My quality of life is increased by having more bike lanes so that I can get around _faster_ and _healthier_ than having to use my car. I'm also able to get where I want and need to be on my own schedule by car, bike, public transit, and walking — which mode matters based on the needs of the destination.
I shop at Costco by bike most of the time. Once every couple of months there's enough that needs to be bought that I use the car.
I have a dental appointment tomorrow: I can walk or cycle there faster than I can drive and find parking. I have another appointment on Monday at a hospital and I'll cycle there far faster than I can take public transit _or_ private car, and I won't have to pay ~$15/hour for parking or park a kilometre away.
Get out of your North American car bubble and look at what Paris and the Netherlands have done: they have not banned private car ownership or use, but they have removed some of them from streets. Utrecht just opened a massive underground _bike parking garage_ but it's also one of the busiest cities in the Netherlands in terms of car traffic.
There is no war on cars; that's something that has been invented out of whole cloth. Those of us who agitate for improved _options_ simply want (1) cars to pay their full freight (they don't, not by a long shot); (2) safer roads for pedestrians, cyclists, and those who want alternative mobility options; (3) more public transit; and (3) fewer cars moving slower because that's the only way to alleviate traffic.
You're not in traffic: you are traffic.
Your claim that designing for cars is designing for people is risible. Designing for people first (that's the goal!) means larger sidewalks, more barriers so that distracted or angry drivers find it harder to find themselves on those sidewalks, and fewer cars with clear rules so that vulnerable road users have absolute priority over people in cars. The larger and faster your vehicle, the more responsibility you should have, both in terms of liability when you inevitably collide with an obstruction and in terms of what you pay to keep the roads and surrounding infrastructure maintained.
The only way to stop congestion is to get cars off the road.
Cars are the congestion. There is no other definition, and no other solution.
HOW you get cars off the road is worthy of debate. Pretending that there's a "war on cars" is not and never has been. Cars and their drivers have been subsidized for more than a century, never paying the full cost of the damage that they do to the environment, the roads, etc.
1. Car taxes / registrations should be based on weight and energy usage inefficiency and ratchet up quickly for personal vehicles that are larger than some sensible size based on pedestrian safety at no more than 30 kph. (Drivers of modern pickup trucks and SUVs cannot see pedestrians shorter than ~1.7m at ~5m, and the fact that their fronts are basically walls mean that those pedestrians are more likely to be killed on impact or bounced under the tires.)
2. There should absolutely be congestion pricing to enter downtown locations during the day or other times when vehicular traffic will be high. Yes, that means that most deliveries by transport truck would need to be staged into smaller vehicles and delivered to the businesses needing them, or delivered overnight.
3. Uber, Lyft, and Waymo are part of the problem and should be treated as such.
4. There should be more investment in public transit. Paid for by increased registrations and congestion pricing, preferentially. Fares should be reduced, ideally to free. More use of public transit makes it safer and incentivizes making it faster.
5. There should absolutely be more bike lanes in pretty much every city. It's called induced demand and once the infrastructure is safe, you will see increased usage by all sorts of alternative mobility users (but mini e-motorcycles should be licensed just like regular motorcycles and should not be using the mobility infrastructure).
6. Pedestrian and wheelchair users matter first and foremost over any other road user (bikes, scooters, cars, etc.).
We've had 50+ years of Robert Moses being proved wrong. It's time to design cities around people, not around cars. Call that a war on cars if you want, but it's not: it's a war for peoples' quality of life. Cars can be part of the solution, but they need to be treated like the problem they are first.
Mostly because people are pretending that it's abnormal to call out asinine behaviour.
Like your bad take. Like the jackass who called my response "racism".
These are threads full of the dumbest takes, and your presumption that focusing on an egotistical maniac's many failings for a few posts with many hours between them where people respond with the absolute worst takes that they could (like yours above) says so much more about you.
I probably won't have anything else to say about Elon unless someone else says something really stupid like "it's his rockets". Talk about erasing people who actually contributed something to the world…
Dude. You can check out my GitHub Profile (it's the same as my HN handle).
This isn't racism, this is calling out fact. EM takes credit for other peoples' hard work. He's ludicrously rich. He's an asshole. All facts.
Also a fact: he's white and he's definitely a white South African with everything _that_ means he grew up with as a privileged child on the oppressor side of SA Apartheid.
It's all facts and none of it racism. Don't be stupid.
Unsurprisingly, you're wrong and likely projecting.
I don't hate Elon. I hate what shitty things he does. I do my best not to think about him, but then there are people who mindlessly defend him because…I have no clue why.
There are at least a billion people worth celebrating in this world more than celebrating an egotistical maniac who has demonstrated that not only does he have no empathy _at all_ (which is, as I understand it, one of the main signs of psychopathy) but has declared that it's a weakness.
Mostly? I try not to think about Elon. He's not worth my time. I left Twitter shortly after he bought it and I refuse to buy anything that he's associated with. Voting with my dollars is all I can do, realistically, and as such Cursor is permanently on my "do not touch" list.
When I see people playing sycophant to him is when I speak up. He doesn't need your ass-kissing and he likely doesn't even notice it. But he's been instrumental in destroying American soft power which is going to destroy America's sole positive role in the world. I also believe that he through "Doge" is indirectly responsible for the premature deaths of millions of people who were being helped by American aid — and I don't call that as mainly Trump's or Stephen Miller's, because Elon gleefully did what was requested.
But for a lot of people, he wouldn't lose his standing for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day because they've attached their identity to him. And that's just sad, because he's not even an interesting cult figure. He's a boring old white supremacist repeating the same bullshit.
I think that it's extremely healthy to have a hostile negative one of someone who has demonstrated repeatedly that they are assholes.
- He threw a "roman" salute; this is incontrovertible fact
- He routinely misgenders and deadnames his daughter Vivian because he's a man-child
- He routinely says things which are demonstrably untrue and have never been true (there is no "white genocide" going on in SA and has never been)
- He routinely insults people with sexual language and has accused someone he disagreed with of being a "pedo guy" — and was exonerated in US courts because US courts have a much lower standard than most of the rest of the world about making false statements
He's not a nice person. He's not really that smart. He's a wealthy nepo baby who took advantage of his mother's Canadian citizenship to make it easier for him to immigrate to the US and was forced to work with Peter Thiel as part of the "PayPal Mafia" because each of their individual projects was tanking pretty badly since neither one was actually as smart as the engineers they had hired (but they get the credit).
There are a bunch of things that I've read about him that I don't believe to be true or simply don't care, and I am unhappy to see the body dysmorphic criticism leveled at him since that hurts other people with similar body types or issues more than it will hurt this psychopathic egotistical asshole.
What's unhealthy is the need for some people to defend someone who is objectively an asshole for his most assholish moves. I felt the same way when people defended Jobs for asshole behaviour.
Given that the egotistical maniac we're talking about is well known for lashing out at people who don't tell him what he wants to hear…I have no reason to trust primary or secondary sources, aside from what selfsame white supremacist egotistical maniac says about himself through the demonstrably false conspiracies he supports and how he treats his own children.
Like most egotistical maniacs, he must be managed around. Hell, even Jobs had to be managed around because he made incorrect choices as often as he made correct choices -- and he was infinitely more likeable on a bad day than Elon Musk on a good day.
I thought it was his actual rocket engineers known for landing rockets, where he's routinely kept out of the loop by having to make choices about the duck the queen is holding.
I find it easier to do when I bike to Costco _without_ my trailer.
(I have two good sized panniers and can end up with ~$150 of foodstuffs packed well in them no problem. More often than not, I get less than that and add more stops to the trip to pick up from 3-4 places while out. And I get my exercise while I'm at it.)
Back in the dark ages of the 80s when I was taking the SAT and ACT, these tests were considered good predictors for the first semester's performance.
That's it.
I did well on both tests and did well on my first semester. It's the semesters after where my performance tanked because I didn't have some of the work habits that solid B students had. (I will also be clear and say that at least some of the problem is attributable to the university and how it handled advisors. My advisor was completely useless and let me schedule for _way_ too much hard stuff.)
There was also a really good predictor of how one would do on the SAT or ACT: NoBitH. The Number of Bathrooms in the House.
Yup. The SAT and ACT at the time were better measures of economic advantage than innate intelligence. I have no reason to believe that this isn't still the case, especially since they're more entrenched in the system than ever.
The chezmoi integration with 1Password is excellent; for those who prefer Bitwarden, it supports both the default CLI (which has some inexcusable behaviours for a security product, IMO) and `rbw` (which is infinitely better than the default CLI). It supports `pass`, `gopass`, `passage`, AWS Secrets Manager, KeePass, and several other approaches.
It was the work of a couple of minutes to enable a secret for a Claude Code API token to be mounted in a VM where I'm running Claude for a project where the value is pulled from 1Password and I can regenerate it and reapply without fear.
If one doesn't have to worry about secrets in one's dotfiles, I'm sure that other dotfile managers including Nix with Home Manager will suffice. I do, so they won't.
I've bounced off Nix every time I tried it, before I even started trying something like Home Manager.
I've been using (and contributing to) chezmoi for ~6 years now. Given that it has first-class integration with secrets managers, I suspect that it does things that Home Manager can't.
Language doesn't work that way. Being prescriptivist about it doesn't change that language evolves. The time to have had this fight about "banned books" was 40 odd years ago, and you still would have lost it because your interpretation being limited to a "country-wide ban" is also nonsense in a meaningful sense. If a political figure has made a decision that a book will not be available in the places where it would otherwise normally be available for people for whom that political figure has some level of control -- and that unavailability is for purely political reasons -- it's perfectly sensible to call it a book banning.
There are books and magazines banned in prison libraries. Because it's prison, those books are also considered contraband if a prisoner's family delivers it to them. This is a book banning. One may argue whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's a book banning.
If children would _normally_ have access to age-appropriate books in a school library about same sex marriages (Suzie's Two Dads or Johnny's Two Mommies or whatever) but some retrogressive numbskull politician in Florida decides that teaching kids about same sex marriages is wrong and therefore those books are no longer allowed in school libraries, it's a book banning. If the child brought said book from home because they have two dads or two moms, they'd also probably land in trouble because school administrations are conservative and CYA in nature.
If you actually cared about words and their meaning, you wouldn't try to insist that there's only one correct meaning. Language evolves.
Wikipedia: Book censorship or book banning is the act of some authority (countries, government) taking measures to suppress ideas and information within a book.
More Wikipedia: According to the Marshall University Library, a banned book in the United States is one that has been "removed from a library, classroom, etc."[19] In many situations, parents or concerned parties will ban or propose a ban on a children's book based on the book's contents.[20] The American Library Association publishes a list of the top "Banned and Challenged Books" for any given year.[21] The American Library Association also organizes a "Banned Books Week", which is "an annual event celebrating the freedom to read."[21] The goal of the project is to bring awareness to banned books and promote the freedom to learn.[22]
All that's required for a "ban" to be a ban is an official act to prevent or prohibit someone from doing something. In the case of school book bans, it's to prevent teachers or school librarians from exercising their skills and judgement on introducing books for kids to read. Sometimes this is justifiable, most of the time it is not.
I suspect that the same applies to most of the words that came to your mind; they're just being used in contexts you politically disagree with and therefore it's a "misuse". (Seinfeld's "soup nazi" was a misuse. Putin's use of the same word is a misuse. Descriptions of modern nationalist movements and the powers that support them are descriptive.)
There is a concept for pets called "banned breeds" (e.g., "pit bulls") that are similarly politically motivated in the same way that book banning happens.
There's a fine line between large modifications to existing infrastructure and "new stuff". You need a handyman you can trust in order to know the difference.
It also depends on your insurance situation. If I'm doing renovations, my house insurance company will not honour my insurance if the work is being done by a contractor without knowing the insurance status of the contractor.
One thing to consider is whether there is a reasonably-priced "emergency contractor" service to which you can subscribe. Enercare in Toronto offers plumbing protection for $21/mo and electrical protection for $16/mo. Service calls — 24 hour service calls — are included and covered in the plan, and labour for fixing the problem is included. We've had multiple cases where we've needed to call a plumber out to look at issues and it would have cost ~$200 to get them in the door and more than $400 by time the work was done. We've also used them for discounted plumbing work (15% off labour and most parts) in the past when we didn't have a different contractor for something we needed done.