mayneack

I think Matt Stoller makes some good points on this sort of topic.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-cant-america-handle-t...

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-new-york-city-is-on-t...

This puts the IFR of the worst flu in recent history (2009 H1N1) at 0.03%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic#Compar...

The subsidies mentioned are federal transportation (highway) spending. Without that (or even better with it redirected into mass transit) the prospect of commuting into the city by car becomes a lot less economical.

I don't know about SV specifically, but a majority of the homeless in LA County have been here for more than 10 years and weren't homeless when they arrived. Seems like the rising cost of housing is one of the causes of homelessness in the first place.

I wonder if he's at the geographic center of his city or postcode. Sometimes a geocoding service will default to the center of an area if the address isn't precise enough or if it's using IP address based geocoding.

It doesn't say if the orders actually have his address on them or just show up.

Approximately a small scale version of this: https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turn...

Seems like it just refers to (but doesn't link to) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/states-lean-toward-pushing-t...

Does it say that they're storing messages? The examples are all the metadata "Signal provides private groups, private contact discovery, private profiles, etc". I interpreted this as saying that my groups and contacts are synced, not the content of the messages.

Some do. I pay to remove ads from the wunderground app which IBM claims means they don't sell my data. Not sure if believe them, but at least I don't see ads.

https://i.imgur.com/TlOo07T.png

Here in Los Angeles, crime is actually down. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/us/los-angeles-coronavirus-cr...

Who are the "best" of the Silicon Valley billionaires that they should be compared to?

Code intended to be closed and released unexpectedly seems like the worst of both worlds though.

This whole thread is about California's roadmap. LA County is something like 25% of the state. Why stop at the USA? With people moving between places, outbreaks anywhere will matter until there's a reasonable vaccine/treatment.

Are they scarce everywhere? I was under the impression that LA county, at least, could test everyone that was symptomatic.

It looks like they're being sent home, not given sick leave. Amazon can absolutely afford paid sick leave for people they deem unfit for work.

Both of the instacart orders I've gotten since LA shut down did both parts.

They're also spending half their time in grocery stores.

It's way too early to assume that the current pandemic will cause such drastic changes to society. Even if it turns out to be close to the damage as the 1918 flu, that was still more than 100 years ago. My guess is that the rise in remote work will be due to people being forced to all try it now more so than because they'll be preemptively trying to prevent this from happening again.

For a long time I used what.cd to find digital copies of most of my Dad's record collection of 60s-80s folk music. A few of them we even managed to ship to users to create high quality rips of. Sadly it got shut down and the replacements haven't caught up yet.

https://heavy.com/tech/2016/11/what-cd-shut-down-music-torre...

At the moment, most tests are certainly being done in less than BSL4, there aren't that many of them.

https://www.liquisearch.com/biosafety_level/list_of_bsl-4_fa...

My guess: non trivial to do it safely and non trivial to get accuracy rates you'd get from a professional lab.

Doing all those things by hand also takes some time. Thinking back to my days in a lab at MIT, sample to PCR probably took a full day (rough approximation). Big labs can probably increase the parallelism a lot.

> 2. They can reject a passenger when the call comes in

I think they are penalized for doing so. They have to accept a certain percentage.

YMMV and all, but I've had a similar experience with just adaptive cruise control for long drives. Driving the 7 hours from LA to Utah became pretty easy to do without having to break/speed up every few minutes with normal traffic. It still falls short in stop and go traffic, which I think teslas do well in.

If you know of initiatives you care about (like SB 50 for example), look for groups pushing that.

If you're on twitter, the twitter networks usually bridge cities. I follow a lot of LA area YIMBY groups, but get some cross pollination from other cities too.

If Trump is really the only thing giving the contract to Microsoft, rebidding might land in 2021 at which point there's some chance Trump isn't in a position to exert influence.

That makes you quite an outlier. 95% of trips are < 5 miles

https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips

I don't think we should optimize our cities for that.

My route (704 along santa monica blvd on the west side) has a mix of shaded or uncovered stops. That bus is pretty reliably tracked by google maps and other transit apps. I get delayed less than once a month. They're actually about to merge the express and local lines into more frequent, slightly farther spaced routes, so it's supposed to change to every 10 minutes or so.

My timing is usually flexible, so I can absorb one delay a month, but when I'm in a hurry (like today), I'll just string together two buses (1 to 4) if the 704 doesn't show. I've taken ubers in a pinch before, but way less than once a month.

40 miles is a pretty long commute. A modern city shouldn't be optimized to make that experience the norm. Most trips are much shorter.

It's obviously hard to tell by looking in windows, but there's plenty of poor and/or disabled people riding the bus and already dealing with the problems you think removing cars would give them.

To some degree this is a zero sum game. Bus lanes are pretty magical in that they make the buses faster than the cars and reduce road capacity to reduce induced demand. Plus they're cheap because the infrastructure is just paint.

I live in West LA and have been commuting by bus for the last year after ditching my car. I think it's actually been a significant improvement to my life as it's a lot less stressful to sit in a bus for an extra 10 minutes rather than spend my commute worrying over how slow everything is moving in traffic.

Everyone here seems to want everyone else to use public transit for all the right reasons, but isn't willing to adjust their own behavior to accommodate that.

The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt.