[HN Gopher] Construction is life
___________________________________________________________________
Construction is life
Author : galfarragem
Score : 209 points
Date : 2022-06-18 13:50 UTC (9 hours ago)
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| baby wrote:
| Related, I learned when I moved to San Francisco that the golden
| gate is continuously being painted in red throughout the year,
| every year.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| salt water and fog really tear up any exposed metals
| Balgair wrote:
| You bring up a good point here.
|
| No matter what it is, there is a need for maintenance of that
| thing. Bridges need painting, streets need repaving, ballparks
| need sweeping.
|
| People are like this too. We all need sleep, the bathroom,
| food, etc. Yet with people we don't think of them during their
| maintenance periods. I think this is because we all do this
| during a certain period of the day, leaving the other parts of
| the day to enjoy our non-self-maintenance work with each other.
|
| Why can't we do this for cities too?
|
| I know it would be difficult. But declaring some sort of
| jubilee from maintenance would be pretty cool. Just for 1 month
| every 10 years or so, no more road construction, or bridge
| painting, or sheds on the sidewalk. Get the city to enforce it,
| make the fine big, coordinate it so that everything is clean
| and tidy, just for 30 days every decade or something. Make it a
| celebration, a party, a big time for tourists to come in and
| photograph everything. Like a height marker for a child on the
| door-frame. A pause, 'Look in the mirror, take it in, breathe,
| it won't last long, savor this moment'.
| thinkingkong wrote:
| Life is life.
|
| Construction is correction.
| yyy888sss wrote:
| Very true, as construction is not just new builds but also
| renovation and maintenance. Even a theoretical city with
| completely stable population still needs to keep its structures
| up to date and renew infrastructure.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I always felt the same way, that construction is a sign that the
| city is alive. Places devoid of new construction always had signs
| of urban decay, e.g. East Des Moines IA.
| dimitar wrote:
| I wonder if it is possible to design buildings that are made to
| be changed and improved on without having to use jackhammers and
| raise a ton of dust. Same for the streets - have modern stone
| pavement that is rearranged when you need to dig under the
| street.
|
| There is a lot to be improved in construction - it is horrible
| for the environment, a lot of the buildings don't last, labor
| productivity has grown more slowly compared to other industries
| or even fallen.
| jessmartin wrote:
| Christopher Alexander theorized about this in a great short
| article entitled Specifications for an Organic and Human
| Building System:
| http://worrydream.com/refs/Alexander%20and%20Jacobson%20-%20...
|
| His key attributes:
|
| 1. A common pattern language
|
| 2. User design
|
| 3. Repair and piecemeal growth
|
| 4. A human-scale building system
| dustractor wrote:
| To each their own, I guess. I guess if your whole life has been
| in cities where construction often involves de-constructing
| already-built structures, you might hear the sound of a
| jackhammer and think "ahh the sounds of life..."
|
| Having grown up in the countryside, where most construction
| involves killing all the trees on a site by scraping off the top
| layer of soil, the sounds of construction only makes me think of
| death.
| golemiprague wrote:
| vivekd wrote:
| I work in construction and I notice this attitude is becoming
| more common, even among my coworkers. The reality is the
| western world is falling behind in essential infrastructure in
| every capacity. And I think our attitudes towards construction
| have a lot to do with that. Its hard to build roads, highways,
| sewers these days without some pushback. We need to start
| changing our views and start seeing constriction as an
| essential human need and return to the old view of
| infrastructure as something we take pride in
| slickdork wrote:
| I wonder if our general views of construction are related to
| the public's distrust of politicians?
|
| Personally, when I'm inconvenienced by a crew spending six
| months on a job that looks like it could be done in two
| weeks, I think "what politician's cousin is padding their
| pockets with this absurdly long and inefficient contract?"
| [deleted]
| kiba wrote:
| We don't need more urban sprawls. Heck, new road construction
| is probably the easiest thing we can get build. The problem
| is the immense cost imposed on society to implement an
| automobile based architecture.
|
| Instead, we should build up what we already have and
| encourage density.
|
| This is not a call for less infrastructure spending, but a
| reconfiguration of our urban design patterns.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Ironically, it's the city where construction is the hardest to
| get permission for.
| mkl95 wrote:
| At the places I've lived, construction is a symptom of chronic
| architectural / civil engineering problems caused by lack of
| vision and poor maintenance. At those places construction is also
| life, but it is life that would have been more constructive (no
| pun) somewhere else.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Or having built a city on a precarious place that shouldn't
| have been for human dwelling by any conceivable reason, and yet
| it is. That people insist on living in these places is a
| testament to the value of human occupation as such.
|
| (I live in a city that's mostly built on what was the ocean two
| hundred years ago (sometimes fifty years ago) but won by civil
| engineering. It's a big empty country otherwise. We're
| basically below the sea level and maintaining underground
| infrastructure (electricity, fiber optic, heating gas, what
| have you) is a constant source of noise -- even the cable
| company has to have its draining machine vans. But by golly do
| we want to live here whatever the costs.
| dubswithus wrote:
| In the third world sometimes the maintenance is just as bad as
| the construction. Does this person know what they are doing?
| Well, we are going to find out.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Eh... If this is supposed to be an allegory to show that your
| convenience and aesthetic preferences don't dictate the greater
| good, then sure... However, there's a vast gulf of perfectly
| healthy states between constant churn and abject neglect. For
| example, many historically important yet populous areas are not
| under construction, yet their vitality withstood the test of
| time. Just because something isn't growing doesn't mean it's
| shrinking. Just because nobody's modifying something doesn't mean
| it lacks necessary modifications. Sometimes things just suit
| their purpose and a bunch of physical infrastructure churn
| wouldn't improve anything.
| baby wrote:
| Do you have an example? I used to live in cities filled with
| historical monuments and they're constantly under maintenance
| as well.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Most old small to medium sized cities?
|
| The historical monuments were _constantly under
| construction?_ The author was talking about scaffolding and
| jackhammers and moved earth, not detailing and polish.
| taneq wrote:
| I feel this misses the point of the article a little. It's not
| saying that everything must be constantly churning, or that
| infrastructure is dying if it's not being ripped down or built,
| just that if nothing around you is being fixed or rebuilt then
| the whole area is dead.
|
| Dead doesn't necessarily mean useless. It just means passive,
| static, unevolving.
| butwhywhyoh wrote:
| What if the things that were built were built right the first
| time and take a long time to decay? If you walk around a
| correctly built city where nothing is falling apart, by this
| logic, you'd naively think this place was dead and dying.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Everything need maintenance, and often. Everything.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| I feel like this definitely something younger people
| don't understand. The extent to which everything human-
| made needs constant effort to keep it from decaying. They
| see a world already built up and functioning and don't
| realize the monumental effort that requires.
| baby wrote:
| That is true as well for democracy.
| jnwatson wrote:
| The first time I built anything to survive outside (a
| ramp to a shed), I learned this the hard way.
|
| Even with a decent amount of planning for the elements,
| it lasted 3 years. It really makes one appreciate how
| special it is that this lump of flesh might survive 70 or
| 80 years.
| huffmsa wrote:
| Your lump of flesh is constantly replacing and repairing
| it's components
| HFguy wrote:
| FWIW, that is what I took away also.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| > Just because something isn't growing doesn't mean it's
| shrinking.
|
| And if you check nature, the pattern of infinite growth should
| be left to tumours. Our goal is survival, not killing our host
| and causing our extinction.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Physical things this need maintenance, repair, and eventually
| replacement. Needs change over time.
|
| If the buildings around you have a lifespan of 50-100 years and
| you aren't replacing 1% or 2% of them every year, then you are
| falling behind. If population is growing due to births,
| increases in life expectancy, or an influx of
| immigrants/refugees then housing construction must account for
| that as well.
| CodeSgt wrote:
| This assumes the construction of these 50-100 year buildings
| were evenly distributed over a given time. If 90% of a towns
| or cities 100 year infrastructure if built in a decade, then
| it'll just lead to a lot of replacements starting in about 90
| years, not continuous small replacements.
| mlyle wrote:
| > If 90% of a towns or cities 100 year infrastructure if
| built in a decade, then it'll just lead to a lot of
| replacements starting in about 90 years, not continuous
| small replacements.
|
| Lifespan of a building isn't some kind of magical threshold
| thing where it is perfect for 100 years and then must be
| replaced in year 101.
|
| A noticeable share of those buildings built for 50 years
| will need to be replaced around years 25-30. Almost all of
| those buildings will need work before 20 years is up. Some
| of them will outlast their design life by a large factor.
|
| Not to mention that not every builder is selecting the same
| construction techniques and design life.
| [deleted]
| seoaeu wrote:
| More likely once the 90 years expires the area discovers
| that it is not actually capable of doing the replacements
| required.
|
| Of course, pretty much only suburban areas have
| infrastructure/buildings built over that short an interval.
| Constructing 90% of a major city's high rises in a decade
| would be a construction boom unlike anything the western
| world has seen in a lifetime.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| It's definitely happened in China though. Some of those
| mega-cities started out as sleepy fishing villages only
| 20 years earlier.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| In the vast majority of the urban northeast-- easily one of
| the most vibrant parts of the country-- there's nowhere close
| to 1 or 2 percent turnover in residential building stock
| every year. Probably not every _ten years._
| djhn wrote:
| Why such a short estimate? Is this an America thing?
|
| I'm currently renovating a 150 year old house that was
| previously majorly renovated 50 years ago and we're aiming
| for a useful lifespan just for the parquet/plumbing/electrics
| of at least 50 years, 100 years for the joists, insulation
| and plaster. The building will hopefully stand for hundreds
| of years.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Man, I miss SimCity.
| andsoitis wrote:
| there's also the obvious parallel to software.
|
| they're never done. or, rather, if they no longer get changes or
| improvements, they've probably reached EOL.
| goodoldneon wrote:
| Depends on the purpose of the software. If it's a focused
| library then the perceived stagnation might actually be feature
| completion
| andsoitis wrote:
| no bugs in the library? no new feature requests? I used to
| think more along those lines, but less so now. I cannot
| really think of a library I actively use that doesn't get
| _any_ changes to it.
|
| But I also won't be surprised if this is true for some. Do
| you have a good example?
| amelius wrote:
| I always wonder how they make those postcard images of cities,
| where no crane is visible in an entire city.
| bombcar wrote:
| There are two seasons - winter and construction.
|
| But constant tearing up of streets isn't necessary for life - you
| can have construction going in stages without a permanent state
| of constant construction.
|
| Construction is a sign of _growth_ usually, which is not entirely
| the same as life.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Construction is a sign of growth usually, which is not
| entirely the same as life.
|
| And unlimited growth is followed by resource exhaustion and
| death.
| tdehnel wrote:
| > unlimited growth is followed by resource exhaustion and
| death.
|
| This is only true in the physical sense _if_ the universe is
| singular *and finite. Which it appears not to be.
|
| It is never true in the sense of technological, economic, and
| societal progress. There is an infinite amount of growth
| possible in those areas. Because that kind of growth leads to
| more efficient use of resources, or the discovery of new
| resources and knowledge which extends how far we can go. And
| this repeats in an endless cycle.
|
| Take virtual reality (metaverse) for example. That would
| allow for massive expansion of the virtual space in which we
| can operate and massive reduction of the physical space we
| need to occupy.
|
| As another example, we could eventually learn how to gather
| up all the raw material (hydrogen) in so called "empty space"
| and use it to manufacture a new planet. There is nothing in
| the laws of physics preventing us from doing this. The only
| thing we lack is the knowledge of how to do it.
|
| So there really is no rational basis for the kind of
| pessimism you are advocating. So long as people are allowed
| to critique existing ideas and develop new ones, we have an
| infinity of progress ahead of us.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > This is only true in the physical sense if the universe
| is singular *and finite. Which it appears not to be.
|
| Laws of physics aren't negotiable. Barring very unlikely
| breakthroughs humans will remain a single planet species
| until the sun goes supernova. And with that constraint we
| face a nearly closed system of resources, except for solar
| energy and maybe a few asteroids.
|
| > The only thing we lack is the knowledge of how to do it.
|
| Again even if more innovation is possible there are only so
| many people with enough resources to discover them. Those
| people have all the basic needs as well as years of
| education just to sustain today's innovation.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > Laws of physics aren't negotiable
|
| Nobody said that. We only need space, matter, energy and
| knowledge.
|
| This last part is mostly what we're missing now, the
| limiting factor, as the universe has plenty of space,
| matter and energy!
|
| > Barring very unlikely breakthroughs humans will remain
| a single planet species until the sun goes supernova
|
| Hard disagree, as some already have their sight on Mars.
| We are an ambitious species!
|
| > Again even if more innovation is possible there are
| only so many people with enough resources to discover
| them
|
| There're over 7 billion of us, and knowledge diffusion
| techniques (especially online) mean innovation is
| accelerating - so the limiting factor won't be limiting
| for long.
|
| Given than facts don't support your pessimist view, I
| wonder why you think this way?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > Hard disagree, as some already have their sight on
| Mars. We are an ambitious species!
|
| Mars is not habitable for humans and has never been
| touched by human hands. Ambition won't overcome that
| fact. Should we exhaust the earth to establish an
| unsustainable colony on Mars?
|
| > Given than facts don't support your pessimist view,
|
| My you are confident. The fact is there are no human
| colonies off planet earth. Even the space stations that
| exist aren't self sustaining. The future is not yet a
| fact, so we're both speculating.
| [deleted]
| baby wrote:
| If you don't grow, you fade away. There's no middle ground.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This is where economic notions of growth get revealed as being
| largely nonsensical, or at least not equivalent to biological
| notions of growth.
|
| For example, most of the molecules in your body are
| regenerated/replaced on a fairly rapid timeline - seconds when
| it comes to things like ATP, minutes to hours when it comes to
| blood sugar, days to weeks when it comes to skin cells and hair
| and intestinal lining cells, and longer timelines for most
| other structures, with a few exceptions like much of the bone
| structure (and even that is dynamic to some extent).
|
| However, your body size doesn't grow despite all this
| construction continually taking place, does it? You lose as
| much as you gain, you're in a healthy steady-state condition.
|
| Now, if your body is infested with parasites, ticks and lice
| and tapeworms and roundworms and malarial protozoans, and
| they're growing happily, while negatively impacting your
| overall health, I suppose that's something your neoclassical
| economist would call 'strong growth of the investor class'...
|
| Welcome to investment capitalism and the financialization of
| the economy! Not the same as main street capitalism and a
| healthy industrial economy, is it?
| seoaeu wrote:
| > But constant tearing up of streets isn't necessary for life
|
| No city has literally all the streets torn up at once. Which
| means by definition all road construction is in stages. I'm
| somewhat puzzled how what you're proposing is different from
| the status quo
| pooper wrote:
| I'd say we need more construction, more frequently based on
| comments I've read here, resealing or resurfacing a street
| more frequently is cheaper than waiting for streets to give
| up the ghost?
|
| This also means we need alternate routes or extra lanes or
| some kind of redundancy which asked this kind of work? So
| higher taxes?
| deepsun wrote:
| I wonder if there are urbanistics designs / architecture that
| would accommodate that permanent state of construction.
| nayuki wrote:
| I have a similar experience. I used to live in the suburbs,
| disliking the mess of road and skyscraper construction in the
| city. I moved to the city, and what enabled that was that the
| target neighborhood was full of new buildings going up.
|
| Slowly, I realized that those two experiences are connected:
| Because those suburban houses have existed for 50 years and will
| probably remain unchanged for 50 more, all the big construction
| projects end up concentrated in a few areas downtown. It would
| fairer if the developments were spread throughout the city.
| lbrito wrote:
| Back in early 2010s Brazil, I remember seeing cranes lifting up
| new buildings everywhere in my city. Not as much new public
| sector infrastructure, but private sector was booming. This came
| with a 100-1000% housing inflation that never corrected later.
|
| The country started its slow but sure descent into the gutter in
| mid 2010s, and by 2016 basically everything stopped. Only pre
| covid did I start seeing new apartment buildings rising again at
| snails pace, but then came covid.
| stakkur wrote:
| What an oddly romanticized view of construction. I like Kevin's
| writing, but this is just fluffy nonsense.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I don't think it's that romantic. When I moved between Europe
| and China for work every few months you could see this in
| action. There was a building close to my apartment that I think
| got rebuild three times in just a few years with a new business
| every time. My hometown in Europe basically looks (and feels)
| like a museum.
|
| And it shows in the people. There's a dynamism, young people
| moving in, upwards mobility, low cost of living, jobs that you
| lack in many of these static, affluent places.
| h2odragon wrote:
| A European buddy visiting the states commented to me, some years
| ago, about how flimsy American construction was. "Back home we
| build things to last 500 years," and so on.
|
| Part of that difference is that we don't _want_ things to last
| that long. Expectations are that within 50 or 100 years this
| building will no longer be wanted in anything like its current
| form, so why build for longer? Just makes the teardown effort
| that much more expensive.
|
| There's argument to be made for investing more in infrastructure
| like roads; but again there's a counter argument to be made in
| favor of the way things have evolved and are done now. Fresh
| roads are smooth and level and "fixing potholes" is never going
| to be cheaper or produce better results than occasional full
| refurbishments do.
|
| Kind of a Laffer curve: Durable, low frequency but expensive
| maintenance vs flimsy, cheaply and often maintained and often
| rebuilt.
| [deleted]
| notahacker wrote:
| There are obviously tradeoffs when building things to last a
| really long time, but people in the US aren't roofing their
| houses with crappy asphalt tiles that'll be lucky to last a
| couple of decades for ease of expansion.
|
| Modifying a well-built structure is often easier than
| completely tearing down and replacing a poorly built structure
| too.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Honestly, so much of America is suburban wasteland that I'm
| glad American buildings are so "disposable" and easily
| replaced. Once everyone figures out that, no, it's not a good
| idea to live so spread-out, hopefully cities will start to
| densify. Ahh, one can dream...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Making cheap, flimsy stuff that you trash (or worse, abandon)
| and rebuild every few years is very wasteful of resources and
| terrible for the environment though.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Using buildings constructed before the invention of modern
| insulation is terrible for the environment too.
| tener wrote:
| You can totally insulate old buildings. Not super cheap,
| but cheaper than heating, perfectly doable.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Sure, in many cases that's the right thing to do. From
| the outside, however, major retrofits like that are going
| to look a lot like the construction that the article is
| taking about
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Broadly, I agree. But the specifics depend on ... well, the
| specifics. If 20 years go by and there's new building
| techniques/materials that drastically reduce the energy
| utilization of a building, it's not unimaginable that it may
| be less wasteful to tear it down.
|
| I would agree that this doesn't happen very often for
| something at least moderately well built; for the not-very-
| well built, I am not so sure.
| pvg wrote:
| _Back home we build things to last 500 years,_
|
| Unless your buddy was from the Vatican, it's not true for much
| of Europe. These beauties aren't gonna last 500 years:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka
| raunak wrote:
| It's just a Communist Eastern Europe vs. Western Europe
| thing. Western Europe's history and historical buildings
| remained and will remain intact for centuries. Eastern
| Europe's didn't remain due to war and won't remain due to
| lack of culture surrounding said buildings now.
|
| None of this meant in an offensive way - just the way it goes
| sometimes.
| pvg wrote:
| Plenty of housing like it was built in the west, with the
| same tech. Not to mention all the cheap workers' housing of
| the industrial revolution most of which didn't last 150
| years, never mind 500.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| But those examples were built as temporary buildings until
| real Communism was established and everyone could live in
| nice houses.
| SamBam wrote:
| Perhaps, but even the old stuff needs to be constantly
| maintained. I grew up in Rome, the eternal city, and everything
| was constantly under scaffolding, and the cobblestones on the
| streets were always being redone.
|
| There were some facades of buildings that I had never even seen
| until I was aged 10, and all of a sudden a square that I always
| thought dull would be revealed with the scaffolding removed and
| the building looking beautiful.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| European warfare repeatedly destroyed valuable buildings "made
| to last 500 years" culminating in mass bombing in the Second
| World War. Meanwhile, super-advanced Japan builds houses that
| are expected to be torn down in less than 100 years, with a
| very different history of public destruction in the name of
| War.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Japan is subject to regular severe earthquakes. Most of
| Europe is not.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Japan may be too far on the disposable end. Apparently buying
| used is a bad thing so they rebuild every 20 years or so.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| That depends entirely on the specifics. The Japanese aren't
| so crazy they'd toss good buildings to the fishes once they
| hit the 20 years. They just don't put the same value on old
| building materials as Europeans and North Americans do.
| mavili wrote:
| Fair point, but I still think ripping streets up only a couple of
| months after paving them is bad planning. Very bad planning.
| Sometimes I wonder if councils in the UK are deliberately badly
| planning highway work so some contruction companies can
| constantly have work to do. I honestly believe if you dig deep
| enough you will see part of this whole "always under
| construction" is a result of some sort of corruption. Otherwise
| who would, in today's age, build a road to only rip it up again
| to install some underground cabling?! What were they thinking
| when they built this only two months ago??
| sitkack wrote:
| This is nothing more than romanticism for the jack hammers of
| poor decisions. A vibrant arcology can take many different forms,
| but constant redecon isn't required.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > Jackhammers removing the old are the sound of a city's
| metabolism. Neighborhoods that have construction in them are
| alive; those without it are ill.
|
| But go to an old European city and you're not going to see much
| construction. And they're not tearing down old stuff to build
| new. And yet many of those cities are very vibrant and full of
| life.
| sgt wrote:
| Full of life, yes. But lower metabolism. Kind of like an aging
| actor.
| [deleted]
| projektfu wrote:
| In NYC the scaffolding is eternal. Nobody gets to enjoy the
| street. It's better than having tools fall on the street and
| things like that, but the average age is over 7 months and many
| are there for years.
|
| https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/sidewalk-shed-map...
|
| Construction is great, maintenance is important, but why have all
| of these architectural facades when all you get to see is painted
| wood and temporary lighting?
| jasode wrote:
| _> In NYC the scaffolding is eternal._
|
| Wendover made a short video about that:
| https://youtu.be/lphKvTqovHs?t=1m56s
|
| TLDW: It's the Law of Unintended Consequences -- The sidewalk
| shed (aka "scaffolding") is a hack to get around a law
| requiring building facades be inspected every 5 years. Instead
| of actually inspecting the building masonry and making any
| necessary repairs, just install a sidewalk shed _and leave it
| there year after year_.
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| A handful of the larger buildings seem to have accepted the
| permanent scaffolding state of affairs and actually handle it
| quite well.
|
| Ie [1] where the supports for the scaffolding are built into
| the building itself leaving the sidewalk completely free of
| interference. Still not the best to look at if you look up, but
| doesn't impede foot traffic at all. And it's nice in the rain.
|
| Some others like [2] have spent a bit more money to make the
| scaffolding look nicer and cleaner.
|
| It's a fair intermediate solution imo that I hope becomes more
| widespread if we take as a given that eternal scaffolding isn't
| going away any time soon.
|
| [1]https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7630615,-73.9738617,3a,75y,2
| ...
|
| [2]https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7589834,-73.9748391,3a,75y,1
| ...
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _In NYC the scaffolding is eternal_
|
| You might enjoy the episode "How to Put Up Scaffolding" from
| the TV show _How to with John Wilson_
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13021528/
| Linda703 wrote:
| [deleted]
| Rerarom wrote:
| What if you hate the noise though?
| LegitShady wrote:
| wear noise cancelling headphones
| eimrine wrote:
| Yo dawg I've heard you don't like noise? Put headphones with
| counter noise so you will not listening noise while not
| listening noise...
| LegitShady wrote:
| He said he dislikes noise, not all sound. If he hates all
| sound he's out of luck in life in general.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| start tearing up your house and soundproofing (sorry renters)
| wwweston wrote:
| Sounds like construction!
|
| Seriously, though, I do think soundproofing is
| _significantly_ underused and even undertaken in most
| residential construction. And at times have thought anyone
| for increasing density needs to start there.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Go live somewhere that's dying, but doing so slowly enough that
| it doesn't bother you (e.g. most suburbs).
| t0mmyb0y wrote:
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| You become a nimby. Everything is an assault to you and can
| just have to constantly fight.
| aj7 wrote:
| Construction is simply an economic activity, not "life." At least
| not any more 'life' than say music, or physics,machining, the
| Grateful Dead, etc. As an economic activity, it has fluctuating
| valuations in asset values, prices, profitability, etc. and is
| greatly influenced by financing. As we're all aware, China has
| hugely over-constructed, is in the process of asset value
| decline, and has wiped out some speculators.
| FastMonkey wrote:
| Where I grew up, they used the number of cranes visible on the
| skyline as an indicator of the strength of the economy.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| San Francisco is dying
| baby wrote:
| It is... All my friends are moving away to cities like New York
| :[
| mistrial9 wrote:
| see History of Berlin
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| well ... yes and no imo. the text sounds like what somebody
| realized during an acid trip. of course maintenance is required.
| but to equate incessant, disruptive maintenance with "life" is a
| bit over the top. properly constructed building won't need
| serious overhauls for decades. the constant building, ripping
| down, ripping up, building again is as I see it just as well
| correlated to an unhealthy pump and dump tendency of our hyper
| capitalist economy.
| [deleted]
| uwagar wrote:
| when they were restoring that taj mahal, all that scaffolding
| made it look ugly. thats when kate and prince william visited and
| still took a picture. hope they removed it now.
| choonway wrote:
| It's not about the continuous construction. It's about the speed.
| Construction is way too slow but the world is spending more money
| on faster compute instead.
| examancer wrote:
| You try 3D printing a house on a Pentium, or running inference
| models. We needed the compute. We need so much compute it
| boggles the mind and we don't know what to do with it.
|
| Only then, as we are drowning in compute, does it spill over
| into other areas and allow that compute to be used as leverage
| towards enhancing or automating areas compute has yet to break
| into. Only then are crazy ideas like having large clusters of
| transistors act as neurons in a neural net actually possible,
| and efficient enough.
|
| This is at least what I mean when I occasionally say something
| flippant like "(technology/computers/software) will eat the
| world". Maybe our relentless pursuit of more compute isn't the
| best way to solve complex problems, but it increasingly seems
| like it may be _a_ way.
| choonway wrote:
| Whether you print a benchy using a tabletop 3d printer using
| PLA, or a using a gigantic gantry crane pouring cement, the
| compute power required is the same.
|
| 3D printing firmware and all of it's associated design
| software (CAD/CAM) would run fine on computing technology 10
| years old.
|
| Construction speed is bottlenecked by the lack of investment
| in new techniques, not for the lack of compute power.
| michelpp wrote:
| Real buildings must take into account material costs,
| weight bearing, soil conditions, thermal cycling through
| various paths, and human and seismic induced dynamic loads.
| The larger the buildings get, the exponentially more
| compute is needed to solve these problems.
|
| "Anyone can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an
| engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."
| photochemsyn wrote:
| andsoitis wrote:
| > How did this living system die? Well, it became infested with
| parasites, didn't it? Parasites of the neoliberal globalization
| investor type, who sucked it dry, then fled overseas for riper
| pastures.
|
| Also: inflexibility, non-adaptation, and homogeneity.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Let's be more explicit:
|
| Inflexibility: as workforces in the Industrial Belt were
| largely unionized, they refused to accept radical wage cuts
| (i.e. GM and Ford could pay $3 an hour in Mexico vs. $30 an
| hour in Detroit).
|
| Non-adaptation: is this the notion that a heavily parasitized
| organism could survive by delivering more of its resources to
| the parasites? Labor costs were cutting into profits and
| dividends, and labor costs could be reduced by writing trade
| deals that eliminated things like tariffs on cross-border
| capital flows.
|
| Homogeneity: completely unclear what this is supposed to
| refer to. The models of cars produced by GM and Ford in
| Mexico, or the types of steel and aluminum produced in China
| and imported to the US, seem to be more or less the same as
| was once produced domestically. Do you mean 'workforce
| diversity' perhaps (although I don't understand how that
| would factor in)?
|
| It's curious how the corporate media is so resolutely opposed
| to discussing the Rust Belt issue, and the related ongoing
| financialization of the US economy, even though that's the
| key deciding factor that gave rise to Trump's surprise
| victory in 2016.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Homogeneity: completely unclear what this is supposed to
| refer to.
|
| Sorry, I should have been clearer. Their economies, as far
| as I understand, were not very diverse.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Inflexibility
|
| What you mean here is that the hard-fought gains of the
| labor movement over 100 years or so were drastically cut or
| eliminated, because what used to be economically infeasible
| (using overseas labor, moving capital overseas and
| repatriating profits) became not just feasible but
| desirable, thanks to specific legislative and
| administrative changes enacted by the US government.
|
| Without those changes, the workforce of the Industrial Belt
| would not have been characterized as "inflexible", but
| rather smart employees who had negotiated a respectable cut
| of their employers profits and were able to enjoy life a
| little more because of it.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I would suggest that they did not suck it dry at all. They just
| left because it became possible to (a) hire labor for much less
| in other countries (b) it became easier to move capital (and
| profit) between countries. There's still plenty of life left in
| the midwest, but it would need (metaphorically) good irrigation
| and even a little fertilizer. Globalization robbed it of those
| things.
| aj7 wrote:
| Globalization did not 'rob' the Midwest or 'sucked it dry' or
| whatever. Anymore than than the Asian economies were BEING
| robbed and sucked dry by the Midwest before the switch. See
| what I mean? Capital is bidirectional and always has been.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Capital is bidirectional and always has been.
|
| Nope, this is categorically false. Historically, the
| movement of capital was extremely limited. You could not
| just decide to invest <big-number-of-currency-units> in a
| foreign country, and you could not just repatriate the
| profits that might arise from the investment.
|
| For the last 50-100 years, the world has shifted quite
| dramatically towards making both capital and profit able to
| move across (many) borders much, much more easily.
|
| Only the EU stands as an example of political and economic
| changes that _also_ allow similar free movement of labor.
| aj7 wrote:
| That's the classical neofascist view.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Are you saying we should be cautious when using simple
| biological analogies to describe complex human social
| behavior?
|
| Or is that just an ad hominem attack on the concept that
| investment capitalism is fundamentally flawed, and is in fact
| more of a destructive force than a creative force relative to
| industrial capitalism in the competitive market model?
|
| Consider: is the situation where a cabal of Wall Street
| billionaires control almost all decisions about industrial
| production (basically the current USA system, with some
| outliers, see Tesla's upset of the car cabal) really all that
| different from a situation where a cohort of Communist Party
| insiders make all such decisions (Soviet Union), or where a
| fascist state-industrial combine (IG Farben - Krupp - Nazi
| Party) does?
|
| Neo-fascist, neo-communist, neo-authoritarian, neo-feudal -
| investment capitalism has a long history of involvement in
| all such behavior, dating back to Lloyd's of London investing
| in the slave trade, or the behavior of various British Crown
| Corporations in India.
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