New York:

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/interactive-new-...

It’s super interesting some platforms in China have discarded view counts and likes in favor of engagement scores, more ways to show a big exciting number to the creators

Like social media has discarded old ‘unique clicks’ with ‘views in feed’ - so you have three orders of magnitude more

Or a normal/skinny weight. Even my shoulders are too wide for modern economy seats.

I fly a lot of business class, and the comfort and space is what you pay for, not entertainment. But having good wifi helps a lot, even in a cramped seat.

Of course this is an Amazon spokesperson, but:

> A spokesperson for Amazon said it “strongly refutes the suggestion that it is ‘dangerous’ to work for Amazon. Safety is always the absolute priority”. They also denied the GMB claim that ambulances were sometimes not called: “As a responsible employer, we will always call an ambulance if someone requires emergency medical attention.”

> The spokesperson said the figures were misleading, citing the huge size of Amazon’s workforce and the fact that it logs, in its self-reported data, 50% fewer injuries with the HSE on average than other transportation and warehousing businesses.

> They added that the “vast majority” of ambulance callouts related to “pre-existing conditions, not work-related incidents” and that Amazon “will always call an ambulance if someone requires medical attention”.

If Amazon is more willing to call an ambulance for smaller things...

(not defending Amazon, just stating that if there's a lower threshold to call an ambulance)

The traffic in a medium sized NA city like Atlanta or Dallas can be a lot better than it is now, and it's definitely not comparable to Shanghai, London or Tokyo.

Do you have any examples in mind of 6-10M cities with stress-free comfortable commuting and affordable housing for all? Off the top of my head, but without a lot of first- or second-hand experience, Rome seems like the commute is probably a lot better than the larger cities, but my perception is that the affordability is pretty poor? Otherwise most of my experience is in larger or much smaller places.

Something that I think often makes this discussion tough is that there are a LOT of well-known historical European cities that are at under-2M population that I don't think Americans typically realize are THAT much smaller than, say, an Atlanta. I think the challenges of serving a growing city of 5M+ are much harder than a well-established old city of 2M.

Internationally the statistics depend quite a bit on how the data is collected and aggregated, so do it's hard to international comparisons accurately.

I will say using US definitions, commute times are very sticky around the 30 minute time period. Longer commutes and people have a large incentive to move closer, short ones and they don't generally bother.

So in the US Tulusa Oklahoma population 400,000 (1M metro) has a 20 minute commute and NYC population 8,800,000 (20M metro) is 50% worse at 32 minutes average and ~100 cities between those extremes. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-...

Edit: This suggests allowing people to move easily move around the metro area would meaningfully lower the need for transportation infrastructure. I suspect NYC has issues with people living in rent controlled apartments having long commutes but being unwilling to leave their cheap apartment, but don't have data backing it up.

If you want stress free comfortable commuting, you're going to need to build an efficient way to move people.

Cars are not really an option when it comes to moving people en mass. It's just too low capacity.

Rome's metro system in particular is stymied by buried Roman artifacts and laws for archaeology. That's not really the worst thing, given that NYC subway construction cost are some of the highest in the world.

That said, I saw what Atlanta looks like. Aside from down Atlanta, a lot of Atlanta is literally just low rise, even downright suburban sometime. It's a smaller city than people thought, given that only half a million people lives within its border proper, but nonetheless traffic is somehow a nightmare.

> Do you have any examples in mind of 6-10M cities with stress-free comfortable commuting and affordable housing for all?

“Do you have examples of cities that are literally utopia? No? Checkmate, urbanists!”

The big question is what counts as a city. American urban / metro areas around a central city are often large, because there are no other major cities nearby. A similar area in Europe may contain several independent cities. For example, if you take Atlanta with wide enough borders to get the population to 5+ million and drop it in the Netherlands, it will probably cover Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht.

Could be just the general deadlock and inability to come to consensus about any long term future threats. Could be AI, climate change, housing crisis, China, etc. But you’re right, likely climate change.

My hot take: there's a general feeling of looking down on "web devs" or UI/front-end stuff. It's not really necessary to have React for a portfolio site, but it's not really an issue if they do.

I wouldn't consider myself a frontend developer--I've run infra teams, built backends, built desktop applications, all that too--and I'd definitely agree with that.

There's a lot of strange smugfacing about using fit-for-purpose tools that translates into the shitting on people by the old-at-heart and the underinformed. Like, stepping away from JavaScript for a second, you still see people getting mad about C++ on HN and defending the use of C outside of a micro because "just be a good programmer" even though maybe a few dozen such good programmers have ever existed. It's very weird and it's one of the things about this profession that bothers me a lot.

I am fortunate that I have reached a place in my career where I can simply refuse to have that sort of person on my team.

Beautifully said. Ironically (or maybe not), the worst engineers I've worked with in the last 15 years are strictly backend engineers who vocalize how frontend is easy / isn't real software engineering / etc.

Nobody drives in NYC, there's too much traffic

But realistically, plenty of folks have cars in NYC. With a metro area of over 20M people, enough people commute into the city, or aren't close enough to LIRR/MNR/NJT, or prefer driving to visit, or just are needed for commercial/industrial/institutional uses to clog the city's roads.

Double parking is infamous in NYC, as are aggressive drivers and terrible roads and parking situations.

> Nobody drives in NYC, there's too much traffic

That joke doesn't work because the people who drive in NYC are by and large not NYC residents.

> But realistically, plenty of folks have cars in NYC.

Depends on your definition of "plenty". NYC is the only city in the country where the majority of residents do not own a car.

Thanks for this!

Also the techbro dream - the marketing has worked for his image, and he's the ideal of a smart, successful, techie, engineer - although realistically he's only one of those