Wikipedia Sucks!

....on a topic that ticks me off.

Featuring a cameo from Chris Chappell, beloved son of search engines.

https://wikipedia-sucks-badly.blogspot. ... tates.html

FWIW the CSU/second-tier system in this state tends to have problems like this. Big and magnificent buildings, poorly maintained. And no one has any idea what they are doing. (If you wanna see real corruption/incompetence, go and look at CSU Sacramento.)

ericbarbour wrote:FWIW the CSU/second-tier system in this state tends to have problems like this. Big and magnificent buildings, poorly maintained. And no one has any idea what they are doing. (If you wanna see real corruption/incompetence, go and look at CSU Sacramento.)

That point ("Big and magnificent buildings, poorly maintained. And no one has any idea what they are doing.") is true, especially on an overloaded campus like SDSU where the administration has a construction/renovation fetish. My point with the EIS building is that it was used as a billboard for donors when forty years ago you had to be a dead or retired professor of merit to get your name on a building (the Storm and Nasatir halls, the Adams Humanities building are examples I can name off the top of my head.) My other problem with the EIS building, like with the new Conrad Prebys* Student Center, is that it's built to dominate the space it's in because the present administration is trying to outdo past administrations. The problem with that is these two new buildings are using the Spanish Colonial style of the surrounding buildings, so they are making a parody of the old style by being so large. There is no reason why all the buildings at SDSU have to resemble the original Spanish Colonial Hepner Hall (the first building on campus) - for a number of years they were building structures like the Life Sciences North, or the Music building, or the Education and Psychology buildings in the International Style (aka "diluted Bauhaus.") The transition point seemed to be the Student Services building which was erected in the early 1990s; it's very much a semi-stylized Spanish Colonial. We may never see a classroom building constructed on that campus that isn't Spanish Colonial in our lifetimes.

I will say this about the UC system - the corruption is far more petty, involving college presidents moonlighting on corporate boards. They make you sign all checks for tuition and housing at UCSD to the Board of Regents. There is a Literature Building at UCSD's Earl Warren College that may be giving women working there breast cancer. They have a long history of fighting with the Che Cafe. Some of the UC colleges have outbuilt their local fire departments meaning that any fire in the dorms might get too large and force them to call in other units.

__________________

* Look up this guy, he was a real piece of work.

Sign of a weak government. In Greece happend the same before it collapsed, useless concrete I called it. Gja ta polia, for the birds to live in like they Greeks say.
And in China there are complete towns build in this way. For instance Tianjin, it seems China used three times more concrete than America.

Graaf Statler wrote:Sign of a weak government. In Greece happend the same before it collapsed, useless concrete I called it. Gja ta polia, for the birds to live in like they Greeks say.
And in China there are complete towns build in this way. For instance Tianjin, it seems China used three times more concrete than America.

That's the problem, Graaf Statler - we were told the old student center (built in 1967) was "too small" even though it was mostly an underground structure going down four floors, and we were told again that the collection of small labs and machine shops was too small for the Engineering department. The projects were sold to the student body as "necessary expansion" even though SDSU has as large a student body as is possible for the campus to absorb. I really think that there is some under-the-table dealings between the Clark construction company and the university, possibly because Jack McGrory (ex-San Diego City Manager and presently a California State University trustee) had dealings with that firm before. Is it criminal? No. But it is greasy and slippery.

China's weird "ghost cities" come from how rural land is owned in China - it's all collective. So when the government sells the land to developers, they want the buildings now, no matter if there is no city around the parcel. So they are building cities backwards - massive apartment complexes or shopping malls go in first, not a small town center that is built up later, and the roads and power substations are built to connect these new places to the urban network, even though they may be miles from another city. The rest of it is waiting for everybody else's growth to catch up to these new-old projects. The other element is that apartments are supposed to remain with an owner for decades, not bought and sold over and over. That's why there are small collections of people living on these sites years before they are even half-full because they bought in early. And housing is what it's really all about - this is the central government's attempt to get the population out of the cruddy slums that surround the major cities and into modern housing.

The euro crisis was partly a concrete crisis. Because in Greece and Spain construction firms started to build houses and projects most times touristic to sell, but the buyers never showed up. And also in Ierland was the crisis in the real estate market in that time. On Crete, in Apokoronas‎ they built more houses in that time than in the rest of Greece. And it was all build and bought whit loans. And when the euro crisis came nobody could sell his house and no one could and wanted to buy it and most are still unsold...
In Holland we never had this problem because most of Holland is overcrowded. Real Estate is extreem expensive, in the centre of Holland two to three times more expensive than in Germany or Belgium. It is very strange, at the moment you cross the border the houses are much cheaper. That is the reason many Dutch near the border live in Germany or Belgium, because five kilometer from Holland you pay often the half price.

Wouldn't it be easier to just buy a cheap bike rather than ride-share on those monstrosities? I can't imagine bikes, even in San Diego, being expensive. I went a "SLAC" (Small Liberal Arts College), but is SDSU really so big that you need to bike everywhere? Can't you just walk?

The End wrote:Wouldn't it be easier to just buy a cheap bike rather than ride-share on those monstrosities? I can't imagine bikes, even in San Diego, being expensive. I went a "SLAC" (Small Liberal Arts College), but is SDSU really so big that you need to bike everywhere? Can't you just walk?

From what I could tell the Ofo people were leaving the bikes in the 2nd story walkway of that parking garage, expecting them to be ridden off campus. Yes, a bike is cheap in San Diego, so much so that some people make low-power mopeds out of them using kits. Do we need the Ofo to cross the campus? No, but some people skateboard from class to class. If they can't make it work in San Francisco or San Diego, the canary yellow bikes will vanish from California entirely....or they will be sold second-hand with the locking mechanism/tracking chip stripped off.

Graaf Statler wrote:The euro crisis was partly a concrete crisis. Because in Greece and Spain construction firms started to build houses and projects most times touristic to sell, but the buyers never showed up. And also in Ireland was the crisis in the real estate market in that time. On Crete, in Apokoronas‎ they built more houses in that time than in the rest of Greece. And it was all build and bought whit loans. And when the euro crisis came nobody could sell his house and no one could and wanted to buy it and most are still unsold...

In Holland we never had this problem because most of Holland is overcrowded. Real Estate is extreem expensive, in the centre of Holland two to three times more expensive than in Germany or Belgium. It is very strange, at the moment you cross the border the houses are much cheaper. That is the reason many Dutch near the border live in Germany or Belgium, because five kilometer from Holland you pay often the half price.

Absolutely, but the Euro zone is working off regular capitalist rules. The Chinese are half-market, half-state control. So the government sells the land, has the buildings built, and is willing to take the loss until the buildings are full of apartment owners paying taxes. And they can get away with this thanks to cities like Shanghai and Beijing, which are packed to the rafters with people. The Chinese state always makes it's money back because they control things from the outset. America and Europe will let a real estate scheme run on and on and on and on until it peters out or it blows up like it did in 2007, and then the central banks have to clean up the mess, and God help you if the system melts down so badly like it did a decade ago - you may never get out of it as a nation-state.

It is very strange, at the moment you cross the border the houses are much cheaper.

All I can think of is that there is no flood insurance if the dikes crumble, right? You appeal to the government if your house joins the North Sea, but before that the landlords and the realtors have their own form of "luxury tax" for living in the Netherlands. This happens elsewhere - San Diego has priced itself out of certain markets, so people who work in the city have passports and they just live in the Zona Norte of Tijuana, Baja California. And the cost of living is much lower, though you have to take your car battery indoors with you after arriving home, because parking in the street is the norm.