The newer technology at that time was cars and roads, and many European countries did try the American system of roads and suburbs.

Its just that most of them realized it wad a bad idea around 20 years ago and started rethinking their cities.

Many city centers were even turned into parking lots like American ones.

Again cities arent supposed to be static, and normally they grow denser, rather than sprawling.

The problem with American cities is partly zoning, and partly nimbyism, where people don’t want their places to change.

And sprawl sucks for pretty much everyone. Less arable land for farming, poorer anmeties, longer travel times, and finally huge transportation costs. Cars are by far the most costly method of travel, both personally and for governments.

The stupid thing is that fixing it isn’t even that hard.

Step one Get rid stupid zoning laws like single family housing and reduce parking minimums.

Step 2 Modify existing roads piece by piece to include alternative transit methods. Add bike lanes, if you can’t slow down roads and people will bike.

Actually run decent buses where peoole want to go, not oversized 50 person buses on 3 routes that nobody uses becasue it doesn’t go anywhere, and has an hour between the next bus.

That’s it, the market will build more housing in areas that need it if its profitable, then use that new tax money to drive transit infrastructure.

There’s a lot of fine details, but we’re bankrupting cities with cars right now.

It’s a good point that cities aren’t built anymore, and that’s part of the problem. Our population has grown drastically, but we don’t build hardly any new infrastructure for them outside of roads. So traffic is terrible despite enormous amounts of money from both government and people.

Cities aren’t supposed to be static, they’re supposed to grow and adapt to the needs of those that live there. There is a large need for non-car transport that is either ignored or sidelined for cars.

I’m not talking about 90% empty land, that’s not where people are.

When the car was invented, governments had little issue buildozing entire neighborhoods for highways, but now that some places are realizing that’s a bad decision, its really hard to undo.

There are places that would be wonderfully served by trains, but just aren’t.

Cars are best in rural areas, but by far the majority of peoole live in cities where cars are the worst, yet we still build them for cars.

Ah I understand, let me be more specific, and answer some questions.

When it comes to farming, we don’t put farmland in cities, in rural areas cars do make sense.

Energy generation doesn’t have to be done in cities either.

As for sewage, yeah it takes up space in cities because you can’t tranport it out, but it’s small compared to the entire city.

The parts that are unsustainable are the vast swaths of single family homes.

The maintenance costs for these areas, in the form of electcity, water, sewage, roads, are higher than the tax revenues generated by property taxes.

It takes a long time for this tax deficit to show, about 30ish years, and it can be delayed by builidng and developing new suburbs. The taxes from the sales and other newness generate some new income. The federal government will also subsidizie a lot a building a new road, but notably not maintaing them. Which after 30 years can be more than the road would cost to build new!

But after a while the maintenance comes due, roads fill with potholes and need replacing, sewer and water pipes start leaking due to wear, or even the ground moving. Electricity lines blow over, knocked by trees, or hit by drivers need to be fixed.

The cost of roads and car dependency is not cheap. A study came out that it costs Americans an average of $20k a year for car dependency. About half that is owning a car, and the other half is taxes spent on road infrastructure.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/01/massachusetts-car-economy-costs-64-billion-study-finds/

In just slightly denser areas, where the government hadn’t regulated things like setbacks, minimum parking requirements, and soley single family housing, there is enough revenue.

So what ends up happening is these denser areas subsidizie car dependent suburbs.

And all the while suburbs with car only transportation have tons of traffic, because when you get down to it, a single lane of cars just can’t move that many people.

Now there are some exceptions to this. I live in an area with astonishingpy high property values, nearing 1 million for a normal house. This generates a lot of revenue, but it creates an housing affordability problem. This problem would be alleviated if there was increased density if the local government didn’t zone 84% of the land into single family housing only.

And it would still increase tax revenues in my area.

Cars are fucking terrible for the economy.

Possible productive hours are wasted with long commutes, because driving takes effort and work.

They caused us to build urban areas spread out in a density that is not self sustaining.

Its horrible for the environment, and climate change is gonna be absolutely great for the economy in the next decades. /s

Not too mention all the money and engineerimg that went into the technology of ICE cars that’s now obsolete.

I think it could’ve used a few more years, because its still not that fun.

Exploation is meaningless, which completely takes the fun out of it. There’s nothing interesting to discover.

This post unironically turned me into a Georgist.

We have reactor designs that use already spent fuel, we just aren’t building them. We have enough spent fuel for centuries, and afterwards the reprocessed fuel is much less radioactive, and only for a few decades.

Anybody got a non paywalled version?

But it’s text, an entire persons message history can be stored very cheaply.

A million words is only 2MB.

Most people are expexted to text less than 10 millions words in a lifetime.

An entire persons lifetime message history is only 20MB, that’s trivial to store.

If they want to charge to save media, thats fine, but text backups should be free

I made a switch to linux recently and some of my paid software works there too.

Most steam games, Matlab. Wine and proton make it possible to run many Windows applications

How much is the subscription?

Why does the author care about raytracing?

Hardly anybody uses raytracing on desktop why would they do it on a phone?

I have a 3080 but I never use raytracing because it’s not worth the loss in framerate.

Honestly, it’s so easy to block accounts, so if there’s only one bot in you community you should just keep it.

If they don’t like it they can block it.

I’ve only crowdfunded a handful of gsmes, mostly vr. Because they can’t get traditional funding. Despite this I want to support projects that could be interesting. Without Kickstarter these projects would not exist, rather than switch to traditional funding.

I know there’s risk, i know they may never get finished. But its worth the risk in case a true gaming gem comes out.

I think you undersell how feature rich steam is for both users and developers.

They offer community forums, reviews, mods through workshop, cloud saves, automatic controller support, openish vr ecosystem (epic cant even do vr, if you buy a vr game you likely need to use steamvr anyway), broad payment and currency options, regional pricing and guidelines, remote play, and more I’m sure.

This is much more feature rich than even console platforms, so I think the 30% fee is justified.

And they do this all without really locking down their ecosystem.

Recent controversy over an absurdly high failure rate.

https://www.theverge.com/22291828/sandisk-extreme-pro-portable-my-passport-failure-continued

Might be fixed now, but i wouldn’t gamble.

Your best bet is probably to make your own.

Find a high quality NVMe drive and put it in a USB enclosure.

If the USB ports or anything other than the drive fail, the data is easily recoverable.

Given your use case, buying an external drive is probably fine, just don’t get one from SanDisk.

Give it a decade and economies of scale, and maybe it will get it down to twice as expensive.