admiralteal

There is an argument, and it’s pretty straightforward and reasonable. In congested cities, a large percent of drivers (I’ve seen as high as 1/3 for downtown Manhattan pre-pandemic) are within a few blocks of destination and are actively seeking parking, and Uber doesn’t need to park. Which does imply an actually-correct argument – the amount of parking you need in a city to support cars being the primary transportation mode is ridiculous.

But the entire sales pitch of Uber is that it will be so quick and easy that you’ll use it without a thought. Their entire business model is to generate more trips, not consolidate or reduce trips. There is no incentive in them to reduce how long their users spend on the road absent competition with bikeped/public transit. There’s a reason Uber pools never caught on. Obviously the easier car trips get, the more people will make trips by car. And while the parking geometry is insane, the road geometry of non-parking vehicles being the primary transportation mode is barely any better. Especially when you consider you’ve simply shifted a large number of vehicles-seeking-parking into vehicles-seeking-fare.

Absent any investment in better bikeped and public transportation, it is possible Uber can have a marginal improvement to congestion. But not enough to really make a difference and improve anyones’ lives. And it’s also possible it slightly worsens it by generating trips that otherwise would’ve simply not happened because the traffic sucked too bad.

He’s incapable of understanding that what he purchased is not a toy put there solely for his enjoyment

But that is exactly what it is.

Why do cops have the power to just routinely turn off their body cams?

That should be limited to using the bathroom. If it gets turned off during regular duty, it should be presumed to mean something is being covered up because that is exactly what it means. There should be paperwork triggered every time it is turned off.

Absolutely. And if the state were offering that safety net earnestly there would be no need for anyone like the church to offer it today. But when the church stopped being the public safety net, the bottom end of housing significantly just dropped out.

We had the idiotic belief that everyone would be living in the suburbs with a two-car garage so we built our society around the idea that very little else needed to exist other than detached single-family homes in the suburbs with a two-car garage.

I’d much rather see serious pushes towards legitimate public/social housing rather than empowering third parties with their own goals and motivations to supply the thing we need. But at the moment I’ll take whatever we can get.

Church housing used to be a part of the service that “missing middle” represents. Not literally stuff in the middle, but housing products that are largely not allowed anymore. They used to supply at the lower end that we now have to rely on extremely inefficient institutions like shelters to do.

All housing that gets built is good for the housing crisis. But what’s particularly good is building housing at Market slices where there is currently nothing.

A person being that deliberately obtuse is present in this thread, unfortunately.

There’s also a huge difference between an AI tool and an AI generative model. There’s definitely grey area there, but pretending the background eraser is identical to Stable Diffusion is ludicrous. One of them is used by an artist to gain marginal improvements in quality/workflow, the other has an objective of replacing the artist entirely.

It really fucks with the resale market, too. As is the intention. People will be getting used cars and being told they need to pay full, new price to unlock features.

More reasons to want right to repair and adversarial interoperability. So that if Tesla refuses to reasonable implement features that the hardware fully supports, a third-party can do it instead.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade1696

Fuck Science for paywalling research. May they rot in hell.

The article implies they are using electric charge to bring the ions into and out of solution to trigger melting and recrystalization. Does anyone have actual details about the process?

Also, is this paper saying it has a COP of 0.3? That’s terrible compared to typical evaporative refrigeration.

Your story with GM is… false. It’s just false.

People were literally lining up at dealers trying to buy the EV1. Their waitlists overflowed.

GM produced that car because of the California Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate (which yes, existed in the 90s). But they didn’t quietly roll over and accept the mandate, they also, in parallel, mounted huge legal and astroturf battles against the law.

Which were successful. The law was killed. And what did GM do with their backstock of vehicles? Did they go down those waitlists and sell off the fleet? No, they packaged them onto car carriers with people literally camped out at dealers to buy them, watching and crushed them.

They had a successful plan to sell profitable EVs that people wanted. It wasn’t nearly as profitable as selling ICE vehicles, but they knew the changing regulatory structure in CA would change that and hedged the bets. But also invested heavily in killing that regulatory change, and the moment they did, they intentionally killed the car to stop more consumers from having and liking them.

Wagoner has said the biggest mistake he ever made as [GM] chief executive was killing the EV1, GM’s revolutionary electric car, and failing to direct more resources to hybrid gas-electric research.

PS: they joined the 2019 Trump lawsuit to fight new CA emission standards.

That doesn’t follow.

It means the AI companies that don’t behave responsibly will have a huge advantage over the ones that do.

But malicious actors don’t want their generated data to be recognizable to LLMs. They want it to be impersonating real people in order to promote advertising/misinformation goals.

Which means that even if they started flagging LLM generated content as LLM generated, that would just mean only the most malicious and vile LLM contents will be out there training models in the future.

I don’t see any solution to this on the horizon. Pandora is out of the box.

Dead internet theory seems like a completely inevitable future place that we’re all racing to. I don’t see any way to avoid it. It’s a tragedy of the commons in a place where there is no organizing body that can step in and prevent private actors from destroying everything. Worse, we’re more concerned with those private actors being strong and competitive which is only accelerating us towards the doomed endgame.

Isn’t that exactly what religion is for?

The complaint is likely to focus on challenges to Amazon Prime, Amazon rules that the FTC says block lower prices on competing websites, and policies the FTC believes force merchants to use Amazon’s logistics and advertising services, according to some of the people.

Amazon Prime, which began as a subscription for unlimited free shipping, is also expected to be a target, some of the people said. Prime has evolved to include books, music and video streaming. The FTC is concerned that the bundle of services is used to illegally cement the company’s market power.

The FTC is also expected to claim that Amazon steers sellers to its own logistics services, which include shipping and warehousing, by rewarding them with better placement on the site, and punishing them when they don’t

Amazon’s rapidly growing digital advertising business will also likely be targeted, some of the people said. The agency is concerned Amazon forces merchants to buy ads in order to get better placement in customer search results.

Sounds like there’s only some very minor restructuring even on the table here. The worst case scenario for Amazon is going to be getting forced to unbundle certain bundled services. I’d definitely like to see that, but I also don’t imagine it would seriously threaten Amazon’s hegemony, unless they’re forced to pay major fines in proportion to the filthy lucre the service bundling has caused. It does not sound like anyone is telling Amazon they need to spin off parts of their business. Just unbundle some products.

Researchers concluded that the culprit behind the extremely unusual 2019 outbreak was the intestinal pathogen, Campylobacter jejuni. The gut-dwelling bacteria is well-known as one of the most common causes of food poisoning and diarrheal cases in the world. But, less well-known, it’s also one of the leading triggers for GBS.

Adding this because I think it’s pretty critical for your quotes. So this is something that has been (likely) foodborne in Peru before. But the article implies that only about 2/3 of their identified cases showed signs of the same infection.

You’re Wrong About did a really nice piece on her just in April, going over the history, the controversy that got her cancelled before “cancelling” was even a thing everyone talked about (because she protested the Catholic Church’s sex abuse in Ireland before the Spotlight stories were even a thing), and just generally her life story: https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/1112270/12624780-sinead-o-connor-with-allyson-mccabe

Worth a listen if you like that kind of thing. She was an amazing person that got repeatedly done dirty by the industry and cultural zeitgeist and this death is a tragedy.

Isolation is definitely torture, but it’s hardly a new form of it. It’s been used to destroy people throughout history. Not to disagree with anything you’ve written here.

Also absolutely massive subsidies are flowing out of the IRA into a lot of diverse economic sectors for the purpose of fighting climate change. Estimated $1.3 trillion since it is uncapped and built largely around unit subsidies.

That is a lot of money flowing to a lot of firms. Republicans like money going to businesses.

28 weeks is 6.2 months.