Zagorath

Zagorath, 4 months ago

If even the threat of a union can improve outcomes, imagine how good it would be to actually be unionised!

Zagorath, 3 months ago

Did they survive? In my case, they got stronger.

In principle, I actually support the idea of people running sites being able to support themselves financially through advertising. I just don’t like when the ads go too far into obnoxious territory. So before all this, I used Adblock Plus with its “acceptable ads policy” to let through unobtrusive banner ads but block prerolls, large graphics, and interstitial ads.

Unfortunately, ABP didn’t adapt to YouTube’s changes quickly enough, so I switched to uBlock Origin. Now I don’t even see unobtrusive ads. Google shot themselves in the foot over this one.

Zagorath, 15 days ago

We’re well past the point where it’s a known fact that putting in bike lanes, even if you remove parking to do it, is incredibly beneficial for local businesses. Unfortunately business owners tend not to be that smart about matters outside the day-to-day running of their own business, and so they buy into fearmongering about the idea that removing parking will kill their business.

The average business has a street frontage of like 2 car parks, and when studies have been done it’s very common for those parks to be taken up for hours at a time. If your business relied on people driving to it (and isn’t in a large shopping centre with a massive parking garage), it would be completely non-viable and go out of business by the end of the month.

The latest episode of The Urbanist Agenda podcast, entitled “Some Business Owners REALLY Hate Bike Lanes (with Bike Curious)” (available on Nebula now, to the public from tomorrow or Saturday, not sure how the time zones work out—show notes, including sources, available already on Nebula without signing in), has some great discussion about this. They have some interesting theorising that part of the issue is that owners tend not to actually live near the store, while customers do. So owners are driving in to their business, and because their day-to-day experience relies on driving, the assume that must be how it is for everyone.

When the new bike lanes went in in the CBD, business owners on the affected streets estimated 43% of their customers came to them by car. In fact only 19% did. Boundary Street in West End would be another great site for this kind of infrastructure.

Zagorath, 1 month ago

standing up when someone of higher status stands

There’s a great story about this. It’s probably apocryphal, but it’s a fun enough story anyway. Like any such myth, there are variations, but this is the one I first heard.

There’s a tradition in classical music of standing when the Hallelujah chorus of Handel’s Messiah is performed. The story goes that the reason for this tradition is that at its premiere, King George II was so enthralled by it that he rose from his seat. And respect dictated that if the king was standing, so must everyone else be, so the entire audience stood.

Zagorath, 1 day ago

Every other user on the road is forced to engage with it, including vulnerable users like cyclists and pedestrians. They didn’t agree to it. They weren’t asked if they’re okay with it.

And Tesla in particular, more than other self-driving ventures, has been incredibly reckless in what features they roll out and how easy they make it for their drivers to be unsafe while using it.

Zagorath, 8 days ago

Honestly it seems to just be the artist’s style.

https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/44f45a9f-73b3-4be8-a166-c6ffb74c2638.png

Sounds like she’s just having a hissy fit.

Zagorath, 5 months ago

I thought Reddit killed off gold earlier this year?