Life insurance: you’re betting you’re gonna die, they’re betting you won’t.
Almost. They’re betting you won’t die before you’ve paid them enough money to cover what they pay back.
Tell me you’re bored with running your social media disaster without telling me you’re bored with running your social media disaster.
He does know that those 550 million users and their 200 million posts per day are the product, right?
The average user is generating 0.4 posts/day? What was the pre-Musk average?
No idea. Also, these are Musk numbers, so…
This is empirically stupid, but I have much more skin in this game now (hopefully only metaphorically) so it hits a little harder.
To summarize: the city installed raised bus stops to protect buses and passengers, but drivers complained that they kept hitting the protective barrier so the city is spending $150,000 to revert to unprotected bus stops. Bodies are much softer than concrete, I guess.
The city has screwed up 11th Street sixty ways from Sunday.
1 Like
He’ll lose me and my 4K followers. I know he’ll be crushed.
I’d leave and take my 300 (rounding up) followers too.
I’ll just leave.
1 Like
He claimed this move would be necessary to eliminate bots, in a conversation with Israel’s PM about ending antisemitism on X.
Putting aside Musk’s own antisemitism, it was made pretty clear that bots were not the issue when antisemitism spiked when he took over and lifted bans on many users - not bots.
1 Like
Is he outing himself as a bot?
Since I never post anything, I’m sure all 3 of my followers are bots.
1 Like
4,000 followers? See, I’m not sure I could handle that. I don’t know 4,000 people, so that means I’d have strangers following me. That sort of creeps me out.
1 Like
It’s my work account. People are not really following me. It’s more my position. I am an introvert and the thought of knowing 4,000 people makes my skin crawl. I can barely stand the 40-or-so of y’all on here…
1 Like
If you can stand all of us, you’re doing better than most of us.
1 Like
Those platforms were pretty dumb. They claim the platforms were partly intended as a barrier to protect the bicycle lane. First the “islands” took up most of the existing bike lane… so it went from ~8’ wide before the intersection, to about 2-3’ of space between the platform and the curb.
Second, the barriers were only ~25-30’ in length, so cyclists had “protection” for… a fraction of a second before cars passed it? Also, there is street parking immediately beyond the platforms, so a rider would have to ride through the narrow slot on the right, then around the left side of parked cars, to re-enter the bike lane that runs between the main lane of traffic and street parking. It made no sense at all.
They should just put a large speed bump there, like they did at 6th Street.
1 Like
There are plenty of ways to calm traffic without building up bus stops. The city planners just need to look around; maybe go on a tax payer-funded junket to Amsterdam.
For example: contiguous sidewalks at intersections - where the road rises up to sidewalk level - is one of those things that just works, because it tells the driver subconsciously that this is not their space, so they slow down. It reminds them physically that pedestrians have the right of way - without the need for actual barriers and without the need for signs that will be ignored anyway.
This is safer for cars, too, because it stops drivers barreling into an intersection at full tilt. Even if they’re on their phone, they will feel the road rising and look the fuck up.
Conversely, stroads are built to highway standards, and so subconsciously hint to the driver that they should be able to hammer along at 50mph+.
Just hire some Austin traffic planners, they have a bag full of tricks to slow cars and make life easier for the 0.05% of people who travel by bikes
Obviously I am in the process of switching from 4 to 2 wheels, so I have a bias. Having said that, this country spends hundreds of billions on road expansions that do nothing but encourage people to take up the slack (“induced demand”). The classic example being the expansion of the Katy Freeway, which took about a decade and cost $2.8 billion (with a “buh”) yet, within 2 years of its completion, commute times were worse than before they started.
A city the size of Houston (or Austin) without a major public transportation infrastructure would be unheard of in Europe. We keep building out roads to the detriment of everything else, and traffic keeps getting worse because we make it impossible to get around by anything other than a personal vehicle.
And it’s not just the roads themselves that are a problem, because everyone will be arriving in their own car, destinations have to have enough parking to accommodate their maximum occupancy - this is typically dictated by zoning laws and building codes, yes even in Houston. So vast swaths of the country are paved over to provide parking space that will sit empty for the vast majority of the time.
Your car, my car, everyone’s car has on average 8 spaces set aside for it. EIGHT. EACH. Even though it can only be in one place at one time. The rest of the time, those other 7 spaces are empty.
1 Like