Cool, cool. End of August. Sure, no rush, bike lanes don't need protection or anything.
(#NYC's 311 has entries allowing you to report multiple types of 'illegal' games, but nothing for reporting any kind of unsafe bike lane situation. So you just send a generic comment to #NYCDOT Queens commissioner, which may get answered eventually..) #BikeNYC
New blog post: There's an approach to climate change that focuses on "Making Polluters Pay" for the cost of carbon pollution. But who counts as a polluter? Why are they so insistent that it's just a handful of corporations?
@Colinvparker@wollman@DiegoBeghin In my experience, the people who promote this strategy play a bit of a shell game. They may claim that (a) there's no need for consumers to change their behavior, because all their polluting consumables will be replaced with carbon-free ones, or (b) that the consumers have been duped by the evil capitalists, and will change their behavior as soon as the capitalists stop manipulating them.
@Colinvparker@wollman@DiegoBeghin Yes, I'm not opposed to penalizing the owners and managers of large corporations, and penalizing just the corporate organizations may even produce some results.
I just don't think it's anywhere near enough. People like Rick Heede and Blair Horner repeat it like it's the obvious solution that will solve all our problems, and that distracts from the work we need to do to change behavior.
@Colinvparker@DiegoBeghin Exactly! I can kind of understand it from people whose focus is elsewhere and just want to do something about climate change - or at least to be seen to do something.
I can't understand it from people who've made opposing climate change their central career or mission in life, like Mary Heglar, Tess Riley, Cline Jones and Rick Heede.
Sometimes they'll even admit they're fudging the numbers a bit, but it's worth it to focus on big polluters.
"IBX errs in only stopping in East New York at Atlantic Avenue, connecting to the L and the LIRR, with no direct connection to Broadway Junction for the A/C and J. The distance between these two locations is only 350 meters, and it may be awkward to have two stops in short succession, but the meaning of high relative density is exactly that it’s okay to have more closely spaced stops."
@kkavee haha no, they have sales on grilling meats every summer holiday. Even though we have Memorial Day and Independence Day in the summer, the meat sales are just about parties...
Anniversary blog post from May 25, 2011: Whenever I hear people claim that Uber and Lyft "destroyed" New York City's taxi system, my mind boggles at how completely ignorant or how deep in denial they must be. This post was part of a series where I described how fantastically shitty the taxi system was in 2011:
@crzwdjk The one-stop shopping was huge too. Not having to look up phone numbers for cab companies, call around, and worry if you were getting ripped off, or if you called the company that happened to be extra busy at that time.
Now there are lots of drivers who are registered simultaneously with Uber, Lyft and Via, so you don't even need to check all three!
@EverydayMoggie Uber executives said a lot of things over the course of the rollout, many of which contradicted each other.
I don't support Uber. I think the execs are amoral at best. But that doesn't mean that we should go back to the shitty taxi system we had before. Everyone involved with that was also stupid and selfish.
If there's an argument against Uber, you should assume I've already heard it. There are tons of good arguments. No need to make stupid reactionary arguments.
Good article on the state of the art in self-driving car technology, with a particular focus on Waymo's and Tesla's efforts.
Interesting statistic: "Over Waymo’s first 7 million driverless miles, its vehicles got into injury-causing crashes about one-fourth as often as comparable human drivers."
@SeanMcTex It's not obvious that they're always (a) ferrying people around, and when they are, that (b) the people would otherwise be driving. Those are both empirical questions…