It's surprising to me that you would need to wait 30 minutes for a bus. Are you in a very rural area? Was it outside of normal commute hours? Or is your city's public transportation network wildly underfunded?
There are three buses that go from the main depot to my office. They all arrived in a line back to back to back, picked up zero passengers, and went their merry way.
I watched this happen from one block over, waiting for the stoplight to change so I could cross the street and catch any of them. Unfortunately, since they were all moving in a blob, the next blob was going to be around in 30 minutes instead of the average 10 minutes one might expect from a non-blob arrangement.
But that part of the story was anecdote. The more relevant part was that in the event of disruption of the infrastructure solution, modern cellular radio and digital technology let us ad hoc book a one-off service solution on the fly, and that is so convenient that the people who facilitate it can get away with some massive wealth extraction as a result.
Are you European or American? To a lot of America, that is considered a good numbers. Its worse in many parts of this vastly large country. The country has chosen to invest heavily in road networks. It appears that you can have one or the other but not both without great expense and reform.
I like to remind my European friends that this is what the US looks like placed on top of Europe: https://i.imgur.com/HkRZfKd.png
Its not a perfect illustration but it drives home the point.
That surface area map is a seriously bad argument: We are talking about bus lines here. Local transit just requires local lines. This isn't about train lines crossing through the whole country.
And how come China does a much better job than the US while they have the same surface area? Why aren't you overlapping those two maps?
In our city, what happened was a demographic shift that the bus network never adapted to. The city had a "hub and spoke" model where the vast bulk of buses went into and out of downtown; it's optimized to get suburbanites to their jobs and back home.
But as the city transitioned from a manufacturing / industry / banking to a service economy, the jobs spread out. If your primary business need is an office park to answer phones or crunch numbers or move lightweight product, property in the suburbs is cheaper. So now you have a situation where someone lives in the two o'clock suburb and their job is in the three o'clock suburb... And there's no bus from here to there, there's a bus from two o'clock to the center and back out to three.
... or they could use a car (carpool or owned), which will cut the travel time by a third.
Retooling to the modern needs is going to really goose the cost (especially since nobody wants to tear down the current model at the same time; the people who rely on it do rely on it to get to their jobs and back, still; their job isn't heavy industry anymore, but people still work downtown!).
I wouldn't celebrate the end of the war on drugs just yet. Even if psychedelic medicines are approved, bifurcated scheduling means that rich white people using psychedelics in clinics would be respectable medical users, but the same exact molecule used on the street by poor brown people would still be schedule 1 and used to justify continued persecution. Tails they win, heads we lose.
Context does matter though? There are plenty of substances which are legal for certified professionals to use in controlled settings that would be illegal for untrained amateurs to use for recreational purposes. Plutonium, for example.
I usually encounter this framing from alcohol drinkers who are trying to be self-righteously judgemental about users of other drugs without getting hit by their own boomerang, so seeing it used for what is essentially the opposite opinion (i.e., that alcohol is worse than other drugs) is quite refreshing.
I still disagree with it, though. Alcohol is clearly a drug.
Yep, alcohol is one of a very small number of recreational drugs that can kill addicted people who quit cold turkey. Even hospitals have to provide ethanol to heavy drinkers to prevent withdrawal.
So if you really want to nab someone but you don't care what the charge is, you can threaten them with a 4th Amendment-violating search, which induces them to destroy evidence. Pretty neat trick.
IANAL, but I don't think it's controversial to say that people who treat the Bill of Rights like an obstacle to be hacked around probably shouldn't be in positions of power.
(IAAL, this is not legal advice, consult your own attorney)
If you destroy evidence, that’s your own fault. You can’t blame law enforcement for inducing you to commit crimes they didn’t ask you to commit. That’s just silly and no court will entertain that theory.
To protect your rights under the 4th Amendment, you refuse the search. If law enforcement conducts the search anyway and a court finds the search was unlawful, the court will exclude the evidence found in the search from consideration in the trial along with any evidence that flows from that. Neither the jury nor the court will be able to use it.
IANAL, but I've heard that entrapment defenses are way harder to use, and much rarer, in reality than on TV.
First, you frequently require a judge's permission to even argue it.
But the real burden is showing that your client would not have committed the crime without the effect of the police. A cop posing as a drug dealer and offering you drugs as you pass them in the park every day doesn't count; a cop hounding you for months to commit wire fraud because they mistakenly believe you're in a criminal org might, though.
2020 was famously a period where the pandemic and the opioid crisis were causing death and despair all over the country, but somehow that became the excuse for backpedaling on decriminalization in Oregon before there could have even been effects to study, not to mention before there was time to study those effects. They even recriminalized drugs that have never been associated with overdose or addiction, like psychedelics. Basically, they did the bare minimum necessary to be able to say "we tried it and it didn't work" with a straight face.
Don't fall for it.
You have it precisely backwards. Culture belonging to the people is the default, natural state, and copyright is an unnatural legal fiction that should only be tolerated insofar at it produces a net positive in terms of promotion of the arts and sciences.
Unfortunately, the whole intellectual property concept has been co-opted by big business for rent-seeking.
I don't think the Konami execs are at a board meeting saying, "we can't fund another Metal Gear sequel because it will just become public domain in 20 years."
Culture may belong to people, but intellectual property like source code doesn't. It's protected by NDAs for the express fact that it doesn't become part of what the people have. Copies of the game have been released for people to play to directly experience the game.
>unnatural legal fiction
It is extremely natural for someone to have ownership over what one has created. If you make a beautifully designed pendant someone can't just steal it from you and claim that they are "archiving it" and want to experience culture.
> Culture may belong to people, but intellectual property like source code doesn't.
> It is extremely natural for someone to have ownership over what one has created.
Intelectual property is an oxymoron, and no oxymoron can be natural. Only scarce things can be property. Making non-scarce things (e.g. binary code) act as property is conflict-seeking behavior that often results in the violation of real ownership of others.
> It's protected by NDAs for the express fact that it doesn't become part of what the people have.
NDA do not protect IPs. While they restrict the flow of information, they are still contracts, and bounded by their limits as such.
> If you make a beautifully designed pendant someone can't just steal it from you and claim that they are "archiving it" and want to experience culture.
Yes, someone can "steal" (copy) my beatiful design on the basis that they own their own pendant materials. To prevent that is to violate their private property rights and, in some cases, their right to live.
Abundant things can be property too. Property is about ownership. Intellectual property is a subcategory of property. It isn't an oxymoron.
>NDA do not protect IPs.
But they do indicate intent.
>someone can "steal" (copy) my beatiful design
I was talking about the physical object. They may think it is of such importance that it should live in a museum instead of as your private property. Other people believe that a museum could preserve it better and they think they know how best the pendant should be used than its actual owner.
> Abundant things can be property too. Property is about ownership.
The legally and ethically relevant concept of ownership is about dealing with mutual exclusivity of material resources and avoiding its conflicts. Abudant things, in this context, do not have mutual exclusivity and, as such, are not ownable in a natural sense.
> But they do indicate intent.
And?
> I was talking about the physical object.
Sure, but we are talking about IPs, not real property, so I fail to see how this example is relevant.
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