Posts by BenWilson
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Does peak oil change the logic of my thought experiment? Or does it make it worse? If oil prices increase, the sprawly cities become less and less attractive, and choke out to the cities with mass transit already in place even more so. So runaway could accelerate.
I mostly agree that it would be nice if Auckland changed, btw. Despite not actually being a commuter myself, I still would like it if the city center was a more attractive one to live and work in. My point is more to do with extrapolating the past success of the mega-cities out there to something we could achieve by doing the same thing. They didn't have to contend with the outflow of people to bigger cities.
By the same token, doesn't Auckland choke out the other cities in NZ? Isn't it almost always going to be more efficient to pump money into Auckland infrastructure, because the ROI is higher, due to the high population, with high wages, paying more tax? Aren't we already seeing a runaway effect? When I was a lad, Auckland wasn't so much larger than the other cities. Some of that is down to Auckland being a major Polynesian center. But again, isn't Auckland choking out development in the Pacific Islands?
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OnPoint: Everything has changed until 2014, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Clare writes for Uncensored. Investigate is like the The New Yorker in comparison.
She did used to write for Investigate though, but found out they were part of the big cover up.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Keir Leslie,
if i weren't an old-fashioned command and control socialist, I'd mutter something about hayek and `designing' being the wrong approach anyway
It's not like transport engineers haven't considered whether their entire business is pointless. There are positions within the discipline that suggest that people will decide for themselves where they want to live and work, and businesses will decide where it is profitable to operate from, and you just improve the roads and infrastructure that are being used already.
Which of course means you get Auckland, exactly how it is. And every other sprawly automobile oriented city in the world.
I'm divided about which approach is better, personally. I do admire massive cities with mass transit. But I also wonder about the extent to which the time for creating such cities has passed. Most of the world's biggest cities are also the world's oldest cities.
The following is a total thought experiment, and may not apply, I'm open to criticism on it:
I've played a fair few large scale world-building strategy games. One thing I have noticed, is that you usually have to build really big cities. But I've also noticed that sometimes a critical point is reached, where there more value in putting all your resources into the big cities you already have, than in trying to build up new cities. It's usually better to channel the output of the small cities into the big cities. So you get a small number of huge developed cities and a large number of small undeveloped ones.
I wonder if this is exactly what is happening, that people who want what big cities offer go to the already existing ones, making them bigger, and you get a runaway effect - at the same time a constant braking effect on the smaller ones.
Since NZ doesn't really have any particularly big cities, those people actually leave the country. So what is left is the kind of people who like NZ how it already is, on the whole.
A similar thing happened in the UK. London is pretty much the big city, where people who like cities go. The rest are much smaller. They're growing, just not as fast. Maybe at some point they could reach a critical mass and have a size explosion. But the bigger city, still running away, could soak up the excess faster and faster.
This experiment is based on the idea that even running a command economy (in these strategy games I'm usually an immortal dictator), some cities going crazy big, and a lot of others not really going anywhere fast, is a perfectly good outcome. My question is: Is this also happening in reality, just naturally from people seeking their societal niche? And is it bad or not?
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@Keith. What's your take on compulsory savings? As I see it, this is the main difference in NZ's tax structure to Australia's and they don't have any of this debt crisis. Nor are they totally skewed towards property, since the super funds typically have a large investment directly into the stockmarket. Could this be the central plank of a genuine response from Labour?
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Hard News: Libya, in reply to Christiaan,
I just find it disappointing that so many liberals seem to go to great lengths to convince themselves that a concern for ordinary people is the driving force behind these things.
Well, it is a concern for those "liberals". I'm not sure why you're even bringing liberals into it, TBH. It seems like a veiled ad hominem. As if being liberal makes any difference whatsoever in this discussion.
Perhaps you are right in that the US, UK, French leadership are more concerned about economics, particularly arms sales and oil. So, for that matter, are the superpowers that abstained from backing a military response. But even so, you can't ignore that a massacre in Libya is likely if Gaddaffi is not stopped. Do you actually approve of this? Or are you also a liberal, just of the "hand-wringing" variety, for whom violence is only OK if you have no part in it? Because violence was happening, is happening, and will continue to happen. It could, however, result in something better than Gaddaffi killing off all opposition in his country.
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I am glad we have a thread on this finally. Still very undecided about the ideal course of action. Yes, there is the staggering failure of many of the UN sanctioned interventions to consider. There is also the Iraq debacle to undermine confidence in world leadership motives. But there is also the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq showed just how massive the power of the US has become. They can quite conceivably beat Libya's army down in a few weeks. Certainly they can destroy Libya's air force, and any mass movements of forces can be quickly and totally destroyed in the open.
But should they? Unless they actually oust Gaddaffi, I can't see any of this going well for the rebels. And ousting him involves going in on the ground. Are there enough rebels left? Do they have the will? Do they have the weapons? Do they have popular support? What weapons does the army still have? What exactly does a ground assault on Tripoli involve, how many people have to die?
One thing is certain, Gaddaffi won't go quietly, and if he gets the upper hand, he will kill the rebels down to the last man, and probably their family and all associates too. This is no longer a revolution, it's a civil war, and it's for all the marbles in Libya.
If he is ousted, and his army destroyed, where does that leave Libya? When you've lived under fascism your entire life, how hard is it to establish a different form of government? When it happens by a revolution, the revolutionaries take over the government, they're now the ones with the guns, they're organized, and no one is going to argue with them. But when most of the force comes from the outside, internally, there is likely to simply be chaos. I can only think of a couple of success stories - Germany and Japan, and they were occupied for decades after they were beaten down.
I'm thinking way ahead here, because the endgame is going to happen one way or another, and only in the end is there any justification for any of this. If Libya is totally fucked at the end, then it might have actually been better for them to have just stuck with Gaddaffi.
My own take - the guy has to go. He's not just a dictator, he's an especially nasty one. He does not have popular support, and makes no secret of the fact that he will punish a lot of Libyans very harshly for daring to suggest he goes. Life under his is not very good for most Libyans, although admittedly it is very good for some of them.
It would be an especially poignant object lesson right now for dictators, if it could be seen that the ones in Tunisia and Egypt actually made the right choice, that "bitter-ending", like Saddam Hussein did, is something that doesn't go well, whereas just calling it quits and retiring as a rich man in exile at least carries life and dignity with it.
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I'm quite surprised that a UN resolution for no-fly actually got through the security council. It would have helped if it had been several weeks, ago, but even still, I can't see how it's really going to help the outgunned rebels. It won't prevent a conventional massacre and it won't enable the rebels to bring Gaddaffi's reign to an end.
I don't know what should be done. If the UN could agree that getting rid of the dictatorship there is a good idea, it should be done fast and hard, after a very short period of threats. I hate the idea of sanctions, which pretty much entrench the power of the dictator. But I find it incredibly hard to believe that Russia and China would support such a thing. Why would/should such a policy stop at Libya? There's still dictatorships all through the Middle East.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Keir Leslie,
They don't have much better access to the general good than you do though.
They don't, but given a set of aims, they're much better than me at achieving them. It's easy to criticize them, but try designing a large scale transport network and see if you do a better job. I figure people who have degrees in the subject tend to have an advantage.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Keir Leslie,
To be honest traffic engineering is one of those disciplines that really hasn't covered itself with glory vs. amateurs when it comes to town planning.
It's one of those things everyone has an opinion about, that's for sure. The traffic planner I know best is well sick of being beleaguered with stupid questions and assertions about how things should be done differently. Every time I've done it, I've usually eventually been shown that my particular bugbear has a reason behind it. I may still disagree, but that comes down to placing different priority on the many, many competing factors, usually placing my own needs higher than the general good (which, of course, they can't do). But I've usually come away feeling that the job is in better hands than my own.
Mind you, it's not like they're all in agreement. Traffic engineers have their own preferences too. If you don't like they way they've planned something, you can always find new tame engineers...which does rather defeat the purpose.
It's a bit like software engineers really. If they're given a spec to design to, and the spec is stupid and wrong (as so many are), they very often have to go through with it anyway. This is part of the reason the best software seems to be thought up by the programmers in the first place. There are exceptions.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Sacha,
the city should no longer be dictated to by traffic engineers.
Because amateurs do a much better job.
I have a funny feeling that transport engineers would still be the best people to ask about how to configure the network for emergencies.
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