Seriously the moderation and flagging policy on this site has reached truly disgusting levels. "Just let me build the dystopia for Silicon Valley freak billionaires and collect my pathetic $180K pittance in peace!"
I'm building a social media product myself and I saw your comment here. So I wanted to reach out and ask if you'd be up to talk about how moderation could be improved online. My contact data is in my bio!
The writing was on the wall when Kamala Harris wouldn't commit to keeping Lina Khan at the FTC. We had some soft Anti-Trust action for the first time in decades, and the Trusts responded. If we get the chance to try again, we should be more clear eyed about what we are up against.
I've de-Googled my life as best I can, but I know how little it actually matters. Now that Google is clearly on the path of closing up Android, I hope the Linux phone effort gets reinvigorated.
Unfortunately I don't think we're going to get the chance to try again. This, and Apple's upcoming case which they'll probably get off free as well, was our chance.
These companies are now even more emboldened, and with market caps bigger than the GDP of most countries, there is no one to stop them. Every politician has a number, and this administration has shown that open bribes are legal and expected.
Good luck prosecuting any big tech when they can pay billions of dollars to the administration to make anything go away.
It does not make any sense to compare market capitalization to GDP.
GDP is a measurement of flow within a certain timespan, market capitalization is a guess by the market of the total potential at a specific point in time.
Wait, are you trying to blame this decision on Kamala Harris not pre-committing to keeping an anti-trust advocate in the FTC? I'm not sure if you noticed, but Kamala Harris is not president and never made these decisions about the FTC. I guarantee you her decisions would have been night and day better than the fraud currently inhabiting the whitehouse.
I'm saying our tenuous attempts towards reestablishing the most basic of anti-trust was dead regardless of who won the election[1].
I think this decision would have been the same regardless of who won. As for the next few years... Harris was clearly signalling that her FTC would be a return to rubber stamping mergers and acting only against the most egregious corporate actions, and even then only when the penalties wouldn't be substantial. I doubt very much that her appointment to FTC Chair would be much different than the current Andrew Ferguson.
Nothing I've written endorses Trump or his actions. But we have to be a little bit more realistic about the interests that Harris was aiming to represent.
We can say that Harris would have been better than Trump in the aggregate, while also prioritizing the interests of Business over those of Consumers. Both these things can be true.
Windows users have no negotiating power. Windows will continued to be monetized in user-hostile ways. Call it enshittification, call it the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, call it what ever you want. It won't reach a breaking point. It'll just get worse and worse, steadily and slowly.
I'm trapped because I'm a C#/WPF developer. But, the day after I retire will see a reformat and installation of Debian.
Also currently a C#/WPF and Windows is permanently segregated to a VM for development. At the end of the day I don't have to use their terrible OS. Retirement is not having to deal with IT that latches onto Microsoft like a parasite.
> Windows is permanently segregated to a VM for development
Have you been able to get a debugger working for this? Last time I tried to develop C++ this way, the Visual Studio debugger would not work from within a VM.
I recently bought my wife a Pixel 8 ($500) and myself a Moto G Stylus ($175). The Pixel has a better camera, but that seems to be about it.
Something I like about my Moto is that it has a sdcard slot. That means I can sync up my entire music library (~600GB). That means I only need a small phone service plan ($15/mo). It also means I get to listen to all the Wilco I want while riding my bike down by the river where there's shoddy reception. There's also a headphone jack, which still comes in handy.
My lament is that as phones get more expensive, they seem to get less useful/interesting.
The 2010's were an exciting time because every year new phones would come out that would be double the power of the previous generation (I still remember trying out an iPhone 3GS when it came out and it was noticeably faster than my iPhone 3G). But I would say starting in like 2016, the progress slowed down and it's now much more incremental.
I now recommend to my friends and family to get lightly used phones that are 2-3 years old. Personally I recently upgraded from an iPhone 11 to an iPhone 15 and the only reason I did so was to go down in screen size from a "Pro Max" to just a "Pro". I imagine I will keep this device for the next 5-7 years and by then the reason I'll be getting a new phone probably won't be because they are noticeably faster.
But I gotta say I like where phones are now. I remember in the 2010's you had to plop down some serious money to get a super fast phone, nowdays I can buy a $150 phone on Amazon that would probably be a great phone for at least 4-5 years.
3 year old phones often have degraded batteries, which is a large part of the reason why they're so available and so cheap. You can put a new battery in for ~$50 and get a fabulous value.
I haven't seen a worthwhile innovation in phone design in at least 5 years. Everything is such a marginal gain for a smaller set of use cases. I got my kid a $150 Moto G Power like 4 years ago because it had a giant battery that lasted 3 days. That's an actually useful feature. It still runs everything just fine and has a fingerprint reader. Not much need for anything else.
Motorolas seemed cool when I was looking for a phone recently but their update support policy was very short. Whether it matters is another question but still..
Pretty much the same story for me. I have a Motorola, wife insisted on a Pixel costing 3 times as much. I don't see anything like 3 times the value.
There are trade offs going both directions:
- The most irritating is the Magnetometer and GPS are both better in the Pixel.
- The Motorola comes with headphone jacks, dual SIM and SDCard, better battery life.
- Fingerprint reader on the Motorola is better.
- Both use the Googles phone app, but Google turns off the call recording on Pixels but it works on the Motorola. Go figure. I use that feature when getting avoid from people like the tax office, so that's a hard no go for me.
- Cheap Motorola's don't have wireless charging, but USB cables are everywhere, wireless chargers not so much.
- I suspect the Pixel's camera is better - but I've never noticed.
Add that all up and for me the Motorola is the better phone; at 1/3 the cost of a Pixel. The "unbeatable value" claim in the headline did cause an eyebrow twitch.
Unlocked. It was a 2023 model I bought in 2024. There are some screaming good deals if you don't mind buying one model older at the right time. I cannot stress enough how much I don't care about OS updates as long as my apps continue to work (not many, mostly from F-Droid).
This is truly the Century of American Hubris. From financial deregulation to spreading democracy in the middle east to carbon fiber submarines, we seem determined to ignore complexity, refuse to acknowledge our biases, and throw out every Lesson-Learned from the last 150 years.
We're going to gut the Federal systems like a Tea Party fever dream. And the re-learning of what we truly need is going to be very painful.
>>"A technology that cuts down on boring tasks is fine; one that threatens your sense of identity is not."
The shareholder class sees no distinction between the two. This is a good reminder not to make your labor your identity and that technology implemented in the workplace is not for the benefit of the worker, but for the benefit of the owners. It doesn't matter if I toil with 1990's technology or 2020's technology, I call it quits at 5pm regardless.
In my personal life I get to choose (for the most part) the amount of technology that I interface with. The only computer in my car controls the spark plugs and fuel injectors. My bicycle shifts with friction. My stove/range only has valves and igniters. My TV is a monitor hooked up to a small PC. I'm not against technology, but I am ruthless in determining the exact amount that makes me happy.
I've been using Post-Its along the bottom of my monitor for 25 years. Works fairly well as they are always right there in front of your face, and if one loses it's stick, well, you know that's the one to focus on or move it to long-term.
This of course only works at a desk. I've never done work on a laptop so my system is very YMMV.
I have a 38" curved wide screen with 1600 vertical pixels. It represents the peak of all the monitors I have bought over the last 25 years.
Me in the year 2000 with a 1024x768 17" CRT would be flabbergasted at the amount of wasted/underutilized space that exists today.
Vertical space is precious, and it's why I paid more to have those 1600 pixels. And then Microsoft decides to not only enlarge the taskbar, but to not provide an option to turn it back to normal. I have to resort to hacks to wrangle MS Windows (primarily a Desktop OS the last time I looked) back down to size and reclaim my vertical space.
You need to rotate your display to portrait mode. ;-P
Serious point: a secondary 1080P display in portrait orientation is actually quite fabulous. Documentation gets parked on the secondary display. Line lengths remain readable, and you get lots of vertical space.
Perhaps tires can be made less toxic, but over all, we need to prioritize driving less.
WFH means I put barely 3000 miles per year on my car. It's absurd we are not aggressively promoting WFH or hybrid WFH at the national level. It's the easiest win for the environment and it's right there for the taking.
Same here, been WFH since 2015, however I did do a lot of driving for other reasons previously. Since 2022 however I drive less than 7000 miles a year, and that includes a family road trip each year for the holidays that is ~2500 miles round-trip. One thing that bothers me is that insurance is getting extremely expensive where I live, even though I hardly drive and my car is garaged year-round due to the greatly increasing amounts of vehicle theft. I've considered a few times just not having a car and renting a car regularly, but services like ZipCar have pretty much died out and I don't live in a city center where they still sometimes exist. I drive on average just once per week, if I could that for a fully-laden cost of less than $500/mo it would be cheaper to rent than buy, but it doesn't seem like there's anyone that's captured this market.
I can call my insurance agent and take a vehicle (seldom-used winter beater truck in the summer, or seldom-used summer car in the winter) on or off the road at a whim, prorating my premium appropriately.
That sucks for usability, but I wonder if there exists a market for 'smart insurance' where I can log into a webpage or use an app to put it on or off a car.
But the real answer, I think, is getting a quote for your actual mileage. You're driving 7000 miles a year and being lumped into a risk group with people who are driving two or three times as much:
I am required to carry full coverage because my car is financed. Even when I've paid a car off, I still carry full coverage, because liability-only policies tend to not help in my past experiences mostly due to the absolute epidemic of uninsured/unregistered cars on American roadways.
One of the biggest environmental impacts is driving, so the real key is to have mixed uses near by.
If you have a family and still need to drive your kids to school everyday, because schools are too far away to walk and there's no bus (typical in California), if you need to drive to go to the grocery store, if you need to drive to do everything in your life, then working from home in a less dense area might still involve a very similar amount of driving.
Once vehicle miles travelled is subtracted out, the biggest impact from living in less dense areas is deforestation, reduction of large fauna in ecosystems, etc. A classic example of that is the Santa Cruz Mountains, highly populated by low-density living, but getting in and out is so arduous that most people do not commute much, or even leave their houses for much. A good life for hermits, but it's not for everyone.
I think it would still involve less driving. You don't get groceries every day if you drive to get them. You buy a few days or a week's worth of supplies at a time.
School may be hard to avoid driving if there's no bus or good walking/biking routes, but maybe you can carpool with neighbors who have kids in the same school.
But I think fundamentally a lot of people are just not accustomed to sitting at home. They feel cooped up, and bored. That's not me -- I'd rarely leave the house if I could get away with it. But I know a lot of people feel that way, if they didn't have to go to work they'd go drive somewhere just to be somewhere different for a while.
I totally understand that, and we need to account for people with different desires and needs. I would go crazy in no time in an isolated setting, I really really crave having a lot of density and people around me. But despise driving to do anything unless it's purely recreational driving, which would be fun maybe once or twice a month.
I would love nothing more than to live in a walkable neighborhood, with very few cars, that lets kids roam free without fear of them getting killed by drivers. But that's really hard to come by anywhere in the US.
My theory is that WFH will mostly contribute to creating secondary markets for more industries. Professionals will still want the services a city affords you but not want to pay SF or even Seattle prices. So they’ll end up somewhere under two hours from the nearest metropolis.
But if you get enough people in one place, you’ll get entrepreneurship.
At some point one has to consider costs, scale and political expediency.
WFH and H-WFH would be broadly popular among the electorate and could probably take off with just some changes to the tax code.
Presuming everyone does want to live in a dense area (I do not), building housing and infrastructure is expensive and at the end of the day it has to be profitable to build. We don't really have the framework to zone municipalities at the Federal level. So now you are talking about leaving it to the individual states... and I think you can see where that goes.
Given all that, yes, fewer miles driven in aggregate is a good and easy win for the environment. Less gasoline consumed, fewer tires and brake pads consumed, less work clothes bought, less meals purchased at lunch, etc.
> Presuming everyone does want to live in a dense area (I do not)
I wish we stopped subsidizing wealthy folks choosing to live in low density areas. It is intrinsically regressive that poorer people living in sustainable denser areas are subsidizing the infrastructure of the low density suburbs where richer people live. Low density suburbs do not raise enough taxes to support their own infrastructure, from roads, to water management, to electricity, etc.
Want to live in a single family home? Great! But don't expect people poorer than you to bear the cost.
> wealthy folks choosing to live in low density areas
There's no way you're saying this with a straight face, right? People move out of the city because it's significantly cheaper. Rent in a nice two bedroom "downtown" is $3500. You move 15 minutes out of there and you can get 3 bedroom house for an $1800 mortgage that'll never go up.
Source: I did that. I got tired of paying such a huge chunk of my income for living.
It’s cheaper because not enough city housing is built and there are other costs associated with suburban living. IMO, property taxes should increase as density decreases because those less dense areas will cost a lot more to maintain roads, utilities, etc. down the road.
Higher property taxes for less dense areas might make sense for suburbs of big cities, but not beyond that. In the countryside road and other infrastructure is required for agriculture, if some people also choose to live there (and that way reduce prices in cities) it's a win-win.
Look, where I live isn't SF or Vancouver that has the "NIMBYs oppose all new building" problem. If you wanted to build super dense high-rise apartments or skyscrapers both the city and state would throw money at you and give you tax breaks. It's still ludicrously expensive compared to even the closest suburb.
We've gotten more traction building apartment complexes on the edges of the burbs than in the metro area in recent years.
I live in a SFH. It's very unpleasant outside of my home. It's inconvenient, sometime outright dangerous to walk to my local grocery store. There's also constant noise from the cars and the ever present possibility of a car driving off the road. I see a bicycle tribute or two to small children in my local area.
I wouldn't even considering cycling given the speed of cars around there. The local road is used for through traffic despite being one lane in each direction. So it's very frustrating if I want to get somewhere during rush hour, and this is just cars!
If you want to walk to the local gas station, you might have to deal with muddy ground because of the ground being the bottom of a hill in order to get there, although the owner of said muddy ground have filled it in with dirt lately. The sidewalks if they exist, are discontinuous.
Yes, wealthier people live in SFH and the surburb, but it's a questionable in term of quality of life.
I visited the city. In some way, they are more convenient such as access to rideshare scooters and bikes, but also dangerous and automotive centric if less so.
My neighborhood and for miles around me is lower to middle-middle class. All people that wouldn't be able to afford to 1) move and leave their equity behind 2) afford the rents in the denser part of town.
No way there should be incentives for living outside dense areas. Utility, road, and service maintenance costs increase per capita as density goes down, and currently that cost is not borne by people in those areas.
Presuming everyone does want to live in a dense area (I do not), building housing and infrastructure is expensive and at the end of the day it has to be profitable to build. We don't really have the framework to zone municipalities at the Federal level. So now you are talking about leaving it to the individual states... and I think you can see where that goes.
It's impossible to build if there are restriction on permitting and construction. Also, I would expect land cost to be a significant factor in high density area due to high demand.
I don't really see how any of this (aside from the brief mention of commuting again) has any bearing on the question of whether it's better for the environment.
As in does working from home require someone to move to the suburbs? No. But many people do choose to move into larger housing in cheaper, less dense areas once they start spending more time at home and aren't tied down by a daily commute.
Denser housing can easily be net zero from nearby solar panels. Additionally, denser housing is much more energy efficient, requiring less overall energy, but this is kind of a minor impact. Once we get to solar + batteries powering most of our energy needs, cutting space heating energy needs by 20%-50% doesn't matter much.
When the topic is "tire wear on cars causes significant environmental damage, not just their combustion-engine emissions", praising houses for just their electricity consumption seems a little silly.
The denser the housing the more efficient in almost every way. Even if we had the money the world already doesn't have enough resources for everyone to get a single family home with solar panels, batteries, a tesla and a well, most will have to live in dense cities to survive.
> It's absurd we are not aggressively promoting WFH or hybrid WFH at the national level.
It's absurd that tech people seem to think that WFH is applicable to everyone. I'm in a shop right now and have to touch machinery on a daily basis. So do the rest of the workers.
Jealousy politics are indeed an obstacle but the societal insistence that everybody needs to pollute the environment because some people have to pollute the environment is nonsense.
A lot of people simply can't work from home due to lack of space, noise and interruptions, etc.
It's a lot easier to buy a cheap used car than uproot your entire living situation to a new home where you can WFH, which you also might not be able to afford.
Not to mention you probably already own your car for other things like getting groceries.
There are lots of ways to adapt to that. For example, you can have localized telework centers or subsidize co-working spaces.
The current situation is far worse. People are literally trapped in a cycle of poverty or bad work experience because they cannot get to a suburban office park for want of a car.
WFH has lots of limitations. Distribute work geographically and you can lower costs and improve outcomes. Why have accounts payable reps in New Jersey in a giant office when I could rent a small office in Maine or Kentucky for 80% less and pay the workers 30% less, without the complexities of offshoring.
Look, I WFH and I love it. But in the process I probably quintupled my emissions. I might be able to get that down to quadrupling with an EV and full solar array. But the realities of suburban/rural living are simply much harsher on the environment.
It's not the realities, but people's choices. One can live in rural area and limit driving to the absolute minimum necessary, and build a small house heated using renewables rather than a big house heated with fossil fuels. Similarly, lots of city people increase their carbon footprint through excess consumption and travel.
I guess ecological rural living may not be easy if you enjoy lots of social activities. For an introvert like me it wouldn't be a problem.
> One can live in rural area and limit driving to the absolute minimum necessary, and build a small house heated using renewables rather than a big house heated with fossil fuels
You’re still consuming massive resources in transporting materials to a low-density location. Unless you’re living completely off the land, de-densifying is far more impactful. (Consider how much land alone would be converted from nature to human use by spreading out the populations of New York and Los Angeles.)
The stated problem is some people can’t effectively work from home.
My goal is to get the best candidates. My reasons are selfish - I can get great people cheap if they have circumstances problematic for other employers.
So I got a 5 desks in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and about 15 people in that region utilize it.
Everyone wins: i spend almost nothing. The employee has a great job, doesn’t have to drive 90 minutes, and doesn’t have to disrupt the family life.
Co-working spaces are distinct from traditional offices because they mix workers of so many different employers. Sometimes as granular as to the desk. This can significantly reduce or eliminate commutes.
> WFH doesn't mean you have to move out of the city
It doesn’t, but within the context of this discussion (“distribute geographically”), it does. The logistics of groceries—even exempting my driving to the grocery store versus walking down the street, and despite being physically closer to farms than I was in New York City—practically doubled my emissions alone. Suburban living is massively more impactful than most people realise. There is a reason most of the world lives in either cities or rural destitution.
You’re taking a pretty dogmatic position that the essentially that only sustainable options for life is NYC or a straw hut.
The misguided vision of late 20th century life and de-industrialization of the US made sustainable communities unsustainable.
Modern governance has created strong incentives for massive, centralized industries. Thats why if you step into a Walmart near my home in upstate New York in October, the shelves are full of apples from Washington picked a year ago.
New York City is a great example of fake sustainability. The financial engineering required to build an operate unnecessary and overbuilt real property has priced out the smaller scale public infrastructure like retail and diners. The landlords can lower rents without their loans being called, and a ton of the older big buildings are vacant and declining.
If people can work and make a living in Binghamton, NY or Scranton, PA, sustainable communities will emerge. Sucking the wealth of the nation to the top 10 metros is to everyone’s disadvantage, as modern society aptly demonstrates.
Before covid I went to the office everyday, by bike, or public transport, owning a car where I live is a more of an annoyance than anything.
If we cared we could solve the bulk of problem somewhat easily, the 80/20 rule still applies but you could drastically reduce the number of cars on the road. Of course if all you care about is short term personal convenience and individualism then we're doomed, but if you care just a tiny bit about optimisation, pollution, long term sustainability, well being, the solutions are painfully obvious
How about a place closer to home than a daily two hour commute? WFH and remotely logging hours doesn't mean working from your home in the strict sense, just a place that works for you with a shorter commute (whether that's your attic, local library or other type of workspace).
I also wonder whether owning a car just 'for groceries' is that commonplace?
I'd say the same for the reverse. Except that has been the history of office work for generations except we have the technology and economy where that isn't required.
I just wish the 4 billion we subsidize EVs with every year here in Norway were put to other use instead. Could habe built a new metro line every year for that amount of money. Which would have had a much larger long term effect.
That's the dream here in the states too. Our issue is that we have built our cities as enormous suburbs with such a low density that rail/transit isn't viable from a cost/person perspective. We tend to think of public transit a a business rather than as a service and our tax payers don't want to spend billions on not driving especially as our cost per mile is insane[0]. So, for the states EVs are basically the only way for us to ease out of 4000+sqft home on 4 acres and a 40 mile car commute and back into an built environment that does not require a car for all trips
They should be buying EVs for those who needs them such as rural area. For the rest of us, our quality of life would improve if we get rid of cars and densify areas.
That's 3000 miles too many. Consider cutting that down to zero. I suggest an e-bike, a normal bike, or just walking. Think about how many tire particles you put into the environment, especially if you didn't just stick to controlled city environments and went to the woods. Our plant and animal life will thank you.
Consider all of the shoe tread debris you create by walking or riding bicycles. Consider only walking barefoot, or just stay in one place and stop moving your body around. Judgemental strangers on the internet will thank you.
I’m not so convinced that people are so foolish. Maybe they don’t want to be the first ones to stop driving but I think most people recognize the problems we face as a society.
India, Africa and China are just waking up economically. Hundreds of millions of people waiting to buy cars to improve their quality of life by being more mobile.
As long as they're willing to pay the actual costs borne by the rest of us for their decisions, sure, why not? The problem is they're generally not, and when you suggest that they need to, they have a very not adult-like temper tantrum.
Let’s not control others. If people want to use lead paint, let them.
Let’s not control others. If people want to use leaded gasoline, let them.
Let’s not control others. If people want to build with asbestos, let them.
Let’s not control others. If people want to cook with trans fats, let them.
Let’s not control others. If people want to do fentanyl, let them.
the entire basis of society and progress is controlling others for the prosperity of the human race.
We could replace all the synthetic rubber with home grown natural rubber right now. It would last longer and be of much higher quality but it would double prices or more, so instead we burn oil and dump pulverized plastics into our waterways, because its a little cheaper.
Unfortunately there are all sorts of other material properties to worry about beyond raw durability/'quality'. Natural rubber tires react quite poorly to hydrocarbons and greases, let alone traction issues. And that is putting aside the logistical issues with getting sufficient natural rubber.
There may be some sort of "compromise" material that could be developed that would lack the toxicity or microplastics issues without compromising safety, but I'm going to defer to experts in that field.
Yes, synthetic should be more durable than natural rubber.
Once the petrochemical supply is exhausted, or what is left is extremely expensive to extract, they won't be able to afford new tires either. (Tires, and personal passenger vehicles, could be some of the least important of the "missing" consumption from the loss of petrochemicals.)
Interesting, but wouldn't using only natural rubber result in a huge amount of land clearing and then a monoculture, similar to the environmental issues of palm oil?
We have a lot of already-cleared farmland that sits vacant or could be used more profitably. I don't know if it's suitable for growing rubber trees, but I doubt we'd have to do a lot of clearing.
Driving is an amazing. It allows everyone huge amounts of freedom in what they do and who they spend time with. Having lots of shops and workplaces near your home is great and should be encouraged, but we should try and find ways to keep the freedom of personal transportation and reduce the impact it has. Lots and lots of tunnels, better tires, electric cars use brakes much less and could get to almost zero, etc.
That's basically how driving was sold to the American public in the 1950s. The reality is that transportation is a network, and driving is only efficient for the individual driver at a relatively low level of density. The bigger the population and the more people who drive, the less efficient the network. If you try to keep the network efficient, then driving acts as a constraint on the rest of societal development and you end up with sprawl and long transit times. Driving doesn't scale beyond a certain point (as you know, by suggesting expensive tunnels).
As for the freedom aspect, to get anywhere in an American suburb-styled society you are required to own and maintain a car, a major personal expense. When you travel somewhere, you have to find a place to safely park your car, and your person is tethered to where you park your car, usually needing to return there in a reasonable amount of time the same day, or else paying for long-term parking. You have to have a license from the government to use the only practical source of transportation, and if you don't have that license, you are effectively shut off from any autonomy. Cars certainly do increase the freedom to move and experience the world in some ways, but that is at the cost of other freedoms.
It's also stupidly expensive for most people, and made us develop a car centric approach to a lot of things, a lot of problems it solves are problems we wouldn't have if we designed our cities in other ways
Replacing the current 2b vehicles on earth by electric vehicles will buy us a few years at best but it won't solve the deeper issues
Travel time is travel time, you would have a similar tally on the train/bus/walking. This isn't really the best argument against cars because people buy cars because it's a massive improvement on "waiting for the bus time."
I don't really understand this statement. Do you genuinely think that there is no difference in QOL between a 30 minute drive on a packed freeway vs a 40 minute walk on pleasant streets? Personally, I'd leave 10 minutes earlier and choose the latter every time. Even better, walking time is remarkably consistent. On foot, I essentially never have to worry about my travel being disrupted by road conditions which means I know when I arrive based on when I leave which is not the case at all with driving which has a much higher variance.
Time on the bike or walking is time spent improving health and well being. Time on the train can be productive, relaxing or entertaining. There is an enormous difference between these and the stress of driving.
It's really not. You can actually do stuff waiting for the bus, or riding the bus. You can't really do much while driving. Walking is incredibly good for you, unlike driving.
Yes, please may I have some more of the unmitigated freedom to pay a ballooning portion of household income toward a depreciating asset; the absolute pleasure of having to buy government-mandated insurance; the utter relief of participating in one of the most dangerous daily activities; the free choice of being able to salt the earth with CO2 emissions and tire particulate matter; and who can forget the ~socialized~ capitalist federal- and state-built roadways that cities are going bankrupt trying to keep up with funding.
Not to mention the sheer joy of listening to the roar of traffic pretty much everywhere, the cost of sound insulation so that I can sleep at night, the increased medical costs (pollution/obesity/stress), drive through litter, being bullied off the road if you're not in a car, and having to either give way to metal box owners or cross roads at locations intended purely to enable them to move freely. All the while watching endless ads that'd make the Marlboro man blush - endless empty roads and vehicles that wouldn't harm a fluffy bunny. Yep, freedumb.
> Driving is an amazing. It allows everyone huge amounts of freedom
Your definition of "everyone" excludes children, many seniors, people who can't afford a personal vehicle, and those who can't drive due to disabilities or health conditions. You're also naively ignoring that just the infrastructure needed to support cars on its own often greatly impinges on these groups' freedom of movement.
Cars are best for the stuff they show on the commercials; driving to the weekend cabin, hauling a thing, impressing a date, going on the family trip.
So yeah, keep the driving, but for the one-off things where they are great at. That's really the only time when a car represents freedom. They are not freedom when it's the only option to get a loaf of bread or get to your office.
>"described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”
“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,”
I think this article is the most on-topic there could be.
The users here that want Tech News and Tech News only are doing themselves, and the community a disservice.
