I mean I will admit I don’t know a lot about European public transit and it is quite a broad region. I mostly have looked at Amsterdam as that’s the big example people use so when I say America won’t reach that level I’m more referring to how nice it is there. I have visited the UK once and I have step family there and the public transit/trains were nice there to actually have them as options compared to America which often times just doesn’t. When I visited I only visited Newcastle and London so again don’t have a ton of knowledge but in general seemed nice. But from my experience not owning a car in America travel within cities is already starting to get pretty good where I’ve lived and I just wish more cities would invest in it and create high speed rail lines between cities for longer trips.

I mean one example in the US I can look to is a city I lived in for a bit, Seattle. They have been actively expanding their public transit and even when I lived there I didn’t use a car to get around and honestly the only problems I had was trips taking a bit longer sometimes and busses running not on time both of which are problems that can be fixed and with the expansions are actively being fixed. If you want an end game for what public transit can look like Europe is a great example. While I don’t think America can ever quite reach that level I think we could definitely reach a point where cars are still required but only for people living further out in the country. Heck if you want a good example for public transit in a larger country the high speed rail China has been building is pretty impressive. Don’t know the most about it but I’ve heard fairly good things about it (of course ignoring the other problems with China, but that isn’t related to public transit). Overall public transit does work and works well especially in the cities that actively invest in it like Seattle and Portland (both of which I’ve lived in/near). The problem in America with adoption just comes from a very car centric attitude which at least in the cities I mentioned before has been slowly getting better as people start to realize that public transit benefits everyone, including drivers. Just because we have to fight to show that it benefits everyone and that building bigger roads doesn’t help doesn’t mean we should just surrender to car infrastructure because it’s hard and takes a long time to push for public transit investments.

Except that is how capitalism works time and time again. Companies will lower prices to gain market share then once they have a large control of the market will happily raise prices and keep any gains in productivity for themselves. The only reason Uber is trying to undercut people right now is because the industry is new and they want to try and capture the market for themselves. Once they do or some situation forms like what we have with internet with Comcast and other providers avoiding competing you can expect prices to not ever be lowered again. If anything this is another reason why I favor public transit over self driving cars because public transit investment is owned by the government and therefore the people, it’s not gonna try and milk people for profit. Whereas these ride share companies already have shown they’re willing to act shitty towards their drivers to drive up their own profits, I imagine these companies would continue to find ways to milk more profit out of the service with self driving cars and with drivers being gone that’s gonna come at the expense of the users.

I just don’t see any gains from self driving cars. We already have ride share services that would allow what you’re talking about to happen but people don’t do it cause it’s expensive. I doubt companies like Uber and Lyft are gonna lower their prices when self driving cars become a thing, they’re just gonna take the extra profit for themselves. All it’s gonna do is encourage more people to drive cause now one of the benefits of public transit, not having to actively drive and being able to do other things while traveling, will now be a benefit of self driving cars too. And on top of that it’s gonna encourage more of the bad practices from the software industry to leak over into cars such as subscriptions services which companies have already been trying to push. Overall I don’t see self driving cars being a benefit for society other than making driving more convenient and pushing even more towards dangerous car focused infrastructure.

With the way cars are now self driving wouldn’t solve the problem of people just using cars to get everywhere. Cause people would own their own self driving car and then you get the same exact problem as you mentioned before except now you also get the convenience of not having to actively drive so why use public transit at all if you can just let your car do all the work to take you to where you need to go. The real solution to the last mile problem is to make better walking/biking infrastructure and to have larger transit networks so people don’t have to go super far to get access to transit. Also you mention having to bike at both ends of your transit and that’s a problem I don’t get cause you can just bring your bike with you on the train/bus. Or since you seem to be leaning towards a rental ride sharing model anyway rental bikes also solve that problem perfectly.

It’s crazy cause the first time around everyone was talking about how Trump is rich so he can’t be bought like other politicians but looks like that has turned around pretty sharply.

Yeah I’ve had the same Chromecast since close to when they first came out. Haven’t had any problems outside of apps not supporting it very well sometimes, which isnt really a problem with the device itself. Still works perfectly even with pretty constant use as I use it for having videos on while I fall asleep.

Don’t know anything about newer Chromecast but I really love my older one. Its just a dumb stick with no apps built in that I can cast stuff from my phone to. The only recent annoying thing with it is that the YouTube app changed the behaviour when you’re connected, so now instead of tapping on a video to bring up a menu asking whether to play it now or add it to the queue it now just defaults playing it now when you tap on it. Makes setting up a queue of videos really annoying now cause you have to tap on the three dots to add it to the queue now.

Yeah its almost like if we didn’t keep extending copyright protections a bunch of stuff would be in the public domain and any streaming service could offer it without having to deal with licensing.

I just don’t give notification permissions to most apps unless I actually care about notifications from it.

At least in my experience I have more customization issues when taking to people rather than using an app or going through a kiosk. The only time it’s the other way around is when they don’t include an option I want on the digital version but that’s becoming less and less common for me at least. The number of times I’ve had orders just missing customization things I asked for but they didn’t hear or forgot to enter is much higher when I go through the drive through or go in person then when I do it through something digital.

This is why I tend to just use the mobile apps for places to order. Not laggy and gives the benefits you mentioned of using a touch screen kiosk. A lot of them you don’t even need an account to use the app which is nice if that’s something that bothers you.

It just makes me think of the scenes in the Ready Player One movie when they’re in the place with all the people in debt to the company who are trapped on something like this to be forced to work in VR for the company.

Theoretically if Amazon drones become wide spread in the environment and I capture one, attach a flamethrower to it, and the above scenario happens after I release it back into the wild, would that defense then apply as Amazon drones are native to the environment?

The problem also goes both ways though. Not only does it create fake things but it makes it much easier to discredit real things by just claiming that it’s deep faked.

Probably companies like Comcast making sure there isn’t anything to disrupt their monopolies. Another reason to break them up so they can’t have that much power.

I mean yeah that’s what monopolies do. They eliminate competition by either buying it out or lowering their prices/improving service to drive them out of business so they can then raise prices again. Just cause a small company can come in and make things better while they’re able to be around doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go after these monopolies and cut them down so they can’t have this power.

Yeah I’ve always assumed incognito mode is just for when you don’t want to have it save to your browser history or if you want to be able to log into a second account on a website.

I mean acting like American tech companies aren’t basically an arm of the American intelligence services is a bit ridiculous too. Just cause they also make money and have to compete in the “fair market” doesn’t change that. If anything it makes it worse cause they’ll sell their data to anyone, whether that be America or China. I’m not saying what TikTok does is good, I’m saying all these companies are bad and focusing on one like this because it’s foreign is dumb.

Yeah I think if anything twitter is a lesson in how even if you try to give users only positive ways to interact they will find ways to use them to interact negatively. Whether that be quote retweeting or ratioing.