Awfully LOUD! Amid the hustle and bustle of a shithole president, a whinging, whining Sukabee Huk, the calamitous jaw of a raw alternative fact that takes shape of ‘CON’ WAY roadway!! The slightest murmur of an electric wheel in spin from A to B and back. Up Market, down Union, Twin Peaks to Silicon Dust, roam Jackson, detour Diviserdero and drop me intact of mind, free of CD ROM, a book in hand ( remember books) I’ll take the silence of the noise, and keep my composure, free and driven by organic connection to my fellow man, my neighbor in seat, a mouth to speak, to express and laugh, and make valuable contact.
Now that’s ridiculous. L.A. is already a major metropolis with (despite its reputation) a huge and well-funded public-transit system, and Santa Monica is among the closest suburbs. Like, the boundary between Santa Monica and downtown L.A. is just an imaginary line on the cement. It’s not like the miles of rural timber country between the Bay Area and Santa Cruz.
I used to really complain about the headlines, but the post about Facebook put it all in perspective.
If you depend on Facebook for a significant amount of traffic, you have to have an attention grabbing headline, even if it’s not supported by the article itself because that’s the only thing that will attract a click, and enough clicks is the difference between life and closing the web site.
It suddenly made a whole lot of the ‘fake news’ business understandable. If web sites have no people browsing the whole site, only clicking on isolated articles from Facebook, then the only thing that keeps you alive are “high-emotional-engagement” items, which are the least likely to have carefully considered or balanced viewpoints.
I wasn’t on the “social media is killing society” bandwagon, but boy, that article has got me wondering. I’d always assumed it was the waste of time web sites that lived on Facebook. I hadn’t considered that every non-hobby site was dependent on them.
I worked in SF near a pick-up stop for the San Jose Corps. These busses block traffic and practically run over pedestrians in their effort to get their highly paid Millennials to the church on time.
When I was coming up, I leaned to code in Assembler. I know how computers work! Silicon Valley wouldn’t give me the time of day when I moved out there: Female and over 40.
BART is actually a victim of its own success. The number of passengers is far greater than it was originally built to handle. This is partly because they have built additional spur lines that feeds passengers into the original line. It’s that original circuit that is creaking under the increased passenger volumes, but so far they have been able to scale up to meet the challenge while staying reasonably reliable. So that optimism was more than justified.
The point of an office with people is that you can talk to them.
If hackerspace contains anyone other than fellow Googlers I suspect that you’ll have opted out of any project that involves anything even remotely confidential.
How does that work? Are there people working for bigger firms or it is all small/independents for whom company gossip leaking out isn’t such a concern?
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”
― Gustavo Petro
Or to transalte for the Tech crowd: A developed country is not a place where the rich ride private busses on public roads paid for by taxation, while making every effort not to contribute to taxation.
I know it’s hard for US citizens to imagine, but a working, well funded public transport system (just as all infrastructure) improves quality of life. Well cared for public parks, libraries and a functioning transport system is good for everyone: rich and poor alike.
Of course Silicon Valley has got some idiotic self-driving cars to sell and consequently, have no interest in functioning public transport. But the physical reality is, that 50 people in a bus or a train take up considerably less road space (thus infrastructure investment) than the same 50 people in cars.
There is no way that a functioning public transport system wouldn’t be able to transport Apple / Google folk quicker to work, than private buses. You just need foresight, vision and commitment. All of which are lacking.
The fact that these blood suckers (meaning the commercial entities, not the individual humans) use the bus stops and roads for free is infuriating.
Having lived through 18 years of gentrification in Central London I would be interested to see a study which explores whether diversity-friendly neighbourhoods are a bad thing per se or just in an economy where housing asset has replaced all savings / pensions and is the only financial security the average person might have.
Oh, and where investment in property in places like London & SF by dodgy, corrupt blood suckers (in this case I do mean the individuals) exploiting natural resources and privatising public assets is the preferred method of life insurance for capitalists from unstable regimes.
In my experience diversity works well until the capitalisation of housing distorts (and destroys) everything.
The rich will never take the bus because when time is not a factor they’ll always choose to travel in comfort.
The only public transport the rich will ever take is a subway since they can be legitimately faster than cars. But those are very expensive and not feasible for many cities.
I already laid out some of this but unless you’re willing to build some sort of trains (LRT or Subway) this is false.
A private buses can pick up employees at a few key stops and then to straight to the workplace with zero other stops, a public bus cannot make that trade-off.
A private bus can massively skew it’s schedule around that businesses workday, a public bus cannot.
Rich people in Japan / Switzerland / Scandinavia don’t seem to have the same preferences.
What exactly is the argument against building some trains? Surely we’ve got the technology to do so, unlike the technology for safe self driving cars.
Might surprise you, but in most places public bus schedules are planned around peoples’ lives / work schedule. Which is why around here in the morning there is a bus every 5 minute while after 9pm they only come every 20 minutes.
I’d have thought that someone like Google could have built a planned town somewhere out in the wilderness with housing for their staff, and a long walk back to civilisation for anyone who gets fired. They could call it something like City 17, or Googlegrad.
Equally surprising might be the idea that many public transport systems run limited-stop express services during peak hours, which effectively “pick up employees at a few key stops and then to straight to the workplace with zero other stops”.
Assuming that the workplace and public transport infrastructure are sensibly managed, of course.
