Fried_out_Kombi

joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] Fried_out_Kombi 14 points 7 months ago (3 children)

From wikipedia:

Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to communists who express support for one-party communist regimes that are associated with Marxism–Leninism, whether contemporary or historical. It is commonly used by anti-authoritarian leftists, including anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists, democratic socialists, and reformists to criticise Leninism, although the term has seen increasing use by liberals and right‐wing factions as well.[5][6]

The term "tankie" was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.[7][8]

By extension, the term is used to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the crimes committed by communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin,[9][10] Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Enver Hoxha, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung. In modern times, the term is used across the political spectrum to describe those who have a bias in favor of illiberal or authoritarian states with a socialist legacy or a nominally left-wing government, such as the Republic of Belarus, People's Republic of China, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Republic of Nicaragua, the Russian Federation, the Syrian Arab Republic, and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Additionally, tankies are said to have a tendency to support non-socialist states with no socialist legacy if they are opposed to the United States and the Western world in general, regardless of their ideology,[4][11] such as the Islamic Republic of Iran.

There are a number of progressive and/or leftist and/or communist but explicitly anti-tankie communities out there, including !196 and !tankiejerk (as well as r/196 and r/tankiejerk back on reddit).

As for whether this guy was a tankie, idk. I'd have to read up on him further.

[–] Fried_out_Kombi 28 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Parking minimums are legal requirements on the minimum number of parking spaces businesses and housing are allowed to have. The thing is these laws were developed using shoddy pseudoscience, are extremely arbitrary, and developed with maximum (rather than typical) usage in mind, meaning many developments have oversized parking lots, wasting valuable land. Further, old buildings that predate the parking minimums (and thus don't have legally sufficient parking) can't renovate or change usage without being legally required to build new parking, often by buying up a neighboring building and demolishing it to build a parking lot. This exact thing is why so many dense American and Canadian downtowns got bulldozed and turned into parking lots, like in the images below:

Atlanta

Tulsa

Kansas City

For more in-depth information on the insanity and idiocy that are parking minimums, see this video: https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=KQbU00UPKw5GeNhQ

[–] Fried_out_Kombi 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

In fact, if you only truly need a car a handful of times per year, it's vastly cheaper and less hassle to just rent it

[–] Fried_out_Kombi 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I agree that they're already statistically safer in limited conditions; the key part is when/if they will surpass in a wide range of conditions, including heavy snow or the disorganized and often unmarked roads of developing countries, for instance. For what it's worth, however, I do think the tech will eventually get there.

[–] Fried_out_Kombi 13 points 8 months ago (6 children)

They’re not a solution simply because they’re still cars, and therefore take up the same grossly excessive amount of space as non-autonomous cars do.

Yeah, the only things autonomous cars might reduce are:

  1. Parking, but only if we forego our current private ownership model and everyone starts doing self-driving robo-taxis everywhere (unlikely)
  2. Road fatalities, but only if the self-driving tech proves statistically better than human drivers in a wide range of conditions (jury is still out)

It's the same fundamental problem that electric cars have: geometry. Cars -- even if electric and self-driving -- are simply grossly inefficient at moving people for the amount of land they require:

[–] Fried_out_Kombi 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Exactly, and I strongly suspect that most in-city accommodation can be done with neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs)

[–] Fried_out_Kombi 31 points 8 months ago

This is basically how I like to put it:

[–] Fried_out_Kombi 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Downs-Thompson is inviolable.

The simple truth that a lot of people don't understand. Cars simply require too much space that you can never possibly meet all the latent demand for car trips within a city, as doing so would mean bulldozing the entire city in the process. The only way to meet latent demand for transit is via an array of vastly more space-efficient means, e.g., public transit, walking, and biking.

[–] Fried_out_Kombi 77 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What's ironic is my city, Montreal, is arguably the biggest cycling city in North America. Even in winter the bike lanes are filled with cyclists. Why? Turns out that all you need is good-quality bike infrastructure that you actually maintain in the winter and people will happily bike year-round.

[–] Fried_out_Kombi 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. I'm in Canada, and I often ride my electric scooter to work in the winter, and many ride bikes in the winter here, too. The windshield on a glorified golf cart plus proper winter clothing is all you really need, although maybe detachable side flaps to keep out the wind might help, too.

And I wear full coat in a car anyways for the exact reason you mention: I still need to walk between car and final destination.

[–] Fried_out_Kombi 3 points 8 months ago

I agree that a bike is generally preferable, but an NEV seems a good compromise for people who need to move multiple people at once or more cargo than a cargo bike can carry. Max one of these per household + bike for everyone + walkable, transit-oriented development seems like a suitable compromise that would be a significant improvement over the status quo.

[–] Fried_out_Kombi 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sounds similar to some of the research my sister has done in her PhD so far. As I understand, she had a bunch of snapshots of proteins from a cryo electron microscope, but these snapshots are 2D. She used ML to construct 3D shapes of different types of proteins. And finding the shape of a protein is important because the shape defines the function. It's crazy stuff that would be ludicrously difficult and time-consuming to try to do manually.

 

For those unfamiliar with Georgism and LVT (land value tax):

Georgism, also called in modern times Geoism,[2][3] and known historically as the single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that, although people should own the value they produce themselves, the economic rent derived from land—including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations—should belong equally to all members of society.[4][5][6] Developed from the writings of American economist and social reformer Henry George, the Georgist paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.[7][8]

Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property). Any natural resource which is inherently limited in supply can generate economic rent, but the classical and most significant example of land monopoly involves the extraction of common ground rent from valuable urban locations. Georgists argue that taxing economic rent is efficient, fair, and equitable. The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value, arguing that revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can be used to reduce or eliminate existing taxes (such as on income, trade, or purchases) that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue to the people by means of a basic income or citizen's dividend.

And although LVT is the most central proposed policy of Georgism, Georgists also advocate for carbon taxes (and other taxes on negative externalities), severance taxes on finite natural resources like oil or minerals, intellectual property (IP) reform, and eliminating barriers to entry. (It should be noted that Georgists want to replace bad/inefficient taxes like sales, income, and property taxes with LVT, externality (aka Pigouvian), and severance taxes.)

As for why LVT? In short, it's just a really good tax. Progressive, widely regarded by economists as "the perfect tax", incentivizes efficient use of land, discourages speculation and rent-seeking, economically efficient, and hard to evade. Plus, critically regarding landlords, land value taxes can't be passed on to tenants, both in economic theory and in observed practice.

In fact, it's so well-regarded a tax that it's been referred to as the "perfect tax", and is supported by economists of all ideological stripes, from free-market libertarians like Milton Friedman — who famously described it as the "least bad tax" — to social democrats and Keynesians like Joseph Stiglitz. It's simply a really good policy that I don't think is talked about nearly enough.

Even a quite milquetoast land value tax, such as in the Australian Capital Territory, has been shown to reduce speculation and improve affordability:

It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.

More resources:

 

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/umP8D

This article explains the recent re-emergence of Georgism, its origins, and the rising popularity of the land value tax as a solution to the housing crisis.

 

In urbanist and YIMBY circles, we often talk a lot about missing middle housing, but this is actually a very broad category. This video gives more in-depth information about the kinds of missing middle housing and how prevalent they are in the five biggest Canadian cities.

 

YIMBYism works, y'all.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/HLM7s

92
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Fried_out_Kombi to c/fuckcars
 

Next year, congestion pricing is coming to New York City. And maybe, just maybe, the toll for motor vehicles entering the lower half of Manhattan should be set at $100.

That number comes from Charles Komanoff, an environmental activist, a transit analyst, and a local political fixture. It represents neither the amount that would maximize revenue nor the amount that would minimize traffic. Rather, it is an estimate of how much it really costs for a single vehicle to take a trip into the congestion zone—in economists’ terminology, the unpriced externality associated with driving into one of the most financially productive and eternally gridlocked places on Earth.

This number comes just from calculating the monetary value of the average delay incurred by each car's contribution to traffic, not even accounting for all the other negative externalities -- e.g., air pollution, sound pollution, injuries, deaths, etc. -- meaning this is probably a sever underestimate.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/LSpi5

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/7654367

https://vhelio.org/

I personally think it could be a great alternative to cars and bikes for those who need to take a whole family somewhere or a decent amount of stuff.

Only modifications I would make would be ride-by-wire and an extra set of pedals (so you can have two people pedalling without the annoyance of normal tandem bikes having to pedal at the same rate), and a more powerful motor (only 250W is legal in France, where this was designed, whereas 500W is legal here in Canada)

 

https://vhelio.org/

I personally think it could be a great alternative to cars and bikes for those who need to take a whole family somewhere or a decent amount of stuff.

Only modifications I would make would be ride-by-wire and an extra set of pedals (so you can have two people pedalling without the annoyance of normal tandem bikes having to pedal at the same rate), and a more powerful motor (only 250W is legal in France, where this was designed, whereas 500W is legal here in Canada)

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/7639583

This video by BritMonkey gives an introduction to Georgism and the importance of land value taxation.

 

This video by BritMonkey gives an introduction to Georgism and the importance of land value taxation.

 

Electric cars are crucial, but not enough to solve climate change. We can’t let them crowd out car-free transit options.

 

This video explains zoning and how these often obscure codes tremendously influence our built environment.

view more: ‹ prev next ›