Car ownership is not a good proxy for how important cars are to living well in a particular place, when the places you're comparing have completely different design philosophies. If you look at how many trips the average Dutch car owner takes by car vs. how many trips the average American car owner takes by car, I guarantee you there will be a much larger difference.
I'm also not sure that anyone was claiming automobile technology itself was bad, just that in many places at many times it has been used in suboptimal and harmful ways.
I definitely agree that merely having automobiles doesn't require adopting characteristically American urban design philosophy, and that this philosophy isn't very compatible with dense walkable urbanism. But I don't see how to interpret
> The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.
other than as a claim we should not have personal automobiles.
This reminds me of the sailor who [decided](https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html) to measure his internal resistance by pushing probes through the skin on his thumbs and electrocuted himself with the 9V multimeter battery.
Mythbusters time. Salty fluids can be remarkably conductive. Blood qualifies. What's interesting though is that you have to wonder if there isn't some contributing factor here, as a kid I did this quite a few times, so that's one more for that list of stuff that could have killed me. At the same time: I didn't have nice insulation piercing tips back then (I do now) and that may be what saved me. I will definitely not try this again.
Another story in the same line is that I heard that a horse got killed by contact with a lantern battery, but I don't have any reference for that, just a story by a family member that collected coaches.
Yeah, but there's a big difference between having a car because you can afford it and it's often more convenient, and it being completely impractical to not have one. Or even to go have a beer without having to drive home.
Lifelong American Midwesterner and I'm also convinced there's a big difference in the taste of some produce between what you get at a typical American grocery store and a farmer's market or my local natural foods store. I get all my produce there, and people who don't normally shop there often comment on how much better my raw vegetables are when they eat at my house.
Someday I should go buy some produce from each store at peak season and try them side by side.
There are subtler versions of this too. I've been working on a TUI app for a couple of weeks, and having great success getting it to interactively test by sending tmux commands, but every once in a while it would just deliver code that didn't work. I finally realized it was because the capture tools I gave it didn't capture the cursor location, so it would, understandably, get confused about where it was and what was selected.
I promptly went and fixed this before doing any more work, because I know if I was put in that situation I would refuse to do any more work until I could actually use the app properly. In general, if you wouldn't be able to solve a problem with the tools you give an LLM, it will probably do a bad job too.
It was originally 30,000 but was changed, your author is using the updated version.
Additionally, there is another way to change it. The Texas State Legislature. Texas is the only state with Congressional pre-approval to break up into 4 more states. 5 total without the need for congresses approval. Texas breaks up, then California and New York are heavily outnumbered in the Senate as each state gets 2 Senators. Other states will follow and so too will calls to expand the House.
There is a path without state amendment process or congress.
> Except most companies do not have endless amounts of new feature work. Eventually devs are mostly sitting idle.
At every place I have ever worked (as well as my personal life), the backlog was 10 times longer than anyone could ever hope to complete, and there were untold amounts of additional work that nobody even bothered adding to the backlog.
Some of that probably wouldn't materialize into real work if you could stay more on top of it – some of the things that eventually get dropped from the backlog were bad ideas or would time out of being useful before they got implemented even with higher velocity – but I think most companies could easily absorb a 300% increase or more in dev productivity and still be getting value out of it.
My assumption was always that the December promo was a combination – they were presumably way under capacity because everyone was on holiday given how enterprise-heavy they are, so giving people a bunch of extra usage with a loud promo meant a whole bunch of people would try Claude and see how good it had gotten at very little cost to Anthropic.
Claude at least does: add "permissions": { "defaultMode: "plan" } to your settings.json.
I'll note this only applies to new sessions though – if you do /clear and start working on something else it doesn't re-apply plan mode (I kind of wish it did)
I'm also not sure that anyone was claiming automobile technology itself was bad, just that in many places at many times it has been used in suboptimal and harmful ways.
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