this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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That's because it's infrastructure. It's very expensive, and needs to be publicly funded to be good - otherwise you have a death spiral of raising prices, neglecting maintenance, and losing passengers because it's expensive and terrible
You can easily make it all back from taxes though... Good public transportation means anyone in a city can work, shop, or patronize anywhere, it makes the economy go brr
The best public transit systems can even make back their money just from low fairs alone due to shear ridership
The best ones don't bother, because collecting fares is expensive and slows everything down
You can have self funded infrastructure, it can work, but it just seems like a bad solution. It's a weakness. All it takes is one leader throwing a wrench in the process, and the whole thing unbalances and you get a death spiral
But if it's free? Even if maintenance is neglected for a time, there's no feedback loop
Btw self funded insulates from that. You can have a committee run it and it blocks a lot of the politics from mattering for it
Might as well make it a public private partnership, right? Then you have total insulation.
That's simply untrue. the best public transit system on earth collects fees, and no, it doesn't slow things down any significant level because it's just tapping as you walk by
It's a schedule that includes buses... You're going to have the odd person who either isn't ready, doesn't have enough on their account, or doesn't understand the system, and each one knocks the schedule off by 20-40 seconds. You've also got lines at the machines, you've got overhead to track all this... None of that is free, especially not the man hours
I've used really really great paid public transport... It just does not compare to when it's also free. More people use it, people act less entitled, it's just a better experience