The "loudness war" issue is not inherent to digital sources. Nor is it something you need to "master the record out of". It's sufficient to not break it in the first place.
You’ve picked an interesting example, as driving a car, even with all safety precautions, is pretty much the most dangerous activity we do on a daily basis. Yet somehow we decide that the benefits outweigh the risks.
It's a completely different story. For cars, it happened because of relentless pressure from the auto lobby. It took years of propaganda from oil companies, car makers etc. to make us think the road is for cars [1]. We demolished and rebuilt entire cities to accommodate cars, partly because they gutted the public transport sector [2]. This made our infrastructure so hostile to our own bodies that we have no choice but to use cars now. We bought their products because they forced them down our throats. There is nowhere near that kind of pressure behind the adoption of... oh dear lord.
I don't think the pressure of the auto lobby is really the reason.
People feel cars are more convenient and more prestigious than riding on a bus. Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force.
The auto lobby invented the word jaywalking to shift the liability for dead pedestrians from the people doing the killing to the people doing the walking.
Even in Amsterdam the original "stop the child murder" protests only barely succeeded, and it took a massive oil crisis and a population that could still (if only just) remember what life was like before cars took over their city to get there.
Uses change and laws need to keep up. Lobby or not, jaywalking is a reasonable thing to be illegal because when cars became common enough, walkers in their way caused an overall loss for everyone. People also used to be allowed to walk on the train tracks freely when trains were slower and more obvious - did the train lobby invent the word "foamer"? Should we make rail corridors train-free? Computer hacking became illegal during my lifetime to shift liability for faulty software and incompetence from the operators to the users. Before that, it didn't really matter because nobody was using the internet for anything important. Friends used to hack each other for fun. Bitcoin used to be a wild west where people would openly steal from or fool each other for sport - I don't think people really saw it as money or property when you could just generate it with your computer.
Cars were quite desirable in Soviet Union, where industry was not allowed to advertise. You had to get into a queue to buy a car, the state was not interested to make them in a quantity to satisfy the demand.
Very few people actually _needed_ cars as soviets built adequate public transport system. But there are many situations where car can really help a lot. Perhaps that's more obvious in a society which has rather few cars.
E.g. back in Soviet days and around that only one member of my extended family had a car. The rest of the family were really happy about opportunities it provides. E.g. with a car you can buy fresh produce directly from farmers with just few hours of driving. Doing the same without a car is so much hassle and effort people just won't do it, and then you're confined to what's available in a local grocery story (which was usually much worse than direct-from-farmer option). Do you think it has something to do with "car industry"?
And in a Cost/Risk/Benefit computation, cars remain incommensurately invaluable. Because one's Quality of Life without them would simply be destroyed, comparatively. The moving "castle" (legal term in the USA) can be more important than the house in crucial regards.
The point attempted at post 48501189 remains unintelligible. That cars imply risks and externalities does not clarify it.
No its much more straightforward, but I get it - there is no warm fuzzy feeling of discovering yet another global evil conspiracy out there set to get all of us.
We are family of 4 with 2 small kids. Whenever we travel, its a series of backpacks, other bags, other stuff, and then some more. Heck, even if I travel alone its almost never just me - there are heaps of garbage to dispose, big shopping bags to bring back, big backpack with camping or climbing or skiing gear etc.
It would have been absolute, utter nightmare to do this over public transport. This comes from European who has generally very good public transport (given rural area) and world's best train network specifically (Switzerland). Yet roads are choke full of cars and every year there is more.
Public transport simply ain't cutting it for anything but the simplest use cases, ie just me and nothing or small backpack. Some routes I take would take 3-5x longer with public transport, or are just not possible at all. No industry massage required here, ever. Not everybody lives in some dense city and never leaves outside for evenings or weekends.
Switzerland does have roads choked full of cars. It also has pretty mediocre bike infrastructure.
But this is kind of besides the point - even in the Netherlands I also would use a car if I were taking camping and skiing gear with the kids, and that's fine. But I can also take them in the bakfiets to the grocery store when I want, and that's also fine. Cars have their purpose, but you shouldn't _have_ to use one for basic trips.
Well, here is where we differ - what is basic trip for you may not be basic trip for me or next Joe. Maybe they don't even have walking path to their house. Maybe closest grocery store is 5km away on roads which are incompatible with safe cycling (many parents don't give a fck and just ride, throwing a tiny little dice with every truck passing centimeters from them and their young kids at high speed). Maybe XYZ.
Don't judge others in some complex situation just because in your case there is some simple straightforward solution. Yes Netherland has top notch cycling infra but thats nowhere else to be seen and won't be seen for quite some time. And don't force your solution unto everybody regardless on fit, that doesn't work long term (aka EU approach to things or why much of eastern part hates it).
Yeah, when you travel. But wouldn't it be cool if school was just down the block and a grocery store was the same distance the other way? In big city Europe, it's like this.
Oh man what a perfect example to be had here. So historically exactly what you're said is 100% what happened. By the time Ford really mastered manufacturing, he managed to get the price of the Model T down to $260 around 1925, about $4,600 in current terms for a premium car!
Needless to say everybody was buying one and he was rocking it. Then came along General Motors and they were desperate to find any way to compete. They couldn't compete on price or quality, so their CEO is credited with inventing planned obsolescence, and turning cars into a fashion. They'd release a new style each year alongside plentiful marketing implying that the old styles were outdated, and it was wildly successful.
So yeah, needless to say people have always genuinely wanted their own cars. But it's also true that companies have managed through advertising to create artificial demand for vehicles that don't objectively make sense. To some degree reality is catching up at least though. Aston Martin is on the verge of bankruptcy and BYD is the largest electric car company in the world, by a wide margin.
Comfort, utility, fun, status. Every person has their own mixed requirement of those that then gets applied to their budget. Expensive for me is probably cheap for our CEO and cheap for me is probably expensive for our interns :)
> Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force.
Not really. We know it’s not as much of a natural force as some would like it to be because there are places where the lobbies lost, and while cars are common and widespread they’re nowhere near as dominant as they are in, say, the USA.
NJB’s next video (currently available on nebula) is about exactly that, Amsterdam’s (/ De Pijp’s) resistance to cars and car lobbying.
Subsidies played a huge role, including the eminent domain bulldozing of cities for free-at-use highways. If people had to pay upfront for those costs, the urban landscape would look much different (probably closer to Japanese cities, which do have massive suburbs, but centred around train stations).
Yet Japan does still have cars (and a car culture even), they're just not necessarily the default or dominant mode of transport.
Sure, nobody is saying cars are useless or unfun, I'm just pushing back against the idea that everything car everywhere is a natural and intrinsic outcome from cars existing. As I noted, even in the netherlands cars are common, the dutch have a very dense road network, and a fair amount of cars.
For me, cars are a perfectly fine mode of transport, but the way so many places prioritize it over alternatives (whatever the reason) isn't necessarily better.
My "wtf" moment was 20 years ago when I was visiting my cousin in an exurb and we sat in a line of cars for over 40 minutes waiting for our turn to pick up her kid. The messed up part was that while there were school busses, everything was so spread out that the bus ride for them would have been over an hour and then another 20 minute walk from the arterial road drop-off point to their house. Everything was far away, including local public parks.
My view on this is based on situation in Ukraine: Ukraine definitely didn't have any car lobby at least until 1990 as Soviet Union was heavily investing into public transportation and did not profit from car sales.
Still, general opinion on cars was that you should buy one if you can, even if you're not going to use it for commute.
I doubt there was any car lobby in independent Ukraine as national car makers were just bad, and foreign were competitors. But general opinion on cars got to a point where not having a car when you can afford it (and can learn to drive, etc.) is considered weird.
So I'm afraid car dominance is just what happens naturally in a capitalist environment, and countering it requires an effort - e.g. eco-conscious population, urban planning and public transport optimization, etc. And Netherlands is such a country, as far as I know, but it just doesn't happen by default.
> Isn't Not Just Bikes some US expat/biking maximalist?
According to their videos, they prefer trams within cities; generally take trains between cities; and acknowledge that cars are very useful for places which aren't so well connected (e.g. places that are far apart which aren't on a train line). They think encouraging the use of cars within cities is a bad idea (dangerous, scales poorly, makes those areas less pleasant to be, etc.).
Not what I'd think of as a "biking maximalist".
They do show themselves cycling to places that are nearby. Does that make Youtubers who record videos in their car "driving maximalists"?
Are there real acknowledgments cases of multiple companies coming together to bribe some state level people to increase their profit and splitting the bribe across the companies?
Like GM, BNW and Honda coming together bribing and splitting the bill. Seems unlikely thou there was a RAM price fixing agreement caught but then again they were caught cause of the number of people aware
Whether public or individual transportation makes more sense really depends on a country’s geography and people’s housing preferences. Public transportation is not always the best option.
Typical comment that probably comes from a healthy, childless, young person with no disabilities that can’t understand why people not in that situation might have different requirements from transportation.
In case of driving the stakes are equally high for everyone on the road. Can we say the same for an agent?
Having an agent is like forever having a genius intern who'll almost always do the perfect job for you. But there is non-zero chance that they'll also come up with quirky solutions and execute those with confidence and no follow-ups. You don't grant the intern production access and hope they check with you.
I don't think the corporate equivalent of "dog ate my homework" flies, if the dog ate your files and your production DB if you are unlucky.
I don’t think that’s really true of driving, pedestrians and cyclists are at a much higher risk of getting killed by a driver than a driver themself. There are huge negative externalities to driving
> In case of driving the stakes are equally high for everyone on the road
The stakes are significantly higher for everyone outside a car. This seems like a pretty good metaphor for slop bombing people who don't use AI. People drive because they don't feel safe around everyone driving. People slop bomb because they can't handle all the slop.
What do you mean “somehow”? You make it sound like people don’t weight benefits and risks. If you do not live in a large city, the benefits are so immense in terms of mobility, they outweigh the risks for most, very clearly. That’s why in large cities, much less people own a driving license for example, the benefits are just not there anymore.
Granted, on the downsides, people look at cost more than risks.
Yes, but we usually use cars as a means to an end. Have you ever met a manager who setup gasmaxxing policies and criticized employees for doing their job instead of driving?
I know sales people in pharma who spend all day driving, not only for sales visits but also drive doctors for their personal errands, and all this driving is encouraged by management.
I'm interested in what you mean, if you could develop. Would it kill tokenmaxxing because it's so bad? Because it's incredibly efficient? Because it's way too expensive?
My perception is that it’s good, but very expensive. I would not be surprised if regular users, if they shifted their flows to Fable at API pricing, would be racking up $200 a day, not a month.
> Yet somehow we decide that the benefits outweigh the risks.
More like malicious lobbying and incompetence made it impossible in many places to use any other form of transportation, despite there being safer, faster, cheaper, and healthier ways to move around. Which come to think if it makes this a rather nice analogy for the current situation... :)
Not really. That decision was taken for you, (I’m presuming you live in the US) by the American car industry and their paid of politicians. Your cities used to have beautiful public transport until it was dismantled.
Unfortunately in Europe the German car industry similarly has a lot of power, hence why their shitty rail network fuck up the whole continents.
The example wasn't "driving a car". The benefits of putting your feet up on the dashboard do not outweigh the risks, at least not where there is actual traffic. I don't think I saw a single person doing that in real life, ever.
Many people will say it’s because of the slop. I think it’s because they have no product vision. The roadmap is pretty much a random walk, which combined with the velocity of agentic coding is like digging a moat with atomic bombs.
Of course, on the other hand does it make sense to keep an obsolete field artificially alive because "jobs"? There are many new oportunities opening for us. One will be increasing demand for cybersecurity auditors, someone will need to wire those servers and someone else will need to expand the AI into more fields.
We humans don't like change much, but that doesn't mean we should pump money to blockbuster.
Quitting is an individual action with potential adverse consequences (misery).
The political question is why despite productivity in economic terms (which i know is flawed) growing many times over, do we still have to work as much, get paid so little, and have so many unemployed people looking for a job?
Looks like without a parasitic capitalist class, we could share resources and work and have people live better lives and work less.
Your job being automated to the point where you no longer proform it has the same adverse consequences. Whether this could work is some economic and societal setup is irrelevant, because that's not the world we live in.
What are you talking about? The only reason we could work less is because we always gave way to innovation. We don't haul large blocks of ice because "evil capitalists" started making fridges. Or do you want to reinstate ice trade, just because it generated more jobs? Or ban tractors because farming by hand was made by way more people?
"Sharing resources" doesn't work. We share way too much just to keep pensioners alive and can't have kids because of that. Confiscating all the billionaire's wealth wouldn't make a dent and would destroy much more.
I'm not advocating for going back to the stone age. But if work was sufficiently shared, we could all work less. A lot of "work" is actually useless in terms of production and social use (see Graeber, Bullshit Jobs).
Rising kids also has a time, effort and opportunity costs which are not easily offset with money. I don’t think there’s a way to frame modern parenting in a way where it „pays off” in the same sense as it did in the past. As of now, it’s essentially a hobby.
It just has to be a "Job" you get paid to do. People will absolutely sign up.
The problem is that there will be far too many people wanting that job, so you have to filter somehow, and that's basically eugenics which isn't the most fun, so I guess you'd have to have a lottery and deal with the fact that like 10% of the population will constantly riot about someone who "doesn't deserve it" getting paid to raise kids.
>In October 2000, however, when appearing before a Family Court hearing examiner to answer Shondel's petition, Mark{*7 NY3d at 325} requested DNA testing. The hearing examiner ordered genetic marker tests, which revealed that Mark is not the child's biological father. The hearing examiner then dismissed Shondel's paternity petition, and Mark abandoned his petition for visitation, having severed his relationship with the child. Shondel objected to the hearing examiner's order, expressing doubts about the laboratory tests and stating that she would be able to show that Mark had always recognized the child as his. Realizing that the hearing examiner had exceeded her authority in dismissing Shondel's petition, Family Court sustained her objection and appointed a law guardian for the child.
>...
>Family Court entered an order of filiation and awarded child support retroactive to the date Shondel commenced the Family Court proceeding. The Appellate Division affirmed, concluding that "Family Court properly determined that it was in the best interests of the subject child to equitably estop [Mark] from denying paternity" (6 AD3d 437 [2004]).[FN1] We agree, based on our precedents, the affirmed findings of fact and the legislative recognition of paternity by estoppel.
and that not just the US, Europe is equally batshit, with France in particular fucking banning paternity tests outright.
they aren't going to pay anything resembling a livable wage for child rearing. firstly, that defeats the purpose, secondly, it would be expensive as fuck.
That one's about someone who acted as the father for almost five years before suddenly questioning it. It's not about paying for children, it's about seeing a responsibility you took on through to the end.
Mandatory DNA testing at birth would solve a lot of these, and bring in new problems.
you appear to be agreeing with me that it's about the money. the state doesn't want to shoulder the bill for supporting the child even in these extremely rare cases I've brought up, it sure as hell can't/won't fund a goddamn breeding program the GP is suggesting with ""It just has to be a "Job" you get paid to do. People will absolutely sign up.""
I mean, it can be offset with money.
- Kids take time - Yes, so does working. If you cutout the 90h my partner and I spend working, that's a lot of time to put into raising children.
- Kids take effort - Yes, so does working. If I didn't need to work this becomes much easier.
- Opportunity cost - Yes, just pay me for the opportunity cost. Pay for my PhD after my kids are in grade school.
It's just that these policies are very expensive, and right now we allocate our money mostly to make rich people richer and maintain very high QoL for our elderly population. That's a choice we make in setting up our society.
Exiting the workforce for a decade (Replacement fertility rate is 2.1 implying some people will have 3 kids, spaced 2 years apart plus 5 years of child-rearing until kindergarten) has an opportunity cost that is potentially in the millions of dollars, depending on the industry, and the time costs of child rearing doesn't suddenly end at 5 either.
Isn’t that just deliberate on their part? As in, they genuinely don’t want developers to use these APIs and just allow them for accessibility use cases.
If that were the case, and Apple suddenly decided that no apps are allowed to use the accessibility APIs, so many utilities would just cease to exist, it'd ruin the OS tbh.
You'd lose all window managers, things like alfred and textexpander, screenshot tools, computer use agents, etc.
Given that they could have easily get Steam Deck levels of compatibility with Windows games, but didn’t, I think they’re mainly after the App Store margins for ported games. Having an independent marketplace with tons of Mac-compatible games is a nightmare for them.
Gambling apps. Extremely few of the "games" on App Store are traditional games. Most of them are lootbox puzzle slop because that's what Apple tolerates && most lucrative.
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