It's infuriating to learn that LA spends taxpayer money to send bus stop designers on overseas junkets.
I found that to be the least infuriating thing in the article.
A rant on bus stops
61–70 of 190 posts
Re: A rant on bus stops
#62The US doesn't have a homeless problem, California has a homeless problem.
Because the rest of the US sends them to California.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
Re: A rant on bus stops
#63My write-up on the recent LA bus stop fiasco
Not exactly fiasco. Some smart ppl spent $300k to jetset across the world for "research". They definitely do not consider that a fiasco!
Re: A rant on bus stops
#64The US doesn't have a homeless problem, California has a homeless problem.
I don’t know if it’s that simple. It’s gotten a lot worse in Philadelphia in the last few years, and there were still quite a few homeless in Philly when I was there before the new status quo.
It's gotten worse but then I live in the NYC area. NY is second (by far) to only California.
Re: A rant on bus stops
#65The TL;DR here is that California has a housing crisis, which caused homelessness, which caused people to look into a bus stop design which doesn’t serve as a proper shelter. Here’s a data-driven argument that homelessness is a problem with lack of homes, more so than mental health or drugs or whatever else: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-... Fixing housing will have a lot of great downst…
i bet homelessness arises from more reasons than a housing crisis, with drug addiction and mental illnesses examples.
Re: A rant on bus stops
#66[flagged]
Re: A rant on bus stops
#67It's infuriating to learn that LA spends taxpayer money to send bus stop designers on overseas junkets.
I disagree. The US could be importing a lot more ideas than it does.
When living in other countries than the US, it has always been notable to me how often conversations about almost anything involved considering how other countries did things.
But after drawing on the world for better ideas, you would expect better results.
Re: A rant on bus stops
#68Some points in the article are hit and miss, but mostly correct. For example, Istanbul is flourishing because it's the Turkish capital, so it necessarily is the most dense and rich city in the country. The high trust is a positive factor, but plenty of more rural cities and towns in Turkey look quite dumpy (perhaps not as bad a Philly, though) The pictures don't really support that either. They depict a fairly averag…
> Istanbul is flourishing because it's the Turkish capital The capital of Turkey is Ankara, not Istanbul.
And Turkey is definitely not a high trust country.
Re: A rant on bus stops
#69Something I’ve always noticed across the US political landscape: people really don’t like spending money to directly help people (mental health care, institutions, public housing, addiction recovery programs) but are fine with wasting money in weird ways like having this non profit travel the world to learn how to put up a sun shade. It’s like the thing Americans dislike isn’t spending the money but the idea of helpi…
The US political landscape does a great job of creating problems that then need an incredible amount of expenditure to address(not even to solve, just to plug holes). This can be seen in exponential rise of diabetes, the opioid crisis, and homelessness, just to name a few. No one wants to pay to prevent a problem from happening, but the system will gladly throw billions to “try to solve one”.
Re: A rant on bus stops
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Capitalism doesn’t inherently mean companies get to alter the laws to favor themselves or government should decide winners and losers with bailouts. That’s a function of the political system involved. This is something else. In some ways it’s closest too feudalism where the rule of law is subservient to various powerful entities and limited competition exists parallel to various monopolies. Though obviously it’s very…
That's oligarchy, which is still capitalism.
Oligarchy doesn’t have anything to do with capitalism. The Roman Senate for example was really an aristocracy rather than what we would consider business leaders as power often flowed from parent to child within powerful families. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Senate