Rules

1. Please identify your city, and post a link to Wikipedia if the name is ambiguous or not well know. If you do not wish to provide this information for privacy reasons, you can provide some general informations about your city or nominate a similar one.

2. Your funds are unlimited, but you're limited to a maximum of 3 projects. The projects can be as big or small as you want. And try to give a reasonable amount of detail. This is not intended for comedy or fictionalized speculation. Please submit ideas that you think are actually viable!

3. You must increase any metrics included on or related to the Human Development Index^[1] of your city.

4. The projects don't need to focus on your birthplace or where you currently live. Any city you have significant knowledge of will do. But it must be a single one.

5. Both consequentalist and deontological ethics must be observed. The projects must not contradict the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In other words, be excellent to each other!

6. Unlike my previous ~talk thread, in this one I won't play a jackass genie or anything like that. The purpose of this thread is to have a healthy discussion on urban development by sharing our aspirations for the cities we love.

Example of areas to improve

• culture
• education
• internet access
• employment
• transportation
• water
• environment

^[1] This is only a starting point. There is space for subjectivity

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Clicking on "Roadmap" at the bottom of any Tildes page brings up an issue board. I'm wondering if that's still being maintained and whether it's worth keeping?

The items listed under "in progress" don't look like they are actually in progress. For example, "Add sticky / pinned topics" is marked as "In progress" but in fact it's a year old and there's been no activity for four months.

Prompted by a recent tildes post about vice, and also this from the bbc, and a conversation with a colleague who just went to a strip club, I keep thinking about this issue.

I have a stake in this, despite being cis male: I have mother, sisters, wife, and most importantly young daughter. And I am a feminist, on simple moral grounds.

My baseline position is that whether a woman chooses to engage in sex work is, and should be legally and socially supported as, entirely her own choice.

The only question I have any business answering, or participating in finding an answer, is whether my patronage of sex work is inherently exploitive, to either the woman whom I am patronizing* or to other women individually or to womanhood and general issues of gender.

And I just can’t come up with a good answer. I do look at porn, but increasingly, as with meat, the potential ethical problems of it are reducing the enjoyment. I have tried to ease my conscience by limiting myself to cartoons and stories, but those wouldn’t stop the harm that is caused by the mere existence of porn, if any exists.

As a purely practical matter, the existence of the industry leads to opportunities for exploitation of individuals, and the advancement of a culture of gender exploitation. But as the war on drugs has so ably demonstrated, any attempt at prohibition only increases the level of exploitation, while smart regulation decreases it. Regardless, though, there’s plenty of exploitation to go around the world, I heard there’s thing called #metoo.

I come from a sex-suppressing, fundamentalist “Christian” background. The quotes are there to indicate that I think much of the practices were anything but christ-like. The principles there swirl through the culture around me in varying degrees of intensity, and they inform and direct my choices (sometimes against my will and my better hopes and ideals). I have to be open to the notion that any objection I have to sex work, or my participation, is entirely a cultural construct. And while I don’t think it is true, I cannot dismiss the notion that morals themselves may have no possible objective existence, having relevance and utility (if at all) only in very time and space limited scopes.

It is what I believe the sociologists call a “wicked” problem. It involves really complicated normative stances, and there’s no data analysis that can provide any guidance. For myself, I expect my participation to continue to wane as I mature. I only hope that whatever I do only further enables and empowers the women in my life and everywhere.

• I almost stopped myself from using this word when I realized potential implications, but ultimately left it in because it (and the fact it was my natural inclination to select it) really highlights the issue for me and hopefully others

Bonus hypothetical: If porn is somehow wrong and harmful, even drawings and writings, are sex fantasies also wrong?

I personally think it could be helpful as a group for us to attempt guiding ourselves to cooperate and do stuff like timasomo. Alternatively it could end up being swallowed by petty drama and be really horrible.

This question really came to mind to me about last week when I was hanging out with some friends. I always noticed it as a part of my personality but I never really thought about it as in depth as I have recently. That night I immediately got concerned to the point of it ruining my evening about the following things:

• We're running out of helium in the world
• Where is my birth certificate
• The old VHS tapes of my childhood and important moments in my family are slowly degrading but I can't digitise them until I go home to my parents and that's not for at least half a year, will they hold up that long?
• There's too much space junk
• I used so much plastic just cooking dinner this one evening for my friends, imagine how much gets bought and consumed worldwide
• Some languages are going to die out and there's nothing I can do about it
• Are the rhinos doing ok?
• What's my blood type and am I allergic to anything?

Does anyone else suffer from this idiosyncracy? If so, what are some things that concern you or what are some other things that I can be concerned about?

EDIT: This turned dark, I thought I was just sharing some lighthearted fun and now I have schizophrenia, OCD and should talk to a therapist... jeez louise