That’s an oversight on my part. I didn’t look at tonight l Tokyo specifically

Yeah I made an error there. I wasn’t looking specifically at Tokyo population for some reason.

Doesn’t that all seem a bit silly?

For sure. All of this is pretty silly.

Also, it seems you are willing to discount discussion out of hand because of your perception of the person on the other side instead of based on the merits of the argument.

Well, I mean, yes, but I’m basically trying to say that social media in it’s various forms is full of armchair experts who have massive blind spots but argue passionately, and the pro-urban, “fuck cars” crowd comes off as particularly cranky in this way.

It’s basically people who didn’t get a driver’s license, or couldn’t afford a car, or lived in an urban traffic nightmare like LA trying to invalidate the personal freedom others experienced as a result of car ownership - and I’m certain it’s a generational thing because boomers, Gen X and the older millennials grew up at a time when anyone could own a car, gas was cheap, and it was woven into the independence of early adulthood. You’ll never convince me that it’s not empowering to get 50-100 miles out of your small city and explore an unpopulated place that public transit could not service. It annoys me to no end that people on socal media hate on this without the lived experience to understand it.

20 years ago, Japan’s population was basically flat. It has the same population today as it did in 1995, having gone up and then down by only a couple million people in between.

Land prices in the US were also low 20 years ago, before we added another 45 million people to the demand side of the equation.

I’ve lived in a lot more places than most people, with a lot more diversity of experience. I certainly can’t guarantee more experience than any random commenter, but it will be more than the vast majority. I’ve lived in several small towns and cities. Many suburbs. A few large cities. I’ve walked to work, biked to work, taken public transit to work. I’ve driven 10m to work and commuted 2.5h to work with a combination of trains and cars - and everything in between. I’ve regularly been to places where you’re within sight of >20 people at all times, and places that haven’t seen a human in 10 years. The vast majority of people live within 20 miles of where they were born, and less than half of gen Z adults have a driver’s license. I’ve owned over two dozen cars and have a pilots license. I live thousands of miles from where I grew up. I have degrees, certifications, or substantial work experience in 5 different fields. I have several hobbies more substantive than many peoples careers. I know things about stuff.

And also, because many, when pressed, will admit to living in a big city, maybe in Europe, or someplace with fucked, hellish sprawl like LA that’s a victim of a half century of compound growth, or some insane new construction suburb in TX or FL that was designed to enrich a real estate developer at the highest possible profit margin. Either urban hell (from my perspective) or a strawman of hellish sprawl that isn’t very similar to older suburbs and the original “American dream” - not having tried much else.

Edit: in one case I was talking with someone who thought the travel distance to a normal suburban grocery store was 500% the straight line distance due to some comical maze of roads. I have to drive/walk/bike 25% further to my suburban grocery store than its straight line distance, and it’s been the same in the last 4 suburbs I’ve lived in, in radically different places. It tells me that a lot of people don’t know WTF they’re talking about.

NYC has more resources to function than just about anywhere. High tax, both state and city, combined with a massive number of taxpayers. Extremely high road and bridge tolls. Best-case, near-universal ridership of the long-established public transit (and significant rider fees). Very small land area over which to spread its city income.

If they can’t maintain a clean and tidy city with the resources they have, the taxation and manpower required is probably not achievable.

I think that unless you have a non-American (e.g. Japanese) community caretaking ethic that comes with other baggage (and can’t easily be recreated in American culture), the residents will wear it down and trash it faster than it can be fixed. If you put 10m rats in a proportional land area, they’d kill each other - I don’t know why we think it’s healthy for human habitation to exist at that level

Maybe I’d be less vocal about it if there wasn’t a loud minority of people - I suspect mostly born after 1990 - who have these opinions largely as a result of lack of other experience. Maybe I’d be less pissed off about it if they stopped moving from huge cities to small ones and fucking up the cost of everything whilst trying to convert everywhere to NYC and Amsterdam.

I’m sick of the Zennial/euro anti-car, ultra pro-urban densification, unopposed bandwagoning online, and I feel compelled to speak up about it.

Maybe 40s-50s for some of them. Maybe never for others, but I think the only way they can idealize apartment living is lack of life experience. City living is hip and fun for young people but it gets old. Maybe we’re dealing with extreme extroverts who can’t bear the quiet of a green suburb, and having private space in a personal vehicle instead of being crammed on the bus or train with the general public.

I think the kids are deluded and have no idea what they’re missing. Density is hell. Single family homes are expensive because the vast majority of people don’t want to spend the rest of their lives living in apartments.

Yeah I lived in NYC for years. It’s a complete shithole urban nightmare with no space, no privacy, no quiet, and no way out. It’s filthy, decaying, and it smells bad. Density is the problem, not the solution.

Japan has declining population, unlike basically every county in the world.

https://newfastuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/fxy2rtr1ec651.png

I do have developer mode on, but don’t keep activities is off

This is a great idea, I’m going to try it

Edit: messages is a system app, battery is set to unrestricted, still reloads with blank screen and big messages icon at the center while it does so.

More of an environmental Skyhawk, actually

That was a great watch - it’s cool to find out the history.

I must say, society is much better off without widespread use of TEL, but as someone who used to do racecar things, TEL works like magic. A little goes a LONG way, and Midgely did legitimately stumble upon something with very high effect for the concentration (they also touch on ethanol in the video which has the drawback of needing a lot).

I’m not opposed to using it in a small scale racing context (like definitely not NASCAR) because it’s so fucking useful and the quantity is unlikely to cause harm. Unfortunately so much bad has been done with it at this point, I don’t think that’s a very popular opinion.

Whatever your views on it, it’s the only thing that can make gasoline legitimately 120+ octane, and that has huge implications for some types of racing.

It’s approved as of last fall, but the FAA spent well over a decade stonewalling it with unnecessary bureaucracy.

Now we’re left with the chicken-and-egg problem of the market, where nobody will offer unleaded because it’s more expensive, but it’s expensive because it’s not widely used. The feds should subsidize it down to $4/gal for 5 years to get it off the ground.

Yes, some light planes have fuel economy similar to efficient cars (which is very impressive considering how fast they are relative to cars). If you consider the advantages of direct, straight line routing, it’s not hard for planes to do better on fuel economy.

We’re not talking about jets here, though some of those do very well in mpg on a per passenger basis.

I gave up kids to have flying!

Worth noting that the amount of aviation fuel burned annually should make it a negligible contributer to environmental lead contamination compared to widespread automotive use (although I’m sure it contributes on airport grounds).

Edit: All the pilots I know want to use unleaded, and it was recently approved after being stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare process, but market forces may make it hard to adopt.