Until people develop a workable alternative, all this narrative does is annoy people who have no choice but to use cars.
When electric buses start making round trips from every main city to every suburb on a set reliable and convenience schedule, then you can start shaming people for having to drive a car.
I have to drive a car because my city is barely traversable otherwise. I hate it. So, I’ve been working with the city council and other committees to start building a modern transit system. It can be done, but it takes motivated people to make it happen.
I’m very curious about this. Did you go into this with some allies or were you able to drum up support by sharing stats and other city/country success stories? Was the council already amenable to the idea? Any resources you could share?
This could be an entire post on its own if you can spare some time to write about it and your experiences.
I’ve used a combination of coalition building, finding allies on the city council, and reaching out to neighborhood leaders.
Much of it has been reaching out to government officials, having conversations, and identifying where decision making is done within the various transit agencies.
So far, most of the resistance to actual progress is just kind of weird noise (complaints & general “I can’t see how having transit would help”) from misc citizens and realtors who don’t want to have changes to their development plans in the city, even if adding in the transit would make regions around it boom. The city council members are surprisingly responsive to even a small number of vocal people. I don’t think they hear from many coherent arguments in any given year. Showing up with data, an even reasonable idea of what can be done, and evidence that you’ve got a coalition of interested groups seems to get traction.
It also helps that we recently voted out a ton of conservative assholes and replaced them with a younger progressive city council. Yes, I worked on campaigns to help make that happen.
We’ve also been getting allies on various transit advisory committees, mostly citizen advisory committees. Then making sure there’s a similar message along with data that supports our goals.
We do also gather up other cities’ long term transit plan documents because they often have some great ideas and examples of what a city can build out given some interest in the public’s success.
I know that I’m also on track to be tapped to help write up materials for federal level proposals in the future. Grant writing isn’t much fun, but it’s how you get the money for a $100 mil project.
Yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty of material for a whole posting in its own right! This isn’t a simple problem to solve. It’s a combination of government systems, managing individual’s needs, reaching out to lots of groups, and a real vision to get people dedicated to. You’ve got to have something people really want to have the buy in for years of work to make it happen.
I mean antagonistic shaming can be awful, obviously. But getting people to care is important, and meeting people where they are sometimes requires making sure they know they should care.
Caring doesn’t mean feeling bad and guilty though. This is part of the toxicity that personal responsibility has created. Not everyone can be equally responsible for their individual contributions. But we can all be much more equal in how much we care about issues.
Something like the bus you describe won’t just appear out of no where. People have to want it, commit to it, consult in its design and then use it.
When electric buses start making round trips from every main city to every suburb on a set reliable and convenience schedule,
How fucked up is your city that this doesn’t already exist? That’s not a pipe dream, it’s the bare minimum. Your local government has failed, please go riot in the streets.
The alternative will not appear out of thin air. More people need to have a sense of the long-reaching consequences of car-dependent urban planning and that’s what propels them to vote for better planning in their cities.
Nothing is going to change without a shift in political leanings, and that’s what this sort of advocacy is doing.
It’s funny to think that future people will have no idea what these jokes will mean, but we’ve translated 2000 year old Roman dick jokes. Future historians will just say the same of us as we do about the Romans. “They created amazing technology that shaped the world we live in today…and they were really horny.”
I just imagine someone in silver robes rapidly hovering through a Tron hallway because they just made the archaeological find of the century… a complete archive of knowyourmeme.com
It seems like a lot of the folk here could be pretty interested in the revival of the Fedora Audio Creation Special Interest Group, as it could become a real powerhouse when it comes to getting more people involved into music creation with Linux.
ZFS and BTRFS could update their codebase to account for these (if they haven’t already), but I agree that their extra mechanical parts worry me. I really don’t care about speed - if you run enough HDDs in your RAID then you get enough speed by proxy. If you need better speeds then you should start looking into RAM/SSD-caching etc. I’d rather have better reliability than speed, because I hate spinning rust’s short lifespan as-is.
I’ve been using Mint for a few months now after initially trying Fedora and Kubuntu. Mint has been by far my favorite experience and I’ve even gotten a few people converted to Linux via Mint. Definitely my recommendation for any Linux newbies.
Yes, it’s him, I was just pulling your leg for the “literally me” kind of comment
(btw, Terry is literally me (I am the best programmer that’s ever lived))
Probably an average. I think the above average types usually have a vim keybinding configured to send current buffer to CIA via curl so they don’t have to use bloated web browser for doing everyday task.
Meh, idk tf he says he understands. Like “make [ported adobe CC] popos-exclusive”: sure, big brain, how’s that supposed to work, exactly? Or “there are 3 desktops ppl GAF about”: riiiight, me along with other wm users aren’t ppl anymore, apparently.
The whole video pretty much boils down to “I don’t need X, hence nobody [«meaning the vast majority of ppl»] needs x”. By the same logic, the “vast majority” doesn’t need CC either, it’s mostly necessary for professional designers, etc 🤷
I mean it’s probably possible to choose the windows route and go “we make one steaming pile of garbage that kinda works everyone but perfectly - for nobody”, yet linux distros so far have been pro-choice and pro-customization. You want “just works”? Sure, go with X, Y, and Z distros. Wanna something specifically tailored for your workflow? You may start with the same and replace/modify stuff, but also I, J, and K are a great base to build your future setup from the ground up and avoid banging your head against the wall while figuring out what drugs their devs were on. And the same goes for DEs/WMs: gnome is, gnome also works, yet if you want to change it significantly, you’ll either have to mess with extensions or maintain a fork of a huge codebase you don’t fully understand and most of which you don’t exactly need. So, building from scratch may just be an easier solution.
Technically, you can also PR, yet it can easily be rejected, and then you’re back to forks.
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