[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('noobtube', 'I') hope people understand the United States is nothing but a collection of city-states.

There is no "rural" or "small town" America.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'D')id you see that!
The cops just let them all go!
just a tour group

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'A')re you talking about the UM "Protest" in Ann Arbor, Michigan?

[theluckycountry]

A lot of the metals in the picture below go into cities, or create product used in the cities. Probably more than half of it ends up in the service of the world's cities.

[nocar]

All that iron, and other metals. I want to know where is goes.

How much is to cars and trucks? How much is for highways? (I believe there is lots of iron for reinforcement i highway bridges)

How much is for building public transport?

How much for agriculture equipment?
How much is for bicycles?

How much is for building? Single family housing, apartments, schools, retail, industries?

[kublikhan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('nocar', 'A')ll that iron, and other metals. I want to know where is goes.

How much is to cars and trucks? How much is for highways? (I believe there is lots of iron for reinforcement i highway bridges)

How much is for building public transport?

How much for agriculture equipment?
How much is for bicycles?

How much is for building? Single family housing, apartments, schools, retail, industries?

[Pops]

Simple fact is there were less homeless when America was great because we warehoused our mentally ill and addicted people in "state hospitals" and prisons. from the 70's-90's this ended as the government-funded hospitals were closed because taxes.

Also the laws surrounding involuntary commitment changed as well — that was a good thing.

For-profit boarding homes (and prisons) sprang up to contain these people. Like any for profit "institution" these places were no better than the state could do and in many cases much worse as their motive was profit not improvement. Today these places can cost tens of thousands per month (because capitalism) so obviously poor people are forced out if they could ever find a bed in the first place. But "deinstitutionalization" made a few people lots of money and made a few other people feel good about kicking out the moochers.

Like all other medicine, capitalism has taken over. We spend more on medicine yet receive worse care than other rich countries. We are 50th behind other rich and not so rich countries in infant mortality. We spend huge percentage of GDP on medicine but because medicine is for-profit, government money just causes the bill to rise that much more.


The other part of homelessness is lack of homes for those willing and able to work but low-skilled, low-paid. Zoning and NIMBYism prevents construction of low-income, high density housing making any home unaffordable in cities... where the jobs are.
To rent the average 1bdrm apt in San Fran you need to earn about $125k/yr. Not exactly dishwasher wages. In fact as more and more money is hovered up by the top rung of society, there is simply less to go around—why else would the stock market again be so overvalued, not to mention all the off-book transactions.




The US populace and government spends more than most countries on for profit medicine and for profit militarism—ye olde Military-Industrial complex is only rivaled by the Medical-Industrial complex. But surprisingly, or not if you follow politics, we are dead last among OECD countries in what is termed "social protection." Think, police, fire and courts. But also measures to help people with a litany of ill fates that befall citizens. Our programs range from OSHA to disability to unemployment to mental heath services: WIC, TANIF, SNAP, and of course especially SSI.

If one shakes their head and scoffs at those programs and votes for the political party that makes those services the butt of jokes and fund-raising emails, there is only one direction to point.

[theluckycountry]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('nocar', 'A')ll that iron, and other metals. I want to know where is goes.

How much is to cars and trucks? How much is for highways? (I believe there is lots of iron for reinforcement i highway bridges)

[ralfy]

More cities are made, especially near port areas, so that more can earn from service industries and manufacturing. Meanwhile, agriculture is mechanized to increase food production.

To ensure all that, just-in-time processes and economic order quantities are needed, especially to ship many goods across long distances, and frequently in order to keep inventory costs low.

[Pops]

Regarding the rebuildability of PV, the panels will last many many years. Old panels hit the pit now mainly because cheaper / more efficient ones are on the market regularly. Panels are warranted for 25 years at 80% output - it seems likely they'll still be making power in fifty, if only at 75%. Don't know how this works, could be they have a cliff, could be they hit a plateau.

In any event, I'll bet that in 2073, if nukes don't resurge and fission and di-lithium crystal power (or whatever the Energy Fairy may pull out of her bum) are still 10 years away, people will be clamoring over 50 year old panels.

[theluckycountry]

DC Transit Could Become "Unrecognizable" With Drastic Service Cuts, Layoffs Amid Deficit
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')larke pointed out the level of proposed service cuts "is hard to imagine." This also includes reducing or eliminating service on 108 of its 135 bus lines. The rail system will have its midnight hours reduced by 2 hours and cease operations at 10 pm.

[Shaved Monkey]

When you go to Japan you realise if you build a great fast reliable rail connection the city will grow to use its benefits,it looks like it wont take long before Kyoto is a suburb of Tokyo.

[theluckycountry]

The End of the Industrial Age is Set in Concrete

An old story, but worth a revisit.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'E')very year, the world pours enough concrete to build a wall 88 feet high and 88 feet wide girdling the globe at the equator. The varieties in concreting, as you see here, are proof. In just two years — 2011 to 2013 — China poured more concrete than the United States did in the entire 20th Century. Manufacturing cement — the product that makes concrete out of water, sand and gravel — is the third largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the world; if it were a country, it would be the world’s fourth worst polluter. Increasing demand for, and scarcity of, sand for both concrete and fracking has created a vicious global competition that in some respects resembles the worst of the drug cartels for violence, ruthlessness and lawlessness.

Now the bad news. Concrete has a life span. Salt, water and heat degrade it until at some point it can no longer be the road or the bridge or the high rise or the dam it once was. If nothing is done to replace or repair it, it fails. And people die.

Now the really bad news. Most of the infrastructure of the United States is made of concrete, and most of that concrete is at the end of its life span. If you want to see what that looks like, go to Surfside, Florida and look at the pile of rubble that used to be the Champlain Towers. The pile of rubble that demonstrates perfectly the nature of the rapidly approaching concrete crisis.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers:

Nearly half of America’s 617,000 bridges are 50 years old, or older, and 46,000 of them are structurally deficient.
40% of the country’s highways are rated in poor or mediocre condition. Many of them in urban situations are impossible to close down in order to rebuild them.
2,300 dams rated as high hazard — meaning that any failure would be catastrophic — are also rated as deficient.

Which brings us to the really, really bad news. There is no logical way that the local, state or federal governments in this or any other country are going to find the political will to raise and spend the money necessary to fix this problem. For half a century and more, especially since the advent of the Reagan Era, the standard operating procedure has been to kick the can down the road. Now both the can and the road are just about used up.

[Newfie]

Yeah, there is some mistaken idea that we can just keep building and building. While at the same time we claim to want to decarbonize. And it extends to office space. In many large US cities new commercial space is at under 30% occupancy with no good prospects.

At this point we should put a moratorium on new construction. Divert funds to maintaining what we have, replacing where rational.

But then what of our odern society is rational?

[theluckycountry]

One of the major problems in our modern world, and in the ancient world as well, is "the psychology of previous investment" It was most famously seen in the Easter Island culture where the ruling tribes kept cutting down trees to facilitate the manufacture of the stone Maui and the elaborate personal veranda they constructed to feast on. These latter were big T shaped stone affairs where the tribes elite would gather. They simply couldn't stop. And eventually the last tree was felled and that was the end.

Today the debt based money system requires continual growth, banks need to loan money, builders want to build, workers want to eat. There is no solution aside from collapse which is inevitable. We have had many partial collapses over the past century or two but cheap coal and oil has allowed us pickup and move on. What we need now, to balance things, is a major collapse that does away with the 20th century hyper expansionist model. We can still have roads and trucks and cars, just not on the same scale. It's one of the many things that didn't jibe with the whole utopian EV/fuel cell future, having millions of complex and arguably delicate vehicles traveling over broken highways and dirt roads.

That's been a global trend for decades, nations that once had decent road networks now covered in broken asphalt.


You go to this



Then to this



It's happening all around us.

The Key to Successfully Converting Paved to Unpaved Roads
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'J')anuary 11, 2021 A Growing Movement

There’s a growing movement of converting paved into unpaved roads. By 2015, road conversion projects had occurred in 27 states (including Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Michigan, Alabama, Pennsylvania and more). Why this growing trend?

Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, when asphalt and construction prices were low, many rural, low-volume roads were paved. Now, those roads are well beyond their design service life and need to be repaved. Local road agencies across the country have found it beneficial to convert to unpaved roads for the sake of cost savings...

[Newfie]

Lucky,

Good to hear. I see that occasionally. And it makes sense.

[theluckycountry]

It's why I bought a 4x4 and then an adventure bike, not that I need them need them yet, but the trend is clear. We're having another intense rain/storm/tornado cycle now and I can only imagine what the backroads will look like when I eventually get out there. There is some weird shit going down here in Oz, storms with 160 km/h winds, unheard of. Then 2 days ago a tornatic event south of Brisbane that cut a swath 60km long and tore down untold power poles and destroyed untold houses. That stuff is common in the US but not here. I guess insurance premiums will be going up again next year...

[Newfie]

Nearly lost the bridge on our woodlot this year. Took 44 truck loads of stone and some serious culvert work to secure the bridge.

https://ibb.co/Zzp4V8L

[careinke]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'N')early lost the bridge on our woodlot this year. Took 44 truck loads of stone and some serious culvert work to secure the bridge.

https://ibb.co/Zzp4V8L

[Newfie]

https://imgur.com/a/iYxce0D

URL=https://imgbox.com/hNbXdxyq][/URL]