> ... It feels like there could be some societal benefit to similarly reducing the number of busses and just making them free. (Today most busses are only at 10-30% capacity). ...
Public transit systems need to consider a lot of trade offs when they plan how to use the resources they have.
Optimizing for cost like this can make the busses less practical to use and less attractive to potential riders.
If a bus stop is only visited by a bus once an hour, then the average amount of time someone needs to wait for a bus to visit that bus stop is 30 minutes (assuming a uniform distribution for when that person arrives at the bus stop). If the bus stop is visited by a bus every 20 minutes, then that person would only need to wait at that bus stop for an average of 10 minutes.
The average time of a trip on this bus will be roughly equal to: the time to walk to the bus stop + the time spent waiting for the bus + the time the bus takes to reach the closest stop to the destination + the time to walk to the destination.
From that, reducing the number of busses that visit that bus stop increases the average amount of time for trips which originate from that bus stop.
A factor which impacts usage of public transit system is how quickly it can get someone to some arbitrary destination.
So, cutting the amount of busses a public transit system runs can reduce costs but also reduces how attractive that public transit system is to potential riders because of the increase in the amount of time an average trip takes.
That increases the use of other forms of transportation, assuming that people don't forgo trips entirely (e.g., staying home instead of going to a bar and getting a DUI, or eating at a hotel's restaurant to avoid spending $60-80 on taxis or Uber for a single meal).
Louis Rossmann has a video series of his rants about commercial real estate and the refusal of landlords to rent spaces to him which have been vacant for multiple years.
One of his videos speculates that real estate is being used to store money and the building owners don't want to rent out anything:
Another video speculates that the owners of some buildings have made claims to banks and investors that their buildings are worth more than these buildings are actually worth. In this situation, if the buildings' owners lowered rents they would be admitting that the building is not worth as much as they claim. This could trigger contractual obligations they have with their mortgages and investors:
> This is empty speculation. And it can be trivially refuted by noticing that vacancy rates are at record lows.
His rants were prompted by his failed attempts to rent out specific vacant storefronts in NYC and that those exact storefronts have sat vacant for more than 10 years at the time he made his videos.
This is similar to my experience living in a smaller city where there are similar vacant and rundown properties a short walk away from where I live. Notably, these vacant properties are owned by commercial landlords who have a reputation for refusing to sign leases, or quoting "fuck off" prices, with small businesses.
> ... GDPR is simply ignored by any bigger US company, it took 5 years for NOYB to facebook get fined which was less than 0.3% of their income, basically a small tax, not a huge fine. ...
From my experience working at multiple companies, and having interacted with others, the GDPR is not ignored by American companies. websites based out of the US block EU users to avoid fines, or these US based companies which don't block EU users have gone out of their way to comply with the GDPR as interpreted by their respective legal department.
> Could you give some examples of what the use cases are where Rails makes it hard to stray from the beaten path?
Rails is amazing for greenfield projects. It will automatically do things for you which will greatly reduce the amount of boilerplate you need to write as long as you follow the framework's conventions.
However, Rails has a less than stellar reputation from those who have maintained long lived projects which use it. Rails' conventions encourage the use of fat models where business logic is implemented in the models themselves.
With the default scaffolding Rails provides, every single model and all of this business logic ends up in the project's app/models/ directory without any separation between different features. Because the default doesn't cleanly separate business logic with well defined boundaries this means that Rails apps tend to evolve in a way where everything starts to become tightly coupled with everything else. When the business requirements for the application inevitably change this tendency towards tight coupling between models makes it difficult to make major changes to existing code.
I've also seen hacky workarounds used in Rails based apps which exist to make complex business logic work (e.g., saving one model doesn't implicitly trigger hooks for business logic on other related models). These hacky workarounds usually break the conventions Rails uses and ends up requiring extra boilerplate to be added elsewhere in the application.
Some developers try to avoid this by hand rolling more architectural layers (e.g., "Java/Go/Node.js/OOP like") on top of Rails to try prevent this, to varying degrees of success. Other frameworks (e.g., Django) try to encourage developers to separate different features into distinct modules to try and prevent them from being tightly coupled with each other.
> Long-lived rails apps are a nightmare to work with, in exactly the same manner as long-lived java, python or php apps
Agreed that tech debt and bad architecture is everywhere. However, from my experience there is a difference in how much work it takes to evolve a project towards something that's less of a nightmare to work with.
Most people are not subject area experts in regards to infrequent purchases. From informal conversation it seems that a lot of consumers have experienced enshittification from brands and products that they previously held in high regard. This has resulted in them losing trust in the market and they now assume that anything they buy will be of poor quality regardless of other factors. As a result, they have given up on making purchasing decisions based on quality and now only purchase the cheapest product they can find.
This seems to have created a situation where consumers are unable to differentiate between different products based on quality and do not trust marketing because they've been lied to before.
> They cancelled "All-American Muslim" because they couldn't get advertisers even though it was averaging 1 million viewers per show which would made it one of the most popular show on TLC.
To add context, this was after a few large companies canceled their ads for that show after push back from a very small number of evangelical christians:
In the context of the US, the vast majority of all infrastructure built or rebuilt over the past century was optimized for cars at the expense of everything else, including demolishing buildings which helped to create the demand for that infrastructure in the first place.
Because car traffic was prioritized over everything else it created a situation where improving any alternative will unavoidably require some sort of compromise.
Although, somewhat non-intuitively policy choices which discourage driving can free up space on roads and create a better experience for other drivers. (I can't find an original source, but I remember hearing about a planning study in some European city which found that about a third of the drivers who contributed to the traffic jams in that city's downtown were just going for a drive and didn't have any specific destination)
I can compare old houses at the edge of a city which cost four times as much to new builds at the far edges of that city's metro area which cost significantly less. The more expensive houses require significantly less infrastructure and cost the government less to support because of their location.
A huge undercurrent in urban planning discourse right now (e.g., Strong Towns), is that if all subsidies and taxes were removed both the poor and rich living closer to the city (or in older, denser suburbs) would have more money at the end of the day, while most living in significantly less dense housing would not be able to afford to pay for their lifestyle.
I'm certain this logic only applies to mega cities. The vast majority of smaller cities and towns are like one or two streets of high density and the rest is suburban or rural. There's not actually anyone in the 'city' to subsidize those around it.
There are a lot of cities in the Rust Belt and Midwest like I described, with the regional population around 1-2 million which are far away from being mega cities.
In the few examples I've personally visited, the residential density in the older "upscale" neighborhoods tends to come from duplexes and single family houses on small lots (or larger lots with a comparatively small amount of street frontage). There's some large buildings mixed in along with some very upscale condos and row houses.
Outside of extreme cases, infrastructure costs tend to become dominated by how long the road or pipes are, rather than the number of people using them.
Public transit systems need to consider a lot of trade offs when they plan how to use the resources they have.
Optimizing for cost like this can make the busses less practical to use and less attractive to potential riders.
If a bus stop is only visited by a bus once an hour, then the average amount of time someone needs to wait for a bus to visit that bus stop is 30 minutes (assuming a uniform distribution for when that person arrives at the bus stop). If the bus stop is visited by a bus every 20 minutes, then that person would only need to wait at that bus stop for an average of 10 minutes.
The average time of a trip on this bus will be roughly equal to: the time to walk to the bus stop + the time spent waiting for the bus + the time the bus takes to reach the closest stop to the destination + the time to walk to the destination.
From that, reducing the number of busses that visit that bus stop increases the average amount of time for trips which originate from that bus stop.
A factor which impacts usage of public transit system is how quickly it can get someone to some arbitrary destination.
So, cutting the amount of busses a public transit system runs can reduce costs but also reduces how attractive that public transit system is to potential riders because of the increase in the amount of time an average trip takes.
That increases the use of other forms of transportation, assuming that people don't forgo trips entirely (e.g., staying home instead of going to a bar and getting a DUI, or eating at a hotel's restaurant to avoid spending $60-80 on taxis or Uber for a single meal).