I don’t think it was an engineering consideration, I suspect it was the only thing they could get past the NIMBYs

Stfu

I worked at a coffee shop and 40% of my wage was tips. I wouldn’t be able to afford to live otherwkse. Please tip your barista.

Tipping isn’t really a social norm as much as it is a social imperative-- the food is considerably cheaper than it should be because you’re expected to make up the cost difference in tips.

There’s a lot of non-Chrome Chromium browsers.

I’m typing this message on GrapheneOS. My point isn’t that it’s completely impossible but rather that degoogling basically has to become your hobby in order to fully do it. It requires a level of effort that’s not practical for the average person so its unreasonable to expect everyone to do it. Also, FOSS and non-google alternatives are often not as good as the service google provides for free, like Google Maps. I use OSMAnd as my daily maps app, but its pretty finnicky and isn’t anywhere close to the smooth, polished experience of Google Maps, and its lacking some important functionality. I still use it, because I’m committed to trying to avoid Google software as much as possible, but its definitely not the best experience.

Also, a lot of institutions andemployers use the G-Suite and so its impoesible for people that have to do business with those organizations to be entirely free of google. My university uses the G-Suite and when school comes back in the fall I’ll be stuck using it again. The local school district does too.

I run a degoogled Pixel 6A with GrapheneOS and Linux on my desktop. I logged in to Google once on my phone and still haven’t logged in a single time on my desktop. I don’t use any of the gsuite apps.

I don’t think the average person should or could reasonably do this. Google is so closely ingrained in society that removing it from your life requires a significant amount of effort to make sure you can still have as much of the stuff you need to participate in society as possible. Some of that stuff just doesn’t exist now without Google.

I’m glad that the software and tools and resources exist to de-google yourself for those that want to but its just not an option for most people.

wear more clothes

Bikes are wonderful and amazing and awesome but I was a full-time bike commuter in my southeastern US city for two years and I can’t blame anyone here who doesn’t.

In the summer you get so hot that you need to expect to have somewhere to change or ideally shower wherever you go if you’re gonna be there for a long time. There’s very few dedicated bike lanes and a lot of roads may not even have sidewalks so you need to be able to bike on the open road sharing space with cars, which means you need to have an athletic ability to be able to maintain a decent pace on the road.

Even still you’ll end up having dozens of close calls from reckless cars and maybe even an accident or two which if you’ll be lucky are minor. I got hit by a Jeep that blew through a stop sign ironically on a bike path. I was okay but my bike had considerable damage. Another time I almost got sideswiped by a car that pulled through to parking on the other side of a bike lane without looking.

In short unless very significant infrastructure improvements are made (which are not expensive and are not really difficult to implement technically), biking is inaccessible as a regular form of transportation for most people in most parts of the United States. Which is very unfortunate, because biking is awesome.

I would not really recommend LaTeX or any of those other programs just for writing student papers. LaTeX is for academic papers and it’s pretty cumbersome and technical to learn, it would be very very extra to use it for writing just like your random freshman comp paper. I’m not sure why that list doesn’t have LibreOffice or OpenOffice or whatever.

The great news is that infrastructure to make cities more walkable and bikeable is actually really cheap. Like, compared to car infrastructure that can move a similar amount of people it’s nothing. It’s mostly an issue of political will to actually build the stuff.

I think a non-insubstantial amount of the comment activity was bots to be fair.

It feels a lot more snappy, clean, and modern. I think most of that is because it hasn’t accumulated a lot of the bloat and feature creep that Reddit has over the years. The biggest downside, though, is that the community is much smaller and there isn’t a lot of the niche content that Reddit is so good for.