The Off Topic Topic

[crazy canuck]

Nobody wants to live underground.

People say the same thing about Mono-high rises.

People need sunlight to be healthy.

Presumably, it'd be a place to sleep/spend time at home.  Hopefully one would still get outside and not be a shut-in.  Otherwise, neither high-rise or negative-rise will matter.

Highrises in Vancouver are pretty much full window walls to let as much natural light in as possible.  A bit of a pain in summer actually.

[Razgovory]

There would be some practical problems.  Draining water and sewage would be a bitch as would circulating air.  When the machines that do that stuff break down it will be very uncomfortable for the residents till the machinery can be fixed.  God save you if you have a flood.  I don't know how safe it would be in an emergency situation.  I don't know enough about engineering to know if would be safer to be underground in an earth quake or fire.

[Tonitrus]

Well, if that doesn't work, we can just hang a super-skyscraper from an orbiting asteroid...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bridaineparnell/2017/03/29/skyscraper_suspended_on_asteroid/

[Sheilbh]

In many ways property ownership doesn't make sense these days. The days of a job for life and a stable existence in one town forever and ever are over. People do need to move around a lot more. In a way it could be seen that more people renting and more of a sharing economy model is desirable.

It's also, in the UK at least, the main way individual's build up savings/assets. It's not that way everywhere in the world but that is a big part of it here.

Isn't that just high rise turned sideways though? A LOT of space gets wasted upward.

Sure. But they are still the highest density properties in the UK - it may be because our style of high-rise tends to need lots of parking space, and planning departments want plenty of green space around them.

I think the answer's a bit of both 4-5 storey terraces. We even have a fairly recognisable vernacular style for it.

[Savonarola]

A high school student redrew a map of the US to feature Ohio 2, Long Texas and no Wyoming. Her goal? To drive us all mad



Life is unfair; this should have been Tim.   

[The Minsky Moment]

The Economist says all expensive cities should go high rise.

NYC and HK went high and now apartments are dirt cheap.


Or not.

[The Minsky Moment]

Our society is based on the assumption that everything will grow forever. When things stagnate, shrink, or even just grow slower that is generally regarded as a disaster.

Which is a little illogical.

Our society is based on the assumption that
1) physical and human capital can be augmented at a marginally faster rate then it depreciates.
2) Techniques, methods and technologies of production and distribution improve over time.

Both those assumptions are logical under certain not unreasonable conditions.

[DGuller]

The Economist says all expensive cities should go high rise.

NYC and HK went high and now apartments are dirt cheap.


Or not.

There is probably a paradoxical effect in play there.  Population density drives economic activity all on its own, if properly managed.  I recall reading a study that found that economic activity grows at faster than linear rate with population density.  The higher up you build, the higher the population density, which leads to higher per capita economic activity and thus higher real estate prices.  In NYC in particular there are also a myriad of byzantine laws and entrenched corruption screwing up the real estate market and making it less dynamic.

[Savonarola]

Finally, someone has come up with something better than Confederate generals reimagined as sad Japanese girls:

Is that Harriet Tubman on a bank debit card, throwing a Wakanda salute?



This is so wonderfully kitschy.  If I were Visa I'd partner with Disney and get a whole series of these, Frederick Douglass, William Tecumseh Sherman, Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe could all do the Wakanda forever salute.  You could put them on t-shirts, mugs, posters, they'd be bigger than Che Guevara. 

[grumbler]

Finally, someone has come up with something better than Confederate generals reimagined as sad Japanese girls:

Is that Harriet Tubman on a bank debit card, throwing a Wakanda salute?



This is so wonderfully kitschy.  If I were Visa I'd partner with Disney and get a whole series of these, Frederick Douglass, William Tecumseh Sherman, Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe could all do the Wakanda forever salute.  You could put them on t-shirts, mugs, posters, they'd be bigger than Che Guevara.

Visa is just a clearing house.  They don't actually issue any credit cards.  Banks do that, and put the Visa name on the card to indicate which clearing house they use.

[Syt]

Austrian reddit is a abuzz with Justin Bieber's new look, as he looks like Austrian children's TV star Thomas Brezina (he's kinda the Austrian Mr Rogers).

[Syt]

Meanwhile at the right wing "memorial" of the Dresden bombing.

Allied "liberation" = Holocaust of the German People



The lady in question used to do the rounds on talk shows as opponent of Islam migration "but not a nazi, honest."

[Admiral Yi]

You can raise objections to the bombing of Dresden.  You can wear black clothes.  You can get a buzz cut.  You can stand in large groups.  But you probably shouldn't do all of those things at the same time.

[Eddie Teach]

Frankly any German objections come off poorly.

[Josquius]

Weird to see the far right get involved in that one. The bombing of Dresden is widely accepted as a very iffy event. Highlights their hypocrisy really.