Re: Bad for some
AC said
"And is usually suggested by young, able bodied, upper middle class white people from good homes who do not actually produce anything and think that working is just answering emails and checking their phone. And likely also use amazon prime and uber eats a lot."
And, to paraphrase Kilgore Trout, so it goes.
I grew up in what was effectively (if we stretch it a wee tad) a 15 minute town, itself embedded in a larger urban area. But then they demolished all the little streets of houses with a pub on one corner and a shop on the other, and built over the small parks and football pitches. Just in time for the small factories, workshop, pharmaceutical labs and commercial offices to close. And we lost the wholesale markets that used to bring produce from market gardens situated on reclaimed land on the estuary (stretching the 15 minutes but they were wholesale facilities that shopkeepers and small retail market traders got their stuff from). And the docks closed as the shipping was going into a container mega-port down the coast.
We had it all: unions easy to organise (stewards just went down the street or to the right pubs), football teams, bands, cycling clubs, allotments, libraries, technical schools doing C&G Radio and TV servicing evening classes the whole thing. So now we will use a few terajoules or much more to build it all again.
(Jane Jacobs wrote about that kind of thing in New York for US audience)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
