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My ultra hardcore recycling guide for our house

Hi all,
I've been putting together info for how to recycle in Tucson while leveraging all the recycling options that are open to me: curbside, the city's upcoming glass drop-off, local and mail-in corporate-sponsored, and TerraCycle (a paid option). I aim to reuse or recycle every last bit of waste coming out of our house, no matter how crazy it may seem. Partly I just want to see how difficult it is; I recognize that my process isn't practical for most people.
Anyway, here's what I've gathered so far.

General principles

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  1. COMPOST: If it can be composted, compost it! (More on this below.)
  2. REUSE: If it can't be composted, reuse it! Reuse is always the most environmentally-friendly option.
  3. DONATE: If it can't be reused by you, donate it if it's something worth donating that someone else could use. https://tucsoncleanandbeautiful.org/ has a great directory for places that will accept various materials. Cero is a Tucson store that also accepts lots of stuff for donation and reuse. Donation usually involves transportation and some kind of carbon emissions, but it's still better than recycling. Don't donate junk! Donations aren't a free trash can.
  4. MUNICIPAL RECYCLING: If it can't be donated, recycle it locally using municipal recycling (curbside or drop-off). Recycle Coach has all the info you need on what municipal recycling can or can't recycle. ESGD's page on residential recycling also has some important guidelines. Recycling uses energy and involves carbon-emitting transport, plus not everything in a recycling waste stream actually gets recycled, so try to reuse first.
  5. LOCAL STORE DROP-OFF: If it can't be recycled using municipal recycling, recycle it at a local store for free. Earth911 has a search page that finds these stores and breaks them down by type, and TerraCycle's corporate-sponsored programs page also has some local programs. These programs typically ship their waste to a recycling partner, often TerraCycle in New Jersey, which adds to the environmental footprint of the process, so try to recycle municipally first.
  6. FREE MAIL-IN: If it can't be recycled at a local store, use one of TerraCycle's free corporate-sponsored mail-in programs. These programs end up sending waste TerraCycle, just like the local store drop-offs, but are arguably less efficient than sending a big communal batch of stuff, so try to use the local store drop-offs first.
  7. TERRACYCLE (PAID): If it can't be recycled using a mail-in program, use a paid all-in-one box to have TerraCycle recycle it if it's small and light. This is effectively the same as using one of the mail-in options above except that you have to pay, so try to use a mail-in program first.
  8. REGIONAL DROP-OFF: If it's a big bulky waste that can't be donated, see if it can be recycled outside of Tucson (e.g., save up Styrofoam for the next time I drive to Phoenix, where they do have the appropriate facilities). TerraCycle accepts almost anything, but their all-in-one boxes are pricey, so it may make more sense to save up big hard-to-recycle stuff like packaging for Phoenix or another big city, if you think you'll drive there at some point. Don't make unnecessary trips just to drop off waste!
  9. TRASH: If it can't be composted, reused, donated or recycled, throw it away and make sure that you follow the guidelines for hazardous waste disposal.
  10. GOLDEN RULE #1: Make sure that the material is clean. Clean waste streams are more valuable to recyclers, which helps keep costs down. Don't use too much water cleaning up stuff, but don't feel too guilty about using water, either! Dishwater usage is a tiny sliver of household water consumption, not to mention that industry and agriculture generally use much more water than homes.
  11. GOLDEN RULE #2: The goal of recycling is to break down your waste into "primary materials" (e.g., plastic, metal, paper, glass) that can be used by industry to make new products. The more mixed your materials, the more you need to research how to recycle it. Knowing the basics goes a long way. For example, I know that metal cans get melted down, so a paper or plastic label attached to the can doesn't worry me because I know that it will get burned off. But what about a milk carton, which is paper fused with plastic? Or the circuitry inside the plastic base of a CFL bulb? If you can't intuitively explain how the thing is going to get broken down into its primary materials, that's your cue that you need to do some research.
  12. GOLDEN RULE #3: Knowing the basics of how recycling centers work goes a long way. For example, if you know that you can't recycle plastic grocery bags curbside because they get stuck in the machines, that's a hint that you shouldn't try to recycle your plastic food wrap, either. Or if you know that plastic bottle caps fall through the holes of a separator, that's a hint that you need to research whether your beer bottle caps are recyclable (even though they're metal).
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Reuse and recycling guide for my home

This is not a comprehensive list of every recycling resource in Tucson, this is just for my house my household's needs. I've found that there's no one-size-fits-all solution if you want to reach close to 100% recycling/reuse, you end up having to come up with a list that's customized for your home, which requires research. I'm providing my list as a potential template as well as for inspiration.
Legend:
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How do I sort all this?

Right now, I'm using a makeshift system of lots and lots of bags to keep everything separate. My idea is to do a monthly "recycling day" and drop off everything that needs to be dropped off as well as mail in everything that needs to be mailed in. I haven't had to do this yet since I started this project.
I hope to build a sorting station in my house once I understand my needs a bit better.
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Notes on TerraCycle and partner programs

A lot of the corporate-sponsored/mail-in/drop-off programs are done through TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based recycler that specializes in recycling hard-to-recycle things (e.g., potato chip bags, toothbrushes). They make lots of their money through large corporations, which essentially pay them to process unprofitable waste in order to burnish their environmental stewardship bona fides. They also offer paid recycling pouches and boxes to the general public. You mail in these pouches/boxes (they come with a shipping label) after filling them up with recyclable waste.
TerraCycle will recycle almost anything and everything. However, anything that gets recycled through them or one of their corporate programs is shipped to New Jersey for processing, so it's preferable to reuse or recycle locally. They're also not as transparent as I wish they would be. I'm not certain, for example, how much of each waste stream actually gets recycled. They have a customer support contact form that's been very good for getting my questions answered, but beware that they take about 2-3 days to get back to you per request.
I bought the large "all-in-one" box from their site and found a coupon code online to bring the cost down to around $350. I read a review elsewhere from someone who got a medium box (about 50% the size) who said that it lasted her six months. My idea is to use this box as "recycling of last resort" and rely on drop-off programs as much as possible to keep costs down. On the other hand, this makes my life more complicated in terms of sorting different waste streams, so you could simplify by putting waste destined for various drop-off points into a single TerraCycle all-in-one box.
You need to register for free on their website to use their mail-in programs. Many of their mail-in programs unfortunately have wait lists. Of the ~15 programs for which I signed up around two weeks ago, about 8 had wait lists, and I got off the wait list for about 5 of them. So they seem to go through the list pretty regularly. Once you're in, you can print off a free UPS label from the "my profile" section of the site after logging in.
If I had to take a wild guess, I would assume that TerraCycle has a higher rate of recycling than municipal programs, but this must be balanced against the financial and environmental cost of shipping waste to their facilities.
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Composting

The Achilles' heel in my recycling and reuse plan is organic matter. The City of Tucson has a composting program but it's only open to businesses.
There are a few volunteer-run programs here and there that accept compostable waste. I managed to sign up for one, UA's Compost Cats, and will be meeting them tomorrow to pick up my sealed composting bucket and go over the program rules. I know that they have limited capacity, so you have to email them. They took about a week to get back to me.
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Am I insane?

Maybe a little 🙃.
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Shout outs

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submitted by Low_Walrus to Tucson [link] [comments]

But Everyone Calls their Planet Dirt!

"We'll want to minimize the amount of our tech they can get their hands on before full capitulation," Intelligence Officer Rouel noted. "To go from undetectable from a distance to an orbital communications relay network in only five hundred years suggests a remarkably high innovation score."
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Admiral Crassock flicked an ear tuft and nodded. "The less we give them to reverse engineer, the less we'll bleed. Are there any other warning flags?"
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"No, sir," Rouel answered. "They launch their satellites with chemical rockets. Even first generation counter-grav is more cost effective, so we can reasonably assume they don't have it. Since you can't do FTL R&D on a planet's surface without destroying it, no counter-grav means no FTL, which means no reinforcements. A separatist colony would have retained enough tech for an outward facing system defense network; a penal colony would have an inward facing one. Since this system has neither, this must be this species's homeworld."
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"Has there been any change in the habitability report since the original survey?" the admiral asked. CRX-4 sat right in the sweet spot of the habitability assessment, with most of its landmass in the subtropical zones, but enough temperate and arctic real estate to ensure that over 90% of galactic species could live there with only adornment grade protective clothing. Only a handful of the most extreme outlier species would need more than class three environmental gear to survive somewhere on the planet. The only reason no one had snapped it up when it was first discovered was that its location was simply too remote to be practical. But borders had expanded in the intervening centuries, and now the Wingover Heromancy was close enough to claim the planet and defend that claim against any contenders.
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"Surprisingly little," the intelligence officer answered. "They must have had their industrial revolution at an atypically low population benchmark, and learned how to clean up after themselves fairly quickly. Another indication that they have an abnormally high innovation score."
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"What about their physiology?" Admiral Crassock asked. "It won't constrain their combat effectiveness as much as it would for a less innovative species, but it must still influence their tactics."
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Intelligence Officer Rouel nodded. "Here, we have visuals on them." He flicked a command to the display, but then began reading off the data anyway. "Mammalian bipeds, hair sparse except on the top of the head and a few other locations that vary by individual. Moderate sexual dimorphism--subtle but enough to render co-ed sports competitions impractical for any but strictly recreational purposes. Very conflicting reports on strength and stamina, suggesting that they have a use-it-or-lose-it physiology. Atypically high resting metabolic rates, even for endotherms."
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"Meaning that a middle of the sleep cycle surprise attack will have to be perfectly executed in order to retain the advantages of a surprise attack?" the admiral interjected.
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"Precisely," Rouel answered. "Viviparous with a gestational period of nearly a year and roughly two decades to maturity. Birthrate appears to inversely correlate with wealth, which suggests a lack of innate control over their reproduction. It's difficult to determine their typical lifespan--hereditary and environmental factors apparently can alter it by as much as 50%; the current primary suppression of their life expectancy appears to come from a tendency toward extreme recklessness in their adolescent males."
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"That will make ground combat...interesting..." Admiral Crossack said. "I think i'll tell the training officers to put their most creative minds on designing the practice scenarios for the ground units."
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"With a combination of innovative and reckless, i'd suggest putting the truly diabolical minds on the air unit training scenarios," Captain Hussend said, his reptilian muzzle parting in a grin of malicious glee.
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"Looking for an excuse to pull out that black box scenario?" Admiral Crossack asked the captain of his fleet's contingent of planetary troops. Returning his attention to the intelligence officer he asked, "Do we have to worry about attempted MAD?"
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"FTL research is noisy enough that we'd detect it long before they managed to weaponize it." Rouel answered. "As much easier as that is than using it for travel, it's still far from easy. They do have fission reactors providing some of their power. There's no evidence that they ever tried to weaponize that technology, however; we'd see fallout scars if they'd done any testing. I'd still recommend seizing those nuclear power plants and any fuel processing facilities as quickly as possible."
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Admiral Crossack nodded. "Unless you find something else before we arrive within targeting range of the planet, i think we'll remain in stealth mode until we're in position to take out all of their satellites simultaneously. Their ground based sensors should be sufficient for them to realize we have orbital superiority. If that isn't enough to make them surrender, it will be Captain Hussend's turn to call the shots. Do we know what they call themselves? If we're going to demand that they surrender sovereignty of their home planet, we can at least do them the courtesy of using their name for it."
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"They call themselves 'humans'," Intelligence Officer Rouel answered. "The planet they call Ferrari. Oddly, it's the same in all twelve of their languages; perhaps it was inherited from some archaic language that is no longer used."
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---------------------------------------
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The initial attack went off perfectly. All of the satellites around Ferrari disintegrated within a few seconds of one another, with no wasted shots from the WHN ships. Almost as soon as they realized that all of their satellite communications were down, the humans began evacuating their civilians toward a series of massive underground bunkers.
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"I can't tell if that's an overpowered communications laser, or a weapons test modulated to carry data to give them plausible deniability if it fails," the Communications Officer reported when the humans finally replied to the Wingover Heromancy's surrender demands.
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"Retaliation will make them assume their weapons are strong enough to damage our ships," Captain Hussend predicted.
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Intelligence Officer Rouel concurred. "My recommendation would be to politely ask them to dial back the power on that laser as it's clearly intended for communication over much longer distances. Imply that it's merely signal degradation due to overexposure, not anything that threatens to actually damage our receiver."
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Admiral Crossack considered the suggestion for a few moments and then told the communications officer, "Do it."
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After some negotiation with the humans over optimal signal strength, the transmission settled on the image of a human in what appeared to be their civilian formal wear. "President Chen, of the Faction Arbitration Council," the human identified himself. "Since you're asking for our surrender rather than simply glassing the planet, you must want it intact, which means you're going to have to come down here and take it. It would be easier to negotiate a land for tech swap--except that none of us has the authority to order everyone else to stand down. You'd have to negotiate with each faction separately if you want the whole planet. And since you opened with an attack, even if it was just on infrastructure and not personnel, rather than a diplomatic contact, half of them are going to insist that you're nothing but thieves and bullies, no matter how big an empire you might happen to have behind you.
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"The short version," President Chen continued. "If you want this planet, you're going to have to come down here and take it."
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"If we refrain from firing on your evacuating civilians, will you refrain from salting the Ferrari?" Admiral Crossack asked.
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"Salting the--?" the human President's forehead wrinkled as he tried to puzzle out the phrase. "You mean, 'salting the earth'?"
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"Isn't that what i said?" Admiral Crossack asked. "I understand that the connotations of synonymous words can vary, but the denotation should be similar enough for understanding. And every terrestrial species calls their planet some cognate of Fertile Soil or Solid Ground. It requires relatively advanced astronomical knowledge to realize that the planet beneath one's feet has anything in common with the wandering stars in the night sky, after all."
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The human's eyes widened, and then his face went curiously blank. He just figured something out, and he's weighing the tactical considerations against the strategic ones, Rouel guessed silently.
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"We won't start an atrocity contest as long as you don't," President Chen said. "Not all of our cultures agree on what does and what does not constitute war crimes, but as long as you refrain from targeting civilians and don't use biological or chemical weapons, they should all remain within the parameters of what most warriors consider an acceptable level of occupational hazard."
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"What's the most common opinion on eating your kills?" Captain Hussend asked, displaying his mouthful of large reptilian teeth.
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"In extremis only," President Chen answered. "There are a few superstitions that hold that eating hearts or certain other organs can be a way to appropriate your enemy's virtues, but far more of us regard it as a way of declaring your enemy to be an animal rather than a person. Cannibalism as a last ditch alternative to death by starvation will generally be overlooked, but ritual practice is not tolerated."
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Captain Hussend nodded. "That is a common consensus among most polities and species as well. I suppose that any trophy taking would best be justifiable as preserving DNA samples to determine who is dead and who is missing once the war ends?"
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"Oh, the nerds are going to love you," President Chen muttered. "Is there anything else we need to discuss, or is it time for you to either reconsider your invasion or else 'bring it on'?"
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"My troops are already dropping," Captain Hussend answered with another toothy grin.
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---------------------------------
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"Woah, hey, there's no need to get nasty," Pedro said as his eyes locked onto the tray of surgical implements. "I'm a civilian. I've got no reason not to spill the beans."
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"Civilian," the mantis looking interrogator scoffed. "You killed at least forty of our soldiers, and crippled over a dozen more."
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"I'm just a guy trying to defend his home. If your people had just obeyed the 'no trespassing' signs, nobody would have died," Pedro responded.
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"In any case, it's your medical condition that's responsible for any nastiness," the interrogator informed the human captive. "The squad that dug you out from under that landslide thought they were recovering a corpse for autopsy. Growing replacement organs for your ruptured ones was straightforward enough, but your species is violently allergic to all of our existing bone glue formulations, so your broken bones are going to have to heal the slow way. I'm told that broken ribs are even more painful than a fractured thoracic plate."
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"Convenient," Pedro said. "You get to dose me with enough painkillers to keep me from guarding my tongue and still claim you're just trying to help me."
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"Quite convenient," the interrogator agreed. "Also a useful argument against those who claim that compassion is nothing but a waste of resources. May i have your full name for the next exchange of survival records?"
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"Pedro Fook. I'm seriously tempted to give you the correct spelling instead of the one English speakers will pronounce correctly, but i'm too tired for that game."
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The interrogator paused to listen to what the linguist was telling him through his earpiece and then clacked in amusement. "Very droll. I can accept that a civilian would have sufficient motive for attacking our troops, but i find your effectiveness implausible."
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Pedro answered, "Why? Hunting the free-range livestock gets us kill training. Paintball games give us tactical training against opponents as smart and creative as we are. Wilderness hiking and camping gets us survival training. And VR lets us familiarize ourselves with the stuff that would be too dangerous to do for real."
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"But how are you coordinating your attacks?" the interrogator asked.
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"We aren't," Pedro answered. "We're spread out enough that we aren't likely to get in each other's ways; and we all grew up reading the same books, watching the same movies, and playing the same games, so we all have fairly similar ideas as to what tactics are likely to work in what situations. We don't need to win, we just have to keep harassing your people enough to prove we haven't abandoned our claim until the military gets here. If you had a prior claim, you should have planted a flag or left a beacon in orbit or something, so we'd have known we needed to negotiate instead of just moving in."
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"Habitable planets are far to precious to be left in the hands of those who can't defend them," the interrogator replied. "There are a few interstellar species so xenophobic that they will glass a planet that someone else beat them to. If you can't keep us from taking it when we want to preserve it, you'd have no hope of keeping them from destroying it."
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"You still could have tried negotiating first and attacking second," Pedro replied angrily. "Counter-gravity tech would be well worth sharing a planet over. Possibly even giving one up if we could have come to an arrangement regarding the people who have put down roots too deep to be willing to move to a different one. Too late for that now, though."
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"You have no FTL," the interrogator said. "How would you leave, and how could you have come here from somewhere else."
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"Why do you think we--ohhhhhh..." Pedro suddenly realized, "You never did solve the energy discharge from getting it almost right problem. You had counter-grav, you could just do your research and development in deep space where failures wouldn't destroy your planet. We had to focus on miniaturization instead, so the energy release was small enough to contain, until we could consistently get it right. Then we scaled back up until we had something suitable for a mass transit system. By the way, the emergency evacuation portals can be weaponized, so i'd advise against backing us into any corners. And our home planet isn't on this network, so even if you manage to capture a control unit intact, you can't get all of us!"
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"Do you know where it is, in spatial terms?" the interrogator asked.
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Pedro started to shrug and them stopped when his ribs objected. "Galaxy cluster on the other side of the Great Attractor from here, if i remember correctly. We've got at least a hundred planets scattered across a dozen different galaxies, as best the astronomers can tell. There's one that's suspected of not even being in the same universe."
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"What does Ferrari translate as," the interrogator asked.
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"Did anyone notice that paved track with the freestanding garage near my house?" Pedro responded. "That car in there, that's a Ferrari."
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The translator listened to something on his earpiece and then said, "Four-wheeled ground vehicle, internal combustion engine--used for recreational racing?" Getting a nod from Pedro he went on, "The car is named after the planet?"
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"No," Pedro answered. "The planet was named after the car; the car is named after the guy who founded the company that originally manufactured it. No clue what the etymology on his family name is."
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"I see," the interrogator said. His insect-like anatomy and stridulatory vocal apparatus didn't prevent him from being noticeably disturbed by what he'd learned.
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-------------------------------------
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"But everyone calls their planet 'Dirt'," Admiral Crossack objected once he finished watching the recording of the interview.
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"But they're not from here," Captain Hussend said. "It would have been obvious, except their method of getting here flies in the face of everything we know about FTL tech. We've got enough seismic surveys now to know those bunkers are nowhere near big enough to hold everyone who went into them. Not even with true stasis tech or physiology that would allow for adult cryofreeze. Can't swear on the former, but we know they don't have the latter."
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"A pity this Pedro never studied enough physics to explain how their portals work. He can tell us what they do, but not why," Intelligence Officer Rouel said. "They probably sent anyone who did have that knowledge home in the first wave of evacuations. A pity we didn't know to stop them."
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Captain Hussend disagreed. "Just as well we didn't. If that portal tech really does have the same energy discharge problem as conventional FTL, they have at least planetary, and possibly system scale, MAD. Firing on evacuees would have been a disaster."
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"And Pedro thinks they've sent enough shuttle parts through that portal for them to reverse engineer the counter-gravity tech," Admiral Crossack said glumly. "Doesn't know enough to guess how long that will take, or which direction they'll try to hit us from once they have it. I suppose i can't really blame him for not bothering to study astrography with the way their portal network ignores physical distance, but it's blasted inconvenient for us."
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"And President Chen still insists that negotiation is impossible until their military arrives in force--no one currently on planet has the authority or the firepower to force all factions to abide by any agreement," Rouel noted, equally glum. "We need to crack one of those bunkers open, see what's in there."
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"Already in planning," Captain Hussend said. "And i just ordered it moved to the top of the priority list."
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That was when the bunkers in question exploded. A number of blunt conical projectiles erupted from each site, propelled by an unholy mixture of chemical rockets and conter-grav.
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"Those missiles have shields," one of the point defense sensor techs reported.
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Captain Hussend's pupils went to full dilation and he lunged for the fleet wide communication toggle. "All personnel, stand by to repel boarders. Projectile loadout, not concussion."
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Admiral Crossack stared at the captain in consternation. "That firefight is going to be a nightmare for damage control."
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"If they can survive that kind of acceleration," Hussend waved a hand at the display that was tracking the missiles' progress, "and be able to fight afterwards, then while concussion injuries may still be a nightmare for the survivors' nearest and dearest to deal with, they won't do us any good."
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"Notify me as soon as all of these presumed boarding missiles have either docked or been destroyed," Admiral Crossack told the sensor officer sorrowfully. Then he turned to the main console and began reciting a lengthy series of authorization codes, concluding with, "Assimilator boarding protocol to standby."
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"You think they're that dangerous, sir?" one of the other ship commanders asked on a private channel.
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"MAD only works if it truly is mutual," Admiral Crossack explained. "We don't know how many planets these humans have or where they are; we cannot allow them to have that information about ours. A species that scores as high as this one for both aggression and innovation is not something we want to have to fight a defensive war against."
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Even with the deranged acceleration produced by the hybrid drive systems, it was several long minutes before the boarding missiles began impacting against the orbiting ships. The smaller, faster ships had been sent racing away from Ferrari. Half of them immediately headed to various WHN stations to relay the information acquired so far; half of them loitered on the fringes of the system to see how events played out. The larger ships, however, needed too much time to bring their main engines up to full thrust to escape the attack via distance.
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The human soldiers from the last of the boarding missiles to arrive were greeted by an automated sounding, "Assimilation boarding protocol activated. Detection of any breaching charge will activate the self-destruct on all WHN ships within one astronomical unit."
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"What did we do that spooked them that bad?" a human from a different boarding party wondered.
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"If that translated correctly," the squads senior member answered, "they're using a protocol intended for somebody else. Still, we must have spooked them at least a little to go with one that all-or-nothing."
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"I'm getting painted with a sensor laser," a third man reported. "Can they eavesdrop on us without cracking the radio encryption?"
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Admiral Crossack figured it was time to offer his proposal. "If you refrain from penetrating any further into our ships, we will withdraw to the fringes of this system until we can negotiate terms for retrieving our planet-side personnel as well as your own return. We will also order our ground troops to return to and remain in the currently existing fortified positions for so long as there are no attacks on those positions. Is this cease fire acceptable?"
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"You will refrain from attacking the positions we currently hold?" one of the human boarders asked.
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"We will," Admiral Crossack answered.
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"Terms accepted."
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-----------------------------------
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Negotiations went as well as could be expected when the humans were reluctant to allow enough Heromancy shuttles near the planet to lift all of their personnel at once and the WHN officers were reluctant to leave a contingent of the size they could lift at one time on the planet alone. The boarding parties, in contrast, had been returned as soon as the humans could satisfy themselves that the shuttle was not booby trapped--neither they nor the WHN was happy about the active self-destruct contingency.
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Eventually a compromise was reached in which the last of the Heromancy bases on Ferrari was to be converted into an embassy. It wouldn't actually attain that status under Heromancy law until the Council of Winglords formally recognized at least one of the human governments, and required a Winglord's presence to attain at least consulate status--but nothing prevented the humans from granting it formal diplomatic recognition in the meanwhile.
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President Chen and Admiral Crossack sat facing each other in one of the lounges of the future embassy. "Exactly how much authority do you have to negotiate?" President Chen asked.
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"Officially, none," Crossack answered. "Treaties must be ratified by the council and negotiated by a Winglord. Unofficially, i should be able to give you reliable guidance as to what terms will be acceptable and what will not. How much of a courtship dance will be required to get those terms accepted, i can't guess until i know which Winglord will be conducting the official negotiations."
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"Seems strange to give you the authority to start a war, but not to finish it," Chen observed.
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"Ordinarily," Crossack explained, "a Winglord would have been dispatched as soon as we realized the situation was anomalous. However, they happen to be in the middle of the once a decade Grand Conclave, the one time when Winglords whose disputes cannot be reconciled by legal means are permitted to seek normally illegal forms of redress. Any Winglord not participating still wants to be there to keep an eye on those who are."
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"Normally illegal...such as dueling?" Chen guessed.
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"Precisely. I was able to attend the last Conclave, and the preparation rituals, intended to preclude cheating, are so humiliating that it can be safely assumed that the participants were not going to be satisfied by anything less than blood." Crossack added, "Technically it's not limited to Winglords, but the requirements for ordinary citizens to challenge anyone are much more stringent. The conventional wisdom is that the less one has to lose, the less likely one is to be deterred by death and dishonor."
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"Hmm, i suppose i can see the logic in that." A communication device pinged, and President Chen looked at the display. "What is a Voice, among your people?"
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Admiral Crossack's ear tufts straightened. Finally, for good or for ill, he would know what was to be. "Both a courier and a seal of authentication. They make no decisions, but they speak with the authority of the full Council of Winglords. They are generally superlative specimens of species that have powers of persuasion or coercion, which is another reason they are so rigorously trained to be bearers of law only and never lawgivers."
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"I see," Chen said slowly. "If she's coming with an arrest warrant, like you were speculating about a few days ago, we're willing to offer you asylum."
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"I find exile more unpalatable than death and dishonor combined, but i am honored by your willingness to have me," Admiral Crossack said. "I am a bit puzzled by it, however. I was the one who ordered the attack on your world, after all."
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President Chen shrugged. "You only fought with those who wanted to fight, and the conter-grav tech we captured is more than adequate compensation for the infrastructure damage. And the special ops teams that boarded your ships were flattered by the fact that you felt you had to pull out your worst case scenario contingency to stop them. The penultimate contingency apparently wasn't good enough. Er, i hope that was your worst case contingency."
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"Worst case for contingency triggers," Crossack agreed. "There's self-destruct every ship in the system now, and trigger a system sterilizing solar flare, but those are direct triggers, and the latter is for scenarios that so far remain purely hypothetical. And the problem was that your people only needed to capture one ship, while i had to keep every single one out of their hands."
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"Your people haven't figured out that the counter to a gray goo scenario is to build nannites that eat nannites?" Chen asked rhetorically. "What are the Assimilators, anyway?"
​
"The reason we don't do implanted technology unless there's no viable alternative medically and keep augmented reality to the absolute minimum needed for non-lethal training," Crossack said. "As best anyone has been able to tell, the Assimilators started as a faction in a VR role playing game. Somewhere along the line the species that originally created the game switched from external device full immersion VR to cyborg tech augmented reality and the players started LARPing. Sometime after that, they stopped their practice of only cyborg modding volunteers who wanted to join their club and started modding anyone they could catch."
​
Crossack grimaced and continued, "As long as they needed a full surgical suite to perform the modifications, they were strictly a law enforcement problem. Unfortunately, before the last of them could be hunted down, they got their hands on some kind of replicant nano-tech that lets them infiltrate a neural link into a person without that person's knowledge."
​
"There's no such thing as a person with a direct brain-computer interface who isn't one of these Assimilators," Chen asked for clarification.
​
"No," Crossack sighed. "Any network they manage to link into, any person directly connected to that network immediately gets converted. How they do it, we're not sure; the leading hypothesis is that they've managed to create a computer-based intelligence with persuasive or coercive powers of a type and power that require a person to either take the Voice's Oath or else accept lifetime quarantine. But we just don't know. The good news is that as long as you keep your tech at arms length, it's perfectly safe, or at least they can't do anything that a conventional hacker couldn't. But it does mean that we can't infiltrate their network to figure out what in the seven blue perditions is going on with them. There are some aspects of a neural link that an external interface just can't mimic."
​
"That could be a problem," President Chen said. "Thankfully, we can't run cable through a portal--it gets cut anytime there's a power blip--but we've got way too many people with medical implants. Your people don't happen to know how to repair spinal cord injuries, do they?"
​
"Some species yes, others no," Crossack answered. "In our efforts to provide medical care to POWs of your species, we found that the treatment had to be provided immediately to be effective, and that which treatment protocol would work varied by both the cause of the damage and idiosyncratic factors. We had to guess right on the first try for treatment to work."
​
"Figures," Chen said. "Any vaccine for their nannite infiltrators?"
​
"A vaccine...for nannites?" Crossack asked in surprise.
​
"Why not?" Chen asked. "Any sufficiently advanced nano-tech is indistinguishable from biology; so why not borrow a page from the bio-control handbook?"
​
"I don't believe there's any such thing," Crossack answered slowly. "Many species can induce sufficient sensitivity to trigger a lethal allergic reaction, but that means walking around with a lethal allergy to many common structural and medical materials."
​
"That would be problematic," Chen agreed. "I need to pass this information about the Assimilators along as quickly as possible. Excuse me for a few minutes."
​
"Of course," Admiral Crossack said. Once President Chen had left the room he stood and began pacing. Curiously, knowing that a Voice was en route and that he would not have to wait much longer to have his hopes and fears regarding his future resolved was making the delay harder rather than easier to endure. After a few laps of failed attempts to resign himself to further waiting, he went to the door and asked the officer guarding it to find out how soon the Voice was expected to arrive.
​
"The Voice's shuttle has landed and the humans are trying to figure out what size and type of escort is appropriate to her rank," the officer reported. Then he blinked and flicked his tail in confusion. "Sir, a Voice is her own escort, isn't she?"
​
"The humans don't know that. A Voice speaks with the authority of the full Council of Winglords, but the humans have no official relationship to the Wingover Hegemony until the Voice delivers her words--assuming she has been given words to that effect."
​
"Precisely, Winglord Crossack."
​
Crossack turned to face the new arrival. The female was tall and so ethereally slender that she was nearly translucent. "Voice Laurelliana," Admiral Winglord Crossack said, having met this particular Voice before. He started to bow, but then the implications of her greeting caught up to him and his ear tufts straightened so hard they nearly snapped. "Wait, what--?"
​
"For recognizing that the impossible was possible in time to avert disaster, for valuing the welfare of the Heromancy above your own pride, for a lifetime of exemplary service, you have been granted the title of Winglord and a seat on the counsel."
​
Admiral Winglord Crossack needed some time to reply as he first had to persuade his throat to stop trying to swallow itself. At last he said, "I am well aware of how badly things could have gone if i had been any slower to admit that the humans must have some other, unknown means of bridging the distance between worlds--but i would have thought that barely enough to buy me an honorable retirement, given that i lost a war i chose to initiate. Then too, i would never have arrived at that understanding so quickly without Captain Hessend and Intelligence Officer Rouel, and their many subordinates who had the wisdom to recognize which reports required immediate attention."
​
"You followed standard procedure to the letter until it was made clear that you were not dealing with the kind of situation which that procedure was intended to cover. You therefore cannot be faulted for initiating the conflict. You were also able to admit that the inconceivable had occurred. To not only be able to stretch your thinking to accommodate what was previously unknown and unimagined, but to do so in time to keep defeat from becoming disaster--this is a capacity much needed in a Winglord, and rarest to find. Many prepare for the impossible; but how can anyone prepare for what he cannot imagine?"
​
Crossack nodded, conceding the point, and the Voice continued, "Many admirals find it almost physically painful to yield overall command to the captain of their ground forces and be relegated to providing fire support. Many of those who have no difficulty yielding command are reluctant to reclaim it when the priority returns to space-side operations, preferring to avoid responsibility. But you have never shown any hesitation in either direction, preferring to let the responsibility rest where it can best be fulfilled."
​
Crossacck shifted and flicked an ear tuft and said, "It helps that i trust Captain Hessend's judgement."
​
"And you never once have tried to claim the credit for your subordinate's efforts," Voice Laurelliana smiled at Crossack.
​
"Eh, stolen honor is not," Crossack replied.
​
"Many say it," the Voice said. "Few live it. The appropriate commendations for those you cited credited with identifying the anomalies here have already been issued. The Vaerins claim to have solved the regeneration resistance problem in draeliks; if Hero Hessend chooses to risk the as yet inadequately tested treatment, the Council will cover his expenses."
​
Hero fits a lot better on him than Winglord sits on me, Crossack thought. "I can't predict whether Hero Hessend will take that offer. He keeps his own counsel when it comes to his injuries."
​
"Is something wrong?" Voice Laurelliana asked President Chen, who'd returned partway through her conversation with Crossack and had been staring at her ever since.
​
"You look much like the description of some of our more insidious legends," Chen told her bluntly. "As unlikely as it is to be anything other than coincidence, it is still difficult to keep the resemblance from inducing significant levels of paranoia."
​
"At least you prefer to lance the boil at once rather than dance around the issue while it festers ever deeper," Laurelliana said, dropping her gaze to indicate that she was speaking as herself and not as a Voice. "Long and long ago, or so it is said, while we were still planet-bound, mine and certain of the other will-bending species dealt with those who abused their powers by exiling them to another world. Your portal network suggests that this is not so impossible as we had thought. If your species has suffered from predation by one of our outcasts, i wouldn't blame you for being paranoid where my kind is concerned."
​
"The conspiracy nuts are going to have fun when they hear that," Chen said with a sigh.
​
Voice Laurelliana lifted her head again. "The council wishes to extend formal diplomatic recognition to your people, but we are suffering from some confusion as to which entity we should be extending that recognition to. Some clarification as to your political structure is needed."
​
"Ah," President Chen said. "I can see how it might. Each of the factions on this planet is considered a sovereign nation, although they're a bit more easy-going about their borders than was, or for that matter still is, customary back on earth. The Faction Arbitration Council is precisely what the name says, a neutral forum in which the factions can hash out their differences and save face by accepting a compromise suggested by a neutral party instead of their opponent. We have no real authority, but we do provide a place where you can address all of the factions at once."
​
"It sounds as though you have all of the responsibility of a Winglord, and none of the power," Voice Laurelliana said.
​
Chen shrugged. "I may only have the authority of a debate moderator, but most of the time that's all i need. As for the times when it is not sufficient, well, the prospect of imminent destruction tends to have a remarkably clarifying effect on everyone's priorities."
​
"I suppose it would," the Voice said. "Whose military did you call in?"
​
"The Liberation Hegemony doesn't claim sovereignty over any but it's native States, but they do provide military protection and economic assistance to anyone who abides by what they regard as the minimum standard of human rights. Which usually works out in practice to 'you can have whatever laws you want as long as you make it easy for people who don't like your laws to leave'. Which is why you never see a planet on the Hegemony network with fewer than seven factions--easy to leave requires that there be a compatible place for you to go."
​
"So we can treat with your Faction Arbitration Counsel as a planetary power, and this Liberation Hegemony as a regional one?" Voice Laurelliana asked, and then added "--to the extent that that's a coherent concept with the way your portal network allegedly ignores distance."
​
"Yes," President Chen said. "There's also the Golden Bureaucracy Bloc. Don't buy anything from them without reading the fine print, and never take out a loan from them. The only reason they aren't ruling us all is that the Hegemony is perfectly willing to apply Alexander's solution to Gordian red tape."
​
"Cultural reference," the Voice said. "Not clear from context."
​
"Sorry," President Chen replied. "Gordias was some guy who tied a really complicated knot and said that the man who untied it would rule the world. Alexander came by a while later, looked it over, and used his sword to cut it apart. After he went on to conquer a larger chunk of the world in less time than anyone before him, the locals where Grodias left the knot decided that this counted as 'untying' it."
​
"So keep it simple, and in good faith, when dealing with the Hegemony, because you never know what they might decide is underhanded enough to void the contract?" Crossack guessed.
​
"This system of yours...works?" the Voice asked uncertainly.
​
"As well as anything else we've tried," Chen answered. "Mostly due to the fact that most of us have gotten too lazy to want to bother proving that we could run other people's lives better than they can. MAD helps keep the peace, too, of course. Although, the fact that exile is always an option does tend to leave people favoring lethal forms of self-defense."
​
"Now that would explain a lot," Winglord Crossack said. "I should go mention that detail to Hero Hessend--he's a bit sore over the fact that it was your civilians bleeding his men so hard."
submitted by Petrified_Lioness to HFY [link] [comments]

Masark's Guide to Trade - Sidewinder to Type-9 Heavy - Third Edition

So, you've just started the game and want to build wealth. This guide will take you from the Sidewinder and explain the process of both the trade in rare commodities, then later how to trade in bulk commodities and also present builds for trade ships from the first Adder up to the Type 9 Heavy. It is not necessary to strictly follow this guide in its entirety at once. Taking some of your accumulated profits to buy a second ship to explore or engage in combat is recommended so you don't burn out on one activity. You'll make sufficient credits after a few hours (particularly once you reach The Real Money) to afford such ships.
Or maybe you've been playing for awhile, but have been exploring or engaged in combat and now want to trade to make money to further your pursuits in those fields or just want to try trading for a change of pace. In that case, you'll want to skip forward to a ship that matches your available means.

Part 1 : Welcome To The Galaxy Commander.

If you're a brand new player, you'll want to play around within the Pilots' Federation District for a while. Missions will be your main source of money, as trading isn't too hot. I would recommend trying some of each kind of mission to get a feel for what each of them involves. All the missions in the District are deliberately simplified so you can perform them in your starter Sidewinder or one of the other early ships available in the District. Bounty hunting is another option, which will involve going to either a nav beacon or a resource extraction site (Avoid the Hazardous ones. These are maximum difficulty places where system authority ships won't go) and killing wanted NPCs. Watching for the sight of lasers firing in the distance, which will indicate that there are System Authority ships (space cops) in a fight with a criminal, then dashing over to help out and collect some easy bounties is a good money maker, though it can be a bit risky if you shoot a bit too much and end up catching the attention of someone with heavy guns.
If you insist on trading within the District, I believe the best route available would be hauling Superconductors from Otegine to Dromi, then hauling Resonating Separators back. This will yield you about 3600cr each loop for each tonne of cargo space you have.
When you advance in a rank, you will be offered a second mission named "Exploring The Galaxy", offering a very tempting 100,000 credits. Ignore that mission for now. That mission will send you out of the District whether you're ready or not and your District permit will be permanently revoked as soon as you land at a station outside of the District.
A recommended early ship progression would be first to the Adder, then to the Cobra MkIII. Both of these are good multipurpose ships suitable for doing anything. When selling a ship, it is advisable to sell off all the modules separately and downgrade all the core internals to the cheapest ones possible. This is because selling modules gets you 100% of their cost back, whereas selling a ship only gets you 90% of its value back, including for any modules it is equipped with. While this won't matter much in the District, where you're dealing with small ships and low rated modules, but that 10% loss can become quite significant later in the game, so it's a good habit to get into.
As an aside, when upgrading ships, be sure to keep the pulse lasers from your starter Sidewinder (store them before you sell it). Gimballed weapons seem to be hard to come by within the District (which seems ridiculous to me), so you're likely to reuse those lasers as you upgrade ships.
If you're sticking to cargo and courier missions and really want to get out of the Sidewinder, you could move up to the Hauler early on, then to the Adder and Cobra. Or if you like the combat stuff, the Eagle, Viper MkIII, and Viper MkIV are worthy options. The Viper MkIV can also be used as an alternative to the Cobra MkIII. It can be outfitted almost identically to the Cobra below and will have only marginally less cargo capacity and jump range.
A Cobra MkIII outfitted with the District's finest parts will look something like this. I would recommend building your way up to that, then building a stockpile of credits (I would recommend a million or so, but more is always useful if you want to spend more time practicing) so you have the cash available to do further upgrades when you leave.
Now that you feel confident in your skills and are probably bored with the limited offerings of the District, take that "Exploring The Galaxy" we mentioned above. This mission will send you to a random nearby system.
Once you've arrived there and turned in the mission, I would recommend making your way to Celsius Hub in the HR 6828 system if the mission didn't send you there. This station has reliable outfitting so we can spend some of that money you saved up on making your ship better.
Now, upgrade your frame shift drive to a 4B (or 4A if you saved up enough extra), your shield generator to a 4D, your class 3 cargo racks to class 4, your fuel scoop to 2B, and install a point defense turret on your second utility hardpoint. The end result should look like this. (A Viper MkIV will look like this). Whether to keep the weapons on or not is your choice. Dropping them will net you a little more jump range, but only a little (about 0.25ly), so keeping them is entirely fine if you don’t want to go unarmed.

Part 2 : A Commander's First Trade

Now you're ready to start trading.
For a first foray into trading, I would recommend rare trading. This is optional, as rare trading is less profitable than bulk trading, but I recommend doing a circuit or two of it as it gives you practical experience in navigation, long distance travel, fuel scooping, and how the mass of your cargo affects your ship's characteristics.
Rare trading involves Rare Commodities, which are special, unique commodities that are only sold from one specific station in limited quantities and are in demand everywhere else. Their prices are not subject to normal supply and demand forces, but rather are determined by the distance from the purchase station. The further you go, the higher the price gets, up to a point of diminishing returns at about 140ly and a hard cap at 200 or so. They are specially marked in the commodity market with a star, a different colour, and their unique names.
My recommended rare circuit is Rares Circuit 1. It is an old and proven circuit that has been around since shortly after the game's release. It's also quite simple, involving just grabbing as much rares as your ship will hold moving along the top or bottom line, then jumping to a sell location, at which point you sell everything you have. Then run along the opposite line, buying up commodities until full, then going to the opposite sell location, selling, then starting over. The Rajukru Diamond is another option for a rare trading route, though I personally find it excessively complicated, with juggling multiple commodities to sell at different locations.
Note that you want to make sure to select the "Fastest" routes when plotting rather than the "Efficient" routes. The latter will take the smallest jumps possible to save on fuel, whereas the former will take the longest jumps to get you were you're going quickly.
If you’re fortunate and a system is in a Boom state, you may be able to fill your hold right there without needing to use the other systems in that branch of the circuit.
As you get money, feel free to upgrade your ship modules, especially your FSD. As mentioned above, you get back exactly what you paid for it when you sell a module, so upgrades are never a waste. But always make sure that you have enough money on hand to cover your rebuy, as shown at the bottom-left of the home tab of your ship’s Internal panel. This can be thought of as your insurance deductible and is the amount you will have to pay to get your ship back should it get blown up. If you don’t have enough to cover that, you will be given a free Sidewinder like the one you started in, basically putting you back to square 1 (though with your remaining credits, ranks, etc. still intact).
Continue this for a run or two or until you feel like advancing.

The Exploration Alternative

Rather than going to rare trading at this point, Road to Riches offers an alternative means of money making and progression (it will also guide you to unlocking your first engineer if you have Horizons). This is an exploration-based method that involves going around within and near human inhabited space ("The Bubble") scanning known Earth-like and Terraformable planets. As among the changes in 2.4 was a very large buff to the value of these scans (to hundreds of thousands per planet), this is a highly effective means of making money, and it can be done in the Sidewinder you start with (with some upgrades). Down to Earth Astronomy has a good video on this subject. You can potentially do this in just the starter Sidewinder with a few upgrades, like this build. If you don't have enough money for the detailed surface scanner, you can omit that and just do the FSS scanning, then buy the scanner later when you've got a couple scans under your belt and turned in your first load of data. The Hauler makes for an excellent ship upgrade from the Sidewinder for this task, with much better jump range, more fuel capacity, and ability to fit a bigger fuel scoop. This is about the kind of build you would aim for in that regard and could afford after just a handful of scans. The Cobra MkIII can also be used, in a build like this, though it will end up with less jump range than the Hauler, making travelling between systems slower In addition to money making, this is highly useful for getting rep with factions (e.g. for obtaining the permits to Alioth and Sirius), as handing in exploration data will quickly raise your rep with the station's owners.

Fuel scoop usage

Your fuel scoop will automatically deploy and start collecting fuel when you come close enough to an appropriate star. Since you usually need to fly near a star to line up with your next jump destination, you can refuel on the way using "passive" or "rush" scooping. Just simply fly tightly in supercruise at full throttle around the yellow line (this indicates the area where your FSD cannot function. If you fly inside that circle and get too close to the star, you'll be yanked out of supercruise and take some damage. If this happens, you’ll have to wait 30 seconds for your FSD to cool down. Then you’ll need to point your ship directly away from the star (on an “escape vector”) in order to jump back to supercruise and continue what you were doing) until your can see your destination This will get you perhaps half a tonne of fuel per star. While this isn't enough to fully refuel from the jump, it does significantly extend your effective travel range.
While you're running the rare circuit, you will need to stop for fuel on the long legs to Witchhaul and Orrere even with the above rush scooping. Rather than finding a station (the graphic lists several inhabited systems along that line), we will just stop to do some serious scooping to refuel. To scoop for fuel, go to an O, B, A, F, G, K, or M class star (these are the first 7 class of star in the galaxy map when you select to show by star class. Mnemonics to remember these include Oh Be A Fine Girl/Guy Kiss Me (keeps them in order of temperature), and KGB FOAM (Putin in a bubble bath), among others). See this guide by the Fuel Rats for guidance with pictures. When you plot a route on the galaxy map and don't have enough fuel to make the entire journey without refuelling, it will mark the last scoopable star in the route before you run out as a "fuel star". Due to the above passive scooping, you'll likely get a jump or two past that before you run out, but you should open up the map and glance at the route every so often to check what your fuel and refuelling status is. If you don't see a yellow circle, go into your Internal panel, select the Ship tab, then the “Pilot Preferences” tab, and turn on orbit lines. A "fuel scoop active" display will appear in the middle of the cockpit display when you get close enough, showing the scooping rate (in kilograms per second), a fuel gauge, and your ship's heat level. You want to fly in and get the scooping rate to about 2/3rds of the scoop's maximum rate to prevent overheating (This is assuming a D-rated power plant. you can go higher if you have a higher rating power plant, which output less heat). For the 2B scoop you should have on your Cobra, that will be about 43kg/s Once you're near that rate, throttle down to zero. This will leave you sitting near the star scooping and creeping along at 30km/s. Now you just wait until you have finished refueling, then just throttle up to full, and pull away from the star. Wait until the "fuel scoop active" display has disappeared before activating your FSD for the hyper jump, or you will likely overheat and damage your ship.
As a last resort, if you've messed up and stranded yourself in an uninhabited and unscoopable system, contact The Fuel Rats. These guys are an awesome player group that assist stranded players by delivering fuel to them.

Dealing With Interdictions

It's likely you'll get interdicted at various times while trading. Your objective in the interdiction minigame is to keep your ship pointed towards the "escape vector", which moves around randomly. When you have your ship pointed on the vector, but your interdictor doesn't, you gain in the game and vice versa. If you fill your blue bar, you'll dump them out of supercruise while you go on your way. If you lose, you'll suffer a 30 second cooldown on your FSD, during which you'll be vulnerable to their weapons fire. So if you feel like you're losing the minigame, you should throttle to zero and surrender to the drop, which will only incur a normal 5 second cooldown before you can jump back to supercruise. Once you're in normal space, immediate hit your boost (default tab) to open up the range. Even if you can't get out of range, the damage of most weapons drops off considerably with distance. Now just wait 5 seconds until your frame shift drive has finished cooling down, then either jump back to supercruise or jump to the next system in your route. If you find yourself mass locked (this occurs when you're close to a ship larger than yours), fire your chaff to scramble their weapons, then choose whether to continue charging back to supercruise ("low wake") or to select another system to jump to ("high wake"). Intersystem hyperspace jumps are immune to mass lock from other ships, which makes it a good option if you've been interdicted by a ship much larger than yours, which will slow your supercruise charge to a crawl. Just select a random nearby system in your

On Armament

The builds I offer in this guide are all weaponless, relying on shields, chaff, and point defence to allow them to escape from pirates. Those of a more aggressive disposition may instead wish to remove any would-be threats rather than fleeing from them. While mines were briefly useful armament for traders, improvements in NPC AI have rendered them basically useless, with NPCs easily dodging them, even at low ranks. Thus, if one intends to act as a Q ship, you will want to select more conventional weapons. Lasers and multi-cannons have long been a standard loadout for the good reasons of being easy to use and providing a useful balance of thermal for shields and kinetic for hull. I personally use such a loadout on my trading Cutter.
Alternatively, the new ship-launched fighters are another option for pirate swatting if you have Horizons and are using a ship capable of equipping one. Equipping a hangar will require sacrificing at least a class 5 compartment (32t of cargo), and likely more as you'll probably want stronger shields than the basic A rated minimum shields I use on all this guide's builds. Further details on SLFs can be found in my writeup on the subject.

Part 3 : The Real Money

So you're tired of rare trading and are ready for real trading, yeah?
Go to eddb.io and use the loop finder. Set the search to the following parameters
Now hit Find Loops. It'll sit there for a moment, then give you a list of loops, sorted by their profit. If you like the look of one of them, start running it. Otherwise tweak your search and hit it again.
If you run out of commodities on your loop, hit the finder and get a new one. This can be quite boring, so I would recommend Netflix (or another streaming site or your favorite torrent site) and a second monitor. You can often find the latter for cheap on second-hand sites like Craigslist, Kijiji, and others.

Part 4 : Time For A Real Trading Ship

Once you’ve collected about 5 million credits, you’ll be ready to advance to a new ship. Specifically, the Type-6 Transporter, otherwise known simply as the T6. This is a significantly bigger unit than your Cobra and will more than double your cargo capacity, and with it your profits. This is your general build.
I would recommend purchasing your ship at a system under the influence of Li Yong-Rui. The effect of this power on his subject systems is that all ships and modules are sold at a 15% discount, which lets you upgrade ships significantly sooner. This purchase price reduction also translates into a reduced rebuy cost, meaning that getting blown up won’t hit the wallet quite as hard. Conveniently, there is a station near Witchhaul that is within his sphere that has all the parts you need, specifically, Zamka Station in LHS 191. For all other builds in my guide, you can find an appropriate Li Yong-Rui station by hitting the $ icon at the top-right of the Coriolis display. That will send you to an EDDB search page. There, simply select Li Yong-Rui under the Powers dropdown and hit Find stations again. If you don’t get any results, remove modules (preferably starting with the cheapest ones) from the Station Sells Modules box and redo the search until you do get results.
Optionally, if you don’t mind staying in the Cobra for a hour or two longer or want to upgrade from the Type 6, you could opt to upgrade to an Asp Explorer (commonly known as the AspX) when you accumulate about 14 million credits. While it only offers a small increase in cargo capacity, it gives significantly better jump range, allowing you to run longer loops faster and thus improve your credits per hour.
Now back to looping!

Giving back

EDDB.io relies on contributions of station data from users in order to keep its trade information up to date in the dynamic universe of Elite:Dangerous. The most popular tool to submit said data is the Elite:Dangerous Market Connector. This program pulls the commodity market data (as well as information on available ships and equipment) from the Elite Dangerous API server and sends it off to the EDDN (Elite : Dangerous Data Network, the system that eddb uses for its data). It can also record that data locally for use with other tools, as well as send star system information to the EDSM (Elite:Dangerous Star Map) and keep a local log of all systems visited.

Contingency Planning

In the event that you find yourself with little money, a low-capital method of rebuilding your funds is to use the galaxy map to locate a system in the Outbreak state. Stations in these systems will have very high levels of demand (and consequently, very high prices) for Basic Medicines. Use eddb.io's Find Commodity tool to locate a nearby system with a decent supply of them, then start hauling them in. This will yield profits in the 2500-3000ct range. While this is less than for the above loop trading, it requires much less in the way of starting capital. A T6 full of high value will cost you several hundred thousand credits, whereas a full load of Basic Medicines will be less than 30,000, allowing easy rebuilding from poverty.

Part 5 : Further Progression

When you’ve acquired about 25 million, it’ll be again time for another upgrade. This time, you’ll be getting a Type-7 Transporter (aka the T7). This will nearly triple your cargo capacity. Though note that you’re moving up to a Large ship, which means outposts will no longer be trading destinations for you, so on the loop finder, you will want to set Landing Pad to L rather than Any.

An Optional Upgrade

When you’ve gotten your credit balance up to about 70 million, you may wish to trade in the Type 7 for a Python. While this will entail a minor downgrade in cargo capacity (16t), unlike the T7, the Python is a medium ship, capable of landing at outposts. This gives it the freedom to select sometimes-more-profitable loops involving those stations. Additionally, it’s a significantly more enjoyable ship to fly and I personally consider it one of the best-looking ships in the game.
You may wish to stay in the Python for awhile longer so as to make enough money that you can purchase the next ship outright without selling it. The Python is a highly versatile ship usable for many game activities, including being an excellent mining ship and great for background simulation play, so I would recommend keeping it around for your non-trading career.

Part 6 : The Ultimate Trading Ship

Once you have 110 million, you’re now ready for the ultimate trading ship in Elite:Dangerous, the Type-9 Heavy. This massive brick of a ship is the slowest and least maneuverable thing in the game, but it also carries a huge 752t of cargo in its depths for huge profits with every trip.

Part 7 : Beyond The Ultimate?

For progression past the T9, the Imperial Cutter is the only competition, with no other ship coming close to the cargo capacity of either of these ships. Purchasing a Cutter requires one to hold the rank of Duke in the Imperial Navy, which will take some effort to acquire. This post gives a highly effective method that will get you a Duchy within hours. I personally regard this ship as the best trading ship in the game. While it has slightly lower cargo capacity than the T9 (720t vs. 752t), it more than compensates for that with it’s superior jump range, better speed, stronger shields, and gorgeous looks.

Part 8 : Player Trading

With the introduction of fleet carriers, trading with other players is an option for making money. Carrier owners can create buy and sell orders on their carriers and will often post them to this subreddit, /elitecarriers, and /PilotsTradeNetwork for others to fufil. Loops invovling these carriers are usually not quite as profitable per tonne as regular loops (as the carrier owner is taking their cut), but are much faster, as the carrier will typically be parked right within a few lightseconds of the buy/sell station, allowing good profits per hour.
Though it is important to note that profits from trading with fleet carriers do not count towards your Trade rank progression. If you're wanting to get to Elite in Trade, you'll want to ignore carriers for the time being and stick to station to station trading.
submitted by Masark to EliteTraders [link] [comments]

The Racist Origins and Painful Legacy of Atlanta's Zoning

I'm going to start this post off with a few disclaimers:
  1. A good amount of my information comes from The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein. I tried to find as many direct sources for the relevant topics brought up in the book as I could, but they weren't always readily availible. I highly encourage you to read the book itself if you want more details and his sources.
  2. While I am going to try to use Atlanta-specific information as much as possible, there are some things that I can only provide evidence for in general, not to mention that I have to discuss this with the wider national historical context as well since Atlanta was but one part of a massive racist horror show.
  3. I am by no means claiming to be an expert on this material. It's just what I have the most supporting information already at had for. Again, if you want to read more details from someone who spent much more time researching than I have, pick up a copy of The Color of Law.
  4. I am by no means claiming that fixing zoning will be the end-all-be-all of segregation legacy, nor that it will singularly solve disparities for minority populations compared to white populations within the city. Undoing the sheer scale of bullshit put in place to codify segregation and racial suppression as it manifests today is an undertaking requiring effort on par with something like the Green New Deal (coincidentally, there can be quite a lot of overlap in with a GND, and that's why climate and social justice are so often packaged with various versions of a GND). Fixing the legacy of racist zoning's impacts is just one part to an incredibly complex system, but it's still one worthy of doing. Gotta start somewhere, right?
Alright, on to the main content... Buckle up kiddos, we're going for a fuckin ride!

Why the Fuck are you Talking About Zoning Right Now‽

The country is, to use an incredible amount of understatement, in a bit of a pickle right now. We're in the midst of a global pandemic that's surging, and resurging within our borders. We're reeling at a seemingly never ending parade of tragedy and failure of composure from the very police forces sworn to protect us. We're dealing with an ever escalating push back and response from a federal government that is attempting to label protesters as terrorists. We've had impeachments, assassinations of foreign political operatives, the emboldenment of out-and-loud racists, foreign bounties on our military, historic Supreme Court decisions, and record stock market crashes. We're staring down the barrel of a depression, and there's a looming climate catastrophe that's been burning in the background of all of this.
So why, in the middle of all of this, am I bringing up zoning of all things? How could that possibly be relevant to any of this?
Well... as it turns out... quite a bit. See, zoning is one of those core functions of government, generally on the local level but not always, that just kinda exists. It's a long, boring, complicated mess of legal code that just doesn't come up all that often in our every day discussions (unless you're a nerd like me who keeps trying to shove it into every conversation... ahem...).
No matter how innocuous or intangible or boring zoning may feel, though, it actually has massive ramifications for how our build environment is shaped. That is literally its job, after all: codifying what is and isn't allowed to be built, where, and how. That build environment then has massive ramifications on a whole pile of social, economic, and environmental issues.
A good zoning code balances public desires for safety, health, and environmental protections, while also helping to ensure various amenities are provided, ideally outweighing any downsides of development with benefits to the community at large. Unfortunately, most zoning systems fail at this balance, often focusing on the wrong components as perceived negatives when they're actually benefits, while codifying build requirements that actively make things worse for the communities around them. A bad zoning code can make housing more expensive, make it harder to meet climate and environmental goals, make the general population more sickly, impede the ability of persons to generate generational wealth, and horrendously damage the tax base, making it harder to fund public projects.
As it turns out, most of these issues trace back to a few core ideas of the initial model zoning systems, and were originally put in as features of the codes. The intent at the time was mainly focused on creating a few specific negative outcomes, with many of the others having taken decades to fully manifest and be recognized. Yet, the original structure of the codes remain, bureaucratic momentum and an incomplete understanding of justice keeping them in place, dragging out the problems for years and years and years.
So what were those features, and what specific negative outcomes were they trying to achieve?

Setting the Stage for Segregation

First, we have to step back, and take a bit of a historical run up to provide proper context.
In 1877, Reconstruction ended. Federal troops, who had defeated the Confederacy, packed up and left the south after 12 years of postbellum occupation (14 if you include overlap years of occupation before the war's end). Reconstruction, though certainly not perfect, had been a time of relative empowerment for black Americans. Backed by federal troops, integration and political power was actually in reach. It wasn't 40-acres and a mule, but it was an incredible leap forward as the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were enforced in about as blunt a way as possible: at the muzzle of a rifle. That all came to a painful and tragic end with the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had promised southern Democrats the end of occupation in exchange for electoral support.
Almost immediately, black Americans suffered a bloody, violent resurgence of oppression, with segregation becoming standard practice, and enforced both at the hands of local law enforcement and mobs of white Americans. Worse yet, as Jim Crow laws and their efforts anchored themselves across the south, previously diverse and inclusive (relatively speaking) parts of the country began to follow suit. All over, towns and cities undertook the effort of removing, or isolating their black populations, using similar tactics learned from the southern states.
Like a cancer, segregation spread far and wide, becoming more and more recognized and acceptable. By 1913, freshly elected president Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet approved the implementation of segregation in federal offices, marking about as drastic a change in federal priority as you could take over the course of three and a half decades.
It is in this atmosphere of invigorated racist bullshit that zoning rises within the policy consciousness.

The Original Sin of Zoning

As a concept, zoning ordinances within the U.S. were rather new, with the 1908 Los Angeles municipal zoning ordinances being the first of their kind. The LA laws were a formalizing of existing nuisance laws, meant to create separations of land use and buffers between the harmful effects of industries and residences. Though specific business classifications (such as unnecessary prohibition of laundries, which were predominantly owned by Chinese immigrants at the time, in certain areas) did come with racial issues, they were quite tame by the standards of the time, as we're about to see.
Prior to the rise of zoning as a popular government effort, it was fairly rare to see actual legal code dedicated towards segregation, instead focusing efforts on government-endorsed vigilantism and governments not enforcing equality laws already in place. This began to change, however. In 1910, a few years before the federal government would make official its office segregation, and two years after the LA zoning system was established, Baltimore became the first city in the nation, (as stated by the New York Times), to create an explicit law mandating the segregation of city areas. The city ordinance dictated that blacks could not buy homes on blocks where whites were the majority, and vice versa. The law was... horribly broken, and judges had to grapple with the complex, integrated reality of the city, trying to adjudicate who could and couldn't live where, or buy property where, creating an incredible mess of legal issues across the city.
The practical problems with the law did not stop other cities from copying the effort, though. Invigorated by Baltimore's example, Birmingham, Dade County (Miami), Charleston, Dallas, Louisville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Richmond, St. Louis, and others all made their own version of racial segregaition mandates within landuse. Amungst this list was, in fact, the City of Atlanta, whose ordinance virtually copied the Baltimore law, with the added provision that a person of one color occupying a house in a mixed block could object to one of another color moving next door.
Unlike the initial LA zoning laws, the systems put in place following Baltimore's example were specifically racially focused, with more familiar zoning laws taking shape in the years to come. These initial racist laws would persist until the 1917 Supreme Court decision that such laws were unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley. However... the decision was based around the freedom of individuals to buy and sell property to whomever they wished, rather than a denunciation of segregation within law itself. Many cities simply ignored the Supreme Court ruling, and moved ahead with their segregationist laws, while others claimed that slight variations in the ordinances, such as the difference between block level and larger zoning styles, meant they didn't have to follow the ruling.
The City of Atlanta was, once again, one of these cities. In The Atlanta Zone Plan: Report Outlining a Tentative Zone Plan for Atlanta (1922), written by Robert H. Whitten as a consultant for the the City Planning Commission, explicit residential districts were outlined by racial makeup, with R1 as "white residence district", R2 as "colored residence district", and R3 as "undetermined race district". It was nice enough to allow servants' quarters remain open to either race. The plan justifies this by saying:
the above race zoning is essential in the interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race.
Additionally, Whitten defended his zoning plan in professional publications by saying that "[e]stablishing colored residence districts has removed one of the most potent causes of race conflict." This, he added, was "a sufficient justification for race zoning.... A reasonable segregation is normal, inevitable and desirable."
Here is a map of the proposed zoning system within the then city limits. You can get an idea of just how limited housing areas for blacks were, just how much of the city was to be dedicated to single family housing compared to apartments, and how relegated commercial uses would be. Incidentally enough, this is where the City of Atlanta begins to see a zoning code similar to modern codes. We'll get to that in a moment. For now, note how closely this map matches some of the racial demographics of the city today, oh, and (just coincidentally I'm sure) how the largest 'Colored District' in the city was to be essentially bordered on three sides by industrial areas. Other zoning maps from the same time would go further with encroaching industrial zones, limiting colored areas, and limiting apartment areas.
Can I just take a moment to say how much I fucking love the Atlanta History Center and its archives? Okay, moving on.
At the same time that Atlanta was ignoring its constitutional duty to not segregate its people, the federal government was stepping into the zoning game. In 1921, then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover organized an Advisory Committee on Zoning to develop a manual explaining why every municipality should develop a zoning ordinance, with an eventual goal of developing model legislation that could be easily adopted. This committee had such members as Frederick Law Olmsted, who argued in 1918 that not only were certain housing types "coincident with racial divisions", and, since it was undesirable to "force the mingling of people who are not yet ready to mingle", great care should be take not to mix housing types, and Irving B. Hiett, who was the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, an organization who would produce a code of realtor ethics stating that "A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood... members of any race or nationality... detrimental to property values" just a few years later. By 1922, the committee had developed A Zoning Primer, which argued that zoning was required to preserve property values, and which was widely distributed across the country. The policies would push out wide and far across the nation, following the federal government's example.

Pretending as if Racist Plans Aren't

In 1924, the Georgia Supreme Court struck down the City of Atlanta zoning code due to its racial components. Despite this, the underlying plan and map developed with segregation in mind, would act as the basis for future plans. Indeed, there are many overlaps with the 1922 plan, and even zoning designations today.
Keep Whitten's and the Zoning Commission's mentalities concerning the importance of racial segregation when looking back through the rest of the initial Atlanta zoning proposal. It provides leading anecdotes (without apparent supporting evidence beyond some photographs that don't really seem to match the narrative) of the dangers of mixing small stores, and low-rise multi-family housing with lower densities, primarily focusing on the perceived loss of value of adjacent properties, while framing the persons who make such developments as greedy speculators only out for a quick buck (rather than look at the economic benefit to the store owner, the new access to the store that surrounding areas get, and the housing relief the apartment dwellers experience).
Still without apparent evidence, the proposal makes sweeping, generalized statements about the need to preserve neighborhoods' character, and preserve property values. It proposes to do this by dividing the city into use, height, area, and race categories, with each mixing with the others to dictate specific allowances. The racial categories were removed, yet the remainder of the plan's suggestions would persist.
Even in 1917 it was understood that density was a major component of affordability. Special City Plan Adviser for the City Plan Commission of Cleveland Ohio Robert H. Whitten's essay The Zoning of Residence Sections, where Olmsted argued the merits of preventing the mixing of people and their racially pre-dis-positioned housing preferences, outright states:
We want to distribute the population as much as practicable, but at the same time we do not wish to force people who for business or other reasons need to live close to the central business sections either to pay very high rents or to go to much less convenient locations. As a city reaches metropolitan size, the demand for housing space near the central area becomes so great that the only way to make that location available to any but the wealthy is to permit a more intensive utilization of the land. Were it not for the ability to pile one dwelling on top of another, rents would be prohibitive in these central locations for the great mass of the people.
Even while expounding on the virtues of low-density housing, Whitten takes effort to acknowledge the economic need for multi-family housing to maintain affordability. Yeah, it's done in a condescending way where he can only imagine a case where being adjacent to the central business district is a legitimate reason for housing density, but he at least still accepts it as reality.
Yet, dwelling house districts, from which apartment houses would be excluded, were to include the larger portion of the area of Atlanta, and were to primarily be made up of the largest area class, requiring at least 5000 sqft per family of lot area. The code outright targets 2-3 story buildings with families living over a store (generally which they would operate) as being undesirable, and thus is explicitly designed to prevent such outcomes. All of these things drove up the per-house price, requiring a family to pay for a significant amount of land, as well as an individual house, in the majority of the city's residential area. In the maps I linked above, you can see just how few areas were allowed to have apartments compared to the wider single-family zones.
The federal zoning primer includes similar sentiments, telling an anecdote of how an apartment house built next to a home would destroy values by becoming 'a giant airless hive, housing human beings like crowded bees', as well as lumping 'sporadic stores' in with 'factories or junk yards' as a contributing factor of blight within a residential neighborhood.
It's important to note that none of these codes tried to make improvements to living conditions through legislation like building codes, which could have helped prevent the squalor conditions that were so readily associated with apartments, and which had been present in the U.S. since at least 1859, in Baltimore, choosing instead to essentially quarantine apartments to prevent their spread into single family areas.
As I laid out above, these are all value judgements made by people who viewed the mixing of races as something to avoid, as something that itself would contribute to a loss of property values (rather than recognize that self-fulfilling white panic, was the actual source of value drop, and that the constrained black populations were willing to pay higher prices because there were so few homes they could even get into, actually raising prices), and even made racial connections to types of housing to keep separated. But, because of the insistence of the courts, their policies were forced to take on an air of race neutrality. Thus, explicit race-based zoning was stripped from the codes, and the far more familiar forms of space and use based zoning were established. Those forms just so happen to harshly restrict the kinds of housing openly accepted as being affordable to the masses, and, in particular, the demographics of people who were least economically able to choose elsewhere.
As the federal zoning primer said: Zoning Is Legal
This is not to say that exclusionary zoning was not without its legal challenges, of course. In the 1926 Supreme Court case of Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365, the court upheld the constitutionality of exclusionary zoning, using as part of its opinion the argument that "very often the apartment house is a mere parasite", and that, if allowed to mix with single-family houses, "come very near to being nuisances". The case was brought to the Supreme Court as an appeal to a U.S. District Court of Ohio ruling against the constitutionality of exclusionary zoning, stating that "the blighting of property values and the congesting of the population, whenever the colored or certain foreign races invade a residential section, are so well known as to be within the judicial cognizance." Essentially, while the Supreme Court decided that exclusionary zoning was based on inherit issues with mixing building types (even though 1) the issues aren't inherit, and 2) the exclusion argument is based on a slippery slope fallacy), the District Court had (correctly) identified an underlying racial motivation for preventing mixing.

When the Pretending Becomes More Overt

Were all else equal, we might be able to ignore the initial racial components of exclusionary zoning, and merely call the resulting codes classist (the reality is that racism and classism were/are tightly intertwined, with each giving perceived justification to the other), but things weren't equal. The median household income for a black family in 1947 (the earliest year I could actually find data) was just 51% of a white household (it was only up to ~63% in 2018). Even though modern discussion around apartments tends to bemoan the 'luxury' branding, and how accurate it may or may not be, the hard reality is that living in an apartment is cheaper than buying a house, at least in the immediate. For lower income people, it's pretty much the only option. For poor, and thus disproportionately black, people, the primary need for housing affordability was in the form of apartment buildings and residential density, even if that was only desired as a stepping stone. But that's not what the zoning system provided.
Overwhelmingly, the city's land was designated for single family homes. Large lots, and individual homes drive up the per-unit costs of housing, locking poorer people out of being able to buy into neighborhoods. Worse yet would be the zoning systems of suburban and smaller towns, which would eliminate the ability to build apartments all together, essentially locking lower income, and thus disproportionately black, persons from being able to relocate there at all. This lead to crowding in the limited apartments, and, since the building codes hadn't been adequately updated to actually prevent it, the very slum conditions used as a justification for preventing apartments in the first place became self-fulfilling.
Of course, not all black people were so poor that they couldn't afford to buy a single-family home, and quite a few did look to leave the limited availability of apartments. They were not met well, and indeed, in the years following the installation of exclusionary zoning systems, the federal government would essentially codify black exclusion from single-family neighborhoods, with cities clinging to the federal policies as justification for blocking black and integrated housing.
Property (particularly home) mortgages used to be very, very different than how we think of them today, which locked many people out of the ability to get them. High-interest rates, huge down-payments, interest-only payments, and short (5-7 year) payback periods. These terms kept middle and low class persons (of all races) from being able to afford to buy property. As part of the New Deal, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation was established. The loan system was restructured to be closer to the lower rates, lower down-payments, overall payment, and long-term periods we're more familiar with today. Additionally, many existing mortgages were bought and restructured to save property owners from foreclosure.
In the process of this, though, HOLC wanted an inventory of risk across the nation, so it could manage these new loan terms without crippling itself financially. This is where the kinda okay policy stopped. The risk inventory was carried out by local real estate agencies, who had national ethics codes and local policies for their agents to explicitly consider race when evaluating risk. So much so that they were actually under direction to maintain community segregation when otherwise selling properties. The inventory took the form of color-coded maps, where red sections on the map represented high-risk (don't loan people money / bail them out here). Many, many of these red areas were based on racial prejudice, with even wealthy / middle class integrated or black communities being rated far worse than equivalent income white areas.
Here is a database of maps across the U.S., overlaid against modern areas. Here's a fun game: compare the Redlining Map for Atlanta to the initial racial zoning map! No it's not a 1-1 match, but it gets awfully close, particularly if you start to include initially designated areas for apartment buildings.
This entire mess was made even worse with the establishment of the Federal Housing Authority, which was intended to insure private bank loans to first-time home buyers. Even though the FHA had its own auditing system separate from the HOLC, it still had direct segregation and whites-only policies. Additionally the FHA very specifically did not insure mortgages within urban centers. This meant that both HOLC and FHA services were denied to nearly the same areas: black or integrated neighborhoods, most often in urban centers.
The FHA justified its racial rules by claiming that black people ruined property values. This was actually backwards, as the limited options available to black people meant that black and integrated properties were in high demand, and thus could be sold at a much higher price. What did happen, though, was 'block-busting'. So, because the FHA (and other organizations) continuously sold the idea that black people ruined property values, as well as the base-level racism, this left white neighborhoods vulnerable to manipulation. Speculators would buy up properties in blocks on the border of black / integrated and white areas, and then rent / sell them to black people. These speculators would also hire black people to walk around white neighborhoods asking about home sales, and looking like they lived there. Then the speculators would go around warning white property owners that their housing values would tank with all the black people moving in, and make stupidly low offers, buying out white properties well below the actual value (this is where the FHA was getting its data). Then the speculators would turn around and, because there were so few other options, sell the same properties above their actual value to black people at bad rates. This drove up costs for black people who otherwise just wanted a home, and the high prices contributed to perpetuating poverty and again creating self-fulfilling slum conditions.
Many cities, private lenders, and other government agencies (like Veterans Affairs) anchored their lending and development approval processes on the FHA backing of home loans, which meant that blacks were barred from even the opportunity to really leave parts of the city within which they lived.
It's worth reiterating that the HOLC and FHA policies were targeted directly at owning private homes, working off of a national policy that private homes were less communist than apartments. No, I'm not kidding. The U.S. Department of Labor distributed pamphlets entitled We Own Our Own Home to schoolchildren stating that it was a "patriotic duty" to cease renting, and to buy a house. Millions of posters were printed, and hung in factories and other businesses, while newspaper ads were run throughout the country. This national housing direction propped up single-family residences, and the infrastructure to support them, while leaving pretty much everything else to languish.
Then there were the racial covenants, where individual properties were made unavailable to black people by deed restrictions, and which were often implimented on neighborhood scales.
Then there was the New-Deal, where the Civilian Conservation Corps abided by local segregation policies for its camps and worker housing, further entrenching local segregation.
Then there was the issue of cities targeting black and low-income areas overwhelmingly with zoning variances for industry and toxic waste disposal sites, exposing those persons to much higher quantities of toxins and pollutants.
Then there was public housing which eliminated mixed-income tenants, was often explicitly segregated, often resisted adding housing for black people, and, when they did add housing open to blacks, located overwhelmingly in already black and poor neighborhoods, effectively concentrating poverty and increasing segregation.
Then there were Interstate Highways, which were explicitly used for 'slum clearing' in many cities (including defining slum based on racial makeup rather than socioeconomic status of the persons living there), which were massive transportation subsidies to the very same segregated low-density suburbs already built with federal loan backing while public transportation languished, and which were actually used as physical barriers between parts of the city.
Frankly, the list kinda just keeps going, and so I'm not going to try and fit it all. Seriously, go read the Color of Law for more explicit details. My main point with all of these is that, when you combine the initial versions of the zoning codes, the opinions of the people who made them, and the wider reactions and policies that came after the codes proved not to 100% segregate black people from white people, it becomes clear that a major component of the zoning system was established not actually to prevent health or value issues, but rather to maintain the separation of races.

That was a lot of words...

Right, so here's the summary:
  1. After a decade of relative progress, the federal government abandons Reconstruction
  2. Almost immediately, communities, including previously inclusive ones, begin to force their black populations out in a renewed effort of segregation
  3. At first this is done outside of the law, but eventually cities get the idea to literally codify segregation through ordinances
  4. That codified segregation was struck down in the Supreme Court, so cities are forced to find a proxy method of enforcing segregation
  5. Cities used the separating of mixed-use developments and multi-family apartment buildings to create racial segregation through the proxy of economic segregation
  6. When this doesn't work 100%, the federal government established home mortgage support systems that directly excluded black people, preventing them from buying into single-family neighborhoods even if they could afford it
  7. There was a lot of other shit that happened to basically show that zoning was not the unbiased system it was pretending to be

Persistence of bad policy

Even though many of the explicitly racist policies have been removed or overturned, and what progress there has been in raising the wealth of black persons has helped with some racial mixing, it's clear that the proxy methods for discrimination persist to this day, with visible segregaition outcomes. Even when we do see integration, it is often in the form of wealthy white people moving into the limited new developments allowed in previously majority black areas (AKA 'Gentrification').
Today, Atlanta is still overwhelmingly zoned for low-density, single-family residential, even if some of those zones allow up to Accessory Dwelling Units (such density, much urban). Lot sizes in much of the city are still mandated to be quite large, and height planes still overly limit the number of stories buildings can be. What apartment buildings are allowed are constrained by cumbersome parking requirements (both codified and required by private lenders), and property setbacks. Mixed uses are often restrained on individual properties, requiring a specific zoning designation to be allowed. Even the city's plan for handling future growth still relegates nearly 75% of the area to relatively low-density housing as 'conservation' areas.
Metro-wide, not nearly as many homes are being built as were pre-recession. While home prices are increasing back to pre-recessionary levels, housing inventory in metro Atlanta is constrained – partially due to a lag in residential construction. Prior to the recession, it was not uncommon for residential building permits to exceed 5,000 per month (in some cases, reaching over 7,000). After May 2007, the region experienced a steep decline in residential building permits, which persisted into early 2012, when the region began seeing modest increases. Though residential permits have trended upward since 2012, they have yet to reach pre-recessional levels, hovering instead between 2,000 and 3,000 permits per month. Because of this, all counties in metro Atlanta are experiencing the a decline in housing inventory. One of the main summary points of that report was: "Home prices rising significantly – faster than wages – due in large part to dwindling supply" ARC Regional Snapshot: Affordable Housing While the metro itself has been pretty easy to build new housing within (atleast from 2000 to 2015) compared to other metros, the parts of the city and close-in suburbs tend to be the hardest within which to add new supplly (of the 10 hardest zipcodes to build, the top 3 were partially in the city, and another three were in or partly in the city).
Indeed, inflation-adjusted housing prices are rising quite quickly in the Atlanta Metro, even including months during this pandemic. Prices are looking to pass pre-2008 peak in 2023ish. Only, this time, vacancy rates for both renters and homeowners have been nearly at all-time lows for the metro (Source: Census Bureau). Many of the most intense price increases happening within the core city.
At the same time, affordable housing initiatives are proving to be far too few to handle the rising costs, with recent 'Inclusionary Zoning' rules, as well as the wider public housing program failing to close the need. We're talking programs considering themselves successful at a few thousand units, when the demand for affordable housing (let alone total housing) is in the hundreds of thousands.
The simple reality is that the racism of our past is leading to an over-all affordability crisis today. While, as usual, the hardest hit are African Americans, this affordability crisis has far reaching impacts across the demographic spectrum, including poor whites, and, particularly, poor Latino populations as well, locking out a wide variety of people who would otherwise want to live in the kinds of dense, walkable, urban areas the City of Atlanta uniquely offers within the metro.
Not only that, but the very types of low-density developments so widely codified across the city and nation do not generate enough economic activity to actually pay for the infrastructure needed to support them, propped up by piles of hidden subsidies, all resulting in cities being effectively bankrupt. (Here's another real-world example) Even some of the most 'wealthy' of towns are having to seriously reconsider their historic development patterns to close out financial gaps. In Atlanta, this leads to things like a massive backlog of maintenance issues that even recent bonds and tax increases can't fully handle. Again, policies of a racist past are hurting everyone today. Undoing those policies, and transitioning back to tried-and-true development styles would greatly help fix financial issues.
Additionally, as we work to overcome challenges with climate as a whole, we need to be seriously looking at our build environments, and just how much low-density development contributes to emissions compared to higher-density parts of the metro, and even the city itself. At the same time, moving away from cars would help reduce respiratory issues for poor and minority persons who are disproportionately affected by road-pollution, and generally moving to cleaner industries while cleaning up legacy pollution sites can help undo the years of inequality through industrial exposure..

Okay, so what do we do?

We need to have a hard discussion about zoning policies: their origins, their purposes, and their effects. We need to be prepared to recognize when policies were built on hate, and where they have lead to harm, just as much as we need to be ready to recognize that not every aspect of the zoning system is bad. We need to be willing to change, and be proactive about fixing the failings of previous generations. Ideally for the net benefit of all of us.
As part of this discussion, though, we are going to have to really, truly consider what 'character' of this city are valuable. What are tangible goals, what are the potential negative outcomes, and what can be done to mitigate those outcomes, ideally while actually adding to the 'character' of the city. Again, we needs to be willing to change here. Not everything wrapped under the broad umbrella of 'character' is actually worth keeping, particularly given how I could probably copy and paste some of the 'neighborhood character' arguments from the initial racial zoning codes into places like NextDoor or Facebook or even here on Reddit without anyone suspecting they are nearly 100 years old.

The End!

Holy shit! You made it to the end! Thanks for putting up with so, so many words... Here's a video of a little girl way too excited to get on a train as a reward.
submitted by killroy200 to Atlanta [link] [comments]

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure OC Tournament #5: Round 2 Match 2 - Maxwell Tenet VS Ace High!

The results are in for Match 1.
The match had proven to be very aerial, both performers very quickly finding ways to fulfill the letter of the ‘try and stay on the ropes’ directive Conqueror Worm had left for them while literally and figuratively flying in the face of its spirit. Alexis Williams needed to very frequently replenish her balloon armor as she bounced around, opportunities to actually get as close to Wrenn Aflight as she’d needed to being very difficult to come by.
Though with her Stand acting as it was, perhaps she didn’t mind such a thing. There was something about the quiet resolve of Kingdom of Desire, even as it wore a certain familiar ring, that was making her almost afraid of what this extension of herself, her traumas, her memories of her, might do. In the meantime, this guy who had agreed to be her opponent had been trying to sing, hiding his pain and his vitriol under his own sort of strong face and performing for the crowd. A tornado of dust had begun to engulf the arena, courtesy of his efforts, and the Vegas-veteran knew a dramatic, flaming ring when she saw one.
As it was, a swing and a near miss had placed her positionally several meters underneath the performer, her own form having been harmed on occasion by the influx of particulate-based chip damage, sweating from the mounting heat in the room, and unable to see many of the balloons she’d left in the fog of smoke as the performer covered the arena; she could barely see the walls, or the windows, let alone any of those.
Alexis needed to put literally everything she had into one final balloon dash. If she could close the distance between herself and Wrenn, she could certainly end this match in close quarters, and if he closed that cyclone of his in on her before she could get out of it, she would be burned badly by the glowing singer.
It was a quick-draw, then.
“Hmm?” Wrenn seemed to register something, his eyes facing her yet not seeming to be focusing on her at all - had something she’d set up earned the attention of that eye-dust he’d scattered about?
Already, the burning dust storm was starting to lower, extremely slowly and not seeming to constrict yet to Alexis’ surprise. Hell, she could even see the balloons she’d left nearby the windows now in one of the points she’d flown towards them, tried to catch Wrenn offguard. Why was he drawing it out when he’d seen what she could do? Why would he waste time on that? This place could catch alight!
“Hey!” The boy clinging to his umbrella above her called down. “These people want their finale! You’re on the same stage as me, so make it grand!”
That was all Alexis needed to hear, even bringing a smile to her face where she was expecting misery. Willing blast after blast of the amassed balloons, she sent all that she could utterly flying.
The tinted windows, which had started off so durable, had not only already begun to crack, but melt under the intense heat, and the balloons close to them blew them open on all sides, filling the previously quieter air with the shocked swears and calls for security of their small audience.
“Wrenn, you changed your mind?!” She wanted to cry for a different reason, but knew now wasn’t the time. That move would likely have only startled them, with holes in the glass of that size (a move by design for Alexis), so the pair would need to think fast in order to avoid being put down for this.
“You’ve been my LEAST favorite kind of audience!” He called eagerly, the flaming cyclone rising again and quickly funneling through the various windows, its burning intensity turned away from Alexis and towards the occupants of each of the viewing boxes. “If you’re putting people in shows like these, then *you have this coming!”***
The screams of the few watchers intensified.
With players’ scores matching at 69 (Nice), you could say the real winner was teamwork… Probably.
Category Winner Point Totals Comments
Popularity Judecca Highrollers 10-19 With a three-vote lead, once again, popularity resolved in a way where the thirtieth point is burned away by a spinning cyclone and balloon blast after blast.
Quality Masters of Funky Action 22-21 Reasoning
JoJolity Masters of Funky Action 27-19 Reasoning
Conduct Tie 10-10
“C’mon, Alexis, don’t choke now! Get us out of here, that guy probably protected himself, and Worm guy definitely has!”
Truthfully, Wrenn had meant to finish her off as the show demanded, secure his own safety, but when his eye-dust had noticed the window-damage, seen that past its cracks there were Fox and the other watchers on all sides, and from there little stairways up into the abandoned stations above and from there, up to the city.
For now, trying not to flinch from the sights of people in pain, he used his spread-out eye-property dust to look into all four sides he could leave from, trying to quickly assess all information. In one room, Conqueror Worm stood, looking extremely amused at this turn of events and doing little to help those trying to get to safety before hopping up into the ceiling and vanishing.
In the second, easily the most burning avenue of escape, a strange fellow in a maroon turban and face coverings stood right by the edge of the destroyed window, not at all minding the flames even as they caught the outfit alike, beginning to lift it up to remove with unsettling fearlessness; the only thing Wrenn saw as flames overtook the area and made its ceiling collapse was this figure grinning widely at him, accentuating a jagged-looking scar along the revealed lower half of their face.
The third side, he could see Fox quickly transform a rock sculpture of an annoying-looking dog into a makeshift shield, protecting himself, that golden-suited Tigran Sins guy, and a shocked looking Metra Doria from the initial, less lethal glass blasts as if he’d seen the flames coming, the structure seeming highly heat resistant and similar in makeup to the balloon armor as it hurried away.
The fourth was mostly just filled with screaming guys, and the stairs still looked accessible.
“Holy hell, are you crazy? Look, uh… Don’t worry about me!” The voice of Metra amplified and pleaded, resonating loudly and clearly in the heads of both fighters, even through the crackling and pain. “I’ll be fine, just… Just escape! I agreed to this because I wanted to ensure you three would survive!”
Well, that settled the guilt on that dilemma. Wrenn quickly pointed to the safest bet. “Blast us that way before we burn up and die! You can’t get cold feet in a place like this!”
Alexis was taken aback, but KoD knew not to let them die for this. Quickly, audible pops! blasted the replenished flying gymnast up towards the singer, right as his umbrella caught alight and he began to fall. He dropped into Alexis’ grasp, and from there in seconds flat they were up and blasting through the direction Wrenn had pointed out, landing safely in the stairways and very quickly making their ways up.
“What… What the hell did you need to go that far for?” Alexis asked, still rattled as the pair caught their breaths.
“Sorry for-” Wrenn coughed a lot, then spoke in a less affected tone. “Sorry for doing what you asked, and trusting you in the end! ‘Put our minds together,’ ‘don’t get caught off-guard,’ ‘get out of here…’” He looked away towards the sound of approaching sirens, voice sounding even heavier, as if a massive weight were on his lithe shoulders. “What did you think that would mean?”
Alexis’ lip trembled, and she hugged herself, finding her stand’s arms around her doing the same thing after a moment. She couldn’t rebut. This was Wrenn trusting in her, wanting her help in escaping these death games, but to do that..! To leave people in such a state, and that the worst perpetrators clearly survived anyway, and that Metra was still stuck with that guy..!
“They’re not going to chase us like this,” he continued, as much trying to convince himself not to break down as he put on his hardest ‘strong face,’ different from that which Alexis had seen before. “So many of those guys probably killed people like us, innocents, too… This is a blow to a whole crime ring.”
Not far from the site of the fire, authorities would find remains of a John Doe later identified as local entertainment industry manager Thutmose. Despite the incident earlier that day, authorities deemed it extremely unlikely these events were connected.
The final toll of the fires were seven dead, three missing, fifteen in critical condition, all of whom accounted for a majority of the audience of the match. Though many suspected members of Sound’s Garden’s criminal underground were lost to the flames, with many other regulars having tuned in through dark web streaming, operations on the blood sports were able to continue.
What a first match to open up the round on! Obviously, results are already in, so there won’t be results announced with M3 going up, but at this point, until the very tail-end of the round the typical posting schedule should be in full swing.
Scenario:
A scrapyard on the northwestern edge of Los Fortuna’s slums, 7:46 PM
Ace High was getting tired of having to move around so much, and for this long. Tailing this “Modern Holiday” man was starting to get on his nerves - despite being a detective, he preferred to deal with these kinds of situations in more direct ways, and passing through desolate streets and heaps of junk didn’t exactly fit his definition of “a good time”, even if his stand helped streamline the process a bit.
He’d been following Holiday at the request of Vitus Calamai, a man who SKADE had worked alongside before in an attempt to get in the good graces of ODIN. Furthermore, he’d already done the same to Holiday’s coworker, a woman by the name of Peres Straviat. Unlike before, however, Ace was alone - Kisa had opted to investigate his own leads, leaving the Sharp Lookers behind, and every other member of the team was occupied with their own tasks.
It seemed as if Holiday had something in mind that he wanted to do in the slums, as he’d supposedly been wandering around the area quite a bit recently, for some reason that neither Ace nor Vitus were aware of. However, Ace did hear that Holiday had some history with a few shady gangs and groups in the area, and considering the man’s track record, it was clear that an investigation was warranted.
As the man moved along, and entered a decrepit scrapyard by the edge of the district, Ace began to notice it - a burning stench that pervaded through the massive scrapyard, and a billowing cloud of smoke rising in the distance. The visibility wasn’t very good - smog filled the air, making it harder to discern what he was actually looking at. Furthermore, his vision was already occupied by the massive mounds of scrap around him, and couldn’t make out much of the area due to needing to remain hidden from Holiday.
Holiday’s path seemed to lead him closer and closer to the source of the smoke, and eventually, he seemed to stop and began looking around. He’d almost spotted Ace, who’d just barely dived behind a pile of scrap in time before Holiday spotted him. He could just barely overhear Holiday saying something, though he couldn’t make out exactly what it was. He had to get closer in order to get within earshot of him.
Moving forwards and peeking up from underneath the pile of scrap, Ace could see it - Holiday and a brown haired man wearing a red leather jacket, standing on the edge of a large crater, from which the smoke seemed to be emerging. Ace raised his head up further, getting a better look of what exactly was within the crater, and spotting the source of the smoke - multiple fires seemed to be burning from within, and some sort of figure stood from within, facing in the pair’s direction. Was that a stand?
Before he could think further about what exactly that was, Ace heard a rustling from behind him. Quickly turning around, he saw it - a stand, rising from the smog behind him, reaching out towards him.“Shit!” Ace quickly began scrambling backwards, up the pile of scrap. “Gangster’s-” Before Ace could finish calling for his Gangster’s Paradise to help him, the mysterious stand firmly grabbed his leg and pulled him back into its reach, and Ace lost consciousness.
An alley on the south side of Los Fortuna’s slums, the day prior to Ace’s investigation, 8:32 PM
Maxwell “Ten-Ten” Tenet sat on the ground, back against a graffiti-filled wall, breathing heavily while clutching his side. Bruises and cuts peppered his body, small droplets of blood falling onto the dirty floor beneath him. He wasn’t in the best shape. Still, the passed out body of the man by him was clearly far worse off than Max himself was.
“...heh. Who'd've thought that mugger would be a stand user as well?” Max idly mused to himself. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, and it probably wasn’t going to be the last. “Well, whatever. Just gotta hope this place calms down eventually...” With a pained grunt, he slowly got up.
He was just on his way over to the Elephant Bones, wanting to surprise London with a visit, when he got sidetracked after hearing the faint noises of some sort of altercation happening far away from him. Quickly checking it out, he quickly realized that it was a mugging, and stepped into the scene to stop it without hesitation. Things quickly spiraled out of control when the mugger tried to fight back against Max with his own stand, but the outcome was inevitable from the very beginning - Max came out on top, albeit having sustained a few wounds here and there.
Beginning to make his way out of the alley, Max sighed. The slums weren’t very peaceful during the best of times, but recently, these kinds of things seemed to have been happening more and more in there. He knew why as well - with the incarceration of “The Gambler”, things were somewhat of a mess for many of the residents of the slums. He didn’t live there himself, but his boyfriend did, and Max came over and patrolled them often enough that he couldn’t help but notice it.
“Sucks, doesn’t it?” Max was taken aback, hearing an unfamiliar voice come from behind him. Turning, he took a look at the person in front of him - a man with a young-looking face, blonde hair, and a wide grin on his face. “It’s just like six years ago, huh? Total chaos. Try as they might, I guess the Temple of Syrinx and the Bakkers aren’t doing a very good job keeping the criminals in check, haha! And just when it seemed like things were improving for the slums!” Despite the man’s dour words, his tone of voice was upbeat and casual.
“And who’re you?” Max tilted his head, curious about who exactly the odd man was. “Oh, I guess I forgot to introduce myself, haha! The name’s Modern Holiday, but you can just call me ‘Holiday’!”
“Holiday..? Hm..” The name sounded familiar to Max. “What’re you here for, Holiday?”
Holiday seemed to pause for a bit, his smile briefly fading away before he took a deep breath and began speaking. “Well, I’m glad you asked! Actually, I’m here because-” “Oh! I remember! London mentioned that one of his coworkers met someone called ‘Holiday’! Her name was Glitch, d’you know her?” Though he was slightly taken aback, Holiday seemed to lighten up at the mention of Glitch. “Oh, Glitch! Yeah, I know her! She’s a fun person, haha! She makes good food!”
“Anyways… The reason I’m here because I need your help! Or rather, I suppose I’ve got something in mind that I think you’d want to help me out with, since you seem to be the crime fighting type! Well, you aren’t really going to be fighting ‘crime’, but... well… uh...” Holiday stumbled over his own words, unsure of how to to word what he was going to say.
“Hey, just tell me what you want and we’ll see if I can help, yeah?” Max said nonchalantly. “Yeah, you’re right… Sheesh, this isn’t like me...” Holiday said with a sigh. “Well… I want you to kill a stand.”
“A stand?” Max’s raised a brow, a slight frown finding its way onto his face. “So... wouldn’t that mean killing the user as well? If that’s what you’re asking, then I’m not interested.” If that was what this ‘Holiday’ really wanted, then this was just a waste of time.
“Wh- no, no! God no, that’s… Yeah, no, I won’t- that’s not what I’m asking!” Holiday said loudly. “This stand’s user… well, she’s…” Holiday sighed and looked down, scratching his head. “She’s already dead. Has been for a while. It’s just… her stand isn’t dead. It’s still out there.”
Oh. “It didn’t disappear after she died?”
“Yeah… Los Fortuna has a weird effect on stands like that sometimes. The stand, Gasoline Family, just… stayed. Ever since then, it’s been mindlessly rampaging around the spot of her death, attacking anyone that gets nearby and making a mess. They say stands are manifestations of our ‘fighting spirit’ or our ‘souls’ or something like that, yeah? Knowing that, and seeing the only remnant of her act like that, it’s not a very nice sight to look at. No one’s really done anything about it until now since it’s so far out of the way of most people, but I want to… to free what remains of her, you know? If that makes sense. I don’t think she’d have wanted this to be what remained of her. And at the very least, I don’t want any unprepared person who goes there to find themselves killed by it.”
There was a moment of silence as Max took in Holiday’s words. “Did you know her? Gasoline Family’s user, I mean.” Max asked, his voice more quiet than before. In response, Holiday chuckled. “Yeah, I guess that was pretty obvious, huh? You could say we were friends back then.” A far cry from his previous demeanor, Holiday was somber. It made sense, considering the subject matter at hand, but it was an odd sight nonetheless.
“My stand, Sleep Apnea, can help protect you in the fight against Gasoline Family, but it’s not really suited for direct combat. I can’t do this without your help. I saw you fight that mugger - your stand is strong.”
Max thought back to his own past friendships and relationships, then to the people he knew in Los Fortuna. Were a similar situation to happen to someone he knew, he’d… he didn’t want to think much about that. “Well, sure. I’ll help you out.” Max said with a smile, to which Holiday responded with a slight grin as well. “... Yeah. Thank you.”
“So - when are we doing this, and what can this ‘Gasoline Family’ even do?”
Back in the scrapyard, 7:55 PM
The first thing Ace noticed when he woke up was the splitting headache he had, and that he was lying on the ground. The second thing he noticed was the pissed-off face of Modern Holiday, staring right at him. He quickly turned away, looking at his surroundings. He’d been dragged closer to the decrepit, smoke-filled crater, and was right by its edge.
Despite his best efforts, he’d gotten caught, somehow. Was the stand that attacked him Holiday’s? It just popped out of the smog behind him, and the moment it grabbed Ace, he passed out. Did it activate its ability on him? Other than the headache, he felt normal, for the most part. Slightly cold, which was weird, considering how close he was to the fires.
“So, you’re awake. Care to explain why exactly you were following me?” Holiday said with a scowl. Ace wasn’t entirely sure how to respond. There was silence for a few seconds, where nothing but the crackling of the fires within the crater could be heard as Ace thought to himself about his next move. From what he’d heard, Holiday was quite a sociable person, and one who was liable to slip up every once in a while, occasionally revealing some useful and sensitive information. Then again, Vitus also said that he was pretty good at catching on to others’ motives and giving people the slip when he didn’t want to converse with them, so it would be tricky, but if Ace could gather some information from Holiday, then that’d be very good.
Of course, Holiday did seem pretty pissed right now, which was somewhat understandable considering that Ace had been tailing him for quite a while. “Well, you know… I was curious about what you were up to, yeah? Walking around the slums so much, almost makes me think you’ve got something in mind~”
“And what if I do? I’m- Ugh. Look. I know that you’re with SKADE, and that Vitus probably put you up to this. This isn’t related to the Ocean Soul, and it isn’t anything that you should be concerned about or that you need to snoop around for.” Seemed like Holiday wasn’t really in the mood for a conversation, like he was on edge for some reason.
Even if what Holiday said was true, Ace’s own curiosity had been piqued at this point, and furthermore, he needed more information. “Well, I’m still quite curious - what’s it about, then?”
“You want to know? Fine. Get up.” Holiday turned away from Ace and pointed down at something within the crater. Ace took a closer look at it. Within it, he saw piles of scrap and debris tossed about haphazardly, a few of them the sources of raging fires, emitting pillars of smoke into the air.
By the border of the crater was the man that Holiday talked to before, and within it was what seemed to be a stand of some kind, the same figure that he’d seen there before. “You see that figure over there? That’s Gasoline Family, a stand. Its user is already dead, but it’s stayed here for a couple of years by now, making a mess of the area and attacking anyone that gets close enough. I’m getting help from someone in order to destroy it. Not a fan of seeing the only thing that remains from an old friend of mine do… this.” Holiday said, waving his hands to direct Ace’s attention to the chaos within the crater.
“A stand, huh? I see… What’s it do? Something related to fire, I assume.” So that was the reason for the disarray of the area here. “Actually, know what - how about I help you out with this ‘Gasoline Family’? As compensation for tailing you, yeah?” Ace said, grinning.
“Hm? You want to help?” Holiday said, mildly surprised. “Well, sure - I was just about to ask you to do the same. While you’re here, might as well make yourself useful. It should also help reassure you that I’m not doing anything illegal here or something like that, if you don’t believe me.”
“Alright, perfect-” Ace said, taking another look at the crater. “I assume those fires hurt stands, right? Uh… Got any tips about dealing with that? If I don’t know any weaknesses or whatnot, it’ll be hard to deal with Gasoline Family when my stand’s liable to be burnt up just like that. I’d rather not get flash-fried.” Ace said with a chuckle.
“Oh, that? Shouldn’t be a problem for you. See, my Sleep Apnea has the ability to force out ‘aspects’ or ‘parts’ of objects or people into copies of them that it creates. By putting the copies together, they’ll merge, but otherwise, the original body will lose said ‘aspect’ forever. Now, when Sleep Apnea first touched you, I made it activate its ability on you. It removed your body and your clothes’ ability to heat up. Of course, this means that the fire won’t hurt you or your stand at all, so that’s not going to be a problem.”
Now this was information that was useful to Ace. Knowing Holiday’s stand would certainly be useful for Vitus, but… It didn’t take long for the analytical part of his brain to realize what the catch here was. His body wasn’t heating up, but it could probably still cool down - that might’ve been why he felt colder before. “And I assume you’ll bring me back to normal once Gasoline Family’s dealt with? I’d rather not freeze to death, you know.”
“Well, don’t worry about that - I’d rather not have anyone’s death on my conscience, so I’ll return you back to normal so long as you don’t try to attack me or keep me from killing Gasoline Family, alright?” The anger in Holiday’s voice had disappeared, now replaced by a more nonchalant attitude, though Ace knew that he probably hadn’t calmed down much.
With a sigh, Ace took a step towards the crater in front of him. “Well, alright then - catch me up on what exactly Gasoline Family does, and I’ll get to work.” Knowing that his life was in Holiday’s hands wasn’t very uplifting, but this could very well turn out to be in Ace’s advantage if he played it right, and if he showed Holiday how useful and cooperative he was to make him lower his guard and spill information.
Max wasn’t sure what to expect when Holiday first mentioned Gasoline Family and told him where to go, but now that he was here, at the center of the crater in which it resided, he could see just how intimidating the stand was. The crater was absolutely decimated - thick puddles of a liquid that seemed to be gasoline were spread around, many of which had already been ignited. Piles of scraps and soot were strewn around, and the smell of smoke was overwhelming. However, Holiday used his stand on him to give him resistance from the fires, which would help in the fight.
Well, if he wanted to get anything done, he’d have to actually get closer to the stand. He briefly glanced behind him, towards Holiday, and spotted someone else descending down the pit towards him, a man with a checkered suit and a bowler hat.
“Oh? Who’re you? Did Holiday get you to help out here as well?” Max asked nonchalantly. In response, Ace grinned and spoke. “I guess you could say so. The name’s Ace High.” Ace sounded quite calm, unphased by the dangerous stand at the center of the crater. “Huh, I see. I’m Max. Having anyone else around to help deal with this is nice.”
With a shrug, Ace took another step forward and spoke. “Heh, yeah - just make sure that you don’t get in my way, yeah? We just gotta get this over with quickly”. Max wasn’t sure if Ace was just cracking a joke of some kind or if he was belittling him. Either way, it slightly annoyed him.
“Oh yeah? Sure, sure, I’ll stay out of your way… But I’ll probably be done with it by the time you get close - and if you step in front of one of my attacks, it’s your fault, not mine.” Max responded. Dealing with Gasoline Family was of utmost importance, of course, but he did get a slight urge to try and outdo Ace.
“Hey, I’m just joking around, yeah?” Ace said, noticing the effect of his comment. This wasn’t entirely true - in his mind, the most important thing would be gathering information from Holiday, and performing impressively against Gasoline Family could help build trust between Holiday and him. To that end, Ace really would have preferred it if Max stayed out of his way. “And don’t just blindly rush that stand down, it’s not gonna help. That is, unless you’ve got a deathwish, of course.” Ace said, his comment doing nothing but further annoying Max.
The two men stood at the bottom of the crater, taking a look at the stand in front of them while preparing themselves for the fight ahead of both of them. It likely wouldn’t be easy, but neither of them was going to leave until the stand was dealt with and the fire raging in the scrapyard was finally extinguished.
OPEN THE GAME!
Location: A crater at the bottom of an abandoned scrapyard by the edge of the slums. Each tile is 4x4 meters, making the map 64x64 meters overall. The players are currently at the bottom of the crater, 8 meters deep into the ground. The grey border is the incline / drop from the outside to the crater into the crater itself, and it’s quite steep. The dark grey areas are the outside of the crater, and are inaccessible to the players. The light orange shapes surrounding the map are puddles of gasoline formed within depressions in the ground - these are roughly 0.2 meters deep, and are currently the only areas of the map capable of containing pools of gasoline deep enough for Gasoline Family to teleport to (though more might end up being formed as the match goes on).
The ground is a mixture of dirt, soot, and ruined pieces of (non-conductive) scrap. Despite the mess, Max is somehow still able to rollerskate around without much issue. The hollow circles are burning pieces of scrap (mainly tires), constantly emitting dense smoke. The area that the smoke obscures is represented by the transparent red circles. Piles of scrap (which also contain various pieces of conductive metal scraps of varying sizes) are littered around the area and are represented by the areas filled with various small light grey shapes, piling up to about a meter in height.
At the bottom right corner of the map is Modern Holiday, whose purpose is explained in the Additional Information section.
Goal: Make sure that you contribute more to the defeat of Gasoline Family than your opponent!
Additional Information: Gasoline Family’s sheet (and a shortened description of its ability) can be found here. Pastebin version here
For the purposes of this match, thanks to Sleep Apnea’s ability, the characters, their stands, and any and all gear that is on them, are functionally immune to any and all fire or heat damage, not even feeling it. Force from explosives can still be felt and smoke is still hazardous to breathing.
Modern Holiday has briefed both characters on Gasoline Family’s abilities, and on how it fights - In general, it will remain mostly quiet, sometimes punching an object near it out of frustration but otherwise staying still until someone gets close enough for it to fight them. Gasoline Family doesn't seem to be capable of very complex thoughts or of formulating involved plans, but it doesn't need that most of the time - its overwhelming power and durability grants it the edge it needs to win out in most direct encounters, but it also knows how to use its ability to grant itself an extra edge.
In close combat, Gasoline Family knows how to create and activate buttons in the environment around it to create explosions for extra damage, and even purposefully tears them off and utilizes the gasoline streams as projectiles should its opponent stay for too long outside of its range. In addition, it will attempt to advance towards any opponent that has gotten close and that is now trying to escape.
After taking enough damage, Gasoline Family will attempt to teleport away to the puddle that is furthest away from where it currently is. Put in numerical terms, this happens when it loses a fifth of its “health”, meaning that it will teleport four times over the course of the match. If no puddle is available, it will attempt to fill the “viable” pools with more gasoline using streams, and if any of them have been plugged up, then it will dig out more with its own two A pow hands. At any moment it will try to make sure that there’s at least two pools available and filled with gasoline, though more than that may form as the match goes on.
Modern Holiday is watching the match from the bottom left corner of the map, at the top of the scrap pile, and is willing to assist you out in a limited degree - he’s willing to use Sleep Apnea on any object tossed to him, and will toss you back the copy of it that the stand creates (without manipulating any property or aspect of it), which will be a stand object, and as such will be able to hurt Gasoline Family.
Should you try and leave the map or directly and knowingly attack Modern Holiday, he will simply refuse to return your bodies back to normal after the match and you will eventually freeze to death, just as Ace predicted. Same goes for attempting to kill your opponent - injuring them is allowed, but not to an extent where they wouldn’t be able to assist in the fight any more.
Team Combatant JoJolity
Sharp Lookers Ace High “M-Maybe the attacks weren't meant to hurt us... they were meant to douse us with gasoline!?” So you’re going to have to get rid of this stand before you can get any information from Modern Holiday, but that’s fine - you’ve handled worse in the past, and you can already think of a few ways to manipulate this situation to your advantage. During the match, make use of the environment and of the various stands within it!
Baker Street Rat Pack Maxwell “Ten-Ten” Tenet “He doused himself with the gasoline... He panicked, because you were going to finish him off!” You’re not sure how this whole situation got so crowded and messy, but dealing with Gasoline Family shouldn’t be too bad either way. In fact, this might even open up some new opportunities for you - During the match, make use of the environment and of the various stands within it!
Link to the Official Player Spreadsheet
Link to Match Schedule
As always, if you would like to interact with the tournament community and be among the first to get updates for the tournament, please feel free to PM a member of our Judge staff for an invite to our Official Discord Server!
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hazardous waste drop off site near me video

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