[p2p-research] "We need more megalopolises"

[Christian Siefkes]

"M. Fioretti" <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:
> Regardless of my opinion, there is no paywall there. Why do you say
> so? As far as I know, there _will_ be one in 2011, but not for casual
> readers:
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.html
> 
> I sure haven't paid anything to read that page (maybe I did a free
> registration, I really don't remember) _and_ it is still readable, I
> just checked.

Frankly, I don't what's going on. I checked the page four times, and three
times I got a login prompt instead of the article. The fourth time they
showed me the article without asking me to log in (which I never did). I
have no idea about how they decide whether or not to show the article. In
any case, I was wrong about the "paywall", since login seems to be free.
That idea didn't occur to me, since what would be the point of forcing
people to log in if not to extract payment?

Anyway, I now read the article and think it's interesting if too
mechanistic. There are obviously many variables that influence the vitality
of cities and size is but one of them (the scientist admits so himself when
stating that he has to know whether a city is in Japan etc.). I think it
would be interesting to learn more about when (at which point) the bad
effects of city growth start to outweigh the good effects, but his thinking
seems to be too linear to explore such issues. (He talks about "sublinear"
and "superlinear", but the idea that there may be turning points doesn't
seem to occur to him.)

Best regards
	Christian

-- 
|------- Dr. Christian Siefkes ------- christian at siefkes.net -------
| Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/ | Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
|    Peer Production Everywhere:       http://peerconomy.org/wiki/
|---------------------------------- OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 --
Jehovah almost alone of the ancient gods never married. Never even went out
on a date. No wonder he was such a neurotic, authoritative prick.
        -- Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

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