 pm »

Ok we should destroy our heritage just because. Good idea that.

As long as you are going to read things that aren't remotely present in my posts, why not accuse me of sex with goats?  I always thought that was a particularly amusing type of bestiality.  If you are going to make a baseless ad hominem, please use that one.

And hey, isn't it really revealing that my mind immediately went to sex with goats and how funny it is?

There is no absolute truth to how to plan and build a world class city,

So what?  That doesn't change the fact that a taller city is a richer city with a smaller environmental impact and less motivation to bulldoze it's history.  You said things that were factually untrue and then when I provided, y'know, links to people who actually know the subject you are trying to talk.


How so? Disarmed, poor social group organization, mass surveillance, efficient policing, centralized control of public infrastructure, easier tracking?
One need only look to see how quickly Hong Kong has had its will broken to see where the ground lies

Or look at the Arab Spring, the color revolutions, the collapse of the iron curtain...
« Last Edit: January 20, 2016, 02:04:11 pm by mainiac »
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« Last Edit: February 10, 1988, 03:27:23 pm by UR MOM »
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Reelya

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9932 on: January 20, 2016, 02:02:17 pm »

Quote
communist architecture

One of the ironies is that the style was created in capitalist countries for reasons of cost and efficiency directly post-WWII and through the height of the Cold War, and only spread to communist countries around the late 1960s - 1980s. "Not wasting taxpayers money" isn't just a communist value, after all, and the "giant concrete box with windows" wasn't really new: it was a growth out of Western modernist architecture of the 1930s.

Compare "Stalinist architecture", which was actual contemporary communist architecture. You get a lot more traditional decorative elements than the west was using at that time. They had no constraints on government spending, after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture
« Last Edit: January 20, 2016, 02:20:40 pm by Reelya »
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Loud Whispers

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9933 on: January 20, 2016, 02:19:59 pm »

As long as you are going to read things that aren't remotely present in my posts, why not accuse me of sex with goats?
People who care not for the environment care not for historical buildings? What else would you be insinuating?

I always thought that was a particularly amusing type of bestiality.  If you are going to make a baseless ad hominem, please use that one.
And hey, isn't it really revealing that my mind immediately went to sex with goats and how funny it is?
Whatever floats your goat

So what?  That doesn't change the fact that a taller city is a richer city with a smaller environmental impact and less motivation to bulldoze it's history.
Because London was a living refutation of that "fact"

You said things that were factually untrue
Where?

and then when I provided, y'know, links to people who actually know the subject you are trying to talk.
Then you must not have read the links you gave me, for when I said there was no absolute truth to how to plan and build a world class city I was using your link and when I came to the conclusion that the world's cities and indeed America's cities would have to have different solutions for they were not in the same boats, I was using your link to Strong Towns:

"There are no universal answers to the complex problems America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods face. At Strong Towns, we seek to discover rational ways to respond to these challenges. A Strong Towns approach."
"    Transfer payments between governments: where the federal or state government makes a direct investment in growth at the local level, such as funding a water or sewer system expansion.
    Transportation spending: where transportation infrastructure is used to improve access to a site that can then be developed.
    Public and private-sector debt: where cities, developers, companies, and individuals take on debt as part of the development process, whether during construction or through the assumption of a mortgage.

In each of these mechanisms, the local unit of government benefits from the enhanced revenues associated with new growth. But it also typically assumes the long-term liability for maintaining the new infrastructure. This exchange — a near-term cash advantage for a long-term financial obligation — is one element of a Ponzi scheme.

The other is the realization that the revenue collected does not come near to covering the costs of maintaining the infrastructure. In America, we have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates the cost at $5 trillion — but that's just for major infrastructure, not the minor streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that serve our homes."
Now this kind of thing can be found everywhere to one degree or another. Planners, obsessed with density, join with developers and politicians to skip over multiple generations of maturing in a single project. Even here in my small town in Central Minnesota, we have four story apartment buildings in neighborhoods surrounded by small single-family homes."So what’s the problem with this? Isn’t density good? How can there be a problem with letting developers meet the market demand? If the land costs so much, doesn’t this force developers to build at scale? This is how things are done, Chuck. It’s the market.
"Third, as the automobile become more ubiquitous, we completely transformed the way land was valued. Instead of a slow, incremental building of wealth from the center out, land become a somewhat random, hit-and-miss kind of prospect. Some sell for $2.5 million. Others wait and get nothing. A lot would depend on where the latest highway project was, what city would give the subsidy and where and – of course – who you knew and what you could get passed. The savvy developer today is less of a visionary designer or builder and more someone good at navigating bureaucracy.

This is why I’ve advocated for throwing out most of our zoning codes, but there is one simple provision I would keep: a height limitation. I would allow the next increment of development, but nothing more. Years ago I experimented writing a vertical building envelope based on the heights of adjacent buildings, but it doesn’t even need to be that complex. Something simple: The maximum building height shall be two stories or 1.5 times the average height of the directly adjacent buildings, whichever is greater. That would do the trick.

Of course, everyone who thinks their vacant lot is worth $2.5 million is going to be really angry when they discover that they can only get $75,000 for it. The fact that the higher value was a random lottery, not a real value, likely won’t be realized. Still, if we are going to turn our cities into Strong Towns, we need to get the incremental growth process back. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, a building height restriction is one simple, elegant way to help bring that about.

I like their 5-6 story hybrid approach very much

Quote
communist architecture
One of the ironies is that the style was created in capitalist countries for reasons of cost and efficiency directly post-WWII and through the height of the Cold War, and only spread to communist countries around the late 1960s - 1980s. "Not wasting taxpayers money" isn't just a communist value, after all, and the "giant concrete box with windows" wasn't really new: it was a growth out of Western modernist architecture of the 1930s.
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You should see our cheap houses that were rapidly constructed post-war in the direst of economy (POST WWII); they are long rows of semi-detached three story houses all manufactured in the same manner. They look quite nice nowadays, though I would not weep if they were demolished and replaced (quite bland really), but they were functional, could house up to two families, were cheap and did not create blindspots that were to become gang centres. Sweden and the Anglo world's academics nurtured their own very unique flavour of Marxism, so ironically the post-communist world sheltered behind its iron curtain is today less Marxist than ours.

mainiac

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9934 on: January 20, 2016, 02:28:25 pm »

You said things that were factually untrue
Where?

You said that dense building increased environmental impact and created funding problems.
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9935 on: January 20, 2016, 02:32:55 pm »

I don't care about anything else that's being said right now, but Brutalism is objectively the worst architectural style whether it's supposed to be progressive or totalitarian.
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mainiac

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9936 on: January 20, 2016, 02:33:05 pm »

So what?  That doesn't change the fact that a taller city is a richer city with a smaller environmental impact and less motivation to bulldoze it's history.
Because London was a living refutation of that "fact"

What lesson are we supposed to take away from London?  A city with a population density of 1500 people per square kilometer, lower then Los Angeles (2750 p/km^2), a city generally used as a synonym for the problems of sprawl?
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« Last Edit: February 10, 1988, 03:27:23 pm by UR MOM »
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Loud Whispers

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9937 on: January 20, 2016, 02:40:33 pm »

You said things that were factually untrue
Where?
You said that dense building increased environmental impact and created funding problems.
I said it leads to burgeoning populations and increased environmental impact, which it does, and nowhere did I say it created funding problems - I said infrastructure problems. If you read the guardian article as well, you'll note the funding problems are not for lack of money, but an issue of political divisions and boundaries (where does a city's jurisdiction end for example). I find we are quite in agreement, though aggressively so xD

What lesson are we supposed to take away from London?  A city with a population density of 1500 people per square kilometer, lower then Los Angeles (2750 p/km^2), a city generally used as a synonym for the problems of sprawl?
You guys might benefit from green belting and underground railways, you've certainly got loads of the money for it. I heard there was some shenanigens from automobile lobbies though :/
That and tower is not always power, 5-6 story hybrid approach is sexy as fuck

I don't care about anything else that's being said right now, but Brutalism is objectively the worst architectural style whether it's supposed to be progressive or totalitarian.
I think it would be awesome to have a brutalist fortress-burial pyramid on top of a hill overlooking everywhere, because that way the brutality makes sense

Flying Dice

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9938 on: January 20, 2016, 03:06:16 pm »

What lesson are we supposed to take away from London?  A city with a population density of 1500 people per square kilometer, lower then Los Angeles (2750 p/km^2), a city generally used as a synonym for the problems of sprawl?
You guys might benefit from green belting and underground railways, you've certainly got loads of the money for it. I heard there was some shenanigens from automobile lobbies though :/
There always is. We had effective and relatively clean public transit systems in most of our major cities back in the '30s, but the automobile industry bought them out and scrapped them while simultaneously pushing the image of automobile ownership as American and closely associated with freedom. Increasing urban congestion from skyrocketing car ownership killed what the illegal monopoly scheme didn't, and they've kept us on inefficient and dirty transit solutions ever since. That's why I want to see the American auto industry crumble instead of being propped up by the state: they're losing our jobs on their own with shitty products, and it's only fair turnaround at this point.
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Powder Miner

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9939 on: January 20, 2016, 04:44:00 pm »

Why would you EVER name your architectural style brutalism?
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Loud Whispers

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9940 on: January 20, 2016, 04:49:16 pm »

Why would you EVER name your architectural style brutalism?
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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9941 on: January 20, 2016, 05:56:30 pm »

What lesson are we supposed to take away from London?  A city with a population density of 1500 people per square kilometer, lower then Los Angeles (2750 p/km^2), a city generally used as a synonym for the problems of sprawl?
You guys might benefit from green belting and underground railways, you've certainly got loads of the money for it. I heard there was some shenanigens from automobile lobbies though :/
There always is. We had effective and relatively clean public transit systems in most of our major cities back in the '30s, but the automobile industry bought them out and scrapped them while simultaneously pushing the image of automobile ownership as American and closely associated with freedom. Increasing urban congestion from skyrocketing car ownership killed what the illegal monopoly scheme didn't, and they've kept us on inefficient and dirty transit solutions ever since. That's why I want to see the American auto industry crumble instead of being propped up by the state: they're losing our jobs on their own with shitty products, and it's only fair turnaround at this point.
That holding company of GM bought at most 10% of street car lines, and they were only able to buy them out and replace them with buses because streetcar lines were already going bankrupt. This was due to being required to maintain the pavement around their lines, thereby subsidizing the car-usage that was causing hour-long delays on streetcar lines, as cars could drive on streetcar tracks in a lot of places but no streetcar could divert from them, and these delays were driving people away from the streetcar into more cars on the road. You see the cycle starting here, yes?

The other cause of bankruptcy was fares were frozen at 5 cents, which was eaten away by inflation and the only way to raise these fares was with negotiation with the city. No elected official wanted to allow them to raise the fares or else their constituents would get in a tiff.

Streetcars lost to the car because of poor management and short-sightedness in negotiations, and in a very lopsided market competition against cars, stacked against streetcars due to aforementioned causes. Not because of a GM conspiracy. I wish they hadn't lost, but they did.
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mainiac

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9942 on: January 20, 2016, 06:08:24 pm »

Huh, my history teacher taught me that the streetcar conspiracy was a fact and I go on wikipedia and read it's an urban myth.  Hm... who to trust?
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« Last Edit: February 10, 1988, 03:27:23 pm by UR MOM »
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wierd

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Re: Ted Cruz's Adult Coloring Book and Chill 2016 Megathread
« Reply #9943 on: January 20, 2016, 06:31:18 pm »

who ever has the most viable and verifiable sources to back thier claim. Conspiracies really do happen in real like (LCD panel price fixing, ebook price fixing, etc...) so discrediting an argument on the basis of it requring a conspiracy is silliness. If there is verifiable evidence of conspiratorial malfeasance, and it outweighs the claim that it was just normal market forces, then that is the way to roll with it until the body of available evidence changes.

the converse is also true, if that is where the preponderance of evidence lies.

To me though, there is good argument in the notion that immediately after the second world war the US had a streamlined infrastructure to mass produce internal combustion vehicles, due to the necessity to mass produce them for the war effort just prior.  In the post-war economy, where the US was one of the few world nations to still have working infrastructure, it made absolute perfect sense to propose the idea that individuals and families should get consumer vehicles. As far as I know, that's really when the american love affair with the automobile came into being. (the 40s and 50s.)

That should not distract from the clear evidence of market contraction seen in the 20s and 30s for public transit. The US went from very fancy luxury mass transit offerings, to dingy run down mass transit during the depression. (Compare, AMTrack vs "silver zepher") and the afore mentioned loss in profitability of streetcar services from contractually fixed price schemes. See also, modern equivalent in NewYork with the fight between established cab companies and the likes of Uber and Lyft. Is there an Uber conspiracy against the cab companies? ;)

It need not be a black and white issue there.  The potential exists for natural market forces to have been eroding the profitability of quality mass transit, with a later upshot in opportunistic, and somewhat conspiratorial automotive capitalists seeking to topple the old status quo and corner the market lending the dieing industry a "helping hand" to get into the grave faster.

EG, it is possible for both to be true.
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