azimir

joined 2 years ago
[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 28 points 14 hours ago (10 children)

No wonder Putin is taking a pass on attending. It would make his time and location line up publicly.

[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 21 points 14 hours ago

Please send your old Kindle to me. I just use them with a USB cable to transfer ebooks. I'll gladly set them up with a few thousand public domain books and give them to kids or local schools.

[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 6 points 14 hours ago

These stupid vehicles and ones that are noisy for the sake of being noisy have one root element: attention. They're designed to force you to pay attention to the owner. Admittedly it's for negative attention, but still it's a cry for help.

Too many people grow up where the only attention they can get is negative. Since humans crave any attention, they'll seek it any way they know how. We'd rather get positive attention, but if you don't have a source or tools to get it you'll go negative in desperation.

I hate that these vehicles are designed to hurt people and they're often on the road because the owner doesn't know how to get attention any other way.

[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 8 points 14 hours ago

If he buys a longer truck, then maybe his dad will hug him just once.

[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 13 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Why does he keep coming back?

[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

It's actually making a serious (at least short term) shift on EV sales in Germany. They're spiking hard right now.

Germany also legalized balcony based solar panels for grid connections. People are excited about lower energy bills, and even directly charging their own cars from their own solar panels.

All of the data shows that renewables are winning the economics in the market compared to carbon-based options. We just need to keep pushing so the rich people let us move faster.

[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 day ago (7 children)

A couple of years ago I got to see a guy shoehorn his person Ford F650 into a Starbucks parking lot. He was so proud of his massive waste of resources that he used daily for commuting and errands. It was utterly sickening with ow much he was excited to talk about how much he was wasting to "stick it to those horrible environmentalists".

The Ford F650 is generally reported to get about 6.75 mpg. Gas prices up? Fuck that asshole. He deserves it.

[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

Our family public health insurance in Germany is 12.5% of your income. There's minimum rates for people who make very little income, but it does cover your household and dependents.

Checkups, illness visits, and initial consultations are free. I had a specialist visit with a cardiologist and it cost zero.

The dental only covers basics. The cost on extra dental is way less than it was in the US for basics.

In the US our good company insurance cost $1200/month, and even then we'd have $3k/year deductables. Oh, and every visit not in the annual checkup was a minimum of $170 out of pocket. Specialists would be $400 out of pocket per visit.

Seeing a non-emergency specialist in Germany can take months. Of course, it was the same in the US, so whatever. Both countries could be better, and should work to improve services available. I'd take Germany's system any day over the commercialized mess that is the US commoditzing and charging people to live.

[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago

As the old joke goes: Emacs is great if you want to learn another OS.

I'm a barbarian vim user. Whenever I watch a real Emacs user operate a full dev environment inside of Emacs I'm always left stunned. It's a whole universe of functionality, not just a refined line editor like vim.

[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 days ago

That's what I was taught at my first tech internship. It's all they had on the UNIX system running the webserver in 1998.

I did write some web pages the pulled live data from the backend. I had the pleasure of writing them in C. I got the data binding to some kind of CORBA system using extern variables that were bound at compile time. All of the html (no js or css yet) was hand built and generated from the C code.

vi was the only editor on the system and there was no way to use arrow keys (the UNIX system didn't have them on the keyboard at all).

I also had the displeasure of building a backup system on a floppy where I had to write a bat script that could manually load a token ring driver, bind a SMB share, load Ghost backup software and backup the local hard drive at under 2mb (yay coax thicknet). The tool used to query and write through the hostname for the backup? Copycon. Fucking copycon in DOS. That showed me how a terrible (but working) tool could be to work with.

Unless an editor can do reasonable vim emulation, I can't take it seriously. You're welcome to use it, but I won't be able to get anything done in it quickly. The vi keys are too ground into my reflexes.

[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Of course.... too long and you only get a fraction of the cookie after gravity wins again.

[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 days ago

You should pay half for streaming services.

 

Spain is ramping up to follow Germany's Deutschland Ticket, which gives nationwide public transit access for a flat rate.

I love our Deutschland Tickets. The subscription system is wonky, but once you have it running it's wonderful.

Nice work, Spain!

 

It's abundantly clear the urban freeways are a total an abject failure for cities and should be removed.

 

London has managed to stabilize the routes and scheduling around the new Elizabeth Line metro in the city. This means they're comfortable with the infrastructure and have the staff to man it properly and they're going from 16 trains an hour to 20 per hour during peak times! That's a train every 3 minutes!

The Elizabeth Line was built to serve east London which had a lack of serious rail services, despite lots of growth over 50 years. It's been wildly successful since it opened in May 2022. It's served over 600,000,000 total trips, with peak days of 800k people per day. The line basically caps out based on how many trains can physically run, so going to 20 per hour could get the line up to a million people per day. That's a huge achievement in the transit world.

Nice work, London!

 

Seattle has opened a subsection of their new Light Rail Line (Line 2). It doesn't connect to downtown yet (still working out engineering issues with the floating bridges), but they were smart enough to start running the section already complete.

Massive (by US standards) ridership has ensured. People needed the transit!

Seattle's geography is really tough for transit systems. The quantity of bottlenecks from riders and mountains is quite high. Trains are a necessity going forward to tie together the region.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34793815

 

I really liked the tone of their article. It's uplifting about how the bike roads are supporting commercial style activities along with being transit resources.

In Berlin I was fascinated by the sheer volume of material being delivered by bikes. Both individuals and companies use the bike roads to move goods. Some of the bikes could haul some serious tonnage, especially the cargo bikes with an enclosed box truck style back end.

Bike infrastructure is commercial infrastructure and it supports jobs all along the route.

 

Seattle continues to inch towards being a pedestrian city again. Now if they could just find a way to make a streetcar that's not stuck in traffic all day...

 
 
 
 

I know that Paris was adding tons of tram lines, but I didn't know about the scale of the metro building. Four wholly new metro lines, 200km of tunnels, 68 stations!

The project was proposed in 2010, started digging in 2016, and is scheduled to be open in 2030.

Huge props to Paris and France! Now that's how you handle big city growth and infrastructure!

 

Plans to pedestrianise parts of Oxford Street will move forward "as quickly as possible", the mayor of London has said.

City Hall claims two thirds of people support the principle of banning traffic on one of the world's busiest streets, with Sir Sadiq Khan adding that "urgent action is needed to give our nation's high street a new lease of life".

Vehicles would be banned from a 0.7-mile (1.1km) stretch between Oxford Circus and Marble Arch, with further potential changes towards Tottenham Court Road.


That piece of road gets a half million visitors per day. It cannot scale with cars taking up all.of the space and resources. I'm really happy to see the Mayor pushing this through. London needs to make more effective use of the scarce room it has. Returning more streets back into places for people instead of cars should be a huge part of that.

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