You didn’t bury the pipes

Seems like a bad idea in colder climates, and also, in other non-cold climates. If the pipes aren’t below the frost line, then they’d freeze and bust open, or, if they drained, you’d be without water for the whole of the winter. You might be able to get away with it in a hotter climate, but then you run into other problems. What do you make these pipes out of? A single conduit of inflexible pipe would be best, since this would deliver water along the fastest route, would be easiest to service, and might also require less chopping of local ecology than if the network was more decentralized or if the pipe was flexible. Because you’re going to have to chop up the local ecology to some degree. Tree branches will grow into or around the pipe, which is a bad thing. A flexible pipe might avoid that but you’d gain a lot of other problems in return. If you go with steel, especially galvanized, that’s kind of ideal, as plastic is gonna have a pretty sorry half-life in the sun and heat and elements. So, you could do it, but, it would take some amount of effort. If you had a stable singular conduit, you could also maybe pump the hot water through more constantly, or, pump it back and forth in times of low demand and otherwise store it in some sort of tank more local to the houses, which might help prevent freezing.

I think probably the best solution, in this case, is just to dig deeper than the, say, 7 feet that the tree roots are gonna be, and then bury your pipe about that deep. Only problem is that you’re gonna have a much harder time servicing anything if you have any sort of problem along the way, since now you’d have to trek through the forest and try to get at it through there. You might want to make a whole fucking very deep custom underground service corridor for all of your utilities, at this point, and that’s going to be incredibly expensive. Especially if your soil conditions are garbage, which they probably are, and you’re still going to have to dig and chop through the roots of the trees where you decide to have outlets for your utilities. I can see some sort of combination of an overhead pipe and an underground service tunnel here, that seems more reasonable while still also being insane, very stupid, and inefficient.

Just uproot the trees and replant them later, EZ.

Old growth forests have interconnected root systems, so you’d have to cut up all the trees at the root, raise them up, and then hopefully you can put them all back in the same configuration you got them out in. Not really a great way around that. This is probably going to kill all your trees. The local nursery is actually a better idea, and it’s better just to move away from an industrial scale of tree production that only produces a couple different kinds of trees, which I think is kind of psychotic at its face.

Yeah, well, we’re gonna have to learn how to do it eventually.

I dunno if our population will keep growing, to be honest. I’m not entirely sold on the idea that just education and birth control will curtail population growth to a maintainable degree, or at least, to the degree where our level of growth won’t outstrip our level of innovation to be able to compress said growth.

Also, probably no chance that we return earth to a pre-change state. Well, maybe. You have promising ideas like spraying sulfur dioxide or some other type of aerosolized chemical high in the atmosphere, like in snowpiercer, and that might be able to curtail a lot of the major effects of climate change if only someone was really willing to do it or co-ordinate an effort.

But seed banks, banks of genomic information to re-sequence species from close neighbors. You can’t really bring back those plants or those species if the conditions which surrounded them no longer exist. I’m not even talking, say, the rainforest as a whole, right. That would be incredibly difficult, but you could line up a process of succession, take the hardier species, plant those, propagate them, then slowly start to propagate other plants that can take over and develop other niches as they arise, same with animals, and probably you’d wanna pair both of these with a good degree of population control so you don’t get any runaway problems like with kudzu in the south.

No, the bigger problem there is that, I don’t really know how you would decrease carbon levels, or global temperatures, or decrease soil acidity, or other chemical traces in the soil, or the level of sand in the soil, or whatever other problems you might have. The reasons why those plants and ecosystems destabilized and went extinct will still be around, and would still have to be combated. You could maybe cook up some different schemes to try and solve those, more geoengineering, more terraforming, but we’ve already been straining credulity with this whole thought experiment, here. At some point, you really have to start asking why a shit ton of people would start to undergo this sort of a process if they couldn’t even see the value in the ecosystem enough to prevent themselves from destroying it in the first place.

You’re also kind of looking at it in terms of, what level of natural change should be allowed to happen. The dinosaurs went extinct from natural causes present in their ecosystem, whether that be an asteroid or a big volcano or whatever. The massive fungus forests that died because of the proliferation of cyanobacteria, that was also a natural process. These things were also massive extinction events. So we really gotta figure out what we’re trying to do here. Are we trying to preserve human suffering? Are we trying to lock nature in some kind of stasis because we think that to be advantageous? Are we maintaining nature and trying to minimize human involvement out of a kind of ethical obligation to do so? I don’t really know.

I dunno, in any case, better to just have everyone live in an apartment complex, I think.

Doesn’t Lyft work sorta like that?

I’ve only ever heard of lyft being a normal taxi service where people just use their own cars they already own. Also, I dunno where you’re getting your numbers for the calculation you’re doing, that would probably be something good to include. You could say the same for everything I write, I guess, but none of my criticisms much have to do with the numbers, except for this: I dunno what “smaller european cars” you’re using. Most cars nowadays are like, 2 tons or so at the least, probably more, and you could maybe get one ton of human body weight, at the most, if you had several 250 pound chucks riding around in one car, which I don’t really imagine to be the case normally at all.

There’s also an efficiency created by the “inefficient” route planning of the bus. By having something that travels in a loop, rather than having every individual travel to every individual point, we’re trading some amount of efficiency in terms of total time spent by everyone (theoretically, but this time is probably eaten up by increased amounts of car traffic in reality), and we’re trading that for a slight increase in the amount of foot traffic that people are collectively engaging in, which is probably a good thing. So that’s a total decrease in curb weight as a factor of total travel time, which is a decrease in road maintenance.

You’re also probably looking at a massive decrease in mechanical maintenance for buses compared to cars, using one big engine, set of brakes, A/C systems, etc, rather than like 15-20 smaller non-standardized sets, and maintenance costs for the specific roads you’re traveling on via bus means you can engineer in less maintenance over time compared to a more spread out system.

Density is also a pretty big consideration, because real estate downtown, i.e. the location most people are going to want to go, is at a high premium, both for people and for the city/state’s tax base. High density has the capacity to provide a sustainable tax base for the cost of providing utilities and maintenance by the city… Unless you park the series of autonomous cars all in some huge superstructure outside of town, and then basically just merge them straight into the highway, where you’d still have to overbuild and deal with a massive amount of car infrastructure (more than just the space you’d save on all this parking, since you could just have a couple pickup and dropoff spaces, if that, compared to all this other parking taken up downtown). I can’t really see it working out, and even at the normal densities we’d be looking at, I’d struggle to come up with a way by which it’s more efficient overall.

There’s also other types of buses, if we’re just talking about emissions efficiency, or energy efficiency. Obviously an overhead electrified bus is probably the most desirable, just behind a tram or a streetcar or whatever. Then you have the weird stupid hybrid battery overhead-electrified buses that I hate, and then probably all your natural gas buses and diesel buses and whatnot, and then your pure battery buses.

If we’re talking about autonomous vehicles, then we’re kind of also sidestepping all these questions about like, the scalability of the AI for this, and the computing power we’d have to use on that, constantly. We’d have to deal with the traveling mailman problem on a near constant basis, something which public transport can mostly sidestep by assuming passengers will come to it, and that public transit will be of a high enough density to create desirable locations simply by stopping there. We have all the pedestrian and cyclist traffic conflicts which we’d encounter, or else have to segregate from these cars entirely (something normal traffic already struggles to do adequately). And if we’re segregating the traffic entirely with a large amount of infrastructure, which definitely makes this much more achievable and easier, if still not easy, I think it makes more sense from a top down maintenance perspective to just go for trams or streetcars, or subways, or something like that.

I think the only real way in which I can cook up a reason this might be done, is because it’s outsourcing costs onto the public, and onto the state. Road maintenance can be done by the city, or state. Probably, this would mean that the autonomous vehicles would not be segregated, which means it’s less of a good idea, which I believe, is the primary reason it hasn’t been done. Then, the taxi service could basically make a bunch of money on their highly necessary transportation, which they have created a large need for, simply by existing and demanding a large amount of infrastructure by existing.

Use bicycles, e-bikes, and walking for individual pedestrian point to point travel. Fuck all the bullshit excuses people give about how, oh no it’s too hot out, too rainy, too hilly, what do I do with this cargo that’s not large or consistently arriving or departing enough to be loaded by a freight train, or by a professional truck, but isn’t so small that I can carry it, what do I do with all my kids, etc… Use cars sparingly enough to fill the very minor amount of gaps that can’t be bridged by bikes, cycling, and public transit, as a method of last resort. Mostly for people that would maybe need to live out in the boonies, like park rangers, maybe. Actual farms, not the stupid rich people playtime “ranches”, and industrial locations, they usually have a large enough cargo haul to justify a small freight train, or a large truck taking a small route to a freight yard.

Yeah, unfortunately people don’t understand that, of the IT guys and linux users and sysadmins that are gonna be most likely to want to migrate over here as a result of reddit going to shit, a lot of those are going to be furries and trans people, sure. But the other half of that demographic is gonna be the most incredible middle class financial anxiety liberal grifter white dudes you’ve ever seen, no question.

I just mean that I don’t think they were a good faith interlocutor. Probably if I were to put a specific explanation on it, I’d say that they are probably tired of having the same argument over and over again and being corrected repetitively, to the point where they’re not genuinely engaging anymore, I’ve seen that a lot. Especially with how quickly they backed out but also still left a comment. I dunno if that level of bad faith would be considered trolling in the strictest sense, but I would probably still classify it as such.

I mean arguably we could’ve done all of that with nasa if nasa had received a similar level of funding to SpaceX, but that’s kind of getting into alt-history.

Depends on the writer. You get a superman DC writer, homelander probably gets treated like every other fascist superman beats up. If it’s a “the boys” writer, homelander probably uses kryptonite to rip superman in half in a graphic full-page spread or some shit. You’re also gonna be dealing with, are we dropping superman into the relatively hopeless universe of the boys, are we dropping homelander into the DC universe, where he’ll probably be right st home with like 30 different characters almost exactly like him, will we come up with some portal stuff, what’s going on there

So I dunno, depends on the writer. Ke personally I’d prefer if superman won, cause it’s more hopeful and less garth ennis-y.

I believe they are what is known as a “low effort troll”

I mean we do have a pretty good indication of a quite large impending factor which may cause a lot of them to collapse in the coming years, and which could collectively be attributed to them pretty well, especially within the last 50 years.

MLK did advocate for pacifism for all but the last few months of his life

I mean this is sort of reframed with the context that he was assassinated for making that turn away from pacifism. I’m not saying that it was the wrong decision even given the hindsight we have now, but it does recontextualize it.

So, people can make the whole like, oh, this is a different context, kyle is joking, whatever whatever, right, and that’s both true and a fine argument to make. But I also think when we make this like, freedom as a principle argument, right, free speech as a principle, argument, it isn’t necessarily hypocritical.

We’re just not prioritizing freedom, prioritizing free speech, as the highest possible value that trumps all other values. I think kind of by necessity, it can’t be. The idea of free speech is logically incoherent if you take it to the extreme, because you could just define speech as being anything. Harmful acts, smearing poop on the bathroom walls, whatever. So you have to put a limit on it, and then those external values are going to be what places the limit on it.

Those external values of “I agree with kyle gass” vs “I agree with dave chapelle”. Agreeing with either argument, beyond that, thinking either argument, had in the public sphere, is worthwhile, that’s what has to define the limits of speech and freedom and what has to drive the outlook on it. I might oppose the poop swastika in the rec center bathroom, but I might think the ACAB poop smear in the nazi bar bathroom is maybe okay, even if it’s a little misguided or kind of just stupid or whatever.

There has to be a core value there. It’s not necessarily hypocritical to believe that political violence can be called for, or justified against your foes necessarily, and then think that the same thing shouldn’t be done to you on the nature of your ideology strictly being better. If my foes are basically just evil, straight up, yeah, probably at the very least stop them from like, having undue economic influence, which depending on who you ask, is gonna be some form of economic violence by nature of stripping away their agency or property or whatever. That doesn’t necessarily strike me as hypocritical, or not believing in equal rights or anything, it just strikes me as pragmatic.

Also, why can’t you just take your friend, friend’s guns, in your car, to the range, store them there? is there any real problem with that, or any real reason why you specifically need to have the guns rather than the range, which might be a better long term storage solution? I’m not opposed to your solution, I think it’s workable, I think it has potential to, maybe not get passed federally since the gun lobby is insanely powerful, but maybe work on a state-by-state basis, right, and build up from there. But if you do have an actual counterargument for what the guy’s saying, then you should give it instead of just kind of deflecting, because right now he does seem to have basically refuted all of the hypotheticals you were able to give about why requiring some kind of record every time a gun is transferred is a bad idea, and why universal background checks and the state as an active third party rather than a retroactive third party might be a good idea.

The only counterargument I can really see against it is maybe that it would result in state overreach or people being prevented from having access to guns if we start to see disproportionate enforcement of crimes and certain crimes being reclassified as felonies or something, but that’s also a problem with the current system that wouldn’t really get solved by your proposal at all, so yeah, I dunno.

Ayaaa, we had a conversation a while ago about this same topic. I do think you are still correct in your proposal to make NICS public, but I do also think that the other guy is perhaps partially right. I think such a law would probably be well-accompanied by requirements to own a gun safe (which might be seen as increasing the cost of ownership and thus discriminating and yadda yadda yadda shit I don’t care about), and to keep guns in said gun safe when perhaps they’re not being kept immediately on your person barring extraneous circumstances. I can’t quite recall, but I do believe we also talked about that last time, that there was a kind of need for common sense pertaining to the handling of guns, more than there is, considering how many guns are overwhelmingly passed into illegal uses through relatively simple theft.

I’m also not sure I agree that a violation of the background check, being a fine, is going to have much of an effect. If the fine is cheap enough, that might well enough be just free license to pass guns into an illegal domain and then pay the fine and go about your day. It may increase the costs of illegal firearms well enough which might have knock-on effects in decreasing illegal access to and usage of guns, and what have you, but I think it would probably require a more severe punishment than a fine a la a traffic ticket.

But then, maybe if that’s the metaphor we’re using, then along the lines of traffic tickets, maybe we should just be, uhh, designing the roads differently, whatever that equivalent might look like for guns, but I think that might be stretching the metaphor a little too much.

I mean I think I’d say it was more the result of poor preparation than anything. I think most places are saying he had like, 3 shots or somewhere around there, and apparently his rifle had no optic on it at all, which is kind of an insane idea at that distance. Which I think also maybe lends credence to the idea that this was just some impulse decision rather than a prepared kind of thing. I don’t think it’s that hard of a shot to make in general, even given the single opportunity that you’re going to be working with, I’ve hit soda cans with .22s at similar ranges. You barely have to take into account windage or holdover and I haven’t seen any evidence of heavy wind on the day of, really.

So, I dunno, I think it’s probably just an idiot kid killing himself in like, some elaborate suicide by cop or something. or just a dumb groyper, jury’s still out.

I think it’s probably that your anecdote and experience is kind of out of left field considering this guy was only dealing with a couple coyotes, and honestly you probably don’t even need a gun in that circumstance, and I don’t think you’d much need anything larger than pistol-caliber.

Hmm, I don’t understand the downvotes but okay lmao I’m sorry that the AR platform is actually fine in close quarters?

As far as I understand it, the main problem people have with it, which they also have with pretty much every gun larger than a foot or so, so most guns, is that you can’t really cross a threshold horizontally. About the only thing that could qualify against that maybe is like, a pistol or one of those shotguns with a bird’s head grip, or like, some smaller pdw or something. I also dunno how much of a problem that is, of, oh it’s gonna snag on something, or whatever, right, I guess it’s just the idea it’s going to present a higher snag risk or something when turning around, or, when getting up to a ready position? I dunno I’m not a gun nut.

I think it probably also isn’t helped by the increasing consumerist trend to load up their guns with more and more extraneous shit and go for longer and longer rifles on their AR platforms to try and increase accuracy on the range, which means they tend to conceptualize of them as being unsuitable for close quarters despite that kind of being the idea of an intermediate cartridge and all that. It also doesn’t really help to cite our military engagements with it considering over the last like 3 decades of the rifle’s service we’ve mostly only fought like, random middle eastern terrorist organizations that don’t have a great reputation for good training or good equipment or anything like that. You could maybe look at uses of the rifle by other organizations like the IRA or whatever, but I don’t think they had any close quarters engagements.

All of those things can be done outside of my house, so I don’t really see any reason why not to. Beard trim, blam, here’s a razor, sandwich, here’s that shit, here’s a bottle of water, the hose is over there, here’s some soap, blam. Even if I’m cooking up the most diabolical and insane homeless person of all time, I can still fulfill all of those requests while also keeping them outside, doing very little, and maybe telling them to also fuck off after if I’m a psycho.

The rest of this is gonna mostly be venting, so you can safely ignore it if you don’t care.

People in america are totally cooked on homelessness, even though they’re, on average, metaphorically inches away from it at any given time. Homeless shelters in america mostly are horrible places to go where your shit will be stolen and they will do nothing. They’re bad for children, they’re full of drugs, and very frequently they have curfews, rules against having animals or pets, rules requiring that you go to religious ceremonies, etc. Homeless people aren’t just like, insane illogical transients. I mean they kind of are, but there’s also a reason for why they do the things that they do, that includes maybe knocking on the door of a random suburb.

I would actually find it more likely in this situation that this random person would probably want to use my toilet since there are no fucking public toilets in america, especially as private businesses will deny use of their restrooms to people who look homeless. Then people get arrested for public defecation, urination, or nudity because there’s nowhere else to go, obviously there’s also mental health, and then all you see is how some guy on the street on fent gets arrested with his pants around his ankles and his asscheeks covered in shit and you think “wow that guy’s crazy” and have no further thoughts. Context is eradicated.

Give someone in america the slightest advantage over the homeless, a shitty suburban flat, with a lower rent, that they spend two thirds or more of their income on, including roommates, and they will still somehow find a way to spit on the homeless after riding the bus into town every day cause they can’t afford a car. They will still live their lives in fear and they will still come to hate the homeless because somehow the person basically making negative income is not able to afford soap or a high-fiber diet.

It’s the “Oh, well, it’s not my problem, that sucks for them, but I’m still allowed to be offended by it.” sort of mentality. You can give them every reason under the sun why hating the homeless doesn’t make any sense, why hating the homeless is immoral, why they don’t deserve it, how they are products of their environment. Still people will desperately cling to it. It makes me understand how racism occurs, I suppose, because it’s the same phenomena. “Ah, well, I understand all of the stats about racism, but this particular member of this particular racial minority, I still hate them personally for acting in line with the statistical average of their group.”. Insanity. It’s as though it’s all just abstract thought goop that has no bearing on anyone’s life, or that somehow I should be the exception to it.

I think it’s gotta be a functional adaptation, or something. Maybe they can prevent themselves from going insane and becoming nihilists if they just suddenly become individualists and objectivists as soon as it becomes convenient, or something. It is not that hard to conceive of a reality in which the person cutting you off in traffic is rushing to the hospital, or, a reality in which they, maybe naively but understandably want to enjoy their expensive car while they still can, or, maybe a reality in which they’re just panicking because they’re late to work or something.

I am an introvert, I am awkward, I hate hanging around people and talking to people. Even I can talk to the homeless when they need someone to talk to, and reluctantly give them money, and rides to places when they ask, since it would otherwise be like two hours and twelve dollars of travel, bus stops, a transfer station, travel, more bus stops, before they get across town to do a fairly basic errand. The social fabric is falling apart. Please be nice, it is not that hard, it costs very little, it happens infrequently, and very possibly if some of you extroverted assholes picked up some slack instead of making things harder for the most maligned, I could go back to my cave.

Mostly I find them annoying. I mildly understand the need for human meaning as it kind of, tends to come up later at night, or for the elderly, or when life really sucks or you tend to even just be really really bored right.

I also understand some of the benefits, right, like. As much as people will despise to admit it, you don’t get, say, the number zero without the Muslim science guys, and you don’t get science without the enlightenment which stemmed out of some weirdass Catholic Christian theory guys. and then everyone’s all like, oh no well you can’t attribute that to the Catholics and if anything they hampered progress, and I’d say, well, maybe, maybe, but also maybe science sucks as we commonly understand it and maybe also you can’t really divorce any part of things from their cultural context, or else things get fucky.

On the other hand I find them annoying and I find that all to be totally null and void because the vast majority of people are just using it as an opiate to placate literally all of their anxieties about the world with a bunch of meaningless thought terminating cliche style statements, and even actively reinforce their own participation in some of the worst aspects of their own culture and society even at points in which they really don’t want to or know that it’s horrible and is causing them pain.

So I dunno, mostly it sucks.

haven’t had much of an issue with that as long as I hide duplicates, require posts with images, and then click on the “owner” tab instead of the dealer tab, but I live in a pretty small city, so ymmv.