• 11 Posts
  • 78 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I don’t know every detail of your use cases, but my offline go to is xournal++ (xournalpp).

    I use it for many of those actions. We moved to Germany and having a GUI pdf editor for signing, highlighting, redacting, pulling pages, etc has been invaluable.

    My wife also uses it for her class lectures. She does math, so she uses a tablet to write on her slides (pdfs) live in class to talk through the material. Then, she saves the lecture PDF to give to students with the notes.











  • This kind of tech has been floating around the research world of smart home tech for over a decade now. Various forms of EM deflection and field deviation modeling have been used to be headcount sensors, gesture sensors, and body position modeling. Yup, it’s out there. Normally, it takes multiple antennas in particular positions to work, so it’s still a more controlled space kind of thing than the whole world. That said, it’s possible to do, so head’s up, we’re in for a rough ride going forward on the privacy and monitoring fronts.











  • America is owned and operated by rich people. They couldn’t make money running passenger trains so once we were ordered to invest in car-only infrastructure the trains were mostly disbanded and shut down. There’s a ghost of a system left with just a few corridors that could be considered bare minimum service in a developed nation.

    How many kilometers of high speed rail does the US have? Zero. We have some that gets close, but not really.

    My mid-sized city has two trains per day, one each direction, and they both leave between 1am and 2am. In Germany you would have 30+ trains per day in a city this size, likely a notable S-Bahn network, and also some trams and/or U-Bahns in the city to compliment busses. I’ve got busses in town, but they operated about every 30-45 minutes each, with evening service being every 60 minutes. Here’s the fun part: our busses are the most used public transit system for a mid-sized city in the US right now and it’s still pathetic when compared to even basic services in Europe.

    DB needs to keep getting investment. Germany must get to a dedicated passenger rail network to separate out the freight trains. DB should also be re-nationalized and operated as a national service, not a for profit system that will inevitably fail as a commercial venture, leading to yet more terrible service. Here’s hoping the latest German Parliament follows through on investment money that they pushed through at the start of the year! Also, keep the Deutschland Karte! That’s such a great resource for everyone.




  • I’m not convinced of the author’s details and models on fares vs taxes. The overall concept seems on track, but there’s differences between direct fees (bus fare) and general funding (taxes).

    The US has a long history of not understanding just how valuable and efficient shared resources are, even with the overhead of government administration. In fact, government administration is usually much more efficient than private corporation administration of the same kinds of services so we get a lot more bang for our buck.

    The author does leave out the libertarians of the world. They do want every bus ride (even school busses), even police, fire, and library service paid for via contracts with the person receiving the service. It’s completely infeasible and never works in practice, but they’re out there.

    The vast majority of public transit systems that go to a fully (or nearly fully) non-fare based model do great. People use the busses, trains, and other resources. They make better transit choices and have more money to spend in the local economy. The author hints at this, though I’m not sure they really made it clear in their writing.

    To sum up: make the transit paid for by the community at large because the community at large benefits from it, even if they’re not actually riding the bus. It gives us freedom as a community to have free public transit and our economies are healthier.