Did NYC get submerged by the ocean or are there a lot of idiots on the pro AGW side making fucking stupid predictions?
Rhetorical question. Kindly keep in mind that supporting or criticizing AGW does not decide your intelligence. Rather, it decides your regard for political correctness more then anything.
I'm not going to permit you to strawman me by associating me with someone else I've never read and do not attach myself.
If you want to argue against my position, then argue against my position. Not someone else's position.
As to your statement about commute distances and congestion, that is caused by imbalances between working space and living space.
Rezone portions of areas that suffer too much commuting TO them to be residential and zone areas that suffer too much people commuting FROM them to commercial space. The system will balance out if you keep doing it.
People cannot commute to a place that has no jobs. You cannot have a skyscraper of commuters to a three story office building.
The math is unavoidable.
The issue in Los Angeles, is that you have some very desirable real estate in the west where wealthier people live. They have their businesses there because they don't want to commute that far. Then all their employees have to commute from very far away to go to work every day.
Your solution is to increase density to such a point that their workers can live about as close to the businesses as their bosses.
Well, does that work in New York City or London or Tokyo? Nope. Properly values skyrocket and apartments shrink to the size of closets while commute times and distances tend to remain the same.
Your solution does not solve the problem You've just masked the issue by expanding your problem and necessitating additional infrastructure to compensate for the additional problems your density created.
Consider an alternative approach. What if there is less commercial/office space in the area everyone is commuting to? What if instead of asking the employees to commute to the boss, you instead force the boss to commute to the employees? Instantly the system becomes more sustainable. You reduce office space in areas that have become congestion problems and increase residential space while also keeping an eye on density so that you don't exceed what nearby resources can handle.
Wrong. Transit works everywhere. Massive cattle car transit only works in hyper dense environments... but why is that desirable?
Does massive cattle car transit reduce commute distances? Nope. Commute times? Nope.
So what is the point?
To allow for greater density.
So mass transit is a solution to how to allow for more density but it doesn't actually solve the problem you had before you increased density. That being the commute times and distances which basically remain the same or if anything increase.
Look at the Japanese bullet train as an example. It allows people from the distant suburbs of Tokyo to commute to work every day. But do they get to work faster then people that go to work in Los Angeles? Nope. Takes about the same amount of time.
You're viewing density as an end unto itself which is insane because density is actually very inefficient in many ways. It also has serious political, cultural, and civic drawbacks.
Democracy doesn't really work in major cities. The population is too high. The city employees amongst others tend to own the political system in major cities and not the actual residents who are by and large hostage to the process.
Density made sense in the early 20th century before airplanes and the internet. But today it makes no sense besides offering a superior dating pool for young people. Once you're settled, the urban environment is typically counter to your interests. Which is why most people that are married try to move to the suburbs where they can get a more reasonable environment.
Los Angeles is interesting because it is a major suburban city. It is all sprawl. And the sprawl is beautiful. But for it to work, density has to be controlled and the balance between work space and living space must be kept in balance.
Wrong. If you increase density you will not stop long commuting distances or patterns. Look at any hyper dense city and tell me if there are not commute distances at least as long as you find in Los Angeles?
There are. Increasing density does not solve the problem. The problem is density and an imbalance between office space and living space.
Another idea if you don't like reducing density which is actually required here... but if you don't like that, then another idea is to rezone office buildings into apartment buildings.
In one stroke you reduce the amount of jobs in an area that people can commute to while at the same time increasing the amount of living space. In doing this, you make it impossible for more people to work in that area while making it inevitable that more people will live there. This automatically will reduce the commute issue.
If the system is out of balance, then increasing density will not alleviate it. You fix an out of balance system by balancing it.
First, you balance density by limiting it to what local services can handle. You do not allow density beyond what the roads, water, power, schools, police, etc can handle.
Second, if you have massive commutes, then you reduce office space in areas where people are commuting to and increase residential space... until the system comes into balance.
Balance. It requires wisdom, discipline, and patience. Just increasing density infinitely is moronic.
Wrong. Increasing density does not reduce commute distances. People commute from long distances in very dense cities. Look at Tokyo or New York City. You have people commuting to work in both of those cities from at least as far as you have them commuting in Los Angeles.
All increasing density does is require the construction of massive cattle car transit systems. And these do not aliviate the road situation. The roads if anything become more congested as the congestion taxes prove. However, you now have an additional problem on top of that because you are now also utterly dependent on an additional transit system.
Reducing density reduces the number of people that can commute to a given area. You can't have a skyscraper worth of people commuting to a three story office building.
What is more, you can also zone existing commercial space to residential/apartment space. If I turn an office building into an apartment, then you're not going to have people commuting to that office building... and now a big building exists that can sell apartment space. Two birds with one stone.
Increasing density does not solve the problem. It makes it worse. IF you have too many people commuting to an area, then either reduce the size of existing office building permits or rezone existing office space to apartments to shift the balance to something more healthy. Keep doing that until the commuting patterns become more reasonable.
The california drought for example is a well known weather pattern. We get that drought every couple decades and always have.
Last time was in the 1970s. It is difficult to link because natural forces are actually the cause of that drought.
As to other droughts, I really couldn't speak to every single one on earth. Just the ones I am personally aware of... and without exception, they're all normal natural processes that have been recorded in those regions for as long as we've kept records.
Attributing any known and consistent weather pattern to global warming is dishonest or ignorant. Pick one.
It is like blaming summer on global warming or winter on global cooling. Neither one is valid unless we consider changes in the earth's orbit to be global warming/cooling.
We are probably going to go into an ice age in the next few thousand years. At least, that is what the climate records show... we're due an ice age. When that comes, I hope we have the foresight to pump something into our atmosphere to limit it. Ice ages are a thousand times worse then any of the silly predictions about Global Warming. A Global Ice Age would make much of the world uninhabitable.
Actually, I was born in Los Angeles and have lived there most of my life.
So... you obviously don't know what is obvious... Right?
1. The city didn't have this problem initially. 2. Something obviously changed between point A and point B. 3. What changed?
saying that the only solution is to turn LA into New York is not helpful. What will happen is that you'll just increase density PERIOD. The commute distances will remain an issue. Look at New York. Do people commute from New Jeresy and the outer burrows? Yes. So increasing density does not stop long commute distances.
However, if you limit density, then there can only be so many offices etc in a given area. Which means at a certain point only so many people could possibly commute there. Which ultimately limits how much of that happens. Increasing density will first and foremost increase it in the areas where we have the most commuting which will make the problem worse.
You increase the density, and the roads will become non-functional. We'll need to have massive mass transit just to keep pace. And that will not fix the issue with the roads. They'll be more clogged then ever. Look at New York with their congestion taxes. What you'll instead have done is created a lot of additional density that can only be serviced by massive cattle car transit systems. But the underlying issue of having too many people commute will not have been addressed.
Urban sprawl if managed properly avoids this issue by not pushing things to that point. You have a general background commute pattern with some choke points that need to be expanded into proper arteries. But web itself is entirely healthy if density is controlled.
Keeping all buildings under 3 stories is a good start. Will people commute still? Sure... but you're not going to have a skyscraper worth of people commute to a 3 story office building.
LA didn't have this problem in the past. The problem has gone up as density has increased beyond what a city of its civic design can handle.
LA is not New York. There is more then one way to design a city. LA is entirely viable at specific density levels.
The other big problem in LA is that commute distances have increased as the city has stratified. We have segements on the west side that are very economically prosperous and lots of people work there because the owners of the companies tend to live there. But the workers often have to travel from the Valley. And that means going through the pass. Everyone that commutes from the Valley to the West Side has to drive over the pass every day twice. And that is a fucking a problem.
The city used to have lower density and much shorter commute distances.
Ideally, the city should zone to restore that balance.
... Block off one side of effected streets turning them into cul de sacs. Additionally, put up a sign at the entry of the cul de sac that makes it clear that there is no passage through that neighborhood.
If there is only one way in and out of a given street then people won't use it to pass through.
The real issue in Los Angeles though is that the population density is too high. Their transit system can't handle it.
The easy solution is to make highrise apartment and office buildings illegal through zoning. Grand father existing structures of course... but when new construction happens, make it clear that it cannot exceed a certain height. Do that and the density is capped. And if you keep the density capped then you won't need to build subway systems etc to handle over development.
Appreciate, LA already has water and power issues. Their infrastructure in general is not keeping pace. The city does not have the schools, the water, the power, the roads, the buses, the subways, the airports, etc to handle what it already has. It is failing to meet demand as anyone can tell you that uses LA resources.
Cap the density at what civic resources are currently providing and only increase that cap when all relevant resources can meet the new demand. A trick they like to play is "projecting" resource expansions in the future and uncapping expansion now to make use of that projected expansion. Then they don't invest the money to build what they projected they'd build.
So don't base anything on projections. Base it on what things are now.
We don't need money spent on propaganda on either side or on AGW research.
Both are wastes of money. Let me walk that back a bit... I am not saying we should have ZERO research into AGW, but that the money being spent on it annually is already counter productive. Scale it down to what we spend studying the moon or something. Enough that serious scientists can keep the lights on and do their work. But not so much that you can build universities on the backs of the research or that the money literally perverts the entire academic institution. You must appreciate that if you throw enough money at something the money distorts everyone's perceptions on that issue. We have too much money spent on AGW research as it is... it is distorting things.
What should we spent the money on instead? Technology and engineering.
Stop giving money to activists, politicians, and even scientists. Give the money instead to engineers and companies capable of actually DOING something.
That is, stop giving the money to people that TALK and start giving money to people that DO.
Energy storage is a big issue. I'd throw a lot of money at that. Investments... not loans. When you throw money at the scientists, politicians, or activists... are they ever required to pay it back? Nope. Only industry has to deal with that. Every other recipiant just gets a check they cash with no strings attached. What green energy and industry needed was not loans. The loans destroyed a few good companies. Solyndra for example could have been awesome. But the federal government killed them. We had all these wonderful US green energy companies and the US federal government went through them and strangled them all in their cribs. Why? Because they were given very large loans that they couldn't possibly repay given current economic conditions. And so the federal government foreclosed on them. What fledgling businesses need is not loans but investment. Buy their stock. Or just as important, maybe give them tax breaks or exemptions from all sorts of things that make it hard to do business in the US.
Do something so they can build for you.
FDR ran into this issue at the start of the US war effort in WW2. He had applied all sorts of controls on US industry that was making it impossible for them to do their jobs. They told him "if you want smooth and reliable war production then you need to take your boot off our necks."... and because he had no choice... FDR complied. US war production skyrocketed and US industry stayed high after the war into the 50's largely because the government is slow and didn't start fucking with industry again until the 60s... and as we all know... by the 70's US industry started to have problems. A lot of this has to do with foreign competition etc undercutting US market dominance. But a significant amount of it was also changes to the regulatory environment which undermined US industry.
The point is, if you want people to build a new and better future for you... you are going to need to respect that producing things is hard and fucking with the people that do it is not in your interest.
If you want solar panels on every roof. If you want coal to become obsolete. If you want everyone to go around in electric cars... we can do these things. Stop fucking with the people that build things or they won't build things.
I try to have original thinking on things. There is no thought but original thought. Which is not to say that other people might not have had the same idea, but rather that I personally came up with these solutions independently.
As to crypto marxism, it is not authoritarianism that gives them away as being marxists. It is rather their thought process on market economics. Their thinking is very distinctive of Marxist thinking. Marxism for example, believes in STATIC economies. That is, if you pull a tile out of the jenga tower which is any economy, they tend to believe that the tower will stay just as it was absent that tile. Allowing them to put the tile they just took out of the tower and place it where ever they want or simply remove it from the game.
That sort of thinking is specific to marxism which literally teaches economic processes in this fashion. It is why Marxists are so often blindsided by market reactions to their policies because they don't believe markets react. They will of course rhetorically say that of course they do... but when you look at their polices, they all inherently assume static market conditions. That they can change a given variable in the economy and that everything else won't adjust to compensate for those changes.
Markets are dynamic. They are like water. They flow. They seek equilibrium. They have ripples and waves... there are splashes and little droplets of money may take some time to run down the walls on occasion. But they always seek equilibrium. Change anything and you change everything.
As to crypto marxists not being a relevant portion of the environmental movement, then most policies wouldn't focus on centralizing industrial power in government hands, redistributing wealth, and generally undoing the industrial revolution. They also would have some inkling that the economy is a dynamic entity and not a block of wood.
Wrong. That is showing you market forces in action.
What this makes clear is that google is vital for their online advertising which by the way google is not charging them for... are they?
The small sites knew that the advertising was worth more then the google news clicks. And so didn't try to piss google off.
The big sites were probably older media institutions and not terrbly internet savvy. And they clearly didn't understand how important google was to them. So they shot themselves in the foot and now understand something the small media outlets knew all along.
They are all small fish. The entire government of Spain apparently needs to learn this lesson as well.
There are many international spanish sites that will provide spanish speakers with international news. And probably more then a few of them reprint stories from spanish papers that are not especially credited.
Which puts the spanish papers in spain in the same position they're in now. Only now, their readers won't even know the link feeds are coming from their papers.
If I were spanish media, I'd register some alternate domains outside Spain and have them host all directed to their site. Anything to get google to relist them.
I don't need to get literally every single person on board. Just enough to make hawking people down unproductive.
What you're saying is that there will only be a couple people using private encryption. Utter nonsense. We have more then that already. Are they going to call us all terrorists, stack us up against the wall, and shoot us? Hardly.
Listen, I don't quite understand where you're going with your argument? Are you saying we're all doomed?
Things change.
And things remain the same.
And the more they change... they more they stay the same.
What are you witnessing is the ancient struggle between order and chaos. The battle between authoritarianism autocracy and wild savage barbarism. It never ends. It never will end. Neither side will ever give up and neither side cares
Do you think that fascism will take total endless control and the forces of chaos will be crushed to never rise again?
Come now.
Neither side ever wins the war. Battles they win... and battles they lose. Back and forth for time out of mind.
The forces of order want to monitor all communications in the 21st century despite a rapidly decentralizing network and personal processing and encryption power expanding exponentially. I frankly doubt their ability to maintain that position.
You might be right... maybe the forces of chaos won't do what I think they'll do... but you're wrong if you think the war is over.
It never ends. Chaos will strike back... and order will strike back at chaos... back and forth forever more.
Learn to go with the ebb and flow. It will be okay. The forces of chaos are not without resources.
It never stops. But then they're fighting something they can't control so it doesn't really matter.
Only when the information goes through known centrally controlled choke points where the encryption keys are known can they get away with this nonsense.
Change any of those variables and the system collapses.
Move the information through decentralized points and they can't monitor them all.
Move them through unknown centrally controlled choke points and they can't get access.
Prevent them from getting access to the encryption keys and it becomes too expensive to actually monitor everything.
Anything changes and they can't control it.
I personally am a fan of shifting everything to a P2P system. Why do I need the cloud when what I really want is to have people find data I want the to find or find data I want to find. No reason I can't host all that myself. How many people check my data? I have about 20 megabits up on my current connection. more then enough to host personal pictures, calenders, run a personal voip system, etc. I don't need the cloud. My systems are powerful enough to host everything I need for myself.
All I need is the software. Simple. A raspberry pi running myCloud offers me most of what I need. I don't need cloud email. I can host it myself.
if everyone does this then they have to grab the information using man in the middle attacks. No databases to search. And that will make it a lot harder for them to search in and of itself. If we use private encryption then they're done.
I know of several VOIP programs that use excellent encryption which is all handled client side. The server decrypts nothing of significance.
... back to some radical islamic mosque with some nutbar cleric preaching death against the people that built the society he intentionally decided to live in.
Ultimately, that should be the focus. Expose those guys. Hang them out so everyone knows who they are and what they're saying. If everyone knows, then we should see these guys coming.
You didn't ask google or negotiate with google. Your government said they'd use their state agencies to cease google assets or go through international diplomatic channels to cease google assets unless google started paying you money.
Google responded by taking that power away from you by shutting down all excuses you would have to use such powers.
Quid pro quo.
This for that.
Action = Reaction.
What needs to be walked back is the Spanish law or attempt to make google pay. If you want google to do some sort of ad revenue sharing or whatever... then have that discussion. But ultimately, if they don't want to pay you... then at the end of the day you're either going to have to accept that google considers the money they get from ad traffic to be all theirs... period... or that you're going to have make a viable internet business without google's help.
Choose.
I, like many here, am very supportive of what google has done here not so much because it sticks it to spanish newspapers which I have no opinion on. But rather because it should scare arrogant government ministers into accepting that they actually aren't all powerful.
Similar things happened in Hungry when they tried to take bandwidth. We have these aging institutions that are being bypassed by the internet and they don't like it. Rather then adapt they're just trying to legislate the internet into paying them.
Fuck them. Either join the 21st century or subsist on existing revenue streams.
The media business is very hard these days. Nothing unusual about that. Many US media organizations are going bankrupt. But if you look back in time, you'll see that that isn't that unusual. The media business has always been a tough one. Typically it is dominated by deep pockets that dominate the industry with ruthless powerplays.
... My point was that if they tried it would fall apart and not be sustainable. Your point is that they want to do it and may try at some point in the future.
And was that law passed outlawing on device encryption or are you just showing evidence that law enforcement doesn't like it?
Because I'd like you to show me where I said law enforcement would LIKE unbreakable on device encryption?
I didn't say that.
Here is something you can do that will help you stop strawmanning people. Do not tell other people what their argument is on an issue. Rather, make your argument. When you tell other people what their argument is then you have to be very careful that you accurately and honestly describe their argument. You don't have to do that when you make your own argument. When you speak for yourself, you can say anything. When you try to speak for me, you have to be accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
We've had ice ages with CO2 more then 4 times these levels. So... you're wrong.
Did NYC get submerged by the ocean or are there a lot of idiots on the pro AGW side making fucking stupid predictions?
Rhetorical question. Kindly keep in mind that supporting or criticizing AGW does not decide your intelligence. Rather, it decides your regard for political correctness more then anything.
I'm not going to permit you to strawman me by associating me with someone else I've never read and do not attach myself.
If you want to argue against my position, then argue against my position. Not someone else's position.
As to your statement about commute distances and congestion, that is caused by imbalances between working space and living space.
Rezone portions of areas that suffer too much commuting TO them to be residential and zone areas that suffer too much people commuting FROM them to commercial space. The system will balance out if you keep doing it.
People cannot commute to a place that has no jobs. You cannot have a skyscraper of commuters to a three story office building.
The math is unavoidable.
The issue in Los Angeles, is that you have some very desirable real estate in the west where wealthier people live. They have their businesses there because they don't want to commute that far. Then all their employees have to commute from very far away to go to work every day.
Your solution is to increase density to such a point that their workers can live about as close to the businesses as their bosses.
Well, does that work in New York City or London or Tokyo? Nope. Properly values skyrocket and apartments shrink to the size of closets while commute times and distances tend to remain the same.
Your solution does not solve the problem You've just masked the issue by expanding your problem and necessitating additional infrastructure to compensate for the additional problems your density created.
Consider an alternative approach. What if there is less commercial/office space in the area everyone is commuting to? What if instead of asking the employees to commute to the boss, you instead force the boss to commute to the employees? Instantly the system becomes more sustainable. You reduce office space in areas that have become congestion problems and increase residential space while also keeping an eye on density so that you don't exceed what nearby resources can handle.
I saw both and agree. He seems to have no energy. The Ford spark is not in evidence.
Look at John Wayne's later movies as a counter example. To the day the man died he had the spark. Ford looks like he's guttered out.
Wrong. Transit works everywhere. Massive cattle car transit only works in hyper dense environments... but why is that desirable?
Does massive cattle car transit reduce commute distances? Nope. Commute times? Nope.
So what is the point?
To allow for greater density.
So mass transit is a solution to how to allow for more density but it doesn't actually solve the problem you had before you increased density. That being the commute times and distances which basically remain the same or if anything increase.
Look at the Japanese bullet train as an example. It allows people from the distant suburbs of Tokyo to commute to work every day. But do they get to work faster then people that go to work in Los Angeles? Nope. Takes about the same amount of time.
You're viewing density as an end unto itself which is insane because density is actually very inefficient in many ways. It also has serious political, cultural, and civic drawbacks.
Democracy doesn't really work in major cities. The population is too high. The city employees amongst others tend to own the political system in major cities and not the actual residents who are by and large hostage to the process.
Density made sense in the early 20th century before airplanes and the internet. But today it makes no sense besides offering a superior dating pool for young people. Once you're settled, the urban environment is typically counter to your interests. Which is why most people that are married try to move to the suburbs where they can get a more reasonable environment.
Los Angeles is interesting because it is a major suburban city. It is all sprawl. And the sprawl is beautiful. But for it to work, density has to be controlled and the balance between work space and living space must be kept in balance.
Wrong. If you increase density you will not stop long commuting distances or patterns. Look at any hyper dense city and tell me if there are not commute distances at least as long as you find in Los Angeles?
There are. Increasing density does not solve the problem. The problem is density and an imbalance between office space and living space.
Another idea if you don't like reducing density which is actually required here... but if you don't like that, then another idea is to rezone office buildings into apartment buildings.
In one stroke you reduce the amount of jobs in an area that people can commute to while at the same time increasing the amount of living space. In doing this, you make it impossible for more people to work in that area while making it inevitable that more people will live there. This automatically will reduce the commute issue.
If the system is out of balance, then increasing density will not alleviate it. You fix an out of balance system by balancing it.
First, you balance density by limiting it to what local services can handle. You do not allow density beyond what the roads, water, power, schools, police, etc can handle.
Second, if you have massive commutes, then you reduce office space in areas where people are commuting to and increase residential space... until the system comes into balance.
Balance. It requires wisdom, discipline, and patience. Just increasing density infinitely is moronic.
Wrong. Increasing density does not reduce commute distances. People commute from long distances in very dense cities. Look at Tokyo or New York City. You have people commuting to work in both of those cities from at least as far as you have them commuting in Los Angeles.
All increasing density does is require the construction of massive cattle car transit systems. And these do not aliviate the road situation. The roads if anything become more congested as the congestion taxes prove. However, you now have an additional problem on top of that because you are now also utterly dependent on an additional transit system.
Reducing density reduces the number of people that can commute to a given area. You can't have a skyscraper worth of people commuting to a three story office building.
What is more, you can also zone existing commercial space to residential/apartment space. If I turn an office building into an apartment, then you're not going to have people commuting to that office building... and now a big building exists that can sell apartment space. Two birds with one stone.
Increasing density does not solve the problem. It makes it worse. IF you have too many people commuting to an area, then either reduce the size of existing office building permits or rezone existing office space to apartments to shift the balance to something more healthy. Keep doing that until the commuting patterns become more reasonable.
The california drought for example is a well known weather pattern. We get that drought every couple decades and always have.
Last time was in the 1970s. It is difficult to link because natural forces are actually the cause of that drought.
As to other droughts, I really couldn't speak to every single one on earth. Just the ones I am personally aware of... and without exception, they're all normal natural processes that have been recorded in those regions for as long as we've kept records.
Attributing any known and consistent weather pattern to global warming is dishonest or ignorant. Pick one.
It is like blaming summer on global warming or winter on global cooling. Neither one is valid unless we consider changes in the earth's orbit to be global warming/cooling.
We are probably going to go into an ice age in the next few thousand years. At least, that is what the climate records show... we're due an ice age. When that comes, I hope we have the foresight to pump something into our atmosphere to limit it. Ice ages are a thousand times worse then any of the silly predictions about Global Warming. A Global Ice Age would make much of the world uninhabitable.
Actually, I was born in Los Angeles and have lived there most of my life.
So... you obviously don't know what is obvious... Right?
1. The city didn't have this problem initially.
2. Something obviously changed between point A and point B.
3. What changed?
saying that the only solution is to turn LA into New York is not helpful. What will happen is that you'll just increase density PERIOD. The commute distances will remain an issue. Look at New York. Do people commute from New Jeresy and the outer burrows? Yes. So increasing density does not stop long commute distances.
However, if you limit density, then there can only be so many offices etc in a given area. Which means at a certain point only so many people could possibly commute there. Which ultimately limits how much of that happens. Increasing density will first and foremost increase it in the areas where we have the most commuting which will make the problem worse.
You increase the density, and the roads will become non-functional. We'll need to have massive mass transit just to keep pace. And that will not fix the issue with the roads. They'll be more clogged then ever. Look at New York with their congestion taxes. What you'll instead have done is created a lot of additional density that can only be serviced by massive cattle car transit systems. But the underlying issue of having too many people commute will not have been addressed.
Urban sprawl if managed properly avoids this issue by not pushing things to that point. You have a general background commute pattern with some choke points that need to be expanded into proper arteries. But web itself is entirely healthy if density is controlled.
Keeping all buildings under 3 stories is a good start. Will people commute still? Sure... but you're not going to have a skyscraper worth of people commute to a 3 story office building.
LA didn't have this problem in the past. The problem has gone up as density has increased beyond what a city of its civic design can handle.
LA is not New York. There is more then one way to design a city. LA is entirely viable at specific density levels.
The other big problem in LA is that commute distances have increased as the city has stratified. We have segements on the west side that are very economically prosperous and lots of people work there because the owners of the companies tend to live there. But the workers often have to travel from the Valley. And that means going through the pass. Everyone that commutes from the Valley to the West Side has to drive over the pass every day twice. And that is a fucking a problem.
The city used to have lower density and much shorter commute distances.
Ideally, the city should zone to restore that balance.
... Block off one side of effected streets turning them into cul de sacs. Additionally, put up a sign at the entry of the cul de sac that makes it clear that there is no passage through that neighborhood.
If there is only one way in and out of a given street then people won't use it to pass through.
The real issue in Los Angeles though is that the population density is too high. Their transit system can't handle it.
The easy solution is to make highrise apartment and office buildings illegal through zoning. Grand father existing structures of course... but when new construction happens, make it clear that it cannot exceed a certain height. Do that and the density is capped. And if you keep the density capped then you won't need to build subway systems etc to handle over development.
Appreciate, LA already has water and power issues. Their infrastructure in general is not keeping pace. The city does not have the schools, the water, the power, the roads, the buses, the subways, the airports, etc to handle what it already has. It is failing to meet demand as anyone can tell you that uses LA resources.
Cap the density at what civic resources are currently providing and only increase that cap when all relevant resources can meet the new demand. A trick they like to play is "projecting" resource expansions in the future and uncapping expansion now to make use of that projected expansion. Then they don't invest the money to build what they projected they'd build.
So don't base anything on projections. Base it on what things are now.
We don't need money spent on propaganda on either side or on AGW research.
Both are wastes of money. Let me walk that back a bit... I am not saying we should have ZERO research into AGW, but that the money being spent on it annually is already counter productive. Scale it down to what we spend studying the moon or something. Enough that serious scientists can keep the lights on and do their work. But not so much that you can build universities on the backs of the research or that the money literally perverts the entire academic institution. You must appreciate that if you throw enough money at something the money distorts everyone's perceptions on that issue. We have too much money spent on AGW research as it is... it is distorting things.
What should we spent the money on instead? Technology and engineering.
Stop giving money to activists, politicians, and even scientists. Give the money instead to engineers and companies capable of actually DOING something.
That is, stop giving the money to people that TALK and start giving money to people that DO.
Energy storage is a big issue. I'd throw a lot of money at that. Investments... not loans. When you throw money at the scientists, politicians, or activists... are they ever required to pay it back? Nope. Only industry has to deal with that. Every other recipiant just gets a check they cash with no strings attached. What green energy and industry needed was not loans. The loans destroyed a few good companies. Solyndra for example could have been awesome. But the federal government killed them. We had all these wonderful US green energy companies and the US federal government went through them and strangled them all in their cribs. Why? Because they were given very large loans that they couldn't possibly repay given current economic conditions. And so the federal government foreclosed on them. What fledgling businesses need is not loans but investment. Buy their stock. Or just as important, maybe give them tax breaks or exemptions from all sorts of things that make it hard to do business in the US.
Do something so they can build for you.
FDR ran into this issue at the start of the US war effort in WW2. He had applied all sorts of controls on US industry that was making it impossible for them to do their jobs. They told him "if you want smooth and reliable war production then you need to take your boot off our necks."... and because he had no choice... FDR complied. US war production skyrocketed and US industry stayed high after the war into the 50's largely because the government is slow and didn't start fucking with industry again until the 60s... and as we all know... by the 70's US industry started to have problems. A lot of this has to do with foreign competition etc undercutting US market dominance. But a significant amount of it was also changes to the regulatory environment which undermined US industry.
The point is, if you want people to build a new and better future for you... you are going to need to respect that producing things is hard and fucking with the people that do it is not in your interest.
If you want solar panels on every roof. If you want coal to become obsolete. If you want everyone to go around in electric cars... we can do these things. Stop fucking with the people that build things or they won't build things.
In regards to having solutions. I said I had them at the bottom and I did explain them roughly to some other people:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I try to have original thinking on things. There is no thought but original thought. Which is not to say that other people might not have had the same idea, but rather that I personally came up with these solutions independently.
As to crypto marxism, it is not authoritarianism that gives them away as being marxists. It is rather their thought process on market economics. Their thinking is very distinctive of Marxist thinking. Marxism for example, believes in STATIC economies. That is, if you pull a tile out of the jenga tower which is any economy, they tend to believe that the tower will stay just as it was absent that tile. Allowing them to put the tile they just took out of the tower and place it where ever they want or simply remove it from the game.
That sort of thinking is specific to marxism which literally teaches economic processes in this fashion. It is why Marxists are so often blindsided by market reactions to their policies because they don't believe markets react. They will of course rhetorically say that of course they do... but when you look at their polices, they all inherently assume static market conditions. That they can change a given variable in the economy and that everything else won't adjust to compensate for those changes.
Markets are dynamic. They are like water. They flow. They seek equilibrium. They have ripples and waves... there are splashes and little droplets of money may take some time to run down the walls on occasion. But they always seek equilibrium. Change anything and you change everything.
As to crypto marxists not being a relevant portion of the environmental movement, then most policies wouldn't focus on centralizing industrial power in government hands, redistributing wealth, and generally undoing the industrial revolution. They also would have some inkling that the economy is a dynamic entity and not a block of wood.
Wrong. That is showing you market forces in action.
What this makes clear is that google is vital for their online advertising which by the way google is not charging them for... are they?
The small sites knew that the advertising was worth more then the google news clicks. And so didn't try to piss google off.
The big sites were probably older media institutions and not terrbly internet savvy. And they clearly didn't understand how important google was to them. So they shot themselves in the foot and now understand something the small media outlets knew all along.
They are all small fish. The entire government of Spain apparently needs to learn this lesson as well.
There are many international spanish sites that will provide spanish speakers with international news. And probably more then a few of them reprint stories from spanish papers that are not especially credited.
Which puts the spanish papers in spain in the same position they're in now. Only now, their readers won't even know the link feeds are coming from their papers.
If I were spanish media, I'd register some alternate domains outside Spain and have them host all directed to their site. Anything to get google to relist them.
There is no evidence for any of your claims. That is chicken little hysteria.
Were this a 1950's science fiction movie... you'd be getting slapped by the protagonist and told to control yourself.
I don't need to get literally every single person on board. Just enough to make hawking people down unproductive.
What you're saying is that there will only be a couple people using private encryption. Utter nonsense. We have more then that already. Are they going to call us all terrorists, stack us up against the wall, and shoot us? Hardly.
Listen, I don't quite understand where you're going with your argument? Are you saying we're all doomed?
Things change.
And things remain the same.
And the more they change... they more they stay the same.
What are you witnessing is the ancient struggle between order and chaos. The battle between authoritarianism autocracy and wild savage barbarism. It never ends. It never will end. Neither side will ever give up and neither side cares
Do you think that fascism will take total endless control and the forces of chaos will be crushed to never rise again?
Come now.
Neither side ever wins the war. Battles they win... and battles they lose. Back and forth for time out of mind.
The forces of order want to monitor all communications in the 21st century despite a rapidly decentralizing network and personal processing and encryption power expanding exponentially. I frankly doubt their ability to maintain that position.
You might be right... maybe the forces of chaos won't do what I think they'll do... but you're wrong if you think the war is over.
It never ends. Chaos will strike back... and order will strike back at chaos... back and forth forever more.
Learn to go with the ebb and flow. It will be okay. The forces of chaos are not without resources.
It never stops. But then they're fighting something they can't control so it doesn't really matter.
Only when the information goes through known centrally controlled choke points where the encryption keys are known can they get away with this nonsense.
Change any of those variables and the system collapses.
Move the information through decentralized points and they can't monitor them all.
Move them through unknown centrally controlled choke points and they can't get access.
Prevent them from getting access to the encryption keys and it becomes too expensive to actually monitor everything.
Anything changes and they can't control it.
I personally am a fan of shifting everything to a P2P system. Why do I need the cloud when what I really want is to have people find data I want the to find or find data I want to find. No reason I can't host all that myself. How many people check my data? I have about 20 megabits up on my current connection. more then enough to host personal pictures, calenders, run a personal voip system, etc. I don't need the cloud. My systems are powerful enough to host everything I need for myself.
All I need is the software. Simple. A raspberry pi running myCloud offers me most of what I need. I don't need cloud email. I can host it myself.
if everyone does this then they have to grab the information using man in the middle attacks. No databases to search. And that will make it a lot harder for them to search in and of itself. If we use private encryption then they're done.
I know of several VOIP programs that use excellent encryption which is all handled client side. The server decrypts nothing of significance.
... back to some radical islamic mosque with some nutbar cleric preaching death against the people that built the society he intentionally decided to live in.
Ultimately, that should be the focus. Expose those guys. Hang them out so everyone knows who they are and what they're saying. If everyone knows, then we should see these guys coming.
What are you referring to?
Sigh... Tragedy of the social media age. Just enough contact to get validation but not enough to pay for my hookers and booze. :'(
Then having been denied an ability to negotiate the contract, google is doing the right thing by shutting down operations in that market.
When they're ready to be reasonable they can enjoy being linked again.
Why?
How about this...
Google agrees to not list anything a site has on google news unless they sign a EULA or whatever that says google isn't going to pay them for it.
Then individual news outlets can individually choose if they want to be listed or want to be ignored.
There you go. Problem solved.
You didn't ask google or negotiate with google. Your government said they'd use their state agencies to cease google assets or go through international diplomatic channels to cease google assets unless google started paying you money.
Google responded by taking that power away from you by shutting down all excuses you would have to use such powers.
Quid pro quo.
This for that.
Action = Reaction.
What needs to be walked back is the Spanish law or attempt to make google pay. If you want google to do some sort of ad revenue sharing or whatever... then have that discussion. But ultimately, if they don't want to pay you... then at the end of the day you're either going to have to accept that google considers the money they get from ad traffic to be all theirs... period... or that you're going to have make a viable internet business without google's help.
Choose.
I, like many here, am very supportive of what google has done here not so much because it sticks it to spanish newspapers which I have no opinion on. But rather because it should scare arrogant government ministers into accepting that they actually aren't all powerful.
Similar things happened in Hungry when they tried to take bandwidth. We have these aging institutions that are being bypassed by the internet and they don't like it. Rather then adapt they're just trying to legislate the internet into paying them.
Fuck them. Either join the 21st century or subsist on existing revenue streams.
The media business is very hard these days. Nothing unusual about that. Many US media organizations are going bankrupt. But if you look back in time, you'll see that that isn't that unusual. The media business has always been a tough one. Typically it is dominated by deep pockets that dominate the industry with ruthless powerplays.
We'll see where it goes.
... My point was that if they tried it would fall apart and not be sustainable. Your point is that they want to do it and may try at some point in the future.
Our points are not in conflict.
And was that law passed outlawing on device encryption or are you just showing evidence that law enforcement doesn't like it?
Because I'd like you to show me where I said law enforcement would LIKE unbreakable on device encryption?
I didn't say that.
Here is something you can do that will help you stop strawmanning people. Do not tell other people what their argument is on an issue. Rather, make your argument. When you tell other people what their argument is then you have to be very careful that you accurately and honestly describe their argument. You don't have to do that when you make your own argument. When you speak for yourself, you can say anything. When you try to speak for me, you have to be accurate.