My problem with e-bikes is my problem with regular bikes. Riding on the sidewalk is generally not permitted and I don't trust drivers in cars to not murder me while driving in the street.
The amount of public real-estate we dedicate exclusively to enabling peoples usage of their private property in the united states (and to lesser extents all other countries really) is absolutely absurd.
I have considered just walking slowly in random lanes of traffic while in downtown areas recently. On what grounds do you need thousands of acres of space? Speed limits should often be 4-5mph and space usage should be shared.
I do this in the small alleys of Taiwan. I find it more safe, actually. Cars and scooters have a habit of flying down these narrow alleys with way too much speed. I simply walk in the middle to force them to slow down, then get to the side so they can pass. Obviously I keep an eye out so I don't get hit lol.
My general theory has become "the harder it is to drive, the better." Turns out we give cars way more leeway than is even legal, like here people will wait to let them finish a right turn they no longer are legally allowed to do (no right turn on red here). Or in a tiny alley, everyone will scooch out of the way if a car shows up. Why? If a tremendously huge person showed up and was is no emergency or particular rush, but just blasted airhorns in people's faces so he could get by a little faster, why would we all do so? Screw that guy lmao you came to a walking area you can go at walking speed like the rest of us. Take the mrt next time.
We just had lantern festival where there were lines of cars snaking out of the city for the few parking lots we have, all of which filled up in the first hour of course. So now just a bunch of cars idling around with nowhere to go. Thought about getting a sign and carrying it around that says "you'd already be here if you took the MRT."
>> I don't want to be brutally killed by a car on unsafe infrastructure
>> Oh yeah? Well how are you going to have a refrigerator delivered or get your sick grandmother to the hospital?
I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just hyper-logical thinking that it has to be all-or-nothing and implemented solely by force. But man, grandmothers and refrigerators are going to be just fine if we stop giving cars priority over people. Maybe better.
The idea is just not as obvious as you think. Take, for example, Manhattan in NY. If you compare the ratio of car/bus on its streets to a smaller city (I live in Seattle), it will be significantly lower. To the point that I am unsure removing cars altogether would change road conditions.
Now suppose we take all or majority of Manhattan's roads, let pedestrians in, and only allow buses, trucks, and utility vehicles. Suddenly buses are much slower than they are now, because the pedestrians have the right of the way.
Extreme labor inefficiency. Today Amazon's driver can deliver an order of magnitude more packages than a person with a wheel barrow could. There are 100,000+ Amazon drivers in the US. You'd need at least 1,000,000 people with wheel barrows.
That's true if we decide it's a good idea to continue to deliver millions of packages of small plastic goods every day. A big part of that is probably also due to the USA's massively isolating suburb design and poorly layed out roads.
I think in aggregate Amazon does more harm to our society than adds value. Its "value add" and service requires the degeneration of labor rights, a massive carbon footprint, and unethical shadow-UX practices on its own website.
As a cyclist for the last 15 years I get this. At the end of the day you gotta keep to what you think will keep you alive.
I can't be sure of the exact mechanisms or whether I'm observing behavior correctly, but a strategy that seemed to be shaking out in SF is cyclists aggressively standing up for our rights, by for example one person blocking cars from making illegal rights while the rest of the bicyclists rode along, or by repeatedly asking people parked in the bike lane to move along.
Again I can't be sure about mechanism of action all I know is that over the course of five years, bicycling in the sf area transformed from a battleground to a relatively easy ride full of demure cars sometimes going out of their way to give right of way to bicyclists (like expecting bicyclists to run stop signs, something I personally disagree with but hey, the slower cars are going the better).
My personal strategy was to decorate myself with so many strobes I was like a rolling disco ball. You can get some pretty crazy bright bicycle lights these days. That plus the GoPro, the rearview mirror, all the shit hanging off my bike... I looked dumb as hell but also the last bicyclist on earth you'd wanna cut off.
that thing where they stop and insist you cross first even though they have the right away really bothers me. it takes longer for both of us and creates a really uncomfortable ambiguity about whether they are actually going to start.
I've just started going up on the sidewalk and dropping a foot to make it clear I'm just not going to cross...or turn if it makes sense
I guess its not as bad the mission post pandemic. seems like people are really blowing through stop signs now
Yes! As a bicyclist on my route I regularly yield to cars that stopped before me on a 4-way stop, but those cars insist I cross first. During broad daylight they often wave to me, but at night it can be difficult to see whether they actually intend to let me cross first.
Yes. As a full time driver and part time pedestrian if someone in a car tries wave me on while I'm on foot I literally turn around and walk in the other direction until they get the hint. Drivers need to practice traffic right away instead of chivalry.
Sounds like a problem with cars, but also lack of facilities for cyclists. Places that care about cycling infrastructure often do things like provide cycle tracks that don't share space with cars.
It's definitely a case where being the change you want to see requires an uncommon risk tolerance.
After a while of doing it you realize that the risks aren't the ones you initially thought they were. I've stopped thinking "my life is in your hands stranger" every time someone passes me too closely. But I'm still hyper vigilant about the ones that pull out in front of me, presumably they tuned me out as noise because I present a relatively small image at that angle.
I take longer routes to avoid the risky spots, which is an option I'm lucky to have, and I feel relatively safe.
I'm not trying to encourage you to take my path, just giving some anecdata of what it's like.
I ride the bus and I can promise you I don't do it because of luxury. Even if that was true, it would only be true in North America. In the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas.
Yeah, if by "extends out" you mean "you can get there, eventually". Not if you mean "you can get there in a reasonable amount of time and you don't need to time it perfectly because you only get two chances a day".
>In the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas.
I have spent a lot of time in Europe and, once you get away from population centers and even larger towns, public transit can get very hit or miss. OK, maybe there's technically a once or twice a day bus to that rural hamlet but lots of Europeans own cars and, while it's generally easier to get by without cars in areas of Europe, it's not like you can hop on public transportation everywhere.
It varies of course. Somewhere like Switzerland (as another poster notes) is generally easier to get off the beaten track by bus or train than a lot of coutries.
Switzerland has villages with only hundreds of people that regularly receive train service. There are states with similar GDP, size and density as Switzerland that do not have any train service. Don't think of the US as a whole, think of the individual states who easily have the budget equivalent of European countries.
Kickstarter will not lose any trust with this decision and if anything they probably gained a decent amount of goodwill from artist and their fanbases.
Exhausted with people abusing and misusing the word monopoly. A monopoly and having market dominance are not the same thing. Google has put far more effort into Google Maps than Microsoft ever has into Bing Maps.
Effort has nothing to do with it. I don't see anything about effort in the FTC's definition of monopoly. [1]
"Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors."
I think the issue is less whether they're a monopoly in a legal sense, as much as if these companies really have a leg to stand on to complain about it. "We all decided to not really make a product in area X, and someone else did, so they're bad."
There's a case for the government or the market to want to have competition for Google Maps, but for 3-4 companies who all went "Eh, just let Google have a monopoly. Competing is too much work." to turn around and complain about it feels a bit rich. It's not like Apple and Google complaining about smartphone OSes, or Linux complaining about Microsoft or Apple.
> "Eh, just let Google have a monopoly. Competing is too much work."
You're acting like it's somehow cowardly not to take on one of the most powerful and infinitely-resourced companies on Earth in an area that they would be happy to lose money on.
And without that competition, google has no real reason to improve maps, and no reason not to degrade maps in support of their other products (if a strategy to do that occurs to them.)
The reason people aren't competing with maps is because they don't want to flush money down the toilet.
I'm saying it's cowardly to aggressively half-ass your "competition" and then act like you're being bullied by someone who now has a monopoly because they cared more about making a product than you did.
It's a bit rich to claim that Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft were cowed by Google being too resourced and willing to run things at a loss when that's essentially how they built their entire businesses too in the modern era. If it was just OSM or some small dev complaining about Google, then sure, but this is 3 of the biggest, most well funded, most willing to do things that lose money companies in the world complaining that another of them had better planning than them.
I'm not in any way arguing that Google Maps isn't a monopoly, or that someone other than OSM would have been wise to compete with them over the last 10 years, (although Apple has been, and notably doesn't seem to be a part of this).
This feels more like all these companies going "damn, we kinda just expected the OSS community would do all of the work for us to beat Google". Clearly Google Maps is providing value for Google now, even if it's peripheral value for interoperability and improving Search and other services. This just feels like all of these companies going "Wait, Google was right. Accurate geospacial data is valuable to a business even if we're not directly selling it as a product." That feels like something where it's a bit rich to complain about it being a monopoly when you didn't have the foresight to see that it would be valuable.
I mention effort because Microsoft hasn't even tried to put a real attempt into competing with Google on maps before claiming a monopoly. Tried nothing and completely out of ideas must be an impenetrable monopoly. To compare it with the FTC's definition, Microsoft and Facebook are not excluded from competing with Google Maps. You can make a maps app and put it on Android today.
At one point in the video, Rossman does imply that he is getting special attention because tech lobbyists (i.e. Apple) are trying to attack him because he lobbies against Apple when it comes to Right to Repair and has done so for years. Not only through criticism on YouTube but in government hearings. Specifically hearings about Right to Repair.
> At one point in the video, Rossman does imply that he is getting special attention because tech lobbyists (i.e. Apple) are trying to attack him because he lobbies against Apple when it comes to Right to Repair and has done so for years. Not only through criticism on YouTube but in government hearings. Specifically hearings about Right to Repair.
That's not my claim. I am not saying audits result from that.
I am saying, that the fact that my business model was disruptive in nature(show people how to do repairs that our industry has tried to keep secret for a long time) combined with the legislative efforts means it would be stupid for me to do something like cheat my taxes. It's incredibly low hanging fruit if you actually have enemies.
A competitor's business 10 years ago asked if I would close for $80,000, and implied he'd be reporting me to state collections agencies if I didn't take the offer. I laughed, and he said this was being cocky. "I pay people on the books, unlike you. and then I rattled off the names of 3 people he was paying off the books.. and he shut up.
This is wrong and you should just watch the video before getting on your soapbox. Or at least click on it and see the title which almost certainly tells you why.
C++ is heavily customized C. The heavy customization make Redshift a columnar database and more ideal for querying large amounts of data quickly. How does Timescale help Postgres in this area?
Timescale is built around a concept they call "hypertables", which automatically partition data into a set of smaller tables segmented by time range. Timescale exposes the time-series data as if it was a single table, but behind the scenes is managing queries against the individual table partitions and automatically creating new partitions as data is inserted.
By tuning the chunk sizes so their data fits in memory, many common queries gain a lot of efficiency. It's built around some assumptions of time-series data: Most inserts and queries are for recent data and are generally ordered.
I've had great experience with TimescaleDB for small-medium time-series loads such as sensor or analytics data; I've found it's pretty plug-and-play and have used it to store tables with ~1B time-series rows of geospatial data, sensor values, etc.
Most media sites lower their paywall for archive.org for altruistic reasons. I wonder if there is some kind of compromise where the paywall only goes down after X days (presumably most interest occurs within the first few days publishing). It would still service the archival mission, but would diminish the use of the archive as a bypass of the paywall. It won't help if the basic economics aren't there. And maybe the free-readers wouldn't read anyway on average if the paywall remained (the old napster argument). But it might be a good compromise on the margin.
