• 28 Posts
  • 386 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle

  • Speaking colloquially, I’m not an expert, just trying to impart intuition.

    India has monsoons, and unfortunately the city design is pretty awful for controlling water. There’s far too much concrete / not enough green space, and then insufficient drainage to handle even regular monsoons. In other countries, building out like this is simply illegal. For example, they will do flood modelling for both a new area for property, and each property needs to get approval for floods – both green space and drainage. Nothing like it in India, especially the older areas (informal settlements) which are simply not built for this.

    What sucks the most is that India also needs the water. They have underwater reservoirs which cannot fill up because the water stays on the surface, wipes away property and lives, and then goes elsewhere, leaving the water tables barely refreshed. The faster the water comes down in cloudbursts, the worse it is. They really could focus on how to control that water and save lives as well as have better, safer water storage.




  • I think realistically the two are about different time horizons. Anarchism is when the protocols are in our heads. It’s how we live. Communalism, to some extent, is about existing in a world where the implied violence of the system will shut down any “pure” anarchism. Create structure so the hierarchies know how to deal with it.

    Sometimes it’s not even about hostility. People just can’t imagine a world without what exists today. Just having anarchism in your head is revolutionary.




  • So I kind of want to split it halfway between you two: The reason all the regulation exists is because of how dangerous it is, the reason Nuclear is so expensive and time consuming is because of regulation. I reckon you could basically make a super dangerous Nuclear plant for not much more than a coal plant and in the same time frame. So, you could say it like “nuclear is too time consuming and expensive to be relevant”, or “nuclear is too dangerous to be relevant” and they’re both basically saying the same thing.




  • Yeah it’s kind of strange policy. It applies only to the city, in the way a congestion charge would be set up (you can drive maybe 20 km off and get fuel), but the government is hard right wing, so they tend to pick solutions which will hurt the rich the least (they already have newer cars and tend to get newer cars as the old ones wear out), and not really mean anything to the poor (they don’t have cars at all, so this is all a moot point). The “middle class” as is the example here tend to suffer.

    However, the middle class also has basically no solidarity with the poor, so like they’ll readily vote for policies which just wreck the poor, and because India is a “cheap labour” country, often the middle classes are sort of like the Petty Bourgeois in that they really hate the poor asking for more rather than punching up. Add that to the whole casteism / racism thing, and I don’t really feel bad for Kapil.

    The other other thing is that India (Delhi) is somehow extremely pedestrian friendly while also being extremely hostile to pedestrians. Like imagine small walkable communities surrounded by stroads and a “might makes right” approach to driving, and a government which is committed to more roads (keeps the rich and the poors separated), and you have a place where kids might be able to walk to school on their own, or have walking mean near-certain death depending on exactly where they live in relation to the school.









  • I watched a Youtube video about this, and yeah, induced demand affects everything, but when it affects Buses, you get more buses, and that’s more efficient. When it affects Trains, you get more trains, and that’s more efficient. The only time it gets less efficient is when it affects cars. The moral of the story was: It wasn’t the Induced Demand, it was the Cars that were the problem.