I think there should be just many types of neighborhoods. Those who need a car for longer distance travel should accept living further away from city center, where there's enough space for parking slots, while the rest can enjoy pedestrian-first neighbourhoods closer to services. Public transport should of course reach all areas, so that the car owners have no real need to use their car much to reach the denser areas.
The least coercive way to do it is probably by making areas closer to the city center worse for driving — narrow roads, no parking, etc — and better for walking and biking. Then people will naturally sort themselves based on their preferences. The problem being that establishing the needed urban environment is itself a political struggle.
I never drive to London because a train will get me there faster, and I can rely public transport to get me to almost anywhere I want to get to. It can definitely be useful to have a car in the suburbs but not enough to be worth the trouble of driving one there.
The difficulty of parking and driving around the city centre is a deterrent, but to me it is secondary to the positive factors.
I do like pedestrianised areas, because they feel safe and clean. The main danger remaining is the cyclists of the "get out of my say" type, especially couriers and the like.
How so? We've built huge amounts of infrastructure (parking being the obvious one) to explicitly enable people to have cars in city centers- stop doing that and my gut (scientific, I know!) says that'll get you most of the way there.
City centres should be built so that people naturally prefer walking/cycling/public transport over driving there. That's how many European cities are, and it works just fine. It doesn't mean anyone has to give up their car, instead people can learn to use it only where it makes sense.
I would never give up my car, but I use it only for stuff where walking is not practical (visiting countryside, buying lots of groceries from a big market located in less dense area). Suburbs that have apartments with enough parking slots AND adequate public transport / cycling roads to city centre work perfectly for me.
Portland is designed in this way. Unforunately, busses, cycling, walking, and trains are also at competition with each other in such a way that they can encourage car travel. Safety of all of those is also another relevant subject.
Recently I found a long lost go-pro style camera using metal detector, after it had fallen off an RC plane, which crashed into a tree in dense forest. Over nearly a decade the camera had been buried several centimeters into the ground, and the card inside the camera wasn't particularly well protected (just an open slot, not waterproof or anything), which made it exposed to lots of water and freezing winters for nearly a decade. After some cleaning the SD card worked perfectly, and all the data was intact. It even had the crash recorded in it. I was impressed by that. The camera didn't survive though.
I recommend everyone take a picture of their contact information with their digital cameras, that way if it gets lost and found, people know who to at least send the pictures to if the camera is destroyed.
I imagine the RC plane's owner would get a real kick if years later the camera was found and they got the footage back.
(I used to work at Philmont Scout Ranch and would do a lot of detective work to get people their cameras back.)
Obviously the transition away from oil should be gradual, and the sectors which are hardest to transition could be given more time to do so. But there's no fundamental need for large scale use of oil, it's just the current infrastructure and limited tech that's the problem.
Hundreds of millions will die due to climate change if we don't act.
No, things should be regulated so that individuals have no choice but to do the right thing. It's governments responsibility to steer Karen towards more sustainable consumption choices. Either tax unsustainable business to make it unprofitable, or tax purchase of their services so that it's not rational for Karen to buy their product / services. The ecological choice should be made the cheapest.
Universally in this world people live most ecologically in parts of the world where they are too poor to act otherwise, not where they are most climate or environment conscious. Voluntary personal responsibility gets you nowhere when it comes to solving large-scale problems.
> Either tax unsustainable business to make it unprofitable, or tax purchase of their services so that it's not rational for Karen to buy their product / services. The ecological choice should be made the cheapest.
That sounds great and all until your granny can’t afford heat in the winter or there’s no food in the stores, etc. Then people will vote out the politicians making the policies or revolt.
That’s what I’m talking about personal responsibility. Not regarding individual actions per se, but accepting that most of us in the developed world are as complicit as the big oil companies.
That said, technology is improving to where the cheapest option is the ecological one for power. A fair bit of that has been due to individual actions of many folks wanting and paying for solar power and electric vehicles, etc.
Ironically to me, the individual preferences of the Green Party members also put lots of political pressure to shutdown nuclear power in Germany. That caused Germany to fallback to coal and natural gas.
Hey don’t get me wrong, we kinda suck in first world countries, but oil companies are run by people with full awareness of what they’re doing and the agency to stop who choose not to stop singly because they’re too interested in raking in money they will never even find a use for.
I've measured about 5w from the wall with Pentium J5005 based Dell thin client which has a tiny fan, one SSD, two RAM modules. No idea how N100 compares to J5005.
But isn't social anxiety a source of many harmful inhibitions? To me moderate lowering of inhibitions is a good thing, and a couple of beers helps with that. But with anything more the bad effects outweigh the good.
Still, facing one's fears and going sober to anxiety inducing situations is absolutely much better long-term treatment of social anxiety. That has a lasting effect, alcohol doesn't.
The surveys also shows that Linux is more or less equally popular with MacOS among techies. As nice as M1/M2 Macbooks are, I probably wouldn't pay Apple tax just to run Ubuntu on it.
Personally I use whatever boring laptop my company offers, and so far that's been Intel. As long as it runs Linux I don't care what's under the hood.
The illegal migrants coming to the US know they have to work if they wish to eat. Meanwhile, coming to Sweden has been just a ticket to easy life, where you get free housing and money, but will be probably excluded from the job market unless you learn the language and get several years of education.
So, in practice the two phenomena are very different.
Personally I think it's less about accepting others, and more about the fact European economy sucks, has rigid job markets, and lacks entrepreneurial spirit. Historically people left Europe to the US, because that's where you could improve your life through hard work. Those Chinese-Americans improved their life by founding successful businesses, which doesn't seem to happen so much over here.
Obviously the US being a land of immigrants with most commonly spoken language in the world helps a lot too. The fact Europe isn't like the US doesn't make it xenophobic. Compared to pretty much anything except the US, it's still among the most accepting towards people of different cultures.
The economy sucks for everyone, not only a subset of poor migrants. A subset of african migrants show up in crime stats way more than plenty of other poor migrants coming from pretty much everywhere, be it asia, africa or latam.
Some poor indian has no advantage coming to Spain compared to someone from the Magreb, in fact we could argue quite the opposite as their support networks/country of origin are pretty far away.
