The last 18 months have proven that the rule of law doesn’t apply to those who are rich enough to ~bribe~ lobby anyone who would enforce the laws.
(A donation to the presidential library, a new RV for the judge, a PAC that runs campaigns for the senator and rep - and Bob’s your uncle. Might cost 0.001% of your assets if you are a trillionaire. Cheap at ten times the price.)
It's always a trip to see the people who practically fetishize the law -- the archaic language, the written form, the pressed uniforms -- turn around and not only develop a self-serving selective blindness to their own team's violations of the law, which is the kind of nonsense you expect in politics, but also employ "stop punching yourself" logic to blame the law itself for those same violations. Absolute madness.
But better cost for the same performance. According to AA, Opus 5 _medium_ is as smart as Opus 4.8 _max_, at 1/3 the cost and twice the speed. And if you need a better response, you can turn it up to 11.
Of course you can walk. But can you walk to your workplace, your kid’s nursery, your local bakery/supermarket, your doctor, your dentist, the pharmacy?
In most of my jobs in Europe(Austria specifically) I couldn't walk to my workplace because most tech companies in my current city put their offices in ugly concrete industrial techno parks outside the city where I don't want to live, meaning driving to work mostly as public transportation there is slow busses only every 30 minutes or one hour of biking. Similarly my GF needs to drive 40 minutes to work outside the city, to one of the few employers in her field. Not everyone lives and works in the city center to be able to walk to work.
So walking to work is such a weird and subjective metric since not all companies in everyone's' area of work will be clustered in your vicinity of your house unless you're lucky or you make active efforts to keep moving close to work which might be in undesirable areas for living.
>your doctor
My current one yeah, but she's terrible and to change her, the only one I found that accepts new patients is on the other side of town so no walking there either, unless I like walking for an hour each direction every time.
MY point is Europe can be highly spread out as well, with people and businesses fleeing inner cities due to space constraints and rent costs, leading to commute distances too long to walk economically. That's why you see traffic jams at highway ramps at rush hour. It's not like those people were too stupid to realize they could walk to work instead of driving if that was an option.
It has reasonably good biking infrastructure, for the US, but suffers badly from sprawl. There's also the summer heat.
San Francisco is hilly (tough riding), but quite compact. It's generally possible to avoid the worst climbs with modest detours.
Sacramento's sprawl means that it has roughly 1/4 the population density of Sacramento. Travel distances are correspondingly longer, and much commercial development (office, retail) is in suburban hubs / malls / office parks, rather than either downtown or in neighbourhood shopping districts, as with SF.
The issues would generally be 1) traffic (a genuine hazard) and 2) bike parking. Many locations have few, if any, bike racks, and often other street furniture (signage, posts, fences) is poorly-suited to securing a bike.
Downtown / midtown areas are often far more amenable than outlying locations, particularly at malls and office parks.
This isn't to say that you cannot bike places, or take risks (collisions, theft), but it's additional friction. As I said, the infrastructure, by American standards, is actually pretty good. I'm just highlighting the limitations / caveats.
The actual data doesn't support any of these estimates.
Note the response of the guy I was arguing with. Faced with the reality that the sources he/she trusted are lying, they rejected the honest source they asked for because of "bias". This kind of motivated reasoning is everywhere in this debate. Quite annoying.
How does that reflect poorly (or positively) on their privacy chops? The dispute is about a competition law, a law Apple is complying with by withholding this feature.
Why should your children not pay tax on the valuables that they acquired without any work, when everyone else has to earn money and both pay income tax and then pay sales tax to acquire the same jewellery?
(And you don’t enter into the equation. You are dead by the time the taxation happens.)
One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up…
(Circumstantial evidence is that a particularly extra nice part of central London has no tube station, ostensibly to keep the riff-raff out, and is the only area with a proposed station on Crossrail 2 that voted against having a new station!)
> One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up…
I have a couple of the 4G-to-wifi bridges they used for the Free Wifi project during the Olympics kicking around somewhere, including the one they used for the promo photos. A friend of mine fitted them in the run-up to the Olympics, and the promo one had been sprayed in beautiful deep blue metallic paint with the logo stuck on.
He got given it to fit on a lamp post in a fairly posh London suburb, but the photographer couldn't come out so it was up there for about a week. When he came to remove it about half a dozen angry locals came up, complaining about the "microwave radiation was making them ill" and the "constant humming from it kept them awake at night", kind of thing, all the stuff they'd been ranting to the local fish-and-chips wrapper about.
"Oh, really? It's been affecting your health that badly?"
"Yes", they all replied, "we're getting a solicitor to take up our case, we're suing over it!"
"Oh," he said, opening the case he'd just taken down to reveal that it was completely empty. "Well, you're going to absolutely hate it when I put one up that's actually got the electronics inside then."
London has a very high ratio of extremely nice houses on a road opposite council houses, or former council houses. There can often be a very large mix of housing in one area.
FWIW ancient Rome was also like this, and for example in Pompeii you can find extremely fancy houses with frescoed dining rooms right next door to single room hovels. They didn't have subways or mobile phones though.
It seems to me to be quite the feature ... well, everywhere except the USA. Certainly all over Europe, one finds this mix. In the USA, you generally only find cheap/low quality/small housing stock adjacent to expensive/high quality/large housing stock where there's some municipal or other border, and the two just can't avoid being where they are.
London tends to get that because it has never really been planned. It just grew over the course of 1600 years and absorbed other areas as it went. There are plenty of areas where a row of £20m+ homes are opposite blocks of 3-bed flats that go for a hundredth of that price.
Hundreds of years ago, before the rail or underground network, you still needed plenty of working class to live near where the rich people lived as the rich people still needed shops, servants, etc.
Having the city split into individual boroughs means that each borough had to provide for the full economic spectrum. The really expensive boroughs still have plenty of social housing and arbitrary divisions of land mean that things but up against each other from different boroughs.
However, new developments don't always get it right, when big green-field or brown-field sites are converted to residential they often struggle to get the correct right, and you end up with bigger areas that only cater for a subset.
National planning laws are also circumvented or gamed. If a new site requires a certain percent of "affordable housing" the developers will often agree (with the local borouhgh/council) to roll that over with another couple of projects and then build most of the "affordable housing" all in one place, and the diversity of individual areas is diminished.
As you say, there are plenty of other places in the world where this is the case, most of them in countries/cities that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years.
Imagine living somewhere that people who work service or retail jobs (or nursing or teaching or all manner of underpaid but essential professions) can also afford to live!
Because it means that you don't get areas of extremes. (well not as much.)
It also means that local services can't be compartmentalised so that only rich people get decent services.
For example, southwark uses the same police force to cover the southbank (cultural centre) the £5m apartment blocks, as well as the shithole council estates (well they aren't shitholes anymore.)
Hckrnews.com is a far better frontent. Implemented the long line fix, and also preserves topics that were upvoted to the top and subsequently flagged to death by bot farms or the owners.
(A donation to the presidential library, a new RV for the judge, a PAC that runs campaigns for the senator and rep - and Bob’s your uncle. Might cost 0.001% of your assets if you are a trillionaire. Cheap at ten times the price.)