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Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

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Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#171

Post by autoexec »

konschubert wrote: post #167
autoexec wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. It's not about how much land a person uses, it's how that land is being used. Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt. Urban living is "pav…

I guess the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you consider a garden "environment/nature". And the parent commenter does not consider a garden "environment/nature". Nature in general is important because it creates biodiversity and space to roam. Forests in particular are sequestering CO2 and are producing oxygen. The average garden behind a detached house does approximately none of that.

> I guess the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you consider a garden "environment/nature".

It's cities that depend on gardens and parks to serve as the only available "nature". Rural areas are filled with forests and woods and grasslands and support far greater numbers and varieties of wildlife than cities do.

We could decide to pack people like sardines into the smallest possible space, completely destroy the local ecosystem in the areas where we live (allowing the pollution to spread outside of our overcrowded cities the same way China's pollution currently crosses the ocean to fill the skies in California), while also suffering the countless costs to our own health and safety those conditions cause in the process just so that we can have vast expanses of polluted but undeveloped land that no human can use for anything, but I propose something a bit more balanced, where we spread out enough so that the biocapacity of the land we settle on isn't exceeded, but still near enough to each other that we can still efficiently sustain a civilization. That means a population density that isn't overcrowded, but not so far apart that we lose all of the efficiencies we gain by living near each other. I'd much prefer to have biodiversity within the places we inhabit and keep space to roam for humans as well as the other animals.

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#172

Post by allturtles »

autoexec wrote: post #171
konschubert wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you consider a garden "environment/nature". And the parent commenter does not consider a garden "environment/nature". Nature in general is important because it creates biodiversity and space to roam. Forests in particular are sequestering CO2 and are producing oxygen. The average garden behind a detached house does approximately none of that.

> I guess the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you consider a garden "environment/nature". It's cities that depend on gardens and parks to serve as the only available "nature". Rural areas are filled with forests and woods and grasslands and support far greater numbers and varieties of wildlife than cities do. We could decide to pack people like sardines into the smallest possible space, completely destroy t…

You seem to have a very dim view of cities as medieval hellholes where people are dying of plague in streets filled with sewage under skies choked with soot. Modern cities are not unhealthy places. Life expectancy in New York City[0] compares favorably to most states[1], and this is 2020 pandemic data, where you might expect cities to fare relatively badly.

[0]:https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/press/pr2023/2020-vital-s... [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/life_expectancy/li...

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#173

Post by TheCoelacanth »

autoexec wrote: post #170
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not debating that one acre of urban land is worse for the environment than one acre of rural land, but that's not a realistic tradeoff. You need hundreds or thousands of times as much land to house people in a rural setting than in an urban setting. Rural people don't pave over all of the land that they have, but they certainly pave over more of it than each person's share of paved over land in an urban setting.…

It's true that if all the people in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota were packed into a tiny space with the density of NYC all of the land they abandoned would be better off, but the land they were shoved into would be much much worse off for it. Like I said: the greater the number of people in a given area the worse it will be for that environment. We n…

The 469 sq miles they lived in would be more impacted, but the other half million miles would be far less impacted.

It is absolutely ludicrous to suggest that it's better for the environment to take up 1000 times as much of it.

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#174

Post by konschubert »

autoexec wrote: post #171
konschubert wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you consider a garden "environment/nature". And the parent commenter does not consider a garden "environment/nature". Nature in general is important because it creates biodiversity and space to roam. Forests in particular are sequestering CO2 and are producing oxygen. The average garden behind a detached house does approximately none of that.

> I guess the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you consider a garden "environment/nature". It's cities that depend on gardens and parks to serve as the only available "nature". Rural areas are filled with forests and woods and grasslands and support far greater numbers and varieties of wildlife than cities do. We could decide to pack people like sardines into the smallest possible space, completely destroy t…

I don’t know man, have you made an effort to understand the argument?

You are saying “Rural areas have lots of forest”

Yea, but they do because not everybody is living there. If all the city people were moving to the countryside and building houses with big driveways and terraces like the country folk do, there would be much fewer forests.

That’s the point, I don’t know how to make it any clearer.

Cities are not the dirty hellholes you seem to think they are. Pollution doesn’t come from cities, it comes from power plants and factories. And that’s a totally solvable problem

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#175

Post by allturtles »

midoridensha wrote: post #162
noduerme wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> if the capital was ever moved out I initially read this as meaning "if the money was ever moved out", and then laughed ... yes, if they ever stopped being the capital ...

"Capital" is a weird word in English. It can mean money as you refer to, but it can also refer to the city where a country's seat of government lies. Then there's "capitol" (with an 'o'), which refers to a building in the capital city where the legislative body meets.

There's also upper-case letters, the big letter at the head of a passage, and adjective forms: capital punishment, a capital idea (archaic). This article has a nice discussion of the etymology of capital: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/financial-word... Usages that started out as living metaphors become 'fossilized' over time as independent meanings.

Don't languages in general have single words with multiple meanings? Is this a special feature of English?

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#176

Post by zip1234 »

autoexec wrote: post #161
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nonsense. You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. The incentive to make improvements comes from ownership model, not form factor. Apartments can be owned and houses can be rented.

> You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. It's not about how much land a person uses, it's how that land is being used. Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt. Urban living is "pav…

> Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt.

I have actually seen this with concrete, but it is usually grass without trees. However, it isn't really the point. The point is this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/13/climate/clima...

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#177

Post by midoridensha »

allturtles wrote: post #175
midoridensha wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Capital" is a weird word in English. It can mean money as you refer to, but it can also refer to the city where a country's seat of government lies. Then there's "capitol" (with an 'o'), which refers to a building in the capital city where the legislative body meets.

There's also upper-case letters, the big letter at the head of a passage, and adjective forms: capital punishment, a capital idea (archaic). This article has a nice discussion of the etymology of capital: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/financial-word... Usages that started out as living metaphors become 'fossilized' over time as independent meanings. Don't languages in general have single words with mu…

>Don't languages in general have single words with multiple meanings? Is this a special feature of English?

That's not what I'm referring to; it's the confusion over "capital" vs "capitol" (in addition to the double meaning of capital city vs capital-money).

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