kdmccormick

lights are designed for cars, not traditional cyclists. it is literally more dangerous for me to wait at a red light surrounded by cars than it is for me to filter to the front of the red light and treat it like a stop sign, getting out ahead of traffic where i am visible and less likely to get hooked by an oblivious turning car.

rather than watching for instances where you think cyclists endanger pedestrians, try to look for instances where cars are endangering both. or if you don't believe that, just look at statistics: thousands of ped and cyclist deaths anually at the hands of drivers, basically zero deaths of peds at the hands of cyclists.

that said, agreed that many 20mph+ ebikes are out of control and needed to be regulated like motor scooters.

oh hey, it's the creator. great site, thank you!!

I would say that a rule is "cheating" iff it is implied by another rule for any arbitrary N.

> I think the issue is 'could any other decision be made'.

IMO, no.

> In the computer analogy, if the 'run time' always arrives at the same answer, because that is the answer from the calculation. Then was there ever a choice?

To me, there was a choice, but that choice was made by an entity which operates deterministically.

> I guess this and the other comments are really saying just because we have the illusion of free will from our perspective,

Kinda. I would only disgaree with the "illusion" thing. It's not an illusion: from our perspective we DO have free will, we ARE in control. Like everything else, free will is relative.

Realize that when we say "we", each of "us" is a facet of that deterministic universe. The universe is not some big external VM that controls us like zombies. It is us. We are the hardware, firmware, and software of the universe, operating and evolving with agency, modifying one another and the world around us. We're not sandboxed processes. You and I, we are two manifestations of conscious thought occurring in the same grand unfolding of physical phenomena. We see a clear boundary between ourselves and the universe, but that's a human point of view, not a physical truth. When the universe decides something, we decide something, and vice versa.

Maybe that's too far into woo woo land for your taste, but it's how I personally reconcile free will and determinism and it's resolved a lot of the existential dread I used to feel around this. ymmv

This is two ways of saying the same thing.

To use a computing metaphor, every animal has "buildtime" predispositions and "runtime" choice-making ability. That "runtime" decision making is based on exercising free will, but of course free will is a biologically built-in capability which executes on the deterministic "VM" that is our physical universe.

i.e., we have free will from the perspective of ourselves, but if you zoom out, that free will is just another predetermined physical phenomena.

It's very simple: Transit in many places is underfunded. Travel info screens cost money to install and maintain. Ads, on the other hand, make money.

Bad comparison. I am not seeking rent on any of my stuff.

Now, if I hoarded a bunch of stuff that other people needed and then charged them for access to it, that'd be rent seeking.

> Sure, you can come up with some obscure examples of rent seeking being immoral, like charging a dehydrated dying person $1000 per glass of water, but that's not what we're discussing here.

This is in fact what we're discussing, and your strawman example is ironically very on the nose. Except it's not water, it's housing. People are being forced to move away from my city or sleep on the street because the average unit rent is $3400 a month. The beneficiaries of this system are property owners who spend some money on development and upkeep (which they deserve to profit from) but largely just rake in passive income from having been lucky enough to buy when prices were low.

Sure, they're worse than walking or biking, but compared to an electric car battery or an ICE car?

At least scooters did something useful for the environment.

> the answer is WAY TOO MUCH, meaning the "eco friendly walkable cities" are not eco friendly AT ALL and they are also unsustainable since they can't evolve without rebuild witch consume much more and demand much big effort than spread areas of small buildings who can be re-built and evolved one at a time issueless for all the others.

This is absolutely inane. Destroying and rebuilding is the opposite of eco-friendly. Building to last is eco-friendly.

Those tightly-packed brick and stone buildings in dense walkable cities last longer and also tend to have less need for AC, since they were designed before that existed. And their use does evolve, from meeting places, to storefronts, to family housing, to condos... old buildings can do it all.

Cookie-cutter suburban homes are the exact opposite. Expendable, inefficient, and inflexible.

What? No. When you are 0, it is your first year. When you are 21, you have begun your 22nd year. In the US you are legal to drink in your 22nd year of life.

You are correct that nobody says "22nd year" in this context, but nobody says "21st year" either. The former is awkward but the latter is just incorrect.

But at the very least Henry George agrees with GP ;)

Spam

Phishing

Buggy generated code

Cheating in online courses

ChatBots that try to do too much and do it worse than real human service reps, like that one that wrongly assured a customer that their airline ticket was refundable

Deluge of low-value generated content taking attention and revenue away from high-value content creators