You joke, but it's a decent comparison. Both GNU and SystemD are projects with a bunch of miscellaneous tools with excessively strong coupling. In GNU's case that's the various userland tools relying on glibc. Both are used in the majority of Linux distros, and while there are distros without them they're not particularly mainstream. Many tools expect their options & custom ways of working, e.g. huge numbers of shell scripts are BASH-specific and need GNU coreutils instead of being portable POSIX shell scripts. Both make developers' lives easier compared to the lowest-common-denominator required by POSIX, which makes sense because POSIX is intended to be a common subset of functionality found across different UNIX OSes.
It's not a perfect equivalence, of course, SystemD diverges more from other UNIXes than GNU does.
Just call it the Red Hat Linux Platform. Both GNU (glibc, binutils, GNU utils, GCC, etc) and Systemd are primarily maintainted by them. Same with Wayland and GNOME.
Transportation influences urban development. That is why most houses have a garage. There is no such thing as private transport (streets are public). Transportation has been heavily centralized since the New Deal. The bicycle was okay for most people living in cities in the 30s, now it is not because the government has favored the car infrastructure over the last decades. I think we need to start with not letting government develop their big infrastructure projects which are not resilient. Advocating for the use of bicycles might make sense in some places yet bicycle infrastructure is required.
Where I live there is plenty of bike infrastructure. I and many others don't use bike for transportation because of crime. Homeless steal bikes and parts of bikes if they cannot defeat the lock somehow. Recently a cyclists got killed in a "bike-jacking". People even get bikes stolen from their balconies on the 2nd floor. Reign in crime if you want people to use bikes more.
This is true. But it does not negate the comment you are replying to. Once you introduce kids into the mix (esp infants) - this whole narrative falls apart quite quick, ditto for elders/people with disabilities. Bikes, public transport are not a substitute for the vehicle.
I do agree that the vehicle should not be the default transportation even if I do consider myself a "car guy".
Also, federal highways are partially a national security issue, and are designed for quickly moving military equipment across otherwise isolated areas. Guidelines for federal interstates are specified jointly with the DoD to ensure that military transport can fit under bridges, and that bridges can support their weight. Industry is the other most important user, while individual consumers/families are the least considered users.
Everyone always assumes that individual choices and consumer behavior drives this stuff, and then they wonder why nothing changes even though we all started using reusable tote bags and LED bulbs. Stop blaming the consumer!
(The DoD is the largest institutional polluter in the world, by the way.)
That is very interesting. It is funny to see how influential the federal government has been on society, infrastructure and other areas of life. Specially considering that some people opposed to it during the confederation period because they saw it as another centralized authority (anti-federalist papers).
Trains are cheaper per mile but are less flexible and easier to sabotage. They are also important but there’s a reason that every country with a powerful military maintains both options.
I dunno, I live in what most people would call peak Suburbia and have all sorts of bike trails I didn’t even know existed until I got the electric assisted bike, I can range 5 miles away from my house in any direction without having to be on any major roads, and have a trailer for doing grocery shopping. I went 15 miles away and back one time but took quite awhile. All the grocery stores I frequent are within this range. When it’s warm out, I use my bike for probably 90% of my trips out of the house.
The exception is that he uses those bike lanes for shopping, not just exercise. Every suburb has plenty of great biking space (the streets are not busy!), but nobody thinks to try to use them that way.
* Extreme Weather: Severe heat, heavy snow, or torrential rain can make biking unsafe or impractical without specialized gear and high physical endurance.
* Accessibility & Mobility Issues: Individuals with certain physical disabilities or chronic health conditions may find traditional cycling impossible. (This also affects an aging population.)
* Time Constraints: For those with "trip-chaining" needs (e.g., daycare drop-off → work → grocery store → gym), the extra time required for cycling can be prohibitive.
* Infrastructure: Older adults are more sensitive to "heavy traffic" and "lack of safe places." Seniors don't stop cycling because they can't do it, but because they don't feel safe in traffic. (Good argument for upgrading roadways.)
* Care-giving: When parents become dependent on their children, often the children need to shuttle their parents around. A parent with dementia who escaped into the neighbourhood can be rapidly collected and ushered home in a car, not so much a bike.
* Theft & Vandalism: I've never had a car stolen. Two locked bikes, on the other hand...
There is definitely something to be said about bike theft. People see cars as a private space with serious social repercussions for violating. Bikes on the other hand are treated like normal belongings. This may have something to do with car-centric bike hatred and possibly the reflexive/reactionary tendency to completely dismiss the utility of bikes for transit. We have laws dedicated to the theft of cars, largely due to the fact the theft removes people’s mode of transport. Why not have the same for theft of other modes of transportation?
Additionally, I personally would have less issue with people driving due to a lack of physical fitness if they didn’t tend to 1. Drive recklessly and fast (35 on a 25 is not okay) and 2. Drive tank-like SUVs and Trucks
Severe heat, heavy snow, or torrential rain can make driving a car unsafe as well. Individuals with certain disabilities, chronic health conditions, or a plethora of age may also find driving impossible. For those with "trip-chaining" needs, extra time required for parking cars can be prohibitive. Old people don't like traffic and can escape and run away so fast you have to drive them back? And you're seriously including the idea that car theft is not a concern? These are some tortured arguments.
The correct argument here is "if bicycles become the dominant transportation mode, then the government will absolutely mandate kill switches for them too." "Bicycles don't have software" hasn't been true for years. E-bikes and wireless deraillers have been around a long time.
Bikes without software will be around for the foreseeable future. They're the cheapest and most plentiful version of bike. In the unlikely scenario that all bikes somehow become electric, old bikes are much easier to maintain than old cars.
My argument to my own post is that cameras that track cars and license plates could easily be reconfigured to track bikes and pedestrians. In that case there's no transportation mode that will save you from surveillance. The cameras have to go.
You do get the idea though, that just because bikes work for what you need to do, they won't necessarily work for what any other given person needs to do, right?
Also, why the hell have you got wireless derailleurs? What is the point? What possible advantage can they have over perfectly normal mechanical ones?
Exactly. I love bikes and live near a grocery store, but unfortunately getting to that store (or anywhere really) requires a few minutes of travel on a dangerously busy highway. It’s not safe to bike that road regularly.
I once lived somewhere that was half an hour from the store by car. Thankfully that isn’t the case anymore.
My in-laws live in a place like that. It's a gorgeous property but day to day errands are a challenge. I also fear the day one of them needs immediate medical care. The nearest urgent care is 20 minutes away and the nearest ER is at least 45 minutes away.
This, from what I can recall seeing about average car trip distance, is actually correct.
(Excluding you rural people, but depending on your city could be true if people had smaller lots and denser less car centric business areas, or more businesses in general)
A vehicle (presumably a car, since bikes are vehicles too) gets you and your stuff from point A to point B. Bikes do that too, though at a smaller scale.
If your commute or your errands aren't excessively long or require the use of a controlled-access highway, a bike's a perfectly fine alternative. The limiting factors are seasonal road or bike path maintenance and the discipline of other road users.
The first step to solving it would be proving it exists.
Because it doesn't. It's been a phrase used for over 40 years to decry basically any change the author didn't like, from different technology, the rise of the 'me' generation or the declining religiousness of the US.
The only one showing any lack of social intelligence is you. The author is choosing not to go into unnecessary personal details while giving a short back story as to why they did a thing.
I've thought of doing basically something similar so my wife knows I'm in a position not to be disturbed. I can, and do, tell her when I have a scheduled call, but unscheduled calls do just happen. Something like this would let her know I can't be disturbed without her coming in, asking and then going 'oh shit, sorry.'
In no way is it engineering a way out of dealing with my wife.
The nice thing about boundaries is you are not required to explain yourself. "Hey, please don't interrupt me between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM, unless it is an emergency. I need to get work done, and interruptions break my concentration. Thank you for understanding." You also don't need to build complicated devices.
> it's pretty much the only browser holding back the rendering engine monopoly
Maybe that's why they're complaining. Maybe they don't want Firefox spending it's time working itself into oblivion.
Of course the Mozilla Foundation isn't bound in any way to listen to them so it's going to happen anyway, but Firefox's users are upset for good reasons.
> Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?
Almost all, to varying degrees, with the expectation increasing the more you deal with people that are outside that field. People seriously underestimate the challenges and difficulties of things they have little experience with while overestimating their ability to do it.
'How hard can it be to ask someone who knows what's going on and write that anyway?'
Honestly how? What law could be written that would ban PE firms and lookalike businesses that would hold up to scrutiny.
No one with a brain likes what PE does, but really, what do they do that's illegal as opposed to people finally realizing that capitalism is essentially evil?
PE depends on favorable tax loopholes and a lot of acquisitions depend on them being able to do things like buying a company with a ton of loans which they then saddle the acquired company with or stripping assets before going bankrupt. All of that depends on arbitrary legal structures and protections which could be rebalanced to favor more productive business models.
Right. Either you directly regulate activity, or you adjust incentives. If you suggest one, detractors say you can't do that, you have to do the other thing, and then work as hard as possible to block your efforts to do the very thing they suggested you do. That's because they don't want things to change at all. But that's obviously not an option, so I tend to suggest trying both and seeing what sticks.
what gets me is trying to make the argument that market economies are not necessarily capitalist economies. it seems plain over time that capitalism works to destroy markets. As an American I'm pretty pro market, but that means at this point I'm an enemy of capitalism.
It doesn't help that the people who say that prove an understanding of capitalism is about as thin as a single layer of varnish and their collective ideas for workable alterations would fit on a single index card after it was already ripped up by hand.
Painfully true and somehow it's everywhere on this forum. To these people, capitalism and markets and money are all the same thing, and the only finite resources in the universe are those whose distribution is gatekept by the evil, evil capitalist overlords.
Everybody's experience is different. I've found experientially that anybody who can actually define and describe these things with any degree of seriousness is, at least, aware of the resource constraints that make up the real world and have opinions that at least run in approximate sync with reality, which definitionally excludes them espousing real Redditor crap. I'm willing to engage with anti-capitalists who have at least put in the work to understand capitalism, but it seems like there's not much overlap between "understands" and "disagrees" for that segment.
No, and in case you stopped reading partway into my comment, this type of useless gotcha counts under Redditor crap. I don't think it's controversial that understanding something is a pathway to criticizing it appropriately. The average anti-capitalist cannot begin to describe exactly what it is they hate, which is in my opinion one of the defining valuable features of capitalism - that many people can benefit from it without understanding it one lick, and can in fact ineffectually hate it while benefiting from it.
This is the website of a bunch of rich capitalists who got rich by doing capitalism. Of course you can't call the owners of the website evil on that website.
So how can an immigrant to the US not understand that someone might want to leave the country they're currently in because of the situation in that country?
Benzedrine (an amphetamine inhaler) was the first antidepressant marketed (although at the time I believe they used the term "psychic energizer" for antidepressants)
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