Do you think that it is meaningful to think about things being good or evil in a manner that is separate from what is "safe" or "prosperous"? If someone points a gun at you and demands all your money, the safe thing is to give it to them. Does that mean it's a good outcome for all?
It is productive to think about the world in terms of good and evil. But if you really engage with more complex events in an intellectually honest way, you will always find that they cannot be easily mapped onto the poles of geopolitical conflicts, as you would like them to be, if I am interpreting the thrust of your question correctly.
If someone points a gun at you, if the threat seems credible, and if you are defenseless against it, and if you would rather be shot than hand over your wallet, then I can only interpret that as false pride, but not as rational behavior and certainly not as ethical behavior. This is all the more true if you are not making this decision for yourself alone.
It is not heroic to die because you did not want to give in out of personal pride, national consciousness, or other false ideals. It is heroic to accept a loss of face in such a difficult situation in order to avert or minimize harm to yourself and others.
I do believe that the discussion of good and evil is a meaningful one, but it's nuanced and we must be extremely careful with definitions and not to confuse ethics debate with irrational emotions.
If someone points a gun at me, I give the money. If life is a strategy game, then this is the moment where you need to sacrifice a piece in order for the game to even continue. And money is usually a pawn in the big picture of life. I may feel it's unfair or that my ego/honor is hurt, but I'd work though that with my therapist, analyze it philosophically and decide what to do next instead of responding emotionally.
I personally don't value nationalist sentiment. From a humanist perspective, associating yourself with one specific nation and making it your goal to serve the elites who actually control it is unjustifiable. There are things I'd consider good and evil, but they're much more universal and not tied to one's birthplace, taste or mood. Education, progress, science are good to me. So if something damages these, I may call it evil.
Ukraine is not one of these though, it is a conflict where principals are fighting for selfish interests, while working their propaganda machines very hard to convince us that their goals are actually universal and humanistic, to harvest us as a resource. Depending on which bucket you ate your slop from, you get one bias or another. As an average citizen, you should not fool yourself thinking that you're one with something great that you must sacrifice yourself for it, and don't full yourself thinking you're serving some great good.
I thought there would be one or two results, perhaps a result of poor reoccurring phrasing. Nope.
>i'm going to change your diaper and burp you
>Carlito is a very good boy Go piss in your diaper you big baby
>He doesn't care. He is a big baby who filled up his diaper with pee pee and poo poo
>you are a big baby and i am going to change your diaper and burp you <
>To be clear I call executives of multi trillion dollar companies scumbags and if you can't deal with that I'm not sure what to do. Burp you? Change your diaper?
>I am going to change your diaper and burp you
>Yeah man it's real authoritarian to say your second name is doodoo. Go change your diaper you big baby
>Yeah because you're a big baby with a big full diaper
>Hello sir this is your uber outside. I have your order from the diaper store
I find Zitron's writing bad and his character questionable but exaggerated accusations like this is why no one takes sexual assault accusations from progressives seriously any more.
You guys spent a decade crying wolf about how everything is literally sexual assault and now you wonder why conservatives are being so successful cracking down on sexual deviance using fabricated accusations. You reap what you sow.
You're reading your own hangups and bugaboos into my comment. The problem begins and ends with the lack of consent. There are plenty of people who would be into it if he asked first.
On the one hand, this is good to see. On the other hand, like basically every such thing, it's too late and way, way, too little. It is pointless to try to chip away at Amazon by saying "oh you did this, oh you did that, oh you harmed people this way, oh you cheated this other way". It's like if a house is on fire and you try to stop it from spreading to nearby houses by catching each flying ember individually. You need to put the fire out.
Companies with as much market power as Amazon simply cannot be allowed to exist. It was a mistake to ever allow it and every response that is not aimed at a total shattering of the company is another mistake. No retail business of any kind can ever be safe when companies like Amazon exist. (And although this article is about Amazon, the same is true of many other companies as well, like Walmart.)
Antitrust laws exist for a reason, when judges and goverment stopped enforcing them it created the age of mega-corporations. AT&T did not had the level of control of the economy that modern tech companies have, and yet got split to make room for competition and a healthy economy.
The world knows how to fix this problem the rich pay to not allow it.
This is pretty much exactly what Lina Khan would say, I'm still mad Harris sidelined her instead of putting her front and center, drilling that message into people's tick skulls.
I think a bigger mistake is just allowing Amazon (and Walmart) to even exist at their current size. There simply shouldn't be any sellers that large, or any marketplace operators that large.
> I live in an area that has a lot of walkable and bikeable things nearby. There are a lot of people who drive anyway.
The less warm and fuzzy part of this urban-design approach is that it can't just be about making things easier to walk to, it also has to be about making them harder to drive to. For instance, by making parking limited and/or expensive. People tend not to like that idea, although I think there's a good likelihood they'd actually be happy with it if not for the meta-awareness of having "lost" parking.
People don't like that idea because it's highly exclusionary.
It only sounds good to younger people who don't have any disabilities, kids, grandparents who want to come along, or any number of other valid reasons to walk.
It's also highly indicative of the weather where you're from. Forcing people to bike and walk everywhere sounds a lot better if you're in a moderate climate where bad weather means you need to pack a light jacket and wait for the light rain to stop. Move somewhere with harsh winters and the moralizing about people driving places stops making sense quickly.
What you've just said is a common refrain, if you haven't already seen it please take a look at these two videos that attempt to address part of what you're saying. I found them very interesting when I came across them years ago and it changed my view of what's possible or even good!
So Canadians bike less in winter than some Finns (not all, as the author of the video himself mentions that Oulu stands out among Finnish cities in this regard) yet those Finns make only 12% of winter trips by bike. That means the vast majority of winter trips they make (88%) are not by bike. In a small town, which is 12x6 miles judging by google maps yet has 590 miles of bike paths. If anything this proves cycling in winter is not an option for the vast majority of population.
And yes, the Dutch have their bike paths and bike without helmets, we all know that. The secret is the lack of elevation and living in crumped cities: on average a Dutch person bikes 3km per day [1].
It's utterly fascinating you wrote that and yet could not make the right conclusion.
"In a small town, which is 12x6 miles judging by google maps yet has 590 miles of bike paths."
+
"not all, as the author of the video himself mentions that Oulu stands out among Finnish cities in this regard"
The right conclusion here is that infrastructure and its maintenance is clearly the defining factor. This really shouldn't be surprising.
Consider this: how many trains do you think passed through the areas rail tracks are at before the tracks were built? Or: how many trains need to pass through an area before we can justify the cost of building train tracks there?
You simply can't point to just any winter cycling stats without first making sure the infrastructure is there. "Cycling in winter just ain't working out!" — no, you literally are not putting in the minimum of effort — "we've tried nothing and are all out of ideas" vibes.
And here's the kicker: You assumed these statistics are from a city that's a cycling paradise, but I'm willing to bet Oulu is a car-infested shithole, just like all of the Netherlands is. No, I'm not kidding in the slightest. And it's pretty much confirmed in the video the parent linked: [1].
Sure, those areas are as good as it gets at this time, but they're nothing to what things should look like, so since your conclusions are based on faulty assumptions, they are automatically invalid.
What these cycling-friendly areas are doing is slowly grinding away at the overbearing behemoth that is the already existing car infrastructure with the eventual goal of getting to at least parity. But they're still decades of work away.
The simplest example is free parking. You expect to get to take up 2m x 5m of public space with your private property for free and forever, almost anywhere in every city in the world. If anyone so much as touches it, they're strictly legally liable. That's normal though, right? Yeah...
Another, literally the snow plowing mentioned in the video: [2]. Imagine you woke up one day, got in your car to drive to work and... uh oh! There's 20cm of snow on the road! Can you imagine the uproar?
I sure can't, because 20cm of snow is normal on cycle paths in 99.9% of the world. And you're comparing those two realities with each other. So "not a lot of people cycle in winter" is actually "not a lot of people cycle through 20cm of snow". No shit.
Overall, the amount of information in the very video the parent linked you just straight up ignored makes me think you either didn't watch it, or didn't want to pay attention to a lot of the points made, like the one on population density: [3].
> yet those Finns make only 12% of winter trips by bike
Yeah, during Finnish winters. How many countries do you think this directly applies to? If 12% of Finns during their harsh winters can cycle just fine in -20C weather conditions then what does that say about the cycling stats of e.g. California?
> The secret is the lack of elevation...
I like to quip that bikes have gears for a reason and it's worth learning to use them, but these days the existence of e-bikes and e-scooters nullifies this argument entirely.
> ...and living in crumped cities: on average a Dutch person bikes 3km per day.
Yes, we're talking about cities here. So, the purpose of pointing out that biking over long distances in say, rural areas, is not viable is what exactly? We can pivot to talking about trains instead if you'd like...
Is this an AI slop or you just don't understand English?
I pointed out that a city with tons of infrastructure still has the vast majority of winter trips (and other trips too, but bike ridership drops in winter) not done on bikes and you are insisting that there is no infrastructure...
> People don't like that idea because it's highly exclusionary.
I disagree with you here- you have it backwards. It's cars that are exclusionary. Kids can't be around car traffic unsupervised, because car traffic is very dangerous. Old people become fat and frail only because they're robbed of exercise by a car-centric lifestyle. Blind people can't drive. Kids can't drive. Old people can't drive. By shaping cities around cars we doom the vast majority for the sake of a very small number of people, and many of them would probably be healthier and safer getting a little exercise and enjoying the excellent public transport that results from shifting a massive budget for car infrastructure to public transport.
This might sound reasonable, but it's a solved problem in Europe. They have plenty of old/disabled people and harsh winters there too. Many parts are de-emphasizing cars.
I think you're confusing a walkable city with a nonwalkable city in which people are forced to walk anyway. As other commenters mentioned, in many ways making a city more walkable benefits the groups you describe.
When I was in SF, the coworkers who drove in were those who lived outside of the city who were trying to save money and raise family. Buying a home in the city is impossible for these people (and me). Mostly less prestigious jobs, like cleaners, technicians, office managers. Not the App guys making 300k living in the Marina.
It's often an unintended tax on the poor.
IDK maybe there's some middle ground where we beef up public transport while beefing up parking at stations.
That's a problem of not building enough walkable areas relative to how many people want to live in walkable areas, leading to them being expensive because of many people competing for scarce resources.
Car-centric infrastructure is incredibly expensive, so there's no inherent reason for walkable areas to be more expensive.
Calling everything but cars exclusionary is mildly hilarious.
First of all, you're simply forgetting about public transport. That's needed too and pretty much covers all your concerns.
However...
1. The disabled? How many of those do you think are disabled in just the right ways to still be able to drive? You know "disabled" doesn't just mean "missing a limb", right?
So uh, if the only option is to drive and someone's disabled and therefore can't drive, what do they... do?
Anyhow: [1]
2. Kids? How many kids do you see driving cars around?
You know 10+ year olds can just... bike on their own, right? Like, to school, etc.? [2] [3] [4]
Below that age, just bike them around? [5] ;)
> Forcing
You know nobody's forcing you to do anything, right? Like, you can still own and use your car, there are some very valid use cases best served by them.
For example, around half of the Dutch own a car. They just don't use them as much for really dumb purposes, like driving 5km to a grocery store, because the nearest one is within walking or cycling distance.
The problem is that driving has been so heavily subsidized, that we've come to take it for granted and are now truly shocked when asked to pay more to even somewhat offset the real costs. And I'm afraid there's no viable path forward that doesn't involve eventually paying in full.
> Forcing people to bike and walk everywhere sounds a lot better if you're in a moderate climate where bad weather means you need to pack a light jacket and wait for the light rain to stop.
Yeah, the Netherlands is quite known for its good weather...
> Move somewhere with harsh winters and the moralizing about people driving places stops making sense quickly.
I'm there. And? Literally the only issue is that the pedestrian/cycling infrastructure just does not get snow plowed either at all or at 1% of the priority the roadway gets. Seriously, the asphalt in winter looks basically the same as during summer but the sidewalks and cycle ways are full of snow, often literally pushed there from the roadway!
So yeah, you won't see many cyclists cycling around in 15+ cm of snow, since it's literally impossible. Cycling on ice is quite risky too. But, as evidenced by snowprints, some people cycle regardless!
Quite a few of the LLM features actually add value for a certain group of users. Automated image descriptions for the visually impaired, automatic translation, ... Running those on local models is a net benefit for quite a few people, but they get a bad rep because they're "AI" and the current trend of shoving AI everyplace and with no means of escape means that AI in general has a - well deserved - bad reputation.
The reason that those questions are asked, though, is that the answer to the actual question is obvious, so a human will start to wonder if it's some kind of trick.
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