Taxis in NYC have medallions, that are significantly more than $100k, and that makes the scarcity of taxis just enough that they are in demand but rarely unused.
Taxis in NYC have medallions, that are significantly more than $100k, and that makes the scarcity of taxis just enough that they are in demand but rarely unused.
NYC is a smaller geographic city (municipal boundaries - 5 boros) and has 2 million more residents. Try implementing this there for a tenth of the price and see if there’s riots at worst, and every elected official losing their next election at best.
But NYC is surrounded by places you can drive to. Singapore is not. The mainland city of Johor Bahru is a relatively poor city of only 500K people, and beyond that it’s farmland until you get to the Malaysian captial, more than 4 hours away. So I wouldn’t expect the two cities to have the same preferences for car ownership in any case.
I get it though, you really don’t need a car to get to maybe 95% of the country. I wonder if people who need to haul stuff around for a living get any incentives.
Not a resident but my partner is from SG. One of the reasons I often hear is that families(mom, dad, kids, grandparents) like to travel together, and the elderly are not always mobile enough for public transport. Public transport is really fantastic, but it doesn’t cover every single need.
And of course it’s a status symbol, some feel the need to show they’ve got the wealth to own a car.
Again, I hear these things second hand and am colored by my partner’s beliefs :) Maybe a SG resident has a better (or different) explanation. edit:
In my eagerness to share, I realize this doesn’t really answer your question. Sorry about that :)
It’s become a habit, that’s how we always abbreviate it.
You can also pronounce it as SinJapore, so I guess that’s why? I don’t know, I just follow my partner’s example :) edit: Official UN/LOCODE is also SG, so I guess that settles it.
Nah you’re good. I was actually thinking of a similar scenario, like for musicians who need to lug their gear around. They don’t exactly fit into the category of a business that transports goods, but they can’t exactly walk, ride a bus, then a train, with all that gear in tow. I’ve been to SG several times myself and I love how easy it is to get around, as someone who prefers urban living.
My mother was born in Singapore and we’ve been to visit many times. There are a lot of taxis, and they are quite cheap. As a tourist it was cheaper to take a taxi than public transit when we were a group of 3 or 4 people. 2 people was pretty close either way. I’m sure public transit is cheaper when you’re a full time resident, but my grandparents just use taxis all the time due to their mobility issues.
Before anyone says that it’s a sign of Russian authoritarianism, adjust your anger accordingly: France is doing the same, the UK is as well (they even have gone as far as just banning encryption because “pedos” - in a country that adores and is ruled by pedophiles).
And the rest of western Europe probably isn’t faring much better but I’m not as aware of it.
It’s not like this will keep happening every year. No, it’s much worse. Temperatures will keep getting even hotter for decades until greenhouse gas emissions reach zero. In a few decades we will wish it was only this hot.
At some point even stopping emissions won’t keep it from getting warmer. Even if we stop tomorrow it will take decades for the co2 in the air to disappear.
I also found it ridiculous. Turns out, you can hide bot posts in your account settings if you login into the web version of your instance (vger doesn’t display the option for example).
Ok I succumb to the summary illness: (in broken english via chatGPT (just for the fun))
In Spain, October start this year very hot. The weather guys say it’s hottest ever. Almost 40% of weather machines show more than 32 degrees Celsius (that’s like 90 Fahrenheit).
Our autumn, usually nice and cool, no good this year. Summer had four super-hot times in 24 days. They say humans make world warmer, you know?
On October 1st, it was like summer here! Way hotter than normal, 7 to 14 degrees more. They broke like 100 records for heat. Two cities in the south, Badajoz and Montoro, hottest ever in October with 38 C. Before it was 37.5 C in Marbella in 2014. Even in Madrid’s Retiro Park, the old weather machine tied the record from 1930, 30 C.
The climate guy from AEMET said it’s because of climate change. He thinks future summers will be even hotter and last longer into our usually nice rainy autumn. Not good, huh?
Ty for this, just did it. Like hell im going to trust some summary from a glorified autocomplete algorithm, ive seen them get it completely wrong and interpret it in biased ways.
Public services - Very high risk
The public services sector carries high corruption risks for businesses. Companies are likely to encounter red tape, petty corruption, bribery and facilitation payments when dealing with India's public administration (GCR 2016-2017, ES 2014). India's economy continues to face constraints in the form of conflicting rules and a complex bureaucratic system with broad discretionary powers (ICS 2016). Businesses find the government's bureaucracy to be inefficient and rather burdensome, and report that bribes are often exchanged when applying for public utilities (GCR 2016-2017). Facilitation payments to expedite public services, such as police protection, water supply, and government assistance are also common (HRR 2016). Likewise, more than a quarter of companies expect to offer gifts or make irregular payments to government officials when applying for an operating license, while more than half of companies expect the same when obtaining a water or electrical connection (ES 2014). On a more positive note, the computerization of some public offices has reduced facilitation payments common in physical encounters with public officials.
Hopefully these funds end up used for the betterment of the people, as intended. Projects like this are so important, especially with local population trends in mind. Done right this could be transformative....
Internet Archive is not Library Genesis, the two organizations have very different functions and should be structured very differently.
Internet Archive is for preserving data, not necessarily distributing it as widely as possible. If distributing the data puts the preservation of that data at risk then don't distribute it, keep it stashed safely away. Maybe a decade or two from now things will change and they'll have the only copies, and keeping them snugly away out of sight will have been vital to preserving them after that point. Internet Archive has a public corporate presence that makes it easy to donate to and easy to run their servers, but also makes them easy to sue. So avoid doing anything that gets you sued.
Library Genesis, on the other hand, is piracy central. Their mandate is distributing this stuff and sticking their thumbs in the eyes of the publishers. So they're structured entirely differently. They run on the shady side of the internet, making them hard to donate to but also hard to sue. They should be the ones "fighting the fight" right now. It would be sad if they got taken down but not an irrecoverable tragedy, a new Library Genesis can rise again.
Internet Archive are being idiots by poking the bear like they have been lately, it's like they're carrying a precious irreplaceable baby and they've decided to take a run through a minefield. I hope they learn from this debacle.
If they have the only copy and their datacenter goes belly up, lot of good it did to have the only remaining copy because now it’s lost to existence. Offsite backups and ideally by many different organizations is the only sure-fire way to preserve this stuff. I donate to archive.org because I believe on what they’re trying to do and I hope they can continue on as long as needed.
Yes, that would be preservation. I don't think they'd have ever got in trouble for doing that, even if it was technically a copyright violation. Probably not even if they had some sort of limited "lending" system so that rare texts could be read by the few who were interested in them. The problem came when Internet Archive flung their gates wide and let everyone download freely, at that point they became a piracy site and got hammered like a piracy site. That's counter to their goal of simple preservation.
I feel so hopeless, so pissed, all these news and how these corporations are destroying open web. I really had hope with new generations being more tech savvy and more online would push for openness of web, instead I’ve come to realize that new generations are really into apps and not going beyond that, not interested in deeper look into software and tech - as long as the gadget works and no matter any subscription cost or microtransactions or surveillance.
I try to be hopeful, but damn it is hard to stay optimistic. I’ve been trying little by little to push friends and family in a nice way into using Firefox, alternatives to big corporate software and so on, but I understand it takes too much effort for someone who is not really interested in these things. But I will be advocate of open web forever myself.
Edit: okay unfair to expect anything from new generations, and of course there are more tech savvy people than there probably use to be, but had hoped for a huge change in that demographic.
Those companies are such a drag for human society because they are afraid of their bottom line. the Music Industry and Amazon also would have burned down the Library of Alexandria if they had deemed it worrisome to their profit.
Remember the time Sony Music installed a rootkit on peoples' computers via commercially purchased CDs because hacking paying customers' computers seemed like a good way to combat piracy?
reuters.com
Hot