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by Mistletoe16 hours ago |
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upvoteby toasty22814 hours ago|
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Don't you love it when gemini quotes an AI generated video with 83 views as a source of truth
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upvoteby Mistletoe7 hours ago|
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I'm also judging by my own eyes because I can see that the WPA concrete uses coarser substrate like the Gemini answer says and is harder than normal concrete when I press it. And also has no cracks in it almost 100 years later.
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upvoteby defrost16 hours ago|
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.. and, also, ...

The folk of the 1930s were entirely capable of making poor quality concrete that barely lasted 30 years (source, my father, born 1935, still alive despite having mixed many a batch of concrete and having laboured).

The reason you don't see that walking about is that poor quality 1930s concrete was replace 50+ years ago.

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upvoteby TylerE16 hours ago|
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Survivorship bias in action.
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upvoteby somenameforme15 hours ago|
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I don't see how this would work because you're saying that the older sidewalks are scrapped and rebuilt when they hit a state of 'x' deterioration, so you only see > 'x' state ones. But how then could it be that newer sidewalks are allowed to fall below 'x' instead of also just being scrapped and rebuilt?
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upvoteby altairprime14 hours ago|
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Municipal budgets cratered hard over the past couple decades, roadway maintenance is given precedence over sidewalk maintenance, and SUVs and electric vehicles do considerably more roadway damage per vehicle. So there’s concurrent causes promoting a global decay in sidewalk maintenance in cities that expanded without the necessary tax base to support maintenance: see for example Los Angeles (current-day example!) repaving all but one foot’s width of their roadways so that they don’t have to fix broken sidewalks. This doesn’t contradict the survivor bias point! If anything, it’ll accelerate it: you’re about to see just how many (or few) sidewalk squares survive the underspend. Citizen science, here we come!
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upvoteby Cthulhu_14 hours ago|
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Politics, money allocation, taxation, etc. The US had a golden age last century and is now in decline. It can still bounce back but it needs a political and legal revolution, in this particular case, it needs to tax the wealthy and spend it on municipal improvements.

But that's socialism / liberalism and apparently that's terrorism now.

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upvoteby somenameforme13 hours ago|
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This is a bit of a tangent, but government revenue has skyrocketed in recent decades. Here is an inflation adjusted table. [1] As a percent of GDP it's been fairly stable since the end of WW2 [2], and dramatically higher than prior. But that understates reality because it excludes deficit spending which has increased exponentially since then. So the government is collecting and spending substantially more than back in the golden age, even after accounting for population/economic/etc growth.

[1] - https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-us-federal-go...

[2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

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upvoteby andsoitis7 hours ago|
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> it needs to tax the wealthy

The top 1% of earners pay about 38% of all federal individual income taxes, while making up roughly 20% of the nation's total Adjusted Gross Income.

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upvoteby cindyllm7 hours ago|
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[dead]
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upvoteby Barbing15 hours ago|
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Gemini 3 Flash?

Edit: if you were an expert in this field and that link saved you from typing, and you mentioned you could confirm every word, that’d make sense - I think those Flash models were tested as being as reliable as a coin flip in some hallucination test scenarios, so linking it’s like… eh do I wanna read potentially-only-plausible history?

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