When Megabus started I seem to recall that its advantage was (ahem) a less problematic quality of clientele than you get on Greyhound due to the fact that you needed to have an internet connection to actually buy a ticket.
But nowadays even the hobos have smartphones, so what's the Megabus clientele like nowadays?
I've always said that the biggest problem with public transport is the quality of the public.
edit: Oh fuck you HN, I've just found out I've been shadowbanned again.
Are these people being naive, or are they just designing a better dish-washing robot?
The typical "dish washing robot" that people draw does a much better job of washing dishes. It doesn't require me to do all the hard work of scrubbing away all the tricky bits of stuck-on food before entrusting the robot with the work, nor the annoying work of unloading the dishwasher when it's done. I'll take my dish-washing robot over your boring old dishwasher any day of the week.
>Google makes no illusion about it any longer, they aim to curate what their users have access to and want to ensure that the curation conforms to an acceptable spectrum of thought
The good news is: I've finally figured out how to beat google, or at least compete with it.
There's billions of dollars on the table for whoever manages to come up with the thing that is to google what Fox News is to CNN.
I'm not sure how the US got so hopelessly divided between the red and the blue tribes, or how to fix it. Is it the 24 hour news cycle? Is it a consequence of the office of the President encouraging the personalisation of politics? Is it just the level of sophistication that political parties have reached in their weaponisation of messaging?
All I know is that it doesn't have to be like this. It's certainly not like this in Australia. My mother and I certainly disagree on politics (in fact all the men in my family disagree with all the women) but it's never actually caused any arguments -- at least not since I reached adulthood. The idea that someone might have a falling out with someone else over politics in Australia is nearly unthinkable (absent a tiny number of crazy ideologues that you probably won't meet after you leave uni).
People here aren't all neutral -- I certainly have a strong dislike for the politicians on the other side of the aisle -- but nobody bothers to extend that dislike to also disliking that party's voters, because they're probably your family or at least friends.
I don't think the target market is CEOs, it's regular civilians. Grandmothers, teenagers, people whose job doesn't involve computers.
These people use their phones for everything, they'd probably be happy not to have a "computer" at all, but they need something more ergonomically convenient than a phone for typing emails, organising photos, and so forth. Give them a phone they can plug into a cheap or leftover monitor/keyboard and they won't need any other devices.
The US Civil War killed 620,000 people, and ruined the lives of many others. That's pretty freaking bad. On the upside, it freed about 3.9 million slaves, but really there should have been a less costly political solution to the slavery problem, as was found in every other country in the Americas at around the same time.
>"All civil wars are bad" produces logical contradictions such as both the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union were bad.
The fall of the Soviet Union didn't occasion a Civil War.
>Wikipedia is not a place for convincing - it is a catalog of what's currently, broadly accepted.
That's true, and it should be the case. But how do we distinguish between "that which is currently broadly accepted" and "that which is currently the leading theory but other theories are also quite widely accepted" and "that which is probably the leading theory, by a narrow margin, but then again might not be, because nobody does polls on this stuff, so we're basically just going by what wikipedia editors reckon"?
What, for instance, should we do if 80% of people believe theory A and 20% of people believe theory B? (Suppose this is one of those rare cases where we're fortunate enough to have actual polls).
It's possible nowadays with a bit of effort to create entirely new "facts" via a one-two shuffle between news sources and Wikipedia.
First, you publish an article on some news source, asserting the fact.
Then you update Wikipedia with that fact, citing your own article.
Other news sources check Wikipedia, find your new fact, and incorporate it into their own articles. Now you have a bunch of extra sources for your Wikipedia article.
This is fine as far as flat Earthism goes, but flat Earthism is a ridiculous outlier even among ridiculous fringe theories.
By making your prototypical example of a dubious minority opinion the flat Earth theory, I think you risk falling into bad mental habits. If you go round thinking "people who disagree with me on subject X are just like flat Earthers" then you're doing both them and yourself a disservice -- yourself because no matter who you are it's certain that on some issues it's you who are wrong.
What I'm saying is that flat Earth is a bad example because it maps poorly onto just about any other real-world disagreement.
The US is also a major outlier among the places you mentioned, in that it's still breeding at above-replacement rates. I wonder if the difficulty of getting a house/car that can comfortably accommodate multiple children is a big factor.
You could contract different lines out to different companies. I think Tokyo does this.
At the very least, though, you could contract out the running of the whole system to a company for five years a time and let different companies compete for the contract every five years.
This isn't a panacea, but it can sometimes help if the main problem is corruption-induced inefficiency as it seems to be for most major cities in the US.
In the US, the price of unskilled labour has been deliberately driven down by decades of non-enforcement of immigration laws. Even a year after the election of a President who was supposed to deal with this issue there's been very little action.
In Australia we have control of our borders and the price of unskilled labour is more respectable.
It seems that this "voting rights act" is a form of mandated gerrymandering, which ought to be done away with. I can't say exactly what the boundaries ought to be, but taking the colour of people's skin into account when drawing them is clearly wrong.
It shouldn't be hard to just write a damn algorithm to divide the state into maximally compact, equal-population regions.
If this results in very different sorts of people being binned into the same district, then... well, good, I guess?
But nowadays even the hobos have smartphones, so what's the Megabus clientele like nowadays?
I've always said that the biggest problem with public transport is the quality of the public.
edit: Oh fuck you HN, I've just found out I've been shadowbanned again.