Whoopsie! Sydney's road planners just discovered induced demand is a thing, after opening a new motorway.
For those outside Sydney, the New South Wales state government recently opened a new spaghetti intersection just west of Sydney's Central Business District.
It was supposed to solve traffic. Instead, it's turned into a giant car park:
"For the third straight day, motorists and bus passengers endured bumper-to-bumper traffic on the City West Link and Victoria Road. A trip from Haberfield to the Anzac Bridge on the City West Link averaged an agonising 44 minutes in the morning peak on Wednesday.
"Several months ago, Transport for NSW’s modelling had suggested traffic from the interchange would add only five to 10 minutes to trips on Victoria Road through Drummoyne and over the Iron Cove Bridge during morning peaks.
"Those travel delays have now blown out."
So what do motorists say when their shiny new road that was supposed to solve traffic instead turns into a massive traffic jam?
'Dude! Just one more lane!'
From the article:
"[Roads Minister John] Graham and his Transport boss Josh Murray appear reluctant to do what many motorists reckon is the obvious solution.
"That is, add lanes or make changes at the pinch-points that are causing the pain. A three-lane to one merge point from Victoria Road onto the Anzac Bridge, along with two lanes merging into one on the City West Link, are proving to be painful bottlenecks."
While the money sold have been spent on public transport, it’s a bit fucking premature to put this down to induced demand - the tangled mess has been operating for what - like 3 business days? People are getting confused and doing silly bullshit. It’s a problem, but it’s not induced demand.
Induced demand is a thing, and it’ll almost certainly be relevant here - there’s no need to lie about it - give it a minute to settle first. This is the benefit of being correct - there’s no need to be dishonest.
Tankies are cringe - but in spite of what they’ll tell you, they’re not communists… Just look at how enfranchised workers are/were in the USSR, China and, the DPRK.
Edit: The red fascists are clearly getting upset trying to square their authoritarian single-party states with their LARPing about the proliteriat. American diabolism isn’t a political or economic system, you dopey fucks.
Are you going to apply this principle consistently and tell me the DPRK is democratic? I ask because that would be a deeply stupid claim to make, but we’d hate for you to be inconsistent.
Descriptivism is when you’re wrong. 50% of the participants in this conversation say so, therefore it’s true.
Similarly, if the majority of people take the word “Juden” to mean subhuman monsters of a specific ethnoreligious group that are a threat to society that should be rounded up and genocided. Why are they wrong from the perspective of linguistic prescriptivism?
What’s the linguistic prescriptivist definition of communism? None of what you’ve said has anything to do with definitions - only assigning now meaningless labels.
You’re talking about the application of labels, not shaping a definition. What’s the linguistically prescriptive definition of communism that’s descriptive of these regimes?
If most people think I’m straight, but I’m enjoying getting railed by 10 dudes 10 times per day, I’m not straight - they’re wrong. If everyone agrees that getting railed by 10 dudes 10 times per day is straight, that’s prescriptivism descriptivism.
I didn’t mention prescriptivism, I only mentioned descripticism
My mistake - I’m muddling my prescriptivism / descriptivism terminology (I’ll edit the terms in the post)
The usefulness of words comes from their understanding, not their use. If you use 100% valid dictionary words but not how people commonly understand them, then you’re failing to communicate.
It doesn’t make me any less correct or them any less wrong though.
In this case, you have a definition of communism contrary to how people understand it, so you should either clarify your definition of it, or not be so attached to the word that you insist on using it.
I’ve given a key reason why they’re wrong (lack of worker enfranchisement), and pointed to the dictionary for my definition - any credible one will do, if in doubt, use the OED.
You’re not seeing your hypocrisy here though - you’re not talking about definitions - you’re talking about labels. People calling China communist isn’t a definition that I can measure other countries against - it’s a label entirely devoid of meaning. That’s meaningless, that’s a failure to provide a definition, and that would make me straight while secretly getting railed by those hundreds of dudes - even when 100% of the people saying I’m straight (making it true to what you call a descriptivist) would say that behaviour makes me gay (an actual descriptivist definition).
What are the characteristics people are pointing to when they say China, the USSR and DPRK are communist?This is what a descriptivist definition is.
There’s a widely spread, rumour that the last Australian Prime Minister - Scott the liar from the Shire Morrison shat himself in an Engadine McDonald’s in 1997 after his team, the Cronulla Sharks lost the finals. The rumours were persistent enough that he had to deny the rumours ~20 years later on one of the most popular radio show in the country.
Considering how much time he spends with a gormless shit-eating grin plastered all over his dumb mug, some of that shit was bound to overflow at one point or another.
A cat could be dropped into the job, spend the whole day licking its arsehole, and still do a better job than Musk. All he had to do was shut his dumb mouth and spend his money, but he’s incapable of even that.
In spite of Google’s share, the fact that you still need to go download a browser means it isn’t over. The barrier for entry is no higher for Firefox vs Chrome, and to the average user, they’re not differentiated - you could change the icon and they’d be none the wiser.
Google using their functional monopoly on search and streaming to entrench their functional monopoly on the browser in a way that’ll give them meaningful control of the way the Internet operates isn’t something we should just roll over on.
Beyond transferring bookmarks and extensions (neither of which tend to be an issue), and the different icon, what would the average user hang their allegiance off?
The prompts to use Edge are the same whether you’re using Chrome or Firefox.
This is now a balancing act to see how much they can cripple the internet for their own benefit without affecting market share enough that it hurts long-term profitability.
Until they use their multiple monopolies to further cripple the experience for competitors, entrenching their dominance, and allowing them to force their proprietary standards on the internet, killing any remaining pretence of Internet freedom.
If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the Netanyahu government, all of this was predictable to the point of inevitability. Spew far-right nonsense and genocidal rhetoric, maintain an open-air concentration camp as you consistently chip away at the Palestinian population and land, back Hamas over the relatively secular, moderate PLO, let encourage them kill your own population and wait for a pretext to stomp on the accelerator toward genocide.
Opposition to a genocide has no inherent tie to race or religion - to call that opposition antisemitic is to make that genocide an inherent trait of semitism - that’s antisemitic. Similarly, what would we call funding a group that will kill as many Israelis as it can over more peaceful opposition? Antisemitic.
Maybe, just maybe it’s an alignment of ideology and geopolitical interests across the ruling class rather than genetics.
Maybe Jews were pushed into usury, maybe they’re over-represented in certain spaces like Ivy League schools because they’re wealthier on average, which buys a better education and more opportunities, perpetuating that wealth and success.
Pretty much anything the Nazis blame on Jewish genetics can easily be boiled down to class intetests without the weird blood libel conspiracism and insistence everyone they don’t like is a Jew.
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