PuddleOfKittens @ PuddleOfKittens @sh.itjust.works

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1 yr. ago

Oh right, let me clarify:

The Spine

Early plans [for Neom] proposed an underground railway with 510-kilometre-per-hour (317 mph) trains that could travel from one end of The Line to the other in 20 minutes.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line%2C_Saudi_Arabia#The_Spine

I meant to refer to that thing. I should have said 20 minutes, not 15, and I shouldn't have used the specific phrase "15 minute city" to refer to a city that can be traveled anywhere within 15 minutes. Mea culpa.

Back to the point, though: none of that changes that a Line is mind-bogglingly stupidly bad compared to just a basic grid.

Fire hydrants provide water, but you need to run the water through a pump to increase the pressure, and a fire truck acts as that pump.

Finally, someone with something approaching an answer!

I'm looking for hard info one way or another, but it looks like some fire hydrants provide much more pressure than others. It seems weird that there would need to be a mobile pump attached to the stationary fire hydrant, when it could be built in. I imagine the reason it's not, is a combination of 1) if the street is wide and the fire engine has a pump built into its water tank anyway, why spend extra on a redundant stationary pump on the fire hydrant? and 2) the pump needs to be powered somehow, and the electrics might be knocked out in an emergency relating to a fire anyway, so it's neater to simply not rely on mains electricity for the pump.

Which begs the question: what do genuinely narrow (<2m) streets do about fire? Well, sometimes they just run a big hose from a hydrant on a wider street. And sometimes...

...they use a fire engine built as a kei truck!

(Kei trucks are <1.5m wide! They easily fit down a 2m street!)

And if all the roads are very narrow, how are you going to get a moving truck or other delivery vehicle in? What about a plumber’s van? What about a small personal vehicle? Two meters isn’t wide enough for any of those, especially not with outdoor seating.

The moving truck isn't important for apartments - everything needs to fit through the front door/corridor/stairwell anyway, so having a 6m-wide street is just about efficiency.

Again though, a kei truck is max 1.48m, so just use a flatbed kei truck and these problems magically disappear. I really don't know why you want to run your small personal vehicle down an obviously for-pedestrians street, but it is possible (if not legal).

More broadly, if the street is tiny then you bring a tiny vehicle. It's like being mad that KFC doesn't have a vegan option. If you really need to use a truck, then drive it to the entrance of the alley and either carry it the rest of the way to the door, or use a trolley.

There's also another precedent here, from delivery vehicles: take a look at the various cargo ebikes used by delivery services, like Amazon's "cargo ebike" that fits in a bike lane. Two of them should be able to pass by eachother in a 2m-wide street.

Six meters gives space for service vehicles to coexist with pedestrians, cyclists, and seating.

So I should clarify: 2m should generally be for the less-used streets. Not all streets should be 2m, if a street is frequently used it could obviously benefit from more space. But conversely, if a street is rarely used then it really shouldn't be overbuilt just to accommodate 'efficiency' of extremely rare events (like a moving truck).

Service vehicles don't need to coexist with that seating/etc. You limit deliveries to a specific hour of the day (say, 8AM-9AM) and pack up the seating during that hour, and if a kei truck is coming down the alley then you squidge over into the remaining 50cm of the street, or duck into a doorway or something, for the ~5 seconds it takes for the truck to go from right behind you to right in front of you. Obviously, a 2m street requires the truck to give way to pedestrians, so they'll want to slow to a crawl as they drive past you.

And FWIW, I'm not opposed to taller buildings. I am opposed to the mindset that automatically assumes they're the only option, though. Short buildings are very cheap-per-sqm and mesh well with incremental development, and short buildings with narrow streets (particularly rowhouses!) are IMO just a straight upgrade from the plenty of places with height restrictions and a requirement for wide streets. It's not like you need to commit to one or the other for the whole city - you can have a 6m street parallel to a 2m street, easy.

Which definition? Some people just made up their own. The definition I used in the above comment was "a city where you can travel everywhere within 15 minutes", no more, no less. Also, I kind of ignored walking times.

the original reason for wanting the Elf Waifu was probably “I could have a Legal Loli Waifu,”

The original reason was obviously some game/anime that had a pretty elf girl with big tits.

You're better off with the Mongol/Dracul system - instead of making pacts with the local lords, you kill them and promote competent nobodies to rule instead. The peasants don't care who their lord is, and by promoting nobodies who don't have a claim to legitimacy outside your support, you guarantee their loyalty. Plus, you get to pick the most competent people, instead of being stuck with the local fat lazy lord who only got the role because his daddy had it.

The problem with 'The Line' is that travelling 170KM in 15 minutes requires an average speed of 680KM/h (I wrote out why that's insane lunacy from an engineering perspective, but I shoved it in a footnote), but you can achieve a 15-minute city of the same volume just by having an, IIRC, 13KM square with 100m-high buildings (and building 100m-high buildings is waaaay cheaper than building 500m-high buildings), built on a simple grid of normal 100KM/h trains - the Manhattan Distance of the maximum distance in a 13KM square is 26KM, which to be fair is still 36 seconds over the 15min mark even if your average speed is 100KM, but 1) it almost achieves the exact same thing as the trillion-dollar sci-fi tech, and 2) if you really care about the sharp 15-minute city premise then you can bump your trains up to run at 150KM/h (which is perfectly doable and only a little more expensive).

Anyway, point is that the only way The Line can fulfil its promises is by casually dropping a trillion dollars on a problem that may or may not be solvable, and will almost certainly be an order of magnitude or three more expensive than the bog-standard existing solution. A 680KM/h train is fucking expensive and while yes, it might be physically possible, most people want the cost of their commute to be lower than their daily wage earned from the job they commute to.

If The Line was ever built (and was cheap without subsidies somehow and became populated), then the first thing to happen after its populated would be a ton of building sideways, mostly around the midpoint/centre of The Line. Why? Because that's the prime land that's empty and therefore cheapest to build on, that's closest to everything (the midpoint of The Line should be ~7.5mins away from everything at most, and would also be the most accessible spot in the city and therefore have the most desirable business locations). And new buildings would be built around there, not at the ends of The Line. They'd add extensions to the train line that turn 90 degrees out, so that people further away from The Line could access the train system. This all would continue until The Line became The Circle.

The only way The Line stays a line is with economic antigravity. Metaphorical antigravity, to be clear. Not the sci-fi tech.,

Never going to happen in america

...why? I'm not saying it'll be easy, but half the time I see that line it's used as a justification for why people shouldn't demand it happen. And frankly, "never" is too strong of a word.

680KM/h isn't even possible with a normal maglev, you'd need to either shove the maglev in a vacuum tube or build a rocket train or something equally insane just to have a maximum speed of 680KM/h. But you actually need a higher speed than 680KM/h since you start out at 0KM/h and 680KM/h is just the average - and since your acceleration is limited to speeds that won't kill the passenger, you really do have to factor it in, one way or another. See, your train has to either permit passengers to stand (which sharply limits safe acceleration without someone being knocked over and bashing their head open on a rail) or it has to give everyone time to board and then seat (all of which takes time for boarding), and you also need a way to ensure that random dickheads won't ignore the rules and stay standing. A boarding delay will kill your average speed just as much as low acceleration.

Nixon wanted to legally bash up hippies and black people.

There is so much wrong with the logic of that sentence. I'm going to start with basic economic/town planning theory:

The core function of a city is that everything is close to everywhere else - you live in a city because it's close to your job/a hospital/a nice lasertag place/whatever, which are located there because 1) you and lots of other people are located in the area, and 2) because other businesses they rely on are located closely. The other businesses are located closely for the exact same reasons 1 and 2 (if the Obscure Thingy repair shop is 2 minutes away instead of 3 days away, then you reduce downtime and save money, etc). The more densely you build, the more these virtuous cycles are amplified. Incidentally, this is why cities are roughly circular (which maximizes the number of places close to other places), and not a 170KMx200mx500m line in empty desert.

"A midsized town" is vague as heck but the logic of the previous paragraph applies just as well to small towns - if you keep stuff compact then you make it easy to walk to places, instead of needing to constantly drive everywhere (and waste even more space on roads and redundant parking at every single destination). In fact, if you have a town of, say, 30 000 people, and you maintain a density of 30 000 people per sqkm, then guess what: literally everything is within a km, which means everything is within a 10minute walk (and statistically, 5mins or less, since 10mins is the distance from one edge of town to the opposite edge, and a naive-average trip would be half of that).

You're technically correct that there's plenty of room on the edge of town to build low-density housing. In practice though, people want to live close to the centre of the city, rather than on the outskirts with a 3-hour commute. The USA having "an abundance of space" on the outskirts means jack shit. Cheap rent on the outskirts just means high mechanic/fuel costs and lots of unpaid hours spent driving to/from work (or literally anywhere else in the city that you want to go - I hope you don't have friends in the city centre that you want to see regularly).

2m isn't wide enough for fire truck access, sure. Why do you need to drive a giant fire truck down the alley? The standard response (besides "we need to carry water and I don't know what a fire hydrant is") is "we have a ladder on the top of the fire truck", which might be relevant in some contexts but the picture is of 2-storey buildings which could be easily handled with man-portable ladders.

My main concern here is that people demand wide roads for fire access to the tall buildings (that can only be fire-fought with trucks), then demand tall buildings because "it's the only way to build densely", ignoring the fact that narrow roads with shorter buildings are just as dense, cheaper to build, and have lower firefighting requirements. It's an idiotic catch-22 that people keep painting us into.

My 20 metres figure isn't a hard number, it's my eyeballing the 2 lanes + 2 parking vehicle storage lanes, plus a footpath plus a nature strip plus the required building setback/front yard.

I'm not saying he's not racist, I'm saying he's not necessarily Republican.

Isn't it weird how half the paycheck goes to rent? It's not like housing is a new invention, why's it so expensive?

IMO, it's some combination of ideologically-driven failures of town planning (the distance from buildings on one side of the street to the other is legally mandated to be ~20m wide, when it could be

99% likely they vote Republican based on the attitide also

Are you sure it's real? Maybe they're just doing the racism bit for the shock value. You can post anonymous shit in 4chan without actually having any opinions on anything, and half the point of 4chan (AIUI) is getting reactions from people.

It's like "plop" - it's the sound of a horse shitting. It's out of frame, but that horse is leaving a steady trail of horseplops behind it like a brown battlefield Hansel and Gretel.

Literally anything can be someone's exact fetish. And if anything is a hornypost, then nothing is a hornypost.

Here's a transcript of the image (typed out):

(layout of a tweet, with a profile pic and blue checkmark etc)
John Romero
@romero
Replying to @fullbright @fullbright @ADAMATOMIC @ID_AA_Carmack : DOOM was made for mouse input, so was Wolf 3D. Keen was expected to use keyboard.

3:11 PM - 2 Jun 2014 from Los Gatos, CA

Some games literally don't use a mouse. For instance Baba Is You or The Binding Of Isaac or Shank would, at best, use the mouse for menus. You could play them exclusively with a keyboard but 1) you're giving up analog input, and 2) unless you have a gaming keyboard, some of those games will have horrific keyboard ghosting especially if they have any sort of combos like Shank does.

It isn't, actually - it ranks 51st, just below Washington DC (which gets low marks for its lack of paperwork).

It failed for multiple reasons, but a big reason was that they tried to outsource the hardware and basically just got reskins of existing gaming-PC prebuilds, which didn't actually make PCs any less confusing. And they didn't actually save money (and some were overpriced scams) so buyers were basically forced to do as much research as buying an actual gaming PC.

All of that will be solved, and the software/UX/other stuff you mentioned are far more mature, like you say.

Theoretically people could use it for a cheap non-gaming PC, except the cheapest non-gaming PC would be non-gaming specs.

Anyone using it for cheap crypto-mining is an idiot, the cheap option there is a rack full of bang-for-buck GPUs.

Are there any other use-cases that involve gaming-PC specs? Making videos, perhaps?

To be fair, they presumably had an office before Zoom existed in a usable state.