I thought comparing capacity factor instead of capacity would be more fair, but I got roughly the same result. Elwha's capacity factor was, at one point, 39% [0], and capacity factor for wind turbines in the US is ~35% [1]. However, we're still comparing a source of on-demand power to a source of intermittent power.
What problem is this system trying to solve? It seems to be, in this initial deployment, that the office park is too far away from the restaurants its employees want to visit, compelling them to drive there. I feel like a better solution would be permitting denser and mixed-use development, so employees can walk to their favorite restaurants on the ground floor instead of driving >1km to them or paying for a delivery tunnel.
I feel like comments like this always come up. Basically reducing it to, why not just become Manhattan?
They want a solution for today, not decades from today which is what urban planning would take. But also they likely want the neighborhood they built/moved to. They don’t want to live in a super dense mixed use plaza. They also want solutions that the plethora of communities like theirs can replicate. They just want a little upgrade to their bucolic life. They don’t want to hit the reset button. It seems way more reasonable to upgrade than try to reinvent it.
You don't need to become Manhattan to have density and mixed-use? I used to work at a place with a restaurant next to it (allowed by a reduction of parking minimums). Guess where a lot of my fellow employees are?
Maybe I am missing something — But what problem is it really solving? They want a hamburger quicker?
I personally enjoy the dichotomy between the burbs and city personally especially in Atlanta.
I don’t think quicker is necessarily the motivation. But currently they’re likely using DoorDash which requires a human and a very large automobile so I think it’s an optimization of that. It may also be quicker since it can more effectively work in parallel
It seems to me like the delivery bots you may see around some places. Except those things are pretty slow and I feel like they’re always involved in accidents with automobiles.
Classic straw man argument, there's a pretty big difference from a walkable and incrementally more dense neighborhood and Manhattan.
We're not going to tear down and rebuild everything all at once, it's going to take time and work to get us out of the massive car dependent hole we've dug for ourselves. It seems Atlanta has massively oversupplied (to it's own detriment) parking and prioritized space for cars, and neglected to consider that cities depend on attracting a sufficent density of humans.
Your quote only adds to the GP's point -- Atlanta is so far from being walkable that it will take half a century of very good urban planning before the problem solved by the article is solved in the way that would make the r/fuckcars posters that show up in every thread on this site about transportation would like it to be.
People arguing that Atlanta should just permit "denser and mixed-use development, so employees can walk to their favorite restaurants on the ground floor instead of driving >1km" as a short-term solution to the massive sprawl that is Atlanta have absolutely no idea of the gargantuan undertaking they are proposing and it's sort of ironic that they propose that undertaking as an "easier" solution to the problem than the one in the article.
I think it's telling that the person who made this comment used km -- it's obvious they are not American, and know very little about Atlanta or about the suburbs around it or how people live there. I, on the other hand, have first-hand experience.
Don't ask me about it though, I don't read replies to my comments on this hellsite
Atlanta as a metropolitan area should not be used to set a bar for walkability. It is a massive city. Instead, one should take neighborhoods and start there. Atlanta certainly has walkable neighborhoods, what it lacks is efficient infrastructure to get from one neighborhood to another.
I'm American and have lived most of my life in American suburbs. I don't like them very much, and I don't like the imperial system.
I don't think denser development is a short term solution, but I don't like short term solutions either. Short term planning is part of what made traffic in cities like Atlanta so bad. And IMO it seemed like a fair suggestion because extending these tunnels to every house in suburban Atlanta wouldn't be a short process either.
Most people move to Atlanta for the burbs! They move away from dense cities like Manhattan to have a yard and some space, without having to pay a lot of money for it, but still be close enough to the city.
But the jobs are all in the city, and they all want to drive in, which is why traffic sucks and midtown/downtown is one big parking lot.
I don’t think they all want to drive in. There’s no choice. For instance if you live in Gwinnett you have to commute to doraville for rail— it’s not a giant time save if at all any time save. They said it would take 30 years to get heavy rail to Duluth at a minimum ! Maybe my grandkids could benefit.
There’s also missing Marta stops such as Atlantic station, Cobb galleria, and ponce city market. Using the buses seems to be the short term work around but it is rather absurd.
It's not mutually exclusive, we can implement this while working on urban planning/re-design since that takes so long. But, we should start that in places already primed for it, like the straw man you mentioned, Downtown Atlanta parking lots.
There’s nothing straw man about it, it’s reality of suburbanite life.
I’ve worked in “walkable” office parks and have the time the guys at the office would get in a car and still drive elsewhere. It doesn’t solve for the overall problem.
The only way to actually eliminate the drive-to-a-place problem is dense Manhattanesque cities where vehicles are prohibitive for the average Joe and robust public transit exists to allow Joe to make a quick jaunt down the road.
If something like this is financially viable (doubt) then it sounds like the density already exists and the problem is the restaurants aren't near the people. All the replies are focused on the density you mentioned but mixed use is probably the bigger and far more easily solved problem.
Letting restaurants open nearby to where there are clearly a lot of people is a tried and proven solution, not gadgetbhan for food.
And/or encouraging more use of things like bikes. I'd bet that painting a bike lane and putting up concrete barriers is cheaper than trenching out a three-quarter mile pseudo-pneumatic-tube-system.
Have you spent any time in Atlanta in August? Biking outside is not just biking, but also swimming - through the humidity. I don't mind it (avid all-season mountain biker) but most office workers wouldn't opt for that in their fancy office clothing just for a sandwich.
As an Asian being sweaty in the summer is the worst part. My dad grew up in Bangladesh (in a village with no AC) and now even Maryland is too much for his taste.
This might have been true during WW II when flat feet and myopia did not exempt men from conscription. It has not, that I know of, been true any time in the last seventy years. I moved to the area forty-five years ago. This was not because I supposed that the 5:1 ratio (which some mentioned) would make women overlook my mediocre looks, shabby clothes, and so-so hygiene; but the chance it could be true seemed like a bonus.
33% of bike trips in the Washington area are by women. Assuming non-binary people are around 1% of trips, that puts men at 66%, giving an exact 2:1 ratio
And IMO you can't call a mode of transportation "fine" when large swathes of the population don't feel safe or comfortable using it (this comes up a lot when I talk to female friends about bus/metro usage too)
Thank you for clarifying, I get what you mean now.
That study is over a decade old though. And I would think that there's too many confounding variables at play there. IMO the biggest confounder is "society issues" that make women feel less safe in general in public spaces. In my local neck of the US, I pretty much never see solo women eating outside at night, vs solo men and mixed groups.
I'll never understand these sort of objections to convenience in favor of density. This is awesome and I can see it being a utility similar to water pipes or electricity going to a house for the same reason we all have mailboxes. Delivery is convenient and this could make it cheap and fast.
I'm not objecting to convince in favor of density because there isn't a choice to be made between the two. You can have convenience in low or high density development. The difference is in cost and complexity; high density development has all the convenience with fewer delivery costs
On this small scale, rebuilding would likely be more expensive than this tunnel. But extending this network to every home would be (IMO) on the same order of magnitude as redevelopment in cost, complexity, and time. Redevelopment is complicated during construction but this system is also complicated forever. Our cities are already being rebuilt piece-by-piece every day; I'd just like zoning laws to permit rebuilding with mixed use and higher density development
It seems like it would always be small scale, just replicated. I don’t think they’re trying to long distance delivery through this. Like if wanted a pizza from 100 miles away, I’d not expect that to be supported.
I’m seeing it like a LAN. Which is how most of America is built. Clusters of businesses supported by surrounding area of residential. Any interconnection would likely benefit from batched movement into the node (cargo truck) then items go into this as a last mile solution.
In some sleepy suburb you must pay for food delivery or hop in your car and drive to the restaurant. In Manhattan you could pay for delivery or skip delivery altogether and walk to one of the half-dozen (at least) restaurants on your block.
I live in London, and it’s very walkable and dense here compared to most US cities. Nevertheless, almost every vehicle is a delivery vehicle of some kind. Uber Eats deliveries and Amazon packages going everywhere all the time.
Some sort of city-wide underground packet switched (literally) delivery network sounds sadly impractical but would be amazing and take a huge amount of traffic off the road.
The answer to this is actually very simple and used all over the world by shopping centres and shopping district associations. You just run a free loop bus for a few hours during lunch time to bring people to and from the shopping district. Even in the US I have seen airport hotels do this in NY, SF and LA. I wonder why the default answer in US is often not simple public transport.
Exactly this. It's generally a service with positive externalities. Also this specific use case (lunchtime bus loops) exists in many parts of the world and they are clearly value creating overall otherwise shopping centres and districts wouldn't be running them.
To a point. Their usefulness is typically eclipsed by trains, drones, and direct insertion in the late game.
Let's extend the metaphor. If you're trying to move a small, intermittent supply of products from around 1km away to your base, do you build an underground belt (this startup's gadgetbahn) or connect it to your rail network (existing roads and sidewalks)?
In OP's article, doesn't the survey show that conservative respondents are about as likely to allow campus speakers who espoused liberal opinions as ones who espoused conservative opinions?
Look at the numbers of who is willing to disagree with their professor publicly on controversial topics. It's those on the left. In other words, more open to express their opinions. By preventing intolerant speech from entering the space, you open it up to people being open to speak freely.
The right is simply more open to having people come in that would scare people from speaking. Again, Paradox of Tolerance.
So you have to aggressively deny intolerant people space because it creates an unfree, fearful space.
>Look at the numbers of who is willing to disagree with their professor publicly on controversial topics. It's those on the left.
Those numbers aren't in OP's article. However, even if that statistic is true, all it says is that people on the right handle conflict better than people on the left. Your assumption is logically invalid since you're making an assumption that people on the right invite people come in that scare people from speaking. Those speakers truly don't, and the left students actively prevent those invited speakers from even speaking.
Also, thanks to your HN profile information, I see you graduated from North Central College in Naperville, IL in 2006. You've been out of school for quite a while, so I can understand that you're probably looking through the lens of college in the mid-2000s. You really don't understand how current students think. Having been in the classroom these past few years, it's abundantly clear that the conservative students are afraid to disagree with their professors, particularly if the professor makes it known that they themselves are liberal.
Look, tyranny needs to be recognized. The Paradox of Tolerance means if you want a tolerant society, you must recognize intolerance as a tyranny and eliminate it. If you recognize a tyranny but do nothing, you stand to receive further oppression.
The students today are recognizing a growing tyranny and are fighting back. The fact that this fight is obfuscated as a fight against 'free speech' is just wrong. Nate Silver doesn't us any service by further obfuscating that fact.
When I was in school, people didn't speak up enough about the Iraq war and the further restricting of liberty via Patriot Act. It was a place of fear. If you think today's schools are oppressive imagine being surrounded by heavy handed nationalism. Why do people forget the early 2000s after 9/11?
>The Paradox of Tolerance means if you want a tolerant society, you must recognize intolerance as a tyranny and eliminate it. If you recognize a tyranny but do nothing, you stand to receive further oppression.
Yes, and the recognition of this tyranny is exactly why the right is banning books. Your view of tyranny is just different than theirs. Unless you can try and rectify that, you'll be seeing them on the battlefield.
>Why do people forget the early 2000s after 9/11?
Well, current college students weren't born yet. I'm sorry that you felt that discussion of the invasion of 9/11 was oppressive, but I can sincerely tell you that schools are far more oppressive than they were back then.
Did you mean to delete your other comment? Let me respond to it here:
>Letting intolerant people speak is not evidence of your support for tolerance. That's what the Paradox of Tolerance shows. You have to be aggressively intolerant of intolerance. That's why that survey shows exactly the opposite of what you demonstrated. Intolerance of intolerance is evidence of support for tolerance. Since the right is tolerant of intolerance (which is what the survey shows) they are not for free speech. Also evidenced by them literally banning books that promote tolerance.
Ah, you seem to think that the left viewpoints in the survey are tolerant, whereas the right viewpoints are intolerant.
>L1. The Second Amendment should be repealed so that guns can be confiscated.
This view is tolerant of intolerance.
>L2. Religious liberty is used as an excuse to discriminate against gays and lesbians.
This view is tolerant of intolerance.
>L3. Structural racism maintains inequality by protecting White privilege.
This view is tolerant of intolerance.
With these points accepted, I agree that letting intolerant people speak is not evidence of support for tolerance.
You might also be assuming that the left's intolerance is morally correct, which isn't true. One purpose of free speech is to converge upon how society should practice tolerance and intolerance through lawmaking and cultural norms. In fact, all six viewpoints in the survey are tolerant of intolerance, and that's exactly the point. If you can't see that all six are tolerant of intolerance, please try.
Left students have made explicit calls in recent days to "murder the Jews" [1]. Calling of the mass murder of a group of people is intolerant. Some people in this thread argue that you can let anyone speak, but just don't give them a megaphone. A book is a type of megaphone that echoes across time. If a book calls for the killing of Jews, and the left allows it to exist, the left is tolerant of intolerance, which is what you claim the right does. By your own statement, intolerance of intolerance is evidence of support for tolerance. Therefore, the left should ban the megaphones that call for the killing of Jews, which includes banning books calling for the killing of Jews.
Perhaps you don't realize that the right says that certain megaphones/books of the left cause injury to children. You might disagree, and that's fine, but a majority of people on the right hold that view. In those cases, if the right allows those books to be read by children, the right will be tolerant of intolerance. Therefore, they have a moral obligation to remove those intolerant books, just as a person on the left will have a moral obligation to ban intolerant books calling for the killing of Jews.
>Intolerance of intolerance is evidence of support for tolerance.
That is a false statement. Tolerance is not a binary variable; NOT ( NOT ( "tolerance" ) ) != "tolerance" or even "evidence of support for tolerance", just "maybe". If tolerance is saying you're wearing a red shirt, intolerance of intolerance is saying you're not wearing a not-red shirt. That response is satisfied by a full red shirt to single red thread secretly woven into a blue shirt. Intolerance of intolerance is undefined uncertainty.
Again, given that all six viewpoints are tolerant of intolerance, and the left and the right are capable of being both tolerant and intolerant, the survey shows the left is less tolerant than the right. The left is more intolerant of intolerance, as you say, which actually shows the left operates with undefined uncertainty about the world. The left, to bring in a theory of knowledge, tends to think about unknown unknowns, whereas the right tends to think about known unknowns. The left tends to say "maybe", and the right tends to say "yes" or "no". Is this really that surprising?
The right claims the books are damaging to children, they aren't claiming the books are intolerant. I'm starting to wonder if you understand what that word means. The books they are banning promote tolerance. You again missed the point.
The liberal talking points used in the survey (2nd Amendment should be repealed, religious liberty is used to justify discrimination, structural racism exists) are also just repeats of the same argument we've heard a million times over. While I agree that novelty should be an important factor in choosing a campus speaker, it's clear that most respondents to the survey don't; they support unoriginal talking points from one side of the political spectrum and not the other.
L1 is the only one I really have trouble with. L2 and L3 are in desperate need of nuance to be remotely persuasive, but that's the thing: the kids they're asking already get it without that nuance. No nuance can save C1-3.
The poll results actually seem to reflect their familiarity with the positions and the typical weakness of arguments for certain ones. I don't think it says anything about their position on free speech.
Secret third option: all medical care, including gender affirming, should be collectively funded. That includes gender affirming care for cis people like breast enhancement and Viagra. Problem solved.
That's a poor comparison. We can't control when we get solar power, and we can't easily store excess solar power right now. Hydropower is available on demand. Green sources of electricity like this are worth building today, because the current best alternative appears to be natural gas turbine generation.
You can already download and run Edge on Chrome OS; it's as simple as `apt install microsoft-edge-stable`. All devices made since 2019 should feature support for a Linux VM (Termina) that runs a Debian container by default. I've been using it to run Edge since Microsoft released their Linux version back in 2021. It's inefficient and still suffers from UI bugs but it gets the job done.
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