Rivalarrival
@Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
- Comment on Being poor is expensive 9 hours ago:
Current Poverty line for a single person is $16000. $12000 is 75% of the current single-person household. $12,000/yr, free and clear, before you leave for work on Monday morning. You’re above the poverty line by noon on Monday.
You and your partner are both receiving the same UBI. Together, you’re receiving $24000/yr. That’s 110% of the current poverty rate for a household of two. You’re above the line just from your UBI.
For you, your partner, and your two kids, that’s $48000/yr. That’s 145% of the poverty line for a household of 4.
Does that still seem unreasonable? I’d be ecstatic over 25%.
- Comment on This was the best ever segment of Saturday Night Live 20 hours ago:
I think this post needs more cowbell.
- Comment on Being poor is expensive 20 hours ago:
Waiting an hour for a bus each way for your daily commute
Adding an hour-long commute turns an 8 hour day into a 10 hour day, for no extra pay. A $25/hr job turns into a $20/hr job.
For the bus rider, avoiding that “commuter tax” strictly limits employment options to those employers on the same line(s) as their home. Adding a transfer slashes the hourly rate even faster.
Further, those bus lines only operate in dense urban areas, where housing costs are also at an exorbitant premium for the space acquired.
The driver can choose to work in less dense areas, where traffic jams simply don’t occur, parking is easy to find, and housing costs are considerably lower. The bus rider can’t: buses tend not to serve such areas.
- Comment on Being poor is expensive 20 hours ago:
And there it hits again: the core of the issue is not the bus agency, but the lack of support for excellent public transit.
I don’t control the busses. I don’t dictate to the busses when they need to come. I don’t dictate to the busses what routes they take, or where they will actually go. I can only accept whatever level of service they are willing to provide.
I do control my car. I do dictate to my car when it needs to go. I create the level of service I will receive.
The monetary price of a bus fare is significantly less than the cost of a car trip. But even with the absolute best public transit system, the opportunity costs vastly exceed the difference. An hour commute turns a $25/hr job into a $20/hr job. Employment and/or housing choices are limited: Job and home need to be on the same bus line, because a twice-daily transfer is just going to kill hourly earnings. And, of course, there is the premium on urban housing.
Between the time costs, the housing costs, and the restrictions on employment choices, busses are a massive cost borne primarily by the impoverished.
- Comment on Being poor is expensive 21 hours ago:
Minimum wage isn’t going to cut it anymore. We need UBI.
Democracy is the idea that political authority is derived from the people. The government’s power to levy taxes and conduct its business is taken from We The People; We The People should be fairly compensated for the use of that power. We should each be paid a citizenship dividend of 75% of the current poverty level, before we put a single hour on the clock.
- Comment on She skipped groceries for a week to pay for that Little Caesars. 1 week ago:
Not under this rationale, no.
- Comment on She skipped groceries for a week to pay for that Little Caesars. 1 week ago:
The “+s/es” construction typically indicates plurality. “It” is fundamentally singular, so there is no justification for “its”.
“It’s” eliminates more exceptions to various rules for word construction; it achieves greater simplification.
- Comment on She skipped groceries for a week to pay for that Little Caesars. 1 week ago:
Found the English teacher.
- Comment on She skipped groceries for a week to pay for that Little Caesars. 1 week ago:
The apostrophe-s construction “it’s” suffices for both the contractive form “it is” as well as the possessive form of “it”. “Its” exists solely to satisfy the craven pedantry of elementary school English teachers. Nothing of value is lost by abandoning this archaic construction.
“Its” is deprecated.
Downvote all you like; pedant tears are full of electrolytes.
- Comment on The holy trinity 1 week ago:
Whiskey, Vodka, Tequila
- Comment on Lawyer here: I concur! 3 weeks ago:
The Bollinger B1 and B2 were supposed to have exactly that. A central passthrough all the way from the back of the bed to the front bumper. You would have been able to haul 20’ lumber entirely within the vehicle.
Of course, their $125k price point for a no-frills electric work truck was twice as much as three-row luxury SUV pretty much doomed them from the start. If they had targeted a price point suitable for fleet operations, we’d all be driving them.
- Comment on Why exactly are nursing aids paid so poorly? 5 weeks ago:
Chronic Luigi Insufficiency.
- Comment on Well done, all of you! 5 weeks ago:
I think you lost the plot. This thread diverted to a discussion on the pitfalls of urbanization.
I think we are largely in agreement on the closed lane issue.
- Comment on Well done, all of you! 5 weeks ago:
3 was not much of an assumption. Roads are very rarely exposed to their peak capacity. 99.9% of the time they have substantial capacity to absorb excess traffic. Your assumption that they cannot is that 0.1%.
Once the motoring public at large understands the method and utilizes it, the only way it doesn’t minimize t
False. Patently false. The degree of control required to prevent stoppages is not available to individual drivers. To avoid hitting cones, drivers near the end of the closing lane have to make rapid changes in speed to ensure they are lined up for a zipper merge. That means hard braking, and that braking ripples through to everyone behind, in both lanes. Zipper merging is the root cause of stop and go traffic.
That hard braking isn’t required when zippering at the beginning of the closure, because there is no hard obstacle to hit in the open lane.
At best, this zipper-at-the-end method “works” not by achieving any traffic benefit, but by setting the expectation for other drivers behavior.
The alternative to zipper-late is “no passing in work zones”. Your position is established at the time you enter the zone; you have between that time and the obstruction to merge, but you may not pass someone in the adjacent lane. There is no longer any benefit to racing ahead to the end of the lane. The zipper merge occurs shortly after the lane closure.
The upside of zipper-late is that there are fewer opportunities to be pissed off at “cheaters”. It is psychologically better. It reduces road rage.
The downside of zipper-late is everything related to traffic. It introduces far more disruption. It needlessly turns free-flowing traffic into stop-and-go. It endangers workers at or near the closure.
“No passing” is objectively better for traffic before and during the closure. It increases speeds and thus throughput. But it also makes it easy for everyone to identify and be pissed at “cheaters”. Those cheaters induce road rage, so we can’t have the superior traffic method. Instead, we have to normalize cheating and tolerate worse traffic.
We tolerate slower baggage handling and longer walks through the terminal when they move the baggage carousel further away from the gate, but we complain much less when they do that. Zipper-late works much the same. It worsens traffic, but trains us to be more tolerant of worse traffic.
- Comment on Well done, all of you! 5 weeks ago:
Well, you’re in the right community.
- Comment on Well done, all of you! 5 weeks ago:
You’d have a point if you were getting rid of the roads. But you’re not. You’re leaving them underutilized, out in the boondocks, where they are needed and used to service farms and mines and everything else your urban centers require. Those same roads serving population densities of <10 people per square mile are readily capable of serving population densities of 320 people per square mile. So, again, why not spread out? Why cram ourselves in like sardines, where we need buses and trains and trams and subways and rentable scooters littered everywhere?
- Comment on Well done, all of you! 5 weeks ago:
You’ve still got that centralization mindset…
Electrical power. In your head, electrical power is in the city, and we need to take a little bit out to a farm house. We don’t want to take a big-ass cable out to a big rural community, because that would be wasteful.
The electrical power produced in the city is a coal-fired plant in the heavy industrial sector. That is not the kind of power we need.
The kind of power we need is produced by big-ass solar generators out near the farmland. It’s produced by big-ass wind turbines out near the farmland. It’s supported by big-ass pumped-storage facilities out near the farmland. This kind of power needs big-ass cables out to the rural areas. You don’t want to build big-ass cables out toward the farmland; big-ass cables are exactly what we need to bring power from the farmland to the cities.
Gas. Gas isn’t produced in the cities. Gas comes from wells scattered throughout rural areas, and flows toward the cities. The gas lines you don’t want to build are the ones that supply the city.
I’ve already addressed internet, but I’ll hit it again: Wireless works better out of town. In town, it is subject to all sorts of interference from everyone trying to use it at once. You need the cables in the city because the available EM spectrum is not nearly enough to meet the needs of that dense populace. Out in the rural areas, where interfering signals are physically separated, there is much more bandwidth available per person.
We wouldn’t need to build a 6 lane elevated highway, we could just make a simple two lane asphalt road with reflector posts.
Those simple, two-lane asphalt roads can handle much more than 320 people per square mile. Those simple roads would be much better utilized by increasing rural densities to the human average, rather than leaving them grossly underutilized. 6-lane elevated highways are features of the medium and high density urban areas, not rural.
- Comment on Well done, all of you! 5 weeks ago:
The urban core generates tons of revenue for the city,
The urban core is consuming the resources produced in the rural surroundings. Again, two acres of agricultural land per urban dweller. The population density of land used by/for humans is 320 per square mile.
and then the suburbs spend it all.
Agreed, the suburbs are terrible. More specifically, lawns are terrible. Replacing all those lawns with gardens and orchards would completely reverse that problem..
But again: every 320 people need a square mile of agricultural land, regardless of how densely you decide to pack those people. There is no replacement for that land area. Whether we cram ourselves in high-rise apartment buildings, or spread ourselves out among our crops, we’re using two acres of ag land per person.
We still need the rural roads, the rural water. Vegetation needs irrigation. We still need rural wires to convey solar and wind power from those agricultural areas back to the grid at large. Internet Cabling is a little less important: lower rural population density means substantially less interference for wireless.
The answer that Strong Towns keeps finding is to invest more money in medium density mixed use neighbourhoods. … And I think you deserve to live somewhere like that.
Please don’t wish that on me. That sounds like the worst of all worlds. None of the benefits of rurality; none of the benefits of urbanity. Not dense enough to actually justify public transit, but still packed in like sardines. Needing to leave home and go into the city for any sort of entertainment. Needing transportation, because you don’t have enough room to simply be comfortable where you live.
It seems that “Strong Towns” is primarily interested in maximizing tax revenue. That is not an objective I find particularly appealing.
- Comment on Well done, all of you! 5 weeks ago:
That’s a lot of infrastructure. Seems like it would require an exorbitant population density to support all that.
Why are we stacking everyone on top of each other? Every person, urban or rural, needs 2 acres of cropland to sustainably provide their food. That’s 320 people per square mile of agricultural land.
Why are we cramming 25,000 people into a square mile of urban blight? Why not spread out enough that we aren’t all huffing each other’s farts?
- Comment on Well done, all of you! 5 weeks ago:
#1 is simply false. All merging is more effective at full speed.
#2 demonstrates a lack of comprehension. With the right lane closed ahead, the slowed traffic in the left lane indicates the effects of the obstruction ahead, and informs drivers that they should exit.
If the left lane isn’t backed up, the effects of the obstruction are not severe, and there is no need to exit.
Allowing both lanes to back up introduces the worst delay, and doubles the number of vehicles needlessly exposed to that delay.
#3 correctly identifies that the load is spread among more routes, but fails to comprehend that those other routes are normally underutilized and have considerable excess capacity available to ameliorate the problem. Diverting excess traffic to routes with excess capacity is a solution, not a problem.
#4, stopped traffic is inevitable with zipper merging immediately before the obstruction. Anyone with more than a million miles of highway experience can corroborate that assertion.
- Comment on Well done, all of you! 5 weeks ago:
Pushing people to seek a detour is the only effective way of actually reducing the effects of a traffic jam.
We all zipper merged back when we were traveling close to full speed. We would continue through the closure at nearly full speed, except some jackass has decided to run up to the end and come to a complete stop before attempting to merge.
Now, we all have to zipper merge at 5mph instead of full speed, because some jackass couldn’t figure out how to do it at the right time.
Anybody who has played Factorio should be able to recognize the problem. If the lane is obstructed anywhere, the capacity of the roadway is the capacity of the remaining open lanes. Filling the closed lane before the obstruction maximizes the duration of the traffic jam.
Ideally, zipper merging should start immediately after the last exit before the obstruction. It should be used to push as many people as possible to exit and seek a detour. The lane should be effectively closed from the exit before to the exit after the obstruction.
- Comment on Well done, all of you! 5 weeks ago:
Take that Centralizationist attitude back to Reddit.
- Comment on something to be reinvented 5 weeks ago:
Exactly. The USPS should have pivoted from daily physical mail delivery to telecommunications services by the 1920s. The breakup of AT&T’s monopoly in the 1980s made the Internet possible; we could have had the internet 30-40 years earlier if we had pushed the USPS into telephone.
- Comment on something to be reinvented 5 weeks ago:
Absolutely. It was an excellent system a hundred years ago.
They failed to expand the postal service into telecommunications between 1890 and 1940, leading to AT&T’s monopoly on the phone system until 1982. They failed to expand their money transfer system into consumer-oriented electronic banking services in the 1990s, leaving Visa and Mastercard with a stranglehold on payment processing. We’ll have to break them apart soon.
- Comment on something to be reinvented 1 month ago:
The USPS needs to take a long, hard look at their Money Order, and pivot toward basic consumer banking. They were the first widespread service for money transfers. They need to return to that core competency. They should issue checking accounts and bank cards (rivaling Visa and Mastercard) for anyone who wants one. They should provide fee-free basic consumer banking services to the general public.
At this time, their operational model is “advertising platform” that happens to occasionally provide delivery services. Their reason for continued existence is bulk mailing. They aren’t a government service. They are a de facto business. They fund themselves, and they produce a revenue stream for their sole shareholder, the US Government. If they were actually a government service, they would be publicly funded, and junk mail would be broadly prohibited.
The USPS is currently a garbage delivery service. Neither snow, nor rain, nor uBlock Origin stays these ad peddlers from littering “Or Current Resident” with their stamped trash. They should shift their focus to parcel delivery, and consumer banking.
- Comment on What does non-gui mean ? 1 month ago:
Exactly. A TUI is not a replacement for a GUI where human interaction is essential to the process.
But, very few computer processes require direct human input. The overwhelming majority of individual operations are performed silently in the background. The presence of a TUI in an image modification program allows for certain operations to be performed automatically, in the background, without a human ever needing to be involved. I actually needed to do this, to add what was basically a watermark and a date stamp to a PDF document via an image modification program. Repeated 80-120 times a day, 6 days a week. A TUI allows for the tying together of a half dozen simple operations into a functional system.
- Comment on What does non-gui mean ? 1 month ago:
TUI. Text User Interface. Command line. Terminal. You interact with the application via the keyboard, rather than a mouse, touchscreen, trackpad, etc.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Games have rules.
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 1 month ago:
Say you are taxed 10% on the value of all the stocks you own, this means you have to sell 10% of your stocks annually,
Myth.
You can transfer the stocks themselves to the IRS, and leave the IRS with the responsibility for liquidating them. We can require the IRS to look at the total traded volume of any issue they acquire, and prohibit them from selling more than 1% of that volume in the same time period. Liquidated shares will comprise no more than 1%; those shares will not significantly affect the market value of the issue.
My personal solution - outlaw stocks, bonds and loans for fucks sake.
“Stock” is what the ownership interest is distributed among multiple people. When two people equally build a business together, they each hold a “share” of that business’s “stock”. Banning “stocks” means banning every type of joint ownership, which is every type of business except “sole proprietorship” and “government enterprise”. Banning stocks is only feasible in a completely centralized economy.
Banning Bonds and Loans is even less feasible, and results in even more absurdities. Taken to extremes, your Amazon driver would have to collect payment at time of delivery, not at time of order. Payment before delivery could be considered a type of loan. Likewise, a business’s order to a vendor for supplies would have to be paid at time of delivery. Any other time would be considered a “loan” one way or another.
- Comment on intruder alert 1 month ago: