I LOVE density. I still live in the same place I grew up and they are "trashing" our location. I know this because that's what all the people age 50+ who live here are saying (it's actually just a subset of the 50+ people, but mostly in that demographic). Takes forever to take a left turn now and they HATE it. They hate sitting there waiting for 4 lanes (2 lanes in both directions) of traffic to clear so they can speed off to work out of the Bojangles parking lot.
Growing up here, I hated how walking places took a whole hour to go anywhere fun, had to walk on medians on a highway to get to the movie theater.
We finally have enough demand due to increased density that they're building out a bus stop within walking distance. I already can walk or bike to get groceries and the pedestrian infrastructure is good enough that I can walk to a few different places, adding the bus route gets me to the train station and even the airport. I experienced the tyranny of the car, first in my childhood, without a car, now in my adulthood, with a car, but soon a closer step free of that tyranny with increases in these kinds of transit services.
Not that I don't think the urbanization is perfect. One of the bigger ones I've noticed is everyone has sterile landscaping, dead grass lawns (even when not in a drought) and other stuff that provides little wildlife value. At least we have serviceberry trees in our neighborhood...
Thing is, even in rural areas, the landscaping will be messed up or sterile too. I even saw someone with a HUGE thicket of bamboo, easily a quarter acre, maybe more, I could only see it from the road. Now that trashes a location!! Not moving anywhere close to that! Yet, the rural life affords more space for less money, which allows, in the correct non-trashed location, the ability to create a valuable space for wildlife.
I find it a really hard choice to make. I'd have to live in a smaller house in a rural area accounting for the fact that I would absolutely go the cheapest I could get, down to a single wide. And giving up the nice infrastructure! I mean, I don't think density is perfect, there are tradeoffs, but I do find the version that I'm experiencing to be enjoyable. I think the only thing that would make it unbearable is if they started rolling back the transit/pedestrian/bike infrastructure progress we've made.
I do think there's an argument against over development, but that's still a "building up" problem. Build up tall, but with bigger green space - like 2-3 acres at least.
I couldn't believe how shitty ClickUp was when I was demoing project management software because it came highly recommended. Actually most of them were shitty. Monday, Asana, and all the others I can't remember. Just absolutely dog slow. I am so confused at how people are productive with these apps. By the time things had loaded, I had already forgotten what I was trying to do.
We settled on Basecamp and it is a joy to work with. Super fast keyboard shortcuts and easy navigation to projects. I'm glad we don't need the more exotic features in the other project management software, but if we ever do, it will probably be OpenProject, which was the runner up.
One really annoying example of YTM's algorithm is it (or whoever works on it) doesn't understand that a genre can have diverse sounds and instruments, so it will recommend songs that all sound the same.
Like if I start listening to house music, it will just recommend 100 songs that have organ 2 [0], even though house music is more diverse than that. Then it forces me to thumbs down the music, which also isn't what I want to do, because I have no idea what effect it's having on my recommendations. Is it just going to stop recommending house music altogether? Is it going to stop recommending songs with organ 2? Is it smart enough to understand that I just want less and not none? I do like organ 2, I just don't want to drown in it when I'm trying to find new music.
Or I will thumbs up a phonk song and it it just floods me with phonk remixes of pop songs.
Last.fm, on the other hand, seemed to have some way of towing a line of different enough without going too far. Both YTM and Spotify algos just do cookiecutter similarity.
> Then it forces me to thumbs down the music, which also isn't what I want to do, because I have no idea what effect it's having on my recommendations.
I feel this. Social media algorithms can be so complex and opaque now that I have to consciously consider what repercussions my interactions have. I have so little idea what interactions affect recommendations on e.g. Instagram that it almost feels random.
That I would so well internalize the "big brother is always watching what you click, what you hover, what you rewatch, what you comment on, what you pause to read longer than average, what you favorite, what you thumbs-down, etc" default experience provided by facebook/amazon/youtube/streaming platform/short form video platform/etc
that when I stick my head back into 4chan from time to time (to see what the motorcycle thread is talking about these days, or get idea for a show to watch) it's a like a physical weight lifts off me as I realize that no one and nothing gives a toss about what threads I open, or what posts I respond to, or what images I save or post. It won't change any feeds in opaque ways. It won't pollute my recommends (jokes aside about how how the choice of website already polluted matters enough). It won't do anything.
Blew my mind when I put my finger on what I was feeling and realized how pervasive this sort of thing has gotten in most every big tech online product.
One of the most infuriating things about recommendations engines is the way they handle non-English music. Maybe it's not with every language, but as soon as I listen to a Dutch song; the engines will recommend me ALL Dutch music, regardless of genre.
> i) The Affordable Care Act specifies that all Marketplace health plans must cover colorectal cancer screening for adults 45 to 75 years at zero cost [i]. That means no copay and no coinsurance, even if you haven't met your deductible. You pay $0.
At least with my ACA insurance plan, you have to appeal it first because they pretend like it's actually diagnostic even though it was billed as screening.
It's fraud prevention! You see, people love to shit in a bucket multiple times a year to have their shit tested all to defraud insurance companies.
Stormwater ponds are the bare minimum, not a deal sweetener. A deal sweetener would be an ecological management plan which demonstrates a true desire to limit the environmental impacts of this development as much as possible. And no, a storm pond company that just pours chemicals into the water to control algae and plants invasive privets around does not demonstrate that.
You're saying the data center has a small footprint, but it does not. You don't need that much stormwater pond if you don't have giant impervious surfaces.
Deal sweetener is footprint (buildings, parking lots, and substation) being 1/6 of the land with the other 5/6 dedicated to nature preservation.
Not all wide open space is created equal. If it's wide open space with Eurasian grasses that get cut every few weeks, it's useless and has 0 benefit to the local ecology. Even if they weren't cut, they're still do very little for the ecology in the area.
If those forests don't have keystone tree species, then it's the same.
The people running these companies are so incompetent, they can't even do greenwashng right.
I think you're a little miscalibrated on "giant impervious surface". The 244-acre site in question would have had three data halls, a substation, and one assumes parking lots and aprons. Here's a 300-acre Walmart distribution center in the same region. It has about 100 acres of concrete. I think that's a lot more than the data center would have had.
That's not how stormwater management works. Land elevation, adjacent land, the profile of the land (how much groundwater is there?) on which the structure is built (and probably even more that I'm not considering) all affect how big of a retention/detention pond is needed. And these requirements change over time when it is discovered that older sites' management techniques failed to adequately manage stormwater. The Walmart site was built at least two decades ago, no? That's enough time for stormwater management guidance and policy to change.
Even then, it is improper to assume anything about the stormwater management needs of one site based on another unrelated site. But even then, Walmart's site seems to be completely surrounded by stormwater management. Even the northwest corner of the site is a detention basin. [0]
The most obvious and logical conclusion to be made here is that an engineer told Microsoft they needed to have stormwater management of that size, so that's what they put in their plans. No sweetness, just lawsuit prevention.
If they want to be sweet, they should be building huge nature preserves (and they have enough money to afford it) into these plans instead of trying to be greedy by building the largest possible structures (they think) they can get away with.
I'm not understanding how you're extrapolating Lord of the Flies from what they're saying. A key part of "raised to be empowered by creation and creativity" would involve parents and other adults to do that. I haven't read the book in a while, were they stranded on the island with their parents?
0% of people will take your advice because it's half-baked and you didn't actually research the requirements (hint: simply knowing English is not enough) to get such a job. Or you purposefully omitted the requirements to make your point that it's "easy".
A word of advice: if you want to give advice, at least be realistic.
The requirements beyond being a native speaker, especially for the demographic of a forum like this, are not real show stoppers. And my advice is similar to the path I took with my own life, though not in Saudi Arabia. And it sent me on a journey that ended up way away from teaching English, but that's the nature of life.
The unspoken benefit of doing things like this is that it also exposes you to endless opportunities because the expats you meet half way around the world tend to be an exceptionally interesting batch. It's certainly a path I'd recommend to absolutely anybody who's not content with the typical treadmill of life.
I thought about it, but it turns out the clover that people use for lawns isn't native, and I figured that if I'm doing the lawncare, I'm going to go as native as possible. I don't think our natives here in the US - trifolium reflexum and trifolium carolinianum - work very well as a "lawn" like that. I do have the carolinianum seeds that I want to grow in a container. Both are rare, so I want to help keep them in existence.
I'm looking into native sedges right now since they provide a lot of ecological benefit and are better-suited to growing in the soil conditions of my yard.
Around here, it isn't possible to do native lawn. The grasses are too tall and the low groundcovers can't be walked on. I'm trying to plant wildflower meadow but it will be a couple of feet high.
My idea is that there are two types of lawns. There are the lawn you use, and it is fine to be grass. But there is a lot of lawn that is landscaping and that can be native plants.
Oh, do you perhaps mean Theodore Payne Foundation at https://theodorepayne.org/ ? I was just searching Thomas Payne Foundation and that was what came up
Their TOS has binding arbitration, so that sort of advice needs to be taken with a grain of salt, since, contractually, they are barred from using the traditional court system to litigate this issue. (Unless they opted out of arbitration when it was first added to the TOS, which most people don't.)
Growing up here, I hated how walking places took a whole hour to go anywhere fun, had to walk on medians on a highway to get to the movie theater.
We finally have enough demand due to increased density that they're building out a bus stop within walking distance. I already can walk or bike to get groceries and the pedestrian infrastructure is good enough that I can walk to a few different places, adding the bus route gets me to the train station and even the airport. I experienced the tyranny of the car, first in my childhood, without a car, now in my adulthood, with a car, but soon a closer step free of that tyranny with increases in these kinds of transit services.
Not that I don't think the urbanization is perfect. One of the bigger ones I've noticed is everyone has sterile landscaping, dead grass lawns (even when not in a drought) and other stuff that provides little wildlife value. At least we have serviceberry trees in our neighborhood...
Thing is, even in rural areas, the landscaping will be messed up or sterile too. I even saw someone with a HUGE thicket of bamboo, easily a quarter acre, maybe more, I could only see it from the road. Now that trashes a location!! Not moving anywhere close to that! Yet, the rural life affords more space for less money, which allows, in the correct non-trashed location, the ability to create a valuable space for wildlife.
I find it a really hard choice to make. I'd have to live in a smaller house in a rural area accounting for the fact that I would absolutely go the cheapest I could get, down to a single wide. And giving up the nice infrastructure! I mean, I don't think density is perfect, there are tradeoffs, but I do find the version that I'm experiencing to be enjoyable. I think the only thing that would make it unbearable is if they started rolling back the transit/pedestrian/bike infrastructure progress we've made.
I do think there's an argument against over development, but that's still a "building up" problem. Build up tall, but with bigger green space - like 2-3 acres at least.
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