Among Trump's many promises for 2024: 10 new cities

1. Good on Reagan for not deregulating more than necessary. When part of your platform is deregulation and the previous guy already started the ball rolling down the hill, it's best to finish the task in a controlled way, for the people, rather than overdoing it. 2. That is why we love free markets, because the alternative is tyranny and corruption. Free market capitalism isn't perfect, but it sure as hell is better than being held behind a wall with machine guns.

 

Washington DC started that way. However, it’s a stupid idea. We have infrastructure in places to support growth more economically than dropping stuff in the middle of a flyover area. Plus the pitch is really “lets create a city with 1950s culture away from liberals”.

 

I assumed that the figures I was looking at were adjusted GDP.

This was a pretty good site since it claims to only offer the facts. :https://www.factsarefirst.com/metrics/gdp-growth/

 

You got hate mail... Lol. All kidding aside, our big cities need a makeover big-time.

If they just remove squatters and their tents from the sidewalks that would be a good start. Some of these people need help with their addictions... while some need to be put in a sanitarium.

 

Thread probably fits here best. A lot of think pieces and some dumb crowing at the outset of the pandemic about cities losing population as showing some rejection of urban life generally, not a byproduct of the pandemic. Richard Florida, long a proponent, looks at the data 3 years later

 

Fascinating data. I find his last point interesting:

15. Rather than kill off downtowns, the pandemic has accelerated their ongoing evolution into more vibrant mixed-used neighborhoods as residents and especially visitors are coming to fill the gap left by the decline of office work.

 

That grabbed my eye as well. A lot happening in Tampa to that effect, but I did not realize it was so widespread

 

Yeah in the last couple of years there's been a lot of doom and gloom pieces about US downtowns. Here's one by Megan McCardle. She's wrong about a lot, and was certainly wrong here. These people live in the past, thinking everyone wants to live in a suburb and have a yard. Educated young people want to live in cities.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...r-long-covid-crisis-downtown-is-deep-trouble/

Downtown, however, is in trouble.

Between offices that have gone all-remote, and the much larger number that will eventually settle on some hybrid model, post-pandemic downtowns are likely to be short perhaps a quarter of their pre-pandemic workforce on an average day. And if the heart of the city has big dead patches, can the rest of the city be healthy? Or do America’s cities end up with the urban version of long covid?

I’m worried that too few people seem to be asking those questions — and that the discussions I do hear about rebuilding after the coronavirus pandemic often seem to be recycling long-term items from progressive wish lists rather than addressing the looming crisis.

 

about 25 years ago I went to see an Economist present his paper titled, Is the Internet a Substitute or a Complement to Cities. I thought it was pretty cool. &, here it is....

Geography and the Internet: is the Internet a substitute or a complement for cities?

1 author is notorious for his paper, The Deadweight Loss of Christmas which was yet 1 more hit to the rep of econ as the dismal science.

 

I LOVE THAT.

McCardle has always been an intellectual burr, because of her style that suggest that she is sympathetic to your pain but just goes with the data, and that if you disagree, it's because you're too emotional to recognize the truth you will eventually have to accept.

My prior favorite was Obamacare - she went on an on for years about how it was so unpopular, a political albatross on Dems, and that Obama's claim that it would be popular in time showed that he was not honest or intellectually serious.

This may be my new favorite for her - great catch

 

Yeah, who needs a City that’s the heart of a state that comprises 8% of US GDP and front faces the nations busiest port.

Such silliness/ignorance partisan nonsense.

 

It's so fitting. The idea of building new cities out of nothing is a perfectly totalitarian thing for Trump to want to do.

 

Wouldn’t ten FEWER cities be a better idea ?

Make America More Rural ?

 

Sort of related. Wooden skyscrapers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/clim...architecture?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f005

But this is a new dream for an old material.

In this sylvan vision, wooden skylines will be erected with glued lumber laminates that rival steel and concrete in strength and reliability. The architects designing tall timber structures say that, if desired, the Empire State Building could be replicated in wood.

Developers, regulators and the public aren’t yet sure what they think of this technology. Until recently, there were strict limits on how tall a wooden building could be.

 

Wow. Fascinating. Had not heard. 280' and 246'. Thinking of CSNY "Wooden Ships". Great stuff

 

Weird....I'm somehow agreeing with the Lefties on here...opposing a massive big ass government expansionist idea proposed by the leading pub candidate.

 

not rilly. Trump is mostly lefty when it comes to stuff like this.

 

He does have a model although apparently it didn't work out that well for his sometimes buddy and sometimes enemy Xi.
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