Linux requires tinkering and Windows doesn’t? Is that some alternate-universe version of Windows? In my experience, the difference is social/psychological. When Windows fucks up, “everybody uses it,” so the blame falls on the masses, not the user, who was just going along with what’s normal and expected. People sort of mentally elide memory of the Windows fuck ups, because that’s just how Windows is.

Linux is different and weird, and you have to stray from the herd to use it. Straying from the masses is scary, because when Linux fucks up, it’s your fault for being contrary. That threat to one’s place in the social order is quite memorable. Hence the reluctance of Windows users, who hate it, to even consider trying another OS that they know nothing about.

I never switched from Windows. I never used Windows as my main OS. I had an Amiga, then learned Unix on SunOS, so I was used to being weird. Once I got a PC, I used FreeBSD. It did require a lot of fiddling back in those days, and when I got tired of that, I switched to Ubuntu, which was amazing in that it Just Worked™. (Aside from manual installation of the Windows driver for the PCMCIA WiFi card with NDISWrapper.)

(I still do tinker with it, and sometimes break it, but the base OS has been rock solid. I noticed the other day that my main PC was installed with Ubuntu 18.04, and upgraded to 24.04.)

Here is osmium, a framework and tool to work with OpenStreetMap data.

Here ya go.

Laboratory instruments controlled by shitty software that’s somehow tied to a particular version of Windows, and won’t work with 11. And, of course, the manufacturer won’t update it, because they’d much rather you drop a quarter million on the new model.

By the time I left r/fuckcars, people were asking this question several times per day, or every 15-20 minutes at peak times. I recall that the moderators had an auto-mod bot that would respond, and my paraphrase of it is something like this:

We don’t hate the cars, per se, but rather the physical, environmental, and social destruction wrought by designing all aspects of daily life around their use (to the near-exclusion of anything else). Small, cheap, utilitarian motorcycles are better than cars in a lot of ways (space, cost, fuel economy), and worse in others (noise, pollution). They’re fine, as long as the riders aren’t demanding that the entire landscape and society be structured and built to cater to their machines.

There’s a reason New Yorkers hate going to Times Square :]

They’re privacy-conscious and don’t want to appear in stock footage?

Crikey, very well-written and well-reasoned! I would just add:

(4)(b) Human have perfect information about the world.

In order to make rational choices, producers and consumers need perfect information. This also ignores so much of reality. Again, there are so many examples, but even in a simplified model transaction of buying a loaf of bread includes so many variables that it would be impossible to know them all: All of the bakeries offering bread, the prices they ask for their loaves, the sensory quality of the bread, the nutritional quality, the bakeries’ food safety standards, and so on. Imagine trying to investigate the food safety record for the producer of each item in your typical grocery cart—an impossibility.

Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what people say, the truth will reveal itself no matter one’s feelings about MAGA or liberals. Whatever people have said about other politicians, I’ve been watching the President’s mental state deteriorate in a manner congruent with the progression of dementia since the early signs in his first term. And, for the record, no, that doesn’t mean he’s going to be gone soon. The life expectancy after diagnosis is years; he might die before the end of his term, or (with the best care in the world) he might not. We’ll see about Schumer, too. I haven’t seen any dementia symptoms in him, but I haven’t paid any attention to him, either.

But Trump was showing early signs of dementia during his first term. He’s showing signs of rapidly-advancing dementia now. Non-dementia health claims about other politicians without evidence in no way discredit the claim that he’s visibly declining with dementia symptoms. The difference here is evidence. (And is it really an improbable that an elderly President would suffer dementia in his second term, and that his staff would try to cover it up?)

Quite a few of them actually do have public transit in the form of shuttle buses.

That’s weird, even by hyperbole standards. Which politicians, exactly? I’d only heard it about Biden, because Repiblicans project enough for an IMAX multiplex.

That’s utterly ridiculous. If the highway has three lanes, it’s because on average there’s too much traffic for two lanes. That’s why they added a third lane. What—the left lane is for passing, the right lane is for cruising, and the middle lane is for decoration?

I don’t see how it could be made better without having to do billions or trillions of taxpayer-funded upgrades to every road

This seems like a good-faith comment, so I’ll try to keep the snark to a minimum. Honestly, when I hear this sentiment, I think that somebody believes that roads are naturally-occurring phenomena. They just sort of… grow? appear? form from the bedrock?

Good lord, no! Roads are highly resource-intensive structures, and roads for cars have a finite lifetime, typically figured in the range of about 30 years before they have to be re-constructed. And that’s not counting perhaps several rounds of re-surfacing and maintenance in that span. In fact, Strong Towns often points out that when businesses acquire a capital asset, they have to book the cost of future maintenance as a liability. Municipal governments, by contrast, book roads as an asset, and ignore the future maintenance liability. If they followed GAAP, most cities and towns would be bankrupt. Hence, the reason the American Society of Civil Engineers grades our roads as D+. As a country, we keep building roads that we can’t afford to fix.

That is a long way of saying, “We have a backlog of trillions of dollars of maintenance to roads already!” They have to be re-built regularly, anyway, and lots are overdue. One of the major reasons that we can’t afford to do it, and the reason that there are so many lane-miles of road to maintain, is cars. The simple geometry of the space needed for cars means that everything has to be far apart in order to fit the roads, and the parking lots, and the drive-thrus in between.

So, we’re on the hook for a backlog of trillions of dollars of taxpayer-funded basic maintenance to roads, and we can’t afford it. Wouldn’t it be better to re-construct our cities and towns—which again, have to be re-constructed no matter what—around more opportunities for walking, biking, or transit? It would be way cheaper. And without all that pavement for cars, we could put things closer together. Walking to the local grocery would be convenient, because the nearest grocery wouldn’t have to be 5 miles away, on the edge of town, where land for a parking lot is cheap enough. We could be healthier, stopping by the grocery for a few minutes on the way home a couple of times a week to pick up fresh, healthy ingredients, instead of loading up the car with a pallet of highly-processed food from CostCo every two weeks. We could have better weak ties with neighbors by seeing them from time to time at nearby places, which science shows is critical to addressing our mental health crisis. We could let our children, elderly, and disabled people have independence again. And the buses could be fast and convenient, if they didn’t have to go so far and get stuck in private car traffic all the way.

Anyway, I’ve gone on long enough, but I hope that this is a peek at just how bad our car-based system is, and how it could be made better, and for cheaper.

In environmental conservation, there’s an old saw about how we’re really good at preserving rocks and ice, i.e. places we can’t make productive use of anyway. I’ve noticed exactly the same effect in urban planning: We’re pretty good about prioritizing bike and pedestrian access where it doesn’t affect drivers, i.e. places hardly anybody wants to go.

And that forces you to treat people without cars as sub-human? No sympathy, or even empathy, for people who have to navigate such a landscape without one?

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I’m convinced that to many Americans, there’s no difference, and that their mental image of a person includes four wheels. (And that a human without a car is not a person, as in, not deserving of moral comsideration.)

Sure, lady, explain that again when they want to put Ivanka in the Oval Office after her old man croaks.

English isn’t that far off. Animal has the same root as animate, which is the Latin anima, “soul” or “breath.” The English word plant has synonyms and general connotations of fixedness or non-intentionality.

Hot take: The euphemsism “flipping burgers” is so dismissive of the physical and emotional labor of working at a fast-food place that anybody using it unironically needs a punch on the nose.