In addition to that, buildings should be made to last. Badly designed or built houses can be just ticking time-bombs for mold and other air-quality issues, and certainly not sustainable.
On the contrary, it is not possible to foresee kind of houses and places people will want to live in 50 years in the future. So,it makes much more sense to make it easy to tear down and rebuild houses-aiming for reusable (like brick) or biodegradable (like untreated wood) building materials.
> On the contrary, it is not possible to foresee kind of houses and places people will want to live in 50 years in the future.
People have been doing it and usually getting it right for millenia. 38% of the UK's housing stock dates from before 1946; much more than was built in the last forty years.
And one of the few really consistent objections to older buildings is 'the architects assumed nobody would still be living in it fifty years later'...
Not sure on getting it right. Old houses in the UK are a nightmare in term of thermal and sound insulation (basically none). Sure, it protects your head from the rain (when it doesn’t leak). But in a discussion about consuming less energy, thery are pretty much a counter-example of what to do.
I'm living in a seventy-year old building - maybe older. It's just lovely, I can't say enough good things about it. It has new windows and such, of focurse.
Do it right in the first place and it will be livable forever.
People are physical beings with well-known needs - warmth, protection from the elements, water and plumbing, privacy, comfort, sunlight, air, lack of health risks (fire, unsafe water, outgassing materials, damp, mold, etc).
A good solution to this problem will be a good solution a century from now, with minor modifications.
People should be less into ripping things up just because they get bored with them. Even if we reuse materials, the environmental cost of a new building is huge.
Do you think majority of people living in 70+ year old houses have such luck that it satisfies everything you write about? Considering people I know, I doubt it. The upkeep can require as big expenses (not just financial, also environmental) as tearing down and building anew.
You can design buildings built to last and simultaneously reuse with little to zero waste far into the future. But it is much more expensive, because the current economic-political order favors externalizing tons of costs onto the environment and into the future.
Example. Concrete foundations don't have to be slabs that are torn up when a new house is built on the lot with a different footprint. They're just cheaper that way. You can instead use a modular foundation if you are willing to pay for it and give up flexibility in foundation footprints. Design the modules using 800 MPa ultra-high strength pozzolanic concrete, pre-stressed basalt fiber reinforcement, and carbon fiber reinforcing filaments, with basalt ducts for carbon fiber post-tensioning cables to connect the modules together, all covered on the envelope with foamed glass insulation to protect from UV.
A foundation system like this would have a lifecycle rated in multiple hundreds of years. Might have to replace the carbon fiber post-tensioning cables sooner than 100 years, but we're still figuring out the lifecycle of those; they're rated about the same as steel as far as we know from current lifecycle testing, possibly longer because they aren't subject to the corrosion concerns of steel, but no one knows for sure yet.
You'd be able to repurpose these modules indefinitely. If foundations like these were commonplace in average residential and commercial buildings, breaking out the jackhammers to toss out a foundation would only be reserved for one-off projects where the compressive load far exceeds what these could take. Used for just your average residential projects, and they'd be fine from SFH up to mid-rise multifamily projects; I'd have to retain and pay structural and civil engineers to figure out what these could ultimately take.
Such a foundation though, is fantastically expensive compared to how we currently build foundations. If you put a gun to my head to force a guess, I'd pluck an order of magnitude out of thin air. I wouldn't be surprised if it is acutally more. I can't even find someone who makes basalt post-tensioning ducts that are textured on the surface to simultaneously serve as reinforcing rods.
I'd like to eventually see if carbon nanotube-based cables can be used for filaments and post-tensioning, possibly pre-tensioning, as carbon fiber manufacturing emits lots of CO2 while there are some interesting processes shown in the lab for making carbon nanotubes that consume CO2.
Concrete and foundation companies wouldn't like it if their customer base shrunk to only bespoke foundation gigs for megascale projects and new customers needing new modular foundation modules. If common foundations were like this, we'd be used to thinking of foundations as some object we simply pass along for multiple generations, and re-purpose as modules across that entire timespan. The amount of concrete manufactured per year after the initial production of modules is satisfied would be alarming to many in the concrete and related industries (don't forget n-th order effects onto real estate and finance among others, for example). I don't even know if we have enough volcanic basalt to satisfy global demand.
Twitter is probably the worst medium for developing a balanced, well-educated view of anything. Americans don't need more fast-paced social media, they need quality education and journalism that covers all sides of these issues.
But of course that's not going to happen. For modern people with attention span of a goldfish it's too much of an effort to read long texts - thus they'll just keep watching the news, or reading short, one-sided tweets full of hate.
As a Finn I wouldn't take any findings from our social scientists very seriously. By treating teens and children like adults they have already ruined our once great education system.
Same here. At least in Facebook you mostly communicate with people you've chosen to accept as friends, and know who they really are.
Reddit and Twitter on the other hand show all the bad sides of anonymity to the fullest. Way too much blind tribalism and conflict seeking, few adults actually capable of real discussion. So it's not only a waste of time, but one that gives you a bad mood as well.
People on Hacker News, by and large, don't seem to grasp the concept of using Twitter for things other than having debates/arguments. The criticisms of it here typically boil down to it not being a good platform for discussion, when in reality, that's just not the point of Twitter!
Most people are using Twitter for the memes, the (often educational) content, the news, and direct messaging. The average person is probably not there to look for people to have a long form discussion with, especially if that person is a stranger who is trying to argue with them.
The echo chamber is real. I went cold turkey on Twitter after using it for 10 years and gaining about 6k followers.
Twitter was the #1 source of left-wing extremist noise in my life. I'm sure there were/are right-wing extremists on that platform too, but one seemed to appear in my algorithmic feed more than the other. Or perhaps it was confirmation bias. Who knows!
Both side's on it. In fact there's no sides. Just that Twitter is competent at removing constructive elements and distilling hatred/rage/anger for profit and it's working against you.
There are few ways to strip out some of their 10-year "improvement" and oh how deserted it looks under there...
Message to the shareholders: "Millions of active users, billions of messages"
The truth: most of those messages are angry and argumentative, and most of those "active users" are just the same people being angry and tribal towards each other.
It makes for good stats, but like all stats, they're just numbers if presented without the context and analysis behind them.
It makes for good stats and it makes revenues. For those angered victims they would express sympathy if that's what you are going to ask for I guess...? My fear is this is going to destroy the society in a decade or two but then not many company survive that long so in financial risktaking standpoint this can't be significant.
I don't have any numbers to back this up, but I'm quite convinced certain subcultures are overrepresented on Twitter, and that while Twitter is open to all, that doesn't mean it's a representative cross-section of the general population.
I think this is true of most social networks, and is more obvious in certain cases, e.g., Tumblr.
Both sides are indeed on Ttwitter but it feels like it has a strong skew to the left. And as Time Pool discussed on Joe Rogan, the platform itself censors right wing opinion far more than left wing opinion.
Similar experiences here. I was a news addict for most of my youth. The general knowledge I gained that way sure helped me to ace college exams, but that's about it as far as benefits go.
All the negativity in news was definitely bad for my mental health. Constantly checking out news was also a giant waste of time - time that could have been spent on self-development, or something that makes me happy. Now I've blocked all news sites of my country on all my devices, and I definitely feel much better. Checking out bbc.com or whatever once a day is enough.
They'll just rebrand it, an average flyer won't know the difference between 737MAX and the older model by looks. At best they might be able to tell that it's a 737.
Yep, and the thing is that most Chinese don't even mind the high level of control for the time being. I don't see any significant large scale instability as long as the material quality of life continues to improve for the average Chinese.
This is probably pretty normal historically. People start rebelling not just because of restrictions on freedom, but usually because their quality of life sucks. See what's happening in Hong Kong: they don't like the increasing Chinese oppression, sure, but they also have some serious quality-of-life complaints too, namely with housing prices.
When people are fat and comfortable, they tend not to rock the boat too much for vague ideals.
Working hard is good, but working so hard that you completely neglect rest of your life isn't. For most people's well being things like family and hobbies are at least as important as work, and there's nothing wrong with that. If our economic system doesn't allow them to enjoy those parts of their lives, then the fault lies on the system, not on individuals.
