small_crow
Are we right before a tight election though? We’re basically mid-term right now. Next election doesn’t need to be called until the Fall of 2025
I agree that it’s politically problematic to make tax scheme adjustments. No matter the reasoning it can be spun to be negative, especially by the Taxation is Theft crowd. But like, if it can only be done within the first year of any particular parliament that basically means our elected representatives can never do anything in response to inflation.
I live in an urban part of my city, and I still have plenty of reasons to leave my 15-minute walkable area. A friend far to the north, a friend on the other side of the river, family on the outskirts. Restaurants I love all over. My office downtown. Theatres near the university. Festivals and expos spread out across all the parks and venues and other walkable areas. I can use my bike to access pretty well all of those things in the warmer months but transit (and sometimes, unfortunately, a car) keeps it accessible year round.
If you don’t see any reason to use transportation in a city, you either don’t appreciate the breadth of experiences that come with city life, or you live in a really boring city.
Even the best designed city will have different things in different parts of it. I’ve been all over the planet - from the backwoods hickville I grew up in to beautiful metropolises in Europe to Asian megacities and no matter where I went there was always a reason to travel around. A particularly beautiful park. A temple floating on a lake. The best damn hamburger you’ll ever eat. That doesn’t change just because I live in a place, and it doesn’t mean it’s poorly designed. Different people in different parts of the city make those parts of the city different.
I noticed you completely glossed over friends and family living in different places. That’s not just some side point. People travel to see other people. I can’t force *everyone *I love to live within a 15 minute walk of me - even if I could, they have their own friends and family, and they have theirs, and they all need to work, probably not in the same buildings. If I’m friends with a Construction worker, a tech bro, an RN, a Highschool teacher, a personal trainer and a genetics researcher, are we all going to be able to live in a 6 block radius? Possibly. But it’d be a lot easier for all of use if we could live a little farther apart (maybe near where we each work) and just take a train to hang out somewhere central.
Life sprawls. It doesn’t mean rural, it doesn’t even mean suburbs (even though that’s how people seem to want it today). But it does mean transportation is a requirement.
I’ve read your response to me, not all the comments you’ve made to whoever else you’re talking to. If you think you’ve explained away people living in different parts of a city not being a problem to someone else, copy and paste it. I won’t go looking for it.
In the rest of your statement you seem to have conflated when I said that “I’ve been to other cities” with “I always go to other cities to do various things” and that’s just not what I said. Nothing except my first paragraph explaining how other (much better designed) cities than my own that I’ve been to have a distribution of experiences throughout them was about travelling between cities. Only within.
This city, the one I live in, has many things in many places. Some of those things are restaurants or parks or events, some of those things are people. I must travel within my city to experience them, and they physically cannot all be within a 15 minute walk, even if my city were much better designed. Not everyone I am friends with will be able to live within a 6 block district. Not every restaurant I would like to eat at will be in my district. Not every sports team or theatrical performance will take place in my district.
I’m not talking about things that take place in other cities. I’m talking about my city, where the opera theatre and the hockey arena are a 15 minute train ride apart. Where the research university and downtown business district are a 10 minute train ride apart. Where there are 7 sizeable hospitals that it would be hard to arrange a couple million people into walking distance around (and only some of which have the capability to offer certain specialized types of care). Where the best bars and restaurants are mostly concentrated onto a handful of streets already, but some streets are not walking distance from the others.
You can call this a problem of design, but the city can only support one hockey arena, so “The hockey arena is far away from the University” isn’t something you can solve without moving billions of dollars of infrastructure (and likely creating entirely new problems) or designing good transportation - unless your solution is professors and students can’t go watch live sports. Similarly “The hospital I live near doesn’t have a Gamma Knife program to excise my brain tumor,” can’t just be hand waved away. That’s a multi-million dollar machine requiring highly specialized staff and it doesn’t need to be at every facility to manage the patient load.
And both are needed. Glad that methane reductions will be cheaper so it won’t hurt as bad to stack it on top of the carbon tax.
“The dog… was shot and killed during an ‘Interaction’” is such an outlandishly vague way to describe the situation and leaves all details up to the imagination. It doesn’t even say if that interaction was with their suspect. A suspect who “is injured” but like, did they injure the guy or did they injure themselves? Did they get shot too? Did the dog try to attack them and was shot by the suspect? Did the dog run at them, and a cop shot at the same time, killing the dog instead of maiming the suspect?
Cops always use passive language so it sounds like all this violence was already there when they showed up.
Gotta start somewhere! For all we know the Borg began as a simple neural implant developed by Space Coca Cola, marketed as a way to touclessly interface with vending machines, but with the actual designed purpose to make you thirsty af and constantly crave sugary beverages.
And then the Coca Cola logistical AI gained sentience.
