jnicholasp

Amazing, Germany has radically innovated a way for people to travel throughout the country via a (logistically) complex system requiring multiple stops, transfers, waiting for vehicles to arrive, unload & reload, where transporting large or heavy items or managing children is extra hassle & stress, where you're exposed to hundreds of strangers' behaviors & germs and the enforcedly generic environment that has to accommodate everyone by not being particularly well-suited to anyone.

Public transport is a good thing to have, but extolling it as a desirable-in-itself, convenient way to travel as compared to personal transport is simply not viable.

Cities don't use public transport,people do. The public transport system for a given city, as compared to the personal transport choices made by individuals, is Worse Is Better in all the ways I said.

Public transportation is obviously WIB: one solution "fits" all, monolithic, logistically complex, not amenable to rapid & piecemeal innovation, good enough for basic function but doesn't & can't offer excellent function either in UX or non-core use cases. Advocating for the superiority of public transport in the same comment as you're espousing the virtues of bespoke software is cognitively dissonant.

Not true in my mid-sized city in the Pacific Northwest.

Anyone riding a motorcycle who is simply blindly counting on other drivers to see them, follow all the rules of the road carefully, and never do anything unexpected, is not going to last long. Everything motorcyclists do has to be done in such a way that it will still be safe even if the other cars around them are all but actively malicious. Fortunately, motorcycles are extremely agile, quick, and small, so it's easy for the attentive, cautious rider to anticipate and avoid most hazards. The trick is just managing to always be sufficiently attentive and cautious.

Ideas don't matter (assuming the set of ideas you're choosing among are roughly equal in quality, and that the average quality of the set is well above outright stupidity).

Which is to say, ideas matter a lot, but no one who subscribes to the saying has ever noticed that they're auto-rejecting bad and terrible ideas constantly, and have also never had a great idea.

Do you expect an alien species that is intelligent enough to create the technology to travel through space will understand math in a way that is at least in principle intelligible to humans?

If yes, is it possible that there are also other ideas that all intelligences are likely to almost necessarily converge on?

I think you forgot to write what should have been paragraph three of your comment, but from context I'm guessing that your proposed effective, ethical response to repeated nonsense is just to change the subject and see who goes with you on the new track?

Any more than it is begging the question to assume that there cannot be anything that is beyond physical explanation?

Yes, words are symbols. But when we're talking about consciousness, we're talking about the experience itself, not the association between the word and the experience. And we have no understanding of why or how the experience exists in us.

Why are you trying to tell this guy what he should value? He wants to do work that interests and excites him, and he's making the tradeoffs that balance his personal set of values - with, incidentally, far more information than you have about what those values and specific tradeoffs are.

Pursue your own balance of values with passion, and allow others to be meaningfully different from you. Their desires don't diminish yours.

This, exactly. I don't understand why these aren't required stock equipment on all cars.

Birds? Source?

They were simply commenting that there were a couple people they especially admired, who they think are really decent (i.e., better than average at being decent). It is neither a necessary nor a natural reading to think that means they believe everyone else is below average.

And in a similar vein, we have only very recently become able to detect (some) objects such as this one, and shortly after we gained the ability to spot things like this, we spotted this one. It at least allows the possibility that events like this are not incredibly rare, and we just haven't been able to perceive them until now.