As European, that has lived across multiple countries, that only applies to the lucky ones able to afford living close to the city center.
Also healthy enough to be able to walk stairs, as very few places care about people with disabilities, or carrying stuff that is a pain to transport across stairways.
People visit the touristic centre of the main cities and assume we all enjoy nice public transport systems.
The point is that Europe is not much better when one goes outside the regional capitals of each state, or district, depending on how each country is organised.
Most towns and villages are also not great examples of infrastructure, especially in the southern countries.
I love the accessibility and diversity of large city living in the US, but it is definitely the exception to the rule. The US is hoping for technological breakthroughs in self driving electric cars to bail us out from the sprawl we've created.
UK transport is much worse than the continent. London is fairly well served but elsewhere not so much, especially not the countryside. The trains are very expensive (even with an old person's railcard) and the buses are often irregular or non-existent in large areas of the countryside.
I am aware, having spent some time in Bristol and Cardiff, in various occasions.
That situation is very comparable to many places in the continent, some of them even worse.
Also here that are many small towns and villages that an hourly bus is already something, and naturally there aren't stops scattered all over the place, or worse, offer no protection from weather.
Well there's a big gap between something like London, a very dense city, and actual countryside. There's also a big variation in will. Where I grew up (Metroland, just beyond the end of the Metropolitan "underground" Line) the services are (other than the afore-mentioned London underground) abysmal because providing services costs money & people there want lower taxes. But where my mother lives today, near Bingley, there are enough buses that I get confused as to which one goes closest to her house when I visit.
The difference in London is also in large part because London was allowed to retain a unified transport system when Tories dismantled other systems because ideologically their position is the Invisible Hand of the Free Market will fix everything.
> to the lucky ones able to afford living close to the city center.
Which is also, to some extent, the reality in the US as well. Some number of the "city centers" have better public transport and/or walk-ability [1] available than what is available just outside those city centers.
One big difference in the US is the massive land area difference as compared to Europe means there is a huge amount more land area (and therefore population) with little to no public transport or walk-ability available and a car becomes mandatory rather than optional in those areas.
[1] It's not perfect, I'm sure there are plenty of city centers in western states where even the city center itself is so spread out that walk-ability suffers and that a car tends to become more necessary.
Which is the same in small European towns and villages, there are only a couple of buses, many of which stop around 8 PM, and tend to occur once an hour in most cases, if not less.
Basic stuff like taking kids to school requires having a car, or being lucky to have some kind of Bus service collecting the kids, for some school levels, and doesn't cover stuff like taking them to other after school activities.
Want to go to the big commercial surfaces? They are all outside the town center and seldom have bus connections.
I’m an American and my vision, fully corrected, is right at the legal borderline to get a license without restrictions. I’ve never “failed” a vision exam at the DMV; one time the clerk even said, “good enough”. (Don’t worry, I never drive, I only keep my license up to date for serious emergencies).
A serious emergency isn't going to be helped by someone with very little driving experience. I don't follow your reasoning. If it was a serious emergency who would care if you had a license?
People think about things differently. It may be that for OP, "but I don't have a license" would cause a second thought and waste time in an emergency. They may be self aware enough to head that off.
A police officer would. The penalty for an accident might be negligent driving.
The penalty for an accident without a license is, at minimum, driving without a license. You're also not likely to be covered by insurance without one either, even if you're not at fault.
Take a person who has marginally acceptable eyesight, who never drives, put them in an emergency situation where they need to drive and you've got a recipe for much higher odds of having an accident.
Given that getting a license is an option, and it conveniently doubles as a photo ID, and there's really not a reason to not get one.
This is one of the strangest internet myths. Every single state in America will issue a photo ID which is fully equivalent to a drivers license for every purpose other than permitting you to drive.
Also, you don't need "Real ID" to fly no matter what they say. You don't even need a photo ID at all (although they'll force you to waste time if you don't have one. I found this out when I lost mine but still had to travel.)
This depends a lot on where you are. I've lived in York, Darlington, Leeds, London, Oxford, and Liverpool for decent periods and used buses in all of them regularly. Only Darlington was really unpleasant for buses - they were often every half an hour and if one came early and you missed it you would be left in the cold for ages without information.
Oxford was great (though cycling was even better); Leeds, Liverpool, and York were perfectly fine, with regular and reliable services; London's are famously efficient.
Antisocial behaviour isn't honestly that common in my experience, though I'm sure that varies by location. Had some aggro in London once, and again on a London night bus. The football special to the LNER stadium in York was properly boisterous, and quite threatening to the poor away-supporting family on the lower deck, but that at least carried a copper to make sure nothing stupid happened. Other than that, I've only ever really seen loud schoolchildren - who can be annoying but have never caused difficulty for anyone outside their group. I've honestly seen worse behaviour on the tube (and been the object of it on Cross Country Trains).
Unfortunately, I've encountered antisocial behaviour on many occasions on buses. Had one guy sit opposite me and proceed to insult me about my clothes. I went over to the driver to complain (I had said nothing and this point) and the driver threatened to throw me off. Also had people hit me on buses and trains. And witnessed someone sexually harassing another passenger — he stood rubbing his crotch in front of her and asked her to "finish me off".
Football fans are often bad. Especially on trains. I hate getting a train full of them.
Football fans are a bit odd. If you spend a lot of time in football crowds you get much more adept at telling when things are going to kick off and when people are only being obnoxiously loud. Both are annoying but only the first is actually dangerous. But the second can definitely make people feel unsafe. And given that you can't easily get off a train if you feel threatened it's a big problem.
When I was younger I got assaulted on the street five times, and it was always in improbable places and for no obvious reason. Some people are just shitty, some of the time.
I know it doesn’t work everywhere, but I’m happy there are services like Uber and Lyft when I get older. I could see myself using those services a lot when I am no longer able to drive.
Nope, even best countries in the world with great public transport like Switzerland have tons of remote places basically unreachable by public transport, or bus that goes 2x a day on some days of the week.
Guess what, mostly old folks live there and all this applies there. Its just not financially feasible to cover everybody. Proper full self driving should fix this, nothing less I am afraid.
> basically unreachable by public transport, or bus that goes 2x a day on some days of the week.
This sentence is hilarious from an American perspective. There are central business districts of major US cities that are less connected to public transit than the most remote rock at the end of a steep canyon in Switzerland.
A bus that ran 1x a day on any day of any week would be a drastic improvement for nearly all of the US.
Its not mutually exclusive - most of the world thats not in stone age has better public transport than US, I guess everybody knows that and its not by accident but for good (well bad but logical) reasons.
That some PT is still not covering somebody's full needs for long term living is understandable too I presume, especially if its few days gaps in service.
Proper self driving is furthest away from being able to handle these cities as well, don't see these driving in Sicily before 2040.
Many of these older people don't even know how to use a smartphone so even a 'perfect solution' will take some effort.I still have to help my grandpa with landline calls because he never had one himself (I live in one of the most developed countries in the world).
Probably one of the best products apple has made of late: relatively affordable, good ux, user replaceable batteries. Glad to see this iteration hasn't made it worse.
You can buy 4 third-party trackers for the price of 1 official one.
They do lack UWB, though there are other great form factors such as cards, and cool features such as wireless charging or usb-c charging, which imo is nicer than swapping batteries every few months.
I have a third-party tracker and the AirTag in my bicycle. The third-party tracker has no clue what it’s doing or meant to do. But then again, the AirTag is completely inaudible in a decently-sized bicycle parking garage.
i thought so too, but in practice i've been getting much better battery life from the official airtag on my keychain, than i do from the "atuvos" trackers that see much less use. high-precision UWB finding and half as many coin cells used makes the airtag an easy choice over the cheaper trackers for me.
the card-shaped one i've got in my wallet isn't going to be replaced by an official airtag any time soon though, that form factor is too nice.
There is a lot of variance amongst third party/clone tags. I had some grey plastic losanges for a while they were junk and all ended up in the trash. Now I have a bunch of Hoco tags and they’re decent (especially for the price)
Would love to know what card tag you’d recommend, I’m after one.
i've got the"ATUVOS Air Tracker Tag Card Wallet Tracker", purchased november 2023 and it's still going strong.
but i think there's some available now in the card form factor that have rechargeable batteries, and that's what i'll buy when i have to replace this one.
The reliability of the other brands are quite poor though. I've tried Tile, I've tried Pebble (using Google's network) and neither has worked reliability enough. So I ended up switching to AirTags and so far I have been impressed with the reliability - it works 100% of the time which is not something I could say about Tile nor Pebble/Google.
Yep, Tile I believe is the only third party service that exists. All other trackers either plug into "Apple Find My" or "Android Find My Device" network. There's finally starting to be a few devices that can do both, but they're rare, so make sure you get the right one when buying. But they take 10s to setup and it's very smooth.
Stupid form factor, though. Need to buy extra accessories to be able to actually mount it to anything, but I guess that's the Apple way. Why not have a hole to put a rope or anything through?
Apple of late is a mystery. Their software and hardware product quality is wildly inconsistent and, yet, with the most simplest of hardware like AirTags and AirPods, they're like magic. iPhones, I could hardly care less about. These new airtags? Insta buy!
yes, apple has a LOT of hidden complexity. Another example is their dongles - many of them have significant processing power, like video conversion chips inside the shell.
Airpods are a great example of good UX making things seem simple. There's a ridiculous amount of engineering that goes into making them work as well as they do.
To be fair, I think everyone but Google has been missing the boat on LLMs as platform integrations.
I call out Google as an exception because Gemini when it works correctly from an integration point of view can actually do some cool stuff like predictive suggestions in messaging based on context, though I wish it was all on device stuff, as on a privacy level I don’t trust Google
That said, it’s not like they’re so far and above anyone else they blow the competition out of the water either, they simply managed to make the functionality sometimes useful
LLMs are way outside their lane. With that said they've been focused on the underlying components to enable LLMs since way before ChatGPT was on the scene: Unified Memory, Neural Accelerator, even Spotlight counts (as a data source), etc...
There was no world where they were going to be the breakthrough leader in LLM development. That's a problem they can catch up on when they need to or license the technology.
Why should Apple care about LLMs? They missed the boat on cloud, cryptocurrencies and on search engines. So what? It's not their business - they can just license a good offering and move on to what they do best : Products.
That just work. I know it sounds simple but if you have been burned by Bluetooth devices before again and again get unburned by AirPods. Also, they stick in my ear even though all other headsets with cable fell out. I don´t know how
I've never had any 'not work'. Sorry.
My Huawei Freeclip 2 are fantastic and a very different form factor Apple doesn't offer sadly. Great for urban walks and listening to podcasts while still being able to hear your surroundings.
Maybe I got lucky, but I never had issues with my Bose, Shokz, or even with my Soundcore headphones and bluetooth. I don't use in ear, so I can not comment on that.
Yep but with AirPods, you are listening music or watching a video, on your Mac, your iPhone rings (on your AirPods), you accept the call, and now the video is paused on your Mac and your AirPods are already connected to your iPhone.
Any time any of the registered devices needs to emit sound, the AirPods instantly switch to this device (and both devices will show an unobtrusive notification to reverse the auto switch).
And it works every. single. time.
Apple can't make Airdrop work reliably after decades but somehow, they are able to magically and instantly transfer bluetooth audio from a device to another device.
Though, if you use your airpods with anything non apple, it will juste work like a classical bluetooth device, with manual pairing and no magic switching.
That is a great point. Airdrop on my iphone currently has this weird bug where if I try and airdrop directly to a target (eg my laptop) it doesn't work, but if I go into airdrop and select the exact same target, works fine. This is even weirder because it's followed me between phones (I restored from icloud backup). Yet, yeah, my airpods are fine at switching.
From what I've read, it's an accumulation of small details.
I have a pair of Soundcore buds, and they work well. Unless only one of the two decides to not connect to the phone. Or they randomly decide to change the noise cancellation setting. Or their gesture detection randomly triggers. To be fair, it's pretty rare and easy to fix: put them back in the case and back out, etc. But it's small things that remind me "yeah, I did not shell out for AirPods". (also, their transparency mode for conversations is nigh useless, but it may be because those are a 4 year old model).
I regularily use a pair of Sony headphones too, and they are a bit less troublesome, because it's a much simpler product: a single BT connection, physical buttons for some quick controls, etc. But they still have their warts: can't charge and be used at the same time, handoff between two source devices still don't work after years, etc.
It's an accumulation of details that are not big, happen rarely, and don't need much to get used to. But they still need to get used to.
I've had Bose 700s, Sennheisers, Anker Soundcore, and probably other bluetooth earbuds and none of them come close to the simplicity of the Airpods. The Bluetooth handoff and pairing is insanely easy and works within a second or two. I've never once had to go to Bluetooth settings to force it to pair.
This is the opposite of my experience. AirPods refusing to connect, randomly disconnecting, pressing "pause" on my phone only to have "play" instead invoke Apple Music on my Mac, and so forth. There are tons of "smart" features built into these that make the experience worse than I've had on normal, bluetooth headphones.
When it works, they at least connect with little friction. That's nice. The real value is in the very good noise-cancellation and battery life.
That is correct. With the iPhone at home, you keep getting "Unknown tracker found travelling with you" spam on your Android, and the AirTag rings occasionally.
I have been trying to make more friends in the real and virtual world the past two years, and I have been pretty successful. Most of my new friends come from the following: Volleyball, MtG, or a writing group.
Really, I think that it comes down to make making or joining a space with a shared activity and moderating out the crap.
The problem is most communities are losing those spaces in favor of private social clubs. That's what we need to fight.
It would have to be catastrophic for most businesses to make think about escaping the cloud. The cost of migration and maintenance are massive for small and medium businesses.
I have a distinct moment in my memory of when I stopped being a voracious reader, and started spending more time online: when I got an iPod touch.
To reverse the trend, I’m trying to read physical books or ebooks on a dedicated ereader as much as possible. No one seems to care, they are on their phones.
When I do use social media, I try to use a computer where I have much more control over what’s happening. So far I’ve read a ton more books this year.
I have thought that we should make entering the medical professions much easier. In order to become a nurse, you usually need a 4 year degree. This has two issues:
1. This is way to much time in the classroom. Much of that coursework simply isn't necessary.
2. You have people that would be good nurses piking other programs because they can't get passing marks in classes that are irrelevant to day to day nursing.
Binding what are essentially professional programs to the academy is a mistake. Don't get me wrong, I love the academy. But we need nurses.
At least in the US, nursing does not require a 4 year degree. You can become an RN with an associates degree. A 2 year nursing degree has one of the highest returns on investment of any training program (especially if you go to community college). Ivy Tech CC in Indiana and WGU both have nursing programs with great returns. Keep in mind, nursing is not an easy path and has a super high burnout rate. It's a tough and demanding job.
Other professions with a great return on training are HVAC, electrician, plumber, robotics/logic systems (CAM, conveyors, etc.). These are especially high paying if you focus on commercial and industrial.
A lot of people are surprised to learn the the average wage for both plumbers and electricians is ~30 bucks an hour, then that’s in exchange for body breaking work. A small subset earn more, but it’s not the norm.
Union electricians and plumbers make good money, and the non-union shops that do commercial work have to pay close to union wages plus some fringes to get enough manpower. I pay $100/hr for a union journeyworker electrician in a metro area of ~3 million, $106
for a foreman, and $112 for a general foreman. Both of those include fringes, the split is about 55/45 or so. The contracts are for three-year terms with raises every year.
Residential construction is a whole different ballgame that I’m unfamiliar with, but I’d imagine that’s where the average gets dragged down.
Because.. that’s what the union charges my employer per hour for an electrician? I don’t have a choice lol
Cincinnati is a rust belt city with depressed wages (no offense to anyone that lives there, but it’s the truth), my market is higher income (Minneapolis/St Paul) where a journeyworker makes $57/hr on the check instead of $38/hr like in Ohio, which is 1.5x (!!) higher.
Well sure, my questions is why is the Union charging over double what seems to be 90th quartile for electricians in small to mid sized MSAs and only a bit more than the 90th quartile on high COL cities.
I suspect the electrician they send over isn’t just pocketing $100/h on wages.
> Well sure, my questions is why is the Union charging over double what seems to be 90th quartile for electricians in small to mid sized MSAs and only a bit more than the 90th quartile on high COL cities.
The union is charging that because *that is what’s in the contract that was signed by the union and the local union contractors after negotiation. Electricians get paid a lot where I live because it’s a wealthy growing area that people want to live in, and not a dying rust belt city.
> I suspect the electrician they send over isn’t just pocketing $100/h on wages.
Did you read the post I wrote initially?
I give the breakdown of how much of the money I pay to the union goes to the worker on his paycheck (55%) with the rest going to insurance, taxes, union dues, pension, etc (fringe benefits, which are 45%)
> Did you read the post I wrote initially?
I give the breakdown of how much of the money I pay to the union goes to the worker on his paycheck (55%) with the rest going to insurance, taxes, union dues, pension, etc (fringe benefits, which are 45%)
I misread that intitially.
At the end of the day, anytime this topic comes up, there’s an oddly large discrepancy between the anecdotes and the BLS data.
Even half of that $100 puts these electricians in the 90th quartile for hourly wages in that MSA. So they’re either sending there most expensive guys or I’m misreading misinterpreting the BLS data.
Union electricians make up the bulk of commercial electricians, with the rest being non-union. Non-union electricians dominate the residential market, and that’s who brings the average wage down, along with the year 1 to year 5 apprentices.
Industrial electrician around here start at 30 - 35 for 2 years as a trainee then go to 40. That's top 10% income for low cost of living area. It's not unusual to hit 100k with no school debt at a young age.
Industrial automation technician I have worked with makes north of 300k but he is traveling all over the world to do it.
Reminds me of when I lived in a shit meth town. Dead economy, propped up entirely by a single military base. Lots of drugs and violence. Most people I knew there worked a shitty low skilled job and sold meth.
One guy I knew had it in his head he could just go back to school for welding and make 6 figures. Of course that didn’t work out. Turns out the local CC doesn’t have anything for underwater welding. Welding programs for sure, but mostly designed to funnel workers into local, lower paying positions that need filled.
I have a suspicion this push towards blue collars jobs is just another learn to code grift.
So are you hoping to be treated by nurses who are worse academically than the ones we have now?
Or are you hoping that "others" will be treated by them while increased supply depresses wages for the good ones that you think will treat you?
Also being a nurse is a very hard job, most people wouldn't last a year as an ER nurse in the US.
We make them take classes like organic chemistry where they have to memorize the reaction of various metal catalysts. Calculus. Physics. These are all two semester classes that are considered hard in undergrad. And yet the nurse will never ever use what they learn in these classes outside them. They aren’t the ones synthesizing the drugs.
Some jobs that are basically nurse will go through standard biology major sequence (usually if there isn’t a more focus prehealth major offered). Physicians assistant is an example. PA school happens after undergrad. A lot of people going to med school end ul taking standard biology majors. Arguably they should have been able to drop all those undergrad prerequisites and spend more time getting clinical hours vs toiling on ochem. As a crude input filter, medical schools often expect you to volunteer for these hours shadowing workers in the medical system even though you have to find the time yourself on top of a full major load that doesn’t account for these extracurricular expectations.
Huh? There have been multiple levels of nursing for many decades, probably longer than you've been alive. At the lowest level a CNA or LPN doesn't even need an Associate's Degree.
In the 1980s 55% of registered nurses were working with diploma. It is down to 6% today. Bachelors or greater was 27% and is now over 70% today.
As your link points out, many states are continually raising the bar and many have already moved to a BSN minimum.
I'm probably dating myself, but there was a time when people started working occupational nursing programs while in high school and were licensed a few years later.
In the US, it's not worth going into because you have to put in hundreds of hours of clinicals which are unpaid, yet just as useful to the employer as a job. Unpaid internships are illegal, yet these are legal and mandatory.
CNAs (Certified Nursing Assistants) have low up-front training costs, but don't make a lot of money: an average of $19/hr [1]. So at least some of the less skilled work is being done with economic efficiency.
I used to work at a company that stored all dates as ints in a YYYYMMDD format. When I asked why, I was told it was so we could subtract 2 dates to get the difference.
I asked them why they couldn’t use DATEDIFF since this was in a sql db.
They said they hadn’t heard of it and that it must be new.
Which sort of works, but then you also have to deal with the cases where the days or months go negative (at the month and year bounds), and that also involves knowing how many days there are in each month. It's pretty difficult for me to imagine how this could be easier than just converting to e.g. unix time and subtracting seconds.
I had no idea how many ads load the average page. I just forgot because I have been using uBlock for so long.
I have been hesitant to use Firefox, just because I am used to chrome. But after Google forcibly disabled software that I chose to run, I'm all in on Firefox.
Whenever I use my partner's iPhone, or even open links on Chrome on my phone (I usually use Firefox with adblock) I feel like I'm being slapped in the face by ads. The difference is shocking.
A decade ago I used to see & hear various ads throughout my day and could ignore them. Nowadays I see so few ads in a month that my brain short circuits whenever somebody shows me their phone with something like youtube and it shows ads.
Mobile web today is like going back to dialup with the time it takes to load a damn article chock full of ads. Worthless. So much for lite mobile websites. Hate browsing on the phone. Only to be done when completely unavoidable.
Even using pihole you see this. I remember a post on reddit, just about every comment was complaining about the ads and how it made it unreadable but it looked just fine to me.
