Stunning!
I'm not a driver, so it won't be easy to organise - but it is on my list of places to see before I die.
Readit Newsfuturix commented on Is the Montreal Metro Profitable? (2017) cat-bus.com/2017/07/is-th... · Posted by u/luu
'Totally free' is usually a bad idea because the asymmetries inherent in the system are multiplied.
The OP argument 'everyone uses it' is also not super rational argument either on it's face - we all 'use food' and 'water' but we pay for those - the former in market terms, and the later is socialized on some level but still paid for by individuals on a usage basis.
1) You'd be happy to have people in villages and in the countryside pay for your transportation, who wouldn't? It's not fair or ideal, to have some people's tax money pushed heavily into systems that don't benefit them.
2) When things are 'free' we tend to use them in a way that does not reflect their true cost. Imagine if toilet paper were 'free' for everyone. We'd probably use a lot more of it, unnecessarily so.
The issue with metros is the intense capital costs and de facto monopoly status.
If there were 20 metros too choose from we wouldn't even think of socializing them, you'd just have to 'pay for it' literally like everything else.
The 'Strategic Advantage' in the metro is that it's actually a very efficient way to move people, but those efficiencies may not be realizable without subsidy.
So instead of 'free' - a reasonable solution might be to subsidize expansion while requiring regular Ops to be paid for out of revenue. Some investment in urban facilities is warranted vis-a-vis the countryside due to the big upside i.e. a large bit of social/industrial gain can be had by government investment that could not be had otherwise.
At least in Germany public transport reaches into very deep countryside and it is used widely everywhere. This is certainly not about just supporting urban transportation.
futurix commented on Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler nytimes.com/2021/01/09/te... · Posted by u/jimmy2020
I gave you an up vote for your honesty (and do appreciate it).
I've been suggesting this since before all this went down: many left of center folks don't actually believe in free speech; only "correct" speech.
What makes me really nervous is historically, leftist governments have much higher body counts than right wing governments. These types of governments have the commonality that they tightly control speech and thought.
This is all personal as a relative in my wife's side of the family spent half his life in the gulag for having the audacity to suggest Stalin was not a good guy to his drinking buddies (who turns out are the ones that reported him).
If you're on the left (or right), please do some soul searching on this topic. Also consider that it might not be your guy/gal/party who decides what speech is appropriate (and it's a constantly moving target). And in the age of the internet archive, anything you've written in the past is/will be open season. That's pretty scary, at least for me.
I can partially understand this, as my family is from ex-USSR country (also went through repressions on one side) and we all shudder at the mentions of 'socialism' and 'communism' too. However it doesn't take a lot of research to realise that the modern Western understanding of those terms and actual things that the modern socialists want are in no way comparable to the realities of mid-20th century. In USSR socialist and communist ideas were subverted to facilitate repressions and totalitarian society. Modern socialism is basically Sweden or Denmark - no gulag there.
I love searching for very American-looking fire hydrants or pedestrian crossings. Great case of US cultural imperialism - I suspect that the developers didn't even think it might not be the same thing abroad.
They’ve also quoted me more than a whole new pair to repair some AirPods Pro that I accidentally washed in the laundry. They didn’t tell me that was the case when I was on the phone with them.
Apple uses a lot of customer hostile behaviors nowadays. Recently:
* I canceled the Apple TV+ year trial that came with my iPhone. While, I believe, they require other apps to allow access until the trial ends, they ended my access immediately.
* Apple Music pulls up a slow interstitial almost every time I open it up to try to get me to pay. I have like 4 albums on my phone I listen to, it’s incredibly annoying how they’ve broken the music app to upsell their services.
I’m trying to get rid of most of my Apple devices in favor of anything else at this point.
TV+ is a special case, because the trial period (1 year) is longer than the non-trial payment cycle (1 month).
Apple Music pop-ups are annoying, but I only saw them after some iOS version updates. There's also a setting to hide Apple Music features completely.
Worst mouse I ever tried. But at least they learned for it and current Magic Mouse is a delight to use (on macOS).
futurix commented on UK virus-tracing app switches to Google-Apple model bbc.co.uk/news/technology... · Posted by u/csmattryder
I voluntarily live in the UK as an EU citizen. Most countries have faults, these are the British faults. Germany won't act without a manual to follow, in Hungary you need direct permission from the maffia (also known as the governing party); choose your poison.
Well, the difference is that German manual tends to work in the end. Certainly worked for Coronavirus (so far).
I've seen it said that blurs can relatively easily be reversed. I wouldn't expect that to be unknown to the Signal team, so I wonder if anyone knows how they dealt with that. A different blur method that is not reversible?
An actual blur that directly modifies multiple pixel values cannot be reversed. Things like swirls and motion "blurs" potentially can be - but I wouldn't even call those blurs as they are more of a directional transformations.
For comparison the planned 4.2km Lower Thames Crossing has already cost £1.2bn (€1,400 million) just for the planning phase with nothing built. The French know how to build.