The whole discussion about "fixing" cities is stupid. Dense cities can't be fixed, and using ad-hoc regulations like this is just like plugging the holes in a dike with fingers.
Next you'll find that you also need to do the same for schools. But schoolteachers won't be able to afford living near the areas that they serve. So you need subsidized housing for them.
Oh, and the same for kindergarten. But what about at-home childcare? And so on.
And no, "land value capture" won't fix it. You'll just move the complexity from giving out subsidies into assessing the value of kindergartens and schools.
If you get rid of a lot of inefficiencies (unnecessary parking, land use segregation increase travel distances, and restrictions on multi family apartments), there will be so much more space available that it would lower housing prices by a lot for everyone. The tax revenues can also offset other taxes like income or sales taxes which also reduce inefficiency.
Are you saying that cities can’t be fixed because they’re already fine, or because they’re irredeemably awful, or just that the notion of “fixing” them is inherently ridiculous?
The problem with US cities is that they're not dense enough. Most of the US has spent the past half-centry actively making new high-density construction illegal or incredibly expensive, so everything is operating within the bounds of 1970s-80s construction being reused over and over again because it was grandfathered in.
People being forced by economic forces to move into uncomfortable and unaffordable dense cities. This in turn creates disadvantaged underclass with no hopes for a better future. And even European social safety nets can only do so much.
While just hours away from dense cities, the apartments are often literally free. With copious space and easy access to basic services.
This results in rising crime. The downward trend that started in 90-s had been reversed. And the crimes of despair, mainly drug-related crimes, are rising faster than violent crimes.
Too late in certain markets like LA. They already built out all the flat land for the most part by the 90s. Only way to go now is to go up. There is no more land to go out. Look at the satellite map, development from ocean to mountains.
Except regulations are what got us here in the first place? At least in the US, zoning is a recent invention with racial motivations. Cities want to be dense because that is the cheapest way to build. That is why basically every city older than a 100 years old that hasn't been wrecked by zoning is dense. Suburbs are an unnatural product of abundant land in the US, the invention of automobiles, and zoning.
It's environmental as much as it is zoning that drives the development you see.
You literally can't build the kind of "concrete jungle" that you used to be able to because of environmental.
Like a store with a few parking spaces up front, the building and an alley around the back to one parking space (for the staff) and the dumpster is literally illegal without a multimillion dollar stormwater treatment system or a bunch of extra land (i.e. suburban sprawl).
This is also why you only ever see <low number> family houses on 1/16th to 1/8 acre (depending on the sqft of the house + parking) and the it jumps right to N-over-Y megacorp apartment blocks (maybe with retail on the bottom).
It's funny that people always bring this up, but I don't see what centrally planned mandatory setbacks, height limits, and parking mandates have to do with preventing industrial accidents.
The state claims jurisdiction on pretty much all the "seriously heavy" industry people like to trot out as though it would be in your back yard if not for zoning. The local towns don't get much of a say and even when they do the projects are high dollar enough that if the town won't grant it then they'll win on appeal and it'll be no big deal.
Aaaand, the real kicker is that the towns typically can't fight too hard because a lot of zoning provisions they'd use are not up to the legal standard it takes to do battle with a megacorp and they'd rather keep them on the books as they are than have the megacorp's lawyers pick them apart.
So you can still have Chernoybl in your back yard with zoning.
Zoning is about 100 years old, and it's not the reason Manhattan doesn't have enough groceries. And ultimately, market forces almost always win over regulations.
Reformulate the question: why do people tolerate living in dense tiny apartments, without easy access to necessities like childcare and grocery stores?
You don't need tiny apartments to have density. You can do it with smaller single-family houses on smaller lots, narrow one-way streets, and alleyways for parking instead of driveways and garages. This is how the pre-war streetcar suburb of Riverdale, Toronto is designed [1] and it has much higher density than the rest of the city.
That's a propaganda channel that "conveniently" ignores everything against their narrative.
These kinds of density still require cars. Unless you want to have a stay-at-home spouse who can do full-time housekeeper duty (like in that Toronto neighborhood).
DHS/ICE is in a weird constitutional spot. Most immigration violations in the US are _civil_ violations. So the Fourth Amendment is less applicable. It's also why detained immigrants don't automatically get the right to be represented by a lawyer.
ICE/DHS technically are just acting as marshals, merely ensuring that defendants appear at court proceedings and then enforcing court decisions (deportations).
It's not really that the 4th amendment is less applicable, it's that the procedural protections are lower in civil proceedings.
I think it's a pretty big undersell to describe ICE as "marshals" too - they've got plenty of discretion in how they prioritize targeted people and who they detain. They are not just a neutral party executing court orders.
In theory yes, but in practice it's more unclear. There are conflicting Supreme Court precedents, that weaken the Fourth Amendment in cases where criminal penalties don't apply. Asset foreiture is another example.
> I think it's a pretty big undersell to describe ICE as "marshals" too - they've got plenty of discretion in how they prioritize targeted people and who they detain. They are not just a neutral party executing court orders.
Yep. That's also a difference between theory and practice.
What exactly do you disagree with? Most immigration violations are a civil matter (USC section 8). There are criminal violations like human trafficking or illegal entry. But if you came into the US with a visa and then overstayed, you're not committing anything criminal.
And even illegal entry is a misdemeanor, the maximum punishment is at most 6 months in jail. So yeah, ICE and DHS _technically_ don't have more power than regular marshals for most immigration cases.
Which should scare you, btw. There are plenty of civil violations that can be similarly weaponized in future.
IMO, the calculus is taught incorrectly. It should start with functions and completely avoid sequences initially. Once you understand how calculus exploits continuity (and sometimes smoothness), it becomes almost intuitive. That's also how it was historically developed, until Weierstrass invented his monster function and forced a bit more rigor.
But instead calculus is taught from fundamentals, building up from sequences. And a lot of complexity and hate comes from all those "technical" theorems that you need to make that jump from sequences to functions. E.g. things like "you can pick a converging subsequence from any bounded sequence".
In Maths classes, we started with functions. Functions as list of pairs, functions defined by algebraic expressions, functions plotted on graph papers and after that limits. Sequences were peripherally treated, just so that limits made sense.
Simultaneously, in Physics classes we were being taught using infinitesimals, with the a call back that "you will see this done more formally in your maths classes, but for intuition, infinitesimals will do for now".
> because the public key has to be hardcoded in the app binary
Nope. On iOS the flow is:
1. Generate a "push token" on the device (with the user's approval).
2. Send this token to your server.
3. Now you can send notifications to the device via this token. Your server needs to authenticate itself with Apple, and this requires an Apple account. But it's not linked to an individual app.
The situation is different on Android. Google went out of their way to make it impossible to customize `google-services.json` at runtime. So the built-in "easy" flow won't work. But notifications ultimately work using veeeeery obfuscated remote procedure calls to Google Play Services and you can run them manually. I need to do a write-up about this....
> Your server needs to authenticate itself with Apple, and this requires an Apple account
How does Firebase Cloud Messaging work with Apple without an Apple account, or is that implied in the client generated push token residing in Firebase?
You're implying some difference here that I don't see.
Both platforms need some way for the client to register to their respective push services, Apple needs an Apple account, Android needs google-services.json.
Both platforms require your app to generate a token which the platform's respective push service holds, and send it to your server which you then use to identify the client you're pushing to.
Apple also requires the Auth p8, Bundle ID, Team ID and Key ID, which are roughly equivalent to the contents of the google-services.json.
I find that these reductive stereotypes are... actually true.
Not all the Middle Ages were really Dark, but some of them were.
> It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views
But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe. And really completely ended only when the Reformation fractured it.
And sure, the Reformation was made possible by internal forces within the religious institutions, slowly building ideological foundation for it.
>> It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views
> But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe. And really completely ended only when the Reformation fractured it.
1. Political, economic, cultural, and even religious systems would vary drastically by place and time in Europe. The lifestyle and thoughts of an English peasent in 600CE would be drastically different from the lifestyle of a Spanish or Frankish one, and would differ even more so between 600CE and 900CE.
2. The "Dark Ages" traditionally started when Rome fell in 476CE, long before Christianity had spread outside of traditional Roman lands.
3. The Reformation didn't start until the 16th century, long after the Dark Ages are considered to have ended. Generously you could say it started with the Hussites in the 1400s but that's still skipping over the Renaissance entirely which is the absolute latest end for the Dark Ages since the whole point of it as a historical context is "rediscovering" the Classical works.
> 1. Political, economic, cultural, and even religious systems would vary drastically by place and time in Europe.
This is a non-answer. Yes, political systems were different. The ARE still different.
But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
> 2. The "Dark Ages" traditionally started when Rome fell in 476CE, long before Christianity had spread outside of traditional Roman lands.
It should have started around the time of the move of the Roman capital to Constantinople. By the time of the fall of Rome, the Darkening had been in full swing.
If you want a precise date, I propose the date of murder of Hypatia in 415 AD.
It was probably the 540s and the subsequent century or so.
> there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
If you define ~800 AD as the end of the dark ages then yes. By Charlemagne’s time that had already changes.
It wasn’t exactly flourishing in Gaul, and Germany during the Roman times either. Those regions had arguably surpassed their Roman peak by the end of the dark ages.
And of course science and scholarship were preserved in Constantinople during the entire period (of course they had some very dark moments too)
> But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
Ireland is often cited as one such place, thanks to early Christian monasteries. The Carolingian Renaissance was significant in Central Europe, and there were important cultural developments in Slavic lands, though perhaps not involving 'science' as such.
> But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
That seems different from what you originally argued but either way, that's also not really accurate. I'm going to assume you're referring to "Western Europe" here since you're clearly aware of Eastern Roman/Byzantine empire still existing, but that still leaves Al-Andalus, the Carolingian Renaissance, agricultural advancements like the three-field system, wheelbarrows, multiple types of milling technology, and during the latter end you start getting advanced compasses, bells, mechnical watches, and other metallurgy.
Where all of these done in one or two specific places? No, continuing to ignore Byzantium here, but there was a still a variety of advancements happening all the time without which the Renaissance couldn't have happened.
> It should have started around the time of the move of the Roman capital to Constantinople. By the time of the fall of Rome, the Darkening had been in full swing.
I mean, you can think that but that's not how or what the term "The Dark Ages" usually refers to. It sounds like you have your own constructed time period in mind and I'm not interested in discussing something I'm not aware of.
> If you want a precise date, I propose the date of murder of Hypatia in 415 AD.
> But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe.
No, it is not. As Stryan noted in another response to your comment, the idea that medieval Europe was somehow one uniform culture is incorrect.
I would also add that the term "Dark Ages" is used in different ways by different people. People who don't know much about the Middle Ages often use that term to describe the whole of the Middle Ages, from roughly the fifth century to the end of the fifteenth (and Christianity had already spread around the Roman Empire by the fifth). Others just the early Medieval period (about 500 to 1000). Some limit the term to periods where we just don't have many sources, or it is perceived that we don't (e.g., I've heard it applied to Visigothic Spain).
Fourteenth-century Humanists (who lived at a time often considered to be part of those so called "Dark Ages"!) first used the term to contrast what they thought were the centuries between their lives and the classical period. They even went so far as to emulate the handwriting of the classical texts they favored, thinking they should because that's how the Romans wrote. They didn't realize they were copying eighth- and ninth-century Carolingian hands instead, texts copied by monks and clerics and court scribes because they valued them. (Lower case letters in modern languages that use the Latin characters, like English, are still based on Carolingian minuscule.)
I would agree that many people view the Middle Ages as a static time, though a point I was trying to make was that the "Dark Ages" can mean different things depending on the person and context.
But more importantly it wasn't static (or "almost entirely stopped")! It's an erroneous conception that, as I said, started with people who lived in the Middle Ages. People in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period would often repeat this, so now many people do too. That doesn't make it correct.
> social and scientific development almost entirely stopped
Well it did in fact sped to an almost unparalleled pace after 1000 AD or so. How much progress do you think there was before the dark ages? The Roman Empire was rather stagnant (especially technologically and there were significant advances in agriculture, metallurgy and industry in the dark ages even before even before 1000 AD
> The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe.
1000-1400s AD was a period of extremely rapid (by historical standards) economic, societal and technological progress. Just compare with the highly stagnant (in relative terms) Roman Empire between 0 AD and 400 AD. It was the opposite of the dark ages…
500-800s AD were not great, but plague, climate change and extreme political instability likely had a bigger impact on that than Christianity…
Next you'll find that you also need to do the same for schools. But schoolteachers won't be able to afford living near the areas that they serve. So you need subsidized housing for them.
Oh, and the same for kindergarten. But what about at-home childcare? And so on.
And no, "land value capture" won't fix it. You'll just move the complexity from giving out subsidies into assessing the value of kindergartens and schools.
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