If he were a Russian asset, he could end the war by lifting Russia’s sanctions or refusing to impose or enforce “new” sanctions (new rules that close loopholes in the existing sanctions).

Trump isn’t a Russian asset, he’s just a shit president.

If industrialized society was easy then everyone would do it. We should all be subsistence farmers.

There’s always something to innovate, you just get diminishing returns. The problem is that sooner or later, the returns diminish below the profit rate of banditry and rent-seeking.

Also, there’s plenty of wildly profitable innovation, but so much of it isn’t politically feasible because it will hurt the profits of existing rich people whose permission you need to upend the status quo. Usually this isn’t a conspiracy so much as the alternative being so completely incomprehensible in the current paradigm that it’s just written off as crazy and a terrible idea.

It’s the laws of physics. Dennard scaling is dead, unless someone discovers new, even smaller atoms and a way of disabling quantum tunnelling.

It’s also the fact that faster speeds are unnecessary and nobody wants to pay more for them, so electronics companies have focused on efficiency/reducing power draw instead (which, incidentally, let’s you run your computer faster anyway).

Is it, though? Even with a jungle mag or such? Dropping an entire gun, pulling out and aiming an entire new gun sounds pretty slow when you think about it.

Not anymore!

It was the Russian standard rifle (that fires AK47 bullets) when their standard SMG was the AK47, right before they realized that the AK47 works just as well as a rifle and just made the AK47 their standard rifle. That didn’t stop Stalin from stockpiling enough of em for WW3 tho.

So, when the USSR collapsed, they dumped approximately seven hundred trillion SKSes onto the market and they were selling for less than $100 each. Which made them cheap until Americans realized they were both cheaper and better than a hipoint.

And Linux used to not have a GUI. Are you going to complain that Linux is too difficult to use because it used to be command-line based? What even is this point?

When do you think Linux didn’t have a GUI? CDE was released in 1993, and let’s be honest: nobody used Linux before 1993.

I wish calibre-web didn’t use the web browser as its client.

And the difference between polytheistic religions and Christianity is that instead of having a god of archery and a god of prostitutes, Christianity has a patron saint of archery and a patron saint of prostitutes. Totally different!

People who literally haven’t invented paper.

Europe had given grants to NLNet to work on open-source alternatives to US proprietary software (Windows etc), but cancelled them in, IIRC, 2022 to fund AI crap.

Oh right, let me clarify:

The Spine

Early plans [for Neom] proposed an underground railway with 510-kilometre-per-hour (317 mph) trains that could travel from one end of The Line to the other in 20 minutes.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line%2C_Saudi_Arabia#The_Spine

I meant to refer to that thing. I should have said 20 minutes, not 15, and I shouldn’t have used the specific phrase “15 minute city” to refer to a city that can be traveled anywhere within 15 minutes. Mea culpa.

Back to the point, though: none of that changes that a Line is mind-bogglingly stupidly bad compared to just a basic grid.

Fire hydrants provide water, but you need to run the water through a pump to increase the pressure, and a fire truck acts as that pump.

Finally, someone with something approaching an answer!

I’m looking for hard info one way or another, but it looks like some fire hydrants provide much more pressure than others. It seems weird that there would need to be a mobile pump attached to the stationary fire hydrant, when it could be built in. I imagine the reason it’s not, is a combination of 1) if the street is wide and the fire engine has a pump built into its water tank anyway, why spend extra on a redundant stationary pump on the fire hydrant? and 2) the pump needs to be powered somehow, and the electrics might be knocked out in an emergency relating to a fire anyway, so it’s neater to simply not rely on mains electricity for the pump.

Which begs the question: what do genuinely narrow (<2m) streets do about fire? Well, sometimes they just run a big hose from a hydrant on a wider street. And sometimes…

…they use a fire engine built as a kei truck!

(Kei trucks are <1.5m wide! They easily fit down a 2m street!)

And if all the roads are very narrow, how are you going to get a moving truck or other delivery vehicle in? What about a plumber’s van? What about a small personal vehicle? Two meters isn’t wide enough for any of those, especially not with outdoor seating.

The moving truck isn’t important for apartments - everything needs to fit through the front door/corridor/stairwell anyway, so having a 6m-wide street is just about efficiency.

Again though, a kei truck is max 1.48m, so just use a flatbed kei truck and these problems magically disappear. I really don’t know why you want to run your small personal vehicle down an obviously for-pedestrians street, but it is possible (if not legal).

More broadly, if the street is tiny then you bring a tiny vehicle. It’s like being mad that KFC doesn’t have a vegan option. If you really need to use a truck, then drive it to the entrance of the alley and either carry it the rest of the way to the door, or use a trolley.

There’s also another precedent here, from delivery vehicles: take a look at the various cargo ebikes used by delivery services, like Amazon’s “cargo ebike” that fits in a bike lane. Two of them should be able to pass by eachother in a 2m-wide street.

Six meters gives space for service vehicles to coexist with pedestrians, cyclists, and seating.

So I should clarify: 2m should generally be for the less-used streets. Not all streets should be 2m, if a street is frequently used it could obviously benefit from more space. But conversely, if a street is rarely used then it really shouldn’t be overbuilt just to accommodate ‘efficiency’ of extremely rare events (like a moving truck).

Service vehicles don’t need to coexist with that seating/etc. You limit deliveries to a specific hour of the day (say, 8AM-9AM) and pack up the seating during that hour, and if a kei truck is coming down the alley then you squidge over into the remaining 50cm of the street, or duck into a doorway or something, for the ~5 seconds it takes for the truck to go from right behind you to right in front of you. Obviously, a 2m street requires the truck to give way to pedestrians, so they’ll want to slow to a crawl as they drive past you.

And FWIW, I’m not opposed to taller buildings. I am opposed to the mindset that automatically assumes they’re the only option, though. Short buildings are very cheap-per-sqm and mesh well with incremental development, and short buildings with narrow streets (particularly rowhouses!) are IMO just a straight upgrade from the plenty of places with height restrictions and a requirement for wide streets. It’s not like you need to commit to one or the other for the whole city - you can have a 6m street parallel to a 2m street, easy.

Which definition? Some people just made up their own. The definition I used in the above comment was “a city where you can travel everywhere within 15 minutes”, no more, no less. Also, I kind of ignored walking times.

the original reason for wanting the Elf Waifu was probably “I could have a Legal Loli Waifu,”

The original reason was obviously some game/anime that had a pretty elf girl with big tits.

You’re better off with the Mongol/Dracul system - instead of making pacts with the local lords, you kill them and promote competent nobodies to rule instead. The peasants don’t care who their lord is, and by promoting nobodies who don’t have a claim to legitimacy outside your support, you guarantee their loyalty. Plus, you get to pick the most competent people, instead of being stuck with the local fat lazy lord who only got the role because his daddy had it.

I thought it was anti-Europe (“please for the love of god get me out of [europe]”) until I read the Russia part.

The problem with ‘The Line’ is that travelling 170KM in 15 minutes requires an average speed of 680KM/h (I wrote out why that’s insane lunacy from an engineering perspective, but I shoved it in a footnote), but you can achieve a 15-minute city of the same volume just by having an, IIRC, 13KM square with 100m-high buildings (and building 100m-high buildings is waaaay cheaper than building 500m-high buildings), built on a simple grid of normal 100KM/h trains - the Manhattan Distance of the maximum distance in a 13KM square is 26KM, which to be fair is still 36 seconds over the 15min mark even if your average speed is 100KM, but 1) it almost achieves the exact same thing as the trillion-dollar sci-fi tech, and 2) if you really care about the sharp 15-minute city premise then you can bump your trains up to run at 150KM/h (which is perfectly doable and only a little more expensive).

Anyway, point is that the only way The Line can fulfil its promises is by casually dropping a trillion dollars on a problem that may or may not be solvable, and will almost certainly be an order of magnitude or three more expensive than the bog-standard existing solution. A 680KM/h train is fucking expensive and while yes, it might be physically possible, most people want the cost of their commute to be lower than their daily wage earned from the job they commute to.

If The Line was ever built (and was cheap without subsidies somehow and became populated), then the first thing to happen after its populated would be a ton of building sideways, mostly around the midpoint/centre of The Line. Why? Because that’s the prime land that’s empty and therefore cheapest to build on, that’s closest to everything (the midpoint of The Line should be ~7.5mins away from everything at most, and would also be the most accessible spot in the city and therefore have the most desirable business locations). And new buildings would be built around there, not at the ends of The Line. They’d add extensions to the train line that turn 90 degrees out, so that people further away from The Line could access the train system. This all would continue until The Line became The Circle.

The only way The Line stays a line is with economic antigravity. Metaphorical antigravity, to be clear. Not the sci-fi tech.,

Never going to happen in america

…why? I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but half the time I see that line it’s used as a justification for why people shouldn’t demand it happen. And frankly, “never” is too strong of a word.

680KM/h isn’t even possible with a normal maglev, you’d need to either shove the maglev in a vacuum tube or build a rocket train or something equally insane just to have a maximum speed of 680KM/h. But you actually need a higher speed than 680KM/h since you start out at 0KM/h and 680KM/h is just the average - and since your acceleration is limited to speeds that won’t kill the passenger, you really do have to factor it in, one way or another. See, your train has to either permit passengers to stand (which sharply limits safe acceleration without someone being knocked over and bashing their head open on a rail) or it has to give everyone time to board and then seat (all of which takes time for boarding), and you also need a way to ensure that random dickheads won’t ignore the rules and stay standing. A boarding delay will kill your average speed just as much as low acceleration.

Usually these people take it as an article of faith that there’s something you could do to unfuck your situation, without necessarily having any idea what that something is. I think he’s just fundamentally speaking abstractly.

Nixon wanted to legally bash up hippies and black people.