What makes the maps that the city makes up better than the ones that the real estate agents make up? If people are using the latter to determine where to live, doesn't that define a neighborhood?
What makes the maps that the city makes up better than the ones that the real estate agents make up?
In this case, the city designations are important because each year the city divides a pot of money that goes to supplemental infrastructure improvements in each neighborhood.
Because it's supplemental money, it is a fixed amount for each neighborhood. If a neighborhood's boundaries increase, then money available for improvements in that neighborhood is stretched thinner. If a neighborhood's boundaries shrink, then more money is available for improvements per block.
This is why boundaries matter, and why they are codified.
That's a good reason for why the city shouldn't arbitrarily change its official definitions of neighborhood boundaries without also changing budget allocations.
Why shouldn't everyone else define neighborhoods however they feel is most useful to them?
I realise it could be a problem if words become unrecognised, but there's already a few spelling variations among neighbours. People are flexible. Heck, they can understand eevn wehn yuo wrte lkie tihs.
> Heck, they can understand eevn wehn yuo wrte lkie tihs.
Not aywlas. I keep sineeg tihs, and ftnrqleeuy fnid mlesyf nidneeg to dcgrusaioe (or at lesat cllhgeane) the ptsooiin. For slaml wdros it can wrok, but I fnid tihs is iltnrheeny dcfuliift (and dnniirag, as wlel as fttrrnsaiug!) to raed, and dns'eot slace to let you raed in a ceorneht fhisoan oevr a ranblaosee poierd wtih mtlui-sllibyac wrods.
Iiagnme a cueopmtr sncciee or poolsghcyy txet dylpaeisd or ogzeriand tihs way. It wulod be ulllnntiigbee, or at the vrey bset a sptmbuioal mhoted of trrrnfnseiag lraeg qnttaiiues of dlteeiad itfrimaoonn atalccurey.
Hope there aren't any spelling mistakes, I tried to ensure everything was correct before I messed with it. I spent way too long on this, and since I've tried to check everything out I need a break. It was still quite enjoyable to do, although I'm sure it had a negative impact on my spelling.
> Not always. I keep seeing this, and frequently find myself needing to discourage (or at least challenge) the position. For small words it can work, but I find this is inherently difficult (and draining, as well as frustrating!) to read, and doesn't scale to let you read in a coherent fashion over a reasonable period with multi-syllabic words.
Imagine a computer science or psychology text displayed or organized this way. It would be unintelligible, or at the very best a suboptimal method of transferring large quantities of information accurately.
But if you're going to mess up words and claim readability, why not take out spaces and see how you might fare?
Or scramble words in sentences without spaces, too?
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Quite readable. Cant' vouch for spelling mistakes, or lack thereof :)
Your compiler isn't going to care about your opinion of the prettiest way to spell "print". Your lawyer is going to have strong opinions about how you spell you name and address on the contract you're about to sign.
Sure, if you're writing poetry, you get to choose everything. If you need what you write to be as close to unambiguously understood as possible to other people (or machines) - then you need to follow the norms and common uses of words, and spell them and use grammar that other people agree on.
(Neighborhood names might well be closer to "poetry" than "reserved words in a computer language", but if we then become beholden to commission-driven real estate agents to define our local nomenclature from a purely personal profit seeking motivation - I think I'd rather have some anonymous city bureaucrat responsible for drawing the lines and choosing the labels...)
My compiler doesn't allow me to make up spelling in my code, but my friends are fine with me making up alternate spelling when I text them. Not everything is computer code or legal documents.
The names that bureaucrats or real estate agents give to neighborhoods has never mattered to me. Why do you think we have to be beholden to it? My point is that you're free to call your neighborhood whatever you want. I'm sure you're capable of figuring out which name is appropriate to use depending on the context of your conversation.
In most of the USA outside of San Francisco, authoritarianism is frowned upon. In China and SF, the government is more free to tell people how to speak and live. It's a cultural difference.
Agents will arbitrarily change maps basted on what their current listing are and would happily change them daily. Longer term there is little point changing place names as changing demographics will eventually adjust the meaning of these names even if no lines move on a map.
Nobody/Everybody, if people start calling a region by a name it makes sense to record the usage and put it on the map. Sure, it probably makes perfections and planners twitch but it makes maps more useful.
I notice a lot of Americans love referring to Canada as “Canadia”. I can’t make a bit of sense out of it, but by your logic we should update the maps already.
You can't change my username, but you don't have to refer to me by my official username. Furthermore, it's ok that my government ID doesn't say daveFNbuck even though I'm using it as my name here.
There are almost no situations where people refer to me by the name in my government records, and that's fine. Those records still work for their intended purpose and there's no need to update them to match my nicknames or aliases.
The issue here isn’t that Google got the name wrong, but that they actively chose a new one and could change it to the new one because the public depends on a private entity’s map system and that private entity is able to manipulate the representation in their own private interest.
>If< I didn’t like you and I were able to change your name on every non-public record to “Fucking Idiot” (Job applications, Facebook, Twitter, GMail, etc.), maybe you wouldn’t mind that. Or maybe you would mind it and I convinced you to not mind it by explaining how it wouldn’t effect your government records. (I doubt the residents in question mind the name “The East Cut” either, but they already had one and preferred it. In many of these name changes, the effects can mean rapid mass development, raised rents and evictions, etc.) For you, this name change would mean at least a lot of explaining how this obnoxious poster on Hacker News was trying to make some disparate point but it has nothing to do with your qualification for the job, getting your account banned from Social media sites. You could start a new one but you’d lose all your posts and followers. At the end of the day, you should probably have been able to stop me, but you couldn’t.
If Google were doing something malicious that caused real and important harm, I'd probably agree with you that what they were doing was wrong. I don't see the harm here, and I don't see malice. They weren't doing this capriciously, they were doing this at the behest of a nonprofit created by the community.
Right. If nothing harmful has been reported by New York Times by now, then I’m sure nothing could ever go wrong.
I’m critiquing the shape of the system and the potential for harm. The municipal duties our ancestors fought to have managed through democratic processes we love to pride ourselves on are swiftly being surrendered to private corporations who citizens widely do not trust. And then we wait until the damage is irreversible and pretend we weren’t asking for it.
I don't think our ancestors fought to ensure that mapmaking could only be done through democratic processes. The usual story we like to tell ourselves about this country is that our ancestors fought to give us freedom, not to ensure that the government would have the final say on how we're allowed to identify our neighborhoods.
You say you critiqued the potential for harm and that you've warned me, but I don't believe that you've done that. You've explained how similar changes to other systems could potentially harm me, but you haven't explained how changing neighborhood names on Google maps could lead to harm.
The maps made by the city have legal impact. They control everything from funding to allocation of community resources. For example, in my city each neighborhood has an official community association that is acts as a liaison to the city.
Improvement projects are also designated by neighborhood, long term planning and resource allocation is on a per-neighborhood basis.
City council determines the areas within a city; it is NOT made up. Some areas are much more popular than others. Leaving this to random people is absurd. The areas don't suddenly change.
Anyway, this is how it is like in The Netherlands.
Neighborhoods imply far more than geography; things like culture, traditions, cooperation, people define a neighborhood. This is, among other things, the contents of trust. The idea of a foundation on which to make a happy life amongst they neighbors can involve many different things, so it’s vague, but the most important part is that the participants themselves are who develops the neighborhood; not capitalists trying to profit from it.
Gentrification is a prime example of where this becomes a cruel and unusual form of manipulation, but it’s not the only one.
What Google is doing should absolutely be considered a crime.
