I’ve said this above but I don’t think this is an incompatible view with what the article says. But the predominant attitude is that everyone just ought to move to the suburbs eventually because it’s just “obviously” so much better, with the bigger living space and the lower density. We’re seeing this attitude pop up with COVID-19 once again.
For me, I so heavily despise the experience of being in a car for even half an hour. So unless I find a neighborhood where everything is nearby or maybe I can bike everywhere (not so easy in the US!) none of these supposed quality-of-life improvements will outweigh the downside for me.
(And yes, I have owned a car and used it for day-to-day stuff. I universally hated every single moment I sat in that car.)
I don’t think that’s the thesis of the article. Rather, I think the article is saying that nice things alone don’t compensate for the opportunity costs and negative second-order effects you incur when obtaining _some_ nice things.
To use the article’s example of living in a city versus a suburb: If you can get a house in a suburb and can commute 15 minutes or so and are within walking distance of the stuff you care about (including your friends/family) and don’t value any of the perks of living in a city environment (or heavily dislike the downsides), then go for it. But a big house in the suburbs _alone_ isn’t automatically going to make your life better, yet in my experience that’s a very dominant mode of thinking.
> Living in downtown Palo Alto probably costs 100% more than living in Pleasanton, which is roughly a one hour commute.
As I understand, there’s heavy resistance to building any sort of density in Palo Alto. That will, of course, skew the cost of living. I believe that people are constantly priced out of the city as well (i.e. they wanted to stay but couldn’t).
> I wonder if this is one of the reasons big tech companies run buses — to make the commute less painful and blend into the background of life.
The American perception toward public transit is that it is unreliable, crowded, dirty and/or filled with poor people. Knowing that there will be a seat on a clean bus to take you home without much worry is a major sell and can convince people to ditch their cars (whether or not the equivalent public transit commute actually matches the above perception).
When I was in a situation where I could take the “tech buses” regularly, they for sure helped make a long commute bearable.
I see you slipped the word "violence" in there. Perhaps you misspelled "defence"?
The State is the primary perpetrator of violence, not "the right".
You shouldn't be thinking in "left vs right", but in "individuals vs the state". The only things sitting between your liberties and the State are: its constitution (if any), and the "militarized right" (gun owners).
There's some historical examples of individuals giving up their guns, perhaps you should read into what happened afterwards?
Bus rapid transportation could be a better fit, given existing freeway infrastructure. But good luck taking away two lanes of highway anywhere in the United States (true right-of-way separation is necessary for any effective _rapid _transit). A lot of other BRT ends up most of the time being express buses with fancy stations/shelters that still cost a bunch of money.
Honestly I think that the way we plan cities in North America is broken to the point where any transportation strategy is doomed to result in sprawl and congestion. To use a train analogy, I’d say that city planning is the true third-rail of American politics.
The problem is that moonshots do not work for solving bread and butter problems, and generally speaking you need to do lots of legwork before a metro area is ready for such things. The poster child I like to use for this is San Jose VTA, which has not a lot to show for its large light rail network despite being the home to Silicon Valley, but similar stories can be told in most major US metropolitan areas.
The odd one out in terms of public transportation in the last two decades is Seattle. Seattle is now investing tens of billions of dollars to extend the tentacles of its light rail throughout the region, eventually to 116 miles. But before this has even been completed, the metro area is one of the only non-NYC metros to have recorded consistently positive transit ridership growth in total, and probably the only one that had an actual percentage growth in mode share too, all with a rapidly expanding population.
This has mostly occurred via the normal, no-frills bus. The vast majority of bus routes do not have lanes or traffic priority or separation, but the very important thing is that frequency was massively increased; 70% of Seattle households are a ten minute walk from very frequent transit in 2019, up from 25%. [1] It turns out that if bus services are actually convenient, and driving is a pain in the ass, people will switch to transit to save themselves the frustration of having to actually pay attention to maddening road congestion. In addition land use in Seattle has long been focused on smart growth, with growth being funneled into dense regional nodes and highway buses being set up to link them on an hourly or half-hourly basis.
That being said, I was under the impression moka pots require a lot of cleanup. For drip, there's a lot of competition, notably the AeroPress, that's only slightly less convenient than the Mr. Coffee machine. But I'm not aware of a product like that for espresso-like drinks.
I think I'll gently disagree with Wirecutter here, as much as I like them. The Nespresso machine may make thin espresso, but it's still espresso -- it brews its espresso the same way a non-capsule machine does.
Moka pots are a little fiddly to clean and, well, a little fiddly in general, I think. I use an Aeropress for brewing most of the time because it's less so. You can make, hmm, "espresso-ish" coffee with it -- it's also actually brewing coffee for a shorter amount of time than usual with greater than usual pressure, when you think about it! -- but I'm generally aiming to get an 8 or 12 ounce cup of normal brewed coffee.
Moka pots only need a deep clean once a week to once every two weeks and even then it's mostly wiping off the oil from the beans without any soap. Otherwise you just rinse with hot water.
They are typically aluminum so it's not like you have to worry about almost anything growing on/in them
> It's like saying "Delhi is too Indian"
No, it’s like saying “Delhi has too many Hindi speakers” or “Delhi has too many Brahmins” or “there are too few Muslims in Delhi” or “Delhi isn’t doing enough to combat colorism”.
> or "Beijing is too Chinese"
No, it’s like saying “Beijing relies too much on unregistered rural hukou holders who effectively form an invisible underclass unable to build wealth” or “Beijing is mistreating its growing African minority” (https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/15/chinas-racism-is-wrecki...).
Perhaps you should educate yourself on the real and pervasive socioeconomic, class, and racial divides present in any country, just like in the United States, before proceeding to make reductionist analogies.
Perhaps you shouldn't embarass yourself with false analogies (caste system, hukou issues). Utah being majority white _is_ the issue for the author. His implied solution is to dramatically change the demographics of the state and disrupt a successful, safe, high-trust society.
I think concerns about how Apple will handle the transition can generally be addressed by the relatively smooth transition from PPC to Intel. Apple has literally done this before.
Apple transitions CPU architectures every 10-15 years.
6502 -> 68k in 1984 via hard-cutover [edit: see cestith's reply, there's more to this story than I knew]
68k -> PPC in 1994 via emulation
PPC -> x86 in 2006 via Rosetta JIT translation
x86 -> ARM in 2020 via Rosetta 2 static recompilation
You could even argue the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X was a transition of similar magnitude (although solely on PowerPC processors), with Classic Environment running a full Mac OS 9 instance [1]
I disagree that 6502 -> 68k was a "transition." The Apple II and Mac were two separate product lines. The three major early home computer companies (Apple, Atari, Commodore) all did this.
This is true, but note it was released in 1991, many years after the Mac's introduction. By that time, the Apple II was definitely on the way out. The last hold outs (schools...) probably needed encouragement.
Yes, in 8-bit mode. The IIgs runs with the processor in 16-bit mode from everything I've read about it. It might be able to swap modes to run older Apple software, but the IIgs is a 16-bit machine.
For me, I so heavily despise the experience of being in a car for even half an hour. So unless I find a neighborhood where everything is nearby or maybe I can bike everywhere (not so easy in the US!) none of these supposed quality-of-life improvements will outweigh the downside for me.
(And yes, I have owned a car and used it for day-to-day stuff. I universally hated every single moment I sat in that car.)