Uber is different because you use an app instead of calling a person on the phone to order a cab. Furthermore, with an Uber you don’t even have to talk to the driver because they already know your destination.
DoorDash is similar: you use an app instead of placing an order over the phone. This is meaningful enough that many people switched to it even when their favourite restaurant already had delivery because they didn’t want to talk to someone on the phone.
Now that sounds really interesting! I saw the movie Yojimbo recently and that one depicts a Japanese village full of lawlessness and banditry, but that was set during the samurai era. My impression of Japanese villages today is that they’re rather idyllic places, albeit boring and lacking job opportunities (hence the exodus to Tokyo).
I will check out those authors though. Thanks for the info!
The bigger question is why? And is it universal or is it specific to some places and/or some times.
Like I doubt small Japanese villages are hotbeds of murder. At the same time I fully believe American small towns have a lot of murders. So it’s a pretty strong claim to leap to the conclusion that small towns cause murder.
But they’re not wrong. Look how many people use Uber instead of calling a cab. Look how many use Doordash instead of calling to order from a restaurant. Look how many use self checkout instead of going through an ordinary cashier lane.
People don’t want to interact with each other anymore. They don’t want to make phone calls with strangers. They don’t want to deal with strangers in person. They just want to push a button and get whatever it is that they want.
I think this is some kind of mass stress response to the alienation we all feel from living in modern cities. Of being sequestered into suburbs and having our lives regimented into school/work schedules. We’ve lost the sense of community we had from when we used to live in villages and walk around to get places and we knew everyone around us.
One of the biggest life lessons I learned was from watching the show Breaking Bad. I think we all have a natural disgust / aversion to evil people. While it’s important as a social function for protecting communities from bad actors, it harms our ability to understand evil.
That’s the key. Understanding evil and how good people descend into it is the best way to protect ourselves from walking down that path. It starts with recognizing that bad circumstances and unaddressed feelings of resentment and perhaps a sense of entitlement all contribute to our ability to justify and rationalize our own actions internally.
Hitler couldn’t have carried out the Holocaust without the help of millions of German citizens who rationalized in exactly this way.
Or you’re Putin looking side-eyed at yet another traitorous regional governor!
TIL: the primary function of balconies is murder!
Hey if I could sell a million copies of a game for just a dollar each as my cut of a bundle, well I’d be a millionaire!
North American cities don’t build a lot of roads. Instead, they build stroads. Stroads are the worst of all worlds: ugly, noisy, unsafe, polluted, congestion-causing abominations.
The question is: did Disney commission the Percy Jackson series or did Rick Riordan shop around for publishers like a traditional book author and happen to get picked up by Disney?
It’s the Texas sharpshooter fallacy writ large. You can always pick the winners after the games are written. The hard part is picking a winner of a game beforehand.
Those are books published by Disney written by established individual authors. They’re not gang-writing books the way they make movies.
You have to include the risk of not succeeding. Without high graphical fidelity to differentiate yourself, you’re forced to compete on gameplay alone. Large companies like Nintendo do not know how to make hits reliably. That’s why Nintendo keeps recycling old franchises.
Look at all of the indie games that no one plays. There are thousands and thousands of developers out there making games. The vast majority of them never succeed. It’s just like trying to become a New York Times best selling author. Notice how Disney hasn’t cracked the novel as a medium. That’s why they spend all their money on big budget Star Wars and Marvel movies and TV shows.
Or even better: build bike lanes lined with trees so we can ride in shade!
The thing I wasn’t prepared for was not the lack of time, it was the lack of desire to play games.
It’s a cognitive dissonance thing for collectors. They want the preserved, playable copy but they don’t ever want to break the seal because that lowers the value.
I bet there are a bunch of collectors out there in possession of empty game boxes (with placebo weights) that have been expertly resealed and then submitted to grading companies for a seal of approval.
Yes, it is a choice. However one of the biggest problems is that so many of the good choices are gone. I’m talking about the positive social institutions and community organizations people used to belong to. The third spaces.
Communities have fragmented. Neighbours hate each other. Both of my neighbours hate our family. One is a childless, alcoholic husband and wife who also hate each other (they used to be nice years ago) who also hate us and give us creepy looks all the time. The other is green lawn-obsessed neighbour who hates us for the pine trees we have growing on our property and refuse to cut down (at our own expense) to suit their tastes.
We’re a society of severely mentally ill, isolated, confused, and angry people. Our villages and communities are all gone. We’re all a bunch of islands unto ourselves.
The manosphere is one symptom of a much larger problem. Look at it in isolation and you’ll miss the big picture. Authoritarianism is on the rise globally. Loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions. Society’s traditional institutions are a distant memory. All we have remaining are loose groups of people shouting at each other as the spectre of war lurks in the background.
I like everything except the road-style bidirectional bike lane. They should split the directions of the bike lane. Head on collisions are very bad. Splitting the lanes makes those essentially impossible. It also makes it much easier for pedestrians to cross since they only need to deal with one direction of traffic at a time.
Just put that plant boulevard between the directions of the bike lane and create pedestrian islands to stand on.
No, though there’s been plenty of marketing where they claim “we know how to build AGI.”
They have marketed ChatGPT as a general purpose AI from the very beginning, though the question of how to leverage that has remained open.
The issue with electrifying rail networks is that it’s very expensive and modern diesel-electric locomotives are already over a hundred times more efficient than trucks. So while it does reduce emissions to replace a diesel locomotive with a fully electric train you’re far better off getting hundreds of trucks off the road and adding one new diesel-electric locomotive!