San Francisco Mayor blames ‘right-wing attacks on the city, including in the media’
According to a new Gallup poll released this week, only 52% of Americans rate San Francisco as safe anymore, freefalling from a previous poll only 15 years ago when the city scored one of the highest ratings and was viewed as one of the safest cities in the entire country.
Newfie wrote:There are ways to deal with this situation but they will never happen. You have to start with the kids, improve their environment, improve their health, improve their education. Then in 3 to 5 generations things will be better.
Simple eh?
Plantagenet wrote:The public school system is a disaster in city after city across the USA. There are many schools in large cities in the USA where not a single child reads or can do math at grade level, or at best there are a handful in the entire school.
Worldwide Average Differences Among Blacks, Whites, and East Asians
IQ test scores: "85 102 106"
Decision times: "Slower Intermediate Faster"
Cultural achievements: "Low High High"
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
mousepad wrote:Plantagenet wrote:The public school system is a disaster in city after city across the USA. There are many schools in large cities in the USA where not a single child reads or can do math at grade level, or at best there are a handful in the entire school.
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/ ... 0years.pdf
What you blame the school for when they have to teach glorified monkeys? Table 3 on page 265 summarizes it nicely.
Newfie wrote:Lucky,
There are ways to deal with this situation but they will never happen. You have to start with the kids, improve their environment, improve their health, improve their education. Then in 3 to 5 generations things will be better.
Simple eh?
New York City Mayor Eric Adams is dealing with yet another problem: A century-old water pipe broke early Tuesday, flooding midtown streets and the city's busiest subway station.
theluckycountry wrote:NYC's Crumbling Infrastructure On Full Display As Century-Old Water Line Floods Times SquareNew York City Mayor Eric Adams is dealing with yet another problem: A century-old water pipe broke early Tuesday, flooding midtown streets and the city's busiest subway station.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/nycs- ... mes-square
Whatever, no big deal one waterpipe, but most cities are old and all the infrastructure in them old. Down here the government doesn't replace many old water pipes, too expensive. They have a machine that bores out the crud and then they sleeve it with a new plastic pipe. The overall pipe diameter is reduced but the pressure increased because the old one was so clogged with rust and mineral buildup. Then there is the sewage network which doesn't lend itself to this sort of fix. It needs to be dug up in it's entirety.
Then we get to the issue of the lifespan of a steel reinforced concrete tower, 60 to 80 years if it was built well. Many of these went up in the 1970's and eighties and will have to come down in the decades ahead. No big deal if there is plenty of room around them but often they are built very close together making demolition a nightmare. And will they be worth demolishing in the future? Even now the value of newish towers have fallen due to lack of demand (post-covid) and the only thing that makes the equation work is that you can use the land to build a bigger one and recoup the demo+land costs.
Imagine these cities in the future, in an energy starved world, one where building materials are sky high? Imagine a city full of crumbling abandoned old buildings, who would want to be walking around them? Well that's a bit apocalyptic but unless they can find a way to make our cities valuable again I could see it coming. They still spend inordinate sums prissing them up with new bridges and tunnels and whatnot but that is simply the "previous investment psychology" or "previous investment trap" where governments are locked into the old ways and continue building monuments to their names.
I detest going into the city center now. It's nothing like it was 40 years ago. Back then it was vibrant and clean, full of interesting shops and tasty food outlets. Now it's just roadworks and closed footpaths, empty shops and cheap asian cuisine, homeless people occupying the benches and wandering around crying out their madness. 1970~1980, the peak of western civilization, the peak of energy use per capita too.
[/quote]noobtube wrote:theluckycountry wrote:NYC's Crumbling Infrastructure On Full Display As Century-Old Water Line Floods Times Square
American cities have always been barely-controlled chaos. It's just that today you have all the finances going toward vanity projects... skyscrapers, stadiums, and arenas subsidizing FIRE (finance/insurance/real estate), athletes, and entertainers. It is entirely unproductive at a time when the productive capital of the country is shrinking, not growing. .
August 07, 2023
The most revealing thing about Friday’s Union Square pop-up riot is that as police dispersed the mob, members started chanting, “Black Lives Matter.”
Make no mistake: This was not a protest on the part of teenagers drawn to 14th Street by Kai Cenat, an online “influencer” with millions of followers, including thousands eager for free PlayStations he used to lure them to demonstrate his importance. But as dozens in the crowd were being arrested for vandalism, they realized they had a useful line of defense: invoking the movement predicated on police mistreatment of minority youth.
The NYPD was not intimidated into turning a blind eye toward the destruction of food carts and cars — not this time around. But the chant pulled up the curtain on what has long been the dirty secret of mass protests, from the Watts riots to the rampages accompanying the “protests” of the police homicides of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
There’s always been a significant part of the crowd that is, in Harvard social scientist Edward Banfield’s legendary phrase, “rioting for fun and profit.”
Plantagenet wrote:I just posted in the "Death of Suburbia Thread" that the premise of that thread has turned out to be totally wrong.
What we actually see in the US today isn't the death of Suburbia but the death of cities.
In city after city, the downtown areas are being abandoned to the homeless, drug addicts and drug dealers, and criminals and thieves.
Since what we area actually seeing in the US today is the death of cities, I've decided to start a new thread on "THE DEATH OF CITIES"
And this isn't exclusively an American problem.....last time I was in Paris I was astonished to see homeless camps in many parts of the city, and drug use and other criminal activity going on in public.
EnergyUnlimited wrote:
Now you have Energy Unlimited's conjecture:
According to a study published in Nature in 2020 the weight of all human made stuff has surpassed the weight of all things living on this planet for the first time in human history.
Plantagenet wrote:In New York City Mayor Adams recently estimated the cost of housing all the illegal immigrants at 12 BILLION DOLLARS!!!!! It doesn't help that NYC is putting them up in luxury hotels and paying top dollars for them to stay there.
When Joe Biden opened up the southern border and allowed the massive influx of illegal immigration to occur, I'm not sure he thought through how badly this might impact places like New York City and other cities where many penniless illegal immigrants wind up living on the streets.
Welcome to New York City where only the homeless can afford to stay in the best hotels....
Cheers!
theluckycountry wrote:Youth brawls draw hundreds to 2 California malls
https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... e-response
Chicago TV news crew robbed at gunpoint while reporting on a string of robberies
https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wi ... -102652494
Just business as usual in American cities? Perhaps, but perhaps things are progressively getting worse over time. That is certainly the case in Australian cities, which are in no way as crime ridden as our US counterparts, 'yet'. It's doubtful we will ever catch up, we will probably always lag, but at what point do you say enough is enough and move away?
The NYPD was not intimidated into turning a blind eye toward the destruction of food carts and cars — not this time around. But the chant pulled up the curtain on what has long been the dirty secret of mass protests, from the Watts riots to the rampages accompanying the “protests” of the police homicides of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
There’s always been a significant part of the crowd that is, in Harvard social scientist Edward Banfield’s legendary phrase, “rioting for fun and profit.”
noobtube wrote:Crime has always been "bad" in American cities because that's where the wealth is.
noobtube wrote:people complaining about crime is like someone complaining about being wealthy.
noobtube wrote:
The cities have survived fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, power outages, political corruption, and organized crime, and so on. Why? Because cities sit on the best land, with the most infrastructure investment. Young people, immigrants, and the rich love the cities.
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