Keith

Comment Threads

• graydonish commented on Generation Z
  There's a sharp distinction between more than 10 houses/acre -- it's ecologically about dead -- and less than 1 house per 10 acres -- it's alive. Preventing building in between those values has some worth. So does preventing building over the high-value arable land, which isn't in especially good supply but which does tend to be near cities. Plus the other sprawl problems of transportation and infrastructure and keeping developers from offloading large costs on to the public purse to maintain their own profit margins....
• David L commented on Generation Z
  Heating can also be done with electricity -- ground source heat pumps are quite efficient I keep wondering if there will be an impact to the slight (?) change in ground temps if an area like Chicago, Atlanta, or London goes to this as a majority way to condition houses....
• David L commented on Generation Z
  Did you factor services into these numbers. In the US the lot costs typically include the road/path/trail to the lot, water, sewer, power grid, phone/internet/entertainment, etc... All of these add to the cost of either the lot or the house....
• Charlie Stross commented on Generation Z
  Yep, that's roughly correct. The weird thing about air travel is that, yammering about how much fuel it burns aside, if you calculate how much fuel it takes to ship bodies between continents on a modern wide-body jet airliner per passenger-seat-mile they work out somewhat cheaper than an ultra-compact diesel-engined automobile. Sure, a Boeing 747 would burn 3 times my weight in kerosene shipping me from the UK to Australia; that's because Australia is a very long way away and if I drove there instead the car or motorbike would burn even more....
• paws4thot commented on Generation Z
  Even that's only part-right. Sure it's right for your car or mine that can manage roughly 60mpg at an economical cruise, but an LWB Transit will carry 15 people rather than 5 (including driver) and that gives us 450 miles per passenger gallon rather than 300....