gfaster

The problem is that, at least in the U.S., we have been giving carrot after carrot to car owners in every conceivable way. We've frozen gas taxes, built highways into downtowns, mandated parking on all new construction, zoned to create the ideal environment for cars, and created a trillion-dollar nationalized highway network.

Now, when people advocate for public transit carrots, those carrots have to compete with a century of driving carrots and the momentum that this status quo has.

I'm unsure if anyone is seriously making arguments that dropping in Uber/Lyft into a city like Phoenix, AZ would be much more efficient. Rather, it would hopefully help as an intermediate transportation mode for cities that have a somewhat useful transit system. For those cities, mass transit is the highly available mode.

To state the obvious, people can want all the availability in the world, but they don't often get that because of the costs associated with it. Cars are expensive[1], and so is parking[2]. The costs of congestion are also typically only paid for by drivers with time (although many cities are toying with congestion pricing). Of course, the cost calculation for residents changes for different cities; the costs in Manhattan vs in Atlanta are very different.

So while you in particular may be able to afford the private cost burdens of car ownership, I believe the convenience of owning a car is a woefully inadequate metric to make policy decisions on. This is all mostly moot anyway as at least according to the original post, ridesharing does not positively impact car ownership.

[1]: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/64-billion-massachu... [2]: The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup (ISBN: 1884829988)

In the policy brief series linked, they do draw a distinction between TNC and ridesharing:

> Ridesharing — Ridesharing involves adding passengers to a private trip in which driver and passengers share a destination. Such an arrangement provides additional transportation options for riders while allowing drivers to fill otherwise empty seats in their vehicles. Traditional forms of ridesharing include carpooling and vanpooling. This term is sometimes used to refer to ridesourcing.

> Transportation Network Company (TNC) — A company that provides ridesourcing services.

This isn't too surprising. If the goal is to reduce car ownership (and trips), then my first thought would be that adding ride sharing services could only help if it fills few remaining trips that a robust public transit system can't easily accommodate. Even if on a per trip basis ridesharing has greater externalities, that might be ok if only a small minority of trips need a car in the first place. Of course, that's obviously not true for already car-dependent cities.

Other aspects that the linked policy brief mentions also follows, such as ridesharing displacing transit more among more wealthy populations. To me, the most surprising finding is that ridesharing did not lower car ownership even in cities that aren't car-dependent. If I had to hypothesize about why that might be the case, I would say it would probably be due to ridesharing replacing transit, making it worse in turn. Especially since U.S. transit is so bad in general, making it much worse would render it useless in many if not most U.S. cities.

> And anyhow, those algorithms are just showing you what you want. Don’t try to deny it, if it wasn’t what you wanted you wouldn’t be doomscrolling so much, would you?

I believe this to be based on a faulty assumption: people do what they want. While it may be true that at the reptile-brain level we do want what the Algorithm feeds us, that statement is equivalent to saying that someone who is addicted to opiates wants to feed their addition. It's only true at the most shallow of levels.

The article at large seems to realize that, but I think what is needed is to distinguish "want" as what we as rats in the Skinner box want and "want" as what we humans who do not wish to be prey to that Skinner box. That is the promise of platforms without the Algorithm, just that it wont try to take advantage of users.

(As a side note, I am an advocate for using capital 'A' the Algorithm to refer to the content-aware, black-box recommendation engines that run social media sites. That let's us continue to talk about lowercase 'a' algorithm to refer to sorting and such)

Like this? https://www.cnet.com/culture/how-to-get-started-using-twitte...

I believe the problem is server load. You want each server to listen and send updates to the federated feed, and forward the federated feed to the users of that instance.

What you want to avoid is a celebrity on instance A posting and then users all over the fediverse pinging instance A to get that post. Instead, instance A sends the post to the fediverse and then for any given user to view the post, they ping their own instance. That allows server requirements to be more closely tied with the number of accounts on it and how heavily they use it rather than the popularity of any given account. Additionally, it makes it so servers only have to interact with their own users and other federated servers.

Of course the downside to this is that as the fediverse as a whole grows, the volume of the federated firehose increases, which still increases the minimum requirements (processing power, bandwidth, and storage alike).

There may be middle grounds here. For example, the instance I'm on (I have no idea how common this is) stores text posts from other servers but images from are not saved, it's the originating server that serves those. Additionally, there may be the possibility of deleting old posts from the fediverse that don't have any local replies, or something like that. There are issues with the latter, especially with old friends-only posts becoming impossible to access by looking at the public profile on the original server, but I could see that being solved by something like generating a readonly token for the other server or something like that.

Mastodon does have a feature where you can verify you own a website by putting a hidden tag on it that links to your profile.

How nice would it be if corporations were held accountable for externalities? You'd almost immediately have all the big fossil fuel companies, automotive manufacturers, and likely banks sued into oblivion for defrauding shareholders.

IANAL, but I don't think this will hold up.

I think you're thinking of automotive manufacturing, which was a super important part of the economy at one point.

Cars (and by extension the policies that enable car dependence), have an extremely high externalities. They require vast amounts of public spending, lower land productivity, make areas more flood prone, damage the health of those living near car infrastructure, contribute to climate change, are traffic, drive suburban sprawl, and kill more Americans than guns do (crashes alone are just 0.3/100k fewer). The reason 'nobody considers it reasonable anymore' to walk are those policies that build for cars. In places with less car-oriented policies, people walk places. It has nothing to do with maximizing the speed of the vehicle you're using.

What your missing is that this is not (generally) the same resource. The resource is individual shows, which are copyrighted and therefore a monopoly. Back when copyright holders didn't recognize the online streaming market and sold off their licenses cheaply, Netflix was awesome. Now that publishers have found out they can charge consumers directly and be the only place to watch a given show, consumers are being squeezed.

You mean trying to violate the deed restriction with compliance mandated by Section 26-475 (and other applicable places) of the Houston Code of Ordinances? I don't think a lawsuit would hold up very well, unless you could could convince the judge that the city can't regulate land use.

Cars are not super cheap, and in fact are very expensive when you start to account for public costs and externalities. Especially in regards parking, building car infrastructure is expensive and space inefficient, and nowhere near the amount built today would be built without laws mandating it. Moreover, highways really aren't cheap either, and Houston is suffering under the financial weight of them.

Obviously since sprawl exists now it's hard to get rid of it; a city would be hard-pressed to go to the suburbs and tell them that they won't receive services anymore. However, as Detroit has shown, sprawl is definitely a liability if the city ever has any sort of period of decline. That certainly hasn't stopped Houston (and many other American cities) from acting as if that could never happen, and I suspect that the next 50 years will reveal the weaknesses of the model. I hope to be proven wrong, but that would require climate change to magically disappear and resources of all kinds to stay abundant, which seems unlikely.

If you would like to be proven conclusively wrong, I'd suggest looking at Japan. Its zoning stayed much more liberal than the United States and despite the massive size and growth of Tokyo, it stays affordable. Even in SF, some of the largest housing advocates are the tech companies that don't like having to pay employees enough to live in SF[1].

[1]: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-donates-to-californi...

Over time Houston's land use code has gotten more restrictive to prevent close proximity of nuisance uses[1]. As for churches, they are very often allowed in residential areas regardless[2][3]. Houston's zoning regulations are still some of the most permissive in the country, but that's only relative to other American cities. Ever since the Euclid v. Ambler (1926), zoning in the US grew rapidly more restrictive, far more so than much of the rest of the world. The primary reason Houston doesn't look like Tokyo (with its more liberal zoning[4][5]) is that it still has a lot of the worst parts of zoning as the parent comment points out.

[1]: https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/ (see Ord. No. 2020-1092)

[2]: https://online.encodeplus.com/regs/fairfaxcounty-va/doc-view...

[3]: https://library.municode.com/tx/austin/codes/code_of_ordinan...

[4]: https://www.mlit.go.jp/toshi/city_plan/toshi_city_plan_tk_00... (japanese, pptx downloads, my japanese isn't good enough to navigate and find better documents, but if anyone knows of them that would be helpful)

[5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071223082802/http://www.toshis...

I'm personally still upset that they made all the ubuntu-advantage software a) come preinstalled b) making it impossible to uninstall because it's a dependency of ubuntu-minimal[1]

[1]: https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/ubuntu-minimal

Well in that case it isn't strictly 'profit' but rather just benefit. In the same way that antisocial urban development isn't necessarily profitable per se, it just allows the people doing it to reap all the benefits while pushing the burden onto society as a whole.

This was also how I could justify being more trusting of Apple. They didn't need all my data because that was paid for up front. The ongoing services that needed to make money I used were also paid for. Obviously that's no long quite true with Apple ramping up their ad business, but that attitude is still often the best you can do without a level of effort that I just am not willing to go through.

"Dammit, I went to school for the whole algorithm, I'm gonna implement the whole algorithm!"

In North America in September of 2022, your statement is not wholly wrong. Building cities around the car is a privilege that NA cities have enjoyed in the decades of unparalleled prosperity and abundance that followed WWII.

However, we saw in just the past year the consequences of even a moderate increase in the cost of gas for the average American, how they reacted to it, and how they learned from it. From that, I think I can say with fair certainty that the American brand of city will not cope well with any meaningful shortage. There are other, longer term problems that will begin to show themselves as abundance wanes as well.

A car can only ever be as useful as the roads it drives on, and the same with a cargo bike. If there are copious protected bike lanes that go everywhere you want to go, you would bike everywhere in just the same way you drive everywhere today. The only difference between them is how they deal with black swan events that threaten the abundance that drives driving.

I'm not trying to be a doomer here, but most places can't (and likely none should) build expecting that they're always going to have the resources to sustain excess. This isn't a knock against you either, you don't always have a choice as to where you live and the means available to you to get around. However, it is worth being aware of the narrowness of this perspective.

For the longest time in urban public spaces, there was a sort of privacy by means of the anonymity processed. You knew that you would never see any of the people around you. That's definitely completely gone now.

...until you have to exist outside of a car, then it is downright terrifying (and extra deadly).

Thank you! I've never been much for acting save for a brief foray in elementary school, during which I found out that I don't particularly enjoy trying to act out a character.

Personally, I dislike having labels on myself that describe behavior whether it be pseudo-science or science-science because I find myself "role-playing" those labels and semi-consciously using them to guide actions. Even for medically diagnosed disorders I'll end up unconsciously thinking "Well of course, I'm going to do X because I have disorder Y/personality type Z".

It would prevent people from simply going and downloading solutions from the internet. A lot of easier assignments are fairly well treaded and already have solutions floating around.

This is pretty great. It would be nice if it were able to handle exceptions, for example:

"The second Sunday of every month except in December"

If you wear glasses that invert the image, your eyes will adapt to the image after a few days. There is some information on the Wikipedia page of the guy who discovered it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_M._Stratton).

Japanese companies are also stereotypically drowning in bureaucracy and have strict adherence to hierarchy. Maybe it was a manager that got annoyed and had an underling do it?

Yes? Of course? I don't think there is a solid argument against HN being social media either. Same goes with Discord, Telegram, and Signal.

They are all media that you interact with and also interact with others via. The distinction is made with television/radio, where interaction is purely one-way, and is therefore not social media.

I believe it is probably "merely" unethical, as I'm sure that was stated somewhere in the fine print. However, I personally don't believe the distinction matters to the kinds of discussion we're seeing in this thread, which seems to be a lot of "everyone does it, so it's really the customer's fault that they didn't expect the party on the other side of the transaction to be deceptive."

The way I see it, this conduct is antithetical to the spirit of the free market and harmful to society at large, regardless of whether or not it can be defended in court.