Agree re the trains, although I'm not sure if that's down to him. TfL have been working towards that goal for a long time. But he probably provided the political air cover required to make it happen.
I wasn't arguing that cars don't have advantages over buses. I was saying that individual transport has a significant disadvantage, and that the two apparent disadvantages of public transport that the OP mentioned (carrying capacity, stop frequency) are both not significant.
Not true. Self-evidently not true. Not even true when occupancy* levels are low, and definitely not true where levels are high. London bus occupancy is above 20 -- clearly, this delivers much lower carbon per passenger mile than any petrol/diesel car could achieve (especially when you take account of the fact that many London buses are hybrids).
Occupancy = passenger miles divided by vehicle miles.
We'd get by even better if they actually kept up the investment in conductors so the hop-on hop-off was routinely used. But BoJo got the money for the toy but not the conductors, the nobber. All mouth and no trousers, that one.
Nope. The problems of individual vehicles are not just technological. Individual vehicles take much more space on the roads. In congested urban areas, this makes a huge difference.
Additionally: 1. Carrying capacity doesn't run nearly empty the rest of the time. See London buses and the tube for an example. Busy during the day, squished in rush hour. 2. You have to compare mass transit vs the alternatives. Yes, lots of stops slows you down, but congestion slows you down even more. The tube is a much quicker way to get across London than a car, for many many journeys. Buses can be faster too for some journeys, not least because of bus lanes.
It must be so frustrating to be as stupid as you appear to be.
Hocus pocus is not required for this to haunt you. You will either resile from this position at some future point, or you will not. If you don't, your attitudes and behaviour will seep out from your actions like a stench, and you will be shunned. Not by everyone, and not in a way that you'd notice (at least not without becoming a lot smarter), because relatively few people enjoy a fight, but opportunities will fall away from you. Your life will be the poorer for your behaviour. Of course, because you're stupid and will therefore likely be oblivious to what is happening, you'll be able to protect your self-conception. I'm sure that's important to you. Certainly -- demonstrably -- more important than the truth.
If by some wild chance you do resile, well, you're going to end up reflecting on your own behaviour, and looking yourself in the mirror, and you will by definition not like what you see (else why resile?) and you are going to have to face the fact that you libelled a Holocaust survivor and downplayed fascistic politics in your own country while falsely accusing others of the same thing. That will be painful.
1. "Hilter"; "ever"; "you're". I'm not sure you're quite clear on what idiocy looks like, but you do an excellent job of demonstrating it. 2. "Use on ever [sic] Republican in the last 20 years". Riiiiight. Show me just one of the plethora of quotes comparing Kasich to Hitler that must, apparently, exist.
Are you trying to claim you read the words without any context? Without knowing of the claim made that he had somehow been involved in collaborating with the Nazis? If not, what is the point of your claim? You read the words, linked them back to the claim, and condemned a man for his recollections of his actions as a 14 year old Jew hiding from Nazis, despite those recollections making no mention whatsoever of anything even vaguely worthy of condemnation.
You who would condemn the oppressed. You have stained your soul. You have chosen the path of injustice and it will haunt you all the days of your life.
So you are not only vile; you are stupid too. In this clip, Soros describes himself as 14 years old. There is a witless and evil assertion, in the form of some written text that, "Soros was in charge of confiscating the land of the Jews of Hungary". And your thought on watching this is that it is true. It doesn't occur to you that there are no conceivable circumstances in which the Nazis looked at a 14 year old boy and said, "let's put him in charge of confiscating the land of the Jews of Hungary". Nor that he says nothing -- not a single thing -- in that entire clip which could substantiate such a ridiculous and vile calumny.
If ever proof were needed that you are genuinely very very stupid, you have provided it in spades here.
Even bigoted idiots like Coulter don't claim Soros *ran* land confiscations for the Nazis in Hungary. (And the pathetic claim they actually did make stands not the slightest bit of scrutiny or critical thought.)
Your stupidity, your vile behaviour, your willingness to repeat terrible lies about your enemies -- these are examples of the behaviours my grandma described to me when she talked about Vienna in the early 30s. But you'll stick by your strongman, I know. I'm trying to get you to think about a previous aftermath, and begin a process of admission of wrongdoing. I realise it's futile, but the words "you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it" hang heavy on me at the moment. Stop lying to yourself, to me, to others, about Soros, about Trump, about Sanders, about the Nazis. Start listening to those whose personal histories actually matter in this.
Seriously, I'm well aware that there are a group who believe that they continue to tell truth to power on Swift Boats, while everyone else thinks it is a venal and disgusting lie. That was the point of my first post. The fact that you are part of the group: bully for you. The fact that you will think you've won because I'm not going to engage in an inordinately lengthy discussion of all sorts of intricacies with you, in the same way I just CBA to engage with climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers or creationists or flat earthers or various others, well, bully twice for you. Enjoy your feeling of victory. Life is too short to waste time arguing this kind of tripe.
You should hang your head in shame for what you have said about Soros. He was 13 when the Nazis occupied his homeland, Hungary. Thirteen, and a Jewish boy. And you think he "worked with the Nazis".
Have you no sense of decency? Can you not tell the difference between good and evil, between the truth and a lie? The moral contortions required to convince yourself that he wasn't actually thirteen, or that a small boy is morally culpable in the face of tyranny that killed at least two thirds of all Hungarian Jews... words fail me. Thinking you have won an argument on the internet in support of Trump may make you happy, but the stain on your soul that will be left by a lie such as this will be indelible. Rather than respond to me, take a step back and think about what you are doing. Is this truly the person you want to be? When you are 80, and you think back to this moment when you accused a Holocaust survivor of being complicit with his Nazi oppressors, will that be a moment you can live with?
As for "actual Nazi tactics", my relatives were put on actual Nazi registers of Jews and faced actual Nazi travel bans on Jews and suffered actual Nazi violence and some were killed in actual Nazi concentration camps. So I'm aware of what an invocation of the Nazis means. To me, it means something in my guts: visceral emotion. To you, based on your posts, it means one-upmanship and winning arguments.
I don't understand your response. Why is the balance of risk from government vs risk from bad actors changed by whether I know about encryption? The implication is simply that encryption ought to be ubiquitous and easy to use if it is to be effective. That's kind of where the tech industry has been pushing. Who exactly is it that you think is more at risk from a terrorist than someone stealing their data? A grandma?! Surely you yourself don't actually believe that.
I can't really be bothered to re-hash with you whether what the government was asking for constitutes a back door or not. What is clear is, it's not going to be a one-time request. That will require either holding that code permanently (a major security risk) or re-making it continuously (a huge waste of time and effort for some of the company's most critical engineers, and still no real mitigation of the security risk, as those engineers will over time inevitably learn the methods required to develop the software from all the repetition and thus be susceptible to compromise by bad actors).
Anyway, enough of this. Why don't you explain what you're proposing? Is it: 1. We deliberately weaken security enough that the government is guaranteed access to information if it wants it, and we all live with the increased risks of compromise from bad actor 2. We invent some kind of special method that weakens security for the government but not for anyone else? 3. Something else And while you're at it, it would be interesting to see you set out and work through at least some of the implications of your proposal.
I may have a hard time convincing *you*, but that's not the same as having a hard time convincing anyone.
I don't see the relevance of recency. An argument that "our parents didn't need this liberty and so neither do we" seems pretty facile, if that's what you have in mind.
If the government says, "you may use a phone to help manage, for example, your health and finances, but you may not buy a phone that has encryption that secures such data from bad actors", then that is giving up an essential liberty. It is also poor public policy: it's not as though people are *not* going to use their devices for such purposes -- the value of mobile access is too great. So de facto, such policy will expose tens of millions of people's most intimate secrets to the risk of compromise by bad actors.
I also don't know why the Dems are so against him. Between Cruz and Trump, Trump has _far_ more liberal policies/tendencies. He'd actually raise taxes if they pushed for it.
Perhaps because they are morally outraged by the idea of a politician rising to power on the back of policies last enacted by Nazis: bans on a religious group entering the country, a national register for a religious group, etc? I do know that my grandma, if she were still alive, would slap me in the face for forgetting our family's history and her murdered aunts, uncles and cousins, if I so much as contemplated voicing even mild support for Trump. And she'd be right to do so.
Whether he believes in these policies or sentiments is besides the point. He is creating a safe space for these ideas to creep back into political life, and that is a pernicious legacy that will cause great harm irrespective of whether he is elected or not.
I think this "a plague on both your houses" rhetoric is just that -- rhetoric, without basis in facts.
For sure, the Dems have behaved badly many times. But their sins have remained forgivable. They haven't gone to Washington with the express purpose of shitting in the bed and then complaining about the stink.
This is properly insightful and fact-based analysis. I would add a third component to Trump's rise: the development of an echo chamber on the right that prefers compelling stories to truthful stories. From Swift Boats onwards. While this phenomenon has always been around, the volume (in both senses) has increased dramatically, especially in the past eight years. By the time Trump came onstage, the audience was well and truly warmed up.
You need to engage with the quote more carefully. The quote speaks of "essential Liberty":
Essential is a high bar. And ironically, locks are an excellent case in point, but you have the example exactly the wrong way round. The government is demanding the power to compel a third party to break any lock it chooses, time and again. It is therefore demanding we all give up the liberty of being able to lock our phones properly -- i.e., so that only we can unlock them -- in the interests of our safety.
We are indeed all happy to give up "some" liberty to purchase safety. But most of us don't want to give up "essential" liberty, which is quite a different thing.
Of course, what you and I think is essential may differ. Hence rules, to protect us from both the definite bad guys and the government, who too often through history have taken the role of bad guys as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I drive a Zoe. No congestion charge, and I park for free in Westminster.
27000 injuries in all transport accidents. Can't easily find figures for the old Routemaster, sadly.
Agree re the trains, although I'm not sure if that's down to him. TfL have been working towards that goal for a long time. But he probably provided the political air cover required to make it happen.
I wasn't arguing that cars don't have advantages over buses. I was saying that individual transport has a significant disadvantage, and that the two apparent disadvantages of public transport that the OP mentioned (carrying capacity, stop frequency) are both not significant.
Not true. Self-evidently not true. Not even true when occupancy* levels are low, and definitely not true where levels are high. London bus occupancy is above 20 -- clearly, this delivers much lower carbon per passenger mile than any petrol/diesel car could achieve (especially when you take account of the fact that many London buses are hybrids).
Occupancy = passenger miles divided by vehicle miles.
Buses are often, but not always, faster than cars in London.
About 12 people per year died on Routemasters. About 130 people now die per year in London in transport accidents.
We'd get by even better if they actually kept up the investment in conductors so the hop-on hop-off was routinely used. But BoJo got the money for the toy but not the conductors, the nobber. All mouth and no trousers, that one.
Will someone please mod the antisemitic tosspot out of the conversation? thanks
Nope. The problems of individual vehicles are not just technological. Individual vehicles take much more space on the roads. In congested urban areas, this makes a huge difference.
http://humantransit.org/2012/0...
Additionally:
1. Carrying capacity doesn't run nearly empty the rest of the time. See London buses and the tube for an example. Busy during the day, squished in rush hour.
2. You have to compare mass transit vs the alternatives. Yes, lots of stops slows you down, but congestion slows you down even more. The tube is a much quicker way to get across London than a car, for many many journeys. Buses can be faster too for some journeys, not least because of bus lanes.
It must be so frustrating to be as stupid as you appear to be.
Hocus pocus is not required for this to haunt you. You will either resile from this position at some future point, or you will not. If you don't, your attitudes and behaviour will seep out from your actions like a stench, and you will be shunned. Not by everyone, and not in a way that you'd notice (at least not without becoming a lot smarter), because relatively few people enjoy a fight, but opportunities will fall away from you. Your life will be the poorer for your behaviour. Of course, because you're stupid and will therefore likely be oblivious to what is happening, you'll be able to protect your self-conception. I'm sure that's important to you. Certainly -- demonstrably -- more important than the truth.
If by some wild chance you do resile, well, you're going to end up reflecting on your own behaviour, and looking yourself in the mirror, and you will by definition not like what you see (else why resile?) and you are going to have to face the fact that you libelled a Holocaust survivor and downplayed fascistic politics in your own country while falsely accusing others of the same thing. That will be painful.
So, haunted either way, and no deity involved.
1. "Hilter"; "ever"; "you're". I'm not sure you're quite clear on what idiocy looks like, but you do an excellent job of demonstrating it.
2. "Use on ever [sic] Republican in the last 20 years". Riiiiight. Show me just one of the plethora of quotes comparing Kasich to Hitler that must, apparently, exist.
Are you trying to claim you read the words without any context? Without knowing of the claim made that he had somehow been involved in collaborating with the Nazis? If not, what is the point of your claim? You read the words, linked them back to the claim, and condemned a man for his recollections of his actions as a 14 year old Jew hiding from Nazis, despite those recollections making no mention whatsoever of anything even vaguely worthy of condemnation.
You who would condemn the oppressed. You have stained your soul. You have chosen the path of injustice and it will haunt you all the days of your life.
So you are not only vile; you are stupid too. In this clip, Soros describes himself as 14 years old. There is a witless and evil assertion, in the form of some written text that, "Soros was in charge of confiscating the land of the Jews of Hungary". And your thought on watching this is that it is true. It doesn't occur to you that there are no conceivable circumstances in which the Nazis looked at a 14 year old boy and said, "let's put him in charge of confiscating the land of the Jews of Hungary". Nor that he says nothing -- not a single thing -- in that entire clip which could substantiate such a ridiculous and vile calumny.
If ever proof were needed that you are genuinely very very stupid, you have provided it in spades here.
Even bigoted idiots like Coulter don't claim Soros *ran* land confiscations for the Nazis in Hungary. (And the pathetic claim they actually did make stands not the slightest bit of scrutiny or critical thought.)
Your stupidity, your vile behaviour, your willingness to repeat terrible lies about your enemies -- these are examples of the behaviours my grandma described to me when she talked about Vienna in the early 30s. But you'll stick by your strongman, I know. I'm trying to get you to think about a previous aftermath, and begin a process of admission of wrongdoing. I realise it's futile, but the words "you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it" hang heavy on me at the moment. Stop lying to yourself, to me, to others, about Soros, about Trump, about Sanders, about the Nazis. Start listening to those whose personal histories actually matter in this.
A previous aftermath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As they say of jazz, if you have to ask...
Seriously, I'm well aware that there are a group who believe that they continue to tell truth to power on Swift Boats, while everyone else thinks it is a venal and disgusting lie. That was the point of my first post. The fact that you are part of the group: bully for you. The fact that you will think you've won because I'm not going to engage in an inordinately lengthy discussion of all sorts of intricacies with you, in the same way I just CBA to engage with climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers or creationists or flat earthers or various others, well, bully twice for you. Enjoy your feeling of victory. Life is too short to waste time arguing this kind of tripe.
You should hang your head in shame for what you have said about Soros. He was 13 when the Nazis occupied his homeland, Hungary. Thirteen, and a Jewish boy. And you think he "worked with the Nazis".
Have you no sense of decency? Can you not tell the difference between good and evil, between the truth and a lie? The moral contortions required to convince yourself that he wasn't actually thirteen, or that a small boy is morally culpable in the face of tyranny that killed at least two thirds of all Hungarian Jews... words fail me. Thinking you have won an argument on the internet in support of Trump may make you happy, but the stain on your soul that will be left by a lie such as this will be indelible. Rather than respond to me, take a step back and think about what you are doing. Is this truly the person you want to be? When you are 80, and you think back to this moment when you accused a Holocaust survivor of being complicit with his Nazi oppressors, will that be a moment you can live with?
As for "actual Nazi tactics", my relatives were put on actual Nazi registers of Jews and faced actual Nazi travel bans on Jews and suffered actual Nazi violence and some were killed in actual Nazi concentration camps. So I'm aware of what an invocation of the Nazis means. To me, it means something in my guts: visceral emotion. To you, based on your posts, it means one-upmanship and winning arguments.
Swift Boat wasn't true.
HTH!
I don't understand your response. Why is the balance of risk from government vs risk from bad actors changed by whether I know about encryption? The implication is simply that encryption ought to be ubiquitous and easy to use if it is to be effective. That's kind of where the tech industry has been pushing. Who exactly is it that you think is more at risk from a terrorist than someone stealing their data? A grandma?! Surely you yourself don't actually believe that.
I can't really be bothered to re-hash with you whether what the government was asking for constitutes a back door or not. What is clear is, it's not going to be a one-time request. That will require either holding that code permanently (a major security risk) or re-making it continuously (a huge waste of time and effort for some of the company's most critical engineers, and still no real mitigation of the security risk, as those engineers will over time inevitably learn the methods required to develop the software from all the repetition and thus be susceptible to compromise by bad actors).
Anyway, enough of this. Why don't you explain what you're proposing? Is it:
1. We deliberately weaken security enough that the government is guaranteed access to information if it wants it, and we all live with the increased risks of compromise from bad actor
2. We invent some kind of special method that weakens security for the government but not for anyone else?
3. Something else
And while you're at it, it would be interesting to see you set out and work through at least some of the implications of your proposal.
I may have a hard time convincing *you*, but that's not the same as having a hard time convincing anyone.
I don't see the relevance of recency. An argument that "our parents didn't need this liberty and so neither do we" seems pretty facile, if that's what you have in mind.
If the government says, "you may use a phone to help manage, for example, your health and finances, but you may not buy a phone that has encryption that secures such data from bad actors", then that is giving up an essential liberty. It is also poor public policy: it's not as though people are *not* going to use their devices for such purposes -- the value of mobile access is too great. So de facto, such policy will expose tens of millions of people's most intimate secrets to the risk of compromise by bad actors.
I also don't know why the Dems are so against him. Between Cruz and Trump, Trump has _far_ more liberal policies/tendencies. He'd actually raise taxes if they pushed for it.
Perhaps because they are morally outraged by the idea of a politician rising to power on the back of policies last enacted by Nazis: bans on a religious group entering the country, a national register for a religious group, etc? I do know that my grandma, if she were still alive, would slap me in the face for forgetting our family's history and her murdered aunts, uncles and cousins, if I so much as contemplated voicing even mild support for Trump. And she'd be right to do so.
Whether he believes in these policies or sentiments is besides the point. He is creating a safe space for these ideas to creep back into political life, and that is a pernicious legacy that will cause great harm irrespective of whether he is elected or not.
Let's hear your list of solutions, then! Why don't you set out what you'd do differently? Some specifics would be nice.
How are the Democrats no better?
I think this "a plague on both your houses" rhetoric is just that -- rhetoric, without basis in facts.
For sure, the Dems have behaved badly many times. But their sins have remained forgivable. They haven't gone to Washington with the express purpose of shitting in the bed and then complaining about the stink.
This is properly insightful and fact-based analysis. I would add a third component to Trump's rise: the development of an echo chamber on the right that prefers compelling stories to truthful stories. From Swift Boats onwards. While this phenomenon has always been around, the volume (in both senses) has increased dramatically, especially in the past eight years. By the time Trump came onstage, the audience was well and truly warmed up.
It's all grotesque.
"Due process is one thing, but carte blanche is another" -- beautifully, pithily put.
You need to engage with the quote more carefully. The quote speaks of "essential Liberty":
Essential is a high bar. And ironically, locks are an excellent case in point, but you have the example exactly the wrong way round. The government is demanding the power to compel a third party to break any lock it chooses, time and again. It is therefore demanding we all give up the liberty of being able to lock our phones properly -- i.e., so that only we can unlock them -- in the interests of our safety.
We are indeed all happy to give up "some" liberty to purchase safety. But most of us don't want to give up "essential" liberty, which is quite a different thing.
Of course, what you and I think is essential may differ. Hence rules, to protect us from both the definite bad guys and the government, who too often through history have taken the role of bad guys as well.