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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

Absolutely! But that's more work. And maybe transit-agency people are just unfamiliar with development, much as architect-urbanists keep building gilded cages (really nice walkable places that are impossible to serve with transit because they are not on the way to anything else).

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

Parlor, living room, family room, rec room, dining room.
Sometimes: den, man cave.
Fuzzy cluster membership: home cinema.
Related and overlapping sets of functional purposes cause fairly similar spaces, with a multitude of names.

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

Residential? (Yes there is a further split between multifamily and SFDR.) Except if it's some sort of hotel, SRO, rooming house, etc. in which case indeed it is CRE. IIRC.

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

Laziness. Shops live in the "commercial real estate" ecosystem, schools are "institutional". It's much easier for the agency to only talk to one developer who can absorb the entirety of the land offered.
(This siloing is a standard complaint wrt. housing-above-shops mixed-use.)

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

Yes, that is exactly that.
Then you invite your friends with their spouses and possibly kids, and suddenly they mix like water and oil and liquid mercury, so you need three different living rooms.
Oh, you never intend to do that? But but how do you keep up with the Joneses without hosting parties?

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

What's weird?
1: They nuked traditional social options (cafe, park, &c) and thus need private social places (parlor) to entertain guests.
2: Need to split the party, see classical Greek andron & gynaeceum. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andron_...
3: "No, bedrooms are private-private not private-social."

Andron (architecture) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

That "builds equity" is a particularly American error. Buildings don't magically appreciate! The land they sit on does, when you bought it on an advancing frontier (whether it's manifest destiny or suburbanization). The land can also fall out from under the buildings: pre-car small town downtown.

Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

AFAICT in the US the permanent coalition lead the soc-dems (for some reason fearing their true name) to pull the blanket bearing the text "liberalism" off the actual liberals. Thus a new name was invented for them: "neoliberalism". There is nothing "neo-" about them, only some labeling confusion.

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

The latter still has value. Yes, a "debate as public spectacle", with both sides trying to "win" (convince people or, even worse, reaffirm the already convinced) is but a pale shadow of a good-faith discussion based on trust and privacy, it still involves seeing both sides' preferred argumets.

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

Except where it is? The beginning of liberalism as a measure to prevent another Thirty Years' War from happening is exactly to be tolerant about ideological (at the time, spelled "religious") questions, no matter how annoyingly wrong the other side is.

Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

? Winning the Clone Wars with "conventional" forces was breathtakingly expensive and slow. Establishing escalation dominance against peer threat with "the Death Star will always get through" plus a less supersized fleet to overmatch smaller attempts is proper diversity of deterrents.

Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

Heavy bus traffic pushes asphalt (and even small concrete pavers) around, though? You'd need large concrete slabs for bus stops not to turn into ruts and ripples.

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

And supplementation of various foodstuffs with e.g. iodine, so that children growing up don't develop goiter and its various symptoms.
And sewers and piped drinking water so people don't get cholera and typhoid and ... all the time.
And shoes (yes really) so people don't get hookworms as children.

Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

BTW, the gasping about "they rewrote the constitution after 2010" is an Americanism. Hungary previously got a new constitution in 1990, and after WW2, and after WW1, and de facto in 1867. (And Fidesz did such a slapdash job they had to amend the new constitution multiple times within the year.)

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

There are limits to what "defend against vice with good system design" can do, but an arrangement where the "brakes and counterweighs" reliably fail under exactly the circumstance you most need them to operate is ...not up to standard.

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

The single-chamber legislature elects the head of state (separate from PM) who has a veto over legislation, with a 2/3 vote. So when the single-seat system amplified their 2010 electoral win to 2/3 of the legislature, they could elect a rubber stamp, and they did.

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

Anyway, 1994-8 Fidesz realized that liberal parties were oversupplied (MDF, SZDSZ, Fidesz, plus the nominally socialist MSZP) but there wasn't a non-insane right party, so they filled that gap. Their post-2010 authoritarian slide is IMO that the opportunity fell in their lap.

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

The maths of the system (party-list + single-seat both feeding a single-chamber parliament, which elects the PM) very strongly drive a national two-party equilibrium. There are multiple socialist, liberal, green, and left-aligned personalist/kleptocratic parties, but now they hold preelections.

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

Weirdly enough, in Hungary the political landscape hasn't yet had the time to settle fully into a two-party system. A feature of this is that the "insane right" has had a sequence of political parties (MIÉP, Jobbik, Mi Hazánk) separate from the mild-to-pronounced-right Fidesz.

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 19

Do you know what is even more noticeable to the people with bad vision than a yellow line? The contrast between the light platform and the dark pit.

Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 16

The alternative, that different classes of passengers use separate within-mode networks (low-cost carriers vs. legacy airlines, or schoolbuses vs. municipal buses) or altogether different modes (American commuter railroads vs. subways/buses) is obviously worse due to wasted economies of scale.

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 16

Yes. We put separate travel classes in the same vehicles (and stationary facilities e.g. airport terminals/lounges) so that all classes of passengers can use the same network without having to mix. Even some urban transit operators have e.g. women-only cars (or other sections of vehicles).

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 16

What is that windowless brick brick and why is something like that placed so prominently?

Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 15

East Germany's Ampelmann was really cute: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampelm%...

Ampelmännchen - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Basil Marte @basilmarte.bsky.social · Sep 15

Driverless trains with conductors on them. Would be extremely American.

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