you do it by aggressively enforcing an urban growth boundary, artificially increasing housing prices inside the area and artificially keeping farmland outside it intact. At least that's how Oregon has been doing it. I don't know how all the other countries are doing it.
Hmm, interesting... Loundoun County VA sort of does a similar thing with farmland or at least expansive ranch style housing. It's just pushed people farther out into the exurbs, some commuting from West Virginia now where lots of medium-dense cookie-cutter mcmansion and townhouse communities are springing up in the wilderness. Everyone is squeezed through the toll road that goes by the airport and funnels into a long congested tech corridor towards the city through Tyson's Corner, which is the current poster child for how not to do car-centric, unwalkable development. But the traffic in that monstrous office park finally got so notorious that they're finally spending a fortune extending the DC Metro to it (and onwards toward Dulles Airport, and the current population explosion around it).
but only because I realized that I need to plug it in to charge.
I had to turn the vibrator ring off. I started feeling vibrations (sometimes muscle spasms) even when I didn't have my phone on me. Now if there was only some way to work that into some sort of autoeroticism product you could sell to the masses... that'd be some form of nirvana.
Yes, the suburbs are a better value, if you don't take all of the transportation costs into account (e.g. someone else pays for all the highways and infrastructure).
I live in the DC metro area, so there are lots of people who live way the hell off in the exurbs because they won't fit in any of the crappy suburbs - acres of garden-style apartments and townhouses with low noise insulation. There are pockets of way expensive "normal" suburbs and high rises maybe like you're envisioning, but those are way way more expensive than they ought to be... that probably shouldn't be the case, and it seems like that should be easy to fix with your econ 101 theory.
Actually, that's pretty much what a lot of other countries are doing (including many of the counties around here)... building lots of affordable high rises, with nearby parks and facilities so people don't get that crowded dirty city feeling. It's more of an architectural / landscaping problem, to increase density without introducing too many negative side effects. Sure it's easy to get wrong, but people are coping without having to run for the hills.
The US is not like other countries. Our sprawl creates a lot of inefficiency which makes it difficult to compete in a global economy, which helps jobs migrate overseas. We can do better.
Meh, I think it's kinda absurd that everyone would live in a contiguous suburban metropolitan complex that extends from Virginia to Maine, and commute an hour each way to work, and consume 20-40 gallons of gas a week between two vehicles just to keep up with the nominal pace of life. Yet here we are.
It's kinda sad that people haven't really figured out how to get along in close proximity with each other, that we've kind of moved from huts and even row houses to single family detached homes with picket fences, and we still sick the HOA on each other at every opportunity. But that's a political problem, and one that probably deserves a political solution, or better yet a diplomatic one (does anyone even do diplomacy these days? or is that considered "weak"?).
Anyway, this whole suburban sprawl problem was more or less inadvertently created by the Eisenhower Interstate System anyway, where it made it cheaper to build out instead of up. So everyone who could afford to (by all this new infrastructure) left the city for the rolling meadows (clear-cutting the trees and naming the streets after them when necessary) the US cities were kinda left to rot and decay. But the city still has the draw of industry and business around what little pieces of "cultural" core remained, maybe surrounded by a few layers of impoverished neighborhoods that couldn't make the rush and were abandoned by the more affluent tax base. And now that the interstates are clogged up (including all of the extra "interstates" they built to deal with the extra rush-hour-only load), the problem is finally bad enough for people to start successfully promoting "smart growth" initiatives, where population centers build up around mass transit instead of out.
In any case, I think the problem is more about how we build our living/working arrangements, rather than our transportation system (which had no small part in determining how our living/working arrangements got so screwed up in the first place). But tweaking the transportation system probably isn't going to directly address the real problem of being too spread out and wasting too much resources and energy crossing acres of dull suburban wasteland to get to the few places worth going to.
From the summary: "The mileage tax is being considered instead of an increase in the gas tax in order to tax hybrids, EVs, and conventional automobiles equally."
Yeah, that part doesn't make so much sense... the heavy vehicles are the ones that create most of the wear and tear on the infrastructure. You could probably have a thousand passenger cars drive by and still not cause as much strain as a single loaded 18-wheeler:-P
So, um, how are they going to split that between county, state, and federally-funded roads?
Infrastructure is infrastructure. Everyone benefits from having it. Putting this kind of administrative overhead on it just makes it more expensive *and* takes away the benefit.
I think the real problem is that people mostly can't afford to live close to where they work. This leads to a lot of inefficiency, as they waste lots of time and energy driving back and forth from their cheap suburbs to the higher rent districts that pay just barely enough to survive if you live a neighborhood a tier or two away. Relatively cheap transportation sorta creates this situation, but there has got to be better ways to solve this than by making transportation more expensive with all of this metering equipment.
Make cities denser, cheaper, more accessible to families with better schools & playgrounds, etc. Get rid of suburban sprawl by zoning more parks and greenways. Maybe build some summer cottages / timeshares so people can still get away "to the country". Done! All the other countries are doing it:-P
Good catch, but still doesn't look like the correct photo was used. The articles describe the Iranian device as a quad rotor... that stock picture of the DraganFlyer X6 has 6 rotors.
Do you metamoderate? I usually get my 5 or 15 shortly after doing so.
I don't really care about moderation, though, it's such a chore. And I usually browse at -1 anyway, so no one else's moderation really impacts me either.
Yep, my $400 G-Tablet pretty much runs circles around my $400 eeePC 901 (granted, the latter is a few years old now). It can play flash videos in fullscreen without stuttering. It connects to wifi faster. I can plug in external storage.
I can even plug in a cheap USB keyboard and do "real work" on it.
Heh, I was inspired by an article somewhere on a large family of 7 or something that lived off a small $40k budget or so with the help of a deep freezer.
It was more efficient than most upright fridges, so they could stock up on lots of bulk meat. They would cook once for a few days and deep freeze the servings in tupperware.
Sure, frozen and thawed food doesn't taste as good. But you don't get rich by living rich:-P
Most developed countries have negative population growth already (hell, Russia has this big campaign and incentives to try to increase their population). The developing world is getting their birth rate under control. The problem just exists in impoverished areas, even poor areas in developed nations.
The key is paradoxically improving health and welfare to reduce the infant mortality rate. If people's children are more likely to survive, then they can invest more resources into a few offspring rather than taking the shotgun approach and pumping out lots of children with the hopes that a couple might survive to adulthood.
I don't seem population stability as a big problem... education and poverty are.
I'm more concerned about evolution of the species. With advances in health and medicine, natural selection has pretty much stopped in the human race. I think it will be much more challenging to figure out how to reapply selective pressures to a population than it is to figure out how to keep a population stable.
Yeah, I really miss Jamie Lee Curtis. She had some awesome T-Mobile ads. Like that one where her convertible breaks down in the middle of the desert, and she whips out her phone... and proceeds to nonchalantly call a friend to chat while she grabs a wrench and fixes up the engine herself.
Oh, wait, do you mean the young bimbo they replaced her with to try to target the "younger" crowd? That one that married that old geezer? Whatever.
Heh, DUH is so old that Scott Adams' page on it doesn't even exist anymore! Though he still seems to be working with an architect to actually build it.
Two dishwashers isn't really all that wasteful, depending on how balanced you are with your dish set. You have one set of dishes that fits exactly in one dishwasher, and a flag or spinner that marks one of them as the receiver for dirty dishes. You try to use as many of the dishes as you can before you run out of one thing or another, and then you run the dirty dishwasher and it becomes the clean one. Sure, there might be a few things clean things left in the new "dirty" washer, but it doesn't really hurt to wash them again, and if you only had 1 dishwasher you'd be washing your dishes at this point anyway. And it's not like you'd be using the space for something else unless you went out and bought more dishes you didn't need for some silly reason. Oh, and I suppose if you were really dedicated, you could even move the handful of remaining clean dishes over to the new clean washer after it's finished.
Sure it takes some discipline, but that's part of what engineers do. Certainly doesn't take much more discipline than what you or I currently do to optimally load our single dishwashers, and it actually has some more pronounced time savings.
Word. The space shuttle program has basically been bleeding the rest of NASA's budgets dry, due to international contracts to deliver stuff to the ISS.
And the ISS was basically created to give the space shuttle something to do.
Now that the ISS is finally more or less complete, the shuttle's job is finished so it can now retire. And NASA is going to finally have a substantial budget to reallocate towards other cool stuff (assuming it doesn't get completely eviscerated for other things).
And while it pains me that the Constellation program is in some sort of limbo, hopefully it will help kill off the corporate welfare contracts to a lot of companies that supplied shuttle parts, and were forcing the Constellation design to reuse things it probably could do better without, like the solid rocket boosters.
Hmm, I was actually thinking of getting a Zune HD in order to use it to receive HD radio broadcasts from home and in the car. Most of the other receivers I'd seen were pretty expensive. Any good alternatives there?
Still, disappointed that our local NPR station considers most of their programming "talk radio", so Prarie Home Companion and This American Life play in low bitrate mono. FM sounds much better with the handful of shows that would make me actually want to upgrade to HD radio:-P
Hell, it seems like all decent dreaming about the future occurred in the 70s. I remember looking for something to show my kids a positive view of the future. I ended up buying the same old Neil Ardley "The World of Tomorrow" books from libraries that were getting rid of them.
And yet of all the neat ideas presented in that series, it seems like the only thing that has actually come to pass in the last 30 years were the double-decker airlines.
Slashdot Mirror
...but how 'ya gonna keep 'em down on the Engineering farm after they've seen Wall Street?
Give them the opportunity to change the world.
Well, that approach apparently works with business guys as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sculley#1983.E2.80.9393:_Sculley_at_Apple
Didn't work out so well at the end, though, he left Apple and got into politics :P
you do it by aggressively enforcing an urban growth boundary, artificially increasing housing prices inside the area and artificially keeping farmland outside it intact. At least that's how Oregon has been doing it. I don't know how all the other countries are doing it.
Hmm, interesting... Loundoun County VA sort of does a similar thing with farmland or at least expansive ranch style housing. It's just pushed people farther out into the exurbs, some commuting from West Virginia now where lots of medium-dense cookie-cutter mcmansion and townhouse communities are springing up in the wilderness. Everyone is squeezed through the toll road that goes by the airport and funnels into a long congested tech corridor towards the city through Tyson's Corner, which is the current poster child for how not to do car-centric, unwalkable development. But the traffic in that monstrous office park finally got so notorious that they're finally spending a fortune extending the DC Metro to it (and onwards toward Dulles Airport, and the current population explosion around it).
but only because I realized that I need to plug it in to charge.
I had to turn the vibrator ring off. I started feeling vibrations (sometimes muscle spasms) even when I didn't have my phone on me. Now if there was only some way to work that into some sort of autoeroticism product you could sell to the masses... that'd be some form of nirvana.
Yes, the suburbs are a better value, if you don't take all of the transportation costs into account (e.g. someone else pays for all the highways and infrastructure).
I live in the DC metro area, so there are lots of people who live way the hell off in the exurbs because they won't fit in any of the crappy suburbs - acres of garden-style apartments and townhouses with low noise insulation. There are pockets of way expensive "normal" suburbs and high rises maybe like you're envisioning, but those are way way more expensive than they ought to be... that probably shouldn't be the case, and it seems like that should be easy to fix with your econ 101 theory.
Actually, that's pretty much what a lot of other countries are doing (including many of the counties around here)... building lots of affordable high rises, with nearby parks and facilities so people don't get that crowded dirty city feeling. It's more of an architectural / landscaping problem, to increase density without introducing too many negative side effects. Sure it's easy to get wrong, but people are coping without having to run for the hills.
The US is not like other countries. Our sprawl creates a lot of inefficiency which makes it difficult to compete in a global economy, which helps jobs migrate overseas. We can do better.
Meh, I think it's kinda absurd that everyone would live in a contiguous suburban metropolitan complex that extends from Virginia to Maine, and commute an hour each way to work, and consume 20-40 gallons of gas a week between two vehicles just to keep up with the nominal pace of life. Yet here we are.
It's kinda sad that people haven't really figured out how to get along in close proximity with each other, that we've kind of moved from huts and even row houses to single family detached homes with picket fences, and we still sick the HOA on each other at every opportunity. But that's a political problem, and one that probably deserves a political solution, or better yet a diplomatic one (does anyone even do diplomacy these days? or is that considered "weak"?).
Anyway, this whole suburban sprawl problem was more or less inadvertently created by the Eisenhower Interstate System anyway, where it made it cheaper to build out instead of up. So everyone who could afford to (by all this new infrastructure) left the city for the rolling meadows (clear-cutting the trees and naming the streets after them when necessary) the US cities were kinda left to rot and decay. But the city still has the draw of industry and business around what little pieces of "cultural" core remained, maybe surrounded by a few layers of impoverished neighborhoods that couldn't make the rush and were abandoned by the more affluent tax base. And now that the interstates are clogged up (including all of the extra "interstates" they built to deal with the extra rush-hour-only load), the problem is finally bad enough for people to start successfully promoting "smart growth" initiatives, where population centers build up around mass transit instead of out.
In any case, I think the problem is more about how we build our living/working arrangements, rather than our transportation system (which had no small part in determining how our living/working arrangements got so screwed up in the first place). But tweaking the transportation system probably isn't going to directly address the real problem of being too spread out and wasting too much resources and energy crossing acres of dull suburban wasteland to get to the few places worth going to.
If all the other countries were jumping off of bridges would you do it?
Is it one of those under-maintained bridges in Minnesota ? ^_^
From the summary:
"The mileage tax is being considered instead of an increase in the gas tax in order to tax hybrids, EVs, and conventional automobiles equally."
Yeah, that part doesn't make so much sense... the heavy vehicles are the ones that create most of the wear and tear on the infrastructure. You could probably have a thousand passenger cars drive by and still not cause as much strain as a single loaded 18-wheeler :-P
So, um, how are they going to split that between county, state, and federally-funded roads?
Infrastructure is infrastructure. Everyone benefits from having it. Putting this kind of administrative overhead on it just makes it more expensive *and* takes away the benefit.
I think the real problem is that people mostly can't afford to live close to where they work. This leads to a lot of inefficiency, as they waste lots of time and energy driving back and forth from their cheap suburbs to the higher rent districts that pay just barely enough to survive if you live a neighborhood a tier or two away. Relatively cheap transportation sorta creates this situation, but there has got to be better ways to solve this than by making transportation more expensive with all of this metering equipment.
Make cities denser, cheaper, more accessible to families with better schools & playgrounds, etc. Get rid of suburban sprawl by zoning more parks and greenways. Maybe build some summer cottages / timeshares so people can still get away "to the country". Done! All the other countries are doing it :-P
You missed your chance to make one hell of a "The Gods Must Be Crazy" reference.
Would make for an awesome episode, though.
Good catch, but still doesn't look like the correct photo was used. The articles describe the Iranian device as a quad rotor... that stock picture of the DraganFlyer X6 has 6 rotors.
Anyway, here's a real picture of an Iranian UAV from last year: :P
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11052023
Do you metamoderate? I usually get my 5 or 15 shortly after doing so.
I don't really care about moderation, though, it's such a chore. And I usually browse at -1 anyway, so no one else's moderation really impacts me either.
Yep, my $400 G-Tablet pretty much runs circles around my $400 eeePC 901 (granted, the latter is a few years old now). It can play flash videos in fullscreen without stuttering. It connects to wifi faster. I can plug in external storage.
I can even plug in a cheap USB keyboard and do "real work" on it.
Heh, I was inspired by an article somewhere on a large family of 7 or something that lived off a small $40k budget or so with the help of a deep freezer.
It was more efficient than most upright fridges, so they could stock up on lots of bulk meat. They would cook once for a few days and deep freeze the servings in tupperware.
Sure, frozen and thawed food doesn't taste as good. But you don't get rich by living rich :-P
Most developed countries have negative population growth already (hell, Russia has this big campaign and incentives to try to increase their population). The developing world is getting their birth rate under control. The problem just exists in impoverished areas, even poor areas in developed nations.
The key is paradoxically improving health and welfare to reduce the infant mortality rate. If people's children are more likely to survive, then they can invest more resources into a few offspring rather than taking the shotgun approach and pumping out lots of children with the hopes that a couple might survive to adulthood.
I don't seem population stability as a big problem... education and poverty are.
I'm more concerned about evolution of the species. With advances in health and medicine, natural selection has pretty much stopped in the human race. I think it will be much more challenging to figure out how to reapply selective pressures to a population than it is to figure out how to keep a population stable.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/glenn-beck-rape-murder-hoax
Yeah, I really miss Jamie Lee Curtis. She had some awesome T-Mobile ads. Like that one where her convertible breaks down in the middle of the desert, and she whips out her phone... and proceeds to nonchalantly call a friend to chat while she grabs a wrench and fixes up the engine herself.
Oh, wait, do you mean the young bimbo they replaced her with to try to target the "younger" crowd? That one that married that old geezer? Whatever.
Heh, I grew up in Laurel, MD. Finally, something to put us on the map other than "Where Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace".
Heh, DUH is so old that Scott Adams' page on it doesn't even exist anymore! Though he still seems to be working with an architect to actually build it.
Two dishwashers isn't really all that wasteful, depending on how balanced you are with your dish set. You have one set of dishes that fits exactly in one dishwasher, and a flag or spinner that marks one of them as the receiver for dirty dishes. You try to use as many of the dishes as you can before you run out of one thing or another, and then you run the dirty dishwasher and it becomes the clean one. Sure, there might be a few things clean things left in the new "dirty" washer, but it doesn't really hurt to wash them again, and if you only had 1 dishwasher you'd be washing your dishes at this point anyway. And it's not like you'd be using the space for something else unless you went out and bought more dishes you didn't need for some silly reason. Oh, and I suppose if you were really dedicated, you could even move the handful of remaining clean dishes over to the new clean washer after it's finished.
Sure it takes some discipline, but that's part of what engineers do. Certainly doesn't take much more discipline than what you or I currently do to optimally load our single dishwashers, and it actually has some more pronounced time savings.
http://www.hwd3d.com/news/dilbert.html
My next house will have two dishwashers, dammit.
(hopefully won't have to move to Utah)
Word. The space shuttle program has basically been bleeding the rest of NASA's budgets dry, due to international contracts to deliver stuff to the ISS.
And the ISS was basically created to give the space shuttle something to do.
Now that the ISS is finally more or less complete, the shuttle's job is finished so it can now retire. And NASA is going to finally have a substantial budget to reallocate towards other cool stuff (assuming it doesn't get completely eviscerated for other things).
And while it pains me that the Constellation program is in some sort of limbo, hopefully it will help kill off the corporate welfare contracts to a lot of companies that supplied shuttle parts, and were forcing the Constellation design to reuse things it probably could do better without, like the solid rocket boosters.
Hmm, I was actually thinking of getting a Zune HD in order to use it to receive HD radio broadcasts from home and in the car. Most of the other receivers I'd seen were pretty expensive. Any good alternatives there?
Still, disappointed that our local NPR station considers most of their programming "talk radio", so Prarie Home Companion and This American Life play in low bitrate mono. FM sounds much better with the handful of shows that would make me actually want to upgrade to HD radio :-P
Hell, it seems like all decent dreaming about the future occurred in the 70s. I remember looking for something to show my kids a positive view of the future. I ended up buying the same old Neil Ardley "The World of Tomorrow" books from libraries that were getting rid of them.
And yet of all the neat ideas presented in that series, it seems like the only thing that has actually come to pass in the last 30 years were the double-decker airlines.
Sorry, but anyone who is stupid enough to still have a BoA account deserves everything they get from them.
/ former BoA customer (quit it before I left college)
// married into a FCU
Here are the three IP addresses in question: 192.168.0.1, 127.0.0.1, and 10.2.133.7
Now quit bitchin' and get on with life!
Um, isn't Joel Stein the guy who does the comedy sketch on the very last page of TIME?
Um, yeah.