• 3 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Unless this thing runs on fossil fuels, I don’t think it’s really going to have a big impact on climate change.

    I guess there’s an argument that this is taking away engineering hours from projects that might have more practical uses in addressing climate change but I’d counter that sometimes engineers need a break from their usual work to avoid burning out from tedious incremental tasks and rigid processes. A bit of time and space for experimentation can be helpful, reinvigorating, and can lead to future discoveries and inventions if done right.





  • It wasn’t always so one sided. Jane Jacobs wrote about the power and effect of local community surveillance over the streets in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. When we zone for and build mixed use streets with enough density and points of interest to ensure foot traffic at all points in the day from a variety of ordinary people, with a healthy percentage of them being established locals, then it’s much easier for good samaritans to notice when something goes wrong (like a kidnapping attempt) and intervene. Privacy used to be a lot easier to achieve too when you needed it.











  • North American driving culture sucks. For the past 70 years cars have dominated at the expense of all other modes of travel. They’re deeply embedded into our culture, infrastructure, planning processes, transportation engineering, and daily lives. They have become synonymous with freedom of movement for a lot of people who can’t imagine any different way to get around. Speed limits and enforcement in their minds are seen as an infringement on their rights. It will be a long and uncertain process to enact change, ripe for disruption and setbacks, but the status quo isn’t working, we’ve hit the limits of cars’ ability to scale, and with the internet showing how things are in the rest of the world, some people are waking up to what’s possible when you aren’t dependent on cars to get around safely and reliably.