He's really impressed with the architecture and fountains, not so much the murder rate.

@Yogi, interesting. I never noticed the street names or ESB in the background the fact that taxi said "nyc" I always thought it was filmed somewhere in cali/LA because of the low architecture. Then again, I've never been to Greenpoint or Williamsburg.

"Architecture of Happiness" - Man-made island near amsterdam has been added as a related post - related requested by Trancecoach on that post.

That's true for a post industrial POV.
When machines already exist, and you just need energy to get things moving.

The energetic concerns of bygone eras were :
Whale oil, and later kerosene. For lighting. (note: back then, a day's work would only buy minutes of light)
Firewood, and later coal. For heating.
Manpower was the only energy user when it came to food production.

Early machines such as the combine were horse drawn, and did not need an energy architecture in place. (ignoring "food" as an energy)

Later machines used steam power, and hence could piggy back on the already existing wood/coal energy architecture (in turn stimulating it to grow larger).

Once the machinery industry was established, and the revenue generation was in place, it was possible to invest in improvements and alternative energies - ultimately leading up to oil burning machinery being common.

In any case, historically, industrialization drove the energy industry. (As it should, why have an industry to produce a product (energy) that isn't needed?)
And industrialization depended on a conducive society. A place where an inventor could own his invention, and could sell it, allowing things that were no more than ideas or garage trinkets to transition into products - which in turn place demand on other resources such as [forms of] energy.

In the past, there was nothing, so everything was build from the ground up. Industries grew out of nothing, they weren't established up front.
Modern times are different, where you have investment capital from entities who's entire existence revolves around investing, and you can front the establishment of an industry in the calculated hope of future demand.
(Granted, lords/aristocrats had a hand in industrial investment. Just not the kind or scale that you can see today.)

What you say applies a bit later, when industrialization was already well under way. Like when Thomas Edison used investment capital to fund power plants and an electrical network, in order to power the first [practical, but not 'first'] light bulb in New York.

-scheherazade

Like the argument that the US is becoming an Empirical state you can trace it's beginnings back to the founding of the nation. As far as we know there's been no other nation that has been founded to become an Empire. With it's Manifest destiny and needing to control it's hemisphere, the US started it's infant life as an Empire. Heck you can even see it in the architecture of it's capital.

Same with Oligarchy, the Senate was always meant to have more control and power and be run by the Owners of the Society. However while this isn't a new argument it has rarely in our history been more brazen than it's becoming now. Which is why the Occupy Movement got started, and it's not over by a long shot.

The battles in the coming few years will influence the direction of our country and the world at large incalculably. It's going to get interesting, and honestly I'm quite excited.

Someone needs to throw every under-handed crime she's ever committed at her-It'd be as large as the architectural blueprints for the Burj Khalifa Towers.

She's a career-criminal to humanity posing as an actress, posing as a politician.

In part, they're hitting on it. It's a heart problem. But taken to it's logical conclusion what they are also saying is that people won't have the avenues any longer to manufacture nice things. The artisans, who with their stellar abilities, craft expensive watches or world class automobiles or majestic architecture will have those abilities sublimated in a very literal sense.

How much of a watch is a 'too expensive' watch? Who decides that you can't make a watch that expensive? Who decides that someone shouldn't be able to own a watch that expensive? Who are we going to trust to draw where those lines ought to be; the lines that take away someone's ability to buy a "too expensive" watch and another's ability to produce that same watch?

Never has a law been written that will change the human heart. That is where the real battle lines are drawn. We can write all the laws we want and will still end up with the rich and the poor. Someone has got to get at those hard hearts.

I'd love to know how Intel/AMD design new architecture, and specifically what degree of abstraction they have, because its difficult to imagine how anybody can get their heads around all the intricacies of modern multicore chip.

This started long before 9/11, that attack just "created a threat" where every congressman was willing to hand out every right that people had accumulated to that day. NSA tried to stop 128bit encryption back in the 90s when the first rumors started circulating in tech community. Encryption was seen as a "threat" to national security. Sound familiar? 9/11 gave NSA the money to do what they were after, at the time they wanted it the most. I've known most about their goals for 15 years, just never thought it was going to be this bad so soon...

NSA used the basic principle of internet, which is trust between nodes to route data from A to B in the most efficient manner possible. In the future, this means that the open architecture has to be stripped in favor of trusted, fixed nodes. That means the end of net neutrality. It also means congestions, traffic jams, huge blackouts when regional nodes go out. And it's the end of freedom in the surface web and the absolute end of deep web.

We are screwed unless this system is taken out NOW and made in to the list "crimes against the humanity" at International Courts. A year from now is too late.

This isn't an exercise in engineering so much as marketing.

The pneumatic motor is limited by the extreme lack of energy stored in compressed air. All inneficiencies in translating that stored energy into motion are failures in the system. The goal is to carefully remove all unnecessary sources of energy loss from the motor.

So there's an interesting engineering challenge in making this work 'at all' using Legos. There are design compromises that must be made, given the restrictions on form imposed by available parts; as well as the stress limitations of the material. It's like someone giving you a pile of reeds and asking you to build a Manhattan 5-Story Walkup. Can it be done? Is there enough stress resistance in the material for something of that scale? A fun challenge with no practical implications. Manhattan low-rises have been built before, you're not innovating architecture and you're definitely not contributing anything to the future of construction.

The question is, does it require a "technology genius" to accomplish? Someone tell me what a "technology genius" is first. Whatever it is...I suspect you don't need one on your team in order to search the internet for pneumatic piston motor schematics and copy/paste a parallel series of 256.

This exercise is inspiring and fun...until you add the marketing entrepreneur, casting hyperbole around and spending other people's money. It is unsettling to think that the new generation of capitalists are chasing the specter of Elon Musk; self promoting egotists who create nothing and take credit for everything. As a longtime member of the internet in good standing, I reject every stealth intrusion of marketing and entrepreneurship into my sandbox.

Hooray for Raul Oaida, engineering buff and hobbyist. Down with Steve Sammartino, marketer, entrepreneur, "brainchild" originator, keeper of secrete locations, crowd funder, project contact and fathead.

People can't just learn from their ancestors mistakes. Instead of taking all their fortune and building something intelligent, sustainable, and long-term, they practically employ slave labor to construct yet another architectural representation of the human-ego.

I would encourage anyone who has the chance to visit the Sagrada Familia to take it.
One of the most impressive, unique and beautiful buildings on the planet. The work of an architectural genius.

I don't see this concept as possible. You can't just take something like a processor or memory and add a few pins for "electronic signals," and call it a working solution. This would require huge amounts of re-engineering and design of whole new architectures and data communication standards. This will never happen. If it does, I will buy 10,000 units.

Also, imagine if this thing got only a single drop of water in one of those many cracks. Toast.

They do have better architecture....our shits ugly and disposable for the most part...

Mathematics

He says
"those god damn pakistanis and their goddamn corner shops
Built a shop on every corner took our British workers jobs
He says those godamn Chinese and their goddamn china shops
I tell him theyre from Vietnam but he doesn't give a toss
I ask him what was there before that damn Japan mans shop
He stares at me and dreams a scene of British workers jobs
Of full time full employment before the godamn boats all came
Where everybody went to work full time every day
A British Business stood their first he claims before the Irish came
Now British people lost their jobs and bloody turkish are there to blame
I ask him how he knows that fact he says because it's true
I ask him how he knows the fact he says he read it in the news
Everytime a Somalian comes here they take a job from us
The mathematics one for one, from us to them it just adds up
He bites his cake and sips is brew and says again he knows the spot
The godamn Carribeans came and now good folk here don't have jobs
I ask him what was there before the goddamn Persian curtain shop
I show him architectures plans of empty godamn plots of land
I show him the historic maps
A bit of sand, a barren land
There was no goddamn shop before those pakistanis came and planned
Man
I'm sick of crappy mathematics
Cos I love a bit of sums
I spent three years into economics
And I geek out over calculus
And when I meet these paper claims
That one of every new that came
Takes away ones daily wage
I desperately want to scream
"Your maths is stuck in primary"
Cos one who comes here also spends
And one who comes here also lends
And some who comes here also tend
To set up work which employs them
And all your balance sheets and trends
Work with numbers not with men
And all your goddamn heated talk
Ignores the trade the Polish brought
Ignores the men they gave work to
Not plumbing jobs but further too
Ignores the ones they buy stock from
Accountants, builders, on and on
And I know it's nice to have someone
To blame our lack of jobs upon
But immigrations not as plain
Despite the sums inside your brain
As one for one, as him or you
As if he goes, they'll employ you
Cos sometimes one that comes makes two
And sometimes one can add three more
And sometimes two times two is much much more
Than four
And most times immigrants bring more
Than minuses.