Additionally the U.S. Government requires that the states have balanced budgets, a requirement that is not stipulated for federal national spending. Unfunded spending obligations are not a problem, the federal government just raises the debt ceiling.
Yep, ran my refrigerator, my router and my modem with an inverter on my Chevrolet Bolt EV after blackouts from a large windstorm in California knocked power out for a few days.
The trick with Bolt EVs is that one must have the car on, because the high voltage battery will not engage when the car is off for safety reasons. Also, the car shuts off every hour of unless the seatbelt is fastened. This is not a big deal.
Every Apple Store has a Genius Room, which repairs everything Apple makes. This union sort of makes sense.
It can get quite sophisticated as all stores are specialized and trained to make these repairs, including Geniuses getting trained on much of the same equipment as an iPhone assembly line, (plus the equipment to do the reverse) including test and validation equipment. I have worked at flagships in top tier cities, down to the smallest mall stores in a market that has exactly one store, the job is exactly the same. These jobs don’t require engineering degrees, but at least for Genius they require quite a bit of training, not so dissimilar from trades. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been there but used to be if one is promoted up to Genius they will be certified to do repairs. If one fails training and cannot get their Apple Technician Certification, they’re demoted or fired.
The problem with most automakers (good example, General Motors) and their electronics divisions (i.e ACDelco) is their centuries of experience with getting sued, so everything innovative gets reworked to satisfy the demands of the legal department, specifically as far as cars sold in the United States is concerned.
Ironically enough the Costco in San Francisco has more free parking than any other parking lot in the City, and is bigger than most all of the paid public garages also.
Removing parking minimums is a noble idea, but one thing I have noticed is that the new “parking free” apartment buildings in San Francisco, such as the Tenderloin and SOMA, are having a hard time getting all of their units filled, even with prices slashed. This is a problem that buildings with parking seem to not have. Even with good transit, the city is much easier to navigate by car. People who have the means to drive, will mostly drive when factoring decisions like this:
Today I went from Church/Market to Chestnut/Fillmore in the Marina on public transit, which took me about 40 minutes. If I was going to drive my car, 15 minutes.
In Berkeley, there are also buses that traverse every major street, BART cutting through downtown and then over to North Berkeley, but it is significantly more difficult to get everything done without a car - food deserts abound, and the main retail and entertainment areas are also lopsided on the east side of town, with the other being 4th street, which is more like a destination retail area - CB2, Apple.
Without a 1:1 ratio of parking, we gain an abundance of traffic congestion in people circling blocks to find a parking spot on the street.
If parking is available for rent in less than a 1:1 ratio, the affluent - with the deeded parking space in their market rate apartments - usually end up with the few parking spots in a development, on the idea that they can afford to pay premiums for it. Below Market Rate units usually only have a few spots available for multiple residents to pay for at full price.
Parking imbalances give credence to the idea that cars are exclusive, everyone else should take the bus. Its not easy to force people to give up their cars.
It can't be if the regulation prohibits building parking for each home, as in this case.
Building housing units without parking just externalizes the problem and makes the whole neighborhood worse. People still need a car, so if they can't have parking they will have to find it on the streets somewhere, which is worse for everyone involved.
I've lived in a neighborhood where apartment buildings didn't have enough parking for residents, it was not pretty. Constant fights over parking, vandalized cars, people circling four hours looking for a spot. Nothing good came out of that.
> This is a good reason to charge appropriately for street parking.
How would that solve it? There still aren't enough spots.
If you do unreserved spaces through parking meters or resident window stickers, people are still stuck doing all the same things (circling for hours, getting into fights).
To solve that you'd need to have reserved street spots so people are guaranteed which spot is theirs. So now you have to staff up enforcement and towing so the spots they reserved is available. But wait.. so we're back to dedicated spots, but in a less convenient and more cumbersome way. So to solve that, just have the apartment buildings themselves provide the spot for each resident. So we're full circle back to where we started.
As long as cars are needed (in the US, they are needed) the optimal solution is for each housing unit to provide it built-in, instead of externalizing the problem onto the neighborhood.
> So if someone wants to live in a home without parking, it should be illegal?
That's a good question, difficult to answer in the general sense.
At the individual level the answer seems very easy. Of course I wouldn't want it to be illegal to live however you want or configure your apartment however you like, with or without parking! You do you.
But what about the next owner? If the very first owner gets to spec the apartment however they like (before it gets built) and opts for no parking that's fine. But later they sell it and the next owner needs a car so now they join the street parking scene. Multiply this by all the units and over time it's a problem.
Because ultimately housing lasts for a very long time. That new building is likely to stand there for a century or more, so those initial decisions of how many parking spots it has vs. units will last for a very long time, far beyond the preferences of the first buyer. So it's not that easy.
> OK, they can pay market rate for street parking.
See previous response for why this does not work. Either the street spots are first come first served which does not solve anything, or they are reserved which creates unnecessary inefficiency.
> Ultimately what I see you proposing is denying people homes because you want to use public land to store your private property free of charge.
I'm advocating the exact opposite.
I'm saying it never works well if residents have to participate in the street parking scene because residents are by definition there every night/day, so they need a dedicated spot. And the optimal way to provide that, is for the building they live in to have a spot for them (which they pay for, in either rent or mortgage).
That's why mandated parking minimums are still the best compromise solution. Anything else just externalizes the problem which is worse for everyone.
> Parking minimums reduce the number of homes that can be built in a given area, thereby reducing the supply of homes, thereby denying people homes.
Yes, of course it does. The goal ultimately is to create livable housing, not just pack the maximum numbers of units into a space without practical considerations. Everything is a compromise.
I mentioned above what happens when you build apartments without enough parking: Constant fights over parking, vandalized cars, people circling four hours looking for a spot.
> You can build parking!
Where?
You can't build parking after the fact into an apartment building. It had to be designed in before construction started. If the building is already done and doesn't have enough parking, it will never have enough parking. You'd have to tear it down and that's too disruptive and expensive, will never get done.
(I am assuming city blocks which are fully built-out already. If there's a bunch of empty land nearby there probably is no parking problem either so this is all a moot point.)
> Just don't force people to build it when price signals indicate housing is a more valuable use of said land.
Capitalism always seeks maximum profit, not a sustainable long term solution. In the absence of regulation the builder will maximize units, which is more profit. The problems that arise when new residents realize they won't find street parking only occur after the builder is done and gone, not their problem. They are very happy to externalize the problem to others.
You can demolish homes to build parking if the price signal is strong enough. Or you can let people who don't need parking live there. Full disclosure, I have no car and enjoy not having parking
> You can demolish homes to build parking if the price signal is strong enough.
You "can", but that's right up there with spherical cows. Let's be serious.
It will never happen that a recently built apartment building gets demolished because they realize in hindsight that it does not have enough parking. That will never happen.
The problem will simply be externalized to the surrounding neighborhood, good luck in the street parking wars.
I now live in the Netherlands but spent some time in SF, and the problem really is just horrifically bad public transport options over there.
Sure, the US is a bit different in that getting to other cities is more difficult without a car, that's definitely true. However within the city itself? My building has dedicated parking spaces for the residents - as in you can't even get into the garage if you don't have a keyfob that opens the garage doors - and of the neighbours I'm acquainted with, people avoid taking their cars as much as possible. And this isn't due to congestion or whatever, cycling or taking a train/bus/metro is just cheaper & more convenient if we're talking within the Netherlands.
My favorite anecdote about a country getting rid of car infrastructure is actually in the city I live in now, Utrecht, where they replaced a highway with a canal [1], and right now Amsterdam has an initiative to bring the number of cars down drastically. They're getting rid of parking spaces in favor of better, human-friendly spaces, small gardens and things of that variety. There's similar initiatives across the whole country, and they've all worked out pretty amazingly in terms of QoL for people.
The US has a planning issue where life is unlivable unless you drive everywhere, but there's no reason for major cities like SF to have this issue if the people in charge really gave a shit. Having good public transportation is an easily attainable goal for cities with so many resources, yet it keeps getting fucked over by car-centric infrastructure.
Life is a lot more than cities and traveling between them. The USA has a vast array of things not in it even close to cities. The USA is vast and beautiful and many people like to explore our nature, parks, etc, etc.
Realistically what's the proportion of car use between going to/from work (or the grocery store or other similar destinations) vs traveling the country for your average USAian? Especially one living in a dense metro area of some kind? And even then, I'm not saying we get rid of all cars, just that owning one shouldn't be a necessity in a massive, dense metropolitan area in order to get from point A to point B.
I own a car myself and use it regularly for longer road trips the few times of year I do that, but I avoid using my car like the plague if I'm traveling within 90% of the Netherlands.
It would not take just 15 minutes by car, it would take another ten to park, but also if one person takes their car, how can they ask other people not to as well. It will take 30 minutes to driver now, and there won’t be parking as everyone drove.
Now upzone the city, oh dear it’s utter gridlock.
Edit: but actually forbidding the building of parking is just as misguided as requiring it. Did not initially see that it was actually proposed to be prohibited rather than simply not required.
> food deserts abound, and the main retail and entertainment areas are also lopsided on the east side of town, with the other being 4th street, which is more like a destination retail area
Have lived in SOMA for the past 9 years or so. No car. Works great.
To be fair I think of The Avenues and the Marina as almost another planet. It’s easier to get to Oakland than over there. Although I do run past the Marina every weekend, but most people don’t do weekly 16mile runs just for fun.
In my area most daily trips are easier by bicycle or public transit than by car. My gym is 15min by car, 12min by bicycle, 20min by bus, and 25min by foot away. During rush hour, which is when I go to the gym, that car trip easily turns into 20min+. I can literally outpace cars uphill on my bicycle thanks to slight fudging around red lights.
I think a lot of this gets solved if the city cracks down on crime and cleans up public transport. I've lived in downtown SF (5th and Mission) as well as across the Bay Area and avoided public transport other than Caltrain (even then, the SF station was not great) because of so much vagrancy, people doing drugs on the bus and metro, and just being worried about personal safety. I personally still didn't buy a car and just walked or took a Lyft/Uber most places in the end but I can see why many refuse to give up cars until public transport is safe enough for the average person who can afford an alternative.
Taxis are just awful for traffic: every journey they drive twice as far as a private car (need to drive to the customer first, then take them to destination) and they spend all day driving around, idling etc. Granted if they are actively driving around, they don't take parking spaces. But they increase congestion instead.
Surely the average deadhead to pickup leg is shorter than the occupied leg, right? If I think of my typical Uber experience, I’m often 3-6 minutes from being picked up and I think I’m usually in the Uber for 15-30 minutes (with occasional longer outliers and almost never a shorter outlier).
I agree, but I wonder what the counterfactual climate impact is for someone who takes a few taxi rides a week but without them would have to buy a car instead (which of course also then needs physical space for parking)
Cities stop being "easy to navigate by car" when they have too many cars around. And car-congested streets are also very hostile to bikes and pedestrians, so it's very hard to correct the problem once it gets ingrained. So it makes sense to give the latter uses high priority, and keep car use as a rare exception.
One of the issues is that your car makes it harder for other people to get around by bike or bus, or walking.
Also, if you price street parking appropriately people don't need to circle for blocks.
Cars _are_ exclusive. They're one of those things where the more people get them, the worse the experience is for existing users. It makes sense to price their negative externalities appropriately.
Man seeing everyone's dialup nightmares I guess I should be satisfied by the quality of my local analog POTS Provider in the 1990s/2000s. I rarely connected at slower than advertised speeds. I would dial out and 99% of the time I would find it connected at 53K, even on a winmodem.
I would say the stress of completing day to day errands and activities here having recently moved to a “walkable neighborhood” has been detrimental to my mental health, since moving out of the car centric western side of SF.
It’s a fact that most of the commercial corridors here are at the bottom of the hill, which means climbing home. It only seems walkable here until you have to climb up 200 feet+ in elevation to get home with your groceries, and panhandled along the way.
And at night, the situation is worse. I have learned that PCP is the most popular drug of choice for the encampment that exists between my walk from Whole Foods to home, and that explains the insanity that comes from it with an almost nightly occurrence.
And even then, options for completing all of my errands locally are limited; for example we lack a full line grocery store in walking distance, among other needed businesses (like Walgreens) that have closed.
I have found that getting what I need without a car in SF is 10x more complicated than having a car, so I keep mine.
When talking about walkable cities, I would leave this off the list.
I’ve done this to my Lumia 950 XL. Battery performance is not great, but it is usable. If one can locate a Mugen Power external battery pack for lumia 950xl, in good condition still, it would be a usable device for having a portable computer on hand… its a nifty device when it is setup properly. It has a steep learning curve for the average person, but most people interested in doing this won’t have too much trouble.
I am also participating in the DuoWoA project from the same team also led by Gustave Monce. It hopes to implement a similar approach for the Microsoft Surface Duo and Duo 2.
Though it is currently working with some major drawbacks which would prevent its use as a daily driver, its overall usability is progressing very well with each release.
This is neat, I have wondered if anything of this nature existed, in the past, as a child of the 80s/90s attempting to master the art of the perfect mixtape… 30 minutes a side down to the second the tape runs out, would be a win.
But for today’s music, shortening the 2010s/2020 already shorter lengths would mean a song might not be more than a minute in length. On average, full unedited tracks today end up being a bit shorter than they used to be, solely due to the economics of streaming. Rather than paying for the content second by second, it is done by paying per track play. The result is a lot of 2 minute tracks, which were produced with the “verse” parts getting jammed together into the “chorus” with no break in vocals, which also uses pitch adjustments, “the “bridge” is an afterthought that is terrible, or more recently, nonexistent……… Instrumental solo? Anyone? Bueller?
Music is no longer anticipated, budgeted for, and purchased on launch day with great fanfare. We have grown accustomed to the idea that we should have everything available at our fingertips, and as a consequence of this we get exactly what we pay for.
You're not wrong about modern songs - but that's not really the use case for this tool:
A few days ago I was given the task of creating a corporate video - just a rolling slideshow for a shop-window display. Then suddenly it was going to go on YouTube as well - so needed some music! I found a suitable track but needed to edit it for length so its closing chord coincided with the credits card at the end of the video.
This tool might have saved me the bother of splicing the music in Audacity.
I just did the same thing. I made a promo video for an art project which is a youtube short that is 60 seconds long. I wanted both the opening of the song, where things start slow and pick up, and the ending of the song where things build to a crescendo and then nicely close, so I had to find some place in the middle to blend the two cuts of the track together. I just tried this tool and it appears to work well. I have not A/B tested it against my manual cut yet, but I might swap out my cut for this one. Nice!
I mean, I’ll easily concede there’s been a consistent trend for shorter songs, more singles and more solo artists since the… 60s (?), but it is also heavily dependent on your taste.
Yes, if the discrepancy is a few seconds - in this case I needed an extra minute or so of music, and the customer had already requested a specific slide duration so I had limited leeway there.
Music is a self eating beast these days. Any new artist is competing with not only all contemporary artists but all past artists too, since its so trivial to just go on spotify and find a playlist with the "best alternative albums of all time" and find all the usual suspects of the last 25 years or so. It's really unprecedented for old material to be at an even pedestal as new material. These older already monied acts tend to get the bigger venues in town and tour all the time too, so it extends beyond the digital realm. Not to mention how many small act sized venues have closed and no longer exist so there are even fewer potential opportunities for such bands compared to the arena filling acts.
My local music venue has ‘indie’ size of couple hundred max. But they mostly program ‘tribute’ bands or ‘classic’ acts because apparently that is the most safe to sell.
Tonight I was at a Melvins show in Amsterdam. It is their 40th anniversary your, amazing! I’ve also seen Einstürzende Neubauten a few months back. Back in early 90s everybody was talking how the Stones were still playing for so long. But nowadays so many bands are still going.
I've rewritten this comment ten times already and I guess I don't really know what I _want_ to say, but this really irks me the wrong way. What you are describing is not Music (with a capital M) but rather the very similar product that is available in high abundance and nearly worthless. Real artists still have a considerable following that will absolutely anticipate and purchase physical media on launch day.
She has a cult following, but Taylor Swift's Midnights broke over 1 million vinyl sales (from late October -> late January).
But I mostly agree with you - I get very excited for artists that I really enjoy releasing new work, and "line up" so to speak by listening to it the day it releases on Spotify.
I think you're describing the difference between art and entertainment. Both of these efforts use "music" as their medium, and of course there's a lot of gray area between. But it's not necessarily a bad thing that there are many different goals when producing music.
Totally. I should have posted what I had written earlier, had a section on this in my comment, and even spent a half hour trying to explain how this doesn’t apply to all artists and genres. I wrote it about 10 times and I do agree…
Identifying the good from the rest in such a place as Apple Music is a miserable experience. To Apple, they also make more revenue from their prioritization of marketing similar sounding two minute tracks in this “nouveau pop” format, backed up by a small amount of older superstar artist anniversary editions. Good original new music never makes it to the featured content sections.
And Genres and algorithms are a mess. It applies across the board to all music and is really a problem for the flavors of House, Techno, and other genres that are simply labeled “Electronic” or “Dance.” I’m getting Avalon Emerson one minute, Bicep the next, to be ruined by corporate mass marketed deadmau5, follow by a Bad Bunny remix….worse is the algorithm which thought I might like corporate edc-esque superstars and poorly autotuned remixes- though I have not added a single song to my collection in 20 years of digital music consumption…
Can we do better than “Dance” and “Electronic?” Of course they could, they haven’t. One must go elsewhere.
For House and Techno, this dearth of music discovery and search-ability methods by streaming companies makes room for independent music station alternatives, like Fault radio, or gives a reason for one to seek out artists via other means, like going to independent music festivals like Sunset Campout, Honcho campout, and other events highlighted on Resident Advisor, a poster in a nightclub, a text message listing the warehouse location.
(Apple Music did at least bring back Beats in Space.)
I think about the proliferation of streaming, and how it actually makes finding new content difficult for people who are not familiar with those other means of distribution.
- We have deprioritized the concept of the local radio station, now what was alternative rock is a rebroadcast of an AM Sports broadcast (i.e KFOG)
- the death of the sale of “singles,” made it a cheap entry point for people to experience a new artist. Releasing a track on Spotify doesn’t feel as substantial.
- and exclusively agreements contract provisions with corporate entities that engage in predatory practices that force up and coming artists to choose between performing for their fans at local venues, or extending their potential reach by putting their name on the bill for Coachella, sacrificing potential shows for a few hundred of miles away and several months on either side of the festival.
- Additionally entertainment conglomerates like AEM and LiveNation are increasingly becoming the owners, or managers of, the entertainment venues in cities around the world. Similar exclusivity agreements can have a significant negative impact on unaffiliated independent venues ability to compete.
I can’t speak for anyone in particular from the Gen Z or Alpha generation. I think for them, it’s all Apple or Spotify, music festivals if they can afford them, sharp discerning music choices on TikTok if they feel the need to branch out… and the question is - do they?
The norm is now a fully mass market formula that is almost impossible to break through… and the effect of this puts the chill on the ability to link good music with committed audiences.
> I can’t speak for anyone in particular from the Gen Z or Alpha generation.
I'm just barely young enough to be a zoomer, so maybe my view will be interesting. From my perspective my ability to find "good" music is better than it ever would have been in the past.
I find music suggestions from forums, review sites, subreddits, friends, online people I follow, etc. Then I can immediately listen to it with no effort or expense. I found my favorite album of all time from a random comment someone left on an internet thread.
To me the idea of having to wait until a local radio station played a song, and then make a leap of faith on purchasing the album seems like such a worse experience.
Similarly, in terms of creating music, it has never been easier to learn, create and distribute your own music. The rise of the internet has made it so much easier to find a niche communities of people making incredibly diverse and experimental music together.
In my mind, streaming sites have two roles and do a very good job at both:
- make all music as accessible as possible
- suggest music for people who want to "passively" listen to music, which is how the average person has always listened to music (and that's a completely legitimate thing to want and enjoy)
I see a lot of "the death of cinema", "the death of music", "the death of video games" takes around, and I can't help but feel like these views come from people who have lost track of where the "niche" communities has moved on to and then feel despair when to them it looks like the "mainstream" is all that exists.
1/4” is a much better “master” of capturing higher fidelity than my method, a compact cassette using two different cassette tape decks. I remember when I swapped it out and got a dual Pioneer compact cassette deck, which could also be controlled by a remote control. It was fantastic, until the home Compact Disc recorder drive came on to the scene. Alas, compact cassettes are not as effective to splice, and I miss the 90’s.
I agree, I think another part of it is accessibility to tools and content. Same thing happens with gaming to an extent, when tools became more accessible, so did the content, but the quality dropped significantly, even among AAA games.
I think music suffers even more so because we're all so tuned into having the best at our fingertips that if a single moment in a song isn't to our liking we can skip and forget about it completely - i think this fuels the fast-short song market, easier to saturate with many short songs and get listens rather than to work/slave on a longer more intricate piece.
Back in the day, mixtapes with songs were slaved on and cherished, today slaving over something is seen as a negative quality.
> if a single moment in a song isn't to our liking we can skip and forget about it completely
I do sometimes worry about this. Some of my favorite songs growing up were ones that I didn't care for initially but which grew on me only after listening to it repeatedly. Now it's easy to dismiss anything that doesn't hook me right away. Thankfully albums are still being released, and you can force yourself to listen though them, or keep more of the "meh" songs in your playlists for longer periods of time, even adding them back into rotation after a while.
I don't think I'd give up the variety we have now though and go back to only having what songs are pushed at us through top 40 radio or the limited selection found in local stores. I get my music now from countries all over the globe. Finding old stuff all the time I'd never heard and new things just released.
We can still invest in the music we listen to and be rewarded. We just aren't forced to, so it needs to be deliberate.
In this world of algorithmic content distribution, we have more genres of music than any one person can enumerate.
I don't see any of the effects you describe on my feeds (tidal; previously apple music). Perhaps you need to switch to a service with a better recommendation algorithm, or nuke your personalization profile and start over.
Meanwhile the ghost of the bridge lives on as a sample in contemporary songs. Future generations will watch these ruins in awe of what the masters in the past were able to construct. Will we ever be able to surpass the classics?
I think we peaked with music already, maybe in the early 2000s. Popular music was so simple before the 1970s. There were a few chord structures and you just had some generic verses and put it on a record. Take someone like leadbelly or bb king, they were just playing folk music that had been played for at least 100 years before either of them were born, reusing old verses or adding their own, adding a short guitar lick between verses if so inclined (bb admits this was even because he could not sing and play at the same time). A lot of their fame as a result was happenstance of being at the right place at the right time (leadbelly in particular) versus them being a head and shoulders better folk musician than the other musicians of their time. A lot of the Beatles and other such acts in the early 60s were like this too, just basic formulaic rock n roll songs with the artists marketed as heartthrobs more than musicians even. They all even had the same haircuts.
Fast forward to something like Radiohead's Kid A and you have orders of magnitude more complexity going on the track. So many different sounds layered in very complicated manners. Its almost like a classical composition how there are motifs, movements, different emotions being evoked, but with any sound imaginable compared to what few are possible from the orchestra ensemble. A song from Kid A is just a part of the greater album itself. Nothing was made to stand on its own between radio advertisements.
It seems these days we are reverting to how commercial music was always made. Very commercial studio focused with the artists removed from production. Generic lyrics written by low paid songwriting staff and same old tried and true chord progressions we've heard forever. The artist is a brand and a sexy person meant to sell products versus someone particularly talented with an instrument or with songwriting skills.
And yet the Beatles stood the test of time much better than the alternative hits of the ‘90s (Radiohead included). (IMO of course, but I think its supported by alternative still being an alternative, while Beatles are still THE Beatles after all this year. BTW I’m not a great fan of either, but appreciate both)
It is easy to create a supercomlex composition, that’s what classical music have been doing way before 1970s. But to capture the minds and hearts of many people with simple things, now that’s the real mastery.
What does stand the test of time even mean in this case? People still listen to both Radiohead and the Beatles and lesser known "alternative" acts from the 1960s like the velvet underground today. All went on to influence others. I'd say they all stood the test of time. Stuff like record sales depends a lot more on how well your label commercialized you versus your musicianship. The mid century media era was also much smaller in terms of competing artists that were actually put in front of listeners. 3 stations on TV, a few radio stations playing music from the same record labels, a shop in town selling records from a few major labels, and that's all the discovery you have. popular acts were far more popular proportionally than popular acts in later years, just because you didn't have much option or choice otherwise back then.
It means that the Beatles (who the parent mentioned explicitly as a basic formulaic rock in contrast to the "peak" from the '90s) is much more well known now than Radiohead, and could even have been more popular than Radiohead even during the peak of Radiohead's popularity (with the general audience, of course). I doubt that the problem of alternative bands was media exposure, because they had plenty in their heyday. The issue is that their music appeal only to a small(ish) subset of people, and that most people would like something else. I don't mean this as a bad thing. It is what it is, but I find amusing how cultish their following is :)
