thomasguide

Interesting article on the relationship between cartography and the development of California's early highway system.

Without wanting to paint with too broad a brush, I would say in my experience driving in 10x countries, U.S. drivers, being most habituated to spending their lives in cars, drive in the most distracted, least careful way. Especially in places where the typology is the U.S. default of low-density, car-oriented sprawl. Accordingly there are an appaling number of deaths and injuries on the road: 1 in 43,750 people dies each year in the U.K. in automobile accidents vs. 1 in 8,500 in the U.S.A.

Inb4 deaths per mile driven, I'd argue higher VMT in the U.S.A. only proves the point - too many cars being driven too much because of silly land use. High VMT is acutally a symptom of a dangerous mobility system as much as a cause.

FYI, this is about the titles of these books, not the textual content of the books themselves. The implication of the article is that sci-fi is losing relative standing to fantasy, but another interpretation is that science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.

“Cost per square foot” to build doesn’t take into account land acquisition costs?

Some of the “economies of scale” the author is discussing accrue to whoever in the development partnership contributes land. If a piece of land can support the development of 250 apartments, it is worth a lot more than the same piece of land used for a few single family houses. But, per unit the land cost is still a lot lower for the apartments in a dense area than the single family houses in the sparse area. So it could be cheaper to build lots of apartments, but the owner of the land takes that potential savings as profit (often contributing the dollar value of the land into the dev partnership for a share of the project equity).

The other thing to consider is that multi-unit apartment buildings are exactly that: a multiplication of costs driven on a per-unit basis. Every unit needs a bathroom and kitchen, the most expensive part of any dwelling. Actually per square foot studios are the most expensive to build and larger apartments are cheaper. Airplane hangars are cheap per square foot.

Look at college dorms or Eastern Bloc communal apartments for an example of how resource-constrained institutions delivered inexpensive housing to large numbers of people while benefitting from economies of scale: amortize the high costs of the expensive parts of a building (kitchens, bathrooms) by sharing them between users who get private access to cheaper building features (bedrooms).

Final thing is that buildings are hard to manufacture off site because, well, to put it in stupid terms: they are very big and heavy, and you never really know whether something will work on site until it’s done on site. So each construction site is a purpose-built “building factory” for one building with all the affiliated capital costs, mobilization costs, etc. There is an economy of scale, but it’s in the manufacturing of things that laborers can work with - tools, standardized wood sizes and hardware, bricks, tiles, flooring, screws, nails, etc.

In the U.S., which is among the largest oil producer as of recent years, the fossil fuel industry is heavily subsidized.[1]

[1]https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trill...

Great tip! Never knew this. Thank you!!

This comment does not show a lot of curiosity - even a quick read of the Wikipedia article for gender identity refutes this argument. Gender has been differentially and socially constructed throughout human history.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity?wprov=sfti1

Not to hijack this thread, but curious whether some map people out there might opine on growth areas for this space - technologically, artistically, product-wise.

Same here.

From my own professional experience: it costs a minimum of $350 per net rentable square foot for new construction of mid-rise rental apartment buildings. This includes all materials, labor and design/permitting costs, and the cost of land acquisition in the urban core of a second-tier U.S. real estate market (NC Triangle). $350,000, 1000-square-foot three-bedroom apartments are affordable housing. But good luck finding one in a new building!

Plastic American-style milk bottles are funnily enough one of the only easily recycled plastics, if I am remembering correctly.

Standardized glass containers would be useful, although in some ways already exist (mason jars usually accept common lids, for instance).

What we need is a shift in mentality away from a plastic-first approach.

“I’ve got one word for you kid: glass.”

Yes, this is a good point. Plastic is cheap because producers don’t pay the true costs.

There are externalities with glass too (think shattered bottles in public spaces) but my feeling is they’re fewer and less earth-destroying.

As a cook I find the squeeze actually sort of frustrating. Sometimes it usefully delivers the right amount of ketchup (or mustard, or whatever) to its destination; mostly it splatters. In any case I still have to use a knife to spread it around.

Solving the leaky bottle upside down problem is too narrow a focus.

This is very interesting, but I can’t help but feel that a glass bottle with a metal cap (and one of those Dutch condiment spatulas) would be just fine for all these applications and also be more easily and effectively reused and recycled.

I re-use jam jars for food storage, drinking glasses, mini herb gardens, etc. and could incorporate bottles, jars, and other glass containers into a variety of needs around the house if they were designed with second and third lives in mind.

Add in health effects of microplastics/chemical leaching and glass is again a winner.

Transportation costs and breakage are perhaps higher, but maybe that’s a cost we should accept?

The target of these laws is not kitchen knives. Pocketknives (manual blade, less than 3") of most kinds are legal.[1, see exceptions] Bans of this kind are fairly common (for instance, in California, there is a ban on concealed carry of fixed-blade knives; in Los Angeles, the ban extends to openly carrying a "knife or dagger" defined as "any knife having a blade of three inches or more in length".[2] These laws strike me as very reasonable.

[1]https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives [2]https://www.losangelescriminallawyers.com/los-angeles-knife-...

Not disagreeing with you per se, but what is benign in some contexts might not be so benign in others. Knife crime is a big problem in London - the tight regulation is in response to these circumstances. For instance, of the 126 homicides committed in London in 2020, 71 were committed with knives.[1]

[1] https://www.onlondon.co.uk/the-number-of-homicides-in-london...

Knife purchases are controlled in the U.K.[1] Persons under 18 are not allowed to buy knives, but in practice this means most people are showing an ID to purchase a knife.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives