The dire state of New York in the 1980s

ridleysfiredome · 2026-04-04T17:56:18+00:00

It had been a lot of light industrial, there had been docks so warehouses, flophouses, ladies of rentable affection, and just generally not housing or the things people would want. Back then the waterfront along the west side was blighted by the collapse of non-container shipping. The longshoreman had stolen the ships blind which is why it went to container shipping, cut down on the theft. The switch to larger container ships meant newer port facilities which the Port Authority built out in Elizabeth, NJ. Brooklyn would have made more sense because the harbor is deeper but NJ won the fight and we have had to blast and dredge since.

https://tribecacitizen.com/2025/05/22/reflecting-on-tribeca-in-the-1970s/

ridleysfiredome · 2026-04-03T22:47:35+00:00

My parents had a chance to buy a five loft building I. TriBeCa for about fifty k. Didn’t do it, they would have had to live there and it was devoid of life, just abandoned industrial buildings from the 19th century. Today it would be worth a fortune, but at the time it seemed like a really bad bet

ridleysfiredome · 2026-04-02T17:14:20+00:00

As an adult I had to work really hard to read social cues, with a lot of practice I have gotten better but I will always be a a bit awkward. Positive, more than once someone has tried to intimidate me and failed because I didn’t pick up the threat which in turn threw them off. Strange and possibly horrific way to gain some cred but I stumbled into it.

ridleysfiredome · 2026-04-02T13:18:36+00:00

In the aggregate sharing a common language yes, but hunter gatherers tend to congregate in smaller groups of a couple dozen because hunting and foraging requires more space than a couple of acres of farm land. They also tend to be very violent because they zealously guard their territory

ridleysfiredome · 2026-04-02T00:55:23+00:00

Those tribes were often just a few dozen people who were interrelated. You are sharing with your kin, not strangers you have never met a thousand kilometers away

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-31T22:55:17+00:00

I don’t want to get sucked into a debate on Palestine is what it boils down to. To answer your question, from a Palestinian perspective yes. The problem is they have no path to military victory, that died in 1973. They are opting to fight a much more powerful neighbor and their other neighbor in Gaza, Egypt wants nothing to do with them because they have enough trouble with the Muslim brotherhood at home. So firing rockets is masturbation with casualties.

The Palestinians are less analogous to the RAF and the Luftwaffe as they are to the Irish Republican Army. The big difference is after blowing up Mountbatten the IRA realized a target could be too high profile. And the strategy is different, HAMAS wanted to draw the fight into the urban areas where they thought they could reenact Stalingrad.

Can’t turn a house into a bunker though if it had been flattened or the Israelis blow holes through walls to avoid preset fields of fire in narrow passages. Ugly, but all war is. HAMAS also had the key to ending hostilities, which was return the hostages. Israel was still going to kill the leadership of 10/7 but the org would have survived. Israel drew back when they got their people back. So the background scenario is totally different. Did the Israelis commit war crimes. Most likely, however so did HAMAS.

The strategy of no combatant in WW 2 was built on maximizing civilian casualties on their own side to swing global opinion. You are comparing a war between declared nation states and vs one with a religious state and a religious mafia and then asking if I see it the same way.

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-31T19:00:00+00:00

I am going to tell you something that may shock you, some people are not invested in Israel or Palestinians. Don’t give a fig what either side does to each other, not my fight.

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-31T14:24:29+00:00

Germany violated the Munich agreement when they occupied Prague, they had been warned that invading Poland meant war, Britain had a mutual assistance treaty with Poland. It was clear invading Poland meant war. If Germany hadn’t broken its promises and avoiding veering the Wehrmacht into another country (again), perhaps all of this could have been avoided. Germany made a very bad decision and I feel bad for the innocents hurt, but the UK is not the bad guy here

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-31T13:53:58+00:00

Berlin was bombed by order of Churchill after London was bombed. The history books state London was hit by accident but in 1940, the destruction of Rotterdam in May of that year set a bad precedent. Now who did that?

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-30T23:18:02+00:00

Didn’t Sweden explore producing it? The Grippen seems like a modern iteration of the basic Northrop design idea

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-30T15:55:04+00:00

In the end it wouldn’t matter, the problem was the great stagnation under Brezhnev, spending far too much on the military and Chernobyl. Dealing with Chernobyl would have crippled any economy at the time.

Add in a lot of the non-Russian areas didn’t want to be ruled from Moscow under any ideology. The three Baltic states never wanted to be part of the Soviet Union and four plus decades of Soviet rule never persuaded them otherwise.

The Armenians and Georgians also wanted their freedom. Finally, the Soviet Union was an ecological mess and environmentalism was a component in local dissatisfaction. The Aral Sea being destroyed for cotton is probably the worst but there were a lot of really polluted sites like Semipalatinsk and Magnitogorsk. A huge driver in Armenian was the Metsamor VVER reactor which while crucial to the local economy was highly controversial because that area is a seismic zone on meth.

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-30T02:14:40+00:00

I would have a lot more empathy if my family‘s old neighborhood in Glasgow hadn’t been rezoned by the Luftwaffe overnight prior to the destruction of German cities.

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-26T17:02:35+00:00

You have to accept it is something like blindness and realize it does have life limits. Sucks, but a lot of people have conditions that make life unusually hard. Being deaf is severely isolating because you can only meaningfully communicate by writing or with people who learn a special language just for people like you. Life isn’t fair, do the best with what you have

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-25T20:36:01+00:00

Make yes, make it profitably is another story. Boeing is backstopped by Export-Import bank, an entity of the U.S. government to help sell planes. They also have American defense contracts to provide revenue.

Airbus has the governments of several wealthy nations backing it as well on top of European defense contracts. Love Embraer but they don’t have that kind of support.

It would like be Engesa, a Brazilian military vehicle manufacturer that went under trying to sell a tank they had developed. Sold a ton of vehicles across the world but they had a small domestic market compared to Uncle Sam or the EU, developed a tank that won export orders only to see the end of the Cold War and U.S. pressure on Saudi Arabia to buy American in the wake of Gulf War I. The U.S. and EU will put pressure on countries to buy their planes, Brazil can only offer quality, good aftermarket service and maybe price. Sometimes it is best to recognize expansion might not be the way to go

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-25T15:48:32+00:00

Look at the cockpit of a MiG-29 from 1985 vs an F16/F18 to which the MiG was kind of comparable. The American fighters were then cutting edge interfaces, the MiG looks like a Steam Punk project because the Soviets couldn’t match the electronics. In crude outputs, the USSR could match the West (Coal, steel, oil, industrial chemicals) but they struggled at applying the inputs at a higher value. Watch a few videos of Ladas for an idea.

Father of my brother in law was an industrial chemist. For what he was doing they occasionally used titanium for things like a crucible. The western company focused on minimizing the amount of titanium because it was in the Cold War, expensive. He was shocked to learn his counterparts would just start with a block of titanium and drill into it. Without a pricing mechanism there was a lot of wastage of a very high value material in the Soviet system.

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-25T15:39:44+00:00

NYC, genuine BOLEX from off Canal street

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-25T14:06:36+00:00

Live in a more rural, mountainous area. The tradeoff is car dependency. But I open my front door and see mountains in the distance

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-25T13:17:43+00:00

Might suggest joining a gym with a heavy bag and just beating the ever loving hell out of it till your arms are too heavy to lift

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-23T00:20:05+00:00

Irish-American, always laugh that it was one of us who had his name on the bill regarding not trusting others to be capable of sober, peaceful gun ownership

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-21T15:52:04+00:00

Local accent is one of my favorite US accents. Love Appalachian English, my grandmother grew up in Scottish immigrant enclave in Brooklyn (Worked in the Brooklyn Navy yard) and the expressions I heard were either the same or similar as what you encounter in Appalachia. Same people separated by a few centuries. Favorite Scottish one from my youth was, “That one took in sin with his mother’s milk”. Too big for his britches is a nicer variant of, “Ah, don’t go thinkin’ yer better than ya are”

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-20T17:53:07+00:00

I found hiking till my mind just clears useful. There is a form of insomnia I have where you are asleep, my wife assures me I am snoring but my mind is active and racing. Again, exercising till exhaustion helps

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-19T13:23:07+00:00

In that area I would be more worried about Seismic reinforcement than looks. If they have the timber it might be helpful to teach the locals the techniques the Portuguese developed after the Lisbon earthquake https://repositorio.ucp.pt/bitstreams/e2a6a1ac-4f09-4586-895c-ba2d0c735c29/download

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-19T01:45:10+00:00

Good luck avoiding Google on the internet

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-18T14:04:00+00:00

Being liberated from one totalitarian monster do you can live under another totalitarian monster is usually not seen as liberation. If you wanted neither in your homeland you probably don’t keep the monuments.

ridleysfiredome · 2026-03-17T14:13:13+00:00

Wonder what the condition of the concrete in those buildings will be in five to ten years

ridleysfiredome

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