On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 08:15:12AM -0700, Chris Kantarjiev wrote: > Because there's a subspecies that doesn't like neighbors and has delusions > of privacy grandeur. Being rich enough to own land has also meant > being rich enough to control one's own commute, at least until now.
If land ownership is a measure of financial wealth, then suburbians are way removed from the range where they can control their own commute. Instead, collectively they make everybody's commute longer. > But Eugen, you made a big leap here, from my discussion of ranchers > to your gripes about suburbia. I was in no way defending suburbia. I have absolutely no gripes about rangers :) They are statistically negligible, and can commute by private plane or helicopter (many have to, usually way up north). > > > Don't get me wrong - I am by no means defending the widespread > > > infestation of the one-person car in the US. But it's very > > > important to keep in mind that "it's a scale thing". The last > > > > No, it's not. Cities are the same everywhere. Hickistan doesn't > > figure. > > Again, you're trying to change the argument :-) Cities are certainly > not the same everywhere - you can't compare, say, Amsterdam and > Mumbai and Beijing and conclude that "they're the same". That's my original question. The cities are all about increasing density to save on infrastructure and increase monkey2monkey interaction rate. Their historical differences ought to be erased over time. > But my point about scale is not the cities themselves, but the > surrounding area. The larger the city, the larger the required > food infrastructure to support it. The larger that infrastructure, > the more vast the distance between the housing to manage the land. I agree. > I agree that densely populated urban areas should be well-supported > by public transport instead of being infested by personal powered > vehicles. But it's less easy to support that argument as the > distances between urban areas increases. The issue of connecting far apart urban centers by railway is orthogonal to each urban center + umland having a working public transportation city. This is somewhat mutex to suburbia. > > I question the whole idea of shipping primates around in a diurnal > > cycle. The whole idea is barbaric. > > It's hard to manufacture widgets at home. So far; home automation and rapid prototyping will be chaging things. But spatial proximity of slow beings to means of production is precisely the point why it is barbaric. At 0.3 m/ns, 300 m/us and 3000 km/ms we slow-time people shouldn't worry about spatial proximity too much. At sufficient telepresence platform density, travel is effectively instanteous. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
