I use transit for transit (it’s in the name) but it also gives fantastic bike directions and transit+bike if I’m not feeling a particularly long ride. I may have had to mess with the settings but it almost always shows biking as an option.
Otherwise I use OsmAnd, but since I almost exclusively get around by bike and bus I am usually looking places up to manually plan routes, not using navigation.
Speed cameras are really good at stopping speeding in their direct area, whether or not someone speeding likes them. Their downfall is they usually are installed by private companies who manage them, and the contracts are paid for by tickets. Since the cameras do such a good job stopping the speeding, the city stops getting ticket money and starts having to pay the companies out of pocket. We’ve been using police to do traffic stops for longer and it hasn’t really worked the same way. (And cops cost waaaaaaay more).
But a quick search found many studies from all over the world.
I bet that person speeding through the construction zone learned a valuable lesson about risking their and other people’s lives for 30 seconds faster arrival times. Also I cant imagine being so distracted while driving that I would miss a traffic camera and the signs that almost always proceed it ten times. Plus the flow of traffic would likely be slowing as more observant drivers saw the camera, which you’d have to ignore and presumably pass aggressively whilst shouting angrily about other people being bad drivers.
Shoot, not to beat this point too much (too late), but it’s also a construction zone which typically has tons of speed signs plastered everywhere… maybe they deserved the 10 tickets in two weeks and they’re just mad because if we relied on cops they would have gotten away with it.
That very much depends on when and where you look in history. Many people didn’t live that way at all and still lived in large communities and built things with the only coercion being the ties of community for hundreds to thousands of years.
Being a serf was apparently a lot less work and less miserable than you might think from pop culture. They worked for another, yes, but they also were looked after in return, and they didn’t have to work the whole year. They also could just leave if they wanted to find a new place to live, which was a lot easier then than it is now. It wasn’t the false choice of today where you work or starve.
Slavery, also, depended on the culture. In some cultures slaves were typically people who were captured or traded in compensation for a killing. But rather than be forced labor, they were treated as a sort of trial family member, and once the debt was seen as paid they would often be fully adopted as part of the community.
I recommend a book by David Graeber and David Wengrow called The Dawn of Everything, if you’re interested in this sort of thing. It challenges the foundations of what we assume history was like using historical evidence, then reimagines foggy parts and builds an at least as probable image of the past in it’s place.
Yes, the airlines aren’t being held hostage, no one said this.
Boeing has been subsidized for years and has generally been the only aircraft purchased by American airline companies. That was the claim and it’s true.
Sure they could buy Airbus or Embraer (and they do a lot more these days since Boeing has lost favor due to some fairly catastrophic crashes and basically stopped making the airplanes companies want), but historically they were much more expensive and “not American” (Airbus) or literally didn’t really exist as a serious choice in commercial air (Embraer). Bombardier hasn’t been in the commercial aircraft business at all since I think 2020, though the CRJ was a relatively common sight in the states for short flights until they stopped making it (I’m having trouble finding which airlines fly them though I didn’t look that hard).
Airbus didn’t have an American factory until 2016, and American Airlines, the airline with the most Airbus aircraft today, only started ordering them in 2011. Delta didn’t have any Airbus until the early 2000s when they bought out a company that did, and they still buy mostly Boeing. United has some Airbus these days too but the vast majority of their fleet and their entire historical fleet is Boeing, Lockheed (been out of commercial air for a long time), or McDonald Douglass (now Boeing).
Those are the current major airlines in the US, and even today they fly mostly Boeing, though that is changing when looking at current orders. There are a few more larger carriers such as Southwest, Alaska, Hawaiian, or Spirit, but many of them also fly mostly Boeing and I’ll let you do that research for yourself.
No company has anyone by hostage, but Boeing clearly has had the market in the US and it has been largely due to government subsidy in the form of “job creation” initiatives, military and space contract, and lax oversight.
Sarcasctically, because one is in real life and the other in a computer, and you aren’t being excluded or hurt from anything tangible. But I suspect you mean what if there were a town in real life that excluded men.
I think the inherent threat of violence would be a pretty clear difference between the the real and imagined scenario. I’ve been near a house with white power banners all over it in the south, I’m white and a man, and I felt threatened. I imagine the people those bigots hated would feel so much worse, more than I can realistically imagine. The threat of violence is inherent with racism everywhere, but in the rural US south, that racism carries more intent to do harm.
I do not imagine a town of women excluding men and by doing so imply they would hurt me or kill me if I came near or wandered into their town on accident. And I am a white man as I said before. Now if they also excluded trans women that would be a more clear indicator of bigotry and intent to harm.
And going back to the community you first mentioned, it doesn’t allow men for the opposite reason, as I interpret it. It is to protect the women in the community from men who are much more likely to be a harm to the people inside. Because men are used to being allowed to go anywhere and everywhere, being gently told, “hey this discussion isn’t for you, but you’re welcome to sit and listen if you’re quiet” is interpreted as an explicit act of violence, even though it’s clearly not.
It’s so bizarre right? It seems almost like an inverse relationship, the more vital the job, the less you get paid
Maybe there aren’t enough jobs because we don’t all need to be doing paid work 40+ hours a day. We do need to eat though and we can’t do that unless we work.
My last job was a temp gig at a corporate headquarters of a publicly traded company where no one but the administrative assistants, cleaning staff, cafe staff, and other support staff really did anything. I thought it was just me not understanding a shared corporate language or something. But the people I interacted with spent the majority of their days talking about how busy they were, chatting with coworkers about their weekend, and walking around the building to talk to different coworkers about their weekend.
It’s hard to quantify how much “work” got done in my year there, especially on teams I didn’t interact with. But in my section of the company, I saw projects that would be a homework assignment for a college student start before I got there and still be going when I left with a dozen people directly working on it.
All that ramble is to give background to my gut reaction, that we’re unemployed because the economy doesn’t need us, there’s too many workers already. If we had universal basic income, I’d be doing a couple things I enjoy like baking bread for friends or making wooden furniture, and I would be working some at the library. I think a lot of those pointless jobs would just disappear too, as people had the opportunity to do something meaningful or more real. At minimum, then we wouldn’t need to find paid work to eat.
Turns out lugging millions of heavy metal boxes around is a tough thing to make climate friendly
I wonder if we were developing petroleum refining and engines now instead of them being established and subsidised, if we would also find them to be unfeasible. I know petroleum products are ludicrously energy dense, but the whole process to make it usable is pretty intense, the infrastructure needed to get it everywhere is extensive, it leaks, it burns, and it smells bad.
It would be interesting to see the modern day cost associated with building out and maintaining gas infrastructure for cars
I feel like I am just repeating myself, disability does not prevent creative expression? A broken arm does not define your ability to paint. Perhaps one medium or another is more challenging but art has many many forms and we have been managing for thousands of years without a tech startup reinventing art. And not every culture in history has been as ableist as the one while live in today. Anyone can already make meaningful art.
As for not having the time, I think that’s an excuse for taking a shortcut using other people’s art and trying to make it their own. It won’t be as impressive, no matter how long they spend typing prompts into the computer, the person badly sketching mushrooms on their 10 at the local coffee chain is far more inspiring.
I wish we lived in a time where we were allowed to do what we loved and I may be a little envious of the people who are able to, but they have a right to complain that their work is being stolen and invalidated by people who don’t value it.
It’s using endless electricity and water to perform tasks I could do powered by a bowl of cereal in the morning. I’d rather need one solar panel than ten, and a river rather than a dried up well, personally, but ever increasing energy demands require the latter two.
If by accelerating you are referring to making the problem worse so we have to deal with melted ice caps sooner, then I agree! I for one don’t really trust turbo predictive text to solve the collapsing jet stream, but I sure do expect it to play a part in causing it. Or maybe just the extraction of increasing material from colonized countries to pay for our funny memes and your “art” through solar panel and battery. Either way, it is contributing in a very real way to the destruction of our planet for little gain that could be achieved more efficiently by other means.
The cool part about a smartphone is I actually wanted it and it did a thing nothing had before (except some PDAs maybe). Also living without one is very possible and I do so frequently, I’m not a chronic poster or social media user. Machine learning with a gui on it is neither something I wanted nor is it novel, and it is not improving the world we live in, it is making it worse.
The saving grace is this fad will pass as it becomes clear it’s the same as home automation, block chain, machine learning, the concept of web domains, etc. and it’s mostly been hype by tech investors all along. I would care about it a whole lot less if it weren’t so full of negative externalities.
I don’t think ‘disabled people’ need a computer to generate content to participate in art creation, and I don’t think artists making art is exploitation. The artists, meaning anyone who ever had their art posted online, are the ones being exploited here, their work was stolen and made to work for tech investors.
Even if these were tangible benefits they are a small compensation for the accelerated degradation of our shared planet, the mass robbery of nearly everyone on earth, and the further damage to our ability to critically think and create. And on top of that, the stuff it generates isn’t even very good.
Banning the chemicals that were eating a hole in the ozone layer worked pretty well, as a quick relevant example, and that ban was global.
The ban would not retroactively remove cars, it would ban the future sale of gas cars by a certain date. This would be like Reagan saying “In 10 years we will be drug free, and drugs will be illegal then.”, then providing a pathway for people who are struggling with addiction (in the car case I’m not sure how much ‘treatment’ would be necessary, electric cars are getting cheaper and car companies are making more electric ones anyway).
Obviously a person addicted to opiates has little choice in their addiction, it isn’t as if they make a clear headed decision every time they use, and there isn’t an alternative that is the same but legal. Like the ozone eating chemicals, on the other hand, the type of car you buy and drive is absolutely a choice, and for the vast majority of miles traveled, you do not need one type of car over another. For the specific scenarios you do, gas cars sold before the target year and ones sold in other states are still available.
The argument you made is far more accurate if all cars were banned under the law, but that simply isn’t the case. It was banning the future sale of them in the state. The eventual death of the gasoline automobile is both necessary and inevitable (to personal electric vehicles, or some other transportation), and the timeline is all we are arguing over here. California wanted to speed the timeline up to help the climate, the extinction speed runners felt like that would hurt Exxon mobile, so they blocked it.
If it turns out to be real, that would be the easiest buy I’ve ever had with a car. But with a design supposedly about practicality, why do they have to go with the iPad car controls? Hopefully that trend dies out soon and we can have buttons again.
I can’t see myself spending money on anything beyond a smartphone with a touchscreen for everything, and seeing it in this makes me more skeptical about the product as a whole.
Finished reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein about 20 years late
I feel like there’s some distinct through lines from there to where we are now, but my head cold is getting in the way of any coherent thought.
Picked up books seven and eight of the wheel of time to recover, should be some much lighter reading
It’s nice to imagine we can keep living exactly as we are and not have to pay up for any of the consequences of our actions. Maybe there will be a tech miracle to save us and the non-consenting species we are taking with us, but that hope, belief, and gamble is not a solution to the problem we have.
We have the solution, we know what it is, and we know how to execute it, we just lack the will. Until that miracle appears we should try to actually fix the problem.
Waiting for a tech solution to appear is like standing on the beach after an earthquake as the tide goes out praying that it won’t come back in.
Edit: Or maybe eating a nice dinner out and continuing to order hoping they forget your bill or someone else pays it. Either way it’s not doing a thing to make the problem better.
These are great examples of that part of art AI can not capture.
The first was painted by a donkeys tail in the presence of a legal witness, sent to exhibition under a false name, and when it began to be recognized at the time by critics and media, the artist said “aha! You literally like art that a donkey can make, your taste is terrible and so is popular art”.
The second is a physical can of the artists feces (I don’t know if anyone has opened the can to be sure), this time with no explicit agenda. What did the artist mean by this, was it another criticism of art critics, was it a criticism of the commodification of art, or something else entirely?
The last was made as the artist tried to find a religious experience derived from art. He said with this piece he did. I don’t find it particularly compelling, but 100 years ago this rethinking of what art can be was revolutionary enough for Stalin to send him to the camps.
If you only value art for consumption, yes these are exactly the same as me sitting at the computer pressing generate for a few hours. If any of the context is included in your enjoyment of the art, there is no comparison.
I enjoy art for the human aspects, the hundreds of musicians performing a single piece together, the incredible talent and skill on display in a photorealistic painting of a person who died hundreds of years ago, or the incredible mind and life of a person writing a moving essay. I don’t usually enjoy art for the sake of the object or product.
AI generated material robs that intangible spirit, floods the world with meaningless content, and as a consequence makes it more challenging to find art. Even when you sort through the muck and see that photorealistic painting, you aren’t imagining the monk who painted it, you’re looking at the hands thinking I don’t know if this is real or not.
Fortunately that’s mainly online for now, you can still go to a concert or museum to confidently see art, you can opt out of the AI content experience. But this sale symbolizes a further erosion of that separation. It seems inevitable that there will be AI “concerts” and “exhibitions” which will physically take space and money from actual artists and further challenge finding enjoyment from art and artists for people like me.
I understand others enjoy art differently, as a consumable product for example, and those people may not be as bothered by AI content. I do hope those people understand that it does impact other people around them and that the generated material is coming at a cost, if not to them, to those people (and the environment, and the artists).
Gimme a break, I don’t expect you to know everything that goes on here, just as all I “know” about Australia is “you” made Murdoch, continue to abuse native people just like us, and dingos regularly eat babies. Like asserting that no Australian people care about those issues is wrong and obviously my fundamental understanding of the country is flawed, it’s also wrongheaded to assert the American people are all broken and spineless for years and have bad moral fiber (I’ll assume this is a normal saying for y’all elsewhere, but that sounds like a nationalistic dog whistle to my ears).
It is especially bizarre to claim that Americans are incapable of direct action a few years after the country had some pretty explosive sustained protests against police violence and racism. The US is filled with broken people, yes, but not because of some nebulous moral failing, and it’s the broken government you have an issue with, not the poor fools who were born here.
Looking to the mentioned protests a few years back might explain the lack of similar reaction now. They burned youth prisons, occupied police stations, ran for office, took to the streets, were shot at, gassed, and went to jail. For what? Nothing changed endured, the establishment “left” abandoned the movement and helped undo any change that occured, the government clamped down harder on dissent, and Trump got reelected. Maybe the methods of resistance have to change to succeed, you cant keep fighting the war of yesterday and expect to win after all, and you sure don’t have to publicize your actions for online strangers to check your moral fiber.
Posting may be meaningless, but I’d say all this to your face if we were talking in person too. Communication is how we change and change minds, and leaving nonsense unchallenged is how we got into this mess in the first place, and I won’t make that mistake here or in my non digital life.
I’m pretty sure Seattle has an ordinance making changing a park to something else very challenging to impossible. Technically golf courses are parks, though I’d argue terrible ones, making it a much smaller lift to turn them into better (actual) parks and let the golfers go out of town.
The apps are bullshit but the slower cycles take less water and energy, which is definitely a positive.
Idk why the speed is a big deal to folks, it’s not like you have to sit there and babysit it, just hit play and go do something else