Still not enough cookies. Nice improvement though.
Ran the numbers and if that dude’s cookie represents $50K, Elon Musk’s pile would have about the same volume as a large, two-story house.
What does Obamacare have to do with working 25hrs a week max?
Obamacare mandates employers offer healthcare to people working 30 hrs a week. A lot of places will only allow you to be scheduled for less than 30 hours a week, even if you are able and willing to go full time. It’s stupid, but some people have convinced themselves that it’s Obamacare’s fault that their employer is shitty and the subsequent governments have been unwilling to close that loophole. It’s also worth mentioning that employers did this even before Obamacare because there are other things that full time employees are entitled to that part time employees aren’t.
Thanks. So OOP just has a shitty boss. Got it.
OP also has a shitty mind set because he sides with the oppressor (his boss is the one denying him healthcare) and not the oppressed (everyone that can’t afford healthcare).
If he understood the situation he would not call it “Obongocare”
“Obongocare” also reeks of racism, but that’s a given- it is 4chan after all.
Obamacare didn’t start that…
Employers definitely used it as an excuse to cut a lot of people’s hours. It was a big deal at the time
i’ve personally had more than one job that limited our hours to under 30 because of (i thought federal) laws requiring employers to offer health insurance plans to employees who work 30 or more…
in multiple states….
well before obamacare… now get off my lawn.
Also called it Obongocare which made me immediately lose any empathy to them for the racism, but it is 4chan I guess.
99% likely they vote Republican based on the attitide also, which is the root cause of a lot of their complaints (min wage, shitty employee protections, expensive Internet [almost certainly one of the monopoly ISP areas], has to rely on a car because public transit is socialism).
Yeah, the Democratic party sucks by and large for many other reasons, but id rather live in a D city than an R one any day of the week. /end obligatory response to “but Dems”
99% likely they vote Republican based on the attitide also
Are you sure it’s real? Maybe they’re just doing the racism bit for the shock value. You can post anonymous shit in 4chan without actually having any opinions on anything, and half the point of 4chan (AIUI) is getting reactions from people.
4chan users love playing Schrodinger’s Racist, so we’ll never know for sure.
I just treat racism as racism, unless it is set up with the most obvious irony or sarcasm beforehand - this ain’t, seems like a genuine whine at their real situation.
Calling it obongocare is racist. Therefore, racist.
Fucking insane mental gymnastics really
I’m not saying he’s not racist, I’m saying he’s not necessarily Republican.
As a middle of nowhere failson 4chan user the odds of him being a Democrat are extremely low.
Also curious about that. Why not work more and cry less?
I commented above, but in the US some employers will refuse to give you more hours to keep you as a part time employee, since full time employees are guaranteed certain benefits. Those benefits include access to healthcare. They would rather hire 2 people part time than 1 person full time. This is not Obamacare’s fault, but for some reason people in the middle of nowhere who make very little money have convinced themselves that it’s Obama who’s to blame instead of the shitty companies and their shitty owners.
I would also like to add, that it’s sometimes almost impossible to have a 2nd part time job because one or both are not regular schedules. People won’t know when they are working until the week before. If both jobs do this you will end up with scheduling conflicts.
Like it would be better if you were scheduled the same 3 or 4 days a week and had the rest of the week off.
At least then you could either chill or find other activities. But they want you at their mercy and constantly in crisis.
Like you said, All Obamacare did from a company standpoint was make people no longer reliant on their employer for healthcare. So it has no bearing on 25 hr work weeks. Although with subsidies going away, a lot of people are becoming uninsured again.
FMLA was 1993, so Clinton Required lunch breaks, etc are state laws, so not Obama OT pay and some other federal protections were pre-WW2
Interesting! In summary:
Anon brags with above-average hourly wage. In the meantime, their employer will not let them work more to dodge paying social security.
Anon proceeds to cry that they don’t earn enough money, even though they’re payed above-average.
Anon‘s a moron.
We were paid 19/h doing barista work working 30-39 hours (never allowed to hit 40 because they would have to give us more rights blah blah stuff) had to live in a tiny illegal room for rent and was barely surviving. After we saved up a little bit of money we moved into a van and now we’re in EU.
Mind you, not flashily, not rich, not even making it. Had to get so much help friends and family and especially our significant other just to get here by the skin of our teeth and now that we’re here we’re struggling to even stay due to visa issues. So fucn scared to go back we literally cry almost nightly every day our last chance to stay here slips away only because we just need 1500€ euro more… hhh when will this stress end?
Damn, that sounds rough, sorry to hear - hang in there ❤️
And this is why some people are voluntarily living in their cars, you can’t save for shit when rent eats 2/3 of your paycheck
“Voluntarily”
For many, they get the air quotes
Which seems like a decent plan, untill your house breaks down or runs out fuel in the middle of nowhere, or your apartment gets impounded while you’re at work or using the gym shower, or even just while you’re sleeping in it…, and then auctioned off after the mail notice they sent to your last physical address was not responded to in time.
Its basically not legal, anywhere in the US, right now, to live in a car and park it almost anywhere.
You have to be hypervigilant, to survive this way, and … that just is PTSD, it’ll make you worse at your job, more likely to lose it.
So we’re basically just making a permanent, sub-proletariat class, thats just gonna get funneled into jail or some kind of concentration camp, probably just turned into some kind of functional, if not formal slave class, whether by debt or criminal conviction or both… within, I dunno, 5 years or less?
I wish we lived in a society where the common belief was that a rising tide lifts all ships, instead of this pull yourself up by your bootstraps rugged individualism nonsense.
Funny thing about that one, the original meaning of that bootstrap idiom was to mean basically impossible, and yet it’s used about as unironically as trickle down economics was
Anon needs to redirect his hatred.
born in 1949 Don’t have to fight in a war
Hmmm
Putting it in context, it’s probably right. There are a lot of different swathes/classes of boomer, and the ones that would be able to do the listed in lines 7-10 are probably not the ones that were targeted for conscription in vietnam.
The American experiment has succeeded, because the suffering is the point and the system is working as intended.
Exactly. The wealthy are living beyond reality now and have adapted the population to working for pittance, living in squalor, and are above the law.
America is the nicest 3rd world country anywhere in the world! America #1
It’s a nation of individual freedom taken to the extreme. That includes the freedom for wealthy individuals to exploit everybody else. And Anon is on the side of the exploited. Anon does seem as a person that will always argue for complete freedom, so finally maintaining the exploitation of themselves and the situation they find themselves in.
Why am I not free to ingest what drugs I want if we are so free?
Usually because a group beneficial to rich folks didn’t like it.
Drugs makes the chattel lazy. Can’t have that. It might hurt GDP.
Nixon wanted to legally bash up hippies and black people.
It’s a nation of individual freedom taken to the extreme.
It is ?.Have you not lived with a HOA ?
No
It’s weird to see this kind of comment and also a Ukrainian flag in the username.
It’s weird to see this kind of hypocrisy and also… no, wait, it’s the same username who thinks adult women can’t have small breasts. Kindly fuck off.
“American experiment” I hate that phrase.
America is just an arbitrary area on the ground some of us were born inside. It’s not some erudite experiment and it never was. It’s five corporations in a trench coat pretending to be a country.
This is what people mean by that:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
In its conception is very much was an experiment. “A republic, if you can keep it” so to say.
They’d already failed the experiment before the ink dried: 34 out of 47 founders owned slaves. I guess the natives weren’t too equal, either. Oops!
All governments are experiments in how we organize and order society. Some experiments (governments) lead to greater flourishing than others, like socialism and communism (in theory). We’d have better evidence that those forms of government actually bring what they promise if oligarchies didn’t shut that shit down as soon as it takes route (see South America).
I just ran the numbers through a tax calculator for my province (Quebec). It says that on a salary of $18,000, I would pay about $1,200 for the pension plan and employment insurance. $0 paid for taxes, and I would actually receive a $4,000 as a tax refund.
And, of course Healthcare is free, Quebec has pharmacare so prescription drugs would be free, childcare is about $10/day if I need it, and since my salary is less than $90,000/year, I would qualify for free dental care.
There would also be a few things like the GST refund that would be about $500/year in my pocket.
Canada is not paradise, but I sure prefer living here.
Les enfants étaient un peu traumatisés quand on est allé à LA cet été. Beaucoup de gens qui se parle tout seul ou qui font dodo dans le gazon.
Immediately identified the biggest problem with Canada right there.
What do you mean?
It’s an anti-French-Canadian joke I think.
That was my guess also. I’m just surprised the bigots are also here in some capacity.
I was born into one of those nowhere low wage “right to work” shitholes and I have some advice for people in them.
Leave. GTFO. Get a passport or move to a state with a high minimum wage. Your family doesn’t matter. Your education options don’t matter. You will be better off somewhere else, I guarantee it.
Move to a state with a high minimum wage
You’d be right back in the same boat. You might make more, but now you live where the cost of living is way higher, too.
California has the second highest minimum wage in the cou try at $16.90/hour, and it’s still not enough to live off of in California.
I am 100% doing this. My family doesn’t matter. Fuck my family. My wife is a piece of shit and the kids are too. A random stranger online said it and that’s fucking gospel to me. Good luck to the kids. I’m outta here. Thanks buddy. You are SO right.
I was implying the family as in the larger social network of parents, grandparents, cousins, etc. The leading cause of homelessness is not having exactly that sort of network, I think about a third are foster care children who aged out of the system.
If you have a wife and kids then you’ve already made your bed. Best you can do is take them with you to Colorado or Washington.
How is Obamacare limiting your hours? Are you a truck driver?
I can’t recall the details because it’s been too long since I worked in the States, but it was something like if you work more than 30 hours per week the employer has to pay certain benefits. It’s cheaper for them to hire two 20hr workers than one 40hr worker, and then the two employees aren’t seeing any of the benefits they’re supposed to be getting. I assume that loophole is by oligarchical design.
When I worked in California I had to turn down raises/promotions because they would have knocked me past the cutoff for socialized healthcare, and the increased cost of mandated private health insurance would have been a massive pay cut.
That shit was true long before Obamacare.
Before Obamacare companies had the option to not provide healthcare at all, and more often their cutoffs when they did was 39 hours. ACA moving that to 30 was an attempt to get around employers hiring two people for part-time rather than 1 full-timer. And then they also made the norm of providing health insurance into a standard requirement.
Well-intentioned, reasonable compromise, modest reform-type stuff, but with raging Republican opposition to anything ever getting better and the inevitable min-maxing of loopholes, it only got us so far. And mail multiple key provisions has been repealed by the Republicans so…
While admitting that my recollection is flawed as hell, I remember it being the case that you couldn’t get a full 40 hours, but that you could easily get 30+ hours so long as you didn’t hit 40 enough times to count.
I’m not trying to agree with OOP that the ACA ruined everything, but it is a truly bizarre and flawed alternative to universal healthcare.
For some reason people thought if they used the Republican’s plan for healthcare then republicans would have no choice but to support it.
All that happened is they got a shitty healthcare plan and the Republicana had nowhere to go and nothing to offer as an alternative.
Also it turns out Republicans can oppose anything they’ve previously supported if they want. There’s no magical force that imposes consistency on them.
It never ceases to amaze me the way Americans are dealt such a shitty hand these days
Send military help. It took wwii to get rid of (some) of the nazis from power, and it’s looking like it’s going to be the same course of events in america. They’re starting by bullying their neighbors and wanting to take land (greenland, canada, mexico, now venezuela is actually getting attacked), and you wanna bet that we’re going to see a repeat of germany/russia’s agreement to not attack each other and split poland (the eu)?
My personal bet is that everything will kick off because trump decides to froth out enough hatred about china to have a fishing dispute escalate into military actions.
It happened to me a decade ago before I switched careers. I did substitute teaching and once I hit 29 hours for the week they’d send me home so I wouldn’t qualify for healthcare. I was regularly told I was one of the good subs, and I loved working with the staff and kids.
I tore my rotator cuff one summer and just had to grin and bear it for a year because I had no coverage and was worried about the bills. Thanks Uncle Sam!
OOP can live alone and pay bills on part time minimum wage is insane
15 bucks is like double minimum wage in most places. But yeah, I’d love $750 rent, but he obviously lives in the middle of nowhere
$115 a month phone/internet? Are US prices really that insane? My phone is £4 a month for unlimited calls/SMS and got an unlimited data SIM for a 4G router that costs £24/month.
Yes, in fact that’s on the cheap side for unlimited with decent speeds for both services.
Limited-time offer available to new MINTernet customers who purchase the 3- or 12-month MINTernet plan with any Mint Premium voice plan. MINTernet plan requires upfront payment of $75 for 3-month or $300 for 12-month plans (each equiv. to $25/mo) & AutoRenewal enrollment. Mint Premium voice plan requires upfront payment of $45 for 3-month, $90 for 6-month or $180 for 12-month plan (each equiv. to $15/mo). Combined equivalent is $40/mo. After introductory rate, standard rates apply. Taxes & fees extra. Fixed wireless gateway provided on loan; return of equipment required upon cancellation or subject to fee. Service delivered via cellular network; speeds vary & may be reduced during congestion after 1TB/mo for MINTernet. MINTernet service limited to registered address at time of enrollment & cannot be relocated. Premium “Unlimited” data may be slowed during congestion after 50GB/mo; video streams at 480p. Includes 20GB/mo. mobile hotspot. Not combinable with certain other offers. Terms subject to change; additional terms & conditions apply. See terms for details.
It’s not actually as cheap as they say, and what you’re getting isn’t really worth the price.
Regardless, when the thing being said is “wages are crap, things are expensive, people are trapped and can’t afford a future” it sorta misses the point to say that they could get substantially worse service for roughly half the price.
I appreciate you quoting all of the fine print, what is the actual gotcha you’re taking away from it? The biggest “gotcha” that in seeing is you have to prepay, which is mints while thing. The second gotcha I can see is that the free phone line they throw in is only good for a year? Which is fine. You’d go from $40/month to $55, still less than half of what was described in the post.
Regardless, when the thing being said is “wages are crap, things are expensive, people are trapped and can’t afford a future”
I understand that’s the point of the overall post, but I’m answering a question asking if internet and cell service is really that expensive in the US.
It’s doing a disservice to pretend like it is when there are much more affordable alternatives. Not only is the typical market price cheaper than what is mentioned in the post, but if you’re on many government aid programs, you qualify for subsidized phone and internet. Pairing the two seemingly adds up to $25/month.
How much do you pay for Internet and cell service that meets your needs?
My “gotcha” was the bit I said right after the fine print: not as cheap as advertised in the long run and not a good value.
The existence of a lower price for some people in some circumstances in some parts of the country doesn’t do much to address actual measurable statistics on us internet costs: Monthly Internet Cost: https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/internet/internet-cost-per-month/
My Internet is about $80 a month, and my phone is roughly $30 per line per month, $120 total because of regulatory fees and such. Looking at what mint typically delivers for internet they wouldn’t work for my requirements, purely for work and not considering I like my streaming to be good quality.
My “gotcha” was the bit I said right after the fine print: not as cheap as advertised in the long run
It’s…it’s a promotion. I didn’t even mention it in my post, where I said internet can typically be had for $40-$50.
After the promotion, the Internet still stays the same price, it’s the free voice line that you don’t get.
I don’t think it’s much of a gotcha worth flourishing the terms and conditions over, but…sure, you’ve pointed out that additional discounts that were never factored into my initial comment expire, so the baseline offering goes back to what I mentioned in my post. $40-$50. This is also entirely avoiding the discussion of the government subsidized internet if you’re on SNAP, etc.
It’s directly applicable when you say cheaper options are available and then link to a promotional offer where the pricing expires.
Government subsidized free Internet is currently not a thing in the US because the government is actively hostile to most of the citizenry. We still have the program to get up to $9.25 off if you make less than $25k a year though. It also requires enrollment in a program whose funding is being cut, is kicking people off , and doing everything possible to reduce enrollment.
Please read the rest of the comment I previously made where I linked to some actual averages for cost, because again: a lower cost existing isn’t the same as the average cost being low.
It’s directly applicable when you say cheaper options are available and then link to a promotional offer where the pricing expires.
Just to make sure we’re on the same page.
I said you can get Internet for $40-$50.
I linked a provider which provides a non-promotional rate of $40/month for Internet.
As a promotion, they’re throwing in a cellular line for free. This expires.
Does this somehow invalidate my claim of you can get Internet for $40-$50?
Government subsidized free Internet is currently not a thing in the US because the government is actively hostile to most of the citizenry. We still have the program to get up to $9.25 off if you make less than $25k a year though.
Yes. I never said it was free, just that it was subsidized.
Please read the rest of the comment I previously made where I linked to some actual averages for cost, because again: a lower cost existing isn’t the same as the average cost being low.
Sure - the average, non-promotional rate of $60 is still cheaper than what this post implies.
If we’re being real, in many markets (hello Xfinity/comcast) you’re oftentimes expected to be on a promotional rate more often than not. When I was living by myself, I could call Xfinity and ask for a promotional rate, and be told that I’d be eligible in x months, usually 2-4. If you live with others, you can swap who the Internet is under each year to always be getting a promotional rate.
In a country with a reputation of overconsumption, I think when someone asks with incredulity about the price of something, it’s valid to include the floor in addition to average/median/etc.
When discussing in the context of someone making little money, the floor is probably more relevant. Someone who’s barely making ends meet is not going to worry about splurging for the no data caps (fuck Xfinity) package for the streaming services he does not have.
Besides fighting the system, a good solution in cases like this is to find roommates. You can easily drop your rent and utilities cost to a third of what you’d normally pay.
“Easily” seems like a stretch.
Most roommate situations are 2 or 3 people. So that’s either half or a third of the cost. I’d call that “easily” yes.
A half or third of the cost… that has been doubled or tripled due to enough space that you’re not sleeping together. I lived in a flyover town in a situation similar to the poster. A studio apartment sucks. Trying to shove another person in there is a nightmare, and getting a slightly bigger apartment balloons your rent in a cartoonishly exaggerated manner.
Something tells me if they gave him 40 hours he’d be posting about how he has no free time to enjoy his life.
Which would be a valid complaint. Your life should not be an endless grind for the privilege of having the most basic necessities to survive.
Isn’t it weird how half the paycheck goes to rent? It’s not like housing is a new invention, why’s it so expensive?
IMO, it’s some combination of ideologically-driven failures of town planning (the distance from buildings on one side of the street to the other is legally mandated to be ~20m wide, when it could be
), financial fuckery (investors drive housing prices through the roof by buying housing as speculative vehicles, and investors do so because investors are driving housing prices through the roof by buying housing as speculative vehicles - an ouroboros of shitfuckery) and lobbyist-driven partisanship on public transport (car companies hate trains, so they wage propaganda war against them and in support of overly-large roads with mandatory lanes for vehicle storage).I agree with you in general, but 2m isn’t wide enough for fire truck access. Some regulations are based on the prevalence and nature of natural disasters in a given area.
I’m also not sure about your 20 meters figure because I can’t find that there is a federal minimum. 20 feet is the minimum for fire trucks though.
2m isn’t wide enough for fire truck access, sure. Why do you need to drive a giant fire truck down the alley? The standard response (besides “we need to carry water and I don’t know what a fire hydrant is”) is “we have a ladder on the top of the fire truck”, which might be relevant in some contexts but the picture is of 2-storey buildings which could be easily handled with man-portable ladders.
My main concern here is that people demand wide roads for fire access to the tall buildings (that can only be fire-fought with trucks), then demand tall buildings because “it’s the only way to build densely”, ignoring the fact that narrow roads with shorter buildings are just as dense, cheaper to build, and have lower firefighting requirements. It’s an idiotic catch-22 that people keep painting us into.
My 20 metres figure isn’t a hard number, it’s my eyeballing the 2 lanes + 2
parkingvehicle storage lanes, plus a footpath plus a nature strip plus the required building setback/front yard.Why do you need to drive a giant fire truck down the alley? […] “we need to carry water and I don’t know what a fire hydrant is”
Fire hydrants provide water, but you need to run the water through a pump to increase the pressure, and a fire truck acts as that pump. It also allows for the attachment of multiple hoses so that water can be sprayed in multiple locations.
And if all the roads are very narrow, how are you going to get a moving truck or other delivery vehicle in? What about a plumber’s van? What about a small personal vehicle? Two meters isn’t wide enough for any of those, especially not with outdoor seating. Six meters gives space for service vehicles to coexist with pedestrians, cyclists, and seating.
I don’t agree with not having tall buildings either though. If the majority of housing is dense apartments above ground-floor businesses then there’s much more open space left for nature preserves, parks, and gardens. I mean, they don’t need to be skyscrapers, just 3-10 stories maybe. You can also save a lot of space with row houses.
Fire hydrants provide water, but you need to run the water through a pump to increase the pressure, and a fire truck acts as that pump.
Finally, someone with something approaching an answer!
I’m looking for hard info one way or another, but it looks like some fire hydrants provide much more pressure than others. It seems weird that there would need to be a mobile pump attached to the stationary fire hydrant, when it could be built in. I imagine the reason it’s not, is a combination of 1) if the street is wide and the fire engine has a pump built into its water tank anyway, why spend extra on a redundant stationary pump on the fire hydrant? and 2) the pump needs to be powered somehow, and the electrics might be knocked out in an emergency relating to a fire anyway, so it’s neater to simply not rely on mains electricity for the pump.
Which begs the question: what do genuinely narrow (<2m) streets do about fire? Well, sometimes they just run a big hose from a hydrant on a wider street. And sometimes…
…they use a fire engine built as a kei truck!
(Kei trucks are <1.5m wide! They easily fit down a 2m street!)
And if all the roads are very narrow, how are you going to get a moving truck or other delivery vehicle in? What about a plumber’s van? What about a small personal vehicle? Two meters isn’t wide enough for any of those, especially not with outdoor seating.
The moving truck isn’t important for apartments - everything needs to fit through the front door/corridor/stairwell anyway, so having a 6m-wide street is just about efficiency.
Again though, a kei truck is max 1.48m, so just use a flatbed kei truck and these problems magically disappear. I really don’t know why you want to run your small personal vehicle down an obviously for-pedestrians street, but it is possible (if not legal).
More broadly, if the street is tiny then you bring a tiny vehicle. It’s like being mad that KFC doesn’t have a vegan option. If you really need to use a truck, then drive it to the entrance of the alley and either carry it the rest of the way to the door, or use a trolley.
There’s also another precedent here, from delivery vehicles: take a look at the various cargo ebikes used by delivery services, like Amazon’s “cargo ebike” that fits in a bike lane. Two of them should be able to pass by eachother in a 2m-wide street.
Six meters gives space for service vehicles to coexist with pedestrians, cyclists, and seating.
So I should clarify: 2m should generally be for the less-used streets. Not all streets should be 2m, if a street is frequently used it could obviously benefit from more space. But conversely, if a street is rarely used then it really shouldn’t be overbuilt just to accommodate ‘efficiency’ of extremely rare events (like a moving truck).
Service vehicles don’t need to coexist with that seating/etc. You limit deliveries to a specific hour of the day (say, 8AM-9AM) and pack up the seating during that hour, and if a kei truck is coming down the alley then you squidge over into the remaining 50cm of the street, or duck into a doorway or something, for the ~5 seconds it takes for the truck to go from right behind you to right in front of you. Obviously, a 2m street requires the truck to give way to pedestrians, so they’ll want to slow to a crawl as they drive past you.
And FWIW, I’m not opposed to taller buildings. I am opposed to the mindset that automatically assumes they’re the only option, though. Short buildings are very cheap-per-sqm and mesh well with incremental development, and short buildings with narrow streets (particularly rowhouses!) are IMO just a straight upgrade from the plenty of places with height restrictions and a requirement for wide streets. It’s not like you need to commit to one or the other for the whole city - you can have a 6m street parallel to a 2m street, easy.
US-Americans have an abundance of space. There is no need to build very densely. Atleast not in a midsized town that Anon describes.
There is so much wrong with the logic of that sentence. I’m going to start with basic economic/town planning theory:
The core function of a city is that everything is close to everywhere else - you live in a city because it’s close to your job/a hospital/a nice lasertag place/whatever, which are located there because 1) you and lots of other people are located in the area, and 2) because other businesses they rely on are located closely. The other businesses are located closely for the exact same reasons 1 and 2 (if the Obscure Thingy repair shop is 2 minutes away instead of 3 days away, then you reduce downtime and save money, etc). The more densely you build, the more these virtuous cycles are amplified. Incidentally, this is why cities are roughly circular (which maximizes the number of places close to other places), and not a 170KMx200mx500m line in empty desert.
“A midsized town” is vague as heck but the logic of the previous paragraph applies just as well to small towns - if you keep stuff compact then you make it easy to walk to places, instead of needing to constantly drive everywhere (and waste even more space on roads and redundant parking at every single destination). In fact, if you have a town of, say, 30 000 people, and you maintain a density of 30 000 people per sqkm, then guess what: literally everything is within a km, which means everything is within a 10minute walk (and statistically, 5mins or less, since 10mins is the distance from one edge of town to the opposite edge, and a naive-average trip would be half of that).
You’re technically correct that there’s plenty of room on the edge of town to build low-density housing. In practice though, people want to live close to the centre of the city, rather than on the outskirts with a 3-hour commute. The USA having “an abundance of space” on the outskirts means jack shit. Cheap rent on the outskirts just means high mechanic/fuel costs and lots of unpaid hours spent driving to/from work (or literally anywhere else in the city that you want to go - I hope you don’t have friends in the city centre that you want to see regularly).
I can’t remember the video about it all that well, but wasn’t ‘the line’ supposed to be using the concept of the 15 minute city? So, while, yes… there are very good reasons circles are city standards, if everything magically worked out and they built the thing it wouldn’t matter whether it was a line or a circle.
I hope you don’t have friends in the city centre that you want to see regularly).
So much fuck this. I have a friend who decided to go that exact route, because it put him ‘halfway’ between multiple family members and friends… and now he sees none of them because they’re all ~an hour away. Suburbs fucking suck, and the car brained society we have is so fucking foolish.
if you keep stuff compact then you make it easy to walk to places
Never going to happen in america :( I lived in a small city (2,500), and it was spread out enough that walking anywhere sucked, not even counting the horrible roads (it was a crossroads of two semi-important highways). I want to say it was 4km x 4km. The medium sized city (for the area, it’s medium sized, we’d consider 30,000 to be large [and in fact, the closest large city was ~30,000, and that’s where you had a real hospital, and all the services you would imagine a city having]) of ~9,000 was more like 10km x 10km.
Those are rural cities. Suburbs get so fucky so quickly… I think the town of 70,000 I lived in for a while was something like 9km x 18km, and that was a factory town. The not factory town suburb of 90,000 was around 15km x 20km. Just mind bogglingly spread out. The developers of an area are trying to maximize profit, and the car culture allows them to buy the cheapest land that’s far away, sell the idiot housebuyers the idea of driving down a (currently, lol, not once everyone moves in) idyllic little road with no traffic to the center of the city and have everything they could want in a 15 minute drive.
The problem with ‘The Line’ is that travelling 170KM in 15 minutes requires an average speed of 680KM/h (I wrote out why that’s insane lunacy from an engineering perspective, but I shoved it in a footnote), but you can achieve a 15-minute city of the same volume just by having an, IIRC, 13KM square with 100m-high buildings (and building 100m-high buildings is waaaay cheaper than building 500m-high buildings), built on a simple grid of normal 100KM/h trains - the Manhattan Distance of the maximum distance in a 13KM square is 26KM, which to be fair is still 36 seconds over the 15min mark even if your average speed is 100KM, but 1) it almost achieves the exact same thing as the trillion-dollar sci-fi tech, and 2) if you really care about the sharp 15-minute city premise then you can bump your trains up to run at 150KM/h (which is perfectly doable and only a little more expensive).
Anyway, point is that the only way The Line can fulfil its promises is by casually dropping a trillion dollars on a problem that may or may not be solvable, and will almost certainly be an order of magnitude or three more expensive than the bog-standard existing solution. A 680KM/h train is fucking expensive and while yes, it might be physically possible, most people want the cost of their commute to be lower than their daily wage earned from the job they commute to.
If The Line was ever built (and was cheap without subsidies somehow and became populated), then the first thing to happen after its populated would be a ton of building sideways, mostly around the midpoint/centre of The Line. Why? Because that’s the prime land that’s empty and therefore cheapest to build on, that’s closest to everything (the midpoint of The Line should be ~7.5mins away from everything at most, and would also be the most accessible spot in the city and therefore have the most desirable business locations). And new buildings would be built around there, not at the ends of The Line. They’d add extensions to the train line that turn 90 degrees out, so that people further away from The Line could access the train system. This all would continue until The Line became The Circle.
The only way The Line stays a line is with economic antigravity. Metaphorical antigravity, to be clear. Not the sci-fi tech.,
Never going to happen in america
…why? I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but half the time I see that line it’s used as a justification for why people shouldn’t demand it happen. And frankly, “never” is too strong of a word.
680KM/h isn’t even possible with a normal maglev, you’d need to either shove the maglev in a vacuum tube or build a rocket train or something equally insane just to have a maximum speed of 680KM/h. But you actually need a higher speed than 680KM/h since you start out at 0KM/h and 680KM/h is just the average - and since your acceleration is limited to speeds that won’t kill the passenger, you really do have to factor it in, one way or another. See, your train has to either permit passengers to stand (which sharply limits safe acceleration without someone being knocked over and bashing their head open on a rail) or it has to give everyone time to board and then seat (all of which takes time for boarding), and you also need a way to ensure that random dickheads won’t ignore the rules and stay standing. A boarding delay will kill your average speed just as much as low acceleration.
I think… you may need to look up the definition of a 15 minute city before expanding on this comment.
Which definition? Some people just made up their own. The definition I used in the above comment was “a city where you can travel everywhere within 15 minutes”, no more, no less. Also, I kind of ignored walking times.
Compared to Now: I would LOVE to have $100 a month all to myself.
