271–280 of 300 posts
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This is completely incorrect, please don't spread culture-war lies on HN. The £12.50 charge is for old, polluting cars. Petrol cars made since around 2005 are exempt, and diesel cars since 2015. Vans from ~2006 and 2016 respectively. https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/ultra-low-emission-zone/car...
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> A healthy economy is one where money, people, skills, and intellectual property has high velocity, meaning people quickly reorient their productive capacity to where it's most useful. Everyone is an interchangeable cog! > Serves them right for Brexit! Brexit wasn’t a unanimous vote. There are people suffering under the Brexit decision that couldn’t vote at the time.
And a lot of them are suffering who definitely could have voted, but decided not to.
The Corporation of London own the land Billingsgate is on. They've been looking to redevelop this for over a decade since the land's value is now magnitudes more than when it was built because of Canary Wharf and the new Canary Wharf Crossrail station. It's prime real estate land, possibly the best plot in London right now. And so is Smithfield, or at least the land that Museum of London is on, and they're moving to…
> Some things need preserving. Mostly because modern cities only allow the most boring, safe things to be built. Less people would be whining if it was possible to build a thriving market like this elsewhere in the city, where it still makes economic sense. But there's probably a billion rules and therefore capital/political requirements where it's impossible. So the only contenders will be a bigco shopping market on…
This is why I'm distrustful towards any initiatives aiming to make a city "more liveable for humans". First they entice you with a vision of a place where everything is within walking distance, then they do this.
This isn't the type of market you pop down to and buy your weekly shop, this is wholesale. It's largely where restaurants will go to to buy their meat for the day/week. Smithfields opens at midnight and closes at 7am. You can walk past at mid-day and it's just a fairly run-down part of london in the middle of other much nicer parts of London. This is nothing to do with walkable cities.
The connection here is that restaurants are part of the appeal of walkable cities and now their life will be made harder. Net effect will of course be an increase in prices.
You need places like these in a city because they shoulder a huge burden, namely logistics, which are particularly hard in densely populated areas.
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Wait why should startups have absurd mission statements? That doesn’t make sense to me
They shouldn't but they do. Making the world a better place is not what founders have in mind. What they have in mind is "we are looking for an exit and retire young", for nearly all of them. Unfortunately those words are not something they can write in a mission statement so they must be creative.
I mean uh. Come work for us / hire us, we're the best at what we do! Honest! AI!
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The reality is that almost no one makes any good money in the food industry. For a lot of people in that industry, if they tried to find jobs that better aligned with their skills (except in food), they'd likely be better off. A lot of people take jobs in terrible places and get complacent, maybe far too complacent. A healthy economy is one where money, people, skills, and intellectual property has high velocity , me…
Unfortunately nobody has solved the pesky problem that people need to eat at least once a day, so somebody has to work in the food industry. Getting rid of these central markets means smaller markets spread all over the country will do the same work, but likely making the food more expensive and the supply less reliable.
Keeping these is a strategic good for the country.
Need a City quant PhD to invent a mathematical analog of Black-Scholes [1] for pricing and trading the irreplaceable value of culturally significant physical spaces to future generations. Then City-like [2] institutions can compete financially for ongoing preservation rights, rather than a one-time chop shop auction. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_…
The reality is that these are not culturally significant institutions and most people in London don’t care. Ordinary Londoners rarely use these markets, and they mostly sell to restaurants, and require major financial support. Not everything from the past is good. We don’t still run coal power plants in London just to get that historic smog. They were already planning to move both markets way out of central London (t…