4 ms·
Stop the suburbs; I want to get off
- markkat 16y agoHey guy, it was racism that screwed up our city of Detroit, not highways. Get it straight. Geesh.
- protomyth 16y agoAt some point, the US really needs to get serious about large scale desalination.
- hypersoar 16y agoIn order to have a long-term solution to that, we need a long-term solution to energy.
- pjscott 16y agoThere are technically feasible medium-to-long-term energy solutions involving nuclear power -- my favorite are liquid fluoride thorium reactors, but there are other good designs -- and the waste heat from those can be used for desalination. To get some approximate numbers, here's a presentation from Dr. Per Peterson at UC Berkeley: http://www.esd-ans.org/cms/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=56&Itemid=82 http://www.esd-ans.org/cms/index.php?option=com_docman&a... A 1 GWe fourth-generation reactor, using efficient Brayton-cycle gas turbines, could produce approximately 100,000 m^3/day of fresh water, without decreasing the amount of electricity it produces or harming its generation efficiency. About eight of those could supply San Diego (1.2 million people) with all its water needs.
- hudibras 16y agoI read this a couple times, but still don't understand the headline. He's talking about Atlanta's growth slowing but other than a mention of "metro Atlanta," he doesn't say anything about the suburbs. Plus, the city is still growing; it's only the rate of growth which has decreased. Writing for the Economist is a nice gig. You can cherry-pick any facts or topics you're interested in, slap it in a blog or column with no byline and, voila, the next day at the water cooler: "The Economist says..." Short version: The Economist is Newsweek for people who don't want to admit they read Newsweek.
- enjo 16y agoI was really looking forward to the chance to bash suburbs. This guy stole that from me:(
- _delirium 16y agoI find their blogs to be somewhat more filled with these off-the-cuff kinds of articles and stats than their actual magazine is, though ymmv. Though it does raise a question: is there a better free-market-oriented magazine without going all the way to a libertarian one like Reason? I've found overall the Economist to be a bit better than the WSJ, which seems to cherry-pick its facts and slant its infographics a lot more, especially on the editorial page (to the point where its data and charts sometimes verge on outright dishonesty).
- ggchappell 16y agoSo, a bunch of cities in the southern U.S. have stopped growing. Any chance global climate change is the predominant cause? The U.S. saw a big population shift southward in the second half of the 20th century. But if the southern U.S. continues what seems to be a trend of getting hotter and stormier, we might see a big shift back north.