Is 3d printing a solution?
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So far, 3-D-printed construction has generated more headlines than buildings. In the past few years, companies have announced the first 3-D-printed house in Florida, “the first two story house printed on site in Europe,” and the first market-rate 3-D-printed house sold in the United States. Until last year, Icon, one of the biggest and best-funded companies in the field, had printed fewer than two dozen houses, most of them essentially test cases. But, when I met Ballard, the company had recently announced a partnership with Lennar, the second-largest home-builder in the United States, to print a hundred houses in a development outside Austin. A lot was riding on the project, which would be a test of whether the technology was ready for the mainstream. “We almost won’t get out of bed for less than a hundred homes anymore,” Ballard told me. “This is a problem at scale, and so we need to be working at scale.”
In Austin, where the median rent has risen forty-five per cent in the past year, the tech industry is usually considered a driver of the housing crisis, rather than its solution. “In short order, like Silicon Valley, it could result in people having to make career decisions and say, ‘I can’t live there, I can’t afford it,’ ” Henry Cisneros, a former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and mayor of San Antonio, said at a panel on housing affordability at South by Southwest last year. The next day, Ballard, one of the conference’s featured speakers, made a more techno-utopian pitch. “What if we could build houses that work twice as good in half the time at half the price? What kind of problems could we solve? What kind of opportunities would open up before us?” he asked. “Humans are amazing, life is a miracle, and we can do this.”
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It could help a but, but building affordable homes is a deeper problem than the time and cost of construction.
why conservatives have turned against science
An essay by Naomi Orestes and Erik Conway. (Merchants of Doubt)
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Empirical data do not support the conclusion of a crisis of public trust in science. They do support the conclusion of a crisis of conservative trust in science: polls show that American attitudes toward science are highly polarized along political lines. In this essay, we argue that conservative hostility toward science is rooted in conservative hostility toward government regulation of the marketplace, which has morphed in recent decades into conservative hostility to government, tout court. This distrust was cultivated by conservative business leaders for nearly a century, but took strong hold during the Reagan administration, largely in response to scientific evidence of environmental crises that invited governmental response. Thus, science—particularly environmental and public health science—became the target of conservative anti-regulatory attitudes. We argue that contemporary distrust of science is mostly collateral damage, a spillover from carefully orchestrated conservative distrust of government.
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a tip of the hat to Greg
18:58 in Current Affairs, General Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)