I don't like this. You're demanding a sync interaction from someone who is probably very busy.
If you have a question, just ask it. If you want to have a 5, 10, or 30 min, discussion, ask for that.
I'd prefer a long form question with all the communication from your side fully expressed, then I can ponder on it and multiplex it between my dozen other things.
As someone who receives lots of questions as a core part of my job, often concurrently via multi async comms channels, my biggest challenge is controlling cognitive load so I can be efficient and effective. Having a spot of politeness in the interaction, as the parent suggests, helps me meter the flow of information in my direction. I much prefer it. Horses for courses I guess.
Reducing the information content of a message, effectively concealing the information that you already plan to send after “Hi”, isn’t being polite to people with this personality, it’s frustrating.
I guess you can feel less obligated if the question hasn't been fully asked yet.
Still.. the question is out there. At least when it's written out, you can know if it's a worthwhile question. Or ask some quick follow-ups that they hadn't thought to nail down first.
I'm sorry, but this is wrong. By including a brief description of your problem you are actually giving them a choice whether or not to respond, rather than just guessing at your intentions. Don't worry about a huge message appearing on screen, almost all popups truncate the message after a certain length.
I think there’s a middle ground. “Hey, are you free to talk about Project X?” is a perfectly valid entry to something where you know an actual conversation will be needed. Likewise “I’m having trouble with the frobinator, when I run frob -x blah it gives me this error: XXX, are you able to help?” if you just need an answer.
Niceites are, well, nice. They help to make sure everyone remembers we’re all human beings rather than question answering machines, but we are also talking to get a job done. Unless you’re actually a good friend of mine if you drop me a message asking me how my weekend was, I know that you’re just lining up to ask me a question, but now I have to do The Dance to work out what it’s going to be about, whether I have time for it, and if I’m even the right person to ask.
I agree. There is no free service. Fake is when candidates stuff in lot of technologies randomnly in their resume, doesn't add those technologies under any project or real experience in any company (think Tech. skills section vs Project Description section) and sometimes even add experience for the time when they were doing their course.
(I am not a US citizen, but visited many times)
Why not build houses using concrete/cement? Poor Asian countries have been building houses for decades using concrete and less maintenance. No, it is not about weather. Concrete can be easily used in Southern US states where winter is less than a month or no snow at all. At least the structure can be concrete and the walls be wood or drywall. I think it is the wood mafia trying to make a living out of enforcing city codes to use only lumber for houses.
The type of lumber used to frame American houses is (well, used to be) quite cheap. Concrete is like $10 per cubic foot. While, a timber framed wall is mostly air. An 18x8 foot wall made of timber would take about 16 boards to make and take an experienced team less than 20 minutes to put up. That's $100 or so in material costs at current (extremely high) prices, plus maybe $100 in labor (this is pretty hard to estimate, actually).
That same wall would be like $700 if made from concrete. And labor costs would be probably equally as expensive because those forms take a long time to assemble. They need to be shipped in, assembled, left to cure, disassembled, then hauled away. While lumber just needs to be dropped off the back of a truck into a pile in the yard.
Poured concrete will often use a lot of lumber anyway, since the concrete needs forms to be poured into. However, using precast concrete or CMUs avoids this.
Another type of concrete construction in parts of Asia uses prefabricated, reinforced concrete members. Piers, beams, and panels with internal steel made in a controlled factory setting and having high strength. It's a bit like half-timber construction but replacing the thick timber with concrete. They also use similar concrete for telephone or neighborhood power poles.
They are brought on site and erected by cranes and pile drivers to build the frame of a house somewhat like with large timber. The panels are set across beams to fill in floor areas, and walls are closed with non-load bearing elements, whether brick, blocks, stucco, drywall, etc. I am not sure how well this method works for seismically active areas though, where you would need to tie those in-fill wall areas into the structure.
Also, a lot of home construction in the US is single family and this type of construction is by and large mostly wood.
Concrete is used as a base for apartment (like four or five over two) but wood still makes up the majority, and there aren’t a whole lot of residential projects in the country built as massive concrete tower blocks outside of some specific regions.
Partially because until recently, wood was the most plentiful and cost-effective building material in parts of the US. It is far more seismically resilient than brick or concrete.
It is also much easier to modify if you want to add a window or other opening - cutting an opening in a concrete or cinder block wall is much harder.
Wood, when responsibly harvested, also sequesters C02.
That all said, it's possible we'll see an uptick in the popularity of alternative structural materials to wood - but traditional concrete has an absolutely massive carbon footprint, and low-carbon and low cost concrete alternatives aren't readily available on the market at this time.
We don’t need to do much of anything, but tall buildings are fine, given that they minimize the land impact of a given amount of square footage, and denser communities have lower land footprint and lower per capita carbon emissions.
(European cities are plenty dense at moderate heights, but they also offer much smaller living quarters than American ones; a Parisian studio is in the range of 9-35 m^2 whereas an average Manhattan studio is 51 m^2, and most Americans would consider it small.)
Skyscrapers specifically (tall buildings depends on definition of height), but they’re very energy intensive. You can only operate, construct, and maintain them with cheap oil.
The problem isn’t density (most European towns are perfect here actually) but too much density. Manhattan is the opposite spectrum of suburbia, and neither are very desirable. France actually does this well in Paris, as you mentioned. The American thing to do would be tear down every arrondissement and replace with skyscrapers. Paris sort of made that mistake with part of the city before they stopped.
I have to imagine that it's not that skyscrapers are great for emissions, but that the suburbs are just abysmal and so everything looks good in comparison.
Walkable neighborhoods and bike-friendly development in mixed-use medium density areas is probably the best. The main issue with suburbs is that you have to drive everywhere, not necessarily the density.
Operating them is not that expensive. A building's heating and cooling needs are proportional to surface area, not volume, and in a given apartment building the vast majority of walls are shared with other units instead of outside. So a taller building is more and more efficient with regards to climate control, unless it doesn't contain a whole lot of volume. The Burj Khalifa is obviously not ideal but at least judging by, say, Hong Kong the optimal sweet spot for a building is 30-40 stories, where you're not running into massive extremes of either cost or carbon emission.
The reason the suburbs perform so poorly is, among other things, transport very quickly becomes the largest contributor to emissions. Hong Kong is so dense that not only is the "fifteen minute city" more than a reality for non-work trips, but most people are within a 15 minute walk or bus ride of massive shopping malls with department stores.
That being said, the end picture looks fuzzy after some more searching, mostly because it's hard to isolate variables about cities (their wealth, their climate, etc.) and also because the definition of what a "city" is varies globally. Other than "very car oriented suburbs with large lots and home sizes are big carbon emitters per capita."
The building's heating and cooling are just one part of the equation - you also have massive amounts of construction materials, lack of tree coverage, maintenance, transportation of materials to and from the building, etc. You did call these things out a bit in your post toward the end. I'd also argue the lack of local agriculture and the need to ship massive amounts of materials to skyscraper cities is an unaccounted for c02 emissions problem as well.
> Hong Kong is so dense that not only is the "fifteen minute city" more than a reality for non-work trips, but most people are within a 15 minute walk or bus ride of massive shopping malls with department stores.
I bet Munich or Amsterdam are 15 minute cities too and you don't need the skyscrapers (or at least as many).
You also rightly called out that the car-oriented suburbs are big time carbon emitters. How will this change with electric cars? Will suburbs become more competitive with cities on a per-capita emissions basis? Idk. If they get close to parity that would be an alarming development for proponents of cities. I think the suburbs have a lot of potential if we could relax zoning laws and more people did things like have suburban gardens.
The ideal state IMO are mixed-use, walkable and bike-able neighborhoods. They should incorporate the local environment well. If you live near the Mediterranean you paint your house white to keep it cool ad develop architectural characteristics. If you live in Ohio you have lots of tree cover, etc. Suburbs are undesirable for obvious reasons, but I think cities will be/are undesirable for other less understood reasons. Right now people in America look to them and say hey look they have great c02 emissions but it depends on what you compare them to. Do small towns and villages in Normandy have worse per-capita c02 emissions?
We also have to consider there is an acceptable level of c02 emissions either way, we don't need to race to the bottom. Overall I'd say if we focus on living sustainably, and reduce the need for nation-state level manufacturing and support, we'd be better off.
I have the opposite opinion; skyscrapers minimize the amount of land used for housing, so they are fantastic at reducing land impact.
Disconnected lawns or apartment courtyards and single street trees are far too small to provide a meaningful, thriving ecosystem, particularly for roaming animals. Hong Kong's extreme density, meanwhile, allows 40% of the territory's land to be uninterrupted natural habitat.
The lack of local agriculture is a far greater issue than just what skyscrapers enable. At least in the US (I'm sure in Europe as well) the seasonality of food is no longer a huge deal for availability because we're willing to ship produce halfway around the world, and that's a problem for both cities and suburbs.
I'm not super confident that the timeline for our electricity getting green is going to proceed at the pace required. And there are also lots of other things electric cars don't fix, like extensive amounts of roadway runoff from roads and parking lots, impact to physical habitats, higher energy use, etc. There still isn't a great heating or cooling solution that is both low energy and works in temperature extremes, and your US suburban homeowner would balk at buying a property without AC.
> I have the opposite opinion; skyscrapers minimize the amount of land used for housing, so they are fantastic at reducing land impact.
I don't think land impact (assuming we're talking about the same thing) is much of an issue. Most places in Europe for example, these small towns and whatnot live quite ok with nature without having to concentrate all human activity into a city.
> The lack of local agriculture is a far greater issue than just what skyscrapers enable. At least in the US (I'm sure in Europe as well) the seasonality of food is no longer a huge deal for availability because we're willing to ship produce halfway around the world, and that's a problem for both cities and suburbs.
Yes but they make the problem worse. Nobody in NYC can farm, for example. I can grow a decent vegetable garden in my backyard in the suburbs (and I do). These cities also enable excess population density which require all of these things to be flown and shipped in because it's impossible to get locally. Suburbs even do a better job than this.
I'm not super confident that the timeline for our electricity getting green is going to proceed at the pace required. And there are also lots of other things electric cars don't fix, like extensive amounts of roadway runoff from roads and parking lots, impact to physical habitats, higher energy use, etc. There still isn't a great heating or cooling solution that is both low energy and works in temperature extremes,
The solution is to look back to what worked in the past for inspiration. Tree coverage, specific construction materials, etc.
> and your US suburban homeowner would balk at buying a property without AC.
Yea... and nobody is buying a condo in NYC without air conditioning or heat either.
It varies between regions, but in general, building with wood is significantly faster and less expensive than using concrete. They are also easier to remodel, extend, and ultimately demolish, but these are secondary reasons.
Some areas, such as regions of Florida or Arizona for example, have substantial historical housing stock made from concrete. However, the majority of new construction is wood for the reasons stated above.
There are not (to my knowledge) any building codes that prohibit concrete construction for residential.
At least in FL, slab-on-grade with concrete block for the first story + wood frame for additional stories is incredibly common because it is far less susceptible to termite & moisture rot damage than slab + wood frame or wooden pier + beam.
Environmental concerns are one reason. Concrete is more environmentally intensive than lumber, and the construction industry already accounts for a significant portion (about 10%) of global GHG emissions. We should be moving away from using concrete when more sustainable alternatives exist.
The US has vast timber forests, so it is inexpensive, and timber (or steel) framing works well for earthquake resistant construction. A large part of the US is a seismic hazard zone and the building regulations reflect that. You can find older neighborhoods with unreinforced masonry throughout the US but those date from a time before they had modern building regulations and before the extent of earthquake risks were fully understood.
According to this article [0], cement is the source of 8% of the worlds carbon dioxide emissions. Switching from renewable materials like wood to carbon emitters like concrete is not what the world needs right now.
> I think it is the wood mafia trying to make a living out of enforcing city codes to use only lumber for houses.
Not really. No more than the ice mafia made the inuit build igloos out of ice. People do with what they have. The eastern seaboard is chock full of trees. When the settlers arrived, they used what was readily available. It's far easier for settlers to make homes out of wood than stone/rocks/etc and concrete didn't exist back in the 1600s/1700s. And as the borders of the country expanded westward, the style of homes made its way west as well.
My ex-wife is Chinese from a city in China where everything is made out of cement.
The reason? The region also lacks trees. They have an abundance of the raw materials for cement, but not wood.. So that is what they used.
Cement is also a terrible material for many climates. Here (ontario) the freeze/thaw cycle causes it to crack unless you use a lot of costly methods to prevent this.
My criminal mind says this could be a way for Apple (and Later Google) to benefit more, from the difference in the price of their phones - Thanks to pricing based on Storage. Once they allow these photo storages to duplicate your data, you will need double the storage and phone starting line-up would be 256GB and upwards very soon. I think innovation to make money has saturated, and now it would be quirks like this to make more money per phone.
FYI. On a related note - I was downvoted a couple of days back for an almost similar comment on the ABP uBO combo.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26058260
It seems ABP is shady that they let some businesses bypass their blocker.
uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus on FF, blocks all the youtube ads for me. DDG didn't. I am okay to sacrifice CPU for not watching the ads and hence sticking with the former duo.
FYI, AdBlock Plus is made by a garbage company who allow companies to buy their way around the blocker in return for fulfilling some token guidelines about ad formatting etc.
1) He/she is in a meeting, they have a choice - to or not to reply
2) If their screen is shared, I am not disturbing the meeting attendees making them read what I typed, and what comes in the notification pop-up
3) Gives enough time for the other person to switch context
4) Ignore me for an indefinite amount of time and continue their work
If the other person responds, my second comment would be with full details.