Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live a 10 minute drive, 45 minute walk, 75 minute bus from work. 30-60 minutes of my life = 125-250 hours a year.
If it's a 45 minute walk it's likely a 10 minute bike ride.
Knees can't do it.
New Cities
551–560 of 710 posts
Re: New Cities
#552I think "old cities" are pretty good too: the kind where they were built for people, rather than cars, and where you could build things without a dense thicket of regulations almost entirely unrelated to safety. Another thing that seems to work well is limiting the amount of up-front large scale projects and growing incrementally. No one can plan for everything ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_pro…
Cars have a place in cities but maybe they should be in tunnels underground or something. I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place. We pay too much 'rent' in general; it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets.
How "bold" are you prepared to accept?
Re: New Cities
#553Since they make it so clear that they're '[..] not interested in building “crazy libertarian utopias for techies.”', I wonder: Who is? And where can I sign up for that?
Good question. Quite a few people seem to be, actually. Mark Lutter is one at http://freecitiesinitiative.com/. Patri Friedman, perhaps the most famous supporter of idea, attempted to start a charter city in Honduras but the Honduran government changed its mind (https://athousandnations.com/2012/10/31/future-cities-develo...). The Seasteading Institute, cofounded by Friedman, was once backed by Peter Thiel.
Re: New Cities
#554I'd like to live in a city where people assume their neighbors are smart, where it is assumed that everyone has something legitimate and constructive to add, where people give each other the benefit of the doubt, where people are generous with their interpretation of what they say to each other, and where people always try understand each other rather than try to prove each other wrong.
Re: New Cities
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
there's almost no room left on the planet for building "new" cities of any significant scale (meaning of course not just the meticulously designed city core; but the whole meta-city that will grow around it -- with suburbs, transportation links, etc) No way. Spend some time in satellite-view in a mapping program and you'll see that there are huge areas of farmland that could be cities. There's a lot of space on the p…
Yeah, convert farmland. What does farms do anyway?
A new city would be much denser than the suburban and exurban sprawl that currently fills our demand for new housing, and so would end up in taking much less farmland than continuing along the current path.
(And the amount of farmland we're talking about, both for new cities and for sprawl, is small as a fraction of total farmland.)
Re: New Cities
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you considered that with infrastructure in place, cars enable an immense amount of individual flexibility? To my mind, it seems somewhat plausible that cars rose to dominance because they enabled individual flexibility for the masses atop pre-existing and extensible infrastructure.
Perhaps you should read some history. IIRC, at some point, car companies bought up public transit infrastructure and shut it down because less public transit was good for sales. #canyousayconflictofinterest? Linky: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con...
Friend, I am aware of the "streetcar conspiracy". I am also aware that streetcars died out for reasons well beyond conspiracy. I am further aware of many areas where cars are very useful that never had streetcar systems to be destroyed by GM.
Re: New Cities
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
you pop into the market as you walk past it on the way home from work, We're not European, we're not going to be European...ever. We just don't "pop in" to some market while we're walking by. We pop-in while we're driving by or we plan to drive 5 minutes to an awesome supermarket. Just stop this constant crap about walking and "only if we're like some European village" crap that will never happen in America.
> that will never happen in America. It happens a lot in New York City, and other dense urban areas in the US.
Where besides NYC? Nowhere. Americans like their cars. They like to drive. America is not the collectivist/statists that represent modern HN...which is pretty sick.
Hackers are anti-establishment! Hackers are not conformists that defer to government minders!
Re: New Cities
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
If externalities are present, there is no general solution to the problem of optimizing either individual net utility or social net utility. Markets don't do it perfectly, but no other solution does any better, and in fact the most common alternative, government regulation, does worse on average.
How do markets optimize net social utility ? let's be more concrete , let's talk about a market with modern advertising ?
> How do markets optimize net social utility ?
In the absence of externalities, this should be obvious. And in the presence of externalities, I did not claim that markets optimize either net social utility or net individual utility. I claimed only that markets work at least as well as any other solution (and that government regulation works worse, on average).
As far as your specific example, modern advertising, is concerned, I'm not clear about whether you think externalities are significant in this case or not.
Re: New Cities
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cars have a place in cities but maybe they should be in tunnels underground or something. I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place. We pay too much 'rent' in general; it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets.
But people wouldn't invest their money in productive assets. Given more spare money, they buy bigger televisions and shinier cars. Financial ignorance and materialism are some of the most basic woes underpinning society. Their thought process is well-illustrated by a recent exchange I had with some children from a background of poverty: Me: Maybe you should save that money instead of spending it. Them: Good point, th…
Here's an article which might expand your empathy for the "irrational" purchasing decisions of the poor: https://tressiemc.com/2013/10/29/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-pe...
Re: New Cities
#560> We now have major technologies such as smart grids, autonomous vehicles, etc Not really. Autonomous vehicles are still coming. We don't know what infrastructure we'll need to support them just yet. Will there be a standardized way of powering / recharging them? What non-autonomous needs will they have and how to we handle them (because there will be some e.g. mechanical repair, rescue, etc)? Sure we can "guess" bas…
> Wait, Adora is part of YC?
I was really surprised by that too. Looking at her and her co-founder's handling of the shutdown as well as the overall fact that they just couldn't execute (raising money isn't executing). I'm not sure what track record and skills she really brings to this.