Venice is unique, it is an island with a single bridge connecting it to mainland. It is easy to put a toll booth there. And at this point, it is more a city-wide museum than a living city anyway, the money will go to maintenance. The regulation is not there because of the protests of the residents, there are not many remaining.
These are fine, though don’t help much and bad for local economy and prosperity (tourists bring money and buy food and things from local businesses which employ local people and pay local taxes). “You can’t come here” is not fine, and thankfully infeasible.
The same logic should also work for states; people, however, are irrational in this regard.
Uniqlo recently released tshirts with some of these prints on. Oiwa-san was on one of them. They also had a few tshirts with the great wave and some from Hiroshige's 53 stations of the Tokkaido road. They're good quality tshirts. Probably sold out though.
The evidence base for general usage of antibiotic prophylaxis in open “uncontaminated” wounds in otherwise healthy people ain’t great.
Depends on what kind of antibiotics they’re talking about, exact location/depth, their health status and what you’d call “uncontaminated” or not. Not really enough info to judge.
Sure, public transit isn’t “clean”, but it’s going to be cleaner than the average human/animal bite or fall into a manure pile.
Sure you’ll hear case reports from the people that didn’t get antibiotics and had a bad outcome, but antibiotics can cause bad outcomes too, from resistance, impaired wound healing from topicals and things like C Diff. Plus added time+cost.
Roads have been around for several hundred years or more, along with public transportation (trains were commonplace in rural areas in the past), and the car has been the primary mode of transportation for about a century. After all that time, why is this still becoming a big problem?
A terraced street in London can have a metric boat-load of social isolation and no cars. I don't think it's (necessarily) the car or the literal distance between houses. At the very least, it's a multi-faceted problem.
Nah, bullshit. I grew up in a rural area [0], my parents are still in a rural area (their postal address literally contains 'rural route'). You just don't go to town every day. You didn't go to town every day in the past; you planned your trips ahead of time. It was a rare occurrence - maybe a monthly, quarterly or even less frequent occurrence. And if you do go to town, it might be a multi-day trip. Why? Because you were either walking or going on horseback. People got around before roads. Roads make travel easier. People have been trying to make traveling easier since the dawn of history. See: roads, ships, animal husbandry, the wheel, etc.
People can live far apart without problem if they're self-sufficient or plan ahead: grow your own food, have stockpiles that can last months if you can't make it to town (rural winters can be a bitch). What's new is this dependency on others and belief of "oh my god, I'll die if I don't make it to town (grocery store) this week".
[0] Our closest neighbor was a quarter mile away. Nearest paved road (and our bus stop as kids) was 2.5 miles away over private dirt roads with about 1000 feet change in elevation. It was 8 miles to town, 20 to city (which would barely be a suburb most places).
Yah, it's not the distance of the houses that matter (well, it does, but it's not the whole story), it's the distance between amenities. Like I said, the actual town I grew up in was terrible. It's 30-45 minutes to get anywhere and most things are stand alone. There's a shopping mall kind of development (Walmart, chain restaurants, etc.) on one side of town, but to get to most of the housing you have to drive 30 minutes. The nearest coffee shop is in another development at least 45 minutes away from both of those places, etc.
Meanwhile, the other nearby town I mentioned has plenty of outlying farms that are pretty far away, but when they do go into town to go to the grocery or whatever they can also walk into the coffee shop, or the little stores or whatever and have chance encounters with their in-town neighbors. Even among the farm areas there's a coffee shop / pub that everyone goes to at the end of the day. There's even a dance hall that used to be a one room school house and now gets re-purposed for monthly dances. You don't get that in the suburb I live in now where having anything like that in a residential or agricultural area is forbidden by the zoning code.
Similarly, back before cars sure you didn't pop into town as regularly, but everyone knew when events were happening and when you did go into town for something everyone was there and things were relatively close together and easy to get to (once you were there already, I mean).
Maybe there's a language barrier here, but isn't a suburb defined by being at the edge of a city? So wouldn't a bar in the city be the communal place for the suburb, just like the bar in town is for those out on the farms?
Granted, I've known of a small number of bars operating on farms (usually farm-based craft breweries/cideries/wineries), but is not the typical use of rural properties. Having one next door that you could walk to would be unusual.
It's much easier to get into town from a farm a few miles out than to the city from the suburbs. Plus in the city there are lots of places and in most of our cities they have similar walkability problems (I'm from Atlanta which is particularly egregious in terms of transit and walk/bikeability). There's not naturally that one place where your neighbors are going to go and happen to bump into each other. You have to first meet them, then plan "let's go to this bar at 13:00, and here's how parking is going to work, etc." as opposed to just "everyone is in town, or at the bar in their neighborhood, the obvious place where you're just going to happen to bump into someone else who showed up for happy hour" or whatever.
I'm sure I'm conveying the difference badly, but it's the difference between random encounters with your neighbors whom you'll see the next time you both go to the grocery and then walk over to the fun coffee place vs. random encounters with strangers you'll never see again.
> It's much easier to get into town from a farm a few miles out than to the city from the suburbs.
It may be harder, but surely you're doing it anyway? It is not like the suburbs have a grocery store either (usually). Driving into the city is the name of the game, much like it is for farmers.
> Plus in the city there are lots of places
Presumably if you pick one, you'll start to see the same faces, though. Certainly in my youth the big city bar I hung out at had a wonderful community of regulars. If you pick a new bar every night you're going to never get to know anyone, perhaps, but there is no reason to do that.
That said, the youth today seem to be rejecting alcohol and thus bars, so perhaps the bar is a bad example for a current conversation? Or maybe it's the right example as it visibly presents something interesting that is happening. When I was young, you'd have 20 year olds, 40 year olds, and 60 year olds all mingling together at the bar. It's just what everyone did. Now the 40 year olds are busy taking their kids to youth sports leagues, the 20 year olds are doing whatever it is 20 year olds do nowadays, while the 60 year olds are still there hanging out at the bar.
Which appears, to my eye, to have created a huge division in communities. There are still micro-communities found within that, or nano-communities, particularly with the sports leagues (the parents don't really seem to mingle outside of their immediate team's social circle), but the cohesion of an entire community seems to be devastated by that separation.
Maybe that's the source of isolation that people are feeling?
This may be different per city, but at least near me this isn't true, the suburbs have a grocery (or several).
> Presumably if you pick one, you'll start to see the same faces, though
Sure, and you'll likely only see them in the grocery and not elsewhere. Probably the same with the bar; I too know a bunch of regulars at a local bar, but likely not going to run into them outside that bar unless we become friends and make specific plans to do so. Also those people probably aren't my actual neighbors. It's a different kind and frequency of chance meeting when the built-environment is designed to facilitate community. I'm not saying that you'll literally never meet a neighbor in the grocery, it will happen, it's just not going to happen with the same kind of frequency as if we actually designed the built-environment to encourage it.
Until you start training this specifically, then it probably loses its predictive power. If you work out, balance exercises are usually a part of your work out. Especially as you get older.
reply