Venting thread

[malloc]

I did read it but I was uncertain what you were trying to say. Hence asking. Thanks for clearing it up, however condescendingly.

Sorry for snapping, but I feel like people just don't take my problems seriously. Really, I just want some acknowledgement that this could represent something deadly and that it's unfair that circumstances have conspired to make seeing a doctor difficult.

[Ares Land]

The whole situation with insurance is awful and all kinds of wrong, man. This whole setup, where you and many others, fear for crippling debt is criminally insane and I feel for you having to leave under that.

And, you know, sorry for assuming it didn't need saying. I do get the anxiety that results from this.

I don't know if that helps, but I'd like to state, again, that this is most likely not a brain tumor or anything deadly.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

The whole situation with insurance is awful and all kinds of wrong, man. This whole setup, where you and many others, fear for crippling debt is criminally insane and I feel for you having to leave under that.

And, you know, sorry for assuming it didn't need saying. I do get the anxiety that results from this.

I don't know if that helps, but I'd like to state, again, that this is most likely not a brain tumor or anything deadly.

Yes, I wish to concur with all of this (and to apologise if I also came off as callous); having been navigating the system for a while, I've been able to get myself into a situation that isn't as abysmal as it could be, but that isn't necessarily something that's replicable, especially right now. What you have as far as insurance goes sounds like some sort of "Bronze" plan (these tend to have low premiums but high deductables and coinsurance), where "Silver" plans are usually the best value for the money (there are also networks to be concerned about). I believe you can also have hospitals bill you and enroll in payment plans, but this is not an ideal situation by a long shot, and the whole system is, yes, a fairly disgusting absurdity.

Being also a hypochondriac myself, it is worth noting that chest pains are frequently indigestion, which (alongside ear infections) can cause vertigo. Numbness or tingling in the limbs is more likely to be some sort of pinched nerve, or sitting in some position too long. An accelerated heartbeat is probably anxiety, which can cause a dreadful feedback loop. I also think that your plan covering a single checkup sounds a bit comically ridiculous, but there are many things I thought were too stupid to be real that turned out to be very real.

[Linguoboy]

So malloc did send me details of his health plan, from which I was able to determine that basic tests will be 100% covered under his plan. He plans to call about booking an appointment, if he hasn't already. I think we can put this one to bed for now.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Wonderful.

[MacAnDàil]

Great!

The practical solution is to open windows, but that isn't so practical when it's 30 degrees out. I assume at this point that the only long-term solution is to get rich, buy land, and hire a good architect.

I think it's important to take into consideration the others in society: on the one hand, the major companies that pollute should take others into account and, on the other hand, those suffering should realise that there thousands of other sufferers that can be their allies to solve the problems together.

Great! Instead of opening a window, I can... personally end the use of formaldehyde-phenol resins, and convince the landlord to replace all the particleboard, in less time than it'll take me to reach the point where it'll make financial sense for me to buy a house?

Air pollution certainly has nothing to do with it - I live on several acres and can't even see my neighbors' porches from mine. The closest thing we have to heavy industry within a mile is a golf course. Water pollution is a general concern, but I'm on well water and I have a distillation tank. (The region where I live doesn't have potable municipal tap water, so it's a reasonable thing to have.)

Come to think of it, it could just be mold. The house was not in great condition when I signed the lease, and although the landlord cleared out the worst of it and I went over everything at move-in, I haven't been doing as much upkeep as I probably should've been. Blasting out the dining room with frankincense can't hurt, at least.

I think that my proposal of collective action at the heart of the problem is 1° not exclusive to individual action 2° not necessarily slower, dearer, less efficient or harder than improvement of one’s own personal condition.

Let’s take an example here:
The public transport is not up to scratch here in Réunion. Having come here, I understand now why the buses in Edinburgh, Lothian buses, received a prize for the network: the buses
1° run often (sometimes even every five minutes outwith Covid time) and
2° on time (very occasionally you have a minute or two wait because of roadworks or traffic jam but the screen lets you know of the short lateness as well),
3° they run to midnight if not 24/7 (with reduced hours after midnight) and
4° there is almost always space to sit (only the stops just after the High School, just after the High School just finished).

By contrast, the buses here
1° run once every fifteen minutes at best during the week and sometimes even don’t run at all on Sundays
2° often arrive late, sometimes very late, sometimes early (this is inexcusable because they should just wait for the customers. The customers sometimes arrive on time but can’t get the bus because it has already gone), and sometimes not at all (even worse of course)
3° they run until nine o’clock at night if you’re really very lucky. On many routes, the buses finish at six.
4° and on the most popular routes, you are often among the many standing if you don’t get on early enough

Now, two projects in Saint-Denis have been suggested, both put to public debate. One, TAO, is a tram project proposed to great approbation. The other, NEO, is the continuation of the New Littoral Road (pet project of the Region head, Didier Robert, and most notable for its prize tag) into the entry of Saint-Denis.

I participated in both, including writing a page against the NEO and the New Littoral Road projects on the Public Debate webpage and on Facebook. The public debate for NEO has been released recently. The public has had a much more mitigated response to this project. Many objections were raised by the public, including the environmental consequences and alternative transport solutions, as I did. Indeed, a paragraph of my text was included in the report (the paragraph about extending the bus hours). So this, along with dozens of other contributions, will need to be listened to and responded to by the project managers.

The fact that they took into account my proposal could have gone into the Happy Things Thread, but I thought it was an appropriate continuation to this conversation.

We can see what the project managers say, but it would appear that the NEO project will be abandoned and alternatives will be put into place.

SO it seems to me that my participation in the public debates will probably bring better results faster and cheaper than if I had decided to learn how to drive a car (which is still possible and not mutually exclusive).

[Ares Land]

Hey, that's pretty awesome.

I suppose the fact that elected official are still pushing for cars over public transport is worth venting about!

[Torco]

everybody loves cars, man. they're small, comfortable, private, convenient. the only thing that's shitty about them is you have to park them.

why aren't we making self-driving cars into fleets and just renting them out from apps again? the bus is just so 20th century, man. drag. sit in benches alongside 50 to 200 strangers? laaame.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I understand big mass transit vehicles to be far more environmentally responsible, but perhaps I'm mistaken?

[Ares Land]

everybody loves cars, man. they're small, comfortable, private, convenient. the only thing that's shitty about them is you have to park them.

why aren't we making self-driving cars into fleets and just renting them out from apps again? the bus is just so 20th century, man. drag. sit in benches alongside 50 to 200 strangers? laaame.

Cars are nice and all but I think they're vastly overrated. Right now, the problem is environmental, cars just emit too much CO2. I'm confident we'll get cleaner alternatives eventually, but they're not coming fast enough. Add to that pollution in general, including noise, the dirty shit we get into, geopolitically, to secure the oil supply.
That said, there's still more because the idea that everyone should drive everywhere and that cities and towns should be adapted accordingly have adapted badly. Cars take up a lot of space, both on the road and when parked (and it's an unending problem, no matter how much space you give cars, you still end up with gridlocks and no parking space). Aside from city centers, you can't just walk places anymore; the general strip mall - suburbia esthetic is soul-deadening (and often killing what was a very nice town in the first place). And if for some reason you can't drive because you're old, or sick, or can't affors repairs, or can't afford gas: you're screwed.

Public transport is pretty lame, granted, but that's because there's a sort of general consensus that there should be as little public transport as possible and that it should suck as much as possible. The unspoken rules are that subway stations should be darker and grittier than a Batman reboot, that the traffic should be grossly underestimated so that everyone can ride standing awkwarkdly, that maintenance work should be as protracted and inconvenient as possible, that there should be no place whatsover for luggage, or small children or you know, unnecessary body parts such as elbows or legs and that trains should sometimes just stop in the middle of nowhere for no reason.
But, I mean, it doesn't have to be that way, all of there are just consequences of politicians not being interested. (It'd be interesting to see what would happen if elected officials had to commute like the rest of us. I'm pretty sure within two years subway stations would have marble floors and subway cars would look like 1st class carriages on the Orient Express.)

That said, I love the idea of self-drive Ubers; I just don't want these to be the only way of getting around.

[MacAnDàil]

Ares Land rightly summarised important defects of cars. The planet is very important, after all. And I don't think anybody's ever looked at a carpark and gone 'Now, that's the epitome of beauty!'

However, to be honest, I also have never learnt to drive a car for other reasons as well: it seems a lot of investment in time, learning and money for what I see are small advantages. A bit of planning is a lot simpler, I find. And I can't read a book while driving a car, but I can (and usually do) read books in the bus.

[Torco]

Ah, no, no, totally, you're gonna still need buses for big trips, uber self-drivies look more to me like a last-mile kind of solution, maybe last five miles.

Cars are certainly bad for the environment, but this can be mitigated a lot by, again, not acting like it's 1940: cars don't have to be the size they are, nor use gasoline, and soon they'll drive themselves: you could have a fleet of these

But also public transport is tbh the kind of thing that looks better from the ivory tower than from the ground: the increased efficiency from the perspective of the system is paid by decreased quality of life on the part of the user: it increases the amount of unfree time in the user's life, exposes them to pathogens and sexual inappropriateness, and they're very often loud and stressful. there's a reason it's mostly poor people who use public transport: if you can get a car, you get a car: in maany cases it just makes your life better. Takes me an hour and a half to get places on public transport that it'd take me 30minutes to drive to, and this is, I think, not a closeable gap: buses need to periodically stop to get people on and off in a way that I, on a car, going from X to Y, simply don't.

my country is very much atypical with regards to public transport funding and conditions: our subway is very clean, well lit, spacious, and generally smells pretty good: it's much better than any other subway system I've been on (which include buenos aires, berlin, barcelona, and paris). but it's still slow, stressful, overcrowded, loud, people fight over seats, and there's at any point in time one dude rapping into an amp, two ladies trying to sell you things and an an old gentleman singing boleros into a different amp. What it also is is expensive, at one dollar and a bit for a ticket in a country where people make something like 500 bucks a month, 70 to 100 of which goes in transport.

Honestly I think regular countries make the correct choice in having public transport not spend a great amount of money in beautification: it's the cheap alternative for when you can't afford anything better, and people's lives here would be better if it cost half of what it does but was dark and smelled of piss sometimes. I don't think the cause is so much politician consensus, but rather that running a public transport system is expensive, and building one is even more expensive: by contrast, the demand for it is both functionally infinite (unless you built a system actually able to accomodate everyone, which is suuuper expensive) and also elastic, as in you have full trains, you double the trains and people in response fill up the new trains, leaving you where you were. and all the money that goes into making things pretty, or the seats more comfortable or so on is money that doesn't go to building new lines or decreasing ticket prices. (or lowering taxes, or paying nurses in public hospitals, etc)

[Ares Land]

Cars are certainly bad for the environment, but this can be mitigated a lot by, again, not acting like it's 1940: cars don't have to be the size they are, nor use gasoline, and soon they'll drive themselves: you could have a fleet of these

Electric cars sure exist, but it looks like most cars will run on gas for the next 20 years or so.

But also public transport is tbh the kind of thing that looks better from the ivory tower than from the ground: the increased efficiency from the perspective of the system is paid by decreased quality of life on the part of the user: it increases the amount of unfree time in the user's life, exposes them to pathogens and sexual inappropriateness, and they're very often loud and stressful. there's a reason it's mostly poor people who use public transport: if you can get a car, you get a car: in maany cases it just makes your life better. Takes me an hour and a half to get places on public transport that it'd take me 30minutes to drive to, and this is, I think, not a closeable gap: buses need to periodically stop to get people on and off in a way that I, on a car, going from X to Y, simply don't.

Man, I may live in a ivory tower but in my ivory tower people use public transport. Unless you work in the suburbs, nobody uses a car for daily trips here unless they can't do otherwise. A mildly annoying hour on the train translate into two hours stuck in traffic at rush hour.
Real estate is, by the way, a lot more expensive in places where public transport is decent.

Buses are the slowest means of public transport because they're most of the time stuck in traffic. There are other options. (A tram won't beat a car for the same distance in the middle of the night or at 3 in the afternoon; but at rush hour it definitely will.)
Note that buses generally suck, but they don't have to. Britain generally seems to get buses right, for instance. London buses are pretty good; Edinburgh buses, as MacAnDàil mentioned, are very good.

Honestly I think regular countries make the correct choice in having public transport not spend a great amount of money in beautification

Beautification isn't quite what I had in mind. I mean stuff like having enough public transport for the expected traffic (even putting extra buses on lines where they're routinely full would be an improvement!), having an uniformed dude being there from time to time (which drastrically cuts the amount of bad behavior on publci transport). I'd like not to have urine puddles around, too, but I'm bourgeois that way.

by contrast, the demand for it is both functionally infinite (unless you built a system actually able to accomodate everyone, which is suuuper expensive) and also elastic, as in you have full trains, you double the trains and people in response fill up the new trains, leaving you where you were.

Sure, but you get the exact same problem you get with any transportation!

On the matter of ticket prices, sure, I get your point... but your solution to that is to have everyone own an even more expensive car?

[Torco]

Man, I may live in a ivory tower but in my ivory tower people use public transport. Unless you work in the suburbs, nobody uses a car for daily trips here unless they can't do otherwise. A mildly annoying hour on the train translate into two hours stuck in traffic at rush hour.
Real estate is, by the way, a lot more expensive in places where public transport is decent.

oh, really? regional variation, i suppose. here being close to subway does increase prices a bit, but the main thing is just how poor/rich the neighbourhood already is.

I'd like not to have urine puddles around, too, but I'm bourgeois that way.

me too tbh, but I mean, how much do you want out of your income in exchange for a little piss here and there.

On the matter of ticket prices, sure, I get your point... but your solution to that is to have everyone own an even more expensive car?

oh, no, not at all! public transport is kinda great, it's mass transit that's lame. I'd have a dirt-cheap, dingy subway, hopefully with well spaced out stations, a bunch of direct here-to-there bus lines for long trips (as opposed to I'm gonna stop every 50 meters, hopefully buses with their own lanes), and rental self-driving tiny cars that take you the last couple kilometers, or just do the whole trip if it's short. Though just the tiny cars might work too, who knows, centralized control might make roads muuuch more efficient. My problem is mainly like it is literally 2021 and our mass transit technology is from the 1920ies.

[doctor shark]

Ares Land rightly summarised important defects of cars. The planet is very important, after all. And I don't think anybody's ever looked at a carpark and gone 'Now, that's the epitome of beauty!'

However, to be honest, I also have never learnt to drive a car for other reasons as well: it seems a lot of investment in time, learning and money for what I see are small advantages. A bit of planning is a lot simpler, I find. And I can't read a book while driving a car, but I can (and usually do) read books in the bus.

The main reason I know how to drive a car and, accordingly, have a driver's license is that, in the part of the US I'm from, a car is all but essential. And, by US standards, I actually got my driver's license quite late (at 21), but that's partly due to all the travel I did and going to university in a part of the US where I could manage without a car, surprisingly. Once I started graduate school, though, the car became all but essential, given that I ended up in a larger town with a bus system that could best be described as "lol". (Plus, as carbon-inefficient as it might be, driving between Ohio and NC was actually a lot cheaper than any other means of transportation, not to mention time-wise.)

But the comment about real estate pricing does hold quite a bit in many parts of Europe. Luxembourg's probably a serious offender in this regard, where housing prices within the larger cities and not far from the bigger railway stations are quite considerably higher compared to in the countryside where the bus network is pretty patchy.

me too tbh, but I mean, how much do you want out of your income in exchange for a little piss here and there.

The Santiago metro's quite new, though, right? I mean, a lot of the newer metro lines look super-shiny, though, again, the priorities of keeping it sufficiently shiny vary from country to country. I remember Copenhagen's metro (when I visited in 2011) also was super-shiny due to it being quite new.

[zompist]

That said, there's still more because the idea that everyone should drive everywhere and that cities and towns should be adapted accordingly have adapted badly. Cars take up a lot of space, both on the road and when parked (and it's an unending problem, no matter how much space you give cars, you still end up with gridlocks and no parking space). Aside from city centers, you can't just walk places anymore; the general strip mall - suburbia esthetic is soul-deadening (and often killing what was a very nice town in the first place). And if for some reason you can't drive because you're old, or sick, or can't affors repairs, or can't afford gas: you're screwed.

In addition to all the problems mentioned, driving is stressful and dangerous— we get about 40,000 deaths a year from crashes. And the driver, at least, can't use the time to do something else.

The US is self-screwed here; except for some urban neighborhoods, it's designed for the car. Besides the inconvenience, that adds enormous construction costs, plus the car support superstructure from dealers to gas stations to repair shops to junk yards. It's very expensive to build a subway here, but it seems much more so because it's a single figure— no one ever adds up the cost of suburban sprawl to compare it to.

There's definitely a sort of libertarian satisfaction in owning your own car, but I'm not sure it was worth centering the entire economy and culture on it.

Self-driving cars might be viable in half a century; right now they're a set of disasters waiting to happen. There have already been fatalities, but more worrying is the attitude of the press, e.g. here or here. Note that both articles immediately move to blaming the pedestrian and the backup driver. We can't just stop a big company from killing people, after all, that would be un-American. It's not hard to suspect that this will be the media strategy going forward: rather than push for better software, blame the pedestrians or other humans. There's a precedent in the criminalization of "jaywalking".

As we say in software development, in 90% of the allotted time you solve 90% of the problems. You then solve the next 9% of the problems with another 90% of the allotted time. Then you absolutely have to ship, so the remaining 1% of problems are never solved.

[Ares Land]

In addition to all the problems mentioned, driving is stressful and dangerous— we get about 40,000 deaths a year from crashes. And the driver, at least, can't use the time to do something else.

Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure we all know someone either killed or badly hurt in a car accident. Which is a really strange fact of life when you stop and think about it.

(Taking, again, a very detached perspective, there's something very weird about the fact we spend quite some time training our children to avoid the fast moving metal boxes.)

There's definitely a sort of libertarian satisfaction in owning your own car, but I'm not sure it was worth centering the entire economy and culture on it.

There seems to be a generational factor there -- well, at least here in Europe (in the biggest cities. More rural/exurban places are very different). People my age and younger increasingly, well, can't be arse to buy cars or even learn to drive.
I once knew a guy who was very bothered by the fact that his sons didn't have their own cars -- I think he saw it as a sign of increasing poverty and decline, but it was (and is) really more about changes in aspiration.

That makes me wonder what present day technological advances will be seen as kind of overrated in a few generations. TV of course will be dead; but maybe smartphones too.

[Travis B.]

I am having the damnedest time getting deletion of tabs working in zeptoforth, especially when combined with characters of code points greater than U+00FF.

[Nortaneous]

There seems to be a generational factor there -- well, at least here in Europe (in the biggest cities. More rural/exurban places are very different). People my age and younger increasingly, well, can't be arse to buy cars or even learn to drive.

Plenty of people my age do this in the US too. I didn't bother to learn to drive until I hit my mid-twenties. Unfortunately, US cities are bad, so now I live in the suburbs, where there's more to do and I don't have to pay out the nose for a 1br.

(NYC, unlike the other cities I lived in, doesn't have the problem of there being nothing to do. It just has other problems.)

[dɮ the phoneme]

I spilled coffee on my laptop this morning, and then it wouldn't start up. Because Apple is a horrible corporation, their laptops are designed to be as difficult to repair as possible for anyone but Apple, so I've duly sent it off to see if the data can be recovered. That's 6+ months of un-backed-up conlanging work. I feel quite dumb.