I’d like more of an explanation of why big buildings “cannot be built under progressive regimes,” please.

Social and technological decay, rapidly increasing time preference.

Note that the top floor in the replacement for the twin towers is labelled 104, but there are actually only 94 habitable floors. Much as the Soviet Union made the trabant out of cardboard to look like the kind of thing capitalism produced.

Your explanation of why we don’t need to build big buildings any more is like the explanation of why we don’t need mach 3 fighters any more, and we don’t need space travel any more.

In fact the economic case for tall buildings has gotten better and better, in that the cost of office space in the city center has risen higher and higher, but we don’t seem able or willing to respond to these incentives any more.

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the One World Trade Center is a fraud, created to disguise the fact that the US can no longer build buildings as large as it used to be able to build

Hey, David, post this one to FSTDT dude!

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The two towers were big buildings, and buildings of that size cannot be built under progressive regimes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_World_Trade_Center

So is New York not a Progressive regime anymore?

The One World Trade Center has 94 inhabitable floors. The Twin towers had 110 inhabited floors.

The spire does not count. Only the inhabited floors count, since that is what is technologically difficult, valuable, and hard to achieve.

As the trabant was a fraud, created to disguise the fact that the Soviet Union could not build consumer cars, the One World Trade Center is a fraud, created to disguise the fact that the US can no longer build buildings as large as it used to be able to build.

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The two towers were big buildings, and buildings of that size cannot be built under progressive regimes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_World_Trade_Center

So is New York not a Progressive regime anymore? In addition, we’ve got at least one 73-story skyscraper project going up here in Downtown LA. Slowly, granted, but the basin has multiple fault lines, I’d appreciate them taking their time and doing it right, please!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilshire_Grand_Tower

Second, I think new big buildings only happen on the upslope of a demographic transition, when population is growing rapidly, and the need for residential and office space is at its peak. Our biggest buildings were built during periods of rapid population growth and urbanization. We haven’t been building them in part because of regulation, but in part because the demand isn’t as pressing a need, especially with a societal pressure toward suburbanization.
I’d like more of an explanation of why big buildings “cannot be built under progressive regimes,” please.

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Women, having shorter time preference than men

Bullshit generalization, do you really despise your mother that much?

and being more easily influenced by social pressure

No shit, it’s entirely more rational to bend rather than break when you are historically in an environment of dependence and vulnerability to coercion. Which stems from women historically being exploited primarily for their means of reproduction. Higher birth rates inevitably = women being more oppressed. Read some damn Firestone, she said it all! Take away the dependence and vulnerability and women don’t have to bend to pressure any more than men do. (This story is music to my ears, a PUA scumbag suddenly discovering he can’t prey on the afraid and vulnerable.)

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If a wealthy man is trying to organize a big building to be built, he is a right winger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Palace_Of_Soviets_1.JPG

…okay, I agree that Stalin was a crypto-rightist, but that’s not what I think you meant.

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Women, having shorter time preference than men, and being more easily influenced by social pressure, do “lack agency” in causing social change.

Though there are other reasons women haven’t had a lot of overt role in causing social change.
But “not a lot” doesn’t mean “none.” One of the more interesting tidbits to come out of my reading of US Civil War history was that women went to the front of movements in urban reform, medical reform (including the United States Sanitary Commission, a soldiers’ aid society) the temperance movement that culminated in Prohibition, and the abolition movement. What was interesting for me was that womens’ involvement in these movements grew out of their societally determined role as mothers and homemakers. Essentially, the argument went: if women are going to be teaching the next generation of citizens and ensuring private morality, shouldn’t they have a role in protecting public morality as well?

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Women, having shorter time preference than men, and being more easily influenced by social pressure, do “lack agency” in causing social change.

And whether or not they “lack agency”, that is a question that has to resolved by looking at external reality, rather than by denouncing certain views as shameful.

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Lets get laid! –> …Women’s equality…

Konk, as a total aside – listen to me closely, this is how you catch the patriarchy at work in your brain. NOT by the fact of making a provocative comment on the rhetoric of gender equality, oh no. By observing that the thought of the lower classes having had historical agency and impact on their own hasn’t entered your mind in the first place. I won’t shame you for your “men liberate women to get laid”, I’m calling your attention to the framing of “men liberate women because they love freedom” vs “men liberate women to get laid”. The option of “women struggling for their collective self-interest” is absent, and “agent” implicitly = “man” that’s the patriarchal mindset.

And it’s not shameful for you, nearly everyone’s a huge sexist that way, I still have years of recovery ahead of myself. In a very parallel way, when I was a left-authoritarian, I used to genuinely alieve that democracy is bad because the people are reactionary and need leftist intellectuals to drag them towards liberation. I’m pissed off by former-me, and much less so by you. Just note that much feminist thought operates on this level, deeper than you’ve touched. Try and read some feminist history book, or, say, Firestone for a start.

P.S.: frankly, the object-level claim looks like ridiculously twisted confirmation bias cherry-picking too. I’m not concerned with millenarian cults in the first place, as they seem to be displaced by very different forms of terror with the arrival of modernity. Take the Great Leap Forward, shall I outline the many ways it was unlike what you describe? To say nothing of Stalin.

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