https://www.404media.co/email/ed674050-352a-4fa2-94f4-74b079733526/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter (I took no part in this AI campaign but I find it hilarious- now will Elon deliver?) Perhaps a motivated "fake it til you make it" activist?
A structural design concept for a removable condo (Also a grand plan to fix the housing shortage and increase social mobility)
Got a new job opportunity, and need to work in another city for 3 months? Why break a lease, when you can just create a new system for parking a condo?
Reduce building costs by 2/3rds- mass produce the components needed to assemble and construct a building. Standardize everything- window repair, insulation, hydraulic jack, heat pumps, water hookups, staircases, so whenever something needs replacement, it doesn't require a local contracter, since they might not be available. All the repair tools can be driven from out of town if unavailable, since the blueprints would be open-sourced.
Don't like your neighbor? Vote with your feet, and a hydraulic lift!
"L'enfer, c'est les autres" Huis Clos, 1944- Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" - Virginia Woolf
Si l'on ne peut pas choisir celui de son voisin, les voisins pourront peut-être choisir ailleurs
Want to improve the healthcare system? Start building houses!
https://nhchc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Housing-is-Health-Care.pdf
https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/briefs/housing-and-health-overview-literature
The primary and essential function of housing, to provide a safe and sheltered space, is absolutely fundamental to the people’s health and well being. – Dearbhal Murphy
"It’s one thing to fail to plan for extreme weather and climate impacts. It’s another to actively impede them and even make it illegal to consider climate impacts in real estate planning (don’t look up!). That’s what North Carolina’s Republican supermajority appears to have done over and over, at the behest of developers who wanted fewer regulations, more land to build on, and no guardrails to protect against some of the destruction we’re seeing in that state right now. Not my normal vibe, I know, but just like we need every solution, we also need to understand that our votes matter, that our resilience is local, and that every future decision that doesn’t take climate risk into account is a decision that puts you and your family in danger." https://www.mollywood.co/p/power-grab-ai-turned-new-york-climate
From my post-scarcity respository: "Imagine you have a slow -moving, Catgeory 5 hurricane in the Caribbean. Northbound, it is expected to reach the southern shores of Florida in days. A condo highrise has removabable condos, and all the units can be emptied from the frame structure, and temporarily moved upstate or under ground. See my blog post on a letter I wrote to Freeman Dyson in 2008."
According to Congressional polarities, Republicans want extra land to build without regulations, and Democrats are typically against additional land or zoning changes. However, both appear to be glaringly missing a third option, reusable space in the form of portable condos with buildings that can be emptied in the event of an oncoming storm. While a tornado can appear out of nowhere, a hurricane and some wildfires can be avoided with portable condos. The insurance legalese calls this "Act of God". In my first trip to DisneyWorld in 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck, and most southern Floridians drove upstate, where all the hotels and motels and motels had no vacancy.
This would reduce insurance premiums, because large areas of Florida and California are uninsurable, or require FEMA insurance, due to (wild) fire, hurricane, tornados (midwest). So what exactly are insurance companies and climate planners doing when they are encouraging construction of buildings in areas with a high probability of a hurricane, such as in much of Florida, Louisiana, Texas (Galveston and the South-eastern coast, as can be seen by Hurricane Helene?
The word "resilience" and "adaptation" is not taken literally enough or fast enough. The definition of resilience is:
"re·sil·ience /rəˈzilēəns/ noun 1. the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. "the remarkable resilience of so many institutions" 2. the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity. "nylon is excellent in wearability and resilience""
Avoiding a hurricane is objective number 1. That comprises 99% of the resilience and adaptation effort. Building a house on steel frames to withstand 225mph winds is another way, of course, but that increases the cost of construction, not to mention the middlemen involved in getting a large insurance payout whenever a hurricane strikes. Thus the insurance system may prefer expensive premiums, so as long it doesn't become uninsurable, and they can fuel a construction industry with a frequent turnover. With portable condos at least, accessing areas that have moldy insulation might be easier because the high cost of insulation and repairs is mainly due to the labor of hiring someone to crawl into an attic or a crawlspace to remove mold, asbestos and add new spray foam, etc.
Another way of viewing resilience is like healthcare. There's preventative healthcare, and then there's treat-after-the-injury/disease healthcare. If you're in the construction business, you might welcome a steady income stream of building houses where they constantly get damaged from gusty winds and hail storms. If you're in the preventative construction business, there is no business to do. Yet one needs to use reason to conceptualize measures to avoid needing to repeat construction where it can be avoided.
As Mario Andretti once said, “If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough.”
The irony is that single casting for automotive frames are prohibitively uninsurable, due to the cost of repairs/replacement- cheaper to produce (assuming no accidents), but far more expensive to insure, because, a dent will cause it to be totalled... But like Apple, capitalistic companies aren't considered where the product goes once it is sold- they only care about selling the service or product, not dealing with the aftermarket. If they could, they'd sell you another Tesla instead of getting one repaired. The purpose of buying a car is to get from point A to point B, not to have a brand new car just because a company wants you to. If Tesla were a monopoly, they'd benefit more from requiring an OEM repair/replacement than an aftermarket solution. The same analogy applies to Condos and buildings: Open Source car.
Why do I take this "third position"? Well, have you ever visited a National Park? Nice, ain't it? Let's say one party wants to eliminate them. And the other party wants to preserve them, but won't budge on any zoning changes to a city like San Francisco. In 1970, Hunter Thompson ran for Aspen Sherriff and I clearely recall reading somewhere that one of his campaign agenda was to ensure that no building was taller than two stories, to prevent blocking the view of the Rockies. That's the current situation. So both parties become virtue signallers- "I am better than you are." Etcetera ad infinitum. Trench warfare by other means. Our taxpayer dollars are basically watching two parties claim how virtuous they are. When Americans would be beter off developing right to repair companies.
Thus, I would rather not develop on more federal and agricultural land, along with state forest preserves and wildlife sanctuaries. But I think cities could improve their dilapidated properties by building up. In cities like NYC, which are known to always change, perhaps building up would be more welcoming than a place like SF. And maybe LA might also build up, turning into a Bladerunner city from 1982 (which I always interpreted as appearing larger than it really was).
In summary:
Aspen, Colorado: 2 story building limit
San Francisco: Angry, grandfathered, long time locals protesting that their view of the waterfront may be obscured:
NYC: Billionaire's row and conspicuous affluence in the sky above others, overlooking Central Park
While it's understandable that some cities may prefer to preserve their charming small towns, the NIMBY cities and states are facing an impending housing unaffordability crisis. YIMBY? One solution is to make housing more affordable, whereever it is. Portability is one aspect of affordability. Modularity is another. Integrating both requires interoperability, and that's where open source comes in. To the extent that a public road is an interoperable space for cars and horse carriages is dependent on society's willingness to accomodate both. That still works in parts of the world where life is slow, income isn't based on whether one gets to work on time driving 20 mph over the speed limit because they're running late. The road is basically where you can see how people who earn more drive faster because they're literally earning more than those who are driving the speed limit.
"Grandpa died last week
And now he's buried in the rocks
But everybody still talks about
How badly they were shocked
But me, I expected it to happen
I knew he'd lost control
When I speed built a fire on Main Street
And shot it full of holes" -Bob Dylan,
"Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" -1966 Hurricanes have been happening for centuries. Does anyone still get shocked when it happens to them?
Some Bing AI images generated with DALL-E for an old idea
from https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/project-vs-reality/the-contemporary-resort :
"Approximately 500 guest rooms line the outer walls of this building. Room renovation should have been a simple matter of replacing modules when refurbishment was needed; however, it was found that the modules settled and became stuck in place, rendering them irremovable. Most of Disney's Polynesian Resort was built this way also."
The winter probably makes the condos hard to dislodge. Some lubrication wouldn't be a bad idea. Most Craftsman cabinet drawers probably use some similar type. A dishwasher has a rollable rack. Really no reason the weight tolerances can't be simulated before the optimum preventative sagging limit is determined. The condo rails could leave an additional few centimers between the walls to wheel back and forth periodically (2-3 months) so that it is not stationary for long periods of time and rusts.
Like Carvana, but for Condos
https://www.yesterland.com/contemporary.html
"WW: Aside from demonstrating a concept, what advantage would there being in building the rooms in a factory? JK: This type of construction was attractive to the company because, in theory, it would cut the building time in half. They were battling tight deadlines to get the Vacation Kingdom built on time. By 1970, all the available 1972 convention dates for the Contemporary had already been booked, so a delay was unthinkable. Usually, you built a structure and then the rooms. By doing both at the same time and then combining them, it would save time and money. It ended up doing neither. U.S. Steel estimated the cost for each room would be $17,000, but the final cost was over $100,000 a room in 1971 dollars. So imagine building a new updated room at 2010 costs and then the additional cost of installing it."
If you read the above article about Yesterland, you might conclude and concur that the construction of the Contemporary Resort was never intended to be modular. And you are correct. However, this isn't the purpose of this repository. It's to explore the feasibility of a portable condo with an elevator. I research the possible, not the impossible. And I definitely don't base research on one-time experiments. What starts as a rumor has no less value to a good idea than one that meets conventional architecture.
"“If you have everything under control, you're not moving fast enough.” — Mario Andretti.
I am not someone who thinks there is necessarily a dream job for everyone. What I do believe though, is that there are many great opportunities that get ignored because the cost of relocation is too prohibitively expensive, either because the duration of the job is too short or too long (and too pricey for a short term rental). And I do not think that makes for a good economy, both for individuals, and national economies. Many people invest in homes as a source of value appreciation, but the low percentage of home-ownership does not indicate a good metric for a prosperity. I think reducing debt is a greater indicator of prosperity, but also increases the ability for individuals to invest in new enterprises. If everyone is paying off a 30-year underwater mortgage, what's the value in that? Therefore I think it's wise for construction firms to allow individuals to pursue both short and long-term jobs, but to be able to spend minimal time moving. Not every town has a hotel or rental property that one can move in and out for months- and even if it were, is it worth the $100=$250 a night? Being able to move fast enough, as in the Andretti quote, is all about allowing people to have everything under control.
The problem is that most researchers aren't interested in history and might only read headlines and conclude what the research stated. But all that proves is that real innovation often gets overlooked, because no one is interested in testing a theory that was never even developed.
"About 10 years ago, when people probably had more attention span than they do now, a survey from a respected organization concluded that the majority of Americans read only headlines.
It was probably worse than that then — who wants to admit to such superficial habits, after all? — and it’s probably much worse than that now.
That’s one reason headlines matter a lot. It’s as far as most people get. The nuances of a story, no matter how much they may matter to reporters and their editors, don’t always break through. Headlines do."
As in anything in life, do you your own research.
Supplemental repository: https://github.com/hatonthecat/Post-scarcity
If you're questioning why I would ask Bing this, you should also ask why Bing would allow me to make this query.
Yes, some of these generations are extremely impractical. Some are comical.
I prefer to generate ones that aren't entirely impractical. Perhaps this is a labor of evolution.
