Podcasts are just a RSS feed with an mp3 downloas link. It’s trivial to open the RSS feed in your browser and locate the mp3 download link. Download the mp3, open it in any audio editor, edit out the ad. Or find the folder where your podcast app stores the mp3s and edit them from there.
Personally, I’m OK with podcast ads as there’s limited opportunity for tracking or personalization. If we don’t encorage podcasts to remain as an open platform, they will be swallowed up by Spotify.
This comment is so depressing. The comic isn’t about politics, it’s just pointing out that human nature is irrational and we’re influenced by how a message is delivered as well as the raw facts. Yet you have to find a political bias in it. Would you feel more positively about the comic if you knew that the author was on “your side”? (Which I’m guessing is the left)
It’s OK to go into debt over a depreciating asset if you can afford to default on the loan, and it substantially improves your ability to make money. Businesses do it all the time. If a sole trader could work better with the cybertruck for some reason(I’ve got nothing) and could borrow off their house as collateral, that’s a financially savvy business decision.
But a lot of people fall victim to predatory marketing. We need to recognize that it’s not just them being dumb, they were manipulated, tricked and lied to by a powerful machine.
Yes. Nobody is suggested we should ban all cars everywhere.
Cars are incredible. I do trips to remote places all the time that would be impossible without cars. There’s no better way to transport 5 people and their gear for a week to a place that’s 100km from the nearest small town.
But for 1 guy commuting from the suburbs to work in the city every day in their SUV? Fuck that, the system is broken to even entertain that as a possibility.
We’re in agreement that night trains are a good thing, but you should push for them whether or not your trains are driverless.
You misunderstand my use of economic. Everything has a cost and a benefit which can theoretically be calculated, with infrastructure like transit that benefit extends beyond fares. Typically governments will do this calculation when deciding whether to pursue a new project, they include all the planning, construction, running costs, and externalities e.g. climate impact, and all the benefits from fares, economic activity, new opportunities for industries and development, ect. This produces a cost benefit ratio. In my research with transport, the best value projects are local safety improvements like cycleways, sometimes the ratio is as good as 10. Large public transport projects are maybe 1-2, and large motorways are usually less than 1. My point was a train driver is a small cost that isn’t going to significant affect this. Of course, this analysis often gets ignored and the overpriced motorway gets built anyway.
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.
Running is an underrated mode of transport. For some reason it’s socially acceptable to exert yourself hard while on a bike, but not running. When combined with public transport it can make all the difference to be able to make a tight transfer by sprinting for it.
I haven’t had any issues with Nextcloud yet. But any torrent client refuses to work. I’ve tried various qbittorrent containers, transmission, deluge briefly, they all work for a while but eventual refuse to do anything.
That’s certainly one cause, but culture is as well. The American dream of a quarter acre in the quiet leafy suburbs, easy commute to work by car on the freeway, has been a pervasive part of culture for a long time. It’s only recently that we’ve started appreciating the unsustainable reality of that idea.
The best estimates of how many intelligent civilizations there should be suggest that the galaxy should be teeming with them. If any of them evolved mere millions of years before we did, given our pace of technological improvement they should have figured out interstellar travel by now, and they should be broadcasting communication across the galaxy like we’re doing. Yet we’ve detected nothing. Why?
A possible explanation is that an advanced civilization is exterminating all other civilizations, perhaps to avoid competition. It seems like a sensible approach to lie low until we can figure this out, just in case.
One train transports 100s of people, the driver is a fairly low proportion of the cost. And there’s other members of staff that are required even in a fully automated system. (network monitoring, security). Removing the driver is a nice step, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the economics of rail transport. If a route is uneconomic, that’s going to be the case without a driver too.
There’s nuances here, but in principle you are incorrect. A car can be assumed to be infinitely heavier than a pedestrian. That means that every part of their body that’s in contact with the car will be accelerated to car speed. So it’s not that with a larger area the force is spread out, there’s actually just more places that have force applied. In other words, a low car will break your legs, a high car will break your legs and torso.