Trainguyrom, trainguyrom@reddthat.com

Yeah I initially saw the OP’s article shared on Mastodon by some generally reliable individuals and honestly my BS sensors went wild. The described roadmap by the sources from Windows Central makes a lot more sense for Microsoft given the current environment. Its the exact same thing they did around this time in Windows 10s lifecycle, squash some bugs and quietly reduce the stuff that users generally did not like and weren’t being used (such as Cortana, remember that?)

I’m really struggling to make heads or tails of your core point that you’re trying to make.

I shared my story about trying to do some car replacement trips by acoustic bike, how it took a full year of training to be able to consistently make the school runs by bike (with a trailer mind you), and then pointed out how ebikes completely remove that physical fitness requirements while providing all of the same benefits of an accoustic bike

Also I love how you keep changing and leaving out details of my story as you go along. I really can’t shake the feeling you’re not actually trying to make any specific point and just want to argue with people

I mean, maybe I’m a bit too optimistic but if they’ve pissed me off they’ve probably pissed off everyone so it should be easy to convince enough people to show up to tear out the silly rules that they keep getting fines for

Bruh you seem really stuck on this idea of “dormant physical athleticism” whatever that means.

Let me break this down for you, the human body has muscles, these are like motors for moving bits of flesh and bone around. Like motors, the amount of physical energy they output changes based on the energy that gets input. Since humans don’t really have control of the chemical energy flow to these muscles, the way you can change that is by pushing these muscles to their limits, and as you keep doing that these limits start increasing.

Its really quite awesome, because unlike most things in life, your muscle gain directly correlates to the amount of work you put in. Its one of the few things you can directly control!

You should probably reread my comment because that was literally what I said

Side note about normal bikses: The way I compare them, normal bikes are limited to physical exertion. Ebikes are limited to time, very similar to cars. Though at the long range cars are still more comfortable

I started biking again 2 years ago, honestly partly pushed by various city planning/car rejection media when I realized I could start being the change I want to see in the world. I’d done some strength training during the pandemic but holy crap was I not in shape enough to be biking. It took me a full year of biking nearly every day to be able to bike my kids to school in a trailer (about 2 miles round trip)

Even now where I finished last summer biking over 22 very hilly miles, I struggled to bike to a haircut just a mile away after just 3 months of winter hibernation, and now that it’s early spring I got up to 5 miles so far within a few bike rides.

Point is, for the average adult, biking is an option but it takes a ton of time and work to build up your strength. Ebikes completely change the game because anyone can ride 10-20 miles on those, and if you have balance issues or other health issues you can get an etrike! They’re such incredible life changing machines!

I just want to say, I absolutely love this kind of question because it forces you to imagine realistically what a car-lite world would look like, and it completely changes the line of thinking from problem identification to problem solving, and in a way that truly will change the world for the better

This is one of those questions where you have to look to the past to really understand the possible future.

Rural America was built by railroads. You know why there’s a town every 10-20 miles on a rough grid? It’s because steam locomotives built during the 20th century would need to stop to refill on water every 10-20 miles. These old steam locomotives were slow usually only running up to 30-40mph. The train would need a spot to stop & refill with water so when the railroads didn’t platte out towns to sell the land they just built through and increased the value of, towns would organically pop up near these stops anyways.

If we fast forward a little to the 1880s or so, electrification was going bonkers, and many electric companies would say “while we’re building these power lines, what if we also ran electric trolley services too?” So the trolleys would advertise the versatility of this newfangled electricity thing while also providing a second revenue stream to electric companies. This is when electric interurban services really hit their peak. There were thousands of interurban lines across the US at this time, but many didn’t survive out of the 20th century, and of those that did very few survived past the second world war, and of those, even fewer survived into being bought up by city transit agencies.

This pre-car period had most people either living in dense walkable cities or living on homesteads and walking/riding horses/carts multiple miles to go to the nearest town for the day. People didn’t move around a lot during this time, and the world was much smaller and life much quieter. This is part of why circuses and fairs were so big is it was the most exciting thing happening all year.

The world has changed so much since the invention and proliferation of the automobile that it’s really hard to imagine a car-lite world, but also there’s aspects of modern society that simply can’t exist without cars. I’m imagining a societal change pushed by something like legislation which doubles vehicle registration fees every year for a decade. Sure that $250 the first year will hurt a little, and the $500 the second will hurt a bit more, but you’ve got a good 3-5 years or so before it’s really going to start hurting most families, and I’d imagine it would be the $4000 mark where most don’t renew which is conveniently after 5 years of the registration fee doubling, and enough time for new bus services to be spun up and plenty of time for people to invest in bikes and manufacturing to adjust to the new demand patterns

The concept of road tripping becomes very different, and travel honestly gets more expensive. I was just looking at Amtrak tickets today chasing an idea of taking a couple day trip out of town during my kids spring break, and I’m immediately looking at $250 to go 200 miles, 5x the cost of just loading the family in the car and driving that distance

Without cars anyone living in rural areas is immediately stranded. Most of rural America has been rebuilt around cars because rural America was the first place cars were able to sell successfully (in fact car companies had to engage in conspiracies to force sales in cities once everyone who wanted a car had already bought one) there’s many houses which are multiple miles from the nearest store of any kind, and many small towns lack any kind of grocery store. Many business and public schools in rural areas are located miles outside of any town and require people to drive or take the school bus just to get there. With about a century for rural America to rebuild into the car centric life that it is and most of the railroad tracks gone, it’s pretty impossibls for rural America to de-car

Suburbs are similarly challenged to rural areas, but at least have the benefit of being close enough to their cities and hubs of commerce that biking and biking to/from public stops remains very viable. Exurbs where they aren’t connected to the urban fabric but are entirely reliant on easy vehicle access to it are absolutely fucked though, and would probably spin up new Intercity bus services to compensate, but needing to transfer bus services to get to anything rapidly makes these already undesirable exurbs become far more undesirable

Small towns that never had the population growth to spawl are even better off. Many of these small towns are super walkable and bikable today with limited infrastructure changes that might be desired. Stroads built to serve big box stores or industries would be the only major challenge, but generally all that needs is a road diet and/or a dedicated parallel greenway

Shopping will definitely look different. For one thing single use plastic bags become completely nonviable since they carry so little per bag even compared to just paper bags, and it’s difficult to carry more than about 3 plastic bags of groceries at once. We’d also definitely see a reversal from fewer larger stores which are further away back to many more smaller stores that are closer to people’s homes. Parking lots will be quickly realized to be unneeded, likely to be torn up with new housing, stores and bus terminals built where those parking lots once stood.

The average road and street will also change dramatically. With people mostly walking, biking and taking public transit, suddenly the minimum acceptable street changes a lot, where right now it’s relatively smooth pavement with relatively good drainage, in a world where people primarily walk, bike and take transit they will instead demand trees and narrower paved areas, bringing it down to human scale. A “narrow” 40 foot wide suburban street will rapidly become much too large and many will be rebuilt to be more pleasant for cyclists and pedestrians (I’m imagining 10-15 foot wide medians with trees, benches, water fointains and a nice greenway in the center, maintaining a pair of 10-12 foot wide lanes on either side for deliveries, emergency services and buses, or the inverse, with the road space narrowed significantly to 16-20 feet to allow for careful passing potentially with a parrelel greenway depending on traffic, again with trees, benches and water fountains)

I rewatched it for the first time as an adult last year and holy crap that film is incredible

Setting up new laptops at work is similarly annoying even with every trick we keep up our sleeves. Naturally Microsoft does bypass some portion of that BS if you happen to be connecting to to an AD or Azure account because they don’t want to completely piss off their core userbase

Had a fun one on a school managed laptop when I went back to school a couple of years ago. Windows got a broken driver release for one of the Realtek audio chipsets added to their driver repository, and literally every one of the laptops pulled down this updated driver and lost all ability to output sound. School’s IT (I had a couple of friends working on their IT at this time) had a heck of a time trying to get it set to roll back and pin the driver on every impacted computer, and when I most recently reinstalled Windows following graduation and gaining ownership of this laptop I had to re-apply this workaround because Microsoft still hadn’t changed the driver version in their repository over a year later

To be entirely fair, some portion of the fault probably lies with Realtek, and this could’ve been avoided by selecting a device with a better audio chipset, but the point still stands that the default state is still slightly very broken

Higher gas prices might encourage some positive change in folks when it comes to their travel choices. In the short term possibly more choosing to walk/bike (or more realistically choosing to abstain from going somewhere that they otherwise would’ve driven) and in the longer term it’ll encourage more efficient vehicles. Energy has been way too cheap in the US for too long and it really encourages a lot of the waste that we see

See I worried about this with my phones for a while, but then I realized I’m literally just doing the job of a charge controller for the phone which only cost about $300, and by the time any wear might show up from enjoying the fast charge capabilities I’ll have already have switched to a newer phone since I tend to upgrade every 2-3 years

Because you are now assuming everyone’s just going to become a cyclist vegan living in densified 300 sq ft condos doing their communal laundry every two weeks with recycled bath water.

Except simply requiring remote work to be an option for all jobs where its feasible will significantly reduce pollution as we all observed in Q2 of 2020

I’m the kind of person who would go full rules-lawyer on them, get myself elected to the board and generally rip out every silly rule they have if not completely disband the HOA if needed

My ring doorbell

Obligatory get that police state spyware off your home and use something else (if cameras are even at all necessary!)

I’m imagining there’s some setup to how the cans were placed that creates a blindspot where the OOP can move them without himself being seen, so the camera will simply pick up the cans moving each night without any clear source of the movement

I think the removed signs should’ve been liberated and re-placed at the rich neighborhood park, and chains should’ve simply been set by the swings there. Make them see what they’re doing and explain to their families why this is happening (if they even bother to use their parks)

It doesn’t damage the park, it doesn’t prevent its use but it does clearly place the problem they created at their doorstep

I mean its perfectly conceivable for any camera to have a blind spot. The lens can only see so much. Heck given its a Ring camera its almost certainly on a wireless connection so its trivial to briefly disrupt the connection if you’re okay with violating FCC regulations

Oh I bet he had amazing counter heights

Come to think of it, they are a really nice height! Normal counters an average sized person has to bend a little but these you can comfortable eat at while standing. I imagine they’d be a bit too high for me to comfortable cook at being only 5’8"ish but yeah I never thought about that