> The US is younger than a single Chinese dynasty.
Eh? There are like 60 Chinese dynasties throughout history. The US has been around longer than most of them. And some of the dynasties that were around longer than the US has been will lose that title if the US lasts another ~30 years. The Qing, Ming, Tang, etc. dynasties all lasted ~275 years, and the US has been around for 248 by now. But the vast majority of the Chinese dynasties lasted like 10 to 50 years.
I have traveled all over the US several times over as part of my job for the last 8 years. I've stayed in, worked from, and explored way too many American cities.
Most American cities have a small walkable core, that is unaffordable for most, surrounded by affordable, but completely car-dependent, suburbs.
Public transportation in most of these walkable cores is a complete joke. Most rely on buses that don't go where you need to be and don't come often or reliably enough to build a routine around.
To wit: the only cities that I travel to that I can safely avoiding renting a car in are NYC, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Traveling to LITERALLY EVERY OTHER CITY requires calculating and pre-planning how long it will take to go places by bus or light rail (if they have it!), juxtaposing that against the customer I'll be visiting and destinations that look interesting, and ultimately concluding "yeah, a rental car's easier." Mind you, I LOVE walking and can walk miles and miles per day when given the option!
The suburbs that run rampant throughout the US don't have sidewalks, cluster everything you need into shopping centers (with comical parking lot sizes that, you guessed it, is completely unsafe to walk through because of cars driving all over it) and have road plans that encourage high-speed traffic feeds into large highways/freeways at the cost of making walking completely infeasible.
(Oh, right, and flying 15+ mph past these already bonkers high speed limits is so completely normal, that driving the actual speed limit becomes dangerous! Imagine riding your bike on a two-lane 45mph road with no sidewalks or shoulder where the drivers behind you would travel 60mph on if given the chance. Aggression central. That was my life for two years. Worst two years of my life in that aspect.)
But, hey, you can get a huge (2400+ sq. ft.) house "for the kids", a yard for the dogs and kids to "safely" run around it, and a two-car garage to store an ABSOLUTELY UNBELIEVABLE amount of pure crap with your mandatory cars parked in front of it for less than $350,000!
This becomes increasingly true the more Southern the city is.
I don't have data to back this, but I strongly believe that the modern suburb is THE driving force behind the increased divisiveness our country is experiencing (or the maxim of the divisiveness that has always existed within this country). The suburbs are designed from their core to separate and isolate, a feature only exacerbated by the infinite stream of entertainment that today's Internet provides. Community only happens naturally when people are close to each other, and that just doesn't happen within suburbs.
Having grown up in an extremely walkable city (outside the US) with top notch public transportation, neighborhood markets, farmer's markets, entertainment options and cultural activities, I'm so thankful for being able to escape that anthill and live in a hardcore Southern suburban cookie-cutter neighborhood where I can enjoy peace, quiet, birds, my man-cave+home theater and comprehensive shopping options that don't require me to literally fight people for parking.
It's great that you get to enjoy birds and your home theater. Birds are amazing.
That shouldn't be the _only_ option for people trying to buy an affordable SFH that isn't an apartment the size of a closet.
I also don't think suburbs shouldn't exist at the cost of walkability. We lived in a modern suburb for two years. Parking was easy (driving to the parking was horrible), but I absolutely hated that walking anywhere was completely infeasible.
Early suburbs were smaller, highly walkable and had (smaller) single family homes. I grew up in such a suburb after my first years in NYC. Our house was small (by today's standards), but I walked to school, walked to the main strip to hang out with friends and took the bus to the mall (though its schedule sucked) and to NYC (when I began working).
I fault the people complaining about performance of a city builder running at 1440p more than the developer. You're looking at concrete and asphalt and brick textures and shit like that. You don't need anything higher than 720p.
Dude, we're talking about an RTX 4090. A GPU that can run current-gen AAA games on max settings at 4k60fps should not slow to a crawl when rendering "concrete and asphalt and brick textures and shit", to use your words.
So if I have a budget PC, I should be content with running this game at Nintendo 64 resolution? Or I guess it's on me to fork over $1,000 for a high-end GPU if I want to run it at 2/3 the resolution of a midrange mobile phone, as you suggest.
If you buy pine or oak or cedar you can be pretty darn sure it is regenerative. That's how the industry is able to exist: they cut the same fields of trees every 15-30 years.
If you're concerned, you can always plant a tree or two somewhere for every project you do that uses wood. There are lots of places that let you plant trees even outside your own property.
That's not really "full self driving" if you are referring to the SAE scale. Level 5, the top, is fully autonomous driving, everywhere. What you are referring to is level 4; fully autonomous driving in specific geofenced areas on predetermined routes. Think Delamain in Cyberpunk 2077.
Oh my god yes trying to watch Carnival Row is freaking impossible during the day. But also, I'd be OK with worse picture if they would let the sound guys actually get a microphone within 20 feet of the actors.
Eh? There are like 60 Chinese dynasties throughout history. The US has been around longer than most of them. And some of the dynasties that were around longer than the US has been will lose that title if the US lasts another ~30 years. The Qing, Ming, Tang, etc. dynasties all lasted ~275 years, and the US has been around for 248 by now. But the vast majority of the Chinese dynasties lasted like 10 to 50 years.