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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)FR
Posts
3
Comments
135
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I’m not against EVs, but let’s not forget that they are still expensive and inefficient car infrastructure. EVs won’t do anything about congestion on the 401, or suburban sprawl causing the housing crisis.

    Cars will always exist, but what we really need is more public transportation. It’s a no brainer to have a high speed train from London to Quebec City. And electric bikes — yes biking in winter is fine, people all over the world do it, Canadians used to do it before cars took over. You just need good bike infrastructure and dedicated snow removal for bikes.

  • hot take: There should not be any area in the country that only allows detached SFHs. Townhomes, duplexes-triplexes-quadplexes, and 3-4 story walkups should be allowed everywhere in the country. If you start making exceptions, everyone wants an exception. Just open it up everywhere. Make these buildings as fast and easy to build as a detached SFH.

    And before anyone complains about parking, we massively overbuild parking everywhere. Even in most of Vancouver, you can often find parking if you are willing to walk one or two blocks away. And before people say we first need more public transportation, I hate that the lack of density supposedly justifies not building public transportation, but the lack of public transportation also justifies not building density.

  • The "front page" of lemmy, either the local of the instance you're on or the "all", is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I'm not sure what the issue is with lemmy's front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?

    It's too bad because the "front page" is the user's first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.

    In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.

  • I often hear this repeated, but I've never seen any evidence for this claim. I'm a highly educated immigrant to Canada, and I can't imagine ever going back to the US. And it's not like most immigrants can just easily shop around for other countries.

  • ah, I see what you mean now. Yes, Vancouver is MUCH more dense than Calgary. But Calgary isn't just sprawling, they also deliberately planned for more housing supply throughout the city, including more density. Vancouver and the LM have not implemented such a plan.

  • I think there needs to be some disambiguation.

    Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop One is literally a train. They themselves call it a train. I guess the idea is that they're small individual cars (called pods) instead of a chain of train cars connected together, which seems really energy inefficient.

    Elon Musk's Hyperloop is a train for automobiles, which has all the inefficient downsides of a personal car, with none of the energy benefits of a train. It is the worst of both worlds. And it relies on car infrastructure at both ends, so it will bottleneck just like a highway on/off ramp. Completely nonsensical.

  • Vancouver geography is not that constrained. Land use is just very bad. The classic Vancouver skyline is a surprisingly small area. It's surrounded by SFH suburbs. The Lower Mainland has tons of strip malls and parking lots due to car culture. It's not a lack of land, it's a bad use of land.

    • BC Lower mainland: 36,000 km^2. Population 3 million.
    • Netherlands: 41,500 km^2. Population 17 million.
    • Belgium: 30,500 km^2. Population 11.7 million.
    • Switzerland: 41,250 km^2. Population 8.7 million.

    These countries are not Hong Kong. They have nature, a mix of big cities and small towns, and lots of low density areas. Switzerland is a famously mountainous region with lots of untouched nature and rural areas.

  • There is a pinned post on this community. It reads:

    Firstly, the issue of donations. Since the inception of this instance, your most frequent request has been the ability to make contributions to support my initiative. While initially, I had never intended to accept donations, I’ve come to realize the value this brings in ensuring our platform’s sustainability. In response to your requests, within the next week, I will be introducing several options for those of you who wish to donate. I want to emphasize that these donations are entirely optional and will directly support our instance’s operational necessities - dedicated hardware, colocation fees, email services, and more.

  • These are good ideas and I share the concern. The dynamic is similar to city government, where an active minority of usually wealthy retired homeowners has outsized power because they have more leisure time. It's undemocratic.

    Another idea to ensure that decisions are not made by an unrepresentative minority is a minimal voting threshold. For example: Only threads with a minimum of x votes will be considered. (Where x might be a percentage of total users of the instance, so that it changes over time.) It would be silly to make important decisions based on a thread with just a handful of votes.

  • I was curious about this topic, so I looked it up and found this Atlantic article.

    It begins:

    if the purpose of academic grading is to communicate accurate and specific information about learning, letter, or points-based grades, are a woefully blunt and inadequate instrument. Worse, points-based grading undermines learning and creativity, rewards cheating, damages students' peer relationships and trust in their teachers, encourages students to avoid challenging work, and teaches students to value grades over knowledge.

    Also, to clear up a possible misunderstanding (that I had and others may have), getting rid of letter grades does not mean getting rid of evaluation. Instead, students are assessed on whether they are achieving/not achieving proficiency in specific skills.