Last night from London the most I could see with my naked eye was diffuse patches of faint pink and green - sometimes highlighted by marginally brighter white-pink streaks that cut across the patches. The camera however picked them up as dramatic bright pink/green columns of light with rarely any trace of the blackness of the sky.
When I was in Iceland a few years ago though - I distinctly remember being easily able to make out super bright and well define dancing wavy bands of bright green, pink, purple and orange (with high contrast compared to the surrounding dark sky) with my naked eye. The camera again picked up the same thing but with the blackness of the sky covered by a green /pink coloured background - something definitely brighter but less well defined that what I could see with my naked eye (and the camera images were not necessarily superior than what I could see in this case).
TL:DR; I’ve seen both versions of what you describe with my naked eye and it’s definitely not bullshit! When people say they can’t see anything like the pictures - I would have to guess that they either have never been in an area with significant activity or maybe didn’t have dark enough skies without light pollution.
In my back garden in london initially it felt like maybe I was just seeing remnants of having looked at a lightbulb and then looking at the sky. After a bit of eyes adjusting the pinks were very clear and the white streaks like rays of light you see in those kind of beams from heaven type pictures. The green was more on the horizon and initially needed the camera to show it at all, and then again after a while I could see feint green with the naked eye. Yes the camera showed it more, but the naked eye experience was also magical and I feel very lucky to have seen it on bbc news website by chance before going to bed. I watched it from 11:15pm to midnight when it seemed to vanish as if it was never there in the first place. I feel like I caught the ISS in a photo too but I can’t find definitive information it was overhead at 11:51pm uk time, so it probably wasn’t.
Reminds me of the time I ordered a $5 nano drone from AliExpress, and after 2 months Indian customs sent me a very threatening ‘show cause’ notice demanding I pay $50 as a fine and appear before the customs officer or whoever to explain why I should not be prosecuted for the illegal importation of illegal goods (no drone with the letter of course). I opted to ignore the matter
I remembered growing up with a the children of a customs officer. Every now and then he would show up with boxes of confiscated pirated movie / game days discs, asking us to pick what we wanted before he was going to return the rest of lot to presumably be ‘destroyed’.
So I’m reasonably sure some some customs officer’s kid ended up enjoying the $5 drone I ordered. The circle of life I guess?
> I remembered growing up with a the children of a customs officer. Every now and then he would show up with boxes of confiscated pirated movie / game days discs, asking us to pick what we wanted before he was going to return the rest of lot to presumably be ‘destroyed’.
At this point I'm pretty convinced a lot of Indian institutions are just cargo culting things they saw in the west. [0]
Can you imagine how better and more productive Indian society would be if some of these bureaucracies were just abolished? Superpower by 2030?
You linking to a definition of cargo cult (which everyone already knows) does nothing to substantiate your notion that Indians are merely cargo culting the west by having customs officers.
2016-18 i think i ordered a bunch of crap from aliexpress just because it was possible and i got really good experience with refunds for no delivery and such. i bought tonnes of garbage but it was a nice experience.
then the banhammer dropped and i haven't touched it since. are we still able to buy from aliexpress today?
edit: just to see if i could, i have bought plastic hooks worth 6 INR from aliexpress. they got delivered. mind=blown
the thing that makes it confusing is that first you mention 2016-2018. Then you say you wonder if it is possible to order from AliExpress still. Then you add an edit saying just to see if you could you placed an order.
That's why it's easy to read your edit as saying that you placed an order today. Which then gets confusing when you say they got delivered :p
I don't either. Selim wasn't kind enough to loop us in so I looked it up and I think it means "naked person." I have to say, if that's accurate, I like it. It has an "emperor has no clothes" vibe that I enjoy.
Holidays homes exists because owners are speculating that tourists will pay a premium that compensates for the time that the rooms stay unoccupied and that overall it will be more profitable than renting it out for ‘100% occupancy’ to a local tenant at a lower daily rate (or equivalent monthly rent)
If a town gets popular among rich tourists and supply remains limited, the tourists will price out the locals (as is already apparent)
Zoning/limiting the number of airbnbs in proportion to the the total housing stock can be one solution to stop the tourist industry from gobbling everything else up (at the expense of the tourist economy)
Not an economist, but an extreme solution to achieve 100% efficiency, i.e occupancy would be for everyone (including locals) to become nomads and be willing to move homes everyday based on daily spot rates for housing and take up any unoccupied house that day based on what they can afford. (I.e a combined market where tourists and locals both live the hotel/Airbnb lifestyle). Sounds horrible though.
The apparent inefficiency (in terms of unnoccupied rooms/houses) IMO arises from the very real inconvenience and costs involved in moving houses too frequently. Contrast that with tourists who want to definitely want to stay in a city only for a few days. The two classes will always compete without intervention that favors one over the other - or tries to find some arbitrary balance
Plus every bugfix that eventually gets discovered now requires an update to be shipped to end users.
Atleast with websites, devs can ship a fix on the server immediately.
So the impact of different browsers behaving differently is much greater when distributing binaries with Neutralinojs. Having a bundled browser (eg Electron) atleast mitigates this vector for bugs
Are you saying that you build desktop apps that are just a webview container for the JS bundle which is hosted server-side? Is that typical with Electron dev work? I would have assumed that most people ship the bundle with the app, so that it can function without phoning home.
Seems like a very British solution to me (being a nation that cares little for liberty); if the police have had enough being constantly called to deal with another 10 being stolen today I'm not surprised they'd only permit company vehicles.
After all, there's no economic value to be gained in stealing them and the insurance premiums for destruction (including simply throwing them into the Thames) is distributed across the customer base. If there are thieves stealing them for parts they'll be easier to detect (since it's not plausibly deniable to claim a company scooter is yours).
Combine that with the fact that it'd be trivial to disable all transport in the case of civil unrest, and you seem to have a winning policy for Londoners.
That they have always been banned is an accident of the way a very old law on vehicles was written.
Making an exception to that law for rentals in limited areas was seen as more controlled than allowing everything, although looking at other cities allowing only non-rental usage first might be more sensible.
In the context of UK law, e-scooters are motorised vehicles which make them illegal to use on the sidewalk. However, they don't come close to meeting the legal requirements for use on the road (no turn signals, for example) making it illegal to use there. Personal e-scooters aren't technically banned (they are available to buy), but there is no where on public property where you can legally ride them (not that it stops people). Therefore, the only way an e-scooter can be used legally is if a special provision has been made for a trial with rental scooters in select locations (Oxford being the one that I am familiar with).
From personal experience even police don’t care. Just don’t do anything too dangerous,I guess. In a way it’s better to operate in a legal gray zone because you don’t need to worry about things like licenses and insurance and fines etc.
Except the streets are still littered with them. While cycling to work a while ago, i came across one parked in the middle of a segregated bike lane, in between a fence and a lane of heavy traffic. If this is the authority maximising control, i dread to think what uncontrolled use looks like.
The rental escooters in London are terrible. You need a driving licence to use them, unlike rental ebikes. Yet they are slower than an ebike or even a regular bike. They are also really expensive. Then add to that the fact that'll they all have geofencing which (i) forces you off the less occupied bike lanes or roads in many cases (eg in/near the Royal Parks - including roads which are open to cars) and (ii) doesn't work properly so that if you're just near to a "slow" area but not on it then you end up having to push them.
This is all entirely down to government enforced regulations - honestly I'm not sure why the companies bothered putting them in at all as they must have pretty well zero repeat custom.
Meanwhile there are plenty of non rental escooters on the bike lanes which seem to work pretty well for people, despite being technically illegal.
I'm pretty sure the taxi-cab lobby groups in London are heavily influencing these stupid decisions that make e-scooters a less viable option for getting around.
I don't have much to explain why they're banned from parks which allow you to drive a range rover through them.
On the other hand, I enjoyed using them last year while in London for work. Could get to our office quicker than using public transport, it was more pleasant than stuck in hot boxes moving around and only slightly more expensive (at least in my case).
If sidewalks could be wider it wouldn't be as much of a concern. Narrow sidewalks are to accommodate car parking more often than not. I would rather see less of that in a city centre.
That you know these bikes and scooters blocking pavements is a social ill but you do not care because it is convenient for a fraction of a percent of commuters
Ah I see, thank you. I think they are a blight as well, but less of a blight than car dominance in city centres. If you can barely fit a pram past a scooter on your footpath, see the bigger picture, your footpath is tool small. You have given all your space to non-mixed road traffic or parking.
I've worked in London for near on 20 years. The people using these are not using them as an alternative to a car. If you look about in Z1 the congestion comes from poor road management and an uptick in commercial traffic.
But sure, as a plumber to come to your house on his bike. See how that goes.
The footpaths have been rougly the same around where i live for 4/500 years.
I haven't spoken about commuting at all. My core point is that car centric city centres sacrificed their space for people to cars, and that blaming scooters for the lack of space was missing the forest for the trees. The fact that you can't fit a pram past a scooter is the same reason businesses can't do alfresco dining, mothers on bicycles have to ride amongst cars, peds have to wait at crossings, walking anywhere is unpleasant and your children can't ride their bikes to school, etc etc. I am not going to pretend it hasn't happened and shift blame to everything but cars just because it's the current status quo.
Before cars your 400 year old road was mixed use, and your plumber certainly didn't turn up in a box van. When cars turned up, everything got pushed onto the sidewalk to make way for cars. It wasn't so long ago, there is no shortage of film of how cities used to be before cars.
Had a motorcycle accident. Completely pulverized. ICU for a week. Got out and was driven everywhere for a while, but when I walked these were not a substantial burden.
In London, Citymapper shows the cost of each trip which can be very useful as there are often many routes that might take a similar amount of time but cost different (eg. sometimes you can take skip zone 1 for a few extra minutes or understand why you're paying extra when taking a train instead of tube in South London). It also recommends the best exit to take quite accurately for train/tube stations.
Citymapper is also much quicker to incorporate changed schedules and excludes delayed / cancelled trains from results within minutes of the changes being announced.
For altered schedules, Google is not only slower to react but also just posts a generic link to the TfL website - and you then have to parse the TfL notice yourself to understand which stations / bus stops are closed etc. The routes suggested by Google also still include cancelled trains / buses - it's your job to double check by visiting the TfL / train operator's websites.
Not sure how Tesla or even Twitter is exposed to India for Musk wanting to please the Indian government.
As big as India is, it keeps being considered as the ‘next billion’ revenue generators for tech companies - but not sure when that day will actually arrive.
Teslas aren’t for sale in India, not that many will be afford it (besides the few virtue signaling billionaires / millionaires who might buy it after acquiring their dream Ferrari or whatever). Nor does India contribute to the supply chain AFAIK.
Pretty sure Indians don’t contribute to significant % of ad or subscription revenue for Twitter or other tech companies either (compared to USA or Europe - outliers being websites like Quora) given the low purchasing power. I recall New York and London together making more $$$ in a day for Uber than the whole of India
So not sure why tech companies are afraid of taking on India, especially Musk. Or maybe just doing what the India govt wants instead of fighting is another way of signaling that they don’t care what happens in India anymore
