kugel7c
@kugel7c@feddit.de
- Comment on Pros / cons of riding a bike? 2 weeks ago:
Yeah I’m in Germany so my context is somewhere in between and here the projects that improve my life the most is when cars don’t get to/need to travel on the streets as much, this can either be through modal filters, removing car lanes or just banning cars (with the usual delivery window in the morning and such). And they are starting to get to the kind of streets where you could go 100km/h (in terms of size) that are in practice 50km/h, and are now getting them down to 30 (taking 1 of 2 car lanes and giving it to bikes as well as adding obstacles to indicate slower speeds). So it’s doable and of course it takes time, but with a bit of luck it might be faster than some Americans imagine it could be.
So of course bike lanes along mayor roads (corridors) make sense, and it can be a good starting point to get a skeleton network in place, which then can Kickstart intersection redesigns and traffic calming, wherever it’s reasonable around it. To me the best bike paths don’t go along roads though, they are the “recreational” paths that still connect things. Cutting through a patch of Forrest or a park, going along the waterfront, parallel to a tramway or rail corridor or just along/through the fields. These are probably also politically cheaper than some other measures, but you run the risk of building a thing that just connects nothing because there is no real infrastructure on either end.
I feel like Americans think they are 60+ years behind when they are probably only 30-40, if the attitude turns somewhat sharply, either just in your local area or more generally, maybe just 15-25.
A lot of this stuff is monetarily very cheap, depending on how desperately you wanted change the actual infrastructure you’d need, would boil down to planters, bollards, cones, maybe hay bails or large stones/concrete pieces. The problem with that stuff is that it’s only possible with the right opportunity politically, otherwise your traffic calming might get bulldozed by police or something.
- Comment on Pros / cons of riding a bike? 2 weeks ago:
I sorta agree and sorta don’t, all streets should be 30km/h or less and shared traffic, everything else should be with bike lanes. Streets meaning a piece of infrastructure that provides access to places lining it, not a piece of infrastructure for longer distance travel.
The Netherlands is good not because there is a bike lane on every street but because all the streets with destinations (private homes, business, schools)are connected by bike lanes as well as roads, often more and more direct bike lanes.
There are a lot of areas where cars bikes and sometimes pedestrians share the same space both in inner cities and in residential neighborhoods, it’s just that they aren’t through roads for cars or at least very very slow ones, while they are often through roads for bikes and peds.
- Comment on Half-Earth Socialism: A Planetary Crisis Planning Game 4 months ago:
Brother have you heard of both young people, and the concept of ‘having a future’, death might be inevitable, it’s still better to think about and implement things to quell the suffering, as well as to continue living with hope than to revel in the fact that we’re all dying.
Hope isn’t at the bottom of the box of Pandora without reason, it’s both, condemning us to strive and suffer, and the only way to make anything of it.
- Comment on Half-Earth Socialism: A Planetary Crisis Planning Game 4 months ago:
I listened to the entire and it struck a chord with me, it might be because I’m similarly petite bourgeois as the authors or something. But if you couldn’t get through it I might suggest softly that you read chapter 4 first (or only).
To me the order the book has it in makes sense, but it might be the wrong one for you. It explains the What for 3/4 and then carefully answers the Why with a short story in the last 1/4. It is essentially a manifesto with a reason to believe in it as the last part.
For me the reason it worked is because the walk through philosophy and history sufficiently grounded the authors claims toward the necessity of economic planning and rewilding and in combination with my prior beliefs made the utopia real.
- Comment on Take me back 7 months ago:
Well I might look at this Rosa Luxemburg Foundation or perhaps this Heinrich Böll Foundation if I were in need to peddle some specific policy to someone that both cares and is powerful. It’s in many ways the same prisoners dilemma as with all of advertisement.
So yes if they were all gone it’d be better for everyone but as we unfortunately live in the system we live in I’d rather have the few that might actually represent me exist beside all of the garbage. Same with the political parties they are associated with as well.
- Comment on Take me back 7 months ago:
Yeah this whole thing a bit maximized might be neatly wrapped up in this Hegelian insight rephrased in 2014 found on the wiki
“It is Hegel’s insight that reason itself has a history, that what counts as reason is the result of a development. This is something that Kant never imagines and that Herder only glimpses.”
In this way if not even the greats can do it how could a modern person or a think tank but at the same time does this not imply we currently need all three of them.
Also is the modern YouTube video essay channel sort of a think tank for terminally online people ? Maybe food for thought, maybe a joke who knows really.
- Comment on Take me back 7 months ago:
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. As much as reading and understanding smith and other philosophy is important for the individual, think tanks unfortunately seem necessary in a modern context aiming to transform, often quite unreadable, as your excerpt demonstrates, philosophical learning, into applicable law/policy.
As with everything this process is utterly captured by right wing and market fundamentalist interests. Just sort this list by Bias/Affiliation and skim some of the descriptions it’s a bit horrific, but it also might save you from reading an old school stochastic parrot with an inhumane agenda.
- Comment on Take me back 7 months ago:
The Adam smith institute is a right wing free market think tank with likely very questionable donors. wiki It likely doesn’t really do research but takes sources that support their preexisting believes and retells them.
Certainly it was at least very hard to make the capitalist exploitation of the worker so all encompassing before the invention of the mechanical watch (Although there was likely a ton of housework and the general situation was garbage what with feudal lords and all that) . It then likely exploded with the industrial revolution and at least in places where the working class managed to emancipate themselves got somewhat cut back. Now especially for countries outside of the west and increasingly also the US and parts of EU it’s likely getting worse, especially with multi employment and precarious employment(gig work, semi self employment, 0h contracts, mechanical turk …).
- Comment on I hate Turkey 8 months ago:
Could also be a Kurd
- Comment on McCarthies everywhere 10 months ago:
Eh I’m pretty sure these parts are there to satisfy some outside actors, the theory behind it certainly is socialism/anarchism, and if you can make transformative change without sticking strictly to definitions from the 30s, that’s still a good thing. Also I believe that democracy/socialism is not really a once you’ve got it you’ve got it thing but a continuous process that strives to better itself constantly, so yes it’s still being built and it will be forever.
- Comment on McCarthies everywhere 10 months ago:
- Comment on From gamer to what?? 10 months ago:
Obligatory wirtual Clip: youtu.be/Vq1iqwGQblo