This means we get first dibs on these new industries (Software As A Service, Family Mental Health As A Service, Guiltlessness As A Service, etc) as they catch on globally. Sometimes naturally because we discover some actual value. More often just by finding a practice which is addicting and then just dumping product until a population is addicted.
Great recipe for success, much wealth has been stockpiled.
It’s possible we sold out some cultural knowledge in the process, but the U.S. is a young country so most of our culture was pretty raw in the 19th century.
The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.
Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Relationships are even becoming less integrated. Yes you can interact with other people, but only as coworkers and paid professionals. Don't cross any weird lines. Even asking someone to engage in friend activities is getting more rare as most people prefer online friends, since they have more in common with them. The throughly modern American asks "Why would you need to be in physical proximity to someone anyway unless it was necessary for work? That's so creepy!". Lately, Tinder and friends have really stripped the last actual need for non-work physical proximity with any indivuals who have not been pre-screened via the algorithm.
Knowing that the US is probably one of the most segregated countries, this makes me smile :-)
I don't think that's accurate. Europe is almost entirely European, Asia is almost entirely Asian, Africa is almost entirely African. Even Wisconsin at 86.5% white is less white than most European countries. And Milwaukee itself is 40% black and 17.3% Latino.
The countries that come anywhere close to the US on diversity are predominantly the other countries in the Americas.
Of course Asia is full of Asians; but they represent an incredible diversity of ethnicities. In some areas, they are geographically mixed, in others not.
Moreover, if you can bisect Asians into Japanese and Koreans etc. then you can bisect whites into Irish and German, Latinos into Colombians and Venezuelans, blacks into Jamaicans and Haitians etc. And if you're going to play that game then why aren't the racially segregated areas still internally diverse in the same way? Certainly they are as much as the countries that consist almost entirely of that category of people are.
My original comment was to explain how the statement, "Knowing that the US is probably one of the most segregated countries . . . " is incorrect.
This has to be sarcasm, right?
If not, this view is very wrong because it views diversity in a manner that's purely and literally skin deep.
Which means there aren't a lot of people of any race who are culturally Japanese in Africa or culturally African American in Europe.
The category "white people in America" has that level of cultural diversity inside of it. It includes millions of first generation immigrants from all of those places. Plus millions of people descended from those cultures who over the past centuries have developed them into something uniquely American, melding them in a thousand cities with the cultures of all the other immigrant populations that have come here since then.
And we can't pretend that no country in Europe has ever sinned. Or any country anywhere for that matter.
Segregation is probably a more chronic problem there than it is or was ever here.
But Saint-Denis is not a rich neighborhood.
It's what the French call a "banlieue."
Literally translated, the word means "suburb," but
it has come to be associated with the depressed, mostly
immigrant neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city
where unemployment is high and opportunity scarce.
"If you look at the situation of people, you
understand the path they have taken to become a
terrorist or whatever you call it," Villain told
CBS News correspondent Vladmir Duthiers. "Exclusion
makes the terrorist, in my opinion."
.
.
.
The French government does not keep statistics
based on race or religion, but surveys have found
unemployment is as high as 30 percent in these immigrant
neighborhoods.[1]
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paris-banlieues-seeds-of-terror...
Segregation in France is absolutely nothing like what you see in America where, outside three or four major cities, different races, no matter how rich or poor, are absolutely cordoned off from one another and do not ever attend the same schools [1]. If you actually go to Saint-Denis you will find everything from Russian Jews to Moroccan Muslims to Nigerians to good ol' fashioned ("from before Napoleon took over the world") French families. It's an extremely diverse hood, the kind you'd only saw 30 years ago in America's largest cities.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17080218/school-segregation-get...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/16/segreg...
If that’s the case then I disavow all things “modern.” Nothing exciting to me at all about putting up walls between me and the people I actually see in person.
Maybe this is why I deleted my facebook a few years back, call when a few texts become a back and forth conversation, push for meet ups, and don’t use Tinder. I really don’t want to live in a world where the majority of our human-to-human communications is tapping on glass.
You baby-boomers need to speak for yourselves only and keep me out of it.
(Assuming you mean "modern" as in contemporary. If you mean the more canonical "modern", sorry for the react.)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
- the media
— the capitalist class
Regarding the chances of arrest, that makes sense to me. I suspect the police are rationally responding to the likelihood of violence.
Regarding the fellows who are considering mass murder, I suggest you notify the police.
Regardless, I like it. I think you're using it to describe businesses that do things like sell carbon credits or do humanitarian work?
If you give tuition money to a few poor kids via a non profit, you don’t solve the college debt and education accessibility problem, but it makes people who did it feel better.
Or pay someone to plant a tree when you fly to offset the carbon.
One could always not give tuition money to a few poor kids. That fails to solve anything too.
I really dislike the knee-jerk, blanket dismissal of people who are trying to do small but good things.
"If nothing we do matters then the only thing that matters is what we do." - Joss Whedon
Basically, it isn't. The theory that everyone should do a little bit is based on the idea that if 1000 people each solve 0.1% of the problem then we solve 100% of the problem. Which in general isn't a bad idea.
The problem comes when somebody tries to sell it with bad math. Because then you have a hundred million people each solving one trillionth of the problem, which accomplishes effectively nothing. And worse than nothing, because then you have a hundred million people each thinking they've done their part and no further action is required, even though no one has made the slightest dent in the actual problem.
This has the taste of conspiracy, but I do believe you're right. There's a lot of money to be made this way.
I had not considered that planning cities like this
was meant to be community-hostile, but I can easily
see how this is meant to breed a dependence on
corporate solutions.
I guess the angle I don't see answered is why would you need 'corporate solutions' say home surveillance solutions, private security solutions and other security & theft deterrence apparatus and solutions if you didn't have any hostile communities to be begin with?
Was this ever studied in the American or non-North American context? Are European cities and towns seeing a new found need for these things now, that were practically unheard of a few decades ago?
There's also a generic version of the word "community" that people throw around, that can mean almost anything: a town (which isn't automatically a community)... gamers ("the gaming community")... "the Native American lesbian sportfishing enthusiast community"... and so on. I don't mean that.
Anyway, something "community-hostile" would therefore be anything that creates separation and alienation. Among other types of separation, there's separation in the spatial realm, such as through sheer distance (things are far apart), or through side effects of physical barriers that are part of the infrastructure, e.g. walls built to block traffic noise, or streets themselves, especially when wide and dangerous; or through other physical barriers that are more subtle such as the windows of your own car, through which you can see, yet you could easily drive right past your friend coming the other way without knowing it, whereas that would never happen if you were both walking or on a bike or scooter. Well, you say, I can just text my friend on my phone. Exactly, and now you're dependent on the phone maker, the carrier, Apple/Google, etc. for that communication to take place.
We've lost most of our knowledge about how to create civic spaces of value.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ
The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.
A lot of it was transformed.
Also, what do you mean by “Guiltlessness as a service”?
Guaranteed by a public-benefit corporation.
Bonus: Now on the blockchain!
Before WW2, America was a culture desert. Europeans fleeing the war are the only reason NYC became an international culture hub.
Hip-hop is undoubtedly the most progressive Western art form. (Side note: hip-hop's genius appropriations of commercial symbolisms and it's will to collective empowerment directly underwrite and provide the language of the public engagement of today's millenials. It's influence is as deep as an ocean.) But while hip-hop is the only non-native wholly American cultural movement, it's American origins are a far cry from enlightment; more bound in shame. To say America created hip-hop would be an offense. Saying America stole it would be more accurate.
Blues, Jazz and Ragtime all predate WWII — and all influenced pretty much everything you hear today.
You could even argue that Breakbeat is American given its roots with the Winston’s.
American culture is vastly richer than many countries specifically because it is effectively an All Star team of traditions from everywhere. Thinking “American” is simply hot dogs and Hip Hop is to greatly undersell what has been one of the great cultural achievements in the history of the world. American culture is vastly diverse compared to, for example, France. You have Cajun/Creole in Louisiana, Tejano culture in Texas, cowboy culture in Montana, laid back “surfer” culture in California, Boston/Nee England culture, Chicago with it’s melange of Polish, Italian, African American. Where else in the world could you have sushi for lunch and watch a rodeo in the evening? To be clear, I am not saying American culture is “best,” I am just saying that to reduce American culture to Hip Hop is about like saying French culture is nothing more than Edith Piaf and baguettes. Americans even invented basketball and baseball — and most of the things I mention were in motion long before world war 2.
NYC was a culture hub long before Workd War 2. Read some de Tocqueville and learn a bit about American history before just engaging in a wholesale dismissal of America.
I am not prone to quoting Bono, but this clip is relevant: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O8aLAZ8SnvI
The actual artists out on the stage doing the music know exactly what comes from where. Culture spreads like that: someone likes a piece and adds it to their own, fusing two cultures. It's how we have American Chinese food that looks nothing like Chinese Chinese food. (the xenophobic policies that led to it is another matter)
You have a very narrow and stereotyped view of American culture. The whole of it is not a few white-majority cities in the north and one over-funded region in the west.
In my previous comment, please note when I say "hip-hop", I am not referring to music, but culture. Nonetheless...
I grew up in the south. My father was literally a clogger. I'm no stranger to folk. But, I am extremely skeptical of a lot of it's history. The mid-century folk-revival era did a real number on our conception of what's really there culture-wise. Behind the curtain, I am honestly afraid it's mostly puritanism, shame, and self-conflict. It's interesting but I think calling it a cultural movement is mostly romanticism. In terms of music, we could delve into details for days, and break down the whole history of hip-hop and jazz, and I do encourage that. There's a lot of good music there. But, I'm afraid it serves essentially the same end in terms of culture; a terribly familiar story. Hip-hop exhibits the whole of the cultural dynamic fairly explicitly, and is internationally renowned. Folk is mostly replicated in parody.
EDIT: Another thing to add... I think most people would be surprised how many contemporary folk musicians (young ones) would actually agree with me. They eventually are challenged with contending with things like: Did folk come from slaves? Or the working class? Or the fraught relations between the two? And is it reconcilable? Where did country music come from?
We may have fundamentally incompatible perspectives if you see culture and art as separate things. I grew up surrounded by hip-hop (Atlanta), but I know better than to sing along with the n word as a white person. This is because the experience of the music is inseparable from one's experience with its culture.
I am basically saying that the legacy of American folk is just too mysterious to nail down, and too precarious to draw conclusions from. I wonder if this would be the case without the mid-century folk revival, which amounted to a mass-commercialization of the white American south as a suffering working-class. The older field recordings in the Library Of Congress suggest the music was predominantly made by slaves. The old radio recordings from Nashville tell a slightly different story and seem to stitch together something of an art form, likely for the very first time. Then folk-revival was a massively commercial effort that made it all look very pretty. But the culture of it all still remains vague. Touring the south and studying it's history doesn't suggest much of any concern for culture in any higher sense. Literacy was surprisingly high but they mostly read the bible. Music seems to have occupied a space more like entertainment than cultural reflection. A likely theory is that it was very much a culture for slaves, but merely entertainment for white people. Hopefully this clarifies my comprehension. Hip-hop is a full embodiment in comparison; a whole new world of unmitigated expression.
However, changing transportation infrastructure is a chicken and egg problem.
People get upset if you take away their parking spaces and build densely when efficient public transport doesn't exist yet and they still need to own a car.
Yet building efficient public transport is at least a decade-long endeavor and requires either buying out or leveraging eminent domain to carve out space for the necessary infrastructure.
Local and state officials aren't going to stick their heads out to support this unless voters will politically reward them for starting a project, but probably not being around to see it finished.
If you want a regime that can efficiently bulldoze its way to the public transit and cheaply, then one way is to copy China, give power to governments to 'strongly encourage' the sale of any rights of way needed, don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183475/united-states-pop...
Given that in US, "public review" for any kind of infrastructure (regardless if it's an apartment building, a cell base station, a railway, a power plant) means soliciting input from the most meddlesome moralistic NIMBY normies who have as little respect for other people's property rights as they have appreciation for the societal benefits of public infrastructure works -- and then giving them the authority to use their concern trolling to obstruct/delay/kill whatever project is considered.
It actually turns out you don't need to go full-on PRC to build cities with apartments and dense single-family houses with modern, high-capacity railways (all of which help reduce both the need and impact of parking spaces) if you're willing to tell these people to pound sand, and remove the land-use laws that they use to enforce their capriciousness.
Since it follows that NIMBYs are more anti-American than Russia, we MUST put sanctions on their ability to affect their fellow Americans.
I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car (I did take an Uber because I wanted to see what it was like to drive from the left side!). It was fantastic being able to take the Underground anywhere I needed to be, but it was very clear that it was only possible because the city was already there and densely populated before the arrival of cars.
It was just policy decisions in many cases.
Quite a few:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb#Post-war_suburban_expan...
Well, to be fair, if you are talking about a specific city in Europe then you should do the same here in the USA. London's american equivalent is NYC. You will not need a car here either.
I'm not sure this is a great test. (Though, yes, London does have a great transit system even though I've also taken cabs from time to time for various reasons.)
When I visit American cities and don't travel outside them, I very rarely rent a car and don't necessarily take cabs/Lyfts all that much other than getting from the airport. I'm usually staying/doing business in/eating in a relatively central location that often exists in cities that are otherwise fairly spread out.
To give just an example that I'm very familiar with. I never rent a car any longer when I visit Raleigh but I'd never claim you could live there without a car.
Most east coast cities have actually decreased their population density considerably since 1930.
The Computer History Museum is situated in the middle of "no-where". But it has a highway 2 minutes away. To go from the close houses walking you need to walk close to the highway, with no trees or shadows. https://goo.gl/maps/P6d977i44SA2
Some friends had a story about this. They were in LA and asked directions to a comic shop. "It is 10 minutes from here in that direction". After 20 minutes walking they asked again. It was "10 minutes" by car, the guy that give them directions did not think that they will go walking.
I always have lived in places where is better to take public transportation or to walk than to use your private car. And one of the reasons is that the parking space is expensive. Buildings with parking space, that is also mandatory for new buildings, will place the space underground. This keeps residential buildings, shopping centres and offices close together.
Once you've created an auto dependent city it's really difficult to undo it.
Surrey, the biggest suburb of Vancouver, is trying to shift from being a car centric suburb to building its own compact downtown. It will take decades to change development patterns. They're trying to jump start it by creating their own LRT system, but of course due to auto dependency there is push back because LRT will "get in the way of the cars..."
Having lived overseas a few times in my life, I really am looking forward to leaving NorCal/NV and heading somewhere more sanely organized.
Boulder has a city population of about 100,000 and a metro region population of about 300,000. Here are some random Street View locations from European towns and cities of a roughly similar size.
Reading, England: https://goo.gl/maps/yQaTTaWQJav
Bonn, Germany: https://goo.gl/maps/Pu9Ro28F4UH2
Caen, France: https://goo.gl/maps/ppgL2J8nsAJ2
Vicenza, Italy: https://goo.gl/maps/rMtCBEqC7vr
Click around a bit, explore the neighbourhood, get a sense for the place. Get the picture?
American urban development happens on a scale that is simply incomprehensible to most Europeans. I spent a good ten minutes clicking around Boulder, looking for the city centre; it took me that long to realise that there wasn't one, at least not in the sense that I understand.
Of course, you wouldn't want to live in Boulder without a car. Pretty much the whole point of being there is to get into the mountains.
So yes, Denver has a few walkable areas that are nice. But if you can only walk 80% of the time and still have to own a car for the other 20%, which has to sit in a parking spot somewhere all the time, then we're back to the subject of this article.
1. I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you have kids, or aren't able-bodied, or don't want to spend 3x - 5x more time on public transit than you would in a car, or live in an area with extreme weather conditions, or don't want to be weird-sweaty-bike-person all the time, etc, then you need a car in most of America.
In the predominantly hispanic areas around Phoenix there are tons of tiny shops serving the neighborhood -- it's a thing. Where I live now there used to be a few corner markets but now that gentrification is in full swing they are all gone and are being replaced with trendy restaurant/bars with the people presumably now shopping at the major supermarkets. There were probably more before they built the super-massive Ranch Market but I didn't live in this area then so can't really say.
I'd venture to say it has more to do with the cost of owning/operating a car, in Mexico (and much of Europe) they are significantly more costly than the US so the convenience of "shopping local" is different.
it's only sad because you went to a 7/11 expecting to get produce! I guarantee you there's a real grocery store within a few blocks.
Pretty good chance that's not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
"In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 23.5% of Americans live in a food desert, meaning that they live more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas, and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas."
Or a 23.5% chance that's not true...
“I guarantee this plane won’t crash” = 23.5% chance of dying?
Plus the "within 1 mile" standard seem a little low, that would mean that every single urban grocery store would have multiple competitors within a 2 mile radius which is totally unrealistic though, apparently, is quite common.
As to your situation, it sounds like it's just not a good fit for your lifestyle. No one is saying that there's not pros / cons or that dense urban living is for everyone. If you want to grow all your own food and raise horses, NYC probably isn't going to be a great fit for you. Ditto if you want a garage full of cars that you work on and take out for leisurely drives all the time.
The issue in America isn't that everyone needs to be forced to live in high-density urban areas. It's that we've spent decades enacting bad policies that heavily discourage urban density while encouraging and subsidizing suburban sprawl. And it turns out that suburban sprawl is bad for the majority of people, and carries huge externalities that we're discovering we can't really afford, but it'll take many decades to reverse the damage we've done.
What makes it more difficult is that there's a lot of cultural value in America (some of it natural, some of it driven by anti-density propaganda) around being positive towards cars, driving, having lots of huge personal space, etc. And negative perceptions of density, public transit, etc.
Not an expert, that's just my read on the situation :)
In reality it is the opposite. The vast vast majority of space in the US is reserved for the low density living.
Even the supposedly "high density" cities in the US are nothing compared to what they could be. Even places like New York have difficulty building enough housing to house everyone who wants to live there.
I just want a single city, in the entire world, where everyone said "hey, let's just allow building to be as high as anyone wants, and not put a single building restriction on anything".
The people who want low density living having an entire world to choose from. And yet that's apparently not enough for them.
What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. But I guess that's more family-friendly as well, especially with 2 or more kids.
This is probably zoning; in many non-urban places mixed zoning is considered to lower the quality of residential living. So you end up with subdivision mazes without so much as a convenience store in walking range.
> wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip
My impression is that it's the other way around: because trips take so long, you maximize the amount you fetch on each.
The distance is related to the shopping habit. It’s neat watching people move to New York. At first, they continue their big, irregular shopping trips. Slowly, though, they switch to quick daily or every-other-day trips (+ delivery), and walkig to a store around the corner.
Ironically, where I live (one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix), they're taking the exact opposite approach -- building restaurants with absolutely zero consideration for parking and it's having a negative impact. They had to put up "resident only parking with permit" signs on my street because it got so bad. The apartments across the street went so far as to designate parking spots on the street -- totally illegal but it seems to work. The ones next door to them leave their trashcans out 24/7 for the same effect.
At first I just considered the parking hassles a "free-wifi tax" but then they added a second popular sandwich shop/bar next door and it just snowballed from there. Oh, and I lost the free-wifi benefit so now it's all just pure hassle.
I believe this is what people like to call "the tragedy of the commons."
There's only like two other neighborhoods in all of Phoenix where there's a residents only parking restriction codified into law so apparently the bureaucrats also think maybe there's an overgrazing problem.
> I'm sure if you want to pay market rate for that land you can get your very own parking spot.
Or I could just pay my landlord and get my very own parking spot?
If there's a shortage of places for people to sleep we don't demand free houses (well, the US doesn't) but once your car has nowhere to sleep that's somehow the taxpayer's problem?
I think everyone missed that the whole point was to provide a counter-example to "far-away restaurants with large parking lots" by describing my personal experiences with the exact opposite. Just because someone thought it was a big enough problem to get the city involved doesn't mean that I personally felt the same way, I simply quit giving them my money and called it a day. Well, also got rid of my truck (that I didn't drive for six years) so I had somewhere to park the work car that wasn't on the street because I didn't want to go get a resident parking permit -- problem solved without involving taxpayer funds...
Another family member of that same era to this day says "rip out the trees, rip out the bike lanes, put in more lanes to deal with this god awful traffic!" Driving is a right. It is not a privilege. Again, it's that ingrained in the culture, and the belief system.
One of those family members gets that cars are on the way out and other things need to replace it for the sake of the planet and human sanity. As much as it was induced sanity in the beginning, it's now a source of individual and public planning stress. The other family member has zero interest in accommodating anything but more cars.
This still manifests in how Americans get driver's licenses: states issue them, and the testing is pretty much a disqualification test not a qualification test; by that I mean it's not so much up to you to prove you're a safe driver but for the test to prove you're not. And boom you get a license. Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive. It might be 2018 but it's the wild west and cowboys still exist here!
Driver's ed at least used to be pretty common,in part because it gave a discount for the (expensive) insurance covering younger drivers. I don't see anything special about the typical driver's ed instructor anyway. It's not like the typical driver's ed is some expensive defensive driving course taught by an ex race car driver.
Furthermore, the typical system is that someone gets a learners permit first which lets them drive only under a limited set of conditions so they gain experience that way.
And, honestly, you gain experience by doing things not taking classes.
That way you try to bring the quality of drivers up to that of the instructor, not a cargo cult of family members who might be horrid at driving.
Sure, but "experience" doesn't have to mean you're out there on the highway with everyone else. You don't start scuba diving in the actual ocean. You get experience in a pool for a while first.
This is a common misunderstanding of what is really needed in driver education to improve the average driver. The average American driver really lacks a lot of skills and a clear understanding of optimal driving behavior. Driving on public roads should be optimized for safety, but most drive as if it ought to be optimized for speed.
It would be a good improvement if all drivers were required to take a Smith system or similar defensive driving course annually in order to retain their license.
But somehow driving, and the daily experience of it is: fuck you, me first. And it shows. It's an adversarial system. I'm really impressed that it works as well as it does, despite being the #1 killer of teenagers, and 40,000 total deaths on the road per year.
So you end up with the current system which is fairly similar across states and countries with somewhat greater or lesser rigor depending on the particular place.
Learners who are driving on a provisional license prior to passing their test must be accompanied by someone who has held a full license for at least three years. They must display an L-plate on the front and rear of the vehicle and cannot use motorways (freeways) unless they are accompanied by a licensed instructor.
It is my understanding that the British process is relatively straightforward by European standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
When I lived in Cincinnati just north of the University in the cool little Gaslight neighborhood, I would come home from my job in an office park in the suburbs, then walk to the grocery, cool shops, the cafe, the library, the bank, friends houses. That wasn't typical, but it still existed.
Parking areas were also built with underground parking buildings. But that's only because land become scare and so it was expensive to have a non-underground parking.
Reasoning leadership is a necessary part of city ecology. Rewarding complainers (hello Pavlov) is not a reasoned solution.
If everybody is expected to have a car then pedestrians never develop, local businesses don't thrive, class mobility is it's highest.
By limiting parking, or at least making it ala carte, residents and businesses consider their location proximity to eachother.
Or, maybe a better question: what part of the Bay Area?
Being used to high density housing and underground parking spaces all those open parking lots seem nonsensical to me, even more considering the alleged housing shortage over there.