@bluGill@kbin.social

bluGill

@bluGill@kbin.social

A programmer with an interest in transit, making music, and building things of all types.

I have dysgraphia which makes writing difficult for me. I hope you can figure out what I mean despite my issues.

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What is the least shit online store of the shitty ones? such as: Wish, AliExpress, etc..

What is the least shitty shit store? Never had a good experience with any of the shops such as, wish, aliexpress and the rest of em. But which one of them is considered the better one, or more likely to actually arrive with the correct item? Is etsy considered better than the rest? Are there any of these “low priced” stores...

bluGill,

Often there is a small company based in the us that has real reviews because they have used the things. ThingYouWant.com or some variation. They don't have everything, but they have a good selection ofithat one thitg for prices not much worse than amazon - and useful advice about what is quality. Find and support them.

bluGill,

Mostly they are the same people.

bluGill,

For the cost of heating you can pay for a lot of gym membership. And if you don't use the gym cancle (gyms are notorious for being hard to cancle so read the fane print)

bluGill,

Are there any that are not on youtube? I'm trying to degoogle my life, and youtube is on the hardest ones to find alternatives to.

bluGill,

I mostly don't need a 1:1 replacement, just great content. There is more great content added in a day than there are hours - even if I watch on 2x speed. Note that I reduced this great content as opposed to the junk and there is still more than enough. Just give me some of that content and I'm happy. (junk vs great is in the eye of the beholder)

bluGill,

Thanks for this. I'm starting to learn it, but already feel like I make less mistakes without autocorrect. Sad as I'm a bad speller.

bluGill,

Unintended consequences. People like to propose grand schemes that will "fix everything", but refuse to accept that there are downsides to that grand scheme.

bluGill,

Traffic is a numbers game. I've often observed that in free flowing traffic where I live (a tiny city with only about 700k people in the entire metro) that if you take two cars that are a safe following distance apart there will be 5 cars in between. If we put in 6 times as many lanes (already a 3-4 lane freeway each way, so we are talk 20 lanes for my tiny city!) traffic wouldn't go any faster, but they would space out to most maintaining a safe following distance. (if you put in 7 times as many lanes they would get farther apart yet, but still not go faster)

bluGill,

Different bases would have different things they cannot represent as a decimal, but no matter what base you can find something that isn't there.

For real world use base 12 is much nicer than base 10. However it isn't perfect. Circles are 360 degrees because base 360 is even nicer yet, but probably too hard to teach multiplication tables.

bluGill,

It would, but worse. Both are a case of more cars than there is space. Heavy congestion would just need a lot more lanes to fix - maybe 10x as many. (don't ask me to pay for that or where those lanes go)

Or in short, support better transit for your city. For that cost of miles of 15 lane highways you can put in a lot of transit.

bluGill,

Sure, but I'm the guy doing the speed limit in the right lane.

bluGill,

Sadly it works out for them overall. It only takes a few times of getting to the next light as it turns yellow and they are way ahead while you are sitting there at a red light. Sure sometimes you get to see them when it doesn't work out, but when it works out they are long gone.

Timing traffic lights is a hard problem.

bluGill,

In the real world when you see .9 you often should round it. You rarely have as much precision as presenting - .5 should generally be seen as 1 unless you have reason to believe the measurement is that precise.

bluGill,

No, PRIVATE transit. I don't support the government building roads - that is meddling in the natural state of things and makes private industry unable to compete. If you must have socialist roads than you must have socialist transit as well, but I reject that.

bluGill,

That won't help much. By the time anyone notices the roads are slowing down there are six times as many cars on it as it can safely handle. Driving skills will help on backroads, but that isn't where most people are driving. No amount of training can make heavy traffic safe.

bluGill,

I get tailgated all the time despite being in the right lane . Sometimes I can see that person hang up their phone, finally look and move over. (This was on a rural highway, I was doing 20 under the limit and over 15 minutes 3 other cars passed without issues, which accounts for a 5 cars going my direction in that time)

bluGill,

I was referring to the city engineers timing all the lights in a city. As a driver paying attention can help, but when you have several square miles of road network, with roads unequally spaced, different speed limits and all the other weird stuff they do in a real city it is not easy. It gets worse if you go from city to a metropolitan area.

I have concluded we will never convince people of that enough to change behavior (they will answer the question correctly when asked, but drive the same) thus i'm supporting transit as much as possible.

bluGill,

Instead of buying a ticket I just search the sidewalk for the winning ticket (that someone else lost) while I'm otherwise doing my normal activities. My odds are winning are nearly the same as someone who buys a ticket, so I can dream just as much - but I can spend the money on something else.

bluGill, (edited )

Deer mostly travel on trails they built themselves. They also change their environment greatly (the act of eating thins the trees)

bluGill,

Most of the time and places a city doesn't need that capacity. Since your rail cannot get the garbage from my house, or my new bed to the house, we need roads as well. Thus for most a bus running in mixed traffic (remember most roads do not have heavy traffic!) is good enough and a lot cheaper. Where you need capacity a train is really good, but you don't need it.

That said I support trains in a lot more places because trains can run fully automated and thus in the real world can achieve the high frequency people need to choose transit even when a car isn't a problem to own (they can afford it and there is no traffic). This is however just a stop gap since self driving buses don't exist (yet?). In most "first world" countries cost of labor is high and automated trains are thus useful in places where a bus could do the job.

bluGill,

That research is useless! Sure they measured it, so it isn't wrong. However it is useless. What it is really saying is your city was so bad that people were not taking advantage of living in the city because they couldn't conveniently get places. Those people could have lived in rural Montana for all the good a city did. Cities are about all the things you can do by living in it, so if people change because of new roads then you are a city were not meeting their ideals.

Also note that they measured one lane. I already asserted that by the time a city is thinking about adding one more lane they already need to add 6 times as many lanes (not 6 more lanes, 6 times!) IF your city needs 6 times more lanes than it has, no wonder people are choosing alternates, and once a lane exists they will start using it.

Again, the moral is build transit in cities.

bluGill,

You have good reason to suspect those dice are not fair.

bluGill,

That is a difference in degree though.

ajsadauskas, to fuck_cars
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

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."

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/how-planners-got-rozelle-traffic-modelling-horribly-wrong-20231129-p5ensa.html

@fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism

bluGill,

@ajsadauskas induced demand is a stupid concept. If adding options increases traffic that means your.city is not serving residents. The point of a city is all the places people can get in them, if you have no place to go then move to Montana or someplace else with noplace to go. Note that I didn't say add more lanes, lanes are not very cost effective'

The reason adding one more lane is wrong is by the time slowdowns occure people are already packing cars in 6 times more dense than is safe and so you need not one more lane but 6 times as many lanes. That is expensive no matter how you look at it. (And probably requires layers of bridges and tunnels)

bluGill,

@rcbrk

@fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism @ajsadauskas That is about the right level of freeway for a city (entire MSA) of about a million people. I believe that the picture is for a city population of 7 million.

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