People feel uncomfortable about others who look really crazy/shady for public transit or in parks, and in response they're told, "have you considered that maybe you're just overthinking it?"
Instead of fixing the problem, we blame those who have the audacity to notice.
Both things can be true. People can have exaggerated fears about the dangers of transit (especially compared to driving, which people seem to pretend is relatively risk-free), and the crazy / shady folks on transit can still be a problem and still need to be addressed.
I can only speak from my own experience riding transit in Seattle for 9 years. I've never had any issues. Sure, there are sketchy characters, but I've never been bothered, and never had anyone bother me. I definitely see news stories about bad shit happening on transit, but when you look at the number of people riding transit vs the amount of bad things that happen, and you look at the number of people driving and how many people die or get seriously injured in the city daily from car-related accidents, it's a no brainer. You don't see people dying on transit every day, but car-related fatalities are a daily occurrence.
Public transit in the US just mostly sucks. It tends to be sparse, slow, unreliable, and yeah sometimes there are crazies who make the environment feel dangerous.
You send Americans over to visit Tokyo and they have zero problems taking the train. The problems isn't with individual Americans.
Americans don't want to live in dense neighborhoods, so public transit is not viable (the operating costs would be too high). Foreigners are often amazed by the quality of life in American suburbs relative to what they experience at home for this reason. Our homes, cars, stores, cafes, are a lot more spacious for example.
I miss the early days of FB where people just wrote thoughts about what they were feeling or doing.
I wish we had something like that where there was no reposting/resharing, and links & photos were allowed but deemphasized in the UI. Also, no like button, that just encourages empty engagement.
Now obviously sometimes new developments really are bad, or they're being targeted at terrible spots -- you don't want a very polluting factory right next to a residential neighborhood.
But we've overcorrected drastically. The rules should be sensible and out in the open; planning committees should only be checking whether companies and governments have followed the law as written, not listening to every single possible objection from neighborhood residents about a new apartment complex affecting street parking or creating shadows.
As I pointed out in another comment in this thread, a "neighborhood group" that's using environmental rules to block a low-cost, employee-owned grocery store being added to a site that was already basically a grocery store (Sam's Club) before, is an insane weaponization of the rules. Nobody who was writing these laws ever intended environmental protections to be misused like this.
To be fair, adopting the 'curious' style of engagement in internet forums is typically a good way to end up as message board roadkill.
It works in smaller groups where basically everyone is engaging in good faith and willing to listen to each other. It works a lot less well on a pseudonymous message board.
They aren't, and yet somehow you still find various groups who will fight them.
Seattle is currently dealing with this for a new WinCo -- which is low-priced and employee-owned, making it particularly unobjectionable -- on a site that used to be a Sam's Club, so it's not even really a new development: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/winco-plan...
> North Seattle shoppers may need to wait even longer for a grocery store to fill a former Sam’s Club location left vacant since 2018
> Two years ago, discount grocery chain WinCo filed plans to remodel the building and reconfigure the parking lot on Aurora Avenue North. But the plans encountered opposition from a neighborhood group for their possible environmental impact.
> Last week, a hearing examiner overturned the city’s determination that the project would have no significant environmental impacts, casting doubts on the future of the project.
> ...
> For a while, everything seemed on track. The city conducted a State Environmental Policy Act process and found WinCo’s plans would have no significant environmental impact.
> Then, last fall, a coalition called Lake Washington Working Families appealed the decision. The group, which tried and failed to disrupt plans for a WinCo coming to Renton last spring, has no website and is not registered with the state — leading to online speculation about who exactly is behind the group. But Karl Anuta, a Portland-based lawyer representing the coalition, said it’s made up of King County residents.
> The coalition claimed the city’s environmental analysis of WinCo’s plans for the North Seattle site was inadequate and required further review. WinCo would have major traffic impacts, the appeal said, releasing pollutants into local bodies of water.
> In an interview Monday, Anuta, who primarily handles cases involving environmental law, said the group is not against having a WinCo store at the location but wants the city to seriously analyze the environmental impacts of such a large business.
> “The real issue for the Lake Washington Working Families was you’re going from eight years of nothing there to a larger facility with many impacts,” he said.
> “You can’t just permit stuff and expect the neighbors to deal with the consequences.”
This is why environmental regulations and processes are getting pushback -- not because people hate the environment, but because NIMBYs learned to weaponize these rules against almost any kind of development, even the kind of thing that the overwhelming majority of people in an area support.
> The group, which tried and failed to disrupt plans for a WinCo coming to Renton last spring, has no website and is not registered with the state — leading to online speculation about who exactly is behind the group. But Karl Anuta, a Portland-based lawyer representing the coalition, said it’s made up of King County residents.
I'm reading this as "WinCo competitors who live in King County" instead of NIMBYs. It seems real shady and of course they'd want to make it seem like it was just a group of good ol' regular folks.
Definitely different than raod tripping in an ICE. We road trip in our Model Y and end up stopping often regardless of charging for snacking, stretching, walking the dogs, etc.
I remember talking to a coworker would couldn't accept taking 10 hours to drive somewhere instead of the 8.5 hours you can make it in an ICE. But then again we are definitely people who puts on road trips.
The ratio has been way worse than that in my experience, especially in cold weather. Could easily turn a 3 hour trip from Seattle to Portland to 5-6 hours during winter, when mileage plummets on the freeway.
Obviously part of that is that the EV wasn't fully charged when we started, but that's the thing -- being low on gas for an ICE car barely affects travel at all.
> We'll spend ~20-30 minutes charging on the way home but that's it.
Just getting off the freeway and back onto it will add ~10 minutes to a trip, and that's assuming the charger is fairly close to the exit, and that you don't have to wait at the charger for an open spot.
> I can't imagine spending 2-3 hours charging on that trip.
Note that "Time that charging requires != time spent charging". If you have to wait for a spot to open up at a charging station, that's not charging time exactly, but it is something that charging occasionally demands of you.
But yeah it fucking sucked. The combination of low temps and freeway speeds tanked our mileage down to like ~50% of the theoretical EPA estimate, and the ID4 seemed to charge pretty slowly too at the Electrify America stations.
I'm not sure a carrier strike group would actually outright lose to a giant swarm of drones, at least in terms of the carrier being sunk. A Shahed warhead is pretty small once you're using it against large warships.
That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night. It feels like the latter strategy would be more effective, saturating air defenses and what have you, but it doesn't seem to be used much. Maybe launching that many drones at roughly the same time is really hard?
You don't need to sink a carrier to make it more of a liability than an asset.
If you hit its radar systems and/or damage the surface enough that landing becomes impossible, it becomes a sitting duck.
> That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks
To some degree, this happens. Journalists reporting from Ukraine already talk about some nights being silent, and then there are strikes with 600 drones or so. On the other side, Ukraine was really effective at using naval drone swarms to attack Russian naval ships.
Why not send even bigger swarm? I guess there are limits to how many drones you can effectively control at once. Data links saturate, and you risk losing a big swarm to jamming.
When Russia really wants to destroy a target in Ukraine, they use ballistic missiles, their interception rate is pretty low. Ukraine seems also pretty effective at destroying things in Russia, so air defense doesn't seem to be such a huge obstacle.
Finally, it feels like the Russia-Ukraine war is turning more and more into an economic battle. Ukraine is now at the point where money is more limited than weapons / ammunition, at least for some types of weaponry. Would saving up drones for a huge wave be a big economic advantage?
> If you hit its radar systems and/or damage the surface enough that landing becomes impossible, it becomes a sitting duck.
Both of these statements are wrong. Carriers generally rely on the radar systems of their escorts and their early warning aircraft much more than their own systems.
Similarly, even if the landing deck was damaged, again the carrier's escorts are its primary defense
True, but if you can't land planes, then you can only launch each plane once.
But I have a suspicion that the US navy practices damage control and recovery. Repairing a landing deck seems like a thing they would practice very extensively.
> "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night.
There are real technical limitations to operating large numbers of drones simultaneously. They are competing with eachother for bandwidth, and the more you squeeze in the weaker they all become to jamming. You need to coordinate larger teams with more resources to operate lots of drones all at once, rather than resupplying smaller teams periodically. Once you have enough drones flying toward a target to survive the defenses, any additional drones are wasted; and for the moment most air defenses are either too expensive or too limited in the number of targets they can simultaneously handle to require large swarms. Smaller numbers of more capable drones can outperform larger numbers of cheaper drones - 1 drone with an 80% chance of neutralizing the target might be cheaper than 2 drones which individually have a 50% chance for a total of 75%; and 2 such drones beat 5 cheap ones. Finally, big attacks are more likely to be detected, either prior to the attack by espionage or while in transit by radar and other sensors - minimizing the time that defenses have to respond or for targets to flee can be much more advantageous than having an extra munition.
All around you want the minimum necessary to get the job done.
I don't think they are fully automated in Ukraine vs Russia. For an onslaught you'd need to either have a lot of pilots, full automation or some in between of like 1 pilot controls one drone but another set of 10 drones fly in formation with the pilot and will self destruct hitting the same target the pilot flew into, but I'm not sure software for this exists yet.
A carrier is nearly impossible to sink. However, a bunch of flaming jet fuel sloshing around a big bathtub with thousands of americans on it is effectively as disastrous.
Ukraine does save up their strike drones. They only launch major strikes on defended targets every week of so. Russia is increasingly running out of air defense systems in many regions.
Russia also does this, with both drones and missiles. It also sends cheap decoys mixed in with the Shaheds, because it turns out they're not as cheap and plentiful as people think, especially when you're trying to hit hard targets.
Free speech is fundamentally about the government restricting your speech, not private platforms. There is no constitutional right to post on Facebook.
Amazing how certain people do their best to ignore this, every single time.
There are laws the restricting speech. There are laws for preventing people from platforms in some cases.
Talk of what's in the constitution doesn't really matter. This person may seem not protected but a different government could go after meta for foreign influence.
It's also a lesson not to trust companies who have a global presence because they are as good as who they do business with.
Freedom of speech also prevents the government using jawboning or implied threats to bully private companies into doing their will. Government doesn’t always need the cover of law to accomplish something.
True, if the government is leaning on private actors then that's also an issue of free speech, because it's still ultimately at the behest of the government.
> Free speech is fundamentally about the government restricting your speech, not private platforms.
A corporate charter is granted at the BEHEST of the People and the Government.
They are at best an artificial entity, and should be an extension of the laws binding government.
Frankly, the current situation of "You can say whatever you want legally (well, not really), but your job will fire you for it and youll end up in a homeless encampment". Yeah, thats real freedom.
So basically its real freedom for the Musks and Trumps of the world to sieg heil on stage, but fuck the citizenry for their attempt at speaking out.
> You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.
That's hilariously impractical. Just because you want to and can moderate some things doesn't mean you can guarantee rapid moderation of illegal stuff. When your platform is nominally open to everyone, and has millions of users, that just doesn't work out well.
What will happen in reality is the too big too fail platforms stay online by regulatory carve outs and smaller mom and pop forums shutdown, just like what is already happening now under other internet regulations.
Maybe platforms shouldn't be allowed to grow too large to manage themselves. Maybe, if strong self-regulation were a requirement, Meta and other companies wouldn't be market behemoths throwing their weight around in lobbying money to guarantee themselves monopolies while avoiding as much real scrutiny as possible.
Meta is enormous because it's useful. It's mostly useful now because of network effects. If it has no other use, Bluesky proves you can start a social media company in the time of Meta and have it be successful, given its slanty take on politics.
I'm sorry but this is ridiculous. How on earth do you think Meta has money? Scale. If you descale it, it has no money to pay people to review everything.
And that's the less troubling issue. The more troubling one is you would be crazy enough to entrust Meta with the task of inspecting everyone's messages on the planet. That's some planet scale, ruinous communism.
People feel uncomfortable about others who look really crazy/shady for public transit or in parks, and in response they're told, "have you considered that maybe you're just overthinking it?"
Instead of fixing the problem, we blame those who have the audacity to notice.
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