diversionfactor

Should I choose public transport, it is ubiquitous and very cheap (even free for some people). Fast and slow trains, streetcars, some subways and buses, but most importantly frequent and with total coverage by law if I remember correctly, no one can be more than 500m from a public transport stop. Even in the countryside you can take public transport everywhere: I have visited rural areas entirely by train and even a farmhouse by bus with a short walk. This is typical European lifestyle at least for the wealthier northern continental countries.

https://www.german-way.com/travel-and-tourism/public-transpo...

There is a downside, however. Everyone - that is everyone except the very rich and those in the countryside - lives in an apartment. An apartment which, even by lower class American standards, is tiny, dark, grungy, often ridden with mold, and with non-existent amenities. For the price I pay in rent, including exorbitant utility costs, I could get a much nicer place anywhere outside the coastal elite urban cores. My fellow software developers, who are paid far above average for German engineers (or even doctors here) are in the same boat. Tiny and grimy is the norm:

https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/berlin/berlin/wohn...

What I wish I saw less of in the car/transit debate was moralizing, and what I wish I saw more of was engineering tradeoffs. You can try to have cars and houses and transit and high salaries and (relatively) low taxes and what you get is NYC or SF - a playground for the rich and a dystopian hellscape for the average middle class worker. If you make transit ubiquitous and affordable with affordable housing and restrictions on cars you get everyone in tiny accommodations, the kind of mass single family home communities and even NYC townhomes and billionaire skyscrapers would never be approved by German town planners. Engineering tradeoffs, which can mean many tiny cars you never see sold in the USA:

https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/shopping-auto_dealer-c...

Let's have more discussion on the tradeoffs, and maybe we can find solutions of which Larry David would say:

"You're unhappy. I'm unhappy too. Have you heard of Henry Clay? He was the Great Compromiser. A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied, and I think that's what we have here."

Comment · 3 years ago

Reference for the uninitiated, a good read. Its veracity on the individual level may be questionable, but the techniques of subduing third world countries via heavy debt burdens is well documented.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_H...

Comment · 3 years ago

I thought spam was not allowed by HN’s content policies?

Comment · 3 years ago

Not actually $0, just rents another property on the same land. Would like to know the actual property taxes, maintenance and utility costs. No one except perhaps royalty pays $0.

Comment · 3 years ago

I worked that long in another country, as an American, and had kids there. Then I was laid off. The government didn’t care, my employer didn’t care, I had to leave and uproot everything. This is how it works in most of the world. Only in America do we think an immigrant “deserves” a job while letting native born citizens go hungry.

Comment · 3 years ago

  Working from home is no picnic,
  and neither is it a sin;
  I rue those who think it is other
  than labor and struggle within.

  Simply refuse, my comrades,
  stand fast and don’t go in;
  parry threats, demerits, evals,
  if fired, grok leetcode again.

  Unless I’m literally starving,
  and maybe not even then;
  will I ever inhabit a cubicle
  trapped in the office again.

Comment · 3 years ago

Oh no, consequences for the coastal elites, the horror.

Comment · 3 years ago

After watching the video several times, I would definitely have slowed down seeing the pedestrian near the cross walk a hundred meters back, and would definitely have stopped in this instance. You never know when someone is going to run or not look for a car and being cautious saves a life. I live and have lived in a city as a driver for decades in multiple countries including in very dense areas and in no case would the FSD behavior be acceptable. We know from the Uber example this kind of automated disregard of pedestrians can result in death.

This is a much bigger and more serious issue, dozens of pedestrians are killed by cars every year in my city.

Comment · 3 years ago

‘Socrates: There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time which the poets call the “threshold of old age”: Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?’

https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/arch/greeks/PlatoRepublic.h...

In 2,500 hundred years we have advanced much in technology. In philosophy, perhaps, none at all.

Comment · 3 years ago

“ After using CRISPR to knock out a gene and render the males sterile, the team implanted them with sperm-producing stem cells from another pig. The normally sterile males would then create offspring with that pig’s genes.”

Wasn’t this the plot behind Jurassic Park’s sterile dinosaurs?