Lurker > adjl

LinkPizza posted...

Its sound likes one person gets screwed. Either the houses cost the same amount for less land, meaning the buyer is spending the the same amount of money for less land overall, erring the builder more. Or the builder is getting screwed because the house are worth less because they have less land meaning they arent making more for more house, but doing more work for less money

It's exceedingly rare for the person building the house to also be the one selling it. More often, it's a developer who owns the land hiring a contractor to do the building. In that case, the builder gets paid the same amount to build the same house, then the developer sells the property for the price of the house plus the price of the land. Generally speaking, reducing the amount of lawn/driveway by 20% will reduce the sale price of the house, but by a lot less than 20% because home prices do not scale linearly by lot size. That means that when all those 20% reductions add up to one new lot every 5 properties, the developer sells 20% more homes. Even if those homes are sold for 85% of the price that would be charged for the full lot (which is a very generous estimate of the discount), selling 20% more means the developer is making 2% more money off of exactly the same amount of land, while creating more 20% construction jobs to build them all, providing 20% more homes, and making homes 15% more affordable for those looking to buy.

It's a win all around, provided that driveway isn't needed. If the driveway is needed, this is no longer an option, which is why I presented this as being something that a city can do when it's not designed so people need to own cars. Otherwise, it is indeed not a viable idea.

LinkPizza posted...

Yeah. But thats only if traffic is actually a problem for them But not everybody has a problem with traffic. And some people could still get to where they want to go with bad traffic just because they can go straight to their destination Meaning that just having better traffic isnt always going to benefit someone, or will benefit someone enough to actually take public transportation

Literally all of this is predicated on transit being improved to the point of being faster than driving, which is entirely possible. I don't know why you insist on bringing up "well what if transit wasn't faster than driving so people kept driving?" when that's not part of the goal at all. By and large, people will do what's most efficient for them. If you make transit most efficient for them, most of them will take transit.

LinkPizza posted...

The things is if they couldve made better routes, they would have.

You dramatically overestimate the competence of American city planning. Thanks to decades of propaganda from the car industry and investment into suppressing effective transit initiatives from people like the Koch brothers that stand to profit from more people driving, transit is overwhelmingly seen as an afterthought after designing the city around cars, tacked on for the sake of the handful of people that can't/really don't want to drive. The routes you have now are designed around that philosophy, aiming to have the bare minimum number of routes (and therefore buses and drivers) needed to cover everyone that needs to use them. That means routes go all over the place for the sake of getting within easy walking distance of as many homes as possible, slowing them down and making them more prone to being caught in traffic problems because they're trying to go through a greater number of different areas.

When cities are designed from a transit-centric perspective, transit routes are established first (sometimes to the extreme of building train stops literally in the middle of nowhere) that draw the most direct lines possible between high-priority areas, then development happens along those lines because when transit actually works, "near a major transit line" is a very attractive feature for a property (whether commercial or residential) to have, and that development can be much denser because there's a lot less need to build around everyone having a car when everyone has ready access to viable alternatives.

LinkPizza posted...

Because most people would still want to have their own vehicle, even if they normally use public transport

That's where carshares come in. If you don't drive to work, you really don't need to own a car. In cities where it's viable to get around without a car most of the time and local governments haven't actively prevented carshare services from getting a foothold (because most of them are bought and paid for by the oil/car industries), carshare networks tend to thrive to the point of being only marginally less convenient than owning a car, while being vastly cheaper, requiring no personal parking space, and having the added bonus of letting you pick the kind of vehicle that's best-suited to what you're doing (like getting a cargo van to pick up large items).

Even if you don't go that far, though, having viable alternatives to driving such that you don't need a car to get to work cuts down on how many cars families need. It's pretty typical for a family to have two cars, simply because both parents need to get to work. Adding in a third when kids get old enough to drive isn't unusual, especially if the house is somewhere where it's pretty much impossible to do anything without a car (a huge portion of the "people need cars to be independent" attitude comes from people remembering how little independent mobility they had as children). Making space for one car is a lot easier than making space for 2-3, such that simply parking on the street is likely to be good enough. That's still not ideal, since it means streets have to be wider (which is a lot of extra space and also contributes to speeding issues), but the bottom line is that people having fewer cars on average allows for greater flexibility and efficiency in how residential areas are built.

LinkPizza posted...

Like my city turned down Six Flags because they didnt want people to come to the city.

That actually might be because of the infrastructure needs it would create. If something brings in a sizable influx of people, that means extra traffic, extra parking, and the need to build extra places for them to stay. All of that is done on the gamble that Six Flags will actually bring in the expected number of people, generates enough taxes to cover the extra infrastructure (which it probably won't on its own), and sustains that level of tourism indefinitely. Otherwise, you end up with a bunch of useless, expensive infrastructure that nobody's paying for.

At the extreme end, you see this pretty often with things like the Olympics, World Cup, and Eurovision: Whichever city ends up hosting often has to invest heavily in creating stadiums, extra accommodations, and other improvements to be able to handle the massive spike in tourists. When the event ends, however, that tourism mostly disappears, often leaving the city with significantly more debt from building all of that infrastructure than they were able to make from such a short-lived spike in tourism. Tourism is good for cities, but only if it's sustainable enough to maintain the infrastructure needed to accommodate it. Temporary, one-off spikes tend to cost more than they make.

Now, would Six Flags be a temporary, one-off spike? Probably not. It's an established franchise, it operates continuously, and expected attendance will be fairly predictable by virtue of how established it is. But if it's attracting significantly more tourism than normal, that does mean quite a lot of investment from the city will be hinging on Six Flags' success, and that's a pretty risky strategy. Something like Six Flags should be part of a broader tourism plan that includes other attractions of a similar scale.

Clench281 posted...

I imagine that behavior would change pretty quickly if people actually paid the true cost of doing so. Sub/exurban single family homes would pay at least 5x the property tax they do now, and gas would be priced about twice what it is now cover its negative externalities

At least. There are quite a few cities where increasing taxes by enough to cover the infrastructure deficit would result in the median tax bill being higher than the median income, which is just outright impossible. At least some of the burden ought to be shifted, though, since as it stands lower-income families stuck in crappy high-density housing actually end up subsidizing wealthy suburban households because their infrastructure bill is low enough for their taxes to yield a surplus.

LinkPizza posted...

Depends on if switching will actually benefit them or not And that depends on a bunch of factors

Which gets back to the point that traffic won't improve unless alternatives to driving are better than driving. That's perfectly attainable, just not without making some significant changes to how cities approach transit, active transportation, and planning.

LinkPizza posted...

The problem isnt always the traffic, though The routes themselves are the problem.

All of this objection is boiling down to "buses aren't good enough now to take the place of cars," but this whole idea entails making buses better to the point that they are good enough to take the place of cars. If the current routes meander too much, make better routes (and adjust zoning laws to allow development around those routes that will take proper advantage of them), actually designed around the premise that they will be used by lots of people and not stopping at everybody's back door to try and cram all of the people that can't afford cars into one bus.

LinkPizza posted...

Chances are that the driveway would be extra lawn if they removed them

If you remove it from existing houses, sure. If you design a new subdivision around transit instead of ensuring every house has room for 2+ cars, though, that's 100% going to allow for smaller lots and more houses, which developers will gladly do because that means more money.

LinkPizza posted...

What Im asking is what if when they propose new subdivisions, the cities say no to them? Wouldnt they still need approval from the city to build the subdivision?

Then they can't build, I guess. Not everything gets approved automatically, but many cities do have to actively court development and growth to stay financially solvent, which just isn't a sustainable model.

LinkPizza posted...

Thats only if everyone have up their car.

It's true if even one person chooses to take the bus instead. It's just a question of magnitude, since obviously the savings become greater the fewer people are driving (which, in turn, makes traffic better for those that do drive). It's never going to be an all-or-nothing deal, as much as conspiracy theorists like to interpret "we should expend transit so people don't have to drive everywhere" as "we should take away everyone's cars and leave them stranded and helpless," but any improvement offers benefits.

LinkPizza posted...

As for doubling the amount of people, thats only if people rode the bus We already have buses, but people still dont ride them (and I dont blame them after working there, tbh)

Which is why all of this is predicated on transit service being improved to the point of being better than driving. That figure is based on frequent, reliable buses that just share the lane with cars (which is a terrible way to do buses because it guarantees they will never actually be faster than cars due to being stuck in the same traffic while also having to stop periodically). If buses are infrequent and unreliable, people don't ride them.

LinkPizza posted...

As for the parked car, most probably spend time parked at home in a garage or driveway

The average residential driveway is about 10-12 feet wide. The average suburban lot in America is about 60 feet wide, though cutting that in half to have 30 feet of frontage isn't uncommon. That means the narrowest point of the driveway - which may widen further than that to accommodate a garage or have two cars side-by-side - takes up potentially 18-36% of the width of the lot, usually running back far enough that it cuts into space that could otherwise be part of the house (especially if it's trying to have room for two cars, which most suburban houses do because they're meant for families and getting by with only one car in a car-dependent suburb is difficult). If those suburbs were properly serviced by transit or otherwise connected such that driveways and garages didn't need to be an absolute requirement, you could fit as many as 20-30% more houses of exactly the same size in the same area, even without getting into zoning changes and developing some of those lots as mutli-family homes or mixed-use properties.

It's not just suburbs that this applies to, either. On average, when you take into account access lanes and whatnot, each parking spot in a parking lot or garage takes up ~288 square feet (https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/07/05/ parking-takes-up-more-space-than-you-think/, minus the space, because apparently this random blog really has my back for this discussion). That means that, to provide a parking spot for every resident of an apartment or condo building with 1200-square foot units, the equivalent of one unit has to be sacrificed to parking for every four units that are available for occupancy. There could be up to 25% more housing in every building like that if there wasn't a need for every resident to park a car, which is huge. Now, buildings like that usually use their basements for parking, which means it's not necessarily a simple matter of being able to use the space for apartments instead, but it's still a huge amount of space rendered useless by the fact that so many people need a place to leave their cars for the vast majority of each day.

LinkPizza posted...

Wouldnt that depends on if the people who run the city wanted it to grow Because I can tell you they dont. Thats why they deny so much stuff already

Depending on how much car-dependent sprawl they've already built, they may not have a choice. When developers propose new subdivisions to cities, it's often with the offer to pay for the initial construction of all roads and other infrastructure (transit excluded) required to connect that subdivision to the rest of the city. That means the city gets a sizable infusion of extra property tax revenue at no immediate cost. Fast-forward ~25 years, though, and that free infrastructure starts to wear out and need maintenance, while the property tax infusion from when the development was built has already been spent on maintaining older infrastructure that wore out in that time frame, so they need a new source of revenue in the form of a new development. Lather, rinse, repeat until they can't find new growth to capitalize on and the city goes bankrupt.

Now, that's not every city. If yours is stable at a relatively small size and low density and doesn't have traffic issues, your city might not actually benefit from this. But most cities in the US lean heavily on subsidies from the state and federal governments to keep their infrastructure afloat because they can't maintain it with their own tax income, and quite a few have outright gone bankrupt because those subsidies weren't enough to offset the shortfall. If you live in an exception, for whatever reason, that's great, but many, many American cities cannot claim the same.

chelle posted...

Never seen a topic stay up after the opening post got moderated.

Weird.

That is weird.

NemesisOgreKing posted...

Guess I'm transphobic for liking Harry Potter

Not really. HP itself carries enough themes of acceptance of those that are different that it's actually quite popular among the LGBTQ crowd, even if Rowling's shenanigans have tainted that and many former fans no longer want to support her in any way because of what she does with the platform that support has given her. The fact that the series is ultimately about a trust fund kid who grows up to become a cop and marry his high school sweetheart isn't exactly something that necessarily resonates with more vulnerable or disenfranchised populations, but generally speaking the stories aren't particularly exclusionary and don't carry any readily apparent transphobic messaging.

NemesisOgreKing posted...

Guess I'm transphobic for [...] agreeing with J.K.

That, however, is 100% true. Rowling is quite unquestionably a TERF, including proudly identifying herself as one before TERFs realized that the term they came up with to describe themselves was being viewed negatively by enough people that they wanted to use a different word. If you don't think so, that's because you've chosen to base your opinion off of a handful of less-egregious comments that you've taken out of context and done absolutely nothing to think about beyond their obvious face value, which is a long-winded way of saying that you don't think she's transphobic because you've decided to avoid anything that might lead you to view her as such. I could rattle off examples, but I'd rather let somebody who actually stands to be hurt by her anti-trans activism handle that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNKyQVsgKLg

NemesisOgreKing posted...

Good to know Hogwarts Lagacy sold well enough to get a series.

It didn't. The series is just re-adapting the books, which I honestly don't see much point in. Legacy makes some sense, since there's some interesting worldbuilding to be done in the HP universe and getting to dick around in an open-world Hogwarts is a neat idea, but the movies already exist as adaptations of the books. Sure, there's plenty of room to improve the movies' faithfulness to the books, but not so much room that I'd be willing to sit through many hours of TV (which will almost certainly end up being ridiculously padded to fill out a season) just to patch those holes.

PK_Spam posted...

Because she didnt and still doesnt live here technically (even if she is the one paying his rent) and it shouldnt be on her to clean up

Maybe I'm weird, but when I make a mess in somebody else's house, I generally at least try to clean it up myself.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

I think having it is causing more problems.

That would be because you only hear about the fringe cases of copyright laws being abused. The fundamental concept is fine, and is in fact pretty much necessary for creatives to be commercially successful at all. In the vast majority of cases, things work as intended and you don't hear anything about them because reporting on the status quo is boring. To abolish the concept because of a few fringe cases of abuse would make no sense at all.

jsb0714 posted...

What is with the idiotic thinking that companies shouldn't protect or be able to protect their IPs? Just because YouTube exists it should be a free-for-all? That's just fucking stupid.

Protecting IP's is fair game, but exerting absolute control over who is and isn't allowed to even display footage from a game is pretty dubious. For one thing, that's exactly what the concept of "fair use" is meant to protect, but more than that, there's little to no benefit and often quite a bit of harm to be found by doing so. It's not the end of the world if that happens, since it's not like there aren't plenty of other companies that are perfectly happy having streamers cover their games to keep that industry afloat, but it's still just a bizarre stance to take and not really a good look overall.

$600 seems like a pretty conservative estimate.

It gets a lot less confusing when you remember that you're thinking about Nintendo in the context of the Internet. They... don't quite understand it just yet, and don't seem to have gotten past the initial impression of "people are using it to steal our products."

LinkPizza posted...

That said, if walking areas arent safe because they are close to the road, I havent seen many safe walking areas in my life (compared to the amount of non-safe Ive seen, at least)

Welcome to America.

LinkPizza posted...

It didnt have to do with zoning laws It was on base, where they basically just follow their own laws

Ah, well then that's not overly relevant to city planning. Self-contained microcosms like bases and campuses tend to be designed better (by virtue of having a cohesive design vision instead of just making it up as they go along), and in the case of bases, it's never really going to happen that the government says "we allocated a bit more land than was actually needed for this base, let's develop it into something more functional" because of security concerns and wanting to have some flexibility available if something changes that demands more land.

LinkPizza posted...

They dont really fix the roads here, anyway So, reduced roads maintenance wont get us much Plus, theyll still need to fix the roads. The public transport will still use them, plus most people would still tend to drive cars

Roads still need to be maintained, but if those roads are being used more efficiently than to carry around a bunch of single-occupant cars, you end up paying less per person moved.

LinkPizza posted...

And more space for everything

This, I think, might be the big thing tripping you up. Car-centric infrastructure requires more space to mvoe the same number of people than any other alternative. Period. If building transit infrastructure does entail taking up more space instead of converting existing space (most likely on-street parking), that's an expansion that would end up happening in the not-too-distant future anyway for the sake of trying to move more car traffic (which is only ever a band-aid solution because induced demand means that new lane will fill up pretty quickly and traffic will continue being just as bad).

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/05/10/how-can-cities-move-more-people-without-wider-streets-hint-not-with-cars/

As outlined there, a lane filled with just cars can generally move somewhere between 600 and 1600 people per hour. You can nearly double that just by throwing frequent buses into the mix (bear in mind that a bus can comfortably carry 50 times more people than most cars have in them, with ~3-4 times the footprint). Make it a dedicated bus lane instead (with appropriate bus saturation), and you can push 4000-8000. Building for transit does not require "more space for everything." Precisely the opposite: Building for private vehicle use is what requires more space, which is why it comes at such a massive infrastructure cost and actively impairs walkability (by making everything further apart), even before considering the question of what has to be done with all those cars that spend an average of 96% of their lifetimes parked.

LinkPizza posted...

And the front-end cost would end up being a ton to change a whole city around to be public transport friendly

Depends how you do it. Tweak zoning laws to allow mixed-use developments of an appropriate density for where they are, put a complete halt on developing new suburbs that don't have enough population/commercial density to pay for the road/transit infrastructure needed to connect them to everything else, and right off the bat you've got a near-zero-cost initiative that will encourage the city to grow sustainably and help to ensure that new transit projects will be used enough to justify the expense.

Beyond that, though, there is indeed a front-end cost, but it's a front-end cost that can be expected to yield a significant return on investment. The alternative is to maintain the status quo and continue hemorrhaging money (quite a bit more than this front-end cost, long-term) trying to tread water and never actually making anything better. Gotta spend money to make money, and in this case, the alternative is spending just as much money and not making anything. There's a pretty clear winner.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


It would appear I was mistaken.

pionear posted...

Wasn't aware there was a difference

It mostly boils down to the egg content and whether or not there's any chemical leavening.

Mostly, trademark law is stupid and if a trademark holder doesn't go after cases where there's the remotest hint of possibility that they might have a case, that can be used in less stupid cases to show that the trademark holder has a history of letting other people use the name.

MeatiestMeatus posted...

Cakey brownies are an affront to humanity

They're alright, but if they're what I'm in the mood for I'm generally going to be better able to satisfy that desire with some actual cake instead, so I might as well just make that.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Usually with a significant mod history on the same account, though. This account hasn't really seen much action yet, so they'll tend to be more lenient unless they're considering a usermap axe.

5 years already? Wild. Congrats, that's really great.

Fudgy brownies>cupcakes>>>cakey brownies.

At least, assuming it's just regular chocolate cupcakes with basic vanilla or chocolate American buttercream we're looking at. In practice, the wide variety of potential flavour, frosting, and filling options for cupcakes make the comparison a lot harder and more subject to whatever I happen to be in the mood for at a given moment.

MightBeOverSoon posted...

I'm not seeing a scenario in which this doesn't end up deleted, and probably me banned, so...

Probably not. Even GameFAQs has higher standards than this for moddable trolling, let alone any kind of significant account action. At worst, if the topic devolves into particularly uncivil discourse, it might be closed, but I don't think that's overly likely.

agesboy posted...

Now that I think of it, that was literally the one time in my life I could actually walk places or had any kind of access to public transportation (a couple of buses ran around campus and occasionally out into town). I could literally go weeks without touching my car unless I wanted 3AM taco bell. It was so fucking good. Sometimes I would just lend my car to family members for months at a time because it was unnecessary for me... but that's because dorm life was designed from the start to be a walkable microcosm.

Yep. A lot of people reflect very fondly on their time in university for exactly that reason: they didn't have to drive if they didn't want to.

LinkPizza posted...

Theres still walking areas around Sidewalks and stuff

Having sidewalks doesn't make an area walkable. Having stuff within a comfortable walking distance does, which is much more difficult when stores are routinely set a kilometre back from the road to accommodate the parking lot, or when entire blocks that could have been destinations are bulldozed to make space for parking. It also relies on walking being a safe option, which it really isn't when the street has been designed to prioritize moving as many cars as possible as quickly as possible, since that results in narrower sidewalks with fewer obstacles between the sidewalk and the road (which minimize the harm of cars mounting the curb for whatever reason), frequent driveways, more complex intersections where drivers have more to pay attention to than pedestrians (right turns on red lights are a particular issue, since drivers are typically looking to their left while making those turns and have a harder time noticing pedestrians coming from the right), longer crossings... The issues are countless.

LinkPizza posted...

That said, most spaces get used. We made just a patch of land that was sitting there useless into more parking spaces since it wasnt used for anything else. So, now its usually full with a couple spaces open. And thats usually enough for everybody to park. And since its a 24 hour operation, they are usually getting used through the whole day

That's kind of the point. Designing the city around cars means all that parking space is necessary, because everybody has to drive and everybody that drives needs somewhere to store their car when they get where they're going. That land wasn't useless, it was unused, which I'd be willing to bet was a consequence of zoning laws, minimum parking requirements, and other car-centric policies making it non-viable to develop it into something more valuable than parking. If it's valuable as parking, then it's close enough to other things to have been valuable as a commercial destination or housing (or both, since mixed-use, medium-density housing is fantastic for cities despite the fact that many cities don't even allow such properties to be built), which it could have been if not for the need to allocate so much land to parking.

LinkPizza posted...

Though, tbf, base just has a lot of extra land that just sits there unused. Mostly just fields Some have trees, and some just have grass They should probably use it for something. But they dont have a need for anything new right now. But its not used for parking or living or anything. Just the local wildlife, I guess. So, it seems like it works well since everything it close-ish on base Still a big base, though

Bases are a bit of a different situation in that they tend to be designed to be self-sufficient and allow people to do what they need to do without travelling far. University campuses are often designed around similar principles, assuming that those living in dorms don't have cars and making everything pleasantly walkable as a result. It'll depend a bit on the base, but I expect you actually can enjoy some of the benefits of good city design already and that there are errands you prefer to run on the base instead of on your way home because the base is just better designed.

LinkPizza posted...

As for tax, either way, tax will be expensive I dont see it getting cheaper with public transportation At least, not anytime soon I can see it getting way more expensive, though

Road infrastructure is unfathomably expensive, and far and away the least cost-efficient way to move people around cities (putting aside obvious silly alternatives like personal, tax-funded helicopters). Low-density housing, industrial parks, and other car-centric designs need way more road infrastructure (and also power, sewer, water, phone, internet, and other forms of infrastructure that every one of those spaced-out buildings needs) to connect them to the rest of the grid, so not only do those parcels of land generate less tax revenue per unit of area, they cost more tax dollars to service. People routinely balk at the idea of spending half a million to install a few protected bike lanes (which improve traffic flow by getting more people out of cars), but happily swallow spending a hundred times that just fixing the potholes that showed up over the winter (which is the bare minimum needed to keep roads usable and does nothing to improve traffic flow).

Would there be a front-end cost? Sure. Is that front-end cost going to be very quickly mitigated by fares, increased property and sales tax revenue, and reduced road maintenance requirements? Absolutely. Cities routinely invest more in road "improvements" than it would take to pivot to a less car-centric model, and those improvements don't actually help anything in the long run.

LinkPizza posted...

Buses and trains have routes. So, even with the bus lanes, it just depends on the route. With a personal vehicle, I head straight to wherever Im going. With public transport, I can end up going a bunch of places around town first (and possibly the transit station) first

Buses tend to follow the same major arterial roads that you'd take in a car anyway, or at least something closely parallel to it. Personally, I don't walk/bike to work on the same road that my bus to work would take, but it's only 1-2 blocks over for most of the trip, and that's the same distance I'd have to walk to get to the stop in the first place. On the rare occasion that I drive, I'll take either of those two roads and see similar results either way. Now, that bus comes once every 20 minutes at best, is routinely very late, sometimes doesn't show up at all, and I'm still leery of public transit amid the pandemic, but I would at least say that the route is well-designed and improving it to be properly usable is going to be a matter of improving the frequency and reliability.

If transit is well-designed, you won't be meandering aimlessly around on a bus before getting to where you're going. It might not be quite as direct a route as you would drive, but it should be comparable, especially with provisions like bus lanes and advance signals to help it avoid getting stuck in traffic (which is a major part of making it faster than driving).

LinkPizza posted...

I know that having used lots of public transit before, youre at the mercy of everything else.

That's no less true of cars. You don't control traffic any more than you control bus schedules. Heck, in most places that just throw buses in with the rest of the cars and wonder why nobody wants to use them, that same traffic is often going to be the main reason buses show up late or miss stops. By and large, machinery that is professionally maintained on a prescribed schedule and operated by trained professionals is going to be less prone to randomly breaking down or getting into an accident than any given car being driven by any given person, to the main factor for unpredictability is traffic, which there are many ways to mitigate for transit (including making transit reliable enough that people take it instead of driving, which improves traffic from the outset).

LinkPizza posted...

Most places Ive needed to go have enough parking that I wasnt looking for long, if at all

And what ratio between productive land and parking has been needed to make that possible? What impact has that had on the ability of a given parcel of land to produce tax revenue to sustain the infrastructure needed to reach it (not to mention everything else the city has to do)? What does it do to the walkability of an area to have ample parking space close to every destination?

It's possible, but it comes at a considerable cost.

LinkPizza posted...

And I do like being able to leave whenever Especially since depending on the how long the route is, and how many buses there are, I might I have to leave like 30 minutes earlier

That would be an example of inadequate transit. Again, traffic will get worse until a faster alternative exists. If you want to improve traffic, you need to figure out a way to make transit faster, such as dedicated bus lanes and advance bus signals to prevent buses from getting stuck in traffic, trams/streetcars that have their own lanes and infrastructure that bypasses traffic, or trains. If transit is slower, that's either a design failure (more likely) or an indication that your local traffic isn't actually bad enough to warrant making efforts to improve it (which is actually true of a lot of smaller towns, but those towns can still benefit from building around transit instead of cars as they try to grow because that growth will be more sustainable).

LinkPizza posted...

That said, Im also forgetful. So, being able to just turn around and go home to get whatever I forgot is definitely helpful

That is indeed a situation where transit isn't likely to be able to match cars, but as you say that's a fairly minor personal issue and therefore not really something worth considering when designing a city.

BADoglick posted...

Curious how it is, reviews seem all over the place. I've literally seen both 'the new gold standard for videogame movies' and also 'yet another bad game adaptation' so idk what to think

My vague impression of the collective opinion is that the movie is a pretty generic animated kids' movie sort of deal, but that it's full of references to the Mario series that actually respect the source material instead of blatantly ignoring it like so many video game movies do, so that's kind of refreshing. I'm guessing your opinion will depend on whether or not you enjoy that kind of fanservice enough to prop up a movie that's otherwise largely unremarkable.

Of course, the actual gold standard for video game movies is Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva, but that's not necessarily a fair comparison because those games' stories are extremely easy to turn into movies (by virtue of already just being movies, for the most part).

DirtBasedSoap posted...

bro how do you put this much effort into posting here. Im genuinely curious

*Shrug*

Muscles posted...

It doesn't matter how much personal transportation improves, it'll never be as convenient or give as much freedom as a personal vehicle.

That "freedom" loses a lot of its lustre when you realize the true cost associated with it. When cities are designed so overwhelmingly for cars, you have to drive everywhere. You don't have the freedom to not own a car, unless you can rely on somebody who does (which still isn't all that free). It means cities need to have higher taxes. It means cities spend all their efforts courting developers willing to build new car-centric suburbs instead of maintaining any sort of historical character to set themselves apart (often bankrupting themselves in the process because that's basically a ponzi scheme). It means poorer-quality infrastructure all around. It means bulldozing acres upon acres of high-value downtown real estate to make room for all the cars that sit and do nothing all day. It means higher housing prices and more homelessness because land that could be housing ends up being used to widen roads. It means small businesses struggling because they depend so heavily on foot traffic. It means orders of magnitude more pedestrian injuries and deaths despite the fact that so many fewer people try to walk anywhere because it's so miserable. It means air pollution, noise, stress, and traffic that will inexorably get worse no matter how many more lanes you add.

But hey, at least you can leave when you want instead of 5-10 minutes earlier or later, and if you're lucky you might only have to circle the block for 10 minutes to find a parking spot closer than the transit stop would be. I guess that's pretty nifty.

Are there merits to personal cars? Sure. But designing cities such that personal cars are the default mode of everyday transportation is utterly asinine. Cities need viable alternatives to driving. It's an inescapable law that traffic will only get worse until a faster alternative exists. If you don't make faster alternatives, you're just going to spend the rest of your life in traffic.

Instead of fondly remembering how liberating it felt to get your driver's license, try getting mad at how imprisoned you felt for the first 16 years of your life, and ask why your community decided to inflict that on you. Being unable (or even unwilling) to drive doesn't have to limit you. That it does is a failure.

Judgmenl posted...

From what I listened to they actually seem to understand enough. I should really listen to the hearing that happened a few weeks ago.

Possibly. I'm saying this having paid zero attention to any of the matter and harbouring no actual fear that VPN's will disappear and modern computing as we know it will collapse. I'm just not about to assume that Congress knows anything about computers until proven otherwise.

Judgmenl posted...

Nobody is going to take this from you. A ban on VPNs is essentially a ban on encryption.
A ban on encryption is literally the end of the modern era. Everything we do relies on encryption to work.

You know that, and I know that, but a substantial number of the dinosaurs running the country don't understand why Tiktok needs to be able to access home wifi networks. Expecting the most basic modicum of technical competency from Congress may be a little too optimistic.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

That would be true if it were a limited edition where the intent is to only make so many. But for a collector's edition I don't see why they can't make as many as are ordered.

"Limited edition" and "collector's edition" tend to be more or less synonymous in typical speech. Both terms serve to increase the apparent value of the extra items by implying that they'll be hard to find if you don't buy it now, driving up demand. I can see why you might think there's a difference if you take each term literally (that is, "limited edition" covers any edition that is limited, while "collector's edition" provides extras that people interested in collecting merchandise might want), but the concept of "collectibles" colloquially implies some degree of rarity and uniqueness that is somewhat at odds with mass production.

Lokarin posted...

ya, i still don't get this... the point of pre-orders is so that makers know how many to order from the factory

Yes and no. Pre-orders are indeed useful for that reason, taking some of the guesswork out of manufacturing, but there's still inevitably going to be an upper limit on what they're willing to produce, and if pre-orders reach that limit, they aren't necessarily gong to produce more. Whether because they underestimated demand and weren't able to satisfy it or because they're deliberately limiting supply to artificially inflate demand (a very real possibility with Nintendo and any sort of collectible item), selling out of pre-orders is perfectly plausible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMH49ieL4es

Dunno why, but I'm not complaining.

Technically his bathroom could have been a locked room, and you could argue that the toilet was "locked" after he tried to flush them.

Entity13 posted...

Allegedly 10k votes had been cast for Harambe as well, but I seem to recall there being no actual evidence of those votes existing?

The real election fraud problem we need to be investigating. Dicks out, everyone. The road to justice is long and hard.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Factorio

Very this. It's insanely easy to lose several hours playing Factorio.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

In the US there is suppose to be a presumption of innocence. Trump's lawyers don't have to prove the records keepers were deceived. The prosecution has to prove that the records were false and the record keepers knew what they entered was false.

And therein lies the "it often holds up in court because hiding evidence and throwing bottom-rung employees under the bus is easy" part that you cropped out of that quote. That changes nothing about how gullible you have to be to believe "I didn't know my employee was spending the money that I gave him for something that overwhelmingly benefited me" in a more colloquial sense.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

They were talking about how underwhelming the indictment was. They were hoping for a crime so obvious even I would be unable to put up an argument. What I agree with CNN on is how weak of a case it appears to be.

So CNN is included in saying "everyone knows that's bullshit," as opposed to agreeing with you in believing what Trump claims. "This is going to be hard to prove in court" is very different from "I believe he's innocent."

BlackScythe0 posted...

I think you know the answer.

I can guess, but I really do want to help him understand the ways in which he's misunderstanding the world.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

I tend to disagree with the talking heads on CNN yet they raised the same issues I did.

Did they raise them as support for their belief that he's innocent, or did they just say that that's the defense he's going with as a statement of the facts?

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

WTF is the point of pre-orders then?

To ensure that there's a copy available for you on launch day. As it happens, it looks like there wouldn't have been a copy either way, but that's still the main idea.

For real, though, I don't recommend getting your hopes up for any collectors' editions of Nintendo games. They tend to dramatically under-produce them and often run into technical issues dealing with the volume of orders (Xenoblade 3's was particularly bad for this), such that actually getting one is pretty hard. That's not to say you shouldn't try if you're interested, but you'll be best off expecting to fail.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

she isn't really harming or oppressing him though

the case is very much related to her, but she didn't initiate any of it, not even positive she's even a part of it right now

and like all these middleaged wussy men would chop off their right nuts to even have a chance with stormy

Her decision to reveal the hush money is what precipitated all of this, so I can understand blaming her. These do tend to be the sorts of... individuals that would rather blame the person who brought the crimes to light than the criminal that committed them, especially where the criminal is their favourite person ever.

Bonus points where she's a woman who didn't save herself for marriage to any of them, so they already hate her.

Lokarin posted...

Ok, Octopath has the most BS final boss ever

I didn't have too much trouble with it, but I also had a thoroughly overpowered party comp. I was more annoyed by the fact that all of the interesting tie-ins between the eight stories were relegated to text dumps hiding behind this obscure sidequest chain that turned out to be the true ending. It was an interesting story, but the delivery left so much to be desired.

Zareth posted...

I am not optimistic for Metroid Prime 4.

Prime Remastered actually gives me some degree of hope for it. Retro very obviously put a lot of work into that remaster to get it looking that good on the Switch. That's more work than would generally be worthwhile just for a remaster, which suggests to me that Remastered was a probably trial run for an engine they've developed to use for a new game. That engine is likely optimized enough for the Switch that it won't be a simple matter to port it over to its successor, so this all probably means Prime 4 is still intended to come out on the Switch.

VampireCoyote posted...

https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/12cqd77/what_a_thrill/

The song popped into my head as soon as I read the URL. Good to see it wasn't misplaced.

Jen0125 posted...

I'm not here to teach you lol.

adjl posted...

Why make an argument if you aren't trying to change minds?

Oh hey look I don't even need to say anything new.

MightBeOverSoon posted...

do you think you would be the first to say that their addiction is in control, or isnt an addiction at all, and doesn't affect their lives?

A considerable majority of those who say they aren't addicted to something actually aren't addicted to it, though. Certainly, there are plenty of addicts in denial, but simply saying "I'm not addicted" is not a symptom of addiction. Therein lies the troll topic.

Jen0125 posted...

Oh just the rhetoric relegating my comments regarding violent sex to "not being good at sex."

Which I subsequently clarified, and you've done nothing to convince me that my position is incorrect. Not being good at something can cause harm. Identifying something as an ignorant mistake does not in any way preclude it from hurting people, nor does it make the harm any less legitimate. It does, however, affect how you need to respond to it to mitigate the risk of further harm. This is why sometimes people get charged with murder after killing somebody, and sometimes they don't face any charges at all.

That also has absolutely nothing to do with the question I asked you, which pertained specifically to violent crime rates.

Jen0125 posted...

Just the whole male diminishing male violence comments.

Such as...? I asked for specific examples. I can't learn from vague "yeah you definitely did that thing you don't think you did but I'm not actually going to tell you how or when" comments. Not only are those useless for identifying the alleged problem, they suggest that you're throwing an aimless trantrum and yelling at whoever will listen, meaning I shouldn't expect to find anything of value in what you're saying.

Jen0125 posted...

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/42tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_42_arrests_by_sex_2012.xls

Here are the statistics on male perpetration of violent crimes for the mod who says it's sexist lol

Agesboy can read it too. And adjl.

Again, you seem to be believing that I've suggested something I haven't. Can you point out where I said that men don't commit the majority of violent crimes? If I've miscommunicated somehow, I'd like to correct that so I can avoid misunderstandings in the future.

chelle posted...

Have you seen the vitriol being spewed at Stormy Daniels now?

The best part is sad men asking who would even want to sleep with her since she's "well used".

Well, your main man did, for one. So.

Not even surprised. Everything the cheeto in chief does is perfect and good, everyone that harms or opposes him in any way is evil and must be punished. Such is the way of the trumpet.

MightBeOverSoon posted...

even when you tell him that you're done talking to the dude, he just cannot stop himself. He really needs you to see things his way. He really needs to force his views on you.

But he's not one of those guys. honest.

adjl posted...

It's always kind of funny to see people think I'm somehow personally invested in them because I keep pointing out that they're wrong. It's nothing personal, they just keep being wrong.

Wheeee...

Person4 posted...

Lol, I was reading a book in the Bourne franchise earlier this morning (Bourne Betrayal) and read a funny quote:

"Being poor is like watching pornography; once you're in, there's no way out."

That is indeed a major problem with it, especially for women and with the unparalleled archival abilities of the Internet. Despite the all-too-common attitude that women in any form of sex work should "get a real job" (because apparently being paid to provide an in-demand service doesn't qualify as a "real job"), many of those same people will go out of their way to get somebody fired from any "real job" if they find out that they do (or used to do) porn. It's very slowly getting better, as society gradually gets a bit less sex-negative and things like OF make it a lot more common for people to do a bit of sex work as a side hustle, but you still routinely see stories of women getting fired for having OF's, and that's really bad.

People want porn, but people want porn actresses to feel bad about making porn. I don't know if it's meant to be some sort of elaborate scheme to convince content creators that their work is of lower value so they charge less for it or if people are just overcompensating for the shame they feel over what they do alone in their bedrooms, but it's a really stupid double standard that needs to stop because it's single-handedly responsible for a large part of the industry's potential harm.

And I just realized I misread the quote and none of that is applicable to it. Meh.

Jen0125 posted...

The fact that adjl thinks violent aggressive sex is the same as "not knowing what to do in bed" is cringe.

It can be. If somebody genuinely believes that that's enjoyable for their partner, then it is indeed a problem of ignorance, not one of being an evil rapist or whatever (the fact that that ignorance can cause injury doesn't change that). In other cases, it's a matter of not caring whether or not it's enjoyable for their partner, and then it's a problem of being an evil rapist or whatever. Ignorance can be fixed with education. Evil, you've just gotta cut your losses and stab them in the dick.

Jen0125 posted...

I don't speak for the experiences of black men that's up for them.

I'm not talking about speaking for the experiences of black men. I'm talking about you categorically saying that nobody should object to prejudicial treatment if the prejudice in question doesn't accurately describe them. Why would you say that?

Jen0125 posted...

I speak on my experience as a woman. Maybe you should try to reel in your "empathy" and stop speaking over other people's lived experiences and what studies actually show.

Which lived experiences have I spoken over? Have I ever suggested that I don't believe that you've had a hard time finding somebody who knows what they're doing in bed? Have I suggested that there isn't a correlation between excessive porn use and sexual violence? Or have I suggested that the problem is more complex than simply blaming porn?

Jen0125 posted...

If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it.

Would you respond that way to a black man complaining that people cross the street when they see him? That if he isn't personally going to assault the person, he shouldn't be concerned about the fact that the person believed he would?

Prejudicial discrimination is always stupid and should always be called out accordingly. It doesn't magically become okay because you feel (justifiably or not) like you've had it worse.

Jen0125 posted...

Why do you always act like things I say on potd are meant to change the world? Again, grow up.

Why make an argument if you aren't trying to change minds?

Jen0125 posted...

Porn addiction and watching porn consistently is bad for your sexual health and how you treat women. It's a fact.

And now you're just misunderstanding correlations and risk factors, to say nothing of how thoroughly useless it is to stop at "this is bad" instead of trying to figure out why it's bad and address whatever the root causes are.

Jen0125 posted...

Men always act like it's people's responsibility to handhold their feelings through reality lol. No.

I'm more of the philosophy that those who know have a responsibility to help those who don't know understand, as they're able. That's not a gendered thing, it's just how you get a well-informed community and society. Part of that does indeed include having the empathy to recognize why people are stuck on certain points and try to navigate that emotional reality.

Jen0125 posted...

If it doesn't apply to you don't wear the shoe.

I'm not wearing it. I'm pointing out that your approach to something we both agree is a problem is counterproductive and probably actually just makes the problem worse. Why would you want to do that?