PuddleOfKittens
@PuddleOfKittens@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Anon thinks about wheat 1 day ago:
People who literally haven’t invented paper.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 1 week 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.
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.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Anon reality checks your fantasy 2 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 3 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 3 weeks ago:
Usually these people take it as an article of faith that there’s something you could do to unfuck your situation, without necessarily having any idea what that something is. I think he’s just fundamentally speaking abstractly.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 3 weeks ago:
Nixon wanted to legally bash up hippies and black people.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 3 weeks ago:
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).
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 3 weeks ago:
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
parkingvehicle storage lanes, plus a footpath plus a nature strip plus the required building setback/front yard. - Comment on Anon lives on a budget 3 weeks ago:
I’m not saying he’s not racist, I’m saying he’s not necessarily Republican.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 3 weeks ago:
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 about 2m), financial fuckery (investors drive housing prices through the roof by buying housing as speculative vehicles, and investors do so because investors are driving housing prices through the roof by buying housing as speculative vehicles - an ouroboros of shitfuckery) and lobbyist-driven partisanship on public transport (car companies hate trains, so they wage propaganda war against them and in support of overly-large roads with mandatory lanes for vehicle storage).
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 3 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Anon learns a new spell 1 month ago:
Shooting in the face where there isn’t cloth won’t necessarily help - if the hat just stop bullets aimed for the head (like a magical forcefield) then it’s pointless.
Also, it’s not gonna hurt like hell and bruise the shit out of them - you’re citing Newtonian mechanics when it’s fucking magic. Hell, maybe the forcefield just deletes the bullet instead of deflecting or blocking it.
“Shoot at it until it dies” is great advice generally, but if you shoot a water pistol at a fish then you’ll be there til you run out of ammo.
- Comment on Anon watches Lord of the Rings 2 months ago:
Can cause physical harm
The irony is that they can’t, but their greatest weapon is that the people they fight think they can, and flee without even trying. And this post is making the exact same mistake, while also assuming they’re invincible. The answer to the post is the post. That or pointing to the post and laughing.
- Comment on Anon learns a new spell 5 months ago:
There’s no reason wizard hats can’t shield the face from bullets. In fact, in the later books there might be a hat that does basically that IIRC.
Besides which, wizard hats have wide brims. And they have scarves.
- Comment on Anon likes trains 6 months ago:
In case this is real: you realize that trains already exist, right? Crackheads don’t “steal the copper from the rail”, in part because the rails don’t have copper (they’re made of steel, the copper is in the overhead line), and in part because the rails are giant continuously-welded steel rails nailed to concrete sleepers; you can’t just pick em up and walk off with em.
- Comment on Anon missed /pol/ 8 months ago:
A “nuh uh” is deniable specifically because it could be just LARPing (especially when you’re not even claiming you’ve done anything, just that “someone” has). Providing specifics of anything anyone’s done in pursuit of this goal is more verifiable and incredibly stupid to post publicly, obviously.
- Comment on Anon critiques humanity 9 months ago:
This means prehistoric humans persistence-hunting wolves is canonical to the crazyness2400verse.
- Comment on The indian and white uniting as one with a $500 Billion budget 10 months ago:
Most Nazis predated the Nazis, the Nazis were only around 20ish years or so.
- Comment on The indian and white uniting as one with a $500 Billion budget 11 months ago:
Okay, counterpoint: If fascists can’t produce decent engineers, then why did the US hire the nazi rocket scientists after WW2?
- Comment on Checking cis privilege 1 year ago:
This is bullshit. Roman public fountains and baths didn’t require any sort of license, the fountains (which were used for fetching water for personal use) had priority over baths and bathing in fountains was strictly forbidden, and also why the fuck is he getting water directly from a cistern? Those aren’t even publicly accessible.
Also, why bring an amphora instead of just a bucket?
- Comment on Anons make the worst game ever 1 year ago:
No feedback when hitting enemies, besides generic blood splashing and maybe a stumble
Way more health than is necessary or interesting on enemies
Combat system is mindless and boring
Quests are full of “go to this cookie-cutter dungeon, clear it out and bring me the MacGuffin at the end” on loop.
The game has lots of bugs that were in the previous 2 games, and were patched in the fan-patches of both the previous 2 games.
- Comment on Anon gives a piracy history lesson 1 year ago:
Linux is not on mobile. And before anyone says “Android/LineageOS is Linux”, 1) Android is proprietary (and AOSP is not a real substitute for Android), and 2) LineageOS isn’t a substitute for Android without microg, and also isn’t Linux (last I checked, app development on LineageOS REQUIRED ANDROID STUDIO for the signing bullshit).
Now, if anyone says “Linux is on mobile, I daily-drive my PinePhone!” (and is actually being honest), then congratulations and I respect the hell out of you but you’re more of a masochist than Drew Devault and that makes you a unicorn.
- Comment on Anon gives a piracy history lesson 1 year ago:
That’s a weird as heck christmas song.
- Comment on Anon gives a piracy history lesson 1 year ago:
If you take venture capital, you sacrifice your ability to not be greedy. Could Facebook have even existed without VC? Facebook didn’t have ads during its startup IIRC, which meant they had no revenue.
- Comment on Anon gives a piracy history lesson 1 year ago:
Valve was the first, their business model was basically removing retail (the actual reason for Steam was to make updates trivial, so a Counterstrike update didn’t break half the servers for 2 weeks), for everyone after Steam the business model was removing Steam by replacing it with a Steam clone.
- Comment on Anon gives a piracy history lesson 1 year ago:
So you can play videogames while burning disks? Idk.
- Comment on Anon hates smartphones 1 year ago:
I hate how /e/OS’s ‘BlissLauncher’ doesn’t let you leave an empty space between icons on the homescreen. I don’t know whether switching to a different launcher will break /e/OS’s widgets etc, and it bugs me just little enough to ignore it. The worst thing is that because you can’t leave gaps (unless you leave the bottom row partially blank, which is dumb because that’s the most important row), moving any app requires swapping it with another, which requires a minimum of three app-drags. In practice four, because draggin one app onto another will turn the icon into a folder with the two apps in them, so you’ll have to open the folder and drag em both out.
I hate it so much. Why can’t they just make a normal homescreen?
- Comment on Anon doesn't tip 1 year ago:
because they have to follow the law.
lol I admire your idealism.
