I fucking hate Las Vegas. Had to go there in February for the World of Concrete this year and am fairly certain I got Covid, testing wasn't available yet so I just suffered for a week thinking I had the flu. The coworker I shared a room with was an anyone but Bernie lib, we watched Iowa caucus together. I remembering walking on the strip listening to Felix's monologue on how hopeless and lonley this country is. It was the weirdest feeling being around so much opulence and destitution in the same space.
A huge convention pertaining to concrete. I think it's in the top 10 for largest conventions.
Sugar slows the chemical reaction of hydration. You cannot make a concrete milkshake as Andy Ngo would imagine. Adding a handful of portland cement to a milkshake will not make it stiffen up.
Yes and no, It's a huge industry. I have done concrete for 15 years, my dad was a concrete contractor, he got me started as a teenager. I know alot about flatwork as I mostly finished.
Every supplier or vendor in the industry gives out swag at their booths. Seminars consisting of lectures or hands on demos. This engineer, Tyler Ley, speaks there and he has some good youtube content.
Here is his speil about sustainability. https://youtu.be/sgwPYceNszY
The urbanization of the southwest and its consequences etc etc
Oh cool, we might have met, my company sent me to World of Conrete too. Always love to see fancy new gadgets that don't work and fall asleep during lectures.
Did you take any seminars? I attended the moisture and rebar classes, which were great, as well as the project management classes, which were absolutley useless.
I went to the five engineering ones, pretty interesting stuff although it was code heavy, which isn't as useful for us since we are Canadian. The hands on courses they do sound really neat though.
Second most consumed product in the world behind water means it's the best industry to agitate if ya wanna start a labor movement.
I made sure to get over to the concrete decor live demos, very cool seeing all the different applications.
Good quote about Vegas:
[This] might be the closest thing to a mystical experience I’ve ever had.
Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear:
It is glorious that we can create something like this.
It is shameful that we did.
Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?
And it occurred to me that maybe there is no philosophy on Earth that would endorse the existence of Las Vegas. Even Objectivism, which is usually my go-to philosophy for justifying the excesses of capitalism, at least grounds it in the belief that capitalism improves people’s lives. Henry Ford was virtuous because he allowed lots of otherwise car-less people to obtain cars and so made them better off. What does Vegas do? Promise a bunch of shmucks free money and not give it to them.
The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.
It'll be empty in 10-20 years. It will be barely inhabitable and water shortages are going to cause mass abandonment of the location.
Think of the unrest and disruption that is going to occur as millions of people within the US are displaced to other locations. What problems they're going to have, what anger they will hold. The lack of enough housing for them all. The food and water shortages. Think of how much these will swell the numbers of those taking to the streets, their material conditions will align them with many of the issues the left raises.
i think you’re underestimating americans’ ability to blame things on minorities. BLM made the water dry up, illegal immigrants made developers build huge vain sprawling suburbs in the middle of the fucking mojave
I think that's completely irrelevant to the material conditions they will find themselves in though. They will find themselves lacking housing or anywhere to go because there literally will not be enough of it. There will be food shortages. There will be water shortages. There may be relief camps set up be the army but that's speculation at best really.
They will have direct and immediate problems that they will want solved and they will swell the numbers of people asking for those direct and immediate problems to be solved. They may place blame in different places but the fact of the matter is that they will participate in demanding their problems are solved. Numbers will swell. Some will radicalise as a result of exposure.
oh you’re 100% correct i’m just being a Epically Blackpilled le Doomer on the internet because its cathartic
Christ, just try zooming out bit-by-bit in any of the surrounding areas.
Just a thoroughly banal, sickening, cookie cutter exurb hellscape. There's no fucking life here right now, let alone in the decades to come when the sands thankfully swallow it up.
Ivanpah is depressing too. Just a massive garbage patch in the middle of the desert. You can see the degredation across the images.
Just built then cast off to build a new one just down the road a few years later.
Not when all the mirrors are made by the Koch brothers and it's smashed up and taken offline less than a decade after it's brought online so they can build a newer one with a different contractor.
They also keep it at temp with natural gas at night so it doesn't have to heat up in the morning which kinda defeats the purpose.
Yeah, it was a cool idea I guess. Just absolutely terrible in terms of execution and maintenance. It's basically a gadgetbahn that pretends to be carbon neutral while barely offsetting its own carbon cost.
Peggy from KOTH said it best when she said Phoenix (and LV too bc why not) are monuments to human arrogance
I thought Las Vegas was on top of a large aquifer, so its location actually made a lot of sense as a pitstop for people crossing the desert at one point. Of course that's before it became the living embodiment of a hamfisted critique of American capitalism.
Yeah, the springs were used by travelers of the Old Spanish Trail, and Mormons traveling from SLC to LA.
I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started, all I had was swamp! Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em!
would you rather build a city over arable land the way 99% of the world's cities are?
