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Chinese Eco-Cities
opencity writes "The Guardian is reporting on a deal by Arups, a British consulting firm, to build four eco-cities in China. The cities are to be self-sufficient in energy, water and most food products, with the aim of zero emissions of greenhouse gases in transport systems. The press release hints at some of the technology."
After a few decades of careful and steady growth, they launch into outer space.
As China is one of the biggest polluters and is not bound by the Kyoto environmental treaty, having them take this step on their own initiative to create cleaner cities is certainly a welcome sight.
The cities are being developed by a British group, and I'm not sure how well that bodes for the final designs. Britain has some of the most "natural urban growth" cities in the Western world. It will be interesting to see how well they will be able to come up with something that is both ecologically friendly and unique and attractive.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I mean seriously, It really would be. I say this in a good way.
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
Recycled news is green too, I suppose ....
"Cats like plain crisps"
Every inhabitant will be given a number + letter designation such as THX 1138. George Lucas to sue in 3....2...
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
For more information check this link as a starting place.
libertarianswag.com
The supposed environmentalist "final solution" is to eliminate people
-1, Obvious Troll
How about self-sufficient governments in these cities? Tibet would be an ideal test site.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
A situation such as this is virtually impossible to achieve in a free market situation. Hence this is showing the benefits of a planned economy. China (economically) has come a long way in the past 50 years and will probably go much further as they gain more influence over their super power buddy the US.
Imagine the US if the govt didn't give businesses money for jobs and everything else?
"but only when a country is rich and the people have decent quality of life will it have the means to stop polluting."
Do you know any countries like this? Me neither. Great theory.
Will all the parts be made in China?
KeepTrackOfIt.com - Find the lowest gas prices in your area graphically
The ability to do these things is probably the strength of China. Because the economy is run by the government, it has the ability to pursue these large-scale and exciting projects such as sending a man to the moon or creating ecological cities.
Every country has its strengths and weaknesses. I actually think these "ecological cities" are a fantastic idea, and I am very happy that someone is modelling them for future modification/reference. On the other hand, China has its own weaknesses (poverty of so many & massive industrial pollution to name two big ones), but I don't think these weaknesses should detract from what is fundamentally a great potential achievement.
Unity in Diversity
I had these years ago in SimCity, 'bout time they caught up with me.
Do I smell another failed biodome-like experiment comming on, or what?
:-P
This sig rocks the casbah.
Well, this would turn out to be another Biodome if not for Dr. Mills patented cure-all energy tonic.
How timely!
Rather than trying to save energy, we should find ways to produce more energy cheaply without causing pollution. Expensive energy is the root cause of global poverty and reduced quality of life. Cover the deserts with solar panels.. make energy dirt cheap.
This is about both saving energy (by making more efficient use of it) and producing more energy (new energy generation for the city to make it self sufficient). Put most succinctly it is about sustainability. Efforts to "save" energy are not about stopping doing things, but about doing possibly even more than we do now, just doing it all more efficiently so that it doesn't use more energy.
To put it in terms of a rough economic analogy, it's like figuring out how to spend your money more wisely so you can get more out of it. Sure you could simply keep spending flagrantly with ever increasing expenses and just take out larger and larger loans, but eventually you have to sit down and work out what your current income level really is, and then see how you can spend that most efficiently. That doesn't mean you stop trying to get a raise, it just means you try and get "living within your means" as a basepoint.
Sustainability and efficiency do make sense, no matter what your standpoint. I think you're simply constructing a straw man with claims that "The supposed environmentalist "final solution" is to eliminate people" and generally implying that energy self sufficiency is about giving things up, rather than what it is really about: doing even more with what we already have.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Unfortunately, China is going to have to drastically limit the personal freedoms of its occupants to achieve these goals.
You are assuming energy consumption and "carbon emmission" is the only means of polluting.
... please do some research .. here's a link to get you started:
N VIRONMENT/EXTEEI/0,,contentMDK:20487946~menuPK:118 7800~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:408050,00 .html
You are much more likely to get clean water in a rich country than a poor one. The USA doesn't deplete its forests like Brazil or Liberia. Nor does the USA pollute her water sources as much as India, Mexico, or China. Fact is, when people are rich they are more capable of enforcing "Not In My Backyard". Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, Japan etc. do not pollute as much as China or India.
If you believe that poor countries have cleaner rivers and less deorestation and their people have better access to sanitation and clean water
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/E
When can we move in? And what flavor of Kool-aid will there be when we want to leave?
The scheme probably won't work if they let in too many jacka**es.
This is great news. Clearly, if China is actually designing eco friendly, self sufficient cities, then they have finished fixing all the other ones! No more poor, no more hunger! We can move on to worrying about the plants, cuz the people are taken care of!
China's last experiment with self-sufficiency was by all accounts a complete disaster, with upwards of 35 million dead. I wouldn't be surprised if this attempt results in another spectacular failure.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
- You have too many roads! Get rid of some to save money.
:P
- We need more Firemen.
When did we let Chinese government officials play SimCity 2000? I'm sure they cheated to get money
To be fair, the GP mentioned population growth. The fact is that having more than two kids produces far more pollution than almost anything else you can do in your lifetime.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
"one which is as close to being carbon neutral as possible within economic constraints." (emphasis mine)
Nothing new here. They're going to scavenge waste heat from their power plant, do some intelligent rain water capture, and put the sewage through a wetlands for treatment. Mix in a decent recycling program, modern building standards on par with ASHRAE 90.1 2004 or California's Title 24, and efficient buildings and you're there. Pull in Amory from the Rocky Mountain Institute if you want a touch of inspiration (Solar powered traffic lights? Communal electric cars? Sewage fermented into methane for generators?) and call it a day. Not entirely carbon neutral, but as carbon neutral as possible within 'economic constraints.'
Is Arups any relation to Ove Arup? I think they're the guys who once put in a 5 acre lake to provide evaporative cooling for an adjacent office building (along with synergistic landscape and park benefits yadda yad). Sigh. I wish I had that kind of economically 'constrained' budget on my next building.
The USA is well on it's way to this goal. It ain't the 50's anymore. The rivers no longer start on fire.
If we were all wondering if we'd be able to feed ourselves through the winter, no one would give a damn if the river water started on fire. A silent spring is the same as any other spring when you haven't eaten in 2 days.
Think about it for a minute and tell me you'd really care if an energy source polluted or not if it was the only thing you could afford to keep your family from freezing some cold January night.
Understanding this stuff is part of being a grown-up. Why not turn that corner right now?
I believe you mean totalitarian's dream, not leftist's dream. Most of us on the left wing are as frightened as you are of such a thing.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
You mean like most of the world's great cities? Here in NYC, for example, our government "plans in advance" where you can live and work (zoning laws), what we can do there (labor law and industry incentives), how we get to work (automobile restrictions and public transit), what products we can buy (consumer safety), where to buy them (business regulation), and where to dispose of the wrappers (litter law, trash pickup, mandatory recycling).
Of course, if you prefer to live in a libertarian shithole like Houston, Texas (no zoning laws, few social services, motor vehicle free-for-all, etc.), that's entirely up to you--and so much the better for the rest of us in livable environments, as we won't have to waste time talking down all the suckers at the teats of Ayn Rand.
Most of us on the left wing are as frightened as you are of such a thing.
Um, then why do you keep trying to tell people they can't
- drive the car,
- eat the food,
- smoke the cigarettes,
- buy the healthcare,
- hire the people,
- work for the wage,
- open the store,
- live with the neighbors,
- run the campaign ads,
- build the factory,
- go to the schools,
- support the charities,
- raise their children the way or
- spend their paychecks the way
they want?
Yeah, NYC sure is a paradise. I suppose you'll tell me it was better when Dinkins was mayor though.
The inhabitants of this marvelous new city will sure be happy to be relieved of the burden of making their own choices, not to mention the constant disappointment of finding out they made the "unenlightened" choice again.
So we have this right wing utopia where the government lies to us to scare people into going along with whatever retarded scheme they've come up with this week. That keep photographers away from military caskets coming back to the states so people remain "unenlightened" of the true cost of war. That sets up prisons in foreign countries so they can torture people without being bothered by that pesky Bill of Rights, and expounds that the best way to balance the budget and help the poor is to grant massive tax cuts to the wealthy.
After the last 5 years of failed, miserable, lying, incompetent Republican rule you have no right to criticize anyone else's government.
At least they're doing something.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
are they going to call the first one of these cities "arkology"?
Yeah, per capita if you count the peasants from the interior of China who are brought to the coast to create industrial products, but who are forbidden to remain there because the Chinese know that if the wealth generated were shared with all 1 billion Chinese no one would make much money.
They're enslaving their own people.
I agree it's tough to industrialize. And you're gonna pollute doing it. But to exclude large portions of the population from the spoils of it is a shame.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Try telling a New Yorker that he has no choice in where he lives, that it's mandated by the government.
He'll laugh in your face, dude.
resigned
Great comeback! You really destroyed my point.
Fact is, to the best of my knowledge in urban planning and design, libertarian "paradises" (like Houston in the field of real estate development) usually turn out to be anything but. Most people would rather live and work in a built environment with effective government--which isn't necessarily the same, mind you, as limited government.
Most of the planning in NYC has been done after the fact. For most of its history, it was a "libertarian shithole" much like Houston is now. In fact, that probably had a lot to do with its phenomenal growth.
Most planned cities, Brasilia, Washington DC, end up being little more than monuments to their creators. Anyone who has anything to do with these cities and has any sense lives in suburbs.
Successful cities create themselves. People move to be closer to some resource, such as a trade route or mine or otherwise strategic location. If there's time for some authority to do any planning at all, there's not really any strategic resource nearby. Most attempts to create successful, self-sustaining cities have been failures.
Look at the location planned here, for instance, "farmland", the absolute worst place to put a city unless you're a government looking to herd citizens into factory jobs.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Rad idea! Every new city from now on should be built super dense too so getting around is faster and easier, and built around pedestrian traffic, bikes, walking... not cars. If people get from place to place via their own power the world would be a lot less fat.
Thousands of years of human society, and finally someone decided to build a real, self sustaining city...
Do you, or do you not, agree that NYC was better when Dinkins was mayor?
It's (usually) illegal to live in a building not zoned for residential use, and to run a large business from, say, a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. I know people who've been arrested for living illegally in lofts (though many others manage to pull it off). These restrictions exist for a reason, and even if they're sometimes mistaken, on the whole they do a lot to improve the quality of life.
I keep mentioning Houston because it's probably the best example of the horrors of the libertarian approach to zoning. I mean, where would you rather live, New York City or Houston? For most people, I dare say, it's no contest.
NYC is the most-moved-to city in the world. It is admired by the greater part of humanity. I supposed you are going to tell us why it sucks?
The real question is why do YOU want to put words in peoples mouths?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That's a good point re: the failure of planned cities. It's best if government steps in only when the need arises, as it did in America in the beginning of the skyscraper era. Even before zoning, there were such regulations as health and tenement laws (and almost certainly fire code, but I'm not familiar with it) to govern construction in NYC. These did much in their day to improve conditions and to keep the city tolerable, if not exactly a vacation destination.
I hate to break it to you bud, but because of housing prices, more people are choosing Houston.
What the hell? Actually, I don't. I voted for Giuliani (twice) and I'm voting for Bloomberg (twice). That said, I'm happy to call myself a liberal, and I'd rather cut off my penis--or better yet, yours!--than vote for Bush. Thanks for asking.
I insist they stop trying to make my choices for me.
First, they should realize that that IS what they're doing.
Then they should realize that making people's choices for them is wrong.
Then they should stop.
Yeah, and housing prices in NYC are high for a reason: it's where people would rather live.
I just want to know whether you guys think it was better when Dinkins ran it.
I have a somewhat limited knowledge of NYC. But it's known as a liberal place. It was more liberal when Dinkins was mayor. Is it worse now that's it's a little less liberal, or is it better?
In Maoist China, Economy plans you!
(joke had to be made)
In my time studying economics, I had the privilege to learn from one of the biggest free-market advocates there is.
His name is Yuri Maltsev, former adviser to the Soviet government....on Gorbachev's reforms.
He would laugh at your new planned-market overlords. As do I.
Let's keep this simple, and say that if a planned economy had any merit whatsoever, most of Eastern Europe would still be collectively referred to as, "The Soviet Bloc" instead of "Applicants for membership in the EU".
It's why Taiwan is in such a hurry to become part of the mainland. It's also, coincidentally, why the Tibetans asked China to annex them....the planned economic model is just so darned efficient!
Yes, they should do what you think they should do.
Whilst the parent may have been written a little tongue in cheek, it isn't exactly a humourous notion to have Chinese-free government in Tibet. No number of green cities can replace a culture that is being destroyed - or for that matter, China's treatment of its own people.
It's like Naxi Germany building the autobahn and ensuring that there was more employment - let's not forget the other side of Communist China, just in the same way that we don't forget about the other side to Nazi Germany.
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
It's better now. However, even during the Dinkins administration--hell, maybe even throughout the worst of the '70s, judging by international immigration patterns--it was still preferable to places governed (and I use that word loosely) by laws lacking all those quality-of-life regulations you're so eager to dismiss as "leftist."
Does this remind anyone else of the facade of the Potemkin Villages? China may build several self sustaining communities, and they will undoubtedly be models for the rest of the world. However, I would be far more impressed with this effort if it were to be applied nationally. Otherwise, this is naught but an exercise in hypocrisy, and merely deflects attention from China's appallingly serious polluting.
Hey, shouldn't people be allowed to produce pollution they breathe themselves? Do you care if I smoke and ruin my own lungs, so long as you don't have to breathe it? That is, doesn't the offense of pollution, if offense there be, come from producing pollution that other people have to breathe?
In which case, the way to measure the obnoxiousness of pollution by country X is just to divide the pollution by the population of the rest of the world, everybody except those who live in X.
By this standard, the Chinese may not do so well, because the non-Chinese population of the world (everybody but the Chinese) is much smaller than the non-US (everybody but the Americans), non-Canadian, non-Australian, et cetera. That is, the amount of US pollution the average non-US citizen must breathe might be less than the amount of Chinese pollution the average non-Chinese citizen must breathe. Oh well.
But wasn't Dinkins more liberal than Giuliani? I don't understand. How could the city have gotten better with a less-liberal mayor?
I don't know much about NYC (or Houston), but I don't think either of them could properly be called a paradise.
I do know that choosing for yourself is better than having someone choose for you though. And that's what my posts in this topic are about.
Hey man, when you decry hollow, vicarious environmentalism I'm with you, but dissing arugula is out of line.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Neither Dinkins nor Giuilani are liberal in the sense that they'd do away with zoning, labor law, consumer safety regulations, and all the rest. It's pretty clear you don't know much about NYC or Houston, given that you seem to have the idea that the latter is a more pleasant place to live. Well, who knows? Maybe it is, for people who want the freedom to build skyscrapers that block light, who don't mind out-of-control noise and air pollution, who don't want their government telling them which restaurants serve clean food and which ones are too filthy to let stay open. But me, I'll take a NYC, London, or Tokyo.
Oops, I mean neither are conservative in the sense that they'd get rid of quality-of-life regulations. (In fact, by your definitions, you might consider Giuiliani the more liberal--he's the one who embarked on the quality-of-life crusade, with all the additional bureaucracy and enforcement to support it.)
This 'achievement' does not mean much to me. The communist government of China has repeatedly demonstrated their lack of respect for individual liberty. How much decision making power is really left to the individuals who must inhabit these cities? Can they leave anytime they want? Are they free to choose to buy a car that burns gasoline?
Ecology driven by the tip of a bayonet is just another form of oppression. I'd like to see the same thing happen in a country that allows freedom of expression and dissent.
Umm... Global and interdependent economy is a recent invention in human history. Humans have lived most of their lives living off of the land and their labor. You may have heard of a little thing called farming.
I know this goes against your globalist/economic paradise line of thinking (gee, how dare these radical commie scum try to thwart economic interdependence!), but this has nothing to do with politics. You are the one who is injecting politics in here. The Chinese are simply trying to make an investment in something that will hopefully reap a gain in effecincy by promoting self-sufficency of these people.
The only class warfare rhetoric, ironically, is yours.
Sure there's a lot of pretentious people who talk about environmental issues or sustainability to be trendy and don't know what they're talking about. Pick any subject and you can find such people. Sustainability does make a certain amount of sense, and just because there are some people who promote a rather hollow shell version of the concept doesn't mean there isn't a real concept with ood sense and reasoning behind it.
Anything "sustainable" (or "organic") is guaranteed to be expensive.
And that is usually the case for one of two reasons:
(1) To get a better profit margin selling mostly the same stuff to pretentious gits, or
(2) Because what had previously been pushed into negative externalities has been introduced into the transaction proper and has increased the cost by better accounting for the true cost of the item.
The first one is about labels and not about sustainability at all, the second is more what sustainability is all about: trying to allow the market to better account for the true costs of producing (and disposing) of things, rather than having the market ignore "hidden" costs that are increasingly coming back to bite us later.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
When you see "sustainable", you can think of this tagline: "Sustainable. By rich liberals, for rich liberals."
Clearly some new definition of "insightful" is being applied here... perhaps one where it means the same thing as "wrong" or "ill-reasoned" or "prone to political name-calling to discourage critical thought".
Sustainability, or something close to it, has been the norm for most of human existence. It's also easy to achieve today, and the simplest way is to just consume a whole lot less. I don't believe that using fewer consumer goods and less energy requires one to be rich. It would appear to be an option available to most people.
I would also like to point out that the survivalist movement is very big on sustainability - though perhaps not for for ecological reasons - and I doubt that anyone will be calling them "liberals" any time soon.
Curious. So the "rich liberals" want sustainable, but that's "expensive." Then the "rich conservatives" want cheap, throw-away shit? Sure they do, but not for themselves (except for maybe their wives). Here in New England, I know a lot of poor liberals who are serious about sustainable stuff, and really concerned about the effect of all that throw-away, cheap stuff made in near-slave conditions in China and sold by Wal-Mart, quite possibly with the end result that rich conservatives in China can afford themselves arcologies to move into when the oil dries up and their air gets even worse than at present, since they have abundant dirty coal to burn after that to keep making cheap, throw-away junk for both the poor conservative here and their own barely-paid labor force. Meanwhile I can show you locations in rural New England where our own rich conservatives are buying up real estate for their own retreat, pending our own economy's likely deep depression whenever the Chinese finally get tired of lending us back so much of the money we've spent on their disposable junk, and our markets collapse.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Organic food is more expensive because:
1. People pay for it due to pretention and irrational fear.
2. Pesticides, inorganic fertilizers, herbicides, hormone injections, genetic modification, and all the other non-organic techniques work. (So you create more food with the same amount of input. Costs are lower, prices can be lower, and food can be a lot more plentiful.)
Are you saying that basically every self-sustaining community is for rich people?
Wow, that kind of ignorance is pretty amazing. Better go check out the Radical Faeries, who have self-sustaining communities all around the world, from here in the mountains of Tennessee to Australia, that requires practically no money, and just a little knowledge. Many of them have no electricity, almost all do some farming, many ARE hippies, but they're quite educated, intelligent, and definitely very outgoing and happy people. It's a paradise for them and to many that come visit, but it's hardly a "posh playground" as you so foolishly put it.
Wikipedia has a fairly decent article about them, you should go look.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Would your answer change if I swore never to touch Medicare? Just curious.
Perhaps Chinese officials are thinking ahead. Earth's population is wasting valuable resouces, warming up it's atmosphere, and gradually destroying it's ozone layer.
China is now attempting to build self-sustaining cities that are able to survive even when Earth dies and it will die if we continue to destroy it.
\
It's probably impossible to get people to change their habits unless it's easy and obvious (like recycling...easy, just do it). Similarly, elevating energy costs to compel people to use it more wisely will only sort of work. People will ration it out as their finances dictate, but to the generation companies they'll just see lower usage (more capacity), but higher margins. There is no incentive for R&D in that sort of market. They'll still burn coal and gas or split atoms, whatever maximizes profit. That's where the pollution is, my incandescents alone pollute nothing.
His straw man argument is the extreme case of what some of the more rabid "pro-environment" crowd advocate. The more mainstream of that crowd is hung up on "back to nature" when in fact, common sense indicates that we built all this technology to ESCAPE nature. Stuff dies in nature for no good reason. It's not fair, it's not controllable, and it's dirty with lots of nasty bugs. Life expectancy in nature alone is poor, and a low carb versus low fat dieter would starve, as the reigning diet is "whatever I can catch, that doesn't catch me first, whether I feel sick or not". Nature sucks now that you get down to it, I like it only when viewed through a window.
There are some realities which those who wish to make environmentalism their cause must accept if they really wish to be part of a solution. We're going to keep our SUVs, air conditioning/heating habits or choice of transport. Don't insult it, that only alienates people and gets them mad, often turning off their receivers in the process. We don't care about the technology which makes them work. The natural solution here is to look for better ways of generating power, and more efficient equipment. There's got to be a better way, there's nothing fundamental about gas or uranium that make them great sources of energy. They were convenient, that's all.
Other countries don't get to decide the prices of China's goods. The PRC heavily regulates its commerce and fixes the price of its currency to make its products artificially competitive price-wise. Even if China magically became free-market capitalist overnight, the manufacturers decide prices they want to sell at. So, we can't exactly say "charge us more for goods so that you can have proper environmental regulation."
Of course, we could just send the PRC a giant check and tell them to pollute less. Even if we assume absolutely zero corruption (no winter dachas) and that 100% of the money actually went to environmental regulation, why should we subsidize China's practice of putting money before its ecology? They sacrifice their environment to glean a bit more $money out of foreign markets - and now we want to HELP them do that?
The point: China inflicts this upon itself, with the government putting its own nationalistic agenda ahead of the health of its people. It's not that we won't pay them enough; it's that their leadership has other priorities, such as amassing a giant army in peacetime, threatening Taiwan, and conducting cooperative military "exercises" with Russia.
No amount of money would fix this, nor should we fund environmental programs that China should be funding itself like every other modern nation on the planet.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Sustainable development is about much more than just organic foods. It's about whether you want your children to have a better or worse life than you have. Period.
We are slowly waking to the reality that our entire economy, and its metrics of success, are based on a lie of perpetual growth. In order for us to have a better standard of living, more things, more energy, less pollution controls, our children must have a worse standard of living, less things, less energy, more pollution controls.
If they don't want to have worse standards of living, our children had better get to work coming up with miraculous technological solutions to the problems we are passing on to them. And with each generation, the resources get fewer and the problems get bigger. Eventually, there will be a crunch, unless we act to prevent it.
If we remain on the point of the cost/benefit curve that promotes maximum profits, we hasten the depletion of easily available natural resources and do long term damage to the prospects of future generations obtaining any natural resources at all.
So, yes, it is more expensive. Or it seems that way, at least. In reality, the economics of sustainable development are more about making sense of resource usage over large time scales instead of quarterly profits. Right now, many of the costs of production are not accurately reflected in the price of things. Unfortunately the way we produce many things today won't make economic sense even 20 years from now. We can either bury our heads in the sand and cry "It's more expensive," or we can make a wise investment in conserving resources today for the "poor people" of tomorrow.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Poorer nations are installing solar PV and wind powered generators or "sustainable" energy devices, because most of the traditional exisiting "traditional" centralized grid tech is just WAY too expensive, plus getting access to and paying for fuel. It's *cheaper* for them to have a lot more de centralized points of production using alternative electrical generating technology than a few huge powerplants and then run powerlines everywhere. In India, they have the largest installed base of methane digesters to provide useful quantities of burnable gas, because it's cheaper over all to do it that way. There's only a few hundred in the US, but tens of thousands or more in India. that's just an example, there are numerous others. Wireless tech is being adopted faster in the poorer nations because it's cheaper/faster to deploy than hard wired now. Poorer nations lead the world in adoption of very high mileage per gallon vehicles, and pure electric, because it's just cheaper to buy them and use them. Poorer nations are adopting advanced agronomy tech that doesn't require as much heavy equipment and chemicals as western agricultural techniques because it's cheaper to do so.
And etc.
This process is obviously ongoing and not near finished, not even close, but the trends are very easy to see and research. They are trying to skip a generation of "almost works cheaply but fails it" western tech, they are at least smart enough to see what works and what doesn't, to be able to learn from others successes and failures, given they have very little cash to work with.
I think you are at least a decade or more behind the times in your energy news reading. There's only a couple of western nations that are pushing the alternatives as strong as the second and third world poorer nations are,(Germany is an example there, somewhat) and the US is down the list, not near the top, not yet anyway. It could be but it would take a few more major energy hits to push it over the top. Now if your rant is meant only for people inside the US, yes, I would agree. Talk is cheap. Although,in my personal circle of friends,use of solar, at least in a useable backup size is pretty common,but as the population goes, no it is not. We think ya'all who haven't got any are sorta sdilly, but oh well. a lot of people were early adopters of PCs, too, they got the benefits, late adopters suffered in ignornace and had no access. To each their own.
This is changing though now that solar tech in particular is good for two decades or more of decent production,is very well built, choices are there, and is increasingly being installed and included in the normal 20 year home note. In fact, the current market is saturated with orders and there's a big demand for panels. The newer polymer tech coming out will drastcially reduce prices,so I expect within five years or so you'll start to see it in every subdivision. Remember when satellite TV first started, or cable television? It took one install in a neighborhood, then within a year or so most all folks had it who were going to get it, it was that quickly adopted, from zero to a real decent market. things can change fast. remember the OPEC embargo and what happened with the japanese car market in the US? FAST is the keyword here. That's what this sort of tech requires, jim bob talking to bubba about his new toy that fixes a major problem. Hmm, very similar to home computers. Very very slow to start out, then wham, mid 90s it took off, now they are almost throw away disposable tech. Most households and almost all business have them now. One decade to go from expensive and medium rare to more common than not.
"Sustainable" tech will get there, and it won't be just the brie and champers crowd using it, because in the long run it's just cheaper and better for most useages. Stufff that uses less power but is better to use will become common, along with personal energy production. It just *will*, there's no ifs about it, inevitable now. Our society was only able to develop that "luxury
==
There's got to be a better way
==
Yes there is, but it's a bitter pill to swallow: reduce energy demand via reducing global population radically. We are a species that has completely overpopulated the planet and we fail to recognize this. Because we have the crutch of technology to support us, we think the laws of nature don't apply to us anymore. They do. Once our energy supply runs out or fouls the planet enough, we'll be out of luck just as much as any animal has been out of luck when it becomes a victim of its own evolutionary success and outstrips its local environment.
You can't say that New York was completely unplanned.
n el.html
a nhattan)
The grid system of Manhattan was a deliberate attempt to avoid the crazy street layouts of Europe.
Central Park was created before the proper city extended that far north. http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1286521
Planning for New York's City Water Tunnel #3 started in 1954, construction began in the 1970s, and the current completion date is 2020.http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/news/3rdtun
and there are places like the Five Points that have been wiped out, unplanned districts can become slums.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Points_(M
Planned cities can become failures as well, http://imdb.com/title/tt0317248/
but you should moderate your opinion.
SOYLENT GREEN?
US is not bounded by Kyoto either. 'Our own plan' is just a load of crap shit. China has 4-5 times the populations of US. Most of them used something called bicycle instead of SUV.
Neither Dinkins nor Giuilani are liberal
Oops, I mean neither are conservative
Sounds like you're ready for the quiz also.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
While at a first look, this appears like a real innovation in China's ecological policy, it might not be as wonderful as it seems. The reason is economy of scale. A community that is basically self sufficient won't be as efficient at producing anything. It doesn't reap gains from specialization or the specialization of its neighbors. The results are both economically and ecologically nonoptimal. More raw materials will be wasted as smaller scale, less specific machines are used to meet the entire spectrum of community needs. increased wasted inputs = increased pollution output.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
The supposed environmentalist "final solution" is to eliminate people
Firstly, this is the perfect way to protect the environment. It's kinda like protecting a PC from internet hackers and virii (not viruses, n00bs) by unplugging it and hiding it in a bunker somewhere. Sure, it's pretty trollish, but it IS a solution, and it certainly is final.
backslashdot had a lot of good points -
Expensive energy is the root cause of global poverty
Well, it is. How much food do you think Africa would be able to grow if they had infinite energy to fertizlize and cultivate their soil? How much would goods cost if the energy needed to ship them was negligible? If you count the costs of pollution control in with the cost of power, having the cheapest power possible maces environmental sense, too.
only when a country is rich and the people have decent quality of life will it have the means to stop polluting
Of course. The easiest and cheapest way to make electricity - something any nation needs if it wants to creep its way out of poverty - is to burn coal (or anything, really) - and environmental regulations be damned. Saving the environment costs MONEY - making/using cleaner coal, building more efficient plants, using solar/nuclear/etc. And if protecting the environment costs money how is any poor nation supposed to have a clean environment?
Unless, of course, you do like your world starving and poor while you sit comfortably in front of a computer demonizing the power used by said computer, running your mouth on slashdot.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Thanks, but hasn't everyone on the internet seen that by now? :-)
I like these better:
What sort of Hipster are you? -- The Artiste
What kind of postmodernist are you!? -- The Theory Slut
Is china actually that bad of a polluter? Let's talk per capita.
Screw "per capita". When pollution from china floats across the Pacific Ocean and poisons my water supply here in California, no amount of BS rationalizing is going to fix it.
(link)
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
You, not he, is confused, sir.
Y'see, everything is economics. An empty stomach trumps any ideology. Namely, if you have a subsistence economy so poor that it can barely feed itself, there will be very little "human rights." People will be concerned about feeding themselves first and foremost, not about protecting their unalienable rights.
So, human rights stems directly from economics.
Autonomy is also a matter of ecoonomics. How is one to be a sovereign nation if you exist only because of foreign financial backing? What if some nation planted a flag in your back yard? Without an economy, how would you resist? With what army? For what reason?
Economics always comes first. Worrying about rights is a luxury affordable only by countries who can feed and protect their citizens. Until then, you have no autonomy or human rights.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Perhaps you are intentionally being glib in your reply, but it still leaves the impression that you are missing the point, or rather two very big points (and since you were modded "insightful" I'll assume that even if you *were* being intentionally glib there are those who've read your post and agree with your remarks as if they were relevant) --
1) China is developing at a rapid pace -- if things continue on the present course they'll be the worlds biggest eco-disaster no matter what scale you measure by... probably in as little as a generation or two.
2) If everyone in the States multiplied until there were more than a billion citizens, and if the lifestyles remained as they are now, then the States would be an even bigger eco-disaster than China might ever hope to be.
The bottom line, is this is an interesting development from the China, and hopefully it's a move of substance more than a political show.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
People who think that the words "liberal" or "conservative" mean anything any more have a child's view of politics. You can't reduce political philsophy down to a boolean value.
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
You mean like most of the world's great cities? Here in NYC, for example, our government "plans in advance" where you can live and work (zoning laws)
That's not where YOU can work. It's where PEOPLE can work. In China you are talking about the kind of planning where you WILL have a baby, try until it's male, and THAT BABY is garbage collector #47 for Red Zone 4 when the old one kicks the bucket.
, what we can do there (labor law and industry incentives)
You are confusing what you are allowed to do with what you are not allowed to do. Again the chinese model is going to dictate exactly what work will be done. Industry incentives are asking businesses to do what is desired, but are not mandates.
, how we get to work (automobile restrictions and public transit)
Restrictions are not the same as bans... catch a theme developing here?
Can any of the occupants of these new cities just go and buy an old classic sports car for the hell of it they drive on Sundays?
, what products we can buy (consumer safety)
Again, dictating some products you can't buy, not providing the full list of what you MAY buy.
, where to buy them (business regulation)
In NYC I imagine you can reach Amazon.
, and where to dispose of the wrappers (litter law, trash pickup, mandatory recycling).
Yeah, like a law has really stopped people in the past from doing things they found convenient. Wake me when you get drug to a prison camp for dropping a candy wrapper on the streets.
Your description might somewhat fit Disney World but certainly does not in any way render NYC equivalent to what a Chinese eco-city will most likely be like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wow. So many people are bashing China in this thread. And they make broad generalizations about their government and history while detracting from the seriousness of their own countries problems. How about anytime someone bash China, also tell us how long you've lived in China, studied China, and talked with Chinese citizens? Maybe that should be a requirement when talking about any subject, so we will know exactly when someone is talking out of their ass, as if it weren't apparent already...
If the motivation for sustainability comes from an external source to the people living in the sustainable environment (namely the government), then that is what many see as extreme leftism at work.
If the motivation comes from the members living within the sustainable lifestyle (a commune or survivalist outpost as you noted) then it based on individualism.
I have real trouble believing that in China, these cities are going to be populated by people that all want to live there. As do others, thus proclaiming this a leftist dream.
If the people inside the Biodome project had been forced to live there it would have caused quite an outcry. So why not have an outcry when a whole city full of people are forced to be test subjects?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Things that are "interesting," (and "provocative," in the political troll subculture), are often championed by trolls who claim to know more than everyone else. They spout off like enlightened, forward-thinking people upon whom the rest of the common slashbots relies for knowledge and sophistication.
In other words, they're trolls. But we're all used to troll sanctimony, right? Here's the part that really gets under my skin.
Any "hyperlinks" (or "links") are guaranteed to be links to goatse. In other words, poor slashbots simply can't afford to click on them. While rich, sophisticated trolls wallow in their somethingawful.com, the poor rabble that they claim to "care about" will still be clicking on lemonparty.com and hick.org. (Or tubgirl.com, seeing as these people will be living in China.) "Humor" won't help those poor people one iota because their eyeballs will be fried by it. The rest of the subhumans will still be ignorantly destroying the slashdot as before. When you see "trolls," you can think of this tagline: "Trolling. By creepy losers, for creepy losers."
Even reading the post makes it seem like these "paragraphs" are going to be nothing more than deviant giggles for jaded readers of "adequacy.org". When the denizens of these not-quite-quaint sad, pathetic subcultures are toasting each other with glasses of "certified 100% organic" urine, will they also be asking themselves, "I wonder what the poor slobs who replied to our troll posts are doing?" Despite their tired rhetoric, I would have to say, "hell, no."
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
I guess the heavily industrialised ways in which we're doing things now are guaranteed not to be expensive, right? Is that what you're implying?
Everything we do today is about growth, by which we measure economic strength against all better judgement. In modern times, growth is based on the abundance of cheap energy and cheap materials, all of which will run out because we can't have sustainable growth (and, because of peaks in the production of oil and natural gas, we'll feel this sooner rather than later). The ballooning costs that come with resource depletion and scarcity are going to wipe out any disadvantage you would care to spout about sustainability.
If you want to talk about "hypocrisy", try reading that sentence in your post about "class-warfare rhetoric". In a way, you're a "rich liberal" as well, by the very premise that you're here. The difference is that some of us really are wondering about the poor people, instead of about the rich.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
I figured it was because NYC is such a massive city and has so much stuff going on. Isn't it also known as the financial capital of the world? Not because of zoning laws... would you care to explain what's so bad about houston?
Personally, I've lived in NYC my whole life (except a year when I lived in AZ.) If I had to choose, I'd probably choose Houston. It's a good sized city, so it won't be hard finding a lot of thing's I've gotten used to (except of course, pizza, and going to B&H for camera gear.) The roads are 100x better, the houses in the suburbs are laid out much nicer, it's warmer, cheaper cost of living.
Well you can laugh because I know something about sustainability and I am not left wing. I can grow TONNES of organic delicious gormet food and it normally sells wholesale for over $12 bux per kilo. So - maybe I'll just get rich eh?
To a large degree it is all about knowledge and engineering.
BTW - I could NEVER sell any of this stuff in China for a price like that because they've known these technologies for over 1000 years.
Often people pay dearly for food because they are either lazy or simply have no idea of the real costs of production. A sack of dried beans for instance costs less than 20 cents per pound. Dried peas are even cheaper. So for about $10 bux I can pretty much fill a 45 gallon drum with beans with pork. If you buy this at the supermarket I suspect $10 bux might get you a case.
Of course beans with pork are not gormet. However if you live in a poor 3rd world country then maybe beans with pork will have you dancing in the streets being it is the musical food.
I think there is a lot we in the western world can learn. We have been very wasteful of our natural resources. I suspect this will hit you right between the eyes this winter and the next when you look at your gas heating bills and wonder why the people who built your house designed it to exclude all free energy and instead replaced it with inefficent non-renewable sources (such as your furnace) where you have to buy the fuel month after month after month.
Check out the Solar Decathalon. The work presented there is very exciting.
Then look around you and try to figure out if there is anything in your house that doesn't have to be torn apart to be rebuilt.
In this city if I go to the new construction areas I see the contractors have not learned much in the last 50 years. They still think houses need furnaces for instance. I know for a fact they do not.
(Yes) It's a pleasure to read these threads, lots of good dialogue including your post.
*thinks /. died and went to heaven* lol ;)
(But) I would just like to point out that when actually taking into account the deficiencies of pollution per GDP as you do in your post then it becomes a very good and useful measure - quite the opposite of lousy. Any measure has it's peculiar deficiencies but that does not neccessarily (and absolutely not in this case) invalidate everything it can show while still taking into account the deficiencies of course.
(No) However I disagree with your two last sentences. How do you support your statement that the US forces other countries to consume? It seems like totally voluntary individual choices within populations to me (even in China), perhaps not smart or wise or intelligent but absolutely voluntary unless one believes in sheeple (tempting, I know) and even then would it actually be fair to blame others than the sheeple themselves?
On the World Bank/IMF you make me remember some questions that were recently put to Paul Wolfowitz on this and I'll just give the gist of the relevant information and answers as he did:
- although the US is the major shareholder and holding votes is more or less proportional to the amount of money contributed to the World Bank by the member nation, still decisions are made by unanimity (just like in NATO, i.e. lots of discussion needed)
- nations are completely free to not seek help from the World Bank and IMF if they so wish. Anyone who do seek assistance naturally has to comply with the agreed conditions for recieving it
- on the few occasions that the US has had an opposing view on a matter they have always (according to Wolfowitz) been "defeated" and had to compromise their stand towards the consensus of the rest of the voting members (portrayed in a positive way by Wolfowitz)
He also said some sensible stuff about privatizing and when it was or was not an appropriate measure but I can't remember the statements precisely enough to include them.
About WTO and to a lesser extent trade agreements it is by its nature a politicized economical battleground but with the addition of trying to "umpire the fight" and that is exactly what it should be: economical diplomacy and brinkmanship. Almost all socalled third world countries have realized this years ago but keep getting interrupted by "friends" who would rather throw rocks at them and the rest discussing/manouvering inside.
Multinational corporations and conglomerates are not "USian" and the US is far from the only who support them, almost every country do so to their best ability (present "winners"; China, India - present "losers"; Argentina, Venezuela - absolute "jumbo dumbo"; North Korea) while all sides also (of course) try to squeeze as much out of them as they can - it becomes an economical battle with many different fronts and perspectives and overall this actually is to everyones benefit (but all the "pendulums" keep swinging back and forwards, it is obvious that the complexity of it all escapes a lot of people).
I bet that if one took a poll of the entire world one would discover that a huge amount of people and in all likelyhood a solid majority does not revile US consumption but rather wishes they had the same level themselves. The good news is that it is not an impossibility to achieve this and even to do so in a environmentally sustainable manner. Sure, not right now, but gradually over time because:
- macroeconomics and trade is not a zero sum game but rather a win-win situation literally growing material wealth and higher living standards
- knowledge and technology is not static but accelerating at least exponentially (neither consumption or pollution are anywhere close to such acceleration)
- energy efficiency and "alternative" energy sources are gaining in momentum, in the quality of the solutions, as well as in the available quantity of different solutions (in relation to th
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
Parent requires that you take a big-picture view of recent chinese activities, especially the political implications: new space race. man on the moon a year before the US returns, an industrial and economic agenda rivaling the equivalent american -- of course theyre trying to impress. potemkin villages in old world russia served the same purpose - convincing europe through a facade that it was full of happy people and progress. the chinese villages are a PILOT, an experiment, of course; however, they're ultimately more of a political statement than a scientific/ecological one. parent was pointing out (very subtly and obviously missed by other repliers) that china is likely trying to garner postive PR
The Britsh/Americans must have killed much more than 35 million natives in the Americas
Since you're so big on numbers, provide a source for your wn outrageous fibs first please.
I insist they stop trying to make my choices for me.
As opposed to the conservatives? They tell you who you can marry, what you can smoke, as well as being involved in every single thing you list as well.
Learn to love Alaska
Yeah, exactly... housing's expensive because this a big city with a lot of stuff going on, and the reason for that is just the right rules and regulations so we can all get along with one another and make all that stuff go on. That includes zoning.
Houston sucks because the air quality's worse, transportation is worse, sprawl is much, much worse--these first three due to lack of zoning laws--architecture and art's worse, local media's worse, music's worse, everything just sucks from a certain perspective. You get long sightlines, I suppose, but what's the point you can barely see five yards through all the smog? Crimson sunsets only get you so far. You mention the roads being better, but why bother driving when in NYC you can just walk downstairs to get whatever you need? I don't see it. I mean, there's no accounting for taste, but the housing market agrees that NYC's the more desirable good.
No, you can worry about self-contained bio-spheres AFTER getting the ships out of the planet's atmosphere. The problem of getting cargo into outer space is the number one issue at this point in time. A bio-sphere isn't too hard to designed and built by college students. (Hydroponic farms anyone? Water for the plants and astronauts, plants will grow all necessary food, carbon dioxide is recycled through the plants and back into oxygen. Solar power for electronic devices. You'd have to be a vegetarian but thats a small price to pay to be a space pioneer.)
> aim of zero emissions of greenhouse gases in transport systems
So it's forbidden to fart?
It all depends on who you hire to design and build your house. The contractor who remodeled my parent's home was a lazy bastard. The only thing I'm satisfied with is the networking and telephony system - and that's because I put it in myself. Unfortunately, now that I need to make modifications, everything's been sealed up - no conduit was run between floors, there are no access panels for junctions, crap that was miswired is buried god knows where. I'm VERY certain that the electrical plans and what actually went into the walls are NOTHING alike.
Of course, I was only screaming about needing a mains junction in both the attic and the garage, for solar power and a garage workshop. What did I get? A 220 socket in the garage (which was subsequently blocked up by cabinetry), and NOTHING in the attic. Let's not even get into the roof...
Mark my words, watch your contractors like a hawk. It turned out the general contractor was paying his buddy $3k to babysit the jobsite, and all he did was make runs to the local Home Depot to pick up stuff the subcontractors ran short of.
The above just demonstrates that you are completely clueless about what most people of the left want. Next time, why don't you try asking people what they thing about those issues instead of putting words in peoples mouths and jump to unjustified conclusions? Or would that make you seem too reasonable?
Imagine you were trying to make the world less messy by cleaning your own house. Which is the best strategy?
1: Picking up all of the junk lying around, do a decent cleaning, and fix up some of the more obvious broken items
2: Build the world's cleanest bathroom and leave the rest of your house wallowing in filth?
These "eco-cities" are a gimmick. The best thing China can do its tackle the biggest messes with the easiest clean-up costs (ie, cost/benefit), not try to maximize one tiny little subset and screw the rest.
"production efficiency". Producers are a small fraction of CO2 emissions.
What you are really comparing are automobile habits, home heating habits (and therefore climate), and total consumption and production.
How to save yourself from heaps of disgrace and derision and in addition make Slashdot a better place.
:)
I'm not doing this to pick on you but one has to have some sort of lower limit and try to help those that fail miserably if one wants less "noise".
Please go understand Godwin's Law (and stop intentionally invoking it too please, especially when doing so erroneously). After realizing that Godwin's law is not about trying to erase any discussion involving totalitarian regimes and comparing them, especially when on topic, try to find the name Hitler in the post you replied to and compare that to your reply and the use of Hitler by you. At any point if you don't get it then take a break before trying again or feel free to ask people around you for help.
Depending on how your post is interpreted you might want to look up what is called the strawman fallacy. If you honestly did not intend to commit such a fallacy then train on your written communication skills or proofreading depending on what you realize you did wrong (ask yourself: did you write an instance of "bad" when you meant "good" by mistake or do you not understand what is wrong?). In addition please learn about internal logical consistency and apply it to your future posts.
If any of this doesn't give you at least one flash of insight then please freshen up on your reading comprehension because you simply didn't understand what you yourself wrote (and the ambiguity of it) or what the post you replied to said.
If you after all this you still have problems understanding the mistakes you made then your problem might be a lack of historical and political knowledge, Wikipedia might suffice for your needs if you read enough.
Hell, even reading every single post in the entire thread might clue you in, look up historical references and things you've never heard of before (the parent post is conceptually connected to at least one of the earlier subthreads).
Best of luck and don't get sad, this is all an opportunity for your selfimprovement
The problem with environmental pollution is that it generally doesn't care about borders. In the Netherlands, we can't drink the water from our rivers mostly because of what other countries dump in them. The fish in Scandinavian lakes die mostly because of pollution produced in other countries. Global warming affects everyone; if global warming is indeed greatly impacted by human activity, it's probably fair to say that the Mexicans get bigger tornadoes and the Romanians get bigger floods largely because of the USA.
Of course, with a country as large as China, a lot of the pollution they generate will affect only people in China. But even then, these people are not necessarily the people who generate the pollution. Is it the factory worker's fault that the emissions from the factory kill his lungs? The housewife's fault that the emissions from the cars on the street kill her lungs? The electricity users' fault that the power plant runs on coal, rather than a more environmentally friendly fuel?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
``Trying to install Linux on a laptop with nocdrom or Ethernet but DLINK usb wi-fi. I NEED HELP!''
You still need that help? Does the machine have an OS that can access the Net? Is the NIC supported under Linux? Any other things I should know?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The problem is that it's incredibly hard to get people to give up on cars. In the Netherlands, fuel costs something like $6/gallon, making alternatives way cheaper, and traffic jams can easily turn a 20 minute drive into an exercise that lasts over an hour. On top of that, driving is probably one of the least safe ways of transportation.
Public transport can get you to many places quickly and easily. There are bike roads virtually everywhere, making cycling efficient and safe.
Well, guess what? People still drive to work by car, all the while complaining that driving is so expensive and that the government should do something about traffic jams.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
What most people on the left want? I don't know what whoever you replied to think about that but from what I can see of what the left actually do in my own country they want a bigger state, a bigger state, a bigger state, and then yet again a bigger state to solve all their problems (and incidentally crush any individuality; but of course they don't want that, they just don't see the obvious connection or that it happened that way in every single other country that went in that direction).
Of course the most active on the left never would see it that way as they would place themselves and their own opinions on top.
The way most social democrats, "liberals", socialists, leftists and communists act and think could easily be classbook examples of hypocrisy. Not everyone of course but a frightening percentage, and what's even more scary is that most of them genuinly believe they are helping people. That notion of "doing good" is one of the reasons totalitarian socialist regimes outlast other totalitarian regimes by an order of magnitude: people actually think they're supporting something good! And if it doesn't work it is so easy to say it wasn't actually true communism, or socialism, or social democracy... talk about inviting, no, begging for, serious levels of abuse of power.
It's hard to conceive of something more naive.
Perhaps some of them should realize that everyone else than "them" actually aren't fascists? That many of those they proclaim as their enemies actually aspire to having more individual freedom? More transparancy into the inner workings of the state? Less interference from the state in at least private matters? Like what hospital they use, which doctor, what school they want their children to go to, how to use their paycheck, who to employ... oops I guess I find myself pretty much repeating a previous post here - wonder why?
So save your pretty words of the intentions of "the left" as those very intentions always lead into a quagmire as long as you base it on a powerful superstructure of a state rather than the inherent rights of the individual against the state and against your concepts of what is good for others.
What a great social experiment! Put all your troublesome individuals and families in one "city" and if something starts getting out of hand you can threaten to close off the city unless the rest of the populace keeps everyone else in line.
Hmmmm. In Japanese feudal society, the Daimiyo's serfs were clustered in families of five. If a member of one family offended the Daimiyo, all five families were executed, so each family member watched everyone else very carefully. The Japanese still have a culture of popular co-operation and responsibility to the population, and this is thought to be one of the originating cultural artifacts.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
The solution for depletion of natural resources is to manipulate genes and change the human body to become smaller.
Oh he'll make friends all right, plenty of people around here actually despise the continued and usually totally off topic whining about the dethroning of a dictator. They usually just don't bother informing the whiners about it (just like me).
For fucks sake the grandparent whiner even took the name of HangingChad. Even Bill Clinton has gone public on the need for democrats (as I guess it's fair to suppose HangingChad is) to stop the goddammned whining! (And yes he used the word whining). Jeez you guys really are your own worst enemies lol
So at least keep it to the Politics section allright? (And do yourself a favour and grow up too, after all "threathening" people with "you wont make friends" isn't all that adult is it?).
Most first world countries have negative native population growth, despite the government encouraging the opposite. The problem is only getting worse.
The US is doing the best (our native growth is about zero), but countries like Japan, "population decline" is becoming a big political issue. It is starting in Europe, too.
In fifty years, no one will be talking about "overpopulation" anymore.
Then there are the smart ones that are being proactive in reducing energy consumption. I don't have the resources to be as smart as possible here, but I think I'm off to a good start with CFL bulbs and I turn them off as much as possible. I'm replacing older appliances with more energy efficient ones (get a front load washer when you're in the market, fellow Americans). I have been able to put off getting an AC unit for the last seven years and counting. We put on clothes during the winter. We walk or ride bikes for short trips. Our car isn't the most efficient, but not as bad as an SUV, and I carpool. If I had the money, I'd be going for the solar roof tiles and a possibly a wind turbine, solar water heating, geothermal climate control, and an efficient sub-compact car for the shorter trips. I wouldn't say I'm radical environmentalist by any means. I sure like spending less money. Hey, do you think overclocking my computer would be a good supplement to my heater during the winter?
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Seems to me that the Chinese government is taking the whole peak oil thing pretty seriously.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Amen to *that*.
Houston, Texas an example of libertarianism (i.e. free will)? You've got to be kidding. Please explain, rather than simply imply, how Houston, Texas qualifies as a libertarian society.
You don't know what libertarianism is, do you? Here's a clue: It doesn't exist anywhere in the world today. At all.
I thought this whole planet IS a bio-dome of sorts, we just fucked it up and need to make mini bio domes to manage our crap resources.
Even worse: pauly shore is still in our global bio-dome!
Are you saying that basically every self-sustaining community is for rich people?
... except that their lifestyle was basically a parasite on the ass of the culture they eschew. For example: they would go take the waste grease from fast food restaurants to power their "eco friendly" cars. Did anyone not realize that such a scheme depended on "Big Food" to function? Later, these same people went dumpster diving. Wow, what an awesome sustainable lifestyle! I wanted to gag.
Of course not! I cannot cover every facet of everything in a single post, can I? I was trying to make a single point: "sustainable" often means "expensive", which contradicts the "pro-poor-people" message that the champions of "sustainable" simultaneously spout.
I saw that episode of Morgan Spurlock's deceitful TV propganda "30 days" in which the two NYC folks visit the "sustanable community". They lived like a primitive tribe (with solar panels)
but it's hardly a "posh playground" as you so foolishly put it.
Perhaps because I wasn't describing the Radical Faeries. There are many, many leftists who spout off all sorts of stupid rhetoric about "the poor" who are also filthy, fucking, stinking rich (Ted Kenendy, John Kerry, George Soros, Barbara Streisand, Michael Moore, the list goes on and on). Why won't you put blame where it is due? Why can't you realize that hypocrisy exists on the "right" *and* on the the "left"?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
So, yes, it is more expensive. Or it seems that way, at least.
Which is it? You can't have it both ways.
We can either bury our heads in the sand and cry "It's more expensive," or we can make a wise investment in conserving resources today for the "poor people" of tomorrow.
Perhaps you can make that choice because your rich enough for "sustanable options" to be in your budget. How many poor people do you see driving hybrid cars? Hybrid cars are expensive.
I'm not burying my head in the sand at all (that actually a job for leftists regarding Shari'a and the new Caliphate). I'm stating an economic fact. Poor people have fewer options they can afford. "Sustainable" options are too expensive for them. Only the rich can choose to be "sustainable". I know you feel this is a moral issue, so you're going to be all "But we *have* to do *SOMETHING*!!!" about it, but that doesn't change the fact that poor people can't afford it.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Because people in the US don't understand the slightest bit about the Tibet situation. Almost no one here has been to Tibet, none of the people who haven't have ever talked to a real Tibetan, they've only talked to (at best) ex-pat Tibetans who are angry about the situation.
Pick any major city in the world with large US ex-pat populations, and ask those people what they think about the situation in the US. They are people who are not living here for reasons they consider very valid, and they will make a very good case for them. Its no different with the ex-pats from Tibet.
What the Chinese did may be wrong, depending on how much of the pro-Tibet propoganda you believe (there are pleanty of *unbiased* experts who believe the absorbtion of Tibet into China probably *saved* their culture!), the fact of the matter is China has done a huge amount of work in the last 20 years to preserve their cultures, to protect the different racial groups, and to expand the quality of live for the entire country. They have a middle class that is bigger than the US, their "poor" tend to live in FAR better conditions than the poor in the US (since the majority of their "poor" live in agrarian communities).
If you haven't been to China and seen these things first hand... if you haven't talked to the people who have chosen to stay there... and if you haven't really compared what their government has been known to do to what ours has, you're really not qualified to make such a pseudo-intellectual statement on Chinese affairs.
Curious. So the "rich liberals" want sustainable, but that's "expensive."
You're using your sarcasm quotes far too liberally (pun un-intended). There are plenty of rich liberals (I know that's an ugly truth) who want things that are "sustainable", and those things are virtually guanrateed to be more expensive than the stuff on the regular market.
Then the "rich conservatives" want cheap, throw-away shit?
What kind of broken, black-and-white thinking is this? Rich people, liberal or conservative, live rich lifestyles. They want big houses with pretty views and nice wine and fancy clothes and everything that you or I would like to enjoy if we had their kind of money. Rich liberals do NOT live among the poor rabble that they often champion. They, like rich conseravtives, live in Aspen or Austin or Long Island. They do NOT live in the 9th ward of New Orleans, not in a million years, despite how much they "care" about the people who live there.
quite possibly with the end result that rich conservatives in China can afford themselves arcologies to move into when the oil dries up and their air gets even worse than at present
You don't quite grasp it yet. The rich conservatives *and* the rich liberals are doing the same thing. They are shoring up so that their families and friends will be safe. This is not a "liberal v. conservative" issue, it's a "rich v. poor" issue, and there are *plenty* of filthy, stinking rich liberals with their millions of dollars in off-shore tax havens. I think the rich liberals suck worse becuase if they really "cared" as much about the poor as they claim to, then they would spend some of their own money to make a difference. Why aren't rich liberals criticized for their yachts and jewelry and egregious tax evasion?
By the way, NONE of this "sustainable" shit will make a damn bit of difference when the oil runs out. Oil is the lifeblood of the American way of life. If we don't find a way to replace it, then life will one day get a whole lot shitter for everyone in the country except for the extremely, extremly rich (in which demographic there are both liberals and conservatives).
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
What does that mean? I 'm genuinely interested, because water falls free from the sky, we're surrounded by it, so what's the problem with water usage?
Surely it's only a matter of cleaning water to make it fit for human consumption and then cleaning it again before it's returned to the environment? Isn't it?
Go on, indulge me here.
Clearly some new definition of "insightful" is being applied here... perhaps one where it means the same thing as "wrong" or "ill-reasoned" or "prone to political name-calling to discourage critical thought".
Well yes, that is exactly the definition of “insightful” in newspeak!
*ducks*
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
You rightfully should be angry at China's treatment of the Tabetian people. But as an American, Canadian, or Australia. We too have blood on our hands. We are not innocent of the same atrocities. Our treatment of the Aboriginals makes us no better than the Chinese.
Were it not for college students and incoming foreigners, NYC would be losing population. The immigrants come to NYC because, hi, everyone else they know is stuck there. The college students are, well, college students...
No one else seriously wishes to move there in any great number. The tough New Yorker is a stereotype illusion.
The above just demonstrates that you are completely clueless about what most people of the left want.
Who cares what they want? The important thing is the result of their policy choices. The two are seldom precisely the same.
Next time, why don't you try asking people what they thing about those issues instead of putting words in peoples mouths and jump to unjustified conclusions? Or would that make you seem too reasonable?
Because the answers are predictable. They want everything to be good for everyone all the time. Lots of people want that. Wanting it doesn't make it happen.
But here's the thing: trying to make it happen by meddling in other people's lives doesn't make it happen either. Most of the time, it makes things worse. If you leave people alone and let them make their own choices, you get a better (but still imperfect) result.
If every chinese started behaving like the average American already do behave, that would lead to a huge increase in pollution.
Hmmm. Seems to me you've only done half the thought experiment. You've imagined increasing the amount of pollution the average Chinese generates to what the average American generates and said, yuck, blech!
But what you've forgotten to do is also increase the amount of economic value the average Chinese generates to what the average American generates. If you did that, then the world economy would have $50 trillion more to devote to remediating pollution, not to mention the fact that it would have three or four times as many highly-trained scientists and engineers working in well-funded First-World-quality research institutes to invent dazzling new efficient technologies to solve those pollution problems.
You might as well have said that if each Chinese farmer eats as much as an American farmer, the world will run out of food, forgetting that if each Chinese farmer also grows as much food as an American farmer, no such thing will happen.
People are producers as well as consumers, eh? And, generally speaking, people in more technologically advanced nations consume more because they also produce more.
As opposed to the conservatives? They tell you who you can marry
No they don't.
, what you can smoke,
I agree. They should mind their own business on this one.
as well as being involved in every single thing you list as well.
No. Conservatives are for a smaller government with less influence on your life.
Fisher's Deduction: The more issues a person shoehorns down into an artificial liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Simcity 2000?
Humans have lived most of their lives living off of the land and their labor. You may have heard of a little thing called farming.
"Saving the family farm" is another one of the popular themes from the left nowadays. What condescending, leftist, urbanites (who have no idea what an actual farm is like) fail to realize is that almost everyone who has grown up on a farm (which is a life filled with endless toil) have done everything to get away from it and toward a life of convenience and leisure (the life that most urbanite leftists ignorantly enjoy). It is that not humans that have lived most of their lives as farmers (which you seem to allege), but rather humanity which has spent most of its existence living in lives of toil and misery. The technology that I can "progress" and you call "unsustainable" has given us humans better lives with more leisure time. My guess is that you wouldn't last 5 minutes doing farm work. The left has rarely championed work anyways! Go look at http://www.whywork.org/ to see what some other leftists think about the issue of work. Do you think those leftists want to spend one millisecond of time doing work on a farm?
I know this goes against your globalist/economic paradise line of thinking . . . but this has nothing to do with politics. You are the one who is injecting politics in here.
This notion of a "globalist/economic paradise line of thinking" is the way you slander me, but does not represent what I think at all. Nor am I the one "injecting politics"; rather, I am responding to what was from the onset a political issue. The "sustainable" movement is intrinsically linked with the environmental movement which has *always* been a political issue. To claim that your argument is beyond politics is deceitful of you. It is a failed attempt to paint your subjective point of view as "fact" rather than a value-based viewpoint.
The Chinese are simply trying to make an investment in something that will hopefully reap a gain in effecincy by promoting self-sufficency of these people.
And yet my valid criticism was not of the Chinese, but rather of the sanctimonious leftists who claim to be "for the poor" while simultaneously championing products that are "good for everyone" yet too expensive for the poor. You have failed to respond to this hypocrisy. Instead, you have chosen to attack me personally which speaks volumes about your character (not ot mention your argument). Granted, there are other aspects of the "sustainable" movmement which do NOT fall under this hypocrital umbrella, and I do not necessarily object to those.
The only class warfare rhetoric, ironically, is yours.
You make this claim shortly after you uttered the "gobalist" rhetoric and attempted to smear me with it. You look like you're not putting a lot of thought into your argument. Furthermore, what, specifically, did I state that you would consider class warfare rhetoric? I notice you cite no examples.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I think you should read something about environmental kuznets curves. Kuznets studied environmental economics and found that pollution initially increases with income/GDP, but then levels off and actually decreases (concave down). this is because rich people have the means to dictate that they want high quality air, etc (i.e. they think having a clean enviroment adds to their quality of life). see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve for some discussion.
I'm going to argue that my viewpoint is based on statistical probability, instead of worst-case or best-case scenarios, or other frankly irrelevant stuff.
It's not irrationally optimistic to believe that solutions to social problems generally go along with economic success. If this were not true, how could anyone rationally argue that the United States is the nation that is best-positioned to solve global problems? When people say the US should shoulder substantial fractions of the world's problems, they implicitly acknowledge that as the major economic power the US is best positioned to solve those problems. How could it be otherwise? You need wealth and leisure to solve knotty problems. If you're scratching for survival, you haven't time or energy to tackle long-range subtle issues, which global pollution problems mostly are.
So all I've done is assume that if the Chinese became as economically successful as the US, then in addition to their increased pollution we could reasonably expect a greatly increased power to solve such problems.
Does the ability to solve pollution problems run ahead of the rate of creation of such problems, when an economy is successfully growing? Of course. The historical record is clear. The US and Europe certainly have the most stringent pollution-control laws on the books, the most advanced pollution-control technology, the best record at actually solving pollution problems (e.g. compare Los Angeles air quality in 2005 to 1970, or note the fact that you can swim in Boston's Back Bay now, where you couldn't in 1980, or note the substitution of wind-power using sophisticated computer-controlled turbines with fancy composite material blades for fossil fuels in Europe and the US). Places like China and Mexico are sinks of filth on a per-polluter (e.g. per automobile) comparison, and have no hope of deploying cool high-tech clean power real soon. Why is this? Well, duh, we have the wealth and technology to do it and they don't. As any number of UN agencies and NGOs will tell you, when they ask for a substantial chunk of US change to lend to the efforts of poorer countries. In addition, places that have fallen on hard time economically -- Russia springs to mind, of course -- have lost ground on pollution control.
But in any event, I suggest the notion that increased wealth, broader education, and more leisure time creates more problems (even for the environment) than it solves is what really needs proving. Even the Marxists never went so far as to argue that the solution to human problems is to be found in increased poverty, a higher fraction of human time devoted to pure survival, and a reduction in the spread of technology.
Newsflash: the chinese economy is already gigantic, they already have first-world class researchers, they already have plenty of money to invest in cleaning up their habits. Have we seen anything approaching what you're insisting is going to happen? Nope... not yet....
Well, that would be the difference between being gigantic and being gigantic on a per-capita basis, right? While China's economy is certainly substantial in an absolute sense, it is still way smaller than the US economy on a per-person basis.
It says "don't worry, we're smart and creative, we'll think of something".
Not quite. First of all, I've never said "don't worry." I just pointed out that when one tries to guess what might happen if the Chinese started to act like Americans (the OP's point), you've got to include the productive aspects of a far bigger Chinese economy as well as the consumptive. They go along together.
Secondly, just as there's a difference between mindless boosterism and rational optimism, there's a difference between mindless negativism and rational caution.
"Reeked" has to do with odor, which suits your sewage theme, but that's the wrong word. "Wrecked" means broken. "Wreaked" is the work you wanted. Pronounced the same, but spelled differently.
Your larger argument is a bit like changing the terms of a formula so one variable either approaches infinity (all the lights on, all SUVS, all the time) or approaches zero (a falsely reductive description of Chinese developments). That's no problem by me; sometimes it's useful to do to check your terms. I'm not sure that argument doesn't amount to a needlessly distracting spat about who has the moral advantage when what we really need is practical mechnisms for exchanging environmental technology, but it's not off limits or anything...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
As opposed to the conservatives? They tell you who you can marry
No they don't.
Really? I, as a male, can not marry a male. The conservatives are the ones that are behind the ban of such marriages.
Learn to love Alaska
Sir, your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
"Peter Head, the Arup director in charge of the first eco-city, at Dongtan near Shanghai, said: 'We are going to help establish a model of how a sustainable city works," Hmm! Does that mean there's going to be a city in China where you can breathe the air and drink the tap water? That would be a first. LarryK Schenectady NY
In other words: we're all going to die, one day. In fact the sun continues to add energy to the planet daily, not to mention our existing reserve of stored energy. I don't argue that "one day" we're going to run out of juice, but it need not be soon. Our sun has a few billion years left, and there's no reason we couldn't be long gone from here by then buying us a bit more time. But sure, one day, it's all over. Everything dies eventually.
The more relevant concern is how to be less dependent of those forms of energy that are becoming in short supply, in favor of more readily available energy with fewer unwanted side effects. That will prevent us from fouling our planet, give us our "crutch" (you know, the one that separates us from the monkeys) and allow us happy lives. Why is that so bad? Nature only threatens those who don't understand it.
Anyhow, given no option but to throw my hands in the air and accept no further technological development, I wouldn't want to argue that our children are better off with more generations by living like primitives in the jungle than burning out sooner by continuing the existance we have now.
I, as a male, can not marry a male.
Yes you can. Go nuts. Marry whoever or whatever you want, as many times as you want. Perform the ceremony yourself, go to a church, or have your parrot officiate. No one cares.
The citizens of a state have no obligation to recognize marriages of any kind.
Animals don't shit in toilets as humans, cleaning up regularly would take up time and effort. Why not use human wastes for fertilizer instead? Gotta get rid of the stuff anyway. What are you gonna feed the animals? Can't exactly grow fields of grain to feed both the astronauts AND the livestock. Same with the pigs. Unless you can feed them plastics, most trash is simply gonna be dumped out into space. Everything else will more or less be recycled or used up (remember, spaceship, can't waste food or, god forbid, spare room). Livestock simply isn't feasible by current or even sub-futuristic planning. Not enough space, not enough feed, not enough benefits. For now, vegetables and freeze dried foods win out for current space exploration foods.
Yes you can. Go nuts. Marry whoever or whatever you want, as many times as you want.
Uh, no. That's illegal. Bigamy is a crime in every state.
The citizens of a state have no obligation to recognize marriages of any kind.
Huh? So, recognizing some and not others is not a government intrusion? You seem to be agreeing with me that the government should get the hell out of the business of blessing marriages under God, as they currently do. However, conservatives want to control who can marry who. If you were correct, then the conservatives should be trying to abolish government controls of marriage, not increase them. But that isn't what is happening.
Learn to love Alaska
Uh, no. That's illegal. Bigamy is a crime in every state.
You don't seem to get it. Maybe if I pronounce you the husband to a box of corn flakes, you'll understand. There's nothing that keeps you from considering yourself married to whoever or whatever you want.
Marriage licenses are granted by the government to individuals on a non-descriminatory basis to enter into marriage as the citizens of a state wish.
They don't constrain what you call a marriage, and you don't constrain what they call a marriage (but you get a vote on the latter).
Huh? So, recognizing some and not others is not a government intrusion?
Not any more than being involved in the first place.
I'll make you a deal: I'll support the government getting out of marriages if the government also gets out of education. What do you think?
You don't seem to get it. Maybe if I pronounce you the husband to a box of corn flakes, you'll understand. There's nothing that keeps you from considering yourself married to whoever or whatever you want.
You don't seem to get it. No matter what I declare myself to be, I am not it unless it is recognized. The governmnet is the official sanctioning body, and they constrain who and what I can marry. I can not marry a box of corn flakes. Being married in the USA involves over 1000 rights conveyed in that contract, many of which can not be conveyed through conventional contracts. That transfer of rights is tightly controlled by the government, who controls who I may or may not enter into that contract with.
Perhaps it would be simpler to explain it as a contract restriction? The conservatives prevent free enterprise because they act to limit those who I may enter into contracts with. Or are you going to tell me now that I can get the contract with the cereal box? I've not seen where that is an option.
Learn to love Alaska
No matter what I declare myself to be, I am not it unless it is recognized. The governmnet is the official sanctioning body
You're basically saying that, if there were no government, there would be no marriage. It's silly.
Marriage existed before there were governments, it exists in places with no controlling government (i.e. international waters), and married folks are still married when a government falls and is replaced by a new government.
You're basically saying that, if there were no government, there would be no marriage. It's silly.
I am saying that the government blesses some marriages and gives them some rights over other marraiges. The conservatives are in support of the government being involved in the conferring of rights based on the type of marriage and the conservatives are involved in wanting the government to maintain control over the institution of marriage in order to control other people.
The conservatives actively work to descriminate against people. They do so through the institution of marriage (as well as other means). They want the government to be involved in blessing marriages and conveying special rights on some and excluding others. I can not choose to have this special contract with anyone I want. I'm being restricted by the conservatives. They actively work to reduce my choices.
Learn to love Alaska