wow this would be a neat twist if true - we all defaulted to the negative explanation of having killed them all where a much more positive explanation might be that we're no longer luring them to their deaths at the leading edge of automobiles?
I guess it is most likely some combination of the above, but if there's any evidence it would be a neat reframing
I am not making any claims about the relative prevalence of insects day vs. night.
I can say with absolute and total confidence that the phenomenon of insect splatter was a common - if not frequent - daytime experience. I've not experienced this phenomenon in decades.
It’s effectively crowdsourcing urban planning, I’m in support.
I honestly think if we invited this type of empowerment/interaction in the physical world a bit more it would probably be good for spurring creativity in society (I think we do a pretty good job of it in software). It’s just a nice reminder that everything is just made up by someone else, likely no smarter than you.
Also I can’t believe this was 10 years ago, I remember being super involved in SPUR in SF (and getting coffee there almost every day) and going to talks about this kind of thing
It's admittedly appealing because it feels far closer to ordinary citizens having an influence, but I can't help feel like this is a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.
Have we really gotten to the point where we can't trust public infrastructure to be properly implemented, and so the only solution is to take it into our own hands? What are the tax dollars paying for then?
I think in many places we have gotten to the point where the planning, processes, and public approval process for some of these simple projects is more costly in time and money than just building it as a temporary experiment and revisiting it in a year or two to measure the outcome.
Not that there shouldn't still be some kind of standards and community approval, but I think we can afford to set that at a lower bar for certain categories of easily reversible projects.
And hopefully incorporating more of these ideas can teach us to be more efficient on transit infrastructure projects in general, where the US often significantly trails other countries on cost and implementation time.
Changes are stymied by bureaucracy put in place due to fear of litigation. The primary reason that things are studied, studied again, given community input, and checked for environmental impact is that if a city or municipality gets sued due to a road change, the onus is on them to demonstrate that they didn't create an unsafe condition. For example in cases where cars crash and are liable for property damage, car owners try to sue the city to claim that the area was unsafe. Pointing to a massive paper trail like this removes liability from a set of city or municipal concerns.
A municipal or state government will not be held liable for the consequences of shitty infrastructure unless there's like 9/11 levels of "the system was blinking red and you ignored it" and even then it's coin toss at best. Like maybe if they kill a ton of people there might be a lawsuit that sticks that's sooooo unlikely for the scope of the kind of thing we're talking about here.
The bureaucracy is put in place because none of the people putting it in place are paying for it, headcount is power, control over resources is power, etc, etc, and all the other perverse incentives you see in government workplaces. And of course once the gravy train is running all these parties have an incentive to keep it running.
I mean, this is the "bullshit" that our DOT told us when talking about guerilla urbanism at a real city meeting. I agree that it's frustrating, but it is what we were told. I don't know how to "disprove" a defensive posture. And yes, our city goverment has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)
> The bureaucracy is put in place because none of the people putting it in place are paying for it, headcount is power, control over resources is power, etc, etc, and all the other perverse incentives you see in government workplaces. And of course once the gravy train is running all these parties have an incentive to keep it running.
Do you have any real experience in city or local government?
>. I don't know how to "disprove" a defensive posture. And yes, our city government has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)
You ask them how much money they'd pay out to lawsuits, how much money they were paying out before adopting those policies. You ask them how much these policies cost (I bet they haven't even calculated it because they'd rather not have that number exist). Etc. Etc You make them spell out the math for you.
>And yes, our city goverment has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)
Suing the .gov is often the only way to get them to shape up and do the thing they should have in the first place. Getting sued doesn't mean much. It's all about the results.
The fear might be real in the minds of the decision makers but that doesn't mean it's well founded or the policies that arise out of it are not wasteful.
>Do you have any real experience in city or local government?
> The fear might be real in the minds of the decision makers but that doesn't mean it's well founded or the policies that arise out of it are not wasteful.
I mean I 100% agree with this by the way. We tried to tell the DOT to look at its own stats. The one lawsuit they actually paid out in was from street design before the formation of the DOT itself and the fact that they fell behind on the paving schedule. If you actually amortize the payout over 30 years (I think the city has had one of these roughly every 30 years) it ends up being some minuscule part of the budget. But they still shut us down.
We kind of have reached that point. You can look at the cost overruns and public consultation before every new project as failures of the system to deliver what people want.
I love the human sense (or vision) that we could find these in the 1750s as carbonized logs and know that we should keep and protect them - that we miiiiight be able to read them someday.
Come on, the (short) texts I've seen decoded were extremely exciting to me, surprising and event still relevant today. I think we have so comparatively little text from such an ancient time that every little passage we can recover is extremely valuable for preservation, historical context, or just philosophically, etc..
This is often said, but this passage could really have been written today:
"… we will inquire into something, but we
will not grasp it, if in some way we depart
from ourselves and from our own nature,
and besides, in the same way as the
remaining arts may be said to be perfected
in one respect, but to be deficient in
practical wisdom in another respect…"
From PHerc. 1667, col 17 (see Complete virtual unwrapping and reading of
a rolled Herculaneum papyrus, pg 25)
Yeah this hits the sentiment on the head, and I think shows the psychic damage of a system sliding into extreme inequality. My friend group seems to sit along this divide, and it's hard to see the impact that this sort of rumination can have on incredibly brilliant people.
It makes me feel a bit cynical to say this: but the strength of advertising as a business smacks to me of the general inequality we find ourselves in.
I’d love to live in a world where creating something of real value to average humans outweighs what advertising has been appraised at - which id describe primarily as offering value to businesses looking to acquire customers. Yes, there is some value offered to those customers by an efficient advertising system, but the lions share of value lives with the businesses here.
I’d look to the brief postwar period where inequality was a bit lower as a great example of an era where massive value was captured by those who invented and produced new goods and services improving the lives of everyday people.
I'm generally anti-advertising but I find Google search advertising to be the least objectionable form of advertising because it can be entirely relevant to what you're searching for.
If I search for "how do I fix a shower that won't drain?" then you will get a mix of results that will include articles, Youtube videos, etc. But also links to plumbers in your area seem entirely relevant to that query, no? I find it strange how many of the most militant anti-advertising purists ignore this completely.
As for creating things of value, there's a problem: housing has become the best performing asset in many developed economies and it is fundamentally parasitic and destructive. As an example, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand analytically created the best-performing portoflio and it was... 100% housing [1].
Demand for housing in many places is inelastic. It enjoys huge tax benefits. And you can leverage it better than most asset classes. Plus it's become a political goal of many governments to have ever-increasing house prices.
So if you want to build a factory that makes widgets that you want to sell, that involves a lot of risks. Why would you when you get a better, easier and safer return from just buying more housing?
If you want a healthier, more equitable economy you absolutely have to decommodify housing. There's simply no other way.
The (search query) -> (targeted ad) isn't the part of Google's ad business most people have a problem with.
They take issue with Google grabbing and compiling every piece of data it can get on you into a profile, keeping that forever, and selling that targeting to advertisers.
I think advertising has soared in valuation over the last few decades because society and technology have evolved to a point where it is viable for many people to own small businesses with a handful of employees, if any. That has led to an explosion in the number of businesses, mostly concentrated in a few sectors (e.g. fast food), and to differentiate oneself in a crowded market you need ads.
I’m not sure this is still the case. An AdWords campaign worth its salt is going to cost a lot more money than some local advertising, and with plenty of bot fraud to boot.
I asked some magazines for print ads and one issue is 60-150€ in my niche. That’s not bad, I think I’ve blown twice that in digital ads before to help a friend and we got a 2 conversions to a paying customer.
Dunno. Maybe at a large scale digital advertising is where you have to go, but small businesses might actually benefit from… small advertising.
Yeah I’d be interested to read more about the reflection of inequality but I kind of chalked it up to how cheap it is to create and distribute an effective ad on the Internet. Never in history has it ever been so easy or cheap to show someone relatively well targeted ad.
I think this is downstream of The Debtor's Revolt[1] and antinormative conspiracies expropriating object-level gains[2] from creators. Those closer to the central bank have lower rates to buy out value-creating startups which are assimilated into the antinormative conspiracy. This ancestral mirroring is a fundamental issue with central planning, anathema to the federation necessary for capitalism to succeed.
Perhaps it is with a heavy dose of copium that I say: I hope the extremely tentative development and release of this product (after having been on the record as fervently against touchscreen laptops), along with the eye-watering price point indicates that this isn't being viewed as the future of the MacOS experience. I hope this remains framed as a true pro-focused experience that unlocks specific apps without greatly impacting the central MacOS design philosophy.
I think simple market forces explain the omission of any discoveries relating to cryptography, the labs have an obligation to at least build solutions and make them available before releasing findings.
If I were to start inferring what’s going on, it’s that findings in this space have relevance to breaking current weak cryptography.
Our friend group went through the support-mode version of this this year and much of the advice rings true.
To add, a giant shared document that the group of friends had access to in order to take notes. Findings, theories, doctor statements will be shared when the patient isn't in a great place to be taking notes.
And for anyone reading this that might have someone facing cancer in their lives, go make a nuisance of yourself being present - feel empowered to spend a bit more time than you might initially think is necessary/helpful with them. Facing this stuff alone is when it is at its hardest.
I was hospitalised (not cancer) and completely zoinked out of my mind due to sleep deprivation, constant blood loss and being in pain 24/7. People did visit, but I guess they just thought... I have things under control? I wish they had talked to the doctors and asked more questions. In the end I came out of it fine, but I probably would have gotten a better result with someone advocating for me.
Please go and be a nuisance. As someone with a clear head you will likely be able to understand the topic better, from a more neutral standpoint, and potentially push for the best possible treatment.
I guess it is most likely some combination of the above, but if there's any evidence it would be a neat reframing
reply