The irony of Just Jeepin's posts

"Spanfeller is a twat" (theaspiringengineer)
09/02/2020 at 08:41 • Filed to: Avant-oppo

1st act: posts about urban sprawl in Houston.

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2nd act: posts about job openings in Jalopnik for people tired of getting very little exposure on Oppo.

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3rd act: Casually, the managing editor of Jalopnik posts about urban sprawl in Houston and uses the same links as Just Jeepin; gets thousands of views.

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DISCUSSION (19)

Just Jeepin' > Spanfeller is a twat
09/02/2020 at 08:45

Heh. It would definitely be interesting to know whether they’re farming Oppo for ideas.

Spanfeller is a twat > Just Jeepin'
09/02/2020 at 08:46

I’m sure Erin Marquis is an avid reader of Texas Monthly.

Who is the Leader - 404 / Blog No Longer Available > Just Jeepin'
09/02/2020 at 08:47

If bad ideas are what they're after they can have them. But yes I did notice that and laughed. Sometimes you get beaten to the punch and other times you just get beaten.

Just Jeepin' > Spanfeller is a twat
09/02/2020 at 08:48

Or she found it the same place I did. Or people are sharing the Texas Monthly piece via Twitter. Or...who knows.

TheRealBicycleBuck > Just Jeepin'
09/02/2020 at 08:50

Bac k in the day, they would occasionally share an Oppo post to the front page. A lthough that doesn’t happen anymore, it’s clear that they pay attention to Oppo and sometimes steal our ideas without giving us credit. It’s happened to me before.

Spanfeller is a twat > Just Jeepin'
09/02/2020 at 08:52

while posible, I think it’s probably unlikely.

Just Jeepin' > Spanfeller is a twat
09/02/2020 at 09:00

It’s unfortunate that the Hacker News comment didn’t elicit any discussion here or on Jalopnik. That was the main piece of content I found worth reading.

I’ll paste it here, but obviously I’m not the author. Credit goes to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jcrawfordor

As a decidedly amateur historian with interest in this area, I think that claim is true on its own but also does not tell the entire story.

It is true that decentralization was viewed as a major component of nuclear survivability, particularly in the earlier part of the cold war. This was the time period during which the FEMA (today’s name) crisis relocation program was being devised, for example, and the high cost and complexity of crisis relocation (which, in an earlier form, was a major motivation for the Eisenhower freeway system, to the extent that it’s probably fair to say that it was the main motivation with materiel movement as a second) served to highlight the inherent vulnerability of dense cities and keep it very much in the minds of government planners. Decentralized cities had an inherent advantage to planners in that money could be saved on crisis relocation efforts. Of course the crisis relocation program was never fully implemented, but the way of thinking was fairly influential.

The federal government had an enormous role in suburbanization of US cities in many, many ways, which is actually part of what makes it hard to address this point. Support for suburbanization was not coming just (or even primarily) from FEMA, all kinds of federal agencies had a hand. Much of the urban renewal work of the 20th century took the effective form of relocating poor people to the suburbs and replacing their inner-city housing with industrial/commercial/transport, for example the Model Cities program of the late ‘60s. This was in part a result of the general feeling that the inner city was where poor people lived and so improving their economic situation required getting them out of it, part of it was merely the practical issue that substantially improving a dense area is a lot more expensive than razing it and build something new there. I don’t know if these programs were strongly influenced by crisis planning, they probably were at least in part, but it seems unlikely that crisis planning was a much bigger influence in federal advocacy of suburbanization than the more organic trends of white flight and urban decay that came out of a set of race and class relations, in a potent combination with some simple budget and timeline considerations.

My point is that nuclear planning was a factor, but the massive suburbanization of the postwar decades originated from many factors out of which nuclear crisis planning was only one, and I’m not convinced that it was one of the bigger ones in the end. Yes, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists very openly advocated for suburbanization of cities and that view was influential, but at the same time so much of suburbanization was motivated by a new vision of the American dream that came out of the peculiarities of post-war economics and demographics, racism, the radical popularity of the automobile (which not only enabled low-density areas but often required the destruction of high-density areas to provide freeway access to business districts), and probably at least a few other things.

Any claim that “urban sprawl is a result of x” where X isn’t a list of things is probably pretty hard to defend. A complete change in not just urban planning but people’s patterns of life tends to require a confluence of factors.

hillrat > Just Jeepin'
09/02/2020 at 09:17

Any claim that “urban sprawl is a result of x” where X isn’t a list of things is probably pretty hard to defend.

^^^^^That’s it right there.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > Just Jeepin'
09/02/2020 at 09:27

One factor in sprawl , w hich people forget about in SoCal, is that the original “villages” across the region were largely “citrus processing centers”. So, generally quite separated by distance, because you didn’t need a lemon packing house every few hundred yards. Many farmers organized into “co-ops” which pooled resources for processing facilities they could share, but scattered even farther apart. And, Sunkist to this day retains this basic historical model.

Even up to WW2 the area was quite rural and “Pomona” was a different town than “Redlands” which was a different town from “Whittier”. The Red Line trolley did in fact connect most places you’d want to go... but only because it was orange groves in between. As the empty space filled in, it became exponentially harder to connect them all with transit.

The local leaders made a lot of decisions favoring “car travel” over “rail travel” but even those are multi-faceted.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > Spanfeller is a twat
09/02/2020 at 09:31

Oh, I’m convinced they are watching. I posted about JetPack guy yesterday and the FP quickly had a short piece and link up... Probably coincidence but they clearly comb a lot of sources for ideas.

Spanfeller is a twat > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish
09/02/2020 at 09:34

jetpack man I can understand because it was an important story in many places...but this? the link on twitter is more than ten days old: that’s like a hundred years in twitter.

Just Jeepin' > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish
09/02/2020 at 09:34

Technically I beat you to that post. You stole it from me. Admit it!

https://oppositelock.kinja.com/2020-just-got-weirder-1844915600

Stef Schrader > Just Jeepin'
09/02/2020 at 09:36

That’s usually how that works. I give h/ts to things I find on forums (as do the front page staff here, at least when I was here), but the internet is big. Folks send in tips. Info goes out through other places. There are a zillion places she could’ve found this one.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > Just Jeepin'
09/02/2020 at 09:37

Well, technically I’m a dumbass for not combing the posts from earlier in the day... so I call it a clear win for you and stand corrected.

I figure Jason can’t type that fast so I think we can agree HE STOLE THE IDEA FROM YOU.

facw > Just Jeepin'
09/02/2020 at 09:44

I would guess they do. And if they do, I think that’s fine, I don’t think “I found this interesting article” is really enough to warrant crediting.

TheRealBicycleBuck > Just Jeepin'
09/02/2020 at 09:55

The comment is correct in that there were many factors that made urban sprawl possible. Inexpensive land (leading to cheap housing) , cheap transportation, new roads and highways, loan practices, white flight, etc. It’s impossible to isolate any one factor and say that it’s the singular cause of urban sprawl.

WasGTIthenGTOthenNOVAnowbacktoGTI > Spanfeller is a twat
09/02/2020 at 10:21

It’s almost like we’re

Kinja'd!!!

Being watched.

Spanfeller is a twat > Stef Schrader
09/02/2020 at 10:24

In this case I think it's too close for comfort.

Stef Schrader > Spanfeller is a twat
09/02/2020 at 15:33

Nah. I also saw this making the rounds before I saw it on Oppo. It’s A Thing.

(Also, most of the FP staff didn’t spend a ton of time in here when I left. No idea if that’s changed nowadays.)