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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Two facts:

    1. The average occupancy of a car in my North American city is 1.2 people per car. This does not vary much by city.
    2. Autonomous vehicles will almost certainly be worse for traffic than human driven cars. They will circle empty with no passengers and drive to pick up passengers empty (dead heading) even with a fully rideshare system. If there is widespread private ownership of autonomous vehicles (and you bet your butt that car companies will campaign for this aggressively to keep sales up), the dead heading problems only multiply. If you don’t believe me, look up any recent literature on the topic: by most accounts it will be worse, not better. Dead heading is only the tip of the iceberg of problems there.





  • As with most sci-fi the author gets loopier in the later books. That being said:

    • Dune: masterpiece of philosophy, one of the best books ever put to print
    • Dune Messiah: a worthy sequel and must read after the first book; completes Paul’s arc
    • Children of Dune: more plot driven than the first, but still thematically rich and entertaining.
    • God Emperor of Dune: the most divisive of the books: you love it or you hate it. I am in the love it camp, the book is unhinged and the themes are marvelous. This is where I’d stop a read of the series.
    • Chapterhouse and the other (Heretics?): forgettable in my opinion, simply because I’ve forgotten them. Later book fan opinions welcome.
    • anything Brian Herbert: not terrible but not awfully good either. Makes for decent light reading I guess, and there’s good lore building in some of the books despite some unforgivable retcons (Agemmemnon, sigh)





  • yimby@lemmy.cato196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneLiving on the Edge Rules
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    10 months ago

    Nobody’s life is in any real danger here. They and all their equipment are roped in on at least 3 redundant anchors (probably a number more). Rock climbing looks scary but with proper precautions and training it is not significantly riskier than other outdoor sports.

    The level of ignorance from these commenters who know nothing of the sport but speak with such authority on it really reminds me of the worst of reddit.









  • You’re being downvoted because this is the attitude that got us into, and is keeping us in, this mess. Let us be precise with terms: housing is not a speculative investment. You don’t buy a house because you presume it will appreciate 100-1000% by the time you sell it. That attitude leads to the paradox that the government is unable to stop: you either build/allow affordable housing, lowering prices and crashing people’s speculative investment, or you restrict new home building through restrictive zoning and NIMBYism run wild, letting houses appreciate to the point of unaffordability.

    You buy a house to live in long term: to buy it back from the bank and own it all to yourself. You have right to sell it for an equal or roughly price tracking rate with inflation. That’s a good investment. Every Canadian has the right to buy affordable housing. Saying affordable housing is affordable renting is not only reductive but downright prejudicial: people don’t rent because they’re poor. They rent because they want the freedom to move without selling a house. They rent because they are building lives as students or young families or their careers. They rent because they choose to invest their money in something other than house equity. And all the real, concrete policies which help new homeowners (ie building more housing) help renters: these two groups are not at odds with each other.