The tearing down of trees for commercial and residential areas is happening here too. It's called urban sprawl. Land developers wipe out natural habitats like forests and leave sterile, artificial suburbs and plazas in its stead.
Most citizens never hear about it until it's too late because it's not easy to find out about the latest zonings. Trying to have a say in the process? Well, that's a whole new level of obfuscation.
The process is confusing for a reason: to keep concerned citizens like you and me out.
What is happening in Istanbul is happening here too.
This isn't urban sprawl, this isn't the tearing down of forests. This is removing a park in the middle of the city. Imaging if they came in and bulldozed Central Park.
You actually raise an interesting parallel: poor communities and planning organizations had railed against the bulldozers of Robert Moses for decades, but in the media he could do no wrong. That was before he tried to build in Central Park. When his policies finally threatened a beloved playground to build private parking, a group well-to-do mothers on the Upper West Side stood up and it triggered the beginning of his downfall.
while trying to build a parking lot in central park is part of moses' downfall, the picture painted here is not really accurate to my knowledge. for one, a lot of stuff was built in central park during moses' reign as parks commissioner, particularly early on: something like 20 playgrounds, including the demolition of the casino restaurant for rumsey playground; a ton of ball fields; tavern on the green; major changes to the central park zoo. more to the point, characterizing residents of the UWS in the 60s as well-to-do is particularly odd. Like the residents of greenwich village more commonly associated with Moses' downfall, I would think that middle class is the far more accurate description.
Yes, Moses built many things in the park. But more to the point, the many famous and well-heeled mothers and residents of west 67th street involved in the protest listed at the beginning of chapter 42 of "The Power Broker" makes your comment particularly odd.
Except it is more of a small, desolate city square, which was central to drug and sex traffic for years. The protests are most certainly not about saving the square.
You know how long the typical suburb takes to build? About three weeks. Three weeks of seasonal employment. You know how long that natural habitat is gone for? Forever.
Forests are not gone "forever". They reclaim land as soon as foot traffic dies. I am from Mogadisho, Somalia, and none of my old neighborhood is recognizable today: it's all jungles. Trees swallowed a quarter of the old city, and another quarter is lost to encroaching desert sand. In our case, "forever" was exactly 10 years.
Out of all the ways to fight sterile sprawl, why choose a method that promotes sterile density? Smart Growth suffers from a very severe and unfortunate unintended consequence: Drastically increased barriers to entry.
It is sad to see how many higher density proposals are squelched because they don't fit the vision of Smart Growth planners, or because the developers don't have multiple years worth of cash flow behind them to support the permitting process, public approval process, and zoning approvals process. Oh, and if you happen to want to have small scale low impact manufacturing (such as clothes manufacturing) instead of Mid-Scale retail or B-Class Office space...good luck waiting another few years for the Smart Growth planners to determine if your appeal is "smart" enough for them. These barriers to entry are how Smart Growth developers (like Paul Allen's Vulcan Real Estate) end up owning entire neighborhoods (like Seattle's South Lake Union).
Manhattan was almost completely built out, with an extremely diverse and interesting landscape, long before the planners took over. There is no need for them and their vision.
People who don't believe in inherent human rights, apparently. If there's something to be gained by being evil, Google will be evil. Maybe not under Sergy and Larry, but Google will live on after they die.
I think that's a bit extreme. It's not as though Penny Arcade sold people a bad service or product.
They have a right to their opinions, and they have a right to use their platform as a soapbox to broadcast them. Nothing wrong there. If you disagree, you disagree.
If you live in the future, garbage is gold. Garbage will be used to build business empires. Garbage will be sold, sorted, repurposed and resold in ways unimaginable, so determine what future assets you are throwing out.
Puts the saying "find something no one else wants to do and make a career out of it" in a whole new light.
Bonus Prediction: William Gibson will write a novel about garbage.
I imagine my dad, a man so engrained in the craigslist marketplace, would really struggle with any sort of technological advancement in this system. He likes the "old-fashioned" way of posting the item himself at a price he wants to sell for then having someone come by to check it out.
Anything else is going to be too complicated for him.
So what the hell is Obama doing anyway? He's done nothing but wring his hands and give lip service to human liberties.
You have to give Obama credit though, he is supernaturally charismatic and completely amoral, not to mention the best centrist in US political history.
I think that when he is gone and his powers of charisma and diversion have long dissipated, history will not be kind to him. He never had the courage and compassion to do the right thing.
I wonder what the reasoning was behind branding the author in the URL path as opposed to as a subdomain. It seems like a very strange approach to take from guys who have done the latter before.
If nothing else it sure makes posts from Medium very annoying on HN because I can't actually tell which blogger's post I'm going to read until I click the link (primarily read on iPad so no hovering).
SEO would be one theory. Pages under the same 'www' subdomain will provide a more positive SEO boost to medium.com than pages under various subdomains.
Why, simply because it's hosted on a different domain? It seems to help people reach an audience wider than they would otherwise, which is anything but bad for branding.
Seriously. The first thing I do if I strongly like or dislike an article is click the name/avatar to get more information about the author to better understand their background. Medium pushes me onto a page with the rest of their articles instead of a profile and I then have to hope that I can use Google to find their Twitter or website based on the small amount of information in their user blurb (because it doesn't force them to include either).
I'm willing to guess that GMail is among the top 3 most used products by HN's readership. This is a substantial change in the experience of that product, as well as deployment of what seems to be some pretty nontrivial technology powering that. It's also the kind of feature that will impact any startup that uses email as a communication channel with its customers (to wit: All of them).
If that's not relevant to the HN community I'm not sure what is.
Most citizens never hear about it until it's too late because it's not easy to find out about the latest zonings. Trying to have a say in the process? Well, that's a whole new level of obfuscation.
The process is confusing for a reason: to keep concerned citizens like you and me out.
What is happening in Istanbul is happening here too.