Is this a joke? How does having more cars on the road, with the same capacity as other cars, and which rely on, adapt to and perpetuate the status quo of car-dependent infrastructure correlate with either of these things?
No. The goal of transport should not be to use a specific technology (trains, busses, cars, etc.). The goal of transport should be to move people and goods safely, efficiently, and quickly. When evaluated on those terms, legacy public transportation doesn't fare very well when compared to self-driving vehicles.
This is disingenuous. You yourself were discussing a specific technology as was the person you're replying to, and really, the specific technology is going to guide the conversation of what gets built. An autonomous car isn't the same as an autonomous train or a bus, and having a bunch of them on the roads does not create demand for other forms of transport or infrastructure that supports it.
Quite a lot of methodological caveats being noted in that section...a couple of questions I would ask are how much computing is done inside a browser now, making the platform irrelevant, and how much is done on a mobile device rather than a desktop. Anecdotally, I see a lot of them collecting dust in the houses of friends & family, and very little being done outside of Zoom and Chrome.
Neither of those scenarios are typical for 'casual users' of the 2020s: at work, most have Windows laptops issued to them that they can't install things onto anyway, and elsewhere they are liable to do most of their computing on a tablet or a phone. There's almost nothing an exe file could do for a casual user that couldn't be done in a browser or mobile app, and most of them understand what an operating system is and that, on some level, there are cross-compatibility issues between them that they may be able to resolve with a tool.
That’s not true—these scenarios absolutely apply to casual users, like students or hobbyists who do things like video editing or photo editing. Students, for example, often need Windows-specific software for schoolwork.
Even if we ignore Windows-specific software entirely, there are still other pain points: DRM support, HDR support, certain drivers, and even the variety of package managers and ways to install things. You know what I mean—these things are nothing special for us, but for someone who’s just casually gaming or doing some creative hobbies, being forced to use the terminal to, for example, update Nvidia drivers or find a workaround to get an unsupported game launcher to work, can be a total dealbreaker
Even something as basic as swapping out PC hardware as a gamer isn’t as seamless on Linux as it is on Windows. That’s a lot of friction for someone who just wants things to “work”. And you know I’m right because if I would be wrong with all these points, we already would have a year of Linux desktops … as it’s being said every year.
You underestimate how most people just value ease of use, familiarity and don’t care about freedom and control over a system. Most don’t want to spend their time tweaking or figuring out why something doesn’t work and that’s totally fine.
I'm not even sure it's an 'or' at this point; I've recently gone (multiple times) through the surreal experience of having to install a client and register an account having already bought a game through a storefront for which I had to install a client and register an account and which had already ostensibly installed. In the first case it was for a game I had actually previously played before the publisher decided to slap an account on top of its offering, and I decided I didn't care enough to keep going.
Which if anything has exactly the opposite effect than what GP is claiming; sell the lowest quality goods and services(i.e. lowest cost) at the highest price possible.
Ugh. This is why the left can't get anything done--we're always getting divided over irrelevant details. Do you see how maybe that isn't a disagreement with what I said? You just jumping in to "correct" me without making any effort to understand what I'm saying is extremely counterproductive.
I've been speaking French at an intermediate level for a couple of decades, but thanks. I'm happy to expand my critique to how your arguments all individualize responsibility for a systemic issue that requires targeted collective action and social transformation. This is not leftist strategy.
> I've been speaking French at an intermediate level for a couple of decades, but thanks.
I didn't ask you to speak French, I asked you to put in any effort at all to understand what I said. Unsurprisingly, speaking has not conferred any understanding of what I said--you might try reading instead of speaking.
> I'm happy to expand my critique to how your arguments all individualize responsibility for a systemic issue that requires targeted collective action and social transformation.
Case in point: I'm puzzled where in my post you think I mentioned who I hold responsible for consumerism. It's certainly not individuals. But again, to know what I think you'd have to try to understand what I say.
> This is not leftist strategy.
Speaking as if you know what I think was bold, speaking for the entire left was bolder.
There is zero advocacy for systemic change here, just lecturing individuals to adopt solutions that only present themselves as choices to the privileged, to say nothing about the gobbledygook about 'guarding your psyche' by 'abstaining' from viewing ads. None of this sounds like leftism, just liberal idealism. Not especially bold to know what one is talking about, but thx.
Train it to attribute its failure to land on wokeness, have it generate designs for merch that communicate this idea, and book an appearance on JRE and it'll have completed the arc of a lot of short run comics.
