I think those words to myself sometimes when I get a body that's in rigor and I'm trying to get their sprawled arms into the body bag.

This is another example of Conservative thinking. All these guys are concerned with is the right now, and the near future. The next quarter. They have no idea what they're talking about here.

China is expecting their population to increase by 300 million in the next thirty-ish years.

I'll say that again for the folks at the back:

China is expecting their population to increase by one United States of America worth of people by the 2050's.

We're talking about a country with a government founded by a workers' revolution, that has had a widespread famine in living memory. (During the Great Leap era.) This isn't ancient history.

They cannot allow "market forces" to dictate how and where people live in North America where fertile fields are plowed under to make room for sprawling suburbs.

That's why they're building. That is why they are building UP.

Young families will not be able to just go any buy a house in the suburbs. China, for the most part doesn't build suburbs. Suburbs waste space.

They need existing farmland to be protected to manage their food security. They don't want a famine, that's how you get a revolution. They don't want a revolution.

They want stability.

China doesn't worry about next quarter because they planned for that a decade ago. It's the next decades that they're planning for now---a timeframe these Conservative talking heads are incapable of understanding.

Only if you ignore the acidification, heating, and other degradation of the oceans (which contain 99% of the living space and as much as 80% of all life on the planet)...and history. The massive habitat losses there are almost completely unrelated to farming feed crops and dwarf the recent losses on land.


Today creating space for farming is the major single cause for the intentional destruction of terrestrial habitats, but not historically.


Wiki-
Habitat destruction caused by humans includes land conversion from forests, etc. to arable land, urban sprawl, infrastructure development, and other anthropogenic changes to the characteristics of land. Habitat degradation, fragmentation, and pollution are aspects of habitat destruction caused by humans that do not necessarily involve over destruction of habitat, yet result in habitat collapse. Desertification, deforestation, and coral reef degradation are specific types of habitat destruction for those areas (deserts, forests, coral reefs).

...but what do you care? GET YOUWA AZZ TO VEGA!

Educated younger people want to be where the action is, meaning places where they can advance quickly in a career they are passionate about while having a high take-home pay. They also want what their parent's generation had, which was often a home in the suburbs or at least a condo or townhouse they owned outright, to comfortably start a family.

The two things are mostly incompatible, because the work they are passionate about is typically around the cities and their parent's generation is still occupying any and all affordable dwellings in the area, including the surrounding suburbs. This wouldn't be a problem except property owners feel an incentive to actively prevent new developments which might lower their home price plus make the area more crowded/disrupted. This is partly a result of the sprawl in areas like Silicon Valley reaching its physical boundaries, so the price of land just keeps increasing to these crazy numbers like '$2mil median home sale in 2016'.

These young people can afford to rent in these areas, so they see how comfortable it is, but don't see how they could own there without a windfall of money. So they are kind of stuck hoping to make it big, but in reality just putting off either buying property where they can't follow the career they want or choosing to follow their career but watching their rent increase. This isn't a new problem, its just become more exaggerated in the last decade, and is pushing a lot of younger people to not have kids and to carry a lot of anxiety about their place in the world.

There are a lot of potential ways forward, like massively increasing government investment in transportation infrastructure to move people more efficiently by bus/train/etc., and massively scaling up internet speeds to make telecommuting more commonplace.

Anyhow, its really just younger people wanting what their parent's had, struggling really hard towards it, settling for much less, and complaining a bit to each other about it. Its just a newer problem for Americans (and places like Australia as well), where there very recently was all this space, and now its all old people's investment properties, available for rent at 400% what their mortgage is.

Here's a thought, instead of adding $600 billion dollars to the US military budget, we could use some of that money to push broadband out to every home in the US.

When every struggling post-boom town has high speed internet, we just need to push the dinosaurs who resist "work from home" out of senior management positions in the corporate world and we'll have a migration towards the smaller, more remote communities, where property values are much lower.

It will mean that sprawl subdivisions will become the new slums...but that just provides incentive to bulldoze those warts off the map and return the lost farmland.

The paradigm shift would spark massive economic growth.

Naw...we need more tactical stealth fighters.

didn't make it through the entire video, but it made me think of two things...
1 if businesses do environmental impact studies of their entire operations, for most businesses, the employee commute to work is the biggest one
2 urban sprawl creates a kind of regressive tax on poor people; land closer in is worth more forcing relatively poorer people to move farther away and then they are the ones stuck with the longer commute times and the resulting lowered happiness

I like the concept of taking this into a 3D modeling program and then after they say "and made history" the top opens up with a fat slob sprawled out on that couch with cigarette butts, chips and grease stains all over it, coke stains on the floor. The music stops as they look on appalled and then the voice continues, "those who pursue perfection forge their own path" hahaha!

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

It's amazing to me that it's been 2 years since VS 5. The more complex a site gets the more entropy sets in, and the harder it becomes to do a major revamp. It's a pretty common IT problem. VS is big, sprawling, messy - though wonderful.

O wow, long time no sift, sorry. Once my account got locked at work, I just never visited anymore.

But I got to head out to the rocket center for the random acts of intelligence show, it was pretty awesome. All the video here is just from one of the 2 building...so ya, worth a trip!

The Saturn was more amazing than I had imagined. I always knew it was big, but seeing it sprawled out on the ceiling is indescribable. Imagine a 30 story building filled with explosives, lit on fire and hurling itself into space...because that is what this is. I have lots of pictures if people want to see, I will surely share them.

Glad to see sift is still alive and well. The sift, specifically a video by @dag, basically changed the course of my life and I am now pursing a degree in nuclear engineering, so thanks for that. Anyway, if I can figure out a way to change my name, perhaps I can once again partake of some sift action.

Interesting you mention Anathem - it reminded me a lot of Asimov style classic sci-fi. Great book.

Ditto on Sprawl Trilogy, but I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the Johnny Mnemonic movie. That could have been done so well, but ughh.

I would like to see Neuromancer done by Christopher Nolan. After Inception, he might be able to pull it off. On the other hand, that being my favorite book ever, I'd probably hate any movie of it.

Though I'm surely forgetting some more obscure work, I certainly can't think of any Aisimov novel or short story that has ever been transitioned into a decent film.

It's possible, as ChaosEngine alluded to, that the Foundation "trilogy" could make a decent film trilogy or miniseries, but it would require an exceptionally good screenwriter and director to make it work--and a LOT of creative liberties. It just covers too great a timespan, too many characters with complex and cross-generational relationships, and frankly very little of real significance happens during reasonable spans of time. Frankly, and though I can't claim to have read all of his works (though probably most), Asimov is probably best left in the realm of literature.

What we really need is a film version of the damn Sprawl Trilogy. I mean, that's just begging to be made into a trilogy of films. The screenplay would almost write itself. I'd say Joss Whedon should direct.

I won't defend the costs of military operations nor can I stand the senseless death that war brings. However, separate from my moral and ethical repulsion, I can see the strategic value of carpet bombing, even in modern warfare

If you want to destroy one building, or take out one person, then precision missiles are perfect. However, if you want to take out a sprawling arms manufacturing complex, they would be cost-ineffective. However, accurately dropped "dumb" bombs are cheap and effective.

Russia used carpet bombing to destroy the port of Poti during the 2008 South Ossetia war.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2565697/House-fit-tyrant-Protestors-storm-sprawling-luxury-estate-Ukraines-fugitive-president-private-zoo-golf
-course-half-size-Monaco.html


Protesters have now seized the presidential palace. FUCK YEAH!

Heroes in the Ukraine today, may the rest of the world follow suit accordingly when the time is ripe.

I live in West Oakland. Before I moved here all my friends told me it was inevitable that I was going to get shot and my apartment broken into.

That has not been true AT ALL. Not only that but I walk around the really really terrible "Lower Bottoms" *gasp* everyday, I'd say a good one hour of foot traffic up and down Lower-Bottoms and I have not seen anyone doing anything in the least bit threatening to anyone's property or man-flesh.

Oakland is actually FUCKING awesome. Yeah, like any city there are portions that are not so great. What was showcased here was a portion of East Oakland a little past Fruitvale BART station.

Yes, there are spots that are dangerous there but Oakland is a sprawled out city, is Oakland the Wild West? I'd venture to say it is somewhat but it certainly is not even close to as bad as people make it out to seem - especially compared to most cities on the East Coast.

"Over time, we're going to see what works and what doesn't and things will generally settle down"
Illusion and fantasy...total confabulation.

A government is a simple creation really, it uses force to achieve the end goal which is control, not unlike a rapist or a thief-The antithesis of liberty in the example of say, the American government works because force is used by an immoral core of liars and thieves to achieve goals that benefit the few rather than the whole of society. Examples of just how fucked things are at face value VooDooV, why bother to cite the examples that are glaringly obvious to anyone who at their core, is a moral and free individual...pointless and insulting to anyone who can think.

Mind you, infrastructure and social safety nets enhance freedom, but what should the end-goal be? To enhance the moral framework of a society, which has surely not been done so far with the American form of government, on the contrary, we see the fabric of what makes a society prosper and maintain a fairness for all being eroded to serve the interests of a few, through force and control...through civil liberties being chipped-away at through surveillance and more prisons, more laws, more fines and punishments for more people, etc. Deficit spending pays debt forward to further enslave the recipients of services like roads and social welfare programs, higher education, etc. The freedom to make poor choices at a micro and macro level is what the current government is all about, getting worse every year.

Urban sprawl will continue as folks with pipe-dreams tout more green, less energy usage, cleaner burning cars and factories, etc. One 'problem' is addressed by creating one for another somewhere else.

Ever listen to Buckminster Fuller's idea of a 'green' or 'energy efficient society'? It doesn't use ANY of the current models of societal structure, it pretty much SCRAPS them all for a trans-formative way of moving forward. The old models are shit if they accomplish them through force and control of human activity. YOU don't live in a democratic system, in case you have been asleep for your entire life, democracy is only a fucking word, a concept not unlike any 'ism' created by humans in the past 3000-7000 years.

The financial structure of the United States is inherently evil. It can not be made fair and moral for everyone, it wasn't designed to. It is designed to serve the few at the top, with enforcers and regulators at the bottom-tier of their system. The government is NOT inherently evil but it has been hijacked by cunts.

Just because you think you know how politicians should perform, does not make it happen that way. Sane health care system? Nope. Maybe for the privileged classes-What they hand the masses is complete shit. National debt? Foreign policy? How would YOU do it? Then that's probably saner than the way it's being run, innit? Government is not needed for ANY of these aspects of a civil and moral society to function. All it takes is moral and sane judgement and agreement at solutions and for folks to voluntarily subscribe to these actions, without force, without police, without armies, etc.

Many more examples too many to pontificate upon, many variables of systems, all of which could function to afford everyone freedom and liberty, WITHOUT a government. The government is a construct just like everything else man creates-It takes willing humans to make them either function efficiently, or to scrap them for something new and improved.

I'm no libertarian, no anarchist, just a practical human being.
There are more reasons for scrapping the world system of government than there are for maintaining them, you simply refuse to see any other way THAN systems of government.

Mankind can self-govern if it does so with a formidable and sound moral compass...Is mankind doing that? It can also make the entire planet it's playground if it chooses to do so...Is mankind doing this??
FUCK NO!