You’re pretty lazy if you stopped there.
That’s all that was needed.
They can drive past stops that don’t have passengers.
Yes, and they often do. But, it’s a massive waste of money if they drive an entire route and nobody gets on or off. They only make sense if the population density is enough.
Which makes titles like “Her Worship” and “Honourable” such bullshit. We should really just get rid of those titles.
When done well, it should be pretty close every five minutes or so.
That only makes sense in a dense, built-up area where there are enough passengers arriving and departing every 5 minutes that it’s worthwhile for a bus to stop. That may be true in downtown NYC, but it isn’t going to be true of the more distant parts of Long Island.
Second, https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/plural-of-bus.
Thanks for proving my point:
What to Know
The plural of the noun bus is buses.
We have those. They’re called bikes.
Ok, I know I don’t have to take you seriously now.
And they’re loud and they smell (both getting better with electric ones, to be fair).
My city just started trialing some electric buses, man are they so much quieter than the deisel buses. One advantage to self-driving cars is that cars can drive themselves to somewhere where they can be charged, which should only make electrification easier. I’m cautiously optimistic that self-driving cars could make cities better, but we’ll see.
The city is facing the worse
I think you mean “worst”
It seems to me that saying that someone does not neatly fit into the category of man or woman is accepting that “category of man” and “category of woman” are valid categories. Rather than fighting sexism, it’s reinforcing sexism. If someone truly believed that cultural norms about what’s male and what’s female was sexist BS, there would be no need for a “they” pronoun.
some cultures assign adherence to certain behavioural norms to that
Isn’t that sexism, something we should be fighting by saying “women can do that too?”
but they would move more to the suburbs and rural areas, and out of the cities. That still doesn’t sound so bad.
It sounds bad for the city cores though. I like cities and I especially like cities with dense cores that combine good walkable areas with great transit. Tokyo is a prime example. Some people still drive in Tokyo, but a lot of people use the amazing mass transit system there. The end result for Tokyo is that mass transit hubs become these amazing walkable areas with all kinds of interesting things to see.
If everybody except the most poor get self driving cars and move to the suburbs, the downtown cores might become robocar hells, where cars have the priority and pedestrians need to wait 5 minutes to cross a street.
Any way, I don’t think self-driving cars should replace public transport, but complement it.
Yeah, I agree. There might need to be some kind of government intervention to make sure that people have an incentive to use public transit instead of just going everywhere in self-driving cars. But, if you can make journeys robocar -> mass transit -> robocar that’s still an improvement on just full robocar journeys.
As for bikes, I have spent most of my life using a bike to get around. I want Netherlands style bike highways everywhere. But, it’s really hard to get any progress with bike-friendly designs in the current climate. What I think some people should do is have some very well developed bike highway plans in their back pockets, waiting for the opportunity to roll them out.
It could be that self-driving cars will take over the roads in a way that was like how cars replaced horses. If that happens, there are going to be a lot of cities that are going to have to make new laws suddenly: what happens to street parking, what do we do with existing parking lots, etc. That would be the time to pull out a big plan and say “ok, first of all, let’s install all these bike highways with the room we now have”.
does not neatly fit into the category of man or woman
What defines the category of man?
While it’s true that the singular they/them has been used for a very long time, it was used in a very narrow context. It was used almost exclusively for an unknown person, or a theoretical person. In your example, the suspect is unknown, if it was known that it was a male suspect or a female suspect, the suspect would no longer be as unknown and so the sentence would probably be changed to “The suspect entered the store, then she exited through the back.”
You can tell that it had a very restricted use because of how “themselves” was used. For example, “anybody who wants one can get themselves a beer”. That’s a singular construction, but in a way that it might apply to multiple people individually. There was no need for “themself” because “they” was always used for unknown or theoretical people.
Using it for a known person, especially a person who might be currently sitting in the room, is a brand new and confusing use. Now, it’s not like English doesn’t have other confusions, even around pronouns. Take: “she was drunk and her mother was angry, and she slapped her”. Who slapped whom? Sometimes the pronouns alone aren’t enough and you need to restructure the sentence to make it more clear. But, the fact that the singular they is used with the same verb forms as the plural they can add extra confusion. Take a non-binary player playing a team sport: “They’re not playing well but they are.” If the personal pronoun version used “is” instead of “are” it would be less confusing in situations like this, but it would be more confusing in other ways because “they” could use both plural and singular verb forms.
It would be just as confusing if people suddenly started using “one” as a pronoun not used for a theoretical person, but for a concrete and actual person. One has been used as a subject pronoun: “One must remain vigilant”, and an object pronoun: “Wounds can make one weary.” But, it is always a theoretical construction, it has never been used to refer to a specific, known person. So, it would be confusing to start using it that way: “Give it to one, one doesn’t have one yet.” But, even that would be less confusing than singular “they”, because at least “one” uses singular verb forms, etc.
They/them for a specific, known individual is a new way of using “singular they” and it adds a lot of confusion You can argue that despite the confusion it’s necessary, but you can’t pretend that it doesn’t add confusion.
- Help the poor
- Healthcare for everyone
- Good treatment at work.
I like the idea, but I don’t think those are very well phrased.
Take “help the poor”. When you say “the poor” it sounds like you’re talking about a certain group of people who are born poor and die poor. Often the characterization is “the poor” are that way because of personal failings, like that they’re lazy. Nobody wants to think of themselves as poor, and they definitely don’t want to consider themselves part of “the poor”. So, even poor people are going to have a bad reaction to being told that we should “help the poor”.
IMO, a better slogan would be something like “Help people who fall on hard times.” because it makes it more clear it’s temporary help, and that it’s not their fault. I think poverty should be eliminated, and billionaires should be, ahem “eliminated”, but I think the average American would be much more likely to accept a social safety net rather than expected to continuously help “the poor”.
For “healthcare for everyone”, I think the issue is that it sounds like people are imagining high-end luxury healthcare for everyone at no cost. Something like “basic healthcare for everyone” is something more Americans would accept, and is more likely the kind of improvement you could actually get from American voters. Those of us who live in developed countries are used to the idea of “equal healthcare for everyone”, but I don’t think you could get that past the average American voter.
As for “good treatment at work”, what American actually thinks that they’ll get good treatment from their employer? Americans are used to thinking that it’s a doggy dog world out there, and don’t expect loyalty or love from an employer. What’s reasonable is fairness, so why not “fair treatment at work” or “fair treatment for workers”?
And if you do say socialism, say it along with something they like that isn’t scurry. For example, “socialism, like the fire department”.
They should call it “Australia”.
Yes, it saves parking, but why would we choose this over busses?!
Because you have to walk to a bus stop, which in some areas can be a 15 minute walk. Then you have to wait for a bus, which in some areas can be a 30-60 minute wait.
Busses do essentially everything self-driving taxis do
Except come to your exact location and come on demand.
Self-driving taxis are car companies trying to make you stop advocating for better solutions that lose them money
The biggest self-driving taxi company isn’t a car company, it’s Google.
That’s it
It’s not it.
Stop doing their work for them.
I’m not. You’re as unaware of the self-driving car space as you are about spelling your favourite alternative: it’s “buses” not “busses”.
Push for public trains and busses
Yes, those are great too, but there will always be a demand for vehicles that go directly to your doorstop and come on demand. In less dense areas a bus will never be able to compete with that. So, you can push for both.
that don’t benefit anyone except shoveling money into a few rich people’s pockets.
Who do you think is getting rich off self-driving cars?
You’d think they’d at least try something like:
Either that, or there are people working menial jobs at Fox News who hate it but need the paycheck, and when they’re told to make a graphic they do something like this.
it also now has to drive around empty to pick up new passengers
If it’s picking up new passengers, that means it isn’t sitting around parked for 8 hours.
Additionally, how much time is spent looking for parking? How much time is spent disrupting traffic while trying to parallel park?
While it’s true that a car might end up driving around empty for a certain amount of time, it’s only doing that in the short space needed to get to the next passenger. The empty trips will be much shorter than the trips with a passenger onboard. And, every time that happens it saves 2 parking spots. One for the passenger it just dropped off, and one for the passenger it’s currently picking up.
At least a personal car never occupies or damages road infrastructure when it isn’t in use.
You live in a place without on-street parking?
How would you get parasites to not use the self driving cabs in lieu of public transit?
Pricing. Taxes on robo-cabs that partially fund the cost of public transit. Subsidies for disabled people who need a robo-cab and can’t use public transit.
IMO there should also be an additional tax on self-driving cars for private use. It’s ridiculous right now that many people use their cars for maybe 2 hours a day, and the other 22 they just sit parked somewhere.
Even before that there was Walter Cronkite, then Peter Jennings.
That was back in an era where everyone watched the same “influencers”. The good part of that was that for the most part, these influencers were rigorously fact checked so the people who watched them agreed on the same set of facts, and those facts were more or less true.
On the other hand, there were times when these “influencers” were biased or even hid the truth. The bias was often something they even had trouble noticing. Like, they all believed communism was a big threat, or that police were trustworthy. As for hiding the truth, sometimes when a politician got in trouble the news would drop the story because of their deference to power. They’d also sometimes try to repeat whatever the government said as truth without checking it, or not investigate bad things the government was doing overseas because they saw that as being patriotic.
Overall, I think it was better when everybody agreed on most things, even if sometimes the news / “influencers” were biased. At least it meant that the government was more or less functional. At least it meant that people were relatively civil with each-other.