bouncing

You meet them online, but they’re a vocal minority. Especially when a smaller phone means a smaller battery and worse camera system, two of the consistently top priorities for consumers.

You're conflating multiple things. Most notably, you're conflating criticizing Israel with praising Hamas.

They are not conflicting. Yes oil production is higher but that’s mostly in response to OPEC producing less.

Overall fossil fuel use is in decline. Probably not enough decline to arrest the greenhouse effect, but that ship has already sailed.

I don’t even understand what the theory is. Plastic is plastic. What does it matter if it’s attached to the bottle?

It sort of depends on where you are, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the homeless problem is noticeably worse than almost anywhere else in America. It’s bad.

An ex of mine lives in a pretty posh part of LA (Crestview). She works constantly and really hard to afford to live there. Now there are people literally shooting heroin on the street outside her home and to take her toddler to play at the park, they’re basically walking around the bodies of people high/sleeping.

I mean, I’m as anti-drug war as they come, but that’s no way to live and the police really should clear it out. Even in the poorer parts of most other cities, that’s not something you see.

Life in plastic. It’s fantastic.

The comparison is between today and ‘today but without the highway’, not between today and before the highway was built. If the population increase is greater with the highway there, that’s still part of the induced demand.

I wouldn't suggest that highways never induce demand, but the idea that people are driving more in Boston because of the Big Dig seems doubtful to me.

A city being “bad for drivers” is not a great indicator of it not being car dependant. Cities in the Netherlands are probably the most walkable and bikable on the planet, and also great to drive in because there are hardly any cars.

The Netherland has pretty robust car infrastructure too.

And I agree; a city can be bikable, walkable, and drivable all at once. That should be the goal.

Do you think the total car traffic in the Boston area today is greater than it would have been had the Big Dig not been built? If yes, the ‘infrastructure naysayers’ were correct.

It's probably gone down, actually, at least in per capita terms. Boston's population is a lot bigger than it used to be, so that has to be taken into account.

Keep in mind, the Big Dig actually reduced the total number of highway ramps, which is part of why it increased traffic flow. And by reclaiming neighborhoods from elevated highways, it reconnected areas. You can easily walk places that were not possible before.

But they still deepen the overall car dependency. Investing in rail-bound transportation while imposing heavy fees on car traffic into the city would likely be a better use of resources.

Boston is far from car dependent; it's probably one of the worst cities in America for drivers, and best for cyclists and pedestrians.

Yeah, that's basically it.

But I think what's getting overlooked in this conversation is that it probably doesn't matter whether it's AI or not. Either new content is derivative or it isn't. That's true whether you wrote it or an AI wrote it.

That's surprising to me. I remember at the time, NBC Nightly News and PBS Newshour (my family's news diet in the 90s) did stories about it, and they both definitely mentioned reclaiming city space as one of the benefits.

I think the Big Dig, while it ended up costing several times what it was supposed to, will go down in history as one of the best highway projects of its era. It also proved infrastructure naysayers wrong. A lot of people insist that any highway projects always just induce demand, resulting in even more congestion, but the Big Dig did nothing of the sort. To this day, 30 years on, Boston traffic is still not as bad as it was pre-Big Dig.

If I created a web app that took samples from songs created by Metallica, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Snoop Dogg, Slayer, Eminem, Mozart, Beethoven, and hundreds of other different musicians, and allowed users to mix all these samples together into new songs, without getting a license to use these samples, the RIAA would sue the pants off of me faster than you could say “unlicensed reproduction.”

The RIAA is indeed a litigious organization, and they tend to use their phalanx of lawyers to extract anyone who does anything creative or new into submission.

But sampling is generally considered fair use.

And if the algorithm you used actually listened to tens of thousands of hours of music, and fed existing patterns into a system that creates new patterns, well, you'd be doing the same thing anyone who goes from listening to music to writing music does. The first song ever written by humans was probably plagiarized from a bird.

Are we going to magically assume the traffic just vanished?

It's an underground highway. Out of sight, out of mind. I imagine they probably also improved the overall road design, like Seattle, Denver, and Boston have done (or are doing) with their projects to bury highways below-grade.