so in other words, you don't actually take the bus, you just puke up the lies you read on the internet
I haven't seen every problem the OP mentioned, but I have seen a number of them, including: Unreliable schedules: This is more of a problem with trains, but buses get slowed by traffic too. Buses that don't show up: And my favorite, the bus that is 100% full, so it doesn't stop and you get to wait for the next scheduled bus). Buses that don't give change: I've never been on a bus where a driver or the machine would break a $20. Pay systems that are broken: Plenty that will reject perfectly good bills and coins, and if that's all you have, you're out of luck. Less of an issue if you have a transit card. Rude drivers: I haven't had to deal with rude drivers. It's the fellow passengers that I hated dealing with.
meanwhile, millions and millions of people all over the planet take the bus every day without problems
Mostly because they don't have an alternative. No goes around their business looking forward to having to take the bus somewhere.
But remember I am talking about IN CITIES. Where is such a place (free, unlimited time parking)? There are none, except around the edges of the city.
So that removes a car from the roads in the core of the city.
No driver is going to just drive around burning gas for longer than a few minutes, so I don't really think the first option applies.
The whole point of Uber is that you get your ride quickly; the thing would crash and burn quickly if you had to wait for the time it took a driver to get from outside the city to where you are.
I really question that "average commute in America is 26 minutes", since I don't think I've ever know a time or place where that was true. Unless you count people who live where they work or some such. I guess telecommuters would lower the time average.
Well, if you live where your work, your time traveled is 0, your distance is 0, 0/0 is... pretty undefined. That can really throw off an average.:-)
A bus that is available at any time, takes you exactly where you want to go, will help you move cargo (like, say, a new refrigerator)
So I take the 'bus' and I get to wait the 15 minutes it takes for someone to load a refrigerator? Because you can bet that when I sign up for a ride, it's not going to advertise that sort of a delay.
The Utopian dream that we can build large scale cities around individual automobile transport was long ago realized to be just that -- a dream, not just a fantasy but a dangerous fantasy at that!
Except that's our reality, and it works out just fine. Sure, there's congestion, but congestion is still better than public transit.
Not to mention there was a (trained, professional) "good guy" with a gun at the Florida high school during the shooting, and he did nothing. The good guy with a gun theory is not looking so good.
I've found that lots of people on both sides of the issue really like to take one single incident and then extrapolate into a more general conclusion, but you can't make a general conclusion with just one data point.
To the anti-gun side: Just because one guy did nothing does not mean that's even a common thing with armed guards. You can't say "well, armed guards don't make a difference, this guy didn't" when it was just one guy in one incident.
And to be fair, to the pro-gun side: Just because the FBI got a warning and did nothing in this case does not mean that whenever the FBI gets a warning, they will do nothing. Also, it ignores all those mass shootings where there was no warning whatsoever. I see a lot of finger-pointing at the FBI (which is well deserved) as well as at mental illness (less well deserved) as a way to deflect blame so as to kick the 'gun question' can down the road yet again.
I thought that the EC voters voted their districts, and then when a majority was reached, all votes switched to that winner, but sure, maybe they don't even bother with that first step. Makes sense to me. Either way, it's winner-takes-all, which is the problem.
You know, there are plenty of real wolves roaming around here. Crying wolf with people who merely disagree with you muddies any discussion of the wolves who are paid to troll. Please do not overuse the "Russian troll!" accusation.
The Electoral College is fine. The problem is that almost every state chooses a "winner take all" format for electoral votes. They don't have to, but every President has run a campaign that exploited and benefited from the winner-take-all format, so they don't have a lot of motivation to change it.
It's actually called the oligarchy of the electoral college ignoring the voters.
As far as I can tell, almost every Electoral College voter actually voted the way the general populace in his/her district voted. There were seven EC voters who voted differently from their state. Seven out of 531. Not much faithlessness there.
If you want to complain, complain about the "winner take all" that almost (almost, because they don't have to, and some don't) every state uses to decide its electoral vote. I know people are all up in arms about the "popular vote," but the United States is a confederation of 50 states, not a giant conglomeration of 323m people. Each state votes. Moving the EC away from WTA would cause the EC vote to more closely resemble the overall popular vote anyway.
Game of Thrones has killed off enough characters that there aren't that many left! The books have more of a problem, since the show never adapted some of the characters and plotlines that were introduced later.
For instance, I don't have much of a problem with Jon and Dany falling in love, but simply due to the episode count, it's difficult to realize that Jon's been sitting at Dragonstone interacting with Dany for months and months. Since less real world time has passed, it feels "rushed. Think of how it might have played out in a previous season. Jon likely would still have reached Dragonstone in Episode 3 or so (being able to skip a character for an episode greatly contributed to the necessary feeling of time passing during travel, something they can't do anymore), but a good six episodes could have passed before he declared himself rather than the three which passed in Season 7. That makes their courtship more properly feel like a season-long development rather than a mid-season blip.
I hate to say it, but now Game of Thrones's seasons are too short. For most other serial TV shows I've seen, their seasons are too long. Breaking Bad is maybe the only TV show I've watched where the season length was just right.
The merger is unambiguously bad. But I really, really also don't want a precedent where the President (whether Trump or anyone else) can easily use selective enforcement anti-trust law for political goals
Huh? It's been that way for decades. The Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit went forward because Microsoft did not donate to political campaigns (at the time). They quickly fixed that mistake, and the lawsuit went away when a business-friendly administration took over.
That's the big lesson of large corporations: You need to donate a decent amount of money to both political parties. Otherwise, you'll be at a disadvantage to those companies who "have their ear" of Congress and the Executive.
I have had no problems getting the movies I wanted to watch (Except for Vampire's Kiss, which I have a morbid curiosity of).
My problem has been with broken discs, and you don't find out about the breakage until half-way through the movie. In fact, the last FOUR discs I have gotten from Netflix have all had playback errors. I tried on multiple devices too, since if a player suddenly can't play back a lot of discs, then the player is often at fault. Nope, it's just Netflix.
Just like last year, slashdot doesn't get why Netflix does this. Its because according to their analytics data, people are binge watching shows instead of watching movies.
People are switching to the shows because either they've already seen the movies, or because every time you look for a specific movie it's not there. Netflix's streaming selection has always sucked hard, because the movie studios are actively hostile to Netflix's pricing model.
You need to actually have a quality movie catalog for someone to use it.
The network orders a specific number of shows and expects them to fit neatly into a 30 or 60 minute time slot. You might only have enough story for 12 episodes, but you have to make 20
Lost got a lot better when they pushed back against the network requirements for 23 shows/year and trimmed down to 16-episodes or so. Granted, the plot eventually got torpedoed anyway, but the first three seasons have a TON of filler and slow-moving plot.
I had hoped that Game of Thrones would get better by cutting back from 10 to 7 episodes in the season, but it was not served well by the change. The overall writing took a dip in quality, but the rushed nature of the storytelling also hid how much time passed and made some developments feel like they happened too quickly.
And why didn't the robot use it's giant awesomesword right at the start?
It's the Voltron Rule, man! You never bust out an awesomesword until it's almost too late.
The Voltron (and Power Rangers which it inspired) ruleset for every episode: 1) Monster comes round. 2) Get individual robots to fight it and get knocked around. 3) Hey, why don't we form Voltron?? 4) Awesomesword = win.
You took the time to know the proper spelling of the white nation, Atlantis, but couldn't give two shits to even google how to spell the black nation Wakanda.
Because we've had 2500 years of tales about the hidden nation of Wakanda, right?
Wakanda is a recent invention. Atlantis has permeated Western culture since the time of Plato. Don't put Wakanda on too high of a cultural pedestal.
Safe? Well you're unlikely to get E.Coli or water-borne diseases, but I would hardly call it safe. The American reliance on such food is a leading cause for our falling life expectancy compared to much of Europe.
The whole Korean chase sequence had a lot of noticeably bad effects. I kept thinking "well, it is a February movie, and not quite as much of a tentpole as the Avengers. They probably had a lower budget and are saving the good shots for later..." And they were, the effects got much better as the movie went on. Until the final battle, which was crap. But there was a lot of good stuff in between.
Any shot that had Black Panther leaping through the air -- extremely poor CG, like almost any film that uses CG for such things.
Slashdot Mirror
so in other words, you don't actually take the bus, you just puke up the lies you read on the internet
I haven't seen every problem the OP mentioned, but I have seen a number of them, including:
Unreliable schedules: This is more of a problem with trains, but buses get slowed by traffic too.
Buses that don't show up: And my favorite, the bus that is 100% full, so it doesn't stop and you get to wait for the next scheduled bus).
Buses that don't give change: I've never been on a bus where a driver or the machine would break a $20.
Pay systems that are broken: Plenty that will reject perfectly good bills and coins, and if that's all you have, you're out of luck. Less of an issue if you have a transit card.
Rude drivers: I haven't had to deal with rude drivers. It's the fellow passengers that I hated dealing with.
meanwhile, millions and millions of people all over the planet take the bus every day without problems
Mostly because they don't have an alternative.
No goes around their business looking forward to having to take the bus somewhere.
But remember I am talking about IN CITIES. Where is such a place (free, unlimited time parking)? There are none, except around the edges of the city.
So that removes a car from the roads in the core of the city.
No driver is going to just drive around burning gas for longer than a few minutes, so I don't really think the first option applies.
The whole point of Uber is that you get your ride quickly; the thing would crash and burn quickly if you had to wait for the time it took a driver to get from outside the city to where you are.
I really question that "average commute in America is 26 minutes", since I don't think I've ever know a time or place where that was true. Unless you count people who live where they work or some such. I guess telecommuters would lower the time average.
Well, if you live where your work, your time traveled is 0, your distance is 0, 0/0 is... pretty undefined. That can really throw off an average. :-)
Man, your subways operate at 1am? Lucky...
A bus that is available at any time, takes you exactly where you want to go, will help you move cargo (like, say, a new refrigerator)
So I take the 'bus' and I get to wait the 15 minutes it takes for someone to load a refrigerator? Because you can bet that when I sign up for a ride, it's not going to advertise that sort of a delay.
And public transport isn't "the government". Good lord.
Of course it is. That's pretty much the definition of its use of "public."
The Utopian dream that we can build large scale cities around individual automobile transport was long ago realized to be just that -- a dream, not just a fantasy but a dangerous fantasy at that!
Except that's our reality, and it works out just fine. Sure, there's congestion, but congestion is still better than public transit.
Not to mention there was a (trained, professional) "good guy" with a gun at the Florida high school during the shooting, and he did nothing. The good guy with a gun theory is not looking so good.
I've found that lots of people on both sides of the issue really like to take one single incident and then extrapolate into a more general conclusion, but you can't make a general conclusion with just one data point.
To the anti-gun side: Just because one guy did nothing does not mean that's even a common thing with armed guards. You can't say "well, armed guards don't make a difference, this guy didn't" when it was just one guy in one incident.
And to be fair, to the pro-gun side: Just because the FBI got a warning and did nothing in this case does not mean that whenever the FBI gets a warning, they will do nothing. Also, it ignores all those mass shootings where there was no warning whatsoever. I see a lot of finger-pointing at the FBI (which is well deserved) as well as at mental illness (less well deserved) as a way to deflect blame so as to kick the 'gun question' can down the road yet again.
Looks like your wikipedia link got cut off. Here is the actual article on Andromeda.
Other than that, perfect post.
I thought that the EC voters voted their districts, and then when a majority was reached, all votes switched to that winner, but sure, maybe they don't even bother with that first step. Makes sense to me. Either way, it's winner-takes-all, which is the problem.
Does it really matter. Turning russian troll into a meme makes a pretty hostile environment for paid shilling
It also means lots of people won't believe charges of Russian trolling anymore either.
You know, there are plenty of real wolves roaming around here. Crying wolf with people who merely disagree with you muddies any discussion of the wolves who are paid to troll.
Please do not overuse the "Russian troll!" accusation.
The Electoral College is fine. The problem is that almost every state chooses a "winner take all" format for electoral votes. They don't have to, but every President has run a campaign that exploited and benefited from the winner-take-all format, so they don't have a lot of motivation to change it.
It's actually called the oligarchy of the electoral college ignoring the voters.
As far as I can tell, almost every Electoral College voter actually voted the way the general populace in his/her district voted. There were seven EC voters who voted differently from their state. Seven out of 531. Not much faithlessness there.
If you want to complain, complain about the "winner take all" that almost (almost, because they don't have to, and some don't) every state uses to decide its electoral vote. I know people are all up in arms about the "popular vote," but the United States is a confederation of 50 states, not a giant conglomeration of 323m people. Each state votes. Moving the EC away from WTA would cause the EC vote to more closely resemble the overall popular vote anyway.
Game of Thrones has killed off enough characters that there aren't that many left! The books have more of a problem, since the show never adapted some of the characters and plotlines that were introduced later.
For instance, I don't have much of a problem with Jon and Dany falling in love, but simply due to the episode count, it's difficult to realize that Jon's been sitting at Dragonstone interacting with Dany for months and months. Since less real world time has passed, it feels "rushed. Think of how it might have played out in a previous season. Jon likely would still have reached Dragonstone in Episode 3 or so (being able to skip a character for an episode greatly contributed to the necessary feeling of time passing during travel, something they can't do anymore), but a good six episodes could have passed before he declared himself rather than the three which passed in Season 7. That makes their courtship more properly feel like a season-long development rather than a mid-season blip.
I hate to say it, but now Game of Thrones's seasons are too short. For most other serial TV shows I've seen, their seasons are too long.
Breaking Bad is maybe the only TV show I've watched where the season length was just right.
What do you think Trump would do to Pence if he *ever* took the initiative?
Pout about it on Twitter?
The merger is unambiguously bad. But I really, really also don't want a precedent where the President (whether Trump or anyone else) can easily use selective enforcement anti-trust law for political goals
Huh? It's been that way for decades. The Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit went forward because Microsoft did not donate to political campaigns (at the time). They quickly fixed that mistake, and the lawsuit went away when a business-friendly administration took over.
That's the big lesson of large corporations: You need to donate a decent amount of money to both political parties. Otherwise, you'll be at a disadvantage to those companies who "have their ear" of Congress and the Executive.
2006: The AT&T split from 25 years prior was ondone. All the Baby Bells became again AT&T. Didn't seem to make much difference.
Sure it did. Now you have Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and a few smaller carriers. AT&T does not have overwhelming monopoly power anymore.
I have had no problems getting the movies I wanted to watch (Except for Vampire's Kiss, which I have a morbid curiosity of).
My problem has been with broken discs, and you don't find out about the breakage until half-way through the movie. In fact, the last FOUR discs I have gotten from Netflix have all had playback errors. I tried on multiple devices too, since if a player suddenly can't play back a lot of discs, then the player is often at fault. Nope, it's just Netflix.
Just like last year, slashdot doesn't get why Netflix does this. Its because according to their analytics data, people are binge watching shows instead of watching movies.
People are switching to the shows because either they've already seen the movies, or because every time you look for a specific movie it's not there. Netflix's streaming selection has always sucked hard, because the movie studios are actively hostile to Netflix's pricing model.
You need to actually have a quality movie catalog for someone to use it.
The network orders a specific number of shows and expects them to fit neatly into a 30 or 60 minute time slot. You might only have enough story for 12 episodes, but you have to make 20
Lost got a lot better when they pushed back against the network requirements for 23 shows/year and trimmed down to 16-episodes or so. Granted, the plot eventually got torpedoed anyway, but the first three seasons have a TON of filler and slow-moving plot.
I had hoped that Game of Thrones would get better by cutting back from 10 to 7 episodes in the season, but it was not served well by the change. The overall writing took a dip in quality, but the rushed nature of the storytelling also hid how much time passed and made some developments feel like they happened too quickly.
And why didn't the robot use it's giant awesomesword right at the start?
It's the Voltron Rule, man! You never bust out an awesomesword until it's almost too late.
The Voltron (and Power Rangers which it inspired) ruleset for every episode:
1) Monster comes round.
2) Get individual robots to fight it and get knocked around.
3) Hey, why don't we form Voltron??
4) Awesomesword = win.
You took the time to know the proper spelling of the white nation, Atlantis, but couldn't give two shits to even google how to spell the black nation Wakanda.
Because we've had 2500 years of tales about the hidden nation of Wakanda, right?
Wakanda is a recent invention. Atlantis has permeated Western culture since the time of Plato. Don't put Wakanda on too high of a cultural pedestal.
Safe? Well you're unlikely to get E.Coli or water-borne diseases, but I would hardly call it safe. The American reliance on such food is a leading cause for our falling life expectancy compared to much of Europe.
The whole Korean chase sequence had a lot of noticeably bad effects. I kept thinking "well, it is a February movie, and not quite as much of a tentpole as the Avengers. They probably had a lower budget and are saving the good shots for later..." And they were, the effects got much better as the movie went on. Until the final battle, which was crap. But there was a lot of good stuff in between.
Any shot that had Black Panther leaping through the air -- extremely poor CG, like almost any film that uses CG for such things.