neoatlantiscodex

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Pigs can turn household waste into meat. Medieval houses had hearths, which were perfect for smoking meat. There were rules for when and where swine could be turned out, woodlands were measured in how many swine they could forage.

And it's not just Europe. The Chinese character for home, 家 (jiā), is literally Pig with a roof over it's head.

What does this have to do with Neo-Atlantis?

The Future is the Past. We used to have rules that allowed maximum use of a property, and now we have people going to jail because they had the temerity to grow tomatoes on the front lawn.

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How This TRULY Omni-Directional Wind Turbine is Genius

Wind turbines are finally catching up to Waterworld.

These turbines are designed to be used on a small scale, with wind coming from any direction, (in 3 dimensions). ��This is because wind is often 3d in urban environments.

We would still need neighbourhood-level power storage to make this viable.

Runtime:  11:24

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Reminds me of the lost art of chainsaw parties.

Back when I was young, we didn't wait for the government to remove a downed tree. We just took the free fire wood.

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rip to all the “fuckyeah___” blogs that carried our society at one point </3

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The Humble Mammoth Tank

This is oddly one of the most viable science fiction tank designs, because it changes very little from current technology.

Despite the apparent difference in cannon size, the Mammoth is stated as using a 120mm cannon, which is the same size of cannon used by modern Abrams.  This is also the heavier standard for artillery cannons.  It has it’s own Anti-Aircraft radar and AA missile systems, which are also very real and easily attached to the Mammoth Tank’s mammoth frame.

But, what powers such a behemoth?

Nuclear.

Now, the first thought most people have is standard fission reactors.  All the basic information I’ve seen suggest a 30ft x 40ft size for naval reactors, and the Abrams is about 30ft in length.  This means a current convention nuclear reactor would take up 1/3 of the Mammoth Tank’s main hull.  This is surprisingly viable, but we should also talk about Micro Nuclear reactors.  Standard nuclear reactors used controlled reactions, but micro-nuclear reactors use natural decay.  This allows them to be miniaturized enough to have legitimate discussions about putting them in cars.  The most popular one, Thorium, has a half-life measured in Thousands of Years, and is plentiful enough to be given primary consideration, (it’s actually a waste product of Uranium-234 (enriched) decay; U-234 is the stardard Uranium used in most nuclear reactors).

This would allow it to patrol areas that no other vehicle could, like say, the US’s / Middle East’s vast deserts.  Or, say, post-apocalyptic desert wastelands.  It has enough interior space to have bunks and basic amenities.  If you added water recovery, which is not inconceivable given it’s size, it’s biggest limiting factor would be food.

Humans are always the weakest link.

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The Crazy Science of 3D Solar … and More

They are working on solar power in less than ideal conditions.

They haven’t really made anything concrete yet.

This is more about his comment, that one of the biggest problems with solar power is buying the land.

Because, without any irony, people think that clearcutting to make room for solar power helps the environment.  Or clearcutting for wind power.

These technologies make zero sense unless we can use them without clearcutting.

Like, we can put wind farms on mountains.  God-forsaken modern skycrapers have about half of their window space as entirely decorative.  They could easily be replaced with solar panels.

Runtime:  14:00

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Solid State Batteries Are REALLY Here: Yoshino Power Station

Solid-state batteries are here.  They are still nascent, but offer much longer lifespans.  Of course, they aren’t actually included in anything, yet.

Rough math has it cheaper than the Telsa per kWh.

Runtime:  12:22

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The Secret to Japan's Great Cities

Japan basically does every city planning thing I rant about.

Tokyo went from the most expensive place in the world to live, to a a place that lowers rent every year.  This did they have having a simplified building code.  It maximizes lot usage.  Allows mixed usage at every level.

If you do this, you can have a higher density neighbourhood and connect your mass transit.  This makes mass transit extremely efficient, and if you make it useful, people will use it.

Narrow streets without street parking.

Well, where do they park?  Mixed usage allows a commercial parking lot to be put in every neighbourhood.  You actually have to prove you have a parking spot withing 2km of your house in order to buy a car.  Which, yeah, you have to have a place to put it.

But, the thing is, Japan has done almost nothing to help bikes.  Because if you have narrow streets everywhere with modal filters for cars, then you don’t have to.  They also allow bikes to ride on sidewalks.  For parking, people can build commercial parking wherever they feel like.

They don’t need to mandate minimum parking for businesses, as the the businesses can build whatever parking they think they need, and if they don’t, someone else can build a commercial car park.

Runtime:  34:50

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The Surprising Fact About Many London Buildings

There is a lot of talk about renewability, but at the end of the day, using local building materials is 10,000x more energy efficient.

Much of London was built using the most easily accessible claw.  Instead of putting the bricks into a kiln, they stacked them into what was effectively ovens.

What do you do with the holes?  Turn them into parks.  The depression kept it shadier, and limited the view from the park of anything other than park.

The timescales he uses, centuries, are just so alien to people in the new world.

Runtime:  21:54

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How to Build a House (Part I-IV)

Part V: Peaked Roofs

There are four main reasons to have peaked roofs:

Hot

Cold

Rain

Structure

Which is why it boggles the mind that it's now basically a lost art.

Almost.

Okay, yes, I'm being hyperbolic, but Architects certainly act like it is.

Hot

Heat rises. Having an open area above the house gives a place for the heat to rise. You can combine this with something like a solar chimney that draws the hot air out, and with enough ventilation, cool(er) air is drawn in.

Cold

Having a sealed off area above the house gives you insulation. Even uninsulated attics provide a barrier between the warm house and the cold outside. If you add insulation, then it works doubly well.

Rain

Having a peaked roof allows rain to fall off. Strange that. On a more practical level, a peaked roof allows tiles to be layered over each other, giving no way for the water to get trapped. For snow it's even more essential, as if too much snow builds up, the weight will destroy your house.

Structure

The triangle is the strongest shape in nature. Almost. Ignoring Buckminster Fullerenes. It also allows wind to be deflected, rather than taking the full wind load. And wind loads on skyscrapers have higher wind loads than they do weight.

Part VI: Ventilation vs. Insulation

Quite frankly, heating is older than Human civilization, while cooling is incredibly new. In order to survive in the intense heat, they came up with the simple solution of ventilation. Even if you don't have access to cool air, the airflow makes the heat much more bearable. Traditional solutions include wind traps

These work so well, that Qatar built them into their new university. More modern solutions have you have ventilation pipes moving through the earth, which cools the air. A number of places in the Middle East don't have windows, they have thick walls with narrow slips that prevent the direct sunlight from getting in, while allowing ventilation. They also traditionally have taller (than 2 storey) buildings by narrow roads, which maximizes the shade.

Seriously, we invent air conditioning, and forget how we lived before it.

Big roads made out of black pavement are, quite literally, the worse option for hot environments.

As for heat, that's easy. You just need fire. But, if you want to control the temperature in a building, you need insulation.

Without AC, if you add insulation, but no AC, in a hot environment, you create a death trap.

Modern Passive House standards assume you are going to have perfectly controlled temperatures, and therefore mandates insulation.

How to Build a House (Part I-IV)

Because we've evolved beyond the need for our buildings to suit our environment. You can go to Vegas and see signs everywhere about water conservation, and then go out to their perfect golf courses, where the green transitions immediately into sand dunes.

Part I: Foundation

Most of our traditional building techniques focus on wood. We don't need to build with wood anymore, but that doesn't mean we cannot learn anything from it. One of the big problems with wood is that it will rot if put directly into the ground, and so you need something else there. Namely rocks.

Reminder: Concrete is just artificial rocks.

The size and depths of your foundation is dependant upon the size of your building, and your ground conditions. The bigger your house, and the worse your soil, the more complex your foundation needs to be.

Part II: Basement

If you extend the foundation upwards, you get a basement. We normally think of basements as underground, but we are wrong in doing this. Basements are just another word for the Undercroft. Because you don't want to add wood to your lowest level, having a floor made of stone was a great idea. Stone was more expensive, so you make it the smallest floor.

Which is wild for us modern people to think that medieval houses often had the lower floor be the smallest.

Part III: Jettying

Why? Hubris? To spite God?

Because it was practical, and it lowers your tax footprint. There was a lot of older construction practices who's primary goal was lowering your tax footprint. We've come down hard on them, but, quite frankly, if the rules are reasonable, and people do something really cool to avoid them, then we don't need to change them. They would sometimes build over river to avoid paying property taxes.

The practical part is that pre-modern houses were built using single beams spanning any open space. Long beams tend to sag over time, but if you put weight on the outside, it evens it out. So, by building the higher floor a step larger, you put weight on the team, and get more space.

Medieval houses would typically pay tax/rent based off either the size of the base, or the size of the frontage. This is actually an incredibly simple way to run building regulations, and the simpler the regulations, the easiest it is to build.

Part II-II: Basement II

In the modern era we've decided to start finishing our basement, only to lo-and-behold discover that it's cold. Not only is the earth cold in northern climates, but heat rises.

Stone has a high heat capacity, meaning it takes a lot of energy, either way, to change the temperature. This means they are great for holding a constant temperature. Before the era of AC, if you wanted to keep something cool, you kept it in a cold room in your basement, or in a room that goes into a hill. If you prevent light from getting in, it would keep colder.

Basements were also used for general storage, or for a business. Because back in the day, most people lived in the same place they worked, and in cities, where space was scarce, you built up. In the modern age, we literally have laws to prevent people from working out of their house, because we're utterly insane.

Once we started added plumbing, furnaces, electricity, etc., having an unfinished basement made it simple to maintain these. When you added cars, it was also a great place for a garage/car port.

Do we need basements, now? No. But they are useful and practical. And understanding their limitations can dramatically reduce your future energy use, and improve your quality of life.

Part IV: Car Port / Garage

Amazingly lost technology. Partially because we started finishing basements. What's worse, is that in most modern countries, parking is getting extremely expensive, as the space is valuable. So valuable that people have died over parking disputes.

A car port is a room in your basement that you can park your car in. If you fully enclose it, it becomes a garage.

If we extend this to apartments, ground floor apartments suck. For everyone. So, you can lift it up a bit, and give them parking under the same foot print. Because a problem we have is that the companies building apartments just do NOT want to build underground parking.

Now, if you have protected underground parking, people could park a car. Or a bike. Or a scooter. Or keep a canoe. Or do maintenance on their car, which is difficult if not impossible to do on apartment parking lots. And this also gives you a place to keep your waste disposal, and other heavy machinery. So, this is another reason to make people pay based off the rote value of the land itself, not the profits that can be made from it. You could also have a bus / train station there.

Thank you @noneatnonedotcom.

[neoatlantiscodex]

How to Build a House (Part I-IV)

Because we've evolved beyond the need for our buildings to suit our environment. You can go to Vegas and see signs everywhere about water conservation, and then go out to their perfect golf courses, where the green transitions immediately into sand dunes.

Part I: Foundation

Most of our traditional building techniques focus on wood. We don't need to build with wood anymore, but that doesn't mean we cannot learn anything from it. One of the big problems with wood is that it will rot if put directly into the ground, and so you need something else there. Namely rocks.

Reminder: Concrete is just artificial rocks.

The size and depths of your foundation is dependant upon the size of your building, and your ground conditions. The bigger your house, and the worse your soil, the more complex your foundation needs to be.

Part II: Basement

If you extend the foundation upwards, you get a basement. We normally think of basements as underground, but we are wrong in doing this. Basements are just another word for the Undercroft. Because you don't want to add wood to your lowest level, having a floor made of stone was a great idea. Stone was more expensive, so you make it the smallest floor.

Which is wild for us modern people to think that medieval houses often had the lower floor be the smallest.

Part III: Jettying

Why? Hubris? To spite God?

Because it was practical, and it lowers your tax footprint. There was a lot of older construction practices who's primary goal was lowering your tax footprint. We've come down hard on them, but, quite frankly, if the rules are reasonable, and people do something really cool to avoid them, then we don't need to change them. They would sometimes build over river to avoid paying property taxes.

The practical part is that pre-modern houses were built using single beams spanning any open space. Long beams tend to sag over time, but if you put weight on the outside, it evens it out. So, by building the higher floor a step larger, you put weight on the team, and get more space.

Medieval houses would typically pay tax/rent based off either the size of the base, or the size of the frontage. This is actually an incredibly simple way to run building regulations, and the simpler the regulations, the easiest it is to build.

Part II-II: Basement II

In the modern era we've decided to start finishing our basement, only to lo-and-behold discover that it's cold. Not only is the earth cold in northern climates, but heat rises.

Stone has a high heat capacity, meaning it takes a lot of energy, either way, to change the temperature. This means they are great for holding a constant temperature. Before the era of AC, if you wanted to keep something cool, you kept it in a cold room in your basement, or in a room that goes into a hill. If you prevent light from getting in, it would keep colder.

Basements were also used for general storage, or for a business. Because back in the day, most people lived in the same place they worked, and in cities, where space was scarce, you built up. In the modern age, we literally have laws to prevent people from working out of their house, because we're utterly insane.

Once we started added plumbing, furnaces, electricity, etc., having an unfinished basement made it simple to maintain these. When you added cars, it was also a great place for a garage/car port.

Do we need basements, now? No. But they are useful and practical. And understanding their limitations can dramatically reduce your future energy use, and improve your quality of life.

Part IV: Car Port / Garage

Amazingly lost technology. Partially because we started finishing basements. What's worse, is that in most modern countries, parking is getting extremely expensive, as the space is valuable. So valuable that people have died over parking disputes.

A car port is a room in your basement that you can park your car in. If you fully enclose it, it becomes a garage.

If we extend this to apartments, ground floor apartments suck. For everyone. So, you can lift it up a bit, and give them parking under the same foot print. Because a problem we have is that the companies building apartments just do NOT want to build underground parking.

Now, if you have protected underground parking, people could park a car. Or a bike. Or a scooter. Or keep a canoe. Or do maintenance on their car, which is difficult if not impossible to do on apartment parking lots. And this also gives you a place to keep your waste disposal, and other heavy machinery. So, this is another reason to make people pay based off the rote value of the land itself, not the profits that can be made from it. You could also have a bus / train station there.

Thank you @noneatnonedotcom.

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Naval Hatcheries

Combine three of the best ways to deal with depleted fish populations.

Hatcheries: Providing ideal conditions for the earliest stages of life. For every creature, the earliest stages have the highest rates of predation.

Fishing Exclusionary Zones: Simply put, zones where you cannot fish. This gives a region where fish can grow to maturity, which dramatically improves the rate of mature fish in the surrounding area.

Raft: Marine Biologist speech for literally anything floating on the surface. If it doesn't move that much, (i.e. drifting), and has texture on the bottom. Even a single log can support it's own ecosystem, and larger, more complex pieces could more marine biomass than what exists in for 20km around, (littoral/epipelagic).

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Daytrading

Daytrading is when an entity buys and sells the same stock on the same day. This seems pretty innocuous, except for the fact it dramatically increases the volatility of the stock market, and allows High Frequency Trading, that is rent-seeking on the stock market.

Investment

The way stocks are supposed to work is that a company sells a portion of it's ownership. People buy this percentage ownership. This provides a large flush of funds. In return, the investors get a percentage of Dividends.

Dividends are the residual profits, profits that are not reinvested in the company. These profits are split equally among the shares. So, if you own 1 share, you get 1 portion. If you own 10,000, you get 10,000 portions.

High Frequency Trading

High Frequency Trading is done by entities that have a hardline between investment hubs. If a request is not fulfilled on the initial hub, the request is sent to other hubs.

i.e. I want to buy/sell this stock for this price.

Having the hardline allows them to go faster. So, they could see the price before it gets to other hubs, and send a message to that hub to create buy/sell order. They then make up the difference, themselves.

Very, very not Capitalism.

RRSP's

Registered Retirement Savings Plans

In the US they are 401K, I think. Anyways, the point is it an investment plan that has you put money in it, but don't pay taxes on it until you withdraw it. The idea is that when you are retired, you will be making less money, and therefore paying less taxes.

But, again, they are investment plans. And where do you think they invest? The stock market. This is why market volatility is so dangerous, and this is why during 2008 banks were too big to fail.

Well, there are other reasons, but if they fell, they would take grandmother's savings with them.

Conclusion

Daytrading is completely unnecessary for the proper operation of the stock market, and by banning it, you can create incredible market stability. I.e. no crashes.

Simple, you cannot buy and sell a stock during the same day. You have to wait until opening tomorrow.

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Signs / Discrimination

On hand, he's right. Most signs can be eliminated by social cohesion and proper design. A simple example is roads. If you narrow the road, and have a lot of intersections, people will naturally slow down.

On the other hand, he proves he's exactly the kind of hippie that would necessitate a policy of "long-haired freaky people need not apply." In the start of the song, he comes across a business that is hiring, with a sign that says "long-haired freaky people need not apply." He puts his hair under his hat, walks in, gets the job, and IMMEDIATELY devolves into the worst stereotype of hippies.

Two things that everyone forgets about discrimination:

Segregation was mandatory.

There is a financial disincentive to discrimination.

During segregation in the US and apartheid in South Africa, segregation was mandatory. In the US, if you had a restaurant that dealt with white people, you couldn't have black customers. And if you were a restaurant with black people, you couldn't have white customers.

In South Africa, they had limits on how many Black people you were allowed to hire for certain jobs. The white business owners responded to this by having triple books, to hide how many black people they actually hired.

A bus driver was fired because he refused to pick up a Japanese man. Now, Japanese = good, and Chinese = bad, according to the law, and he got his job back by proving he could not tell the difference.

This is the reality of how stupid apartheid was, he was required to discriminate in ways he was not skilled enough to do.

And, by contrast, the most racist organizations, by pretty much every study into it, are either government or NGO's. This is because private businesses have a direct financial benefit to not discriminate.

Here's three scenarios. For the faint of heart, the operate insult is "chug", (basically meaning drunken indian).

Place is hiring. Under the sign is another sign that says "Indians need not apply."

Place is hiring. Indian walks in, has a pleasant interview with the manager. He leaves, and the moment he's out the door, the manager drops his resume in the garbage, because he doesn't want to risk hiring a drunken indian.

Place is hiring. He walks in, and the manager responds with, "Who do you I know you are not a useless chug?"

Anyone who fainted won't be allowed in Neo-Atlantis.

Anyways, of these three scenarios, the one that gives him the best chance of being hired is the last. The accusation is terrible, but this gives him a chance to refute it. The the first two scenarios give him 0 chance to be hired.

In the US, there is a problem that business won't hire young, black men. When the same business would hire an older black man, or a black woman of either age. Because they are afraid of gang involvement. But, there is a fantastic exception, jobs with a required criminal background check do not have this problem.

So, how does the government respond to this? By cracking down on criminal background checks, which is one of the things that dramatically increases the chance of a young, black man to get hired.

This is because in the prevailing leftist worldview, something that feels bad is worse than something that actively makes your life substantially worse.

This is why my province's Human Rights Commission was running ads during COVID lockdowns begging anyone who had a bad word said to them to come forward. Because locking you in your house is not a violation of your Human Rights. Having a bad word said to you in a CoD lobby is, however.

So, does Neo-Atlantis need anti-discrimination laws?

Fuck no.

Make clear laws. Send criminals to prison. Have immigration rules that are both accommodating, while also keeping out undesirables. Unless you have a monopoly, it's not a problem. And if you have a monopoly, THAT is the problem.

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High School / ATLAS

A lot of people think about High School, blame it on Rockefeller, trying to create a pliable labour-class to work in the factories.

To be honest, he 100% did do this, but he based it off of British Grammar schools.

Grammar School, which the British Grammar schools are still considered the best schools in the world. Just like Oxbridge (Oxford + Cambridge) are considered the best universities. Grammar Cchool was designed to create the nobility. Literally. As in, not too long ago, you were literally born into a caste, or to say you were born into a family with inheritable privileges.

The nobility were both a martial class, and a managerial class. This is because that one of the only legitimate jobs of the government is to protect you militarily, and Feudalism is essential a military government writ large. It really wasn't until modernity that we had viable alternatives.

They had inheritable land, that they owned because of pledges of military service to the king. They were allowed to keep all of the money they could get out of their fife. This meant that the survival of their workers, and managerial skills, directly benefited them. Compare this to modern corporations, that gain no benefit to your continued existence.

To create this martial, managerial class, they were sent to Grammar School, where they were taught important things, like accounting, Latin, military strategy, the rough equivalent of an MBA, and unimportant things, like how to speak in the secret Frog language. Rugby doesn't just teach you military strategy, but Games are important to keeping your body active.

If you look at standard High Schools, they teach the same thing, but a pale imitation of this. We've even tried to turn Games into Physical Education, and bent backwards in the attempt to add education into the simple act of keeping your body physically fit, (along with the social and psychological benefits). You learn a second language, but in English-speaking countries, this is not to do anything productive, (non-English countries learn English, because it's so useful). We used to learn banking, and now learn abstract mathematics. Which, as someone who was good at, and studied them much further, you aren't going to use it unless you become an engineer or mathematician. Because of the purposelessness, High School doesn't have any way to evaluate it's success. As such, it's basically become a holding pen.

People are going to High School, nowadays, and coming out less prepared for life than when they went in. Same thing with University. Because the most important thing you can do in High School and University is sit still, and not do anything productive.

For some reason, teenagers are feeling a bit unfulfilled by this, and our solution is to shoot them full of drugs.

Historically, once you had elementary school, Elementary Cchool taught you the three R's. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.

Catchy, but inaccurate to call them R's.

Anyways.

After Primary School, if you weren't going to Grammar School or University, you... worked. You got an apprenticeship. By the time you are 21, you are a journeyman, whom is marriageable.

Now, we send everyone to University. Which adds another 8 years of education. They come out of University with $50-60,000 in debt. About 10% of the people who come out of University actually work a single day in the field they studied. They come out, never having done anything productive in their life, other than the most basic of service jobs.

And if they had worked those service jobs for those years, would be financially better off, and have more work experience.

So, we're creating Utopia, so, what do we do with schools?

I mean, we can't have teenagers working. Except we can. And in my experience as someone who has to teach teenagers at work, and who is a former teenager himself, the teenagers with jobs are typically better in almost every way than the teenagers without jobs.

Well, what about Trade Schools?! That's the usual alternative.

Well, Trade Schools don't really exist. Most trades have a 3 semester rotation of 2 work and 1 study, or something similar. Trade schools are often literally just university-colleges, or technical universities, that partner with firms to pair students with appropriate jobs in their field. Engineering literally works the same way, and and both engineering nursing requires a practicum after graduation.

But we're running into the ATLAS principle, which comes from Bioshock. In Bioshock, an Objectivist created an Objectivist paradise. The big problem he didn't account for is that he promised that everyone could become captains of industry. "But, in the end, someone has to scrub the toilets."

Every, single, discussion about High School acts as if every - single - person is going to have a storied career, either in academia, or the trades. The unfortunate answer is that most people have jobs, not careers. Your job is to lift heavy thing, or push buttons. The nature of unskilled jobs, i.e. jobs without skills that are rare enough to command a better wage, is a different issue. And it really doesn't matter HOW we accomplish this, we need account for the people who have to scrub the toilets. They need to have housing, and enough money to support a family. On one wage, or as is most common, one-and-a-half. People who don't go into some form of secondary education should not be shamed as failures. They are instead the backbone of the economy. Or, the muscles of the economy? You have a lot more muscle than you do bones. The basement of the economy is fitting, but people might take that the wrong way.

As Forrest Gump says, stupid is as stupid does. Most people think this is an insult, but stupid people can lead productive lives, and brilliant people have lead disastrous lives. You don't need grade 12 to scrub the toilets. Literally, as many janitorial jobs require grade 12, because it was the line in the sand we choose.

And, by the way, this is literally Utopian, as in, it's in Thomas Moore's Utopia. People with free time, and a culture of interest in reading, will create a culture of reading.

If we get a four-day work week, either 4x8, or 4x10, we can have days off, and people can attend secondary education of their choice. Especially with the advent of the internet, you can have masters in their field teaching courses that you need to pay $20/month to view. If a teenager is still living with their parents, a couple days of work a week would be sufficient to cover their expenses, and give them plenty of time for education.

Well, what about people who want to go into a field that actually requires a university degree.

Then they can go to High School. Or have the local university-college offer the equivalent courses. If we cut out the bullshit, and focus only on those who are academically skilled, we could easily cut the time in half.

[neoatlantiscodex]

Layered Metropolis

Almost a requirement for Neo-Atlantis, but the real question is how do you do it without turning it into a dystopia? Because layered Metropolis is also dystopic, right?

If you have a complete lack of ordered regulation. Regulations don't have to be verbose prose that would put War and Peace to shame. For those who think I'm exaggerating, Omnibus Spending Bills in the US can be five times the length of War and Peace.

Honestly, all you have to do is say that every 15 stories, you have to leave room for a parkade, surrounding lobbies, and the ability to allow a highway/trainway/viaduct to be built through it. Why fifteen stories? SimTower. These would be the stopping off point for express elevators, with local elevator access form the sky lobbies. And this solves the elevator problem.

The elevator problem is that conventional elevator designs would take up all of a skyscrappers internal space when you decide to go really big.

In fact, if you mandate elevated interconnection between, you can solve the problem of alternate access in case of emergencies.

Then mandate a minimum distance between skyscrapers, like say, a full block. This would allow light and air access, because our current city designs turn them into pitch black wind tunnels.