Its all nice and good to point out the problem that parking causes in terms of the development or destruction of any downtown, however unless the lack of parking is compensated for by having an excellent public transit system (like Portland) simply removing parking or not starting to address the issue is a recipe for disaster.
Take Los Angeles for example, there are way too many parking structures and lots all over downtown. Unfortunately there isn't really a way to get into downtown unless you are withing 5 miles of it. And you don't really want to live in that area. Even the SF Bay area for that matter, yes there is BART and Muni, but unless you live in the city (for the most part) BART is quite useless if your area of interest is more than a mile outside the sliver that BART services (ignoring all the other problems BART has), and Muni is a joke during rush hour, not to mention the combination of BART + Muni + anything else that you use gets to be pretty pricey.
Unless the issues of public transit are addressed properly, nothing will fix the parking problem or the congestion problem or the gas usage problem or the pollution problem to mention a few.
> unless the lack of parking is compensated for by having an excellent public transit system.
That is the key. If public transit system was destroyed or never developed a city would have to either build parking facilities or build a public transit system. It all comes down to these questions:
- "How do we expect people to get downtown?"
- "How do we expect people to get around downtown?"
The approach a city takes will mostly answer these questions.
If nobody lives downtown and they have to commute from distant suburbs, it could make sense in the short term to start building parking spaces. The city is eventually transformed into an "office city". Everything closes down at 5. It is hard to even move around the city, so office workers would just go to lunch some place nearby their office, then quickly get in their cars and escape to the suburbs. That is not a city that I would like to live near or go to. But that is what a lot of American cities have become.
If many people live downtown or near downtown area, then it makes sense to invest in a public transit system. This also helps people move around the city. It opens an opportunity for evening, and weekend businesses, for entertainment and tourism.
This is also a chicken and egg problem. A city could decide to encourage building residential areas downtown to attract different segments of populations there. But that is a long term solution. It takes many years to revitalize a downtown neighborhood, especially if it is a high crime area, has a lot of abandoned buildings, and most of all, a bad reputation.
This is one the primary reasons I have not watched anything sports related on NBC for a long time. The rah-rah, the overly obsessive coverage of only US players and related history, the focus on all the wrong parts of the games, I can (with great effort) tolerate. But once you add the absolutely useless and inane commentary and the tendency to shove the schedule on me, I prefer to switch to other sources and I strongly recommend that to as many people as I can (while trying not to be a grouch).
This was done to such a degree during the last FIFA world cup that I chose to watch it in Univision even though the only two words I understood were pelota and goal. And even that was oodles better than NBC. I wish I could stream CBC from somewhere or at least pay for coverage that just keeps the damn commentators quite unless absolutely necessary. Unfortunately AFAIK the way the whole thing is setup, there really is no choice in the matter.
I was following the 2002 World Cup fairly closely and watched on Univision for a different (but related) reason: they actually broadcast the games when they happened. 4 in the morning? No problem. There was no question of knowing the results before the broadcast, which was already eight years ago a typical problem for those of us with decent internet connectivity.
um, I guess the sarcasm punctuation mark is not common parlance round these parts. though I guess </snark> or something would be more universally understood.
I think you are making an assumption regarding availability vs price vs demand. I would think that given the sort of capacity Amazon has, at some point of time the cost of a spot instance would be the same as or higher than the cost of a regular ec2 instance, at which time it would make more sense to just get a regular instance.
Per my understanding the attraction of spot instances is that you can get short-term instances at lower rates. Even as I say this I am making a big assumption that Amazon's spare capacity is much larger than demand for sport instances.
Finally slow ping times could be caused by any number of reasons, attributing them to one particular cause based on a coincidental date might be a bit much.
>> Are you sure about not stopping one bomb? Their service is like the electric company (and IT), you don't notice it until it stops working.
Are you kidding me! Utility companies don't try to place your gas line right next to a bad electrical circuit breaker "to keep you safe". Yes analogies always suck and this one is quite bad too, but it does illustrate the point. TSA's job should be contain and respond, not investigate and prevent. The latter should be left to investigative and intelligence agencies as that is their forte.
This was some time ago and I have not flown since so it might have changed, but things like:
- dumping all the contents of all passengers water bottle into one big trashcan is stupid. Of course mentioning binary explosives will only get me into a lot of trouble.
- spending 7m+ dollars on GE entry scans that make a ton of whooshing noises but are not really any better than plain ol' bulge under the shoulder check
- checking your shoes when you can mold semtex or c4 into your belt just as easily and detonate it with something that looks like a fountain pen
- turning on your laptop (what about the extra bay - how much explosive can you pack in there?)
Lets face it, unless we as consumers force the politicians to implement transparent, clear and measurable security policies and are willing to spend the time to think about it a bit, this sort of stuff will keep happening again and again and again.
At the risk of getting down-voted on my first comment:
I am sorry, how can you comment on an article about the possibility of acquiring some form of ADD and attempt to provide a potential solution without actually reading the article. Perhaps the author is actually correct, especially considering the size of your response and the actual content.
Just because something does not agree with your outlook does not necessarily mean that it is incorrect or invalid. Try reading some of those types of things. You would be surprised how refreshing, entertaining or enlightening they are.
Take Los Angeles for example, there are way too many parking structures and lots all over downtown. Unfortunately there isn't really a way to get into downtown unless you are withing 5 miles of it. And you don't really want to live in that area. Even the SF Bay area for that matter, yes there is BART and Muni, but unless you live in the city (for the most part) BART is quite useless if your area of interest is more than a mile outside the sliver that BART services (ignoring all the other problems BART has), and Muni is a joke during rush hour, not to mention the combination of BART + Muni + anything else that you use gets to be pretty pricey.
Unless the issues of public transit are addressed properly, nothing will fix the parking problem or the congestion problem or the gas usage problem or the pollution problem to mention a few.