jcrm

I'm a huge self checkout fan, but I think we need more perspective on how shitty ours is sometimes. Loblaws and all of them are way behind on how it should work. Look at the Netherlands and how it's often done there, you walk around with a scanner so you can scan as you go and quickly pay at the end.

Or even better, look at how Uniqlo is doing it. It's all RFID, so you just drop your basket on the checkout, and it scans it all for you basically instantly.

The problem isn't self checkout, it's that the grocery stores are using it to purely cut costs and don't actually care if it's better for the consumer in any way. But hey, at least it's easy to "accidentally" not scan something right now.

Yes? That's how art has always worked.

Higher energy density is going to be needed for sure, but as a brutalism evangelist, I'm gonna take this chance to say we could just make the whole building out of concrete so it's all one big battery.

I'm so tired of the provincial and federal governments doing this dance. Sure it's a provincial responsibility, just like healthcare. But we have several provinces who are actively making things worse. If the feds are going to stand around and let it happen, they might as well be complicit in it.

They used to fund public housing. Ban corporate home ownership, and introduce taxes to make owning multiple homes unprofitable. Then fix our tax brackets so I don't pay basically the same rate as someone making 10x what I do.

I wasn't talking about the feds, I was talking about provincial governments in Canada, which municipalities and local governments are fully controlled by. So that small change also can't happen, because a premiere can just decide they want to override what the local government wants to do, and there's nothing you can do about that except wait for an election. And even then, our electoral system is so screwed up that the Conservatives have a majority government (allowing them to do whatever they want) with only 18% of eligible voters casting a ballot for them.

Change is possible, but there's a lotta steps we have to get through before urbanist advocacy is even going to be considered. Electorial reform bringing in MMPR is the first step.

There's ways to position them in LEO that are sustainable. Geostationary for internet means they're going to be about as useful as dialup for any modern usage. Far too much latency to do even a Zoom call.

I got in a fight with somebody on Instagram who decided to do a whole reel on how this is NJB "hurting urbanism". I disagreed with them entirely, but I'm glad to not be seeing his awful points repeated here.

Are there problems with Jason's view? Absolutely, but he's also not speaking on behalf of anyone other than himself. There straight up are massive amounts of the US and Canada that I don't think are ever fixable, short of razing them and restarting. And the problem with advocacy to fix them is that there's so many issues that compound to make them horrible places, that no advocacy group will be able to win anything. Putting in bike lanes only works when there are places to bike to (and we can't even seem to get good bike lanes right here).

He literally closes with "it can get better, but it cannot be fixed within your children's lifetimes". Specifically referring to the US there. He isn't discouraging anyone from advocating, just explaining why he himself does not for NA.

It's not phrased the best it could be here, but he isn't talking about all of NA, but he is talking about a majority of it. There are pockets here that will get better, and are doing so, but there's also massive amounts that just can't get better without razing them. The exurbs being built on top of prime farm land in Ontario is a perfect example of this. Those places can never, and will never be fixed, at least not within my lifetime. And it is a waste of energy and time to try to fix those places.

That only applies when you don't have people ripping out the trees every other election cycle.

His constant lies about his products maybe? Like how we're on year 6 of "all Tesla's will be self driving" and it still hasn't happened?

Or the roadster that still doesn't exist and we've had no updates on. Or the truck that's years overdue and has been beat to market by several others.

Or Hyperloop that he's now admitted was purely to try to kill HSR development in California.

Yes, designed to run over the internet, as in they use end to end encryption, which has long been the way of defeating MitM intercepts.

Right but the instance I'm on could get taken over by an asshole, and get defederated by, or defederates from, my favourite subs. Then I've got to abandon that account and start a whole new one, same as I did leaving Reddit. I'm really not sold on this model until I can transfer my account somehow.