Oh no, where will I possibly find weird racist xenophobic takes if not during my taxi ride? It's too bad there's not a million social media sites where I could be exposed to them
Vaguely interested in what the hypothetical Dutch Protocol could be, though.
As a cyclist in Boston you might not be aware of the overwhelming popularity of electric bikes in New York. Between Citi Bike and the delivery guys they are by far the dominant variety of bike. At this point it's wrong to think that electric bikes are stepping on the turf of the analog bicyclist.
E-bikes are becoming dominant in Boston/Cambridge also. The Citi Bikes are fine, they're small and slow (and frankly the problem with them is new riders who are seemingly completely unaware of anything). It's the huge delivery bikes, the bros on pseudo-mopeds, and the humongous (and usually empty) baby-cart bikes (e.g. Tern) that are dangerous in bike lanes and mixed-use paths.
(Again -- I love that these are displacing cars. I just wish they physically displaced the cars also, and not pedal bicyclists and pedestrians.)
Our (Cambridge) bike infrastructure has really just come into its own after decades of advocacy by pedal bicyclists. So seeing it suddenly flooded with what are effectively mopeds and Vespas really hits a nerve, like it's 1990 all over again.
I think you'd probably better just get over your aesthetic reflex. Getting the family bike moms into your coalition is important to the future of American cycle advocacy.
In Berkeley the local safe streets advocacy org is now easily 80% ebike moms. I could bore them with my story of how back in my day (ten entire years ago) I took my kids to school on a manual-pedal longtail, but I don't.
I'll get on my soapbox every time to also point out that a fareless system is also cheaper for everyone to operate. Operating and maintaining fare systems costs millions of dollars (hundreds of millions when they upgrade the system), enforcing and gating fares reduces system efficiency. Rolling those costs into taxes instead will always cost less than collecting at point of operation.
Fares are already too low to cover operational costs, so at this point it's practically theater.
Enforcement of many laws disproportionately penalize the poor. Should we live in a lawless society?
On the "free transit" point, unless you convince bus drivers and train operators and the tens of thousands of people that operate MTA to work for nothing, then it cannot be free. It can be paid for by someone else (e.g. taxpayers), but in general if you have a third party paying for something, you run into big problems related to expense growth, under investment, and inefficient use of resources in general.
Seeing your fare go up due to bloated expenses and mismanagement is an important signal. Hiding it and hoping everyone is honest and diligent with resources is naive.
Highway system is mostly funded through gasoline tax, which although not perfect, is pretty good proxy for how much you use public roads.
Regarding police, private security does exist and works pretty well. Whether you're installing an alarm on your home or paying off-duty police to escort you around, it's an option and often provides better service and more options due to the profit incentive.
I wish more public services had a profit incentive as long as there was a choice. Like with fire insurance, I can choose my coverage and its priced competitively. The insurance company also has an incentive to not have your house burn down, so they mandate you have fire detectors and other such preventative measures. Seems like a pretty good system.
You say this like it's a fact I have to accept but it simply isn't. It's an ideological position I wasn't convinced of at the beginning of this conversation and still am not.
I think "pay for something you use" is not an ideological position. This is a lesson we teach 3 year olds. "That's not yours" is in fact one of the very first lessons we teach children. And it's not specific to any one culture or country. Pretty basic stuff.
most train and bus systems also have reduced/free fare through means-testing systems... this covers the poor, students, the elderly, disabled people...
guess what's built in to the tax code? means testing
we eliminate piles of bureaucracy when we eliminate fare systems
SF startups seem like a fucking nightmare. I live in a second-tier city and there's lots of six-figure, 9-5 software dev roles that are nowhere near as competitive. Consider relocating somewhere with a lower CoL and more sane culture?
That's the plan for now - if I found a job with decent enough salary I'd more than consider returning to New York where the culture is more sane and people do... anything other than just tech.
No, “most opportunities” only if you want to work the startup grind. If you don’t, there are tech jobs in other cities that are boring stable 9-5 jobs if you don’t need Big Tech level salary.
> delta doesn’t reimburse for missed connections claiming air traffic control policies are outside of their control.
AFAIK if it's one booking on the same airline or a codeshare they are required to rebook you. If you planned a "connection" which is two single flights with different airlines you don't get any legal protections. This isn't just Delta, no airline will reimburse you for missing a flight you didn't book through them
they did book me on a flight the next day. i was scheduled to fly two legs on delta. but see my other replies below on lack of accommodation and rep behavior.
perhaps. what’s more my ticket to cross from east coast to western state cost more than my previous ticket to cross the atlantic into the country. maybe that’s a rational market outcome but it’s hard to fathom sometimes.
I think it's a "fuck around and find out" situation like Brexit. People love to stomp their feet and complain, but when some big interest group actually organizes the vote and it happens they'll be caught unawares.
People complain about have/have-not provinces, but Alberta would be in a much worse position as a independent nation. There are benefits to Confederation beyond just shuffling tax dollars around.
As an Albertan, I agree, but it is the inevitable result if Alberta were to separate. Fortunately, separation remains a minority position (for now, at least), despite certain parties fanning the flames.
As an outsider with no horse in the race, and pays little attention to domestic affairs of foreign nations - has Brexit actually been that awful for people?
For all of the doomsday talk, hand-wringing, and sky-is-falling bluster, nothing substantial/consequential seems to have materialized.
> For all of the doomsday talk, hand-wringing, and sky-is-falling bluster
You have to be careful about these arguments. A lot of them were post-fact rationalisation by Brexiteers who needed to justify their actions, and they did it by erecting strawmen. Nobody said that the sky would be falling. Nobody sane, anyway. What was said was things like “immigration will happen anyway because the UK has a structural need for manpower”, which is true and immigration is still increasing; “this will create more red tape rather than less”, which it did; “exports will fall and it is our major market”, which they did and it still is; and so on.
If you read actual prospective papers from the time, the warnings were true, give or take the massive spanner in the works that was Covid. The EU did not roll over, and the UK did not get access to the single market without costs. The UK was sidelined and just spent 10 years cap in hand trying to get free trade deals. Fishermen are not better off, far from it. Environment regulations did get to shit. The cost in terms of GDP was massive. Poverty did rise (although it was bound to rise anyway with pre-Brexit policies).
If the whole thing is not a massive self-inflicted shot in the feet, I don’t know what is.
Is it not one of those "rip the band-aid off" things and endure temporary pain for long term gain?
Sometimes continuing the status quo is attractive, but wrong in the long term.
The EU moves appeared to be out of spite at the time. Perhaps things will thaw over time?
The UK has a long history of being fiercely independent, so I can at least understand the desire to separate from the EU (which appears, to a foreigner, to be assembling into a nation of states, similar to the US).
> Is it not one of those "rip the band-aid off" things and endure temporary pain for long term gain?
Not really, because Brexit cannot deliver what its supporters are still saying it will. It won’t have its cake after having eaten it and there are no sunny uplands of milk and honey. It was a scam, internal Tory politics that went out of hand.
> The EU moves appeared to be out of spite at the time.
The thing is, the EU did not move. The vast majority of what happened was utterly predictable. The UK was never going to get access without contributing, it would never have worked with the treaties and there would never have been the necessary support amongst member-states to change them. All of this was clear from day 1. As was the fact that the EFTA members had no interest in welcoming the UK. Never mind the fact that May had no plan whatsoever and Boris was a lying bastard so trust was in short supply anyway.
> Perhaps things will thaw over time?
Of course. The UK physically cannot get away from Europe. And the EU has strong interests in having good relations with the UK over the long term. Things will improve, and however terrible it was during the negotiations, there were other lows before in the History of Europe. It’s still cold comfort for the people living through it.
> The UK has a long history of being fiercely independent
That’s how they like to see it. The UK has more of an history of meddling and playing divide and conquer games with the rest of Europe. It was never outside European politics at any point in time since the Romans. It is not more fiercely independent than France or Poland.
> which appears, to a foreigner, to be assembling into a nation of states, similar to the US
The EU is nothing like the US. It is not a nation and does not have a central government. The whole construction depends on the member-states approving it indefinitely. It is a club of countries, not a federation.
> The EU is nothing like the US. It is not a nation and does not have a central government. The whole construction depends on the member-states approving it indefinitely. It is a club of countries, not a federation.
I addressed most of your comment in my down-thread comment - but I'd like to point out here that this is almost exactly how the US was started via it's Articles of Confederation[1].
Over time, the loosely formed "club" of states were determined to be too weak, which in order to address growing problems (simplifying a bit) led to the birth of a much stronger centralized government. Over time, even a war was fought to compel states to remain in the union (another simplification but you get the gist).
Prior to the Constitution being ratified, each state was it's own nation state, complete with it's own culture, customs, way of life, etc - hence the name "The United States".
>Nobody said that the sky would be falling. Nobody sane, anyway.
At a previous job I worked, there were lunchroom conversations among the younger developers (in their 20s), all of a leftist persuasion. They were convinced that people in the UK would be dying because there was no access to medicine (that came from the mainland), and even in some cases hunger (though they didn't go so far as to claim starvation).
For the rest of you it may be the case that the people saying these same things were online, and therefor suspect (as it should be), but for me these were real-life conversations that I overheard. Perhaps this phenomenon was atypical, and almost everywhere else it was untrue, and of course you shouldn't take my word for it either, but with proper skepticism keep in mind I'm reporting something different here.
> At a previous job I worked, there were lunchroom conversations among the younger developers (in their 20s), all of a leftist persuasion. They were convinced that people in the UK would be dying because there was no access to medicine (that came from the mainland), and even in some cases hunger (though they didn't go so far as to claim starvation).
That’s not really serious. I am not talking as serious the noise from people like Gisela Stuart, either. Though I still have a flyer that explains that 70 millions Syrians will invade the UK because Turkey was a candidate (!)
Listening to what politicians like Cameron (yuck) and Tory, Lib Dems and Labour remainers actually said is a different story. There still are recordings of debates and speeches, it’s not hidden. Most of them warned of severe consequences and little gains, not the end of the world.
If anything, remainers were not very good at playing the emotional card.
> For the rest of you it may be the case that the people saying these same things were online, and therefor suspect (as it should be), but for me these were real-life conversations that I overheard.
I was there, I remember very well. I split my time between London and Newcastle at the time, talk about worlds apart…
Darn near every graph/poll I've seen completely ignores COVID-19 happening, and points to economic turmoil (which every nation on the planet suffered). AKA, the data is political and not objective.
The rest of the world enjoys trade relations with EU member nations, but aren't part of the EU themselves.
So, besides EU citizens (whatever they're actually called) being able to freely come/go from the UK, what else actually happened that was negative?
The immigration issues brought up by Brexit supporters, in my opinion, cannot casually be tossed aside. The UK isn't a huge nation, and having it's culture and national identity changed so rapidly by outsiders is a net negative for any society - something many nations are currently grappling with today (including the US).
You mentioned the EFTA rejecting the UK in another comment - my googling indicates EFTA is made up of 4 relatively small nations. Is this really a significant problem? Won't those nations openly trade with the UK in time, like they do with the rest of the world (hinting at my "spite" comment from earlier).
Reviewing all of your comments in this thread, so far, nothing seems to be an actual problem for the UK.
My opinion here is meaningless since I do not live in the region - but I just want to point out your responses are slightly colored by your political views - as you indicate which politicians you believe are liars but somehow others are fine, etc. Perhaps there's some objective truth to what you are asserting, but I'm not seeing it very clearly.
None of it. And you can't get a remainer to admit it, ever. They'll just deny they ever said anything was going to happen, and call leavers stupid liars again. According to remainers, all of that screaming they were doing is because they thought Brexit would slightly weaken the £.
Purely a protest of the wealthy and the haters of export? It didn't seem like it at the time. I thought they were fighting a Nazi-ridden post-apocalyptic deathscape. The numbers of dead from medication shortages was supposed to be massive. Was that ever a sane or good-faith prediction?
"AI tend to be brittle and optimized for specific tasks, so we made a new specific task and then someone optimized for it" isn't some kind of gotcha. Once ARC puzzles became a benchmark they ceased to be meaningful WRT "AGI".
So if DOTA became a benchmark same way Chess or Go became earlier it would be promptly beaten. It just didn't stick before people moved to more useful "games".
BNPL seems primarily like a regulatory arbitrage because of increasing scrutiny of payday loans and limits on credit card interest rates. Do we really think securitization of burrito loans is unlocking new liquidity in the market that Visa and Mastercard couldn't provide?
I organized some grassroots hackathon events 10+ years ago. Turnout was mostly students and die-hard geeks who wanted something to do on the weekend. Even in this small pond we had a local startup sponsor and try to shoe-horn their service into it.
When I attended bigger events with bigger sponsors it felt like 90% marketing to pitch your idea. The actual technical side was never that impressive or interesting.
One community that kicks ass at this are InfoSec people, I've done a lot of terrific volunteer-run CTFs.
Yeah CTFs are definitely a big part of our culture in security. We’re blessed with unending material in the form of vulnerabilities and mis configurations :)
I will say (as someone that runs, organises and builds CTFs) organising meaningful CTFs is becoming slightly challenging though, a lot of challenges are highly treaded ground where one very mature team just comes along and clears the table.
That and generative AI can solve a lot of CTF problems with enough prodding if it’s at all derivative.
There is nothing wrong with a sponsor if it affords cash to spend on food and refreshments for attendees. I believe there are right and wrong ways to sponsor these events. You have to keep in mind developers are one of the most marketing skeptical audiences extant, but it’s possible for it to be done well.
