> its not very walk-able, it gets hot and humid in the summer.
You Americans are so funny. Japan is hotter and more humid yet public transit and walking are not an issue. Taipei similar story, rapidly building out rail in a hotter place.
You build the rail, then upzome the areas around stations and over time those giant ashfault lots go away and become urban centres.
Having spent time outside in both Tokyo and Houston in July, Tokyo might be slightly cooler but the humidity makes it more unbearable than Houston (even though Houston is already very humid).
People like you are funny too but its easy to make posts like yours. Density in most urban parts of Japan and Taipei are wildly higher than say a Houston Texas. Again like I said, you are oversimplifying the problem which I get it, its easy to do. I don't think this is as simple as "build the rail, then upzone the area around stations", would happy to be wrong but I think like all of the world there are cultural and historical reasons for the difference.
It would take decades, you need buy in from both tax payers, commercial buildings, retail spaces, home builders etc.
It would be great if you could have a central planner like a China to just build a city with all the infrastructure in place but in places like America, that does not happen and so its a very tough egg to crack. Keep in mind its not just about being hot, definitely lots of Japan and Taiwan are very humid but you are also in city centers that have 8-9x the density of Houston. Lots of things to do and often you are most likely not walking that far, relative for city walking. I could walk a mile in Houston and still have not left my starting spot.
Houstonites do not want to live in dense cities. “Just live like East Asians” doesn’t work when the people you are talking to despise the lifestyle of East Asians.
I do think there is room for more these "New Urbanist" style developments which I have seen a few of in Texas. w the builder puts retail buildings centralized in the development. Lots of real parks and other type of shared resources for the community. Something where you still have a house with a yard but you can walk to the coffee shop in your neighborhood.
Yes, they'd rather spend 2 hours a day commuting and then grow fat and die young from heart disease. And before anyone says anything: I used to live in Houston. Truly an awful, awful place to live. It's not even a concrete jungle, it's more like a concrete prairie.
I'm going to blow your mind: people are different! I have lived in several cities in the PNW and New England and now live in Houston metro by choice. It is far easier, more efficient, and more economical for my family which are our priorities. (Also infinitely more diverse, which is a big plus, but doesn't really have anything to do with urban planning). We like it a lot here.
Houston can be very cheap, but it comes with the steep cost of having to live in Houston.
I'm being harsh, Houston isn't completely terrible. There is a lot of culture and diversity. But you can't really get to it because everything is too far, and you're already tired from commuting 10 hours that week.
I live in the area and agree it's quite miserable in some ways. Anything inside 610 is effectively a no-go zone for people who have the capacity to participate on HN. The entire point of Houston is that it's approximately the cheapest place you can live that still has things like an international airport and an Apple Store.
You don’t have to agree with them, but yea, that is legitimately the way they want to spend their life. I think that’s the issue with these urbanism discussions. Your preferences are so different that you can’t even comprehend them so you end up talking past each other.
And I can respect that - the problem is that urbanism, at it's core, is an organization problem. It internetly involves other people, regardless of if any one of them wants it to or not.
I mean, ideally, I could say I want to live all on my own in a mansion far away from everyone else. But I still want access to the world's best food, entertainment, and socialization. But it's just not possible.
Everything is compromises. We can't be erecting hundreds of miles of road and acres of parking lots so people have a 10 by 10 foot lawn, you know? And ultimately it will come back to them, too. Because commuting does suck, and I think most people know it sucks. They just can't, or won't, put two and two together on their lifestyle and commuting. They're inherently linked!
Of course there are trade offs. Suburbanites are just happy to spend time commuting in exchange for a big house with a big yard. You are still talking like they don’t realize the tradeoff they’re making instead of accepting that they’ve considered that and come to the conclusion that it’s worth it. They think living in apartments with no personal space sucks more than commuting.
I'm talking like that because even you're not understanding the tradeoff.
The tradeoff isn't live like rats. That's the tradeoff RIGHT NOW, because we designed our cities for maximum suckage.
But really, you can have reasonable space and a decent commute. Light rail goes a long way, and not spending 50% of your land on parking lots does too.
When you design your cities around cars, there are really no winners. People might think that's just the natural cost of having a home, but it's just not. You can have denser cities with more space per person. Because, remember, most of the space in Houston is currently worthless. It can't actually be used by people.
So it's still dense where it matters. The pockets of goodness are just that. Between the roads and parking lots there's little dense pockets of life, and that's where everything actually happens.
Look, think of it this way. If we don't spend 50% of our most valuable space on parking lots, your home can be 50% larger. AND in an area where it matters, instead of in Timbuktu.
I lived in Chicago for 30 years. I didnt own a car for a decade. I’ve been to east Asia. There are massive downsides to living in cities even when done well. People in Tokyo live in tiny spaces compared to American suburbanites. In the parts of Chicago where you don’t really need a car no one has a yard. Public parks are not the same as private yards. People in New York who aren’t Uber wealthy live lifestyles that I personally can not stand. I got out of nyc as soon as I could because I hated living there. Seriously nyc is by far my least favorite of places I have lived. Going back to anything like that is unimaginable for me. I don’t like Houston either but I understand why people do and it’s not because they’re deluding themselves or because they’re close minded to the wonders of urbanism.
Light rail is terrible and anyone acting like it’s not is immediately written off as a non thinker imo. If you’re gonna do rail do it right.
Lots of healthy people that live in Houston too. Your lack of being able to see that the world is diverse and people have different preferences is a shame.
Look, I'm not looking down at your life choices, I'm just saying it probably sucks and you would probably prefer it if it wasn't like that.
Meaning, I don't think people are commuting 2 hours or three or whatever because they LIKE to. Rather, they're victims of poor poor urban design, and most of them, too, would prefer not that.
I don't think a single soul is moving to Houston because of the commute. They're doing it in spite of the commute. But wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to do that?
Ultimately its optional, it's a choice. We could have Houston without the commute. Everyone could live the life they want without a commute, if we just put in the time and effort to design our urban spaces around that. And, if people really do want to commute - more power. I don't think that's a desire that will ever be rare to find. But we probably shouldn't be optimizing for shit, right? Or, at least, what I think we both agree most people think is shit.
The big scam is some terminals are configured with 17% forex fees (looking at your shady restaurants in Budapest), really funny when it's paired with tips in an EU country.
But this is why Revolut and WISE cards are a god send when travelling, just load them up with the local currency and these issues disappear.
Wise cards are still issued in your home country however. My NZ-issued Wise card still triggers the DCC prompt so it's more or less the same as a NZ-issued card from any other provider. A common misconception but understandable given how Wise markets their card products.
Yes, zero Forex fees cards work. But the terminal detects that your home currency is different to the local currency and you still have to choose the right option.
For example, just the other day I fat fingered the screen and chose the wrong currency.
1. A lot of math crops up in unexpected ways in everyday life. Trig in construction & wood working, calculus & integration when doing finance, &c.
2. It's not about teaching how to crunch numbers, it's also teaching general problem solving, and using tools to break down complex problems using your various tools to solve it. This translates directly to everyday life.
As a programmer we use calculus and integration all the time in performance testing and stats when we aggregate the data and pull insights. I have started getting into making canopies for events and I have todo a lot of trig to calculate the dimensions of the shapes before I send them to the printer. Hell I even use lots of my high school physics when I go to calculate the load to choose to right type of rope or metal wire and to determine if anchoring points are safe or not. We also use a lot math when calculating generator loads and building power grids for raves & festivals. I also do aerial circus and we use lots of physics when setting up rigging points and determining safety margins. Hell just having a basic physics understanding is really important to figure out if the carabiner you're using is going to kill you or not.
So yea math is really fucking important, and you do use it everyday even if it's just the problem solving it teaches.
> A lot of math crops up in unexpected ways in everyday life.
Planning a route through an amusement park or mall to reach the most things in the least time...
There's a lot we don't need mathematical perfection on so it never registers as math, but improved intuition can unconsciously help in completely unexpected ways. Like an understanding of latency for why a line at a convention was set up badly.
From what I understand, 'rave' was a late 1980s to early 1990s phenomenon. It was a time when everyone had an excellent time, high on drugs. Nobody was 'calculating generator loads and building power grids' even if you had 14kW of sound system to plug in, monitor speakers and some lights obtained for the weekend from the local theatre.
Electrical items would be plugged in with a slight risk of electrocution or fire, possibly in a pig's shed, in the pouring rain and in the dark. But this was not a worry since the show had to go on and there was the danger of the police turning up in force, with the legal right to steal the whole sound system, which could be big enough to require a semi truck to get it places.
Either the setup worked or it didn't. There was nobody doing advanced maths to get it working, and yes, there would always be a setup problem or two, which happens with kit that is made to work hard. The far more useful skills were the soft skills, so teamwork and coordination, not maths.
In time the rave scene was commercialised to the festival nonsense we have today. A proper rave was a full-on temporary autonomous zone where you could have small children trying to sell you acid tabs or ecstacy. Everything about it was illegal and nobody was sober.
Moving on to festivals and organised mandatory fun events, you have to have an entrance fee, the guys providing the music have to be paid, there has to be a small army of people in high visibility 'security' jackets and you certainly don't have small children trying to sell anyone any drugs.
In this secondary 'professional' context, where the goal is to make money not give people the best party they have ever been to, you really do have to 'calculate generator loads and build power grids' or else you won't get the venue, insurance or the event happening.
Clearly the free party scene is not what it was. Kids today have their five hundred social media friends so they don't need to socialise in real life. However, there was a time, not so long ago, when it all came together wonderfully, with the rave scene, and, part and parcel of that was the complete lack of professionalism. There was fun in taking your life into your own hands.
The aerial circus sounds fun (as does the canopy making). However, across all of the extreme sports where some acrobatics is needed, nobody is doing maths. Engineers behind the scenes, maybe, but the performers? It is all about dedication and practice. To take a relatively modern 'sport', parkour. That dangerous jump from building A to building B, that is done by eye, gut feeling and intuition, after lots of experience doing other jumps. No parkour person is going to whip out the old slide rule to work out the parameters of such a jump.
You mention the carabiner, which is a mountaineering gadget. Again, nobody doing mountaineering is doing fancy maths to select the right carabiner for the job. It comes down to intuition again, and what you and your climbing partner have fielded for the day.
Regarding finance, maths is allegedly useful, but how many bookkeepers are doing any maths beyond addition, subtraction and calculating percentages, mostly for tax paying purposes? In America, where everything is financially engineered and the economy is all about debt payments, maybe more maths is needed for the average citizen, but those hundreds of millions struggling to make their car payments just need a living wage, not added maths skills.
I will stop shouting at the clouds now, however, have you done any of your canopy designs in Blender with the cardboard box plugin that enables you to unwrap a 3D shape into 2D flat surfaces? If that is a no, then give it a go and see if it works for your projects. Note that it enables you to do a render that the client can approve before printing happens.
1. Just because a few commercial American events masquerade as raves or fedtivals, doesn't mean all events are like this. You just don't hear about the good events. We have to calculate generator loads because we're running 500-1000 person festivals with permits &c, but it's still an underground party operating by rave rules. No high vis security or police around. Also we're not doing this in the US, please don't project your shitty culture onto the whole world.
2. Aerial circus it's extremely important to inspect the rigging points and the hardware being used due to the sheer amount of force being generated by drops. You absolutely need to know the load of carabiniers, regular rock climbing ones are often not sufficient.
3. Blender could be a fun idea but you often are limited by the room and where the rigging points are, than what you can dream up.
The murder bot books are a bit silly from the get go, so the show leaned into the campy vibe to sell the comedic aspect.
As someone who loves the book, I think the show is a 10/10 for capturing the feeling. Though if you where expecting as more serious scifi I can see why you think it's of inferior quality.
> MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on
Except when Apple deprecates APIs but the replacement doesn't have close to the same functionality (looking at you screen capture kit).
Or when the documentation just doesn't explain anything and you have to reverse engineer the API to figure out what it does.
or how there's a bunch of hidden APIs only certain vendors are told about so you can't even compete on an even playing field.
And don't get me started on the C, C++, ObjectiveC and now Swift monstrosities. Having fun with your legacy project when the new APIs require swift, so you have to use the objectiveC bridge and the weird bugs that comes with it.
Certainly not in the way Apple does. Archive/zip integration into the file explorer is a great example. As apposed to F.lux, where Apple completely removed the API and app and made their own version of it.
There's also labour participation and underemployment to look at.
In your case underemployment would go up.
You need to look at all metrics together to get a bigger picture. Example is unemployment is down, but so is labour participation. That doesn't mean there was job growth, it means people stopped looking.
Or if unemployment is down, but underemployment is up. Similar picture emerges.
With their market share they are by definition of monopoly. Monopoly doesn't mean "only store front", it just means majourity market share to the point they control the market.
People forget there's nothing inherently wrong with monopolies. It's only when they abuse their monopoly position that there's issues.
Steam's customers aren't really the end users, though
Steam's customers are game publishers. Steam provides a service to connect publishers to their audience. Their business model is not "takes money from customers in exchange for goods". It is "takes a cut of each sale that a publisher makes on their platform"
Given that there is no real friction for end users to install Epic Launcher or GoG launcher, is Steam really a monopoly to their customers, the publishers?
If Steam tries to muscle a publisher, they can refuse to publish on Steam and still have options. When popular games aren't on Steam, it does seem like people have absolutely no problem installing another launcher/storefront to access it
Look at the massive success of Fortnite, which is only on the Epic Launcher
You Americans are so funny. Japan is hotter and more humid yet public transit and walking are not an issue. Taipei similar story, rapidly building out rail in a hotter place.
You build the rail, then upzome the areas around stations and over time those giant ashfault lots go away and become urban centres.