rexxit

joined 1 year ago
[–] rexxit@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's worth noting that Americans also must spend that income in a similarly-inflated market, so it doesn't much matter what their salary would be worth in, say, Uganda. I think any such comparison of global wealth runs into these sorts of issues.

Someone earning in the global top 10% may not be able to afford a house locally. Someone earning in the top 30% may not be able to afford rent and food at the same time in their locale. It makes the percentile meaningless.

[–] rexxit@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

What's far less dense with better public transit than NYC? The most popular example of no-car city design I see is Amsterdam, which is 1/2 the density of NYC, but still 15x the density of where I'm from (not even close to a rural area). I think robust public transit at 1/15th the density of Amsterdam and 1/30th the density of NYC is a pipe dream.

In these lower density places, maybe you luck out and you're walking or biking distance to work. If you change jobs do you have to move instead of hopping in the car and commuting a bit further? In circumstances like these, transit can't possibly serve every origin and destination efficiently, and personal vehicles can offer efficient point to point.

[–] rexxit@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Fuckcars is made up of people with little life experience who think they have all the answers, and people who fetishize city living and think it's normal or healthy for humans to live at a density like NYC (and fuck you if you disagree). They're oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness, and handwaving away the problems.

[–] rexxit@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I feel like this point is missing the big picture: people create the demand, and companies supply what the market demands. Like or hate "the free market", this is essentially what it is. If there were magically 1/10th the number of humans on the planet, we would expect those companies to have 90% less emissions. It's not that some of these companies aren't bad actors, and have actions that are at times immoral, it's that they are amoral actors in a market economy that is only responsive to consumer demand.

The example I like to give is that companies' race to the bottom on quality. They're responding to human behavior, where if an item on Amazon is $6, and another very similar item is 10 cents cheaper, the cheaper item will sell 100x more. This is a brutal, cutthroat example of human behavior and market forces. It leads to shitty products because consumers are more responsive to price and find it hard to distinguish quality, so the market supplies superficially-passable junk at the lowest possible price and (with robust competition) the lowest possible profit margin.

 

I get the impression that we're headed for the same issues that pop up when we put all our eggs in one basket with Reddit/FB/whatever. People flock to the largest instance, and someday that instance could go down due to cost or the host losing interest.

I'm wondering whether it would be technically achievable to have servers/instances and federation where the communities are essentially mirrored or have broadly distributed existence - maybe even with user storage a la torrents.

If there's a large blargh@lemmy.here community and a small blargh@lemmy.there community, all of the discussion, images, contributions to lemmy.here die if the server goes down for good. Yes, the users can relocate to lemmmy.there - even under the same community name - but it's not the same as having full continuity of a completely mirrored community.

I realize this concept has technical hurdles and would involve a reimagining of how the fediverse works, but I worry we're just setting up for another blowup at some TBD date when individual sysadmins decide they've had enough. If it's not truly distributed and just functions as a series of interconnected fiefdoms, communities and their information won't survive outages, deaths, and power struggles.