224 units is not enough to build even an elementary school around
Why not? If the housing is meant for families, let's assume a modest 60 percent of the houses have families, and that they each have 2.3 children. That's a total of 309 children. My kids go to a school of about 350 kids. I understand that in some places they have huge schools with thousands of kids, but I really don't see the advantage of that. Smaller schools where everybody knows everybody have a lot of appeal.
Simple, an elementary school will have, at best, half of the school-aged children (ages 5 through 11). So based on your guess, of the 309 kids aged 0-18, only 100 or so will be at the elementary school. You might be able to make a small school out of that (it puts less than 20 in each grade) but more than likely, there is already a few elems in the area that can absorb the kids. And if not? Less than 20 kids/grade means a lot of attention.
To get at your guesstimate on how many kids are there to begin with, let's look at Marin county specifically: average household of 2.39 people (parents+kids) and 15% of those are between 5 and 18. So if you assume the units will be filled "on average" (which is prone to error but we are just guesstimating) you end up with 80 school aged kids. That's about 40 elementary aged kids.
And farmers indeed are the ones cutting usage by the most. The point isn't that they use more of it, it's that the difference between water at the tap in LA or SD costing the same during the drought is everyone just not wasting it on green grass. No one is dying of thirst but prices are going to get pretty ridiculous here soon, as some munis run out of water entirely (having not managed to get price hikes through) and all the residents rely on bottled water which is far more expensive.
It's not really just about annoying the neighbours. If you stick all the poor people in the same neighbourhood, then all the poor kids will go to schools with poor kids, and all the rich kids will go to school with rich kids. Since schools are funded by property taxes, the poor kid schools always end up having less money. If you mix poor and rich kids in the same areas, and they attend the same schools, and benefit from the same property taxes, then things end up much more even. Instead of one school having everything, and another having nothing, you'd have all the schools with similar amounts of resources.
224 units is not enough to build even an elementary school around, so don't worry. This is definitely "mixed in" with the other residents compared to most income-gap boundaries. However, at this level the indigenous population will almost certainly be sending their kids to high pricetag private school even from kindergarten. However, I have a feeling that all the property taxes in the coffers from the dozens of multi-million dollar homes will be enough to afford the "poor" residents of Lucas' Groundwalker Ranch (still workshopping the name) who are still almost all in the upper 50% of income nationwide, a decent place to send their kids.
On one hand I'm glad he built this low-income housing...on the other hand I don't like that the mere existence of poor people in the vicinity is being used as revenge. I mean it's hilarious and not his fault that rich people think like this, but participating in it seems wrong in itself.
"Won't let me build my studio huh!? Well then eat poor people, motherfuckers! Muahahaha!"
I can only hope that the "poor people" (no doubt average people to you and me) are such good residents that they make the property value jump for Lucas and drop for all his nose-up neighbors (because you don't have to spend several million just to live in Nicasio any more).
Yes, that's the problem. Once it starts it tends to build on itself. That is why it is better to spread it out more. Not 200+ units in one development.
200 units on 54 acres is a breeze, really. 1/4 acre per unit is a TON of room, you won't have any problem telling who the good neighbors are and who the shitheads are. 800 units on 54 acres? Then you are into some downward spiral trouble unless you pour a lot of money into managing it.
At $200M for 224 homes it sounds like he is building an upper middle class housing development. This does not sound like habitat for humanity-like helping the poor.
Yeah $900,000 per unit is pretty steep nationally, but it's average for the area.
Especially when selling 0-days isn't actually illegal in most circumstances, only rather shady. Researchers do deals all the time. Total anonymity on one or both sides doesn't really help anyone. Hell, it's so commonplace they have discussed it on NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
If anything this is just a new way to scam people out of money or to ferret out security researchers for further recruitment/waterboarding by the CIA.
After all, if you destroy DC, you destroy the people that are authorized to pay you in the first place.
That, and you completely destabilize/devalue the very thing you are demanding. Your $100B USD won't go far if the US government collapses. Better ask for Gold or Bitcoins.
And $30B will get you 30 desal plants like Carlsbad's, which cost $1B, and which will provide 7% of what San Diego area residents need.
But the $30B won't get you the power it takes to run them (new power plants?) Or the energy required to power the power plants.
Also, CA's agriculture depends upon cheap water, not expensive desalinated water.
That said, would a $30B pipeline bring in the same amount of water as desal plants? Or more? Operating expenses are sure to be lower, but there'd need to be a detailed economic and engineering case made for one solution over the other.
--PM
Desalinated water is ready to drink, so you would effectively be taking all the normal purification plants offline and freeing up all the water that went through them for agri use. That being said, SoCal could solve the "water crisis" today if they stopped watering all their fucking lawns.
...so the poorer people will move out. Nice plan. How about putting water meters on farm consumption, most have no meters at all. Most ag water users pay zero, or close to that. How about letting the market decide where almonds and lettuce should be grown, instead of giving CA farmers a massive subsidy while cities go dry?
The market decides by way of water rights on certain parcels (that drives up/down land value). The landowners then get to decide which crops (i.e. ones that are the most valuable per gallon) to grow with their water. If water were truly scarce the farmers would be just bottling the water and selling it (some already are, but most are just growing almonds like always). The market is working nicely, thanks. And if poor people can't afford to live in SoCal? (its already really really hard unless you are OK being a homeless bum) Let them move to a cheaper place to live and maybe they will enjoy their minimum wage a little. Then, prices on everything in SoCal will go up (even more) and the market will kick in and force some of the rich people to move out too. This is Adam Smith's plan at work, why disrupt it?
Of course, all they need to do is not get caught. Same thing happens with slot machines and other random chance electronic games... it's easier than lobbying:
1) Casino boss invites high ranking government official. 2) Boss says, "We know you'll have fun, but I think you'll have more fun on machine number 57 if you grant consideration to improving legal conditions surrounding our fine establishment." 3) Official wins jackpot 4) Boss wins jackpot (figuratively)
You're a fool if you don't think this happens. This is why I'm against electronic gambling. Not because of some moral "gambling is of the devil" thing... but because it would be trivial to rig these machines and then erase all evidence that anything fraudulent happened. Politicians can literally transform your hopes and dreams into money lining their wallet.
There (should be) a paper trail of payouts to any winner from any casino, for tax purposes. The distinction that a mechanical vs electronic device was "rigged" is totally secondary to that fact. If this was skirted, then several other laws were also broken that day.
I'm actually surprised there haven't been more cases of insiders rigging lotteries.
I should think knowing all of those zillions of dollars are just sitting there would cause more people to decide to see if they could get away with it.
How would you know if there were, and they were getting away with it?
It might be useful to inform an admin to look at suspicious postings, especially if they can get the accuracy higher. BUT I hope no one uses such algorithms to automatically stop suspected trolls. This can only lead to unforeseen consequences and stifling of free speech (unless of course stifling is not an unforeseen consequence, but an intended one).
Moderation at a privately owned/operated site can be freely used to filter anything they don't want their users to see, even if it creates a slant. However, the odds that they will start filtering specifically subversive content is pretty low, since it's those kind of posts that generate hundreds of follow-ups of disagreement, bolstering even more traffic. More likely, they will filter the truly atrocious (bland death threats, etc) that add little in terms of desirable content.
Me american, me play joke me take bit at end of double float and set it randomly whenever you divide good luck trying to figure out of your nukes will go off!
If no one paid for a.sucks domain, Google (where all information discovery starts out at on the internet anyway) would simply rank.sucks domains nice and far down and mcdonalds.sucks would be no more relevant than mcdonalds-sucks.tumblr.com so you can thank whoever it is that bought the first.sucks for this shitstorm. I just can't believe that it's 2015 and we are still debating how best to handle basic squatting. If someone owns a particular trademark, why not just wait for someone to shell out for the.sucks version, and then lawyer the shit out of them? Maybe because it would cost more than $2500 anyway.
"(payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre)"
It's difficult to take someone's opinions about net neturality seriously when they don't understand the difference between broadcast media and on-demand media.
If you think there's a huge difference in record companies wanting to control content despite consumer's interests, and ISPs wanting to control content despite consumer's interests, then I think we're done here. Close it up, we had a good run. The Internet is now over.
I don't want ANYONE buying promotions into my IP stream! I want my ISP to do their freaking job and shift packets from the source to me, without molestation and without interest or undue visibility into the contents.
Sadly, this is impossible. The problem is that there isn't one big pool of "internet" and a bunch of ISPs out there finding ways to sell it to you. Instead, a massive and intricate network of peering agreements exist just to make the internet function at the basic level, and THEN they figure out how to get it to your house. So, it's impossible for the FCC to say "hey verizon treat netflix with the same respect you would any other peer" because peering agreements work both ways, cost both companies money, and either verizon OR netflix can abuse the relationship.
You seem obsessed with robots but also seem to have no actual experience with any of those industries.
Having watched *millions* of jobs in the US and even more globally disappear at the hands of automation in the past 30 years, it is pretty laughable to insist that somehow the trend will stop and/or reverse itself any time soon. You are right that there will always be a need for a certain number of humans in any given physical operation, but that number is constantly going down and it will not stop going down until it's at 1. Keep on thinking that "most of the jobs are safe" and sure, they might be safe in your lifetime, but they are not safe for very long in the bigger picture of urban planning, which is the crux of this article.
Why do we *need* to travel at all? Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
Because sometimes there's real value in being there. Sure, most of the information you get from a conference or meeting could be found online, or you could watch a seminar remotely, but you don't necessarily get the same experience and make the same contacts that you would from a face-to-face meeting. Often times, you end up learning things at a conference that you didn't even know you were looking for.
Sometimes? Yes. But the question of commuting is about *all* the times.
So far, increases in the efficiency of commutes have led directly to longer commutes. I would be surprised if actual traffic density decreases, but it will be interesting to see.
Momentary density will increase but as the cars require a much smaller timeslot of the resource, the average time spent on the highway will go down and thus the number of cars at any given moment on the highway will be lower. This will probably result in longer commutes as the penalty is lower (living 1hr from the city will be tolerable since the commute can be used for work anyway), but the potential for optimized scheduling and ride-sharing is so large that even if half of the cars on the road were ridesharing with one extra passenger, that cuts down traffic by 25% which in most cases is enough to act like adding another full lane to the city core.
I wonder how it would survive a missile strike. OK, the helium is not going to explode, but if it leaks out through a big hole in the hull, you're going to go down anyway. You'll need lots of compartments to limit that, and those compartments would add quite a lot of weight.
They probably mean that a missile strike is basically the missile shooting through one side and out the other since the skin isn't thick enough to trigger a detonator. A small missile sized hole is enough to down it, but not very fast.
In developing countries, the upper half (maybe) can afford it, but the lower half live without even reliable electricity, much less a computer to grant them access to rich information/education/entertainment/etc.
While I largely agree with you, what I have seen also is that our [western] definition of development isn't necessarily other people's definition.
Case in point: We may be really technologically developed but the way of life that comes with the development has also brought with it serious issues of mental illness and a breakdown in family. I remember being in one village and the elders there told me categorically, that they do not need electricity or running water. It *IS* their choice. I was baffled! The business of refrigeration was foreign to them though some liked it.The elders were not sure how to service the equipment after we left. They didn't like the whole concept of relying on other people's tech. So, values are different.
I see a problem for us Americans. With Russia's lead, some Asian countries are beginning to conduct trade without the dollar. If this spreads, we as USA are done. The days of dominating currency markets won't last for ever. That will be ugly.
So, you think it's the mark of an advanced society that allows for parts of itself to be community oriented and reject technology? We've got plenty of that in the US.
And Russia leading a currency revolution? I spit coffee on the keyboard, thanks for that. The ruble is worth less than 2 cents, and dropping as we speak. Russia isn't leading anything but their own fading influence.
And yet over these past five decades, that same laggard country has dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation.
When I travel especially in Asia, (read China, South Korea, Singapore etc), I find better employment of technology than in USA right from the airport! This technology isn't necessarily American at all!
What I find we Americans have, is the view that we are at the epitome of the best. You can't compare the subway system in NY to that in Shanghai in terms of deployed tech for example! NY is in the dark ages. I know because engineers from NY go to Shanghai to "learn" how things are done on such scale.
The Koreans have come to dominate ship building not using western tech, but their home grown solutions to enormous problems.
What I find is that we in America are really one confident lot, right from school kids. We also have a spirit of "self congratulation." But trust me, those Asian folks beat us in many ways.
"I find author's facts dubious" sums up your comment rather nicely. Other (asian) nations might appear to be technological leaders because their airports are new and shiny (at least, the one airport at the capitol that you visited) and that's all well and good but as soon as you get away from the metropolis you see where the actual differences lie: in the US you have technology accessible to nearly 100% of the population, in terms of cost and functionality. That shit ain't easy. In developing countries, the upper half (maybe) can afford it, but the lower half live without even reliable electricity, much less a computer to grant them access to rich information/education/entertainment/etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not? If the housing is meant for families, let's assume a modest 60 percent of the houses have families, and that they each have 2.3 children. That's a total of 309 children. My kids go to a school of about 350 kids. I understand that in some places they have huge schools with thousands of kids, but I really don't see the advantage of that. Smaller schools where everybody knows everybody have a lot of appeal.
Simple, an elementary school will have, at best, half of the school-aged children (ages 5 through 11). So based on your guess, of the 309 kids aged 0-18, only 100 or so will be at the elementary school. You might be able to make a small school out of that (it puts less than 20 in each grade) but more than likely, there is already a few elems in the area that can absorb the kids. And if not? Less than 20 kids/grade means a lot of attention.
To get at your guesstimate on how many kids are there to begin with, let's look at Marin county specifically: average household of 2.39 people (parents+kids) and 15% of those are between 5 and 18. So if you assume the units will be filled "on average" (which is prone to error but we are just guesstimating) you end up with 80 school aged kids. That's about 40 elementary aged kids.
TL;DR: Your guess is way high.
SoCal could solve the "water crisis" today if they stopped watering all their fucking lawns.
I'm surprised that after all this time people still have this misconception. Lawn watering is just part of that little 4% sliver at the bottom. Farming uses the vast majority of water.
And farmers indeed are the ones cutting usage by the most. The point isn't that they use more of it, it's that the difference between water at the tap in LA or SD costing the same during the drought is everyone just not wasting it on green grass. No one is dying of thirst but prices are going to get pretty ridiculous here soon, as some munis run out of water entirely (having not managed to get price hikes through) and all the residents rely on bottled water which is far more expensive.
It's not really just about annoying the neighbours. If you stick all the poor people in the same neighbourhood, then all the poor kids will go to schools with poor kids, and all the rich kids will go to school with rich kids. Since schools are funded by property taxes, the poor kid schools always end up having less money. If you mix poor and rich kids in the same areas, and they attend the same schools, and benefit from the same property taxes, then things end up much more even. Instead of one school having everything, and another having nothing, you'd have all the schools with similar amounts of resources.
224 units is not enough to build even an elementary school around, so don't worry. This is definitely "mixed in" with the other residents compared to most income-gap boundaries. However, at this level the indigenous population will almost certainly be sending their kids to high pricetag private school even from kindergarten. However, I have a feeling that all the property taxes in the coffers from the dozens of multi-million dollar homes will be enough to afford the "poor" residents of Lucas' Groundwalker Ranch (still workshopping the name) who are still almost all in the upper 50% of income nationwide, a decent place to send their kids.
On one hand I'm glad he built this low-income housing...on the other hand I don't like that the mere existence of poor people in the vicinity is being used as revenge. I mean it's hilarious and not his fault that rich people think like this, but participating in it seems wrong in itself.
"Won't let me build my studio huh!? Well then eat poor people, motherfuckers! Muahahaha!"
I can only hope that the "poor people" (no doubt average people to you and me) are such good residents that they make the property value jump for Lucas and drop for all his nose-up neighbors (because you don't have to spend several million just to live in Nicasio any more).
Yes, that's the problem. Once it starts it tends to build on itself. That is why it is better to spread it out more. Not 200+ units in one development.
200 units on 54 acres is a breeze, really. 1/4 acre per unit is a TON of room, you won't have any problem telling who the good neighbors are and who the shitheads are. 800 units on 54 acres? Then you are into some downward spiral trouble unless you pour a lot of money into managing it.
At $200M for 224 homes it sounds like he is building an upper middle class housing development. This does not sound like habitat for humanity-like helping the poor.
Yeah $900,000 per unit is pretty steep nationally, but it's average for the area.
This sounds like a honeypot to me..
Especially when selling 0-days isn't actually illegal in most circumstances, only rather shady. Researchers do deals all the time. Total anonymity on one or both sides doesn't really help anyone. Hell, it's so commonplace they have discussed it on NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
If anything this is just a new way to scam people out of money or to ferret out security researchers for further recruitment/waterboarding by the CIA.
After all, if you destroy DC, you destroy the people that are authorized to pay you in the first place.
That, and you completely destabilize/devalue the very thing you are demanding. Your $100B USD won't go far if the US government collapses. Better ask for Gold or Bitcoins.
And $30B will get you 30 desal plants like Carlsbad's, which cost $1B, and which will provide 7% of what San Diego area residents need.
But the $30B won't get you the power it takes to run them (new power plants?) Or the energy required to power the power plants.
Also, CA's agriculture depends upon cheap water, not expensive desalinated water.
That said, would a $30B pipeline bring in the same amount of water as desal plants? Or more? Operating expenses are sure to be lower, but there'd need to be a detailed economic and engineering case made for one solution over the other.
--PM
Desalinated water is ready to drink, so you would effectively be taking all the normal purification plants offline and freeing up all the water that went through them for agri use. That being said, SoCal could solve the "water crisis" today if they stopped watering all their fucking lawns.
...so the poorer people will move out. Nice plan. How about putting water meters on farm consumption, most have no meters at all. Most ag water users pay zero, or close to that. How about letting the market decide where almonds and lettuce should be grown, instead of giving CA farmers a massive subsidy while cities go dry?
The market decides by way of water rights on certain parcels (that drives up/down land value). The landowners then get to decide which crops (i.e. ones that are the most valuable per gallon) to grow with their water. If water were truly scarce the farmers would be just bottling the water and selling it (some already are, but most are just growing almonds like always). The market is working nicely, thanks. And if poor people can't afford to live in SoCal? (its already really really hard unless you are OK being a homeless bum) Let them move to a cheaper place to live and maybe they will enjoy their minimum wage a little. Then, prices on everything in SoCal will go up (even more) and the market will kick in and force some of the rich people to move out too. This is Adam Smith's plan at work, why disrupt it?
Of course, all they need to do is not get caught. Same thing happens with slot machines and other random chance electronic games... it's easier than lobbying:
1) Casino boss invites high ranking government official.
2) Boss says, "We know you'll have fun, but I think you'll have more fun on machine number 57 if you grant consideration to improving legal conditions surrounding our fine establishment."
3) Official wins jackpot
4) Boss wins jackpot (figuratively)
You're a fool if you don't think this happens. This is why I'm against electronic gambling. Not because of some moral "gambling is of the devil" thing... but because it would be trivial to rig these machines and then erase all evidence that anything fraudulent happened. Politicians can literally transform your hopes and dreams into money lining their wallet.
There (should be) a paper trail of payouts to any winner from any casino, for tax purposes. The distinction that a mechanical vs electronic device was "rigged" is totally secondary to that fact. If this was skirted, then several other laws were also broken that day.
I'm actually surprised there haven't been more cases of insiders rigging lotteries.
I should think knowing all of those zillions of dollars are just sitting there would cause more people to decide to see if they could get away with it.
How would you know if there were, and they were getting away with it?
It might be useful to inform an admin to look at suspicious postings, especially if they can get the accuracy higher. BUT I hope no one uses such algorithms to automatically stop suspected trolls. This can only lead to unforeseen consequences and stifling of free speech (unless of course stifling is not an unforeseen consequence, but an intended one).
Moderation at a privately owned/operated site can be freely used to filter anything they don't want their users to see, even if it creates a slant. However, the odds that they will start filtering specifically subversive content is pretty low, since it's those kind of posts that generate hundreds of follow-ups of disagreement, bolstering even more traffic. More likely, they will filter the truly atrocious (bland death threats, etc) that add little in terms of desirable content.
Me american, me play joke
me take bit at end of double float and set it randomly whenever you divide
good luck trying to figure out of your nukes will go off!
It rhymes better in Mandarin, I swear
If no one paid for a .sucks domain, Google (where all information discovery starts out at on the internet anyway) would simply rank .sucks domains nice and far down and mcdonalds.sucks would be no more relevant than mcdonalds-sucks.tumblr.com so you can thank whoever it is that bought the first .sucks for this shitstorm. I just can't believe that it's 2015 and we are still debating how best to handle basic squatting. If someone owns a particular trademark, why not just wait for someone to shell out for the .sucks version, and then lawyer the shit out of them? Maybe because it would cost more than $2500 anyway.
"(payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre)"
It's difficult to take someone's opinions about net neturality seriously when they don't understand the difference between broadcast media and on-demand media.
If you think there's a huge difference in record companies wanting to control content despite consumer's interests, and ISPs wanting to control content despite consumer's interests, then I think we're done here. Close it up, we had a good run. The Internet is now over.
I don't want ANYONE buying promotions into my IP stream! I want my ISP to do their freaking job and shift packets from the source to me, without molestation and without interest or undue visibility into the contents.
Sadly, this is impossible. The problem is that there isn't one big pool of "internet" and a bunch of ISPs out there finding ways to sell it to you. Instead, a massive and intricate network of peering agreements exist just to make the internet function at the basic level, and THEN they figure out how to get it to your house. So, it's impossible for the FCC to say "hey verizon treat netflix with the same respect you would any other peer" because peering agreements work both ways, cost both companies money, and either verizon OR netflix can abuse the relationship.
You seem obsessed with robots but also seem to have no actual experience with any of those industries.
Having watched *millions* of jobs in the US and even more globally disappear at the hands of automation in the past 30 years, it is pretty laughable to insist that somehow the trend will stop and/or reverse itself any time soon. You are right that there will always be a need for a certain number of humans in any given physical operation, but that number is constantly going down and it will not stop going down until it's at 1. Keep on thinking that "most of the jobs are safe" and sure, they might be safe in your lifetime, but they are not safe for very long in the bigger picture of urban planning, which is the crux of this article.
Why do we *need* to travel at all? Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
Because sometimes there's real value in being there. Sure, most of the information you get from a conference or meeting could be found online, or you could watch a seminar remotely, but you don't necessarily get the same experience and make the same contacts that you would from a face-to-face meeting. Often times, you end up learning things at a conference that you didn't even know you were looking for.
Sometimes? Yes. But the question of commuting is about *all* the times.
Since this thread is about autonomous cars...
Retail
stocking robots
medicine,
surgery robots
manufacturing,
factory robots
freight,
automated delivery robots
mining,
digging robots
farming,
plowing robots
restaurants,
serving robots
refining,
valve turning robots
Did I miss any?
So far, increases in the efficiency of commutes have led directly to longer commutes. I would be surprised if actual traffic density decreases, but it will be interesting to see.
Momentary density will increase but as the cars require a much smaller timeslot of the resource, the average time spent on the highway will go down and thus the number of cars at any given moment on the highway will be lower. This will probably result in longer commutes as the penalty is lower (living 1hr from the city will be tolerable since the commute can be used for work anyway), but the potential for optimized scheduling and ride-sharing is so large that even if half of the cars on the road were ridesharing with one extra passenger, that cuts down traffic by 25% which in most cases is enough to act like adding another full lane to the city core.
I already know what's going to happen in the year 2525 and beyond. And, well, the year 9595 doesn't look good. Why bother planning for it.
I wonder how it would survive a missile strike. OK, the helium is not going to explode, but if it leaks out through a big hole in the hull, you're going to go down anyway. You'll need lots of compartments to limit that, and those compartments would add quite a lot of weight.
They probably mean that a missile strike is basically the missile shooting through one side and out the other since the skin isn't thick enough to trigger a detonator. A small missile sized hole is enough to down it, but not very fast.
In developing countries, the upper half (maybe) can afford it, but the lower half live without even reliable electricity, much less a computer to grant them access to rich information/education/entertainment/etc.
While I largely agree with you, what I have seen also is that our [western] definition of development isn't necessarily other people's definition.
Case in point: We may be really technologically developed but the way of life that comes with the development has also brought with it serious issues of mental illness and a breakdown in family. I remember being in one village and the elders there told me categorically, that they do not need electricity or running water. It *IS* their choice. I was baffled! The business of refrigeration was foreign to them though some liked it.The elders were not sure how to service the equipment after we left. They didn't like the whole concept of relying on other people's tech. So, values are different.
I see a problem for us Americans. With Russia's lead, some Asian countries are beginning to conduct trade without the dollar. If this spreads, we as USA are done. The days of dominating currency markets won't last for ever. That will be ugly.
So, you think it's the mark of an advanced society that allows for parts of itself to be community oriented and reject technology? We've got plenty of that in the US.
And Russia leading a currency revolution? I spit coffee on the keyboard, thanks for that. The ruble is worth less than 2 cents, and dropping as we speak. Russia isn't leading anything but their own fading influence.
From the linked piece...
And yet over these past five decades, that same laggard country has dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation.
When I travel especially in Asia, (read China, South Korea, Singapore etc), I find better employment of technology than in USA right from the airport! This technology isn't necessarily American at all!
What I find we Americans have, is the view that we are at the epitome of the best. You can't compare the subway system in NY to that in Shanghai in terms of deployed tech for example! NY is in the dark ages. I know because engineers from NY go to Shanghai to "learn" how things are done on such scale.
The Koreans have come to dominate ship building not using western tech, but their home grown solutions to enormous problems.
What I find is that we in America are really one confident lot, right from school kids. We also have a spirit of "self congratulation." But trust me, those Asian folks beat us in many ways.
"I find author's facts dubious" sums up your comment rather nicely. Other (asian) nations might appear to be technological leaders because their airports are new and shiny (at least, the one airport at the capitol that you visited) and that's all well and good but as soon as you get away from the metropolis you see where the actual differences lie: in the US you have technology accessible to nearly 100% of the population, in terms of cost and functionality. That shit ain't easy. In developing countries, the upper half (maybe) can afford it, but the lower half live without even reliable electricity, much less a computer to grant them access to rich information/education/entertainment/etc.