> I don't think the people paying half again as much at the pump feel like it benefited them.
Since when has the current US government done anything to benefit average citizens?
The war in Iran helps those who actually matter -- the oil companies that spent 445 million dollars getting Trump and other Republicans elected in 2024.
Just pointing out that oil prices going up definitely looks like a benefit to the people the government is beholden to (which ain't the average citizen).
There have been some pretty large protests and such, but US citizens were definitely not prepared for what happened to them in 2024. The US government has operated for our lifetimes on voluntary norms that were casually accepted as if they were law. People still haven't figured out how to effectively deal with a bad actor that has the full power of the executive and no restraint. Aside from yelling, nobody knows what to do other than wait for the next election.
Giving the oil companies, some of the richest companies on the planet, MORE money is a benefit? Is that your idea of good governance? You don't think there's better uses of that money that's coming right out of your pocket and everybody elses?
That's absolutely not my idea of good governance, playing with oil prices is extremely dangerous considering that economy is strongly tied to them. Starting a useless war is crazy in the first place.
But it is more money in America (for the government / oil producers to misuse) which is a benefit from the standpoint of the government. Not sure it exceeds the losses though.
That code is minimal. It’s definitely not the source.
Given all the sales and recruiting spam I get, I think it’s a good thing that LinkedIn is making efforts to detect people using garbage plugins that scrape data and send it to their servers or prepare it for mass spamming.
I love seeing trees in more places, but for parking lots in particular they do have some downsides compared to solar panels. They often require more space; they attract birds that that poo on vehicles; and there’s a higher risk of collateral damage during windstorms. Not to mention that solar panels directly produce electricity, of course.
We absolutely should see more trees in many cities, but they introduce their own challenges in parking lots, especially if they’re placed retroactively.
I think this is a tree density problem. Most cities have a small number of trees, and they’re almost always over cars. These are trees that line streets and parking lots. Without trees, birds just have telephone poles and wires, which are also over the cars.
In San Francisco, we have a lot of trees on most of our streets, and many parks small and big, all full of trees. This means birds spread themselves out everywhere, not just over cars.
I think the true barrier to getting more trees is that individuals tend not to want to pay for and maintain trees. This includes caring for the tree, trimming it when it gets bigger, and cleaning the pollen, leaves, fruits, and branches that fall.
They also have the annoying habit of pushing concrete out of their way as they grow, and not just sidewalks. At my house we developed a water leak because the main waterline was 1 foot away from a tree. I don't know which came first, the tree or the waterline, but surely someone realized they were too close together, but they put them there anyway. Fast forward 50-100 years and the tree roots got bigger and ripped up the line.
Trees can cause a lot of trouble if you don't give them enough space to grow. "Enough space" depends on the kind of the tree, but it's typically similar to a parking space. You can mandate trees, but then you'll get less parking.
People always end up petitioning for them to be cutdown because tree litter inevitably falls on cars. The best solution for cars is dense multistory parking.
In South Korea, you usually don't see parking lots the size of several football fields like in the U.S., even around venues that generally attract a lot of cars, even in suburban areas. Instead, there are several stories of parking lots under every large building. Above-ground space is simply too valuable to waste on parking.
Unfortunately, you can't install solar panels underground.
They both are in competition for surface exposed to the sun. The mall’s parking lot near my place used to have trees. When they installed the solar panel shaders last year they cut down all of them.
The solar panels go over the parking spaces, like a kind of a bridge, with supports at the sides. There's a lot of space in between.
If the trees were in the same space as the panels, they'd be in the midddle of the parking space. What you'd have then is not a car park, but just a plain ordinary park.
I’m not sure to understand the design you’re talking about. The one I usually see have big supports each ~10/20 parking spot and the roof cover the spots but also overhang them by a few meters. Almost all space is exploited and you basically can’t see the sun anymore, which is the intent I suppose.
Notice how there are trees planted on the grassy strips between the rows of parking?
The solar panel supports take up a parking space at each end of the rows of bays with a lot of gaps in between.
Google Streetview is from 2009 - nothing newer, weirdly - but if you nose about you'll see what an insanely cool building it is. You can walk around in those roof gardens.
That’s a well-designed lot and very cool green-roof building indeed! I would love to work there! But it serves a very different context and real-estate economics than the high-density examples linked by Troupo. A suburban insurance HQ in a mid-sized city doesn't face the same constraints as a retail hub in a capital. The target demographics and land pressure aren't comparable.
In your example, they could have likely built the solar array on the large lawn to the north for much cheaper and with easier maintenance. The fact that they chose this integration suggests that cost was secondary to corporate signaling and employee experience [0]. For most parking lots density isn't a design choice, it's a financial necessity.
The one I was talking about (still on construction) targets a working class suburb. The few trees were tightly packed between the parking spaces and the new roof's supports are as well placed mostly in-between spots. They cuter the tree because the shade and the impossible maintenance. The shaded rosebush were kept but are now dying.
edit [0] Indeed, the roofs are part of their "Transition Plan" > As a key part of our ambition to consume 100% renewable electricity, Aviva has taken a significant step by installing a 1MW wind turbine at its Perth office in October 2024 In combination with our existing solar car ports and rooftop solar, the turbine will fully power the Perth office with 100% self-generated renewable energy for the majority of the year. It is expected to generate 1,700MWh annually, the equivalent to the electricity required to power over 620 homes. https://static.aviva.io/content/dam/aviva-corporate/document...
> That’s a well-designed lot and very cool green-roof building indeed! I would love to work there!
It's a very cool building indeed. I did all the radio equipment for the facilities and security guys about 15 (and maybe closer to 20) years ago which you can't quite see in the enclosure in the middle where the air handling stuff is. For testing I spent most of the day touring the building with an analyser checking signal strengths and drinking excellent coffee.
Almost makes me want to pack engineering and get into insurance sales.
> In your example, they could have likely built the solar array on the large lawn to the north for much cheaper and with easier maintenance.
They wouldn't have got planning permission for that.
> The one I was talking about (still on construction) targets a working class suburb.
> If the trees were in the same space as the panels, they'd be in the midddle of the parking space. What you'd have then is not a car park, but just a plain ordinary park.
Sigh No, it's not. You can, and you should have trees in the middle of parking lots.
If gasoline engines burned their fuel as efficiently as possible, they would produce three by-products: water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen (N2).
Unfortunately, engines do not run perfectly, and as a result, they also produce three by-products commonly referred to as the "terrible trio" of automotive pollutants. This trio includes the following:
* Carbon monoxide (CO) – An odorless, tasteless, poisonous gas, carbon monoxide can cause a variety of health problems and even death. Many urban areas experience critically high levels of carbon monoxide, especially during the cold winter months when engines take longer to warm up and run cleanly
* Unburned hydrocarbons (HC) – Responsible for causing a variety of respiratory problems, unburned hydrocarbons can also cause crop damage and promote the formation of smog
* Oxides of nitrogen (NOX) – Like unburned hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen cause respiratory problems and promote the formation of smog
More trees often means less density which leads to worse cities. There is a place for trees, but 'more is better' is not true, especially around a parking lot which has already dropped the density massively. A parking lot is a city dead zone. Trees next to that will just expand that dead zone. It is like in the US where there are ornamental 'parks' at huge intersections. Nobody goes there. They didn't help. Same with parks around government buildings. SF is a great example of wasted space due to this. Generally, you need to minimize parking areas massively and then pack as much city next to them as possible to make up for the services they robbed. In the places where you actually do have exceptionally dense city then you can think about patches of green strategically placed. Getting a diverse, ecosystem like, city is the right approach but there is no hard and fast rule to get there.
Is there any constructive counter to my arguments? It is a great area to discuss.
We often think 'if a little is good then a lot is better' but clearly that isn't the case for basically every resource. Take the 'put trees everywhere' concept to the extreme and you have a forest, not a city. I am 100% in favor of putting trees and parks in a lot of city spaces, so long as it encourages the city and doesn't create or expand city dead zones. People should be using that green space regularly. Not their cars and the more infrastructure dedicated to cars and car support the less there is for people and people support. Trees in parking lots is car support, not people support. I have never once in my life wanted to drive to a parking lot for the trees in it and rarely want to take mass transit or walk to a parking lot next to a park since I would rather a park that has great restaurants and other services near it, not a bunch of concrete for cars. You have to minimize the impact of a parking lot quickly to get use out of it. Expanding its footprint with trees isn't doing that, it is actively making things worse.
Everything south of San Francisco is either leaf-shaded or a shithole, and anyone who drives through California can see this stark discrepancy for themselves.
Ultima Online emulators have existed almost since the launch of Ultima Online, and are arguably a reason the core game is still running today.
Ultima Online launched in September 1997. The first "offline emulator" launched in October. Emulators became playable by mid 1998. https://www.uox3.org/history/timeline.txt
Most of my sick days in high school were after big Ultima Online patches dropped, I believe, usually on Tuesdays. A neighbor had much faster internet - I think his dad did work from home? - so I'd download the patch onto a ZIP drive and sprint back home. Then spent the day debugging changes (client changes and network/protocol changes) with others on IRC to get SphereServer to connect again. Learned so much.
In the very, very early days I had a 6ms ping to my server on a then high bandwidth connection. This was when most players were at best on a 28.8 modem with multihundred ms ping times. I remember being able to easily outrun people who were on horses.
My roommate and I could sit next to each other and between the combination of our connection and the advantage voice communication provided for coordination was an enormous advantage. We spent a lot of time in PK hot spots pretending to be lagged newbies, only to give the PK gangs a rude awakening when they'd come to grief us. Turns out a pair of toons who were multi-GMs when most weren't a single GM yet, who were lighting fast compared to others, and with perfect coordination made short work of your average PK gang back then
Pretty sure I still have the source to SphereServer sitting somewhere on my NAS. It was my first exposure -- in early high school -- to coding in a group and operating a Linux server.
Core memories of carefully setting my fisherman on a boat with `ezmacro` before I got ready for school. I'd come home to either a boat full of fish (to later cook into fish steaks), or be dead from a player killer who found my boat and killed my macroing guy to try and steal the boat.
Because this style of game appealed to two clusters of gamers. The first one is small and niche, and thus not profitable. The second one are the griefers who only want to play if they have victims available, which isn't going to happen in a small & niche game.
These kinds of games *do* exist, they're just, well, small & niche as they've learned to either build in protections against griefers and/or stay small enough to not attract notice. If you find yourself in the first cluster and not the second, you may want to check out the latest project from Raph Koster, aka Designer Dragon from UO. [1]
Market manipulation and the media largely forgetting about a certain set of files that reference many people in powerful positions.
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