I don’t think Canada has an Alabama. As conservative as they are, Alberta is wealthy, highly educated, and they frequently vote for women and POC. They like “small government”, but also have some of the highest paid government workers in the country. I just don’t see much similarity.
I think the comparison to Texas is more apt because they’re both conservative petro states with center left suburban sprawl cities.
These are good points. But I wonder if the longer life really comes from it being a general purpose computer per se. The points you make are more about the internet connectivity of the device. You can use a DOS machine in 2023 because it’s almost like an appliance. It works just as well now as a text editor as in the 90s. But an internet connected device has to be supported, and good enough for today’s processor intensive web apps. That general purpose DOS machine, like the first iPad, is never running Discord or Netflix.
Because they are a soulless profit-maximizing corporation, there will come a time when Apple stops supporting perfectly functioning iPads for no reason, but I’m not sure we’re there yet. The iPads they stopped supporting really do suck from a hardware perspective.
I agree the iPad is almost completely useless, but I don’t think comparing it to 13 years before the iPad is useful. My MacBook Air is 11 years old and it’s still great because it’s good enough to run YouTube, all the major websites, office suites, etc. It’s still getting security updates from Apple. I think that’s what 90% of people use a laptop for. A computer two years older than it, on the other hand, might be useless. It’s not really linear. Hopefully, iPads from 5 years ago can last over a decade.
This is an incredible project. This channel has made me realize that the plain angular modernist aesthetic is really limiting.
It always drives me crazy that, in Canada and the US, there’s a “charming part of the city” and we all lament that there’s not more of them. We could, at any time, decide to build more, but instead we make it illegal, mostly for the sake of cars.
But, like you said, the foreign makers are also making big cars to comply with our corrupt pro-corporate regulations.
EVs are looking to be both more expensive and more dangerous. I have zero hope that they will be an improvement in any way except emissions.
We need weight and size based taxation to discourage big cars. More than that, we need to move away from car dependence.
Consumer preference is part of it, but car manufacturers have also intentionally stopped competing for the low end and small vehicle market. It’s textbook tacit cooperation.
During the pandemic, there was a chip shortage that led makers to prioritize high margin cars like trucks and luxury SUVs. Many makers decided that they liked being a low volume high price seller and just cut their lower priced cars altogether. If everyone does it at the same time, there’s no market mechanism to punish them. Many people can’t buy smaller cars even if they wanted. It doesn’t help that all of our car regulations in the US and Canada encourage this by having much weaker regulations for bigger vehicles. The whole market is a mess.
On The Media - a podcast analyzing the media, giving historical and scientific context to news coverage. In the process, it turns out to be the best in depth news shows. Academics and journalists love this show but it doesn’t seem to be as big of a hit with the greater public. I recommend this show very highly.
Also listen to a bunch of nerdy academic podcasts like The Dissenter and New Books in Science, Psychology, Philosophy, etc in the New Books networks.
“Instead of seeking happiness, save money with misery”
Americans support a lot of things they don’t vote for. Most Americans want universal healthcare, higher taxes on the rich, more government services, etc. But many famously “vote against their interests”. Abortion is turning out to be the surprising exception.
Mastodonians, Kbingers, and Fedizens are all superb. I’m not a fan of “feds” because it has another pretty common usage. I feel like whatever term is chosen should unambiguously evoke the fediverse.
Riffing off of another comment, I think it’s ok to have terms specific to each platform, and then a term for all platforms.
Platform specific:
Overall:
“The feds” don’t have the best connotation…
Also in practice the sentences come out a bit unclear to me. “The fed that posted this clearly knew their stuff.” “Some feds just like to stir things up.”
Edit: that said, I think that’s a really good point about the need for a platform neutral term.
This is why I said fewer cars, not no cars. Most people obviously do not drive 160 miles a day. With better infrastructure and public transportation, a 2 car family might go down to 1 car, or replace half of their car trips with other modalities, etc.
Outside of the US and Canada, electric bikes look to be the future instead of mainly electric cars. E-bikes are not just massively more environmentally friendly, they’re also radically reshaping city design to be more livable. I hope the future isn’t just a different kind of car. I hope, for the sake of the environment and society, it’s a world with fewer cars.
On The Media is the best news podcast. It reports on how stories are being reported, hence “on the media”, and in the process ends up being the most informative and deep reporting available. Journalists and academics love it, it’s a legendarily good show that started on NPR radio.
I thought it wasn’t, but dumber things exist so I had the slightest uncertainty.
This might be a dumb question, but is this real?
ah yes, the 0.3 meters difference in car length makes this completely “dishonest”. Throw the whole thing out because they used 4.5 instead of 4.2.
I don’t even get your point about car following distance. A line of totally immobile cars bumper to bumper is illustrative of nothing. Using the ideal scenario for car storage is hardly “more honest”. I have no idea what is motivating all this weird nitpicking.
Trains are generally at their fullest when cars are at their emptiest, during commuter hours.
If that’s true, then we are obviously comparing like-for-like: busy train commute time, busy car commute time. Which makes it a completely fair and representative comparison. “This isn’t fair because what about when no one is commuting?” is a weird complaint.
That said, I’m skeptical that for most of the day trains are “near empty” and that for most of the day cars are “likely full of groups of workmen”. Do you have a source for that?
Saskatchewan is the birthplace of the NDP (Canada’s social democratic party), universal public healthcare (ever heard of Tommy Douglas?), and historically one of the pillars of the labour movement. It’s now the most conservative province, but still has tons of new immigrants, racial and cultural diversity, good education, and well funded government services. The SK NDP ruled almost continuously from 1971 to 2006.
SK is much more like midwestern farm states that were formerly pro-labour pro-union hotbeds but are now more moderate or conservative, like Iowa and Wisconsin.