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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
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On August 21 2018 10:25 Tachion wrote:Show nested quote +On August 21 2018 08:54 Plansix wrote:
This thread is a good read on how abnormal it is for ex CIA and military officials speak out against a sitting president. Especially on mass like they are. Although the guy posting lionizes the intelligence officials a bit, he is right that they are not monetizing their clearance and wouldn’t normally be involved with politics. That the “deep state” narrative is also a way for Trump and his allies to discredit the people in charge of holding them accountable for breaking the law. The New Yorker put out a piece about the origins of Brennan's decision to start speaking out that I found fascinating. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/john-brennans-choice-to-confront-trumpTrump has been very outspoken and critical about US intelligence agencies when it came to the Russia investigation and the dossier from the start of his presidency. He has tried to discredit them at least a dozen times, saying he doesn't believe them, Putin is telling the truth, he doesn't know who did the hacking, and on and on while they have been providing him intel that all says differently. Anything that is critical of him, even objectively, needs to be attacked. Then there was his disgraceful speech in front of the CIA memorial wall that he used to complain about the media and his inauguration size. Point is, these government officials who are speaking out against him are not doing so unprovoked. Show nested quote +Other intelligence veterans fell in the middle, citing concerns that personal attacks fuelled distrust of the C.I.A. as an institution. “John, I understand why you’re doing what you’re doing,” a former intelligence official told me, summing up the views of several of Brennan’s former colleagues on the private e-mail chain. “I understand why you feel so strongly about it. I get it. I actually feel the same way. What you write resonates with me. But I worry about the impact on the President’s perspective of current intelligence officers. It confirms his biases. It reinforces his theme that there’s a ‘deep state’ and that the ‘deep state’ is out to get him. It is actually helpful to him in solidifying his base.” There is no deep state. Trump simply attacks the government institutions who uncover his misdeeds, and when they speak out against his poor conduct it's suddenly a government conspiracy to delegitimize his presidency. He's handled this whole thing about as badly as one could imagine. Trump is deserving of the criticism he gets from these officials.
Deep state can mean many things. The way the Trump administration uses the phrase is slightly different to the common meaning (ie John Le Carre's definition). I think Trump uses it to mean anyone working for the government who opposes Trump, in which case you can definitely say there's a case that the deep state exists. Le Carre would define it as a very specific group of wealthy elites who rule the country (world?) in secret, and use intelligence agencies as their operatives (Trump, or at least people he hangs around with, would have probably fit into this category somewhere.)
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United States24740 Posts
I've lived in a variety of places in the US and the current conversation is causing me to think about what my car vs non-car options were. In the suburb where I grew up, my home was in the middle of a neighborhood such that the first kilometer or so in any direction was entirely housing. The local high school was over 8 km away by car. Commuting to work either required a car, a 4 km walk to a train station that may or may not have a line that goes near your destination, or a 2 km walk to a bus route that likely didn't go where you want.
When I lived in downtown Washington DC, I lived right near work and could easily walk to work. To get to most of the shopping I liked I still needed a car to travel the >5 km across roads that I wouldn't recommend biking on. When I moved to a town outside of Pittsburgh, same situation. My roommate tried going no-car for a while and experimented with bus passes and other things, but after about two weeks he begged me to drive him to car dealerships. When I moved out to the DC suburbs, I had the same situation as where I grew up except I commuted to work by train, but that was obviously orchestrated. When I moved to a home right outside of DC, I maintained the ability to commute to work by train, but still use a car to go anywhere else (except the post office or a nearby pizza place).
In every case, I've needed the car to go to any golf course, any flight training center, or the homes of most friends (or in other cases driving was much faster than mass transit). Basically for anything other than commuting I just need my car. I'm thinking about moving again at some point and most of the places I could move to would necessitate me to start commuting by car again.
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On August 21 2018 17:27 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On August 21 2018 16:36 zatic wrote:
Distances in pretty much anywhere in the US are much, much longer. Anything but taking a car is just not possible. Even if it was a lifestyle choice it's not like people could now decide to change anything about it if anywhere you need to go to is a 20-30min car ride away. Distances between places being long doesn't really have much to do with city planning though. I've lived in Brazil. First I lived in Porto Alegre, which is planned with pretty good public transport and shops and businesses mixed up in the residential areas. I didn't own a car. Then in Campinas. When we arrived, the plan was to find an apartment, and then figure out if we needed a car (everybody had told us that we would). Turns out that we couldn't even do apartment hunting reasonably without a car. We ended up living in one of the few neighborhoods where you could actually walk to things and my girlfriend walked to work, we had a supermarket nearby, and we had some good bars within walking distance too. But we still needed that car. I needed it to get to work, and we needed it to get anywhere outside our compact (and safe) neighborhood. I agree change won't be fast. But cities could make an effort, and people should not just blame it on the weather. Your weather is no better or worse than places where daily life happens fine for many people without a car. For freezing winter's, there's Scandinavia. For hot summers there's Spain and Italy, or for that matter, Porto Alegre, which I'm sure can rival anywhere in the US for heat and humidity.
There are a lot of different factors that contribute to the problem in the U.S.
1) Weather - I live in MN, and our metro area is significantly colder than any metro area in the U.S./Canada except for Winnipeg, and significantly colder than any metro area in Europe outside of certain Russian cities. The severe weather also does incredible damage to the roads and public transportation here (this is why our seasons are "winter" and "construction season").
2) Geography - Not reasonable to build subways in California where there are earthquakes all the time.
3) Poor city planning - We have great public transportation in Minneapolis/St. Paul, if you live in certain sections of the metro. I live in the southeast section of the metro here and I have no reasonable public transportation options. Any public transportation option would double or triple my commute time, which is already 30-40 minutes to get to the Cities. And it probably doesn't even need to be said, but road design/freeway layout is horrendous, meaning that traffic doubles your commute time if you work normal working hours. This is true pretty much anywhere.
4) Distance - The average worker commutes roughly 25 minutes to work, and around 11% of workers have at least a 60 minute trip to get to work every day. This is, of course a lot worse in metro areas. Job/city sprawl and population density are a much bigger problem in the U.S. than in other parts of the world.
5) Cost of living - As people in Seattle/SF/other cities can attest, a huge contributing factor is that it is extremely hard to live where you work due to rent costs. I work in a nice suburb here in the Twin Cities and live in a much smaller suburb. It's a 30 minute drive for me to work. If I was to move to the suburb that I work in, it would tack on $400 to my rent, which my wife and I can't afford. If I was to move to Minneapolis/St. Paul so that I am right next to school, my rent would probably double. The only (paid) job that my wife could find in her career field is a half hour in the opposite direction away from the Cities. It's a very well-paid job, but the location is inconvenient. I have coworkers that commute 1.5 hours to get to work. There's a huge number of people that commute from Eau Claire (a small city in Wisconsin nearly 2 hours away from the Twin Cities) to work in Minneapolis/St. Paul.
And to whoever said that European obesity rates are "tiny", this is simply not true. All major European countries are above 20% obesity rates, and they've been rising for a long time now.
We're still the kings though.
We literally cycle in that weather in Denmark. The US just has a very carcentric society neatly examplified by the average americans relation with driving distance compared to that of Europeans who flinch at the thought of a 3 hour drive.
Denmark's weather is a joke compared to huge swaths of the U.S. Minneapolis is the coldest metro area in the country and our average daily summer high is around 85F (nearly 29C) and our average daily winter low is between 5-10F (as low as -15C). We have 70 days a years below 0F. While it doesn't get as cold as you get into states south of Minnesota, it gets significantly warmer, and MN is already warm in the summer. Denmark is a nice, mild vacation compared to the weather we deal with every day, and that doesn't even begin to talk about the heat in the south and southwest. I was training for a year in North Carolina (I'm in the military) and I wouldn't wish that weather on my worst enemy.
The U.S. absolutely has a lot of problems with loving cars and unhealthy lifestyles, but there are certainly factors that contribute to this beyond the people's control.
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The problem is about 70% city planning that was centered on the car being the local point of people's lives. The other 30% is a mix of everything. If we had, instead of building a sprawling, confusing and poorly kept highway system, and built a good rail transit system (not this amtrak crap) and invested early in high speed rail, we could have minimized a lot of issues. The problem was sprawl and now we're trying to reverse it.
Read almost anything by Jan Gehl for reference.
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On August 21 2018 22:30 JimmiC wrote:
Yeah our city planners are always trying to do things to encourage biking and public transit. But people don't want it, and where I live people don't drive cars we drive trucks. Instead of investing in Bike paths we just approved two large park-aids down town.
I never realized how truly awful the Philly metro area's rail system was until I went to Paris.
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Many of our cities were build before the advent and refinement of urban planning. The joke about Boston is that it didn't have the common sense to burn down like New York did, so we have all these messed up roads. Europe has had more than a couple chances to rebuild large parts of their urban centers due a couple world wars.
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Having lived in a place where public transit sucked(Las Vegas) I understand the desire to need / own a car even in large cities.
Here in Portland, OR I've never felt the need to own my own car. I haven't driven since the day I've arrived in 2011. Walking / Public Transit are good enough even in the suburbs to downtown that it really hasn't been an issue at all. I will say that I do get a ride to the grocery store despite living next to one as groceries are heavy and I don't particularly want to shop at the more expensive close by option.
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On August 21 2018 22:32 Gahlo wrote:Show nested quote +On August 21 2018 22:30 JimmiC wrote:
Yeah our city planners are always trying to do things to encourage biking and public transit. But people don't want it, and where I live people don't drive cars we drive trucks. Instead of investing in Bike paths we just approved two large park-aids down town. I never realized how truly awful the Philly metro area's rail system was until I went to Paris.
What's bad about it? I use it a couple times a year without complaint but I've never been to Europe to compare
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On August 21 2018 23:03 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On August 21 2018 22:32 Gahlo wrote:On August 21 2018 22:30 JimmiC wrote:
Yeah our city planners are always trying to do things to encourage biking and public transit. But people don't want it, and where I live people don't drive cars we drive trucks. Instead of investing in Bike paths we just approved two large park-aids down town. I never realized how truly awful the Philly metro area's rail system was until I went to Paris. Yes I think many Europeans dont understand how bad public transit is over here and we don't understand how good it is over there. Also, cars and gas are so much cheaper over here, and parking is available, I mean almost every house in my city has parking for 2 cars either in a garage or on the driveway. Our cities build out instead of up!
It's kind of like how Europeans don't understand the size of the US. It took me 30 minutes and Google maps to point out to a couple friends how impractical it was to visit San Francisco, New Orleans and DC in the course of 4 days. They literally thought they could just do a driving tour.
Also, suburbia is unable to generate the tax revenue needed to maintain the roads and other infrastructure for it. It's really bad. https://www.strongtowns.org/ has some great info about how bad urban sprawl is.
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Norway28706 Posts
denmark is one of the most bicycle-friendly countries in the world. it's completely flat, weather is quite nice, it's fairly densely populated, and roads and infrastructure is designed to accommodate use of bicycles.
in copenhagen in 2014, 60% of the population used a bicycle to get to work or school. (source, danish though ;p ) Those numbers are not really attainable in other places where the climate or topography really work against you.
But then, there's a city like Trondheim, where I live, which differs quite a bit from Denmark. It's really hilly. There's a lot of snow and ice - regions of the city usually experience snow from october until mid-april. The rest of the year, it's quite windy, rainy and cold. It's also stretched quite thin. I'd wager there are few urban areas in the US that are worse from a 'it's too cold and hilly' perspective - I can see how hot and humid is a different challenge though. However, even then, more than 8% of all trips in trondheim are with a bike, and it's been on an upswing for quite some time. The reason is a deliberate effort to create bicycling paths (which does sometimes mean they've had to steal part of the road that used to belong to cars) making it possible to bike without going at car-speed.
Like, it really is a very challenging city to bike in, you always have to bike a lot of uphill, and if you're an all-year cyclist, you have to bike downhill on snow / ice and or gravel for 4 months+ every year. As a curiosity - backing up the point that Trondheim is a hilly city that still has a lot of cyclists, we have the world's only bicycle elevator. But still, a considerable number of people find themselves occasionally using a bike.
I guess some north western regions in the US might have decent numbers too, but overall, I suspect that few urban areas in the US have numbers that could match Trondheim's, even though even fewer of your urban areas are less geographically or climatically suited for cycling.
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On August 21 2018 21:48 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On August 21 2018 17:27 Acrofales wrote:On August 21 2018 16:36 zatic wrote:
Distances in pretty much anywhere in the US are much, much longer. Anything but taking a car is just not possible. Even if it was a lifestyle choice it's not like people could now decide to change anything about it if anywhere you need to go to is a 20-30min car ride away. Distances between places being long doesn't really have much to do with city planning though. I've lived in Brazil. First I lived in Porto Alegre, which is planned with pretty good public transport and shops and businesses mixed up in the residential areas. I didn't own a car. Then in Campinas. When we arrived, the plan was to find an apartment, and then figure out if we needed a car (everybody had told us that we would). Turns out that we couldn't even do apartment hunting reasonably without a car. We ended up living in one of the few neighborhoods where you could actually walk to things and my girlfriend walked to work, we had a supermarket nearby, and we had some good bars within walking distance too. But we still needed that car. I needed it to get to work, and we needed it to get anywhere outside our compact (and safe) neighborhood. I agree change won't be fast. But cities could make an effort, and people should not just blame it on the weather. Your weather is no better or worse than places where daily life happens fine for many people without a car. For freezing winter's, there's Scandinavia. For hot summers there's Spain and Italy, or for that matter, Porto Alegre, which I'm sure can rival anywhere in the US for heat and humidity. There are a lot of different factors that contribute to the problem in the U.S. 1) Weather - I live in MN, and our metro area is significantly colder than any metro area in the U.S./Canada except for Winnipeg, and significantly colder than any metro area in Europe outside of certain Russian cities. The severe weather also does incredible damage to the roads and public transportation here (this is why our seasons are "winter" and "construction season"). 2) Geography - Not reasonable to build subways in California where there are earthquakes all the time. 3) Poor city planning - We have great public transportation in Minneapolis/St. Paul, if you live in certain sections of the metro. I live in the southeast section of the metro here and I have no reasonable public transportation options. Any public transportation option would double or triple my commute time, which is already 30-40 minutes to get to the Cities. And it probably doesn't even need to be said, but road design/freeway layout is horrendous, meaning that traffic doubles your commute time if you work normal working hours. This is true pretty much anywhere. 4) Distance - The average worker commutes roughly 25 minutes to work, and around 11% of workers have at least a 60 minute trip to get to work every day. This is, of course a lot worse in metro areas. Job/city sprawl and population density are a much bigger problem in the U.S. than in other parts of the world. 5) Cost of living - As people in Seattle/SF/other cities can attest, a huge contributing factor is that it is extremely hard to live where you work due to rent costs. I work in a nice suburb here in the Twin Cities and live in a much smaller suburb. It's a 30 minute drive for me to work. If I was to move to the suburb that I work in, it would tack on $400 to my rent, which my wife and I can't afford. If I was to move to Minneapolis/St. Paul so that I am right next to school, my rent would probably double. The only (paid) job that my wife could find in her career field is a half hour in the opposite direction away from the Cities. It's a very well-paid job, but the location is inconvenient. I have coworkers that commute 1.5 hours to get to work. There's a huge number of people that commute from Eau Claire (a small city in Wisconsin nearly 2 hours away from the Twin Cities) to work in Minneapolis/St. Paul. And to whoever said that European obesity rates are "tiny", this is simply not true. All major European countries are above 20% obesity rates, and they've been rising for a long time now. We're still the kings though. Show nested quote +We literally cycle in that weather in Denmark. The US just has a very carcentric society neatly examplified by the average americans relation with driving distance compared to that of Europeans who flinch at the thought of a 3 hour drive. Denmark's weather is a joke compared to huge swaths of the U.S. Minneapolis is the coldest metro area in the country and our average daily summer high is around 85F (nearly 29C) and our average daily winter low is between 5-10F (as low as -15C). We have 70 days a years below 0F. While it doesn't get as cold as you get into states south of Minnesota, it gets significantly warmer, and MN is already warm in the summer. Denmark is a nice, mild vacation compared to the weather we deal with every day, and that doesn't even begin to talk about the heat in the south and southwest. I was training for a year in North Carolina (I'm in the military) and I wouldn't wish that weather on my worst enemy. The U.S. absolutely has a lot of problems with loving cars and unhealthy lifestyles, but there are certainly factors that contribute to this beyond the people's control.
I am well aware of the US weather - I have lived in multiple states (including California, North Carolina and Toronto) for half and whole years. This year Denmark literally had minus 15 Celsius in January and it has been 30 plus since May - less precipitation than usually though. I didnt want to start a pissing contest about whose weather is worse, but having biked every day in the abovementioned conditions (32 km each way) I stand by my original point that weather really isn't an excuse except for rather short periods of time during the year. I fully agree that there are factors outside individuals control dictating commuting options - but the weather is frankly a minor part of it - including in North Carolina (where I incidentally biked 5 km each way)
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Ghost is right that a pissing contest over weather isn’t productive. The better way to think about the US’s infrastructure is that it’s needs are as varied as all of the EU countries. The needs of New England are wildly different from the needs of Florida or Texas. And our city planning suffers from a lack of direction due to the wide variety of needs and problems that face each region. We have seen the photos of what happens when southern parts of the US get two inches of snow.
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On August 22 2018 00:28 Plansix wrote:
Ghost is right that a pissing contest over weather isn’t productive. The better way to think about the US’s infrastructure is that it’s needs are as varied as all of the EU countries. The needs of New England are wildly different from the needs of Florida or Texas. And our city planning suffers from a lack of direction due to the wide variety of needs and problems that face each region. We have seen the photos of what happens when southern parts of the US get two inches of snow.
It is possible. And I think with the new generations coming, it might happen. Less people are owning cars. There's ubers and lyfts. Bike sharing. It's picking up here in KC. But what people need are still pretty fairly spaced out and a car is still needed. But they're figuring out in the midwest. Slower than the coasts but it is happening.
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Uber and Lyft are just regulation dodging using smart phones. Currently bike sharing is being treated like high end litter where I live, because no one wants those Green Cycles or whatever they are dumped all over the city. Cities and towns need to decide what they want their future to look, rather than waiting for tech companies to dump the future on their lap.
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On August 21 2018 23:51 Ghostcom wrote:Show nested quote +On August 21 2018 21:48 Stratos_speAr wrote:On August 21 2018 17:27 Acrofales wrote:On August 21 2018 16:36 zatic wrote:
Distances in pretty much anywhere in the US are much, much longer. Anything but taking a car is just not possible. Even if it was a lifestyle choice it's not like people could now decide to change anything about it if anywhere you need to go to is a 20-30min car ride away. Distances between places being long doesn't really have much to do with city planning though. I've lived in Brazil. First I lived in Porto Alegre, which is planned with pretty good public transport and shops and businesses mixed up in the residential areas. I didn't own a car. Then in Campinas. When we arrived, the plan was to find an apartment, and then figure out if we needed a car (everybody had told us that we would). Turns out that we couldn't even do apartment hunting reasonably without a car. We ended up living in one of the few neighborhoods where you could actually walk to things and my girlfriend walked to work, we had a supermarket nearby, and we had some good bars within walking distance too. But we still needed that car. I needed it to get to work, and we needed it to get anywhere outside our compact (and safe) neighborhood. I agree change won't be fast. But cities could make an effort, and people should not just blame it on the weather. Your weather is no better or worse than places where daily life happens fine for many people without a car. For freezing winter's, there's Scandinavia. For hot summers there's Spain and Italy, or for that matter, Porto Alegre, which I'm sure can rival anywhere in the US for heat and humidity. There are a lot of different factors that contribute to the problem in the U.S. 1) Weather - I live in MN, and our metro area is significantly colder than any metro area in the U.S./Canada except for Winnipeg, and significantly colder than any metro area in Europe outside of certain Russian cities. The severe weather also does incredible damage to the roads and public transportation here (this is why our seasons are "winter" and "construction season"). 2) Geography - Not reasonable to build subways in California where there are earthquakes all the time. 3) Poor city planning - We have great public transportation in Minneapolis/St. Paul, if you live in certain sections of the metro. I live in the southeast section of the metro here and I have no reasonable public transportation options. Any public transportation option would double or triple my commute time, which is already 30-40 minutes to get to the Cities. And it probably doesn't even need to be said, but road design/freeway layout is horrendous, meaning that traffic doubles your commute time if you work normal working hours. This is true pretty much anywhere. 4) Distance - The average worker commutes roughly 25 minutes to work, and around 11% of workers have at least a 60 minute trip to get to work every day. This is, of course a lot worse in metro areas. Job/city sprawl and population density are a much bigger problem in the U.S. than in other parts of the world. 5) Cost of living - As people in Seattle/SF/other cities can attest, a huge contributing factor is that it is extremely hard to live where you work due to rent costs. I work in a nice suburb here in the Twin Cities and live in a much smaller suburb. It's a 30 minute drive for me to work. If I was to move to the suburb that I work in, it would tack on $400 to my rent, which my wife and I can't afford. If I was to move to Minneapolis/St. Paul so that I am right next to school, my rent would probably double. The only (paid) job that my wife could find in her career field is a half hour in the opposite direction away from the Cities. It's a very well-paid job, but the location is inconvenient. I have coworkers that commute 1.5 hours to get to work. There's a huge number of people that commute from Eau Claire (a small city in Wisconsin nearly 2 hours away from the Twin Cities) to work in Minneapolis/St. Paul. And to whoever said that European obesity rates are "tiny", this is simply not true. All major European countries are above 20% obesity rates, and they've been rising for a long time now. We're still the kings though. We literally cycle in that weather in Denmark. The US just has a very carcentric society neatly examplified by the average americans relation with driving distance compared to that of Europeans who flinch at the thought of a 3 hour drive. Denmark's weather is a joke compared to huge swaths of the U.S. Minneapolis is the coldest metro area in the country and our average daily summer high is around 85F (nearly 29C) and our average daily winter low is between 5-10F (as low as -15C). We have 70 days a years below 0F. While it doesn't get as cold as you get into states south of Minnesota, it gets significantly warmer, and MN is already warm in the summer. Denmark is a nice, mild vacation compared to the weather we deal with every day, and that doesn't even begin to talk about the heat in the south and southwest. I was training for a year in North Carolina (I'm in the military) and I wouldn't wish that weather on my worst enemy. The U.S. absolutely has a lot of problems with loving cars and unhealthy lifestyles, but there are certainly factors that contribute to this beyond the people's control. I am well aware of the US weather - I have lived in multiple states (including California, North Carolina and Toronto) for half and whole years. This year Denmark literally had minus 15 Celsius in January and it has been 30 plus since May - less precipitation than usually though. I didnt want to start a pissing contest about whose weather is worse, but having biked every day in the abovementioned conditions (32 km each way) I stand by my original point that weather really isn't an excuse except for rather short periods of time during the year. I fully agree that there are factors outside individuals control dictating commuting options - but the weather is frankly a minor part of it - including in North Carolina (where I incidentally biked 5 km each way)
there's a difference still between "feasible for a young healthy person to do" and "comfortable to do".
also, which part of Denmark are you using? (I'm looking at the Copenhagen stats, which don't seem to match what you're describing)
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Americans are good are justifying their love for their cars. When I hear about poor city planning... Like, you know, all french towns were built/rebuilt in the last 50 years (starting with Paris btw)! I lived in Grenoble for many years, I saw temperatures from -20 to +40 many times, and guess what? Grenoble was (maybe still is, dunno) the city with the most cycles paths in France. So yeah, maybe weather is not that good of an excuse.
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When Belgium gets a surprise "snow storm" the entire Belgian traffic is hard jammed. It was insane how ill prepared we were and how slow people had to drive. I'm pretty sure we salted the streets the day before even.
I heard stories of people that had to drive just a few kilometers and they took 3 hours to get there or something like that (iirc).
And for the record, the snowstorm was like.. 20cm of snow or something lol, maybe even less (maybe a bit more I really can't say for sure, but definitely not deviating a lot from 20)
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EPT
