Seriously, though, this is a complete waste of time. Mass transit has been solving the problem of getting people from point A to point B without them having to do the piloting for a hundred years. What we really need to be spending our money on is rebuilding the streetcar and intercity rail systems that used to connect nearly every town in the country and electrifying them. This will drastically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels (because oil is the only portable energy source cheap and powerful enough for automobiles) and reducing greenhouse gasses. Instead, we're talking about an overly complex solution involving creation of an automated driving system on all our highways and compelling thousands of users to upgrade to driverless cars, which may or may not be electric.
In other words, Google's driverless car is to transportation as Dart is to DOM scripting.
So, I've been a life-long rider of mass-transit in Toronto, and Southern Ontario. I think I was 30 before I actually had to drive to a job.
You know what -- I hate transit during rush hour. It's uncomfortable, you don't get a seat. Ugh. During the off-times, it's great.
Traffic sucks, but at least you've got a little bubble of space over which you have control. This is psychologically significant.
Think of the difference between having a desk whose layout (or lack thereof) you control, versus working elbow-to-elbow at a long table with other people's jostling you and their crap falling in your space.
People need a certain amount of control over their space.
I get the impression you think that electricity is automatically clean energy. Have you ever thought about how that electricity is generated? Ever heard about coal or nuclear power plants etc.? Do you think they're are environmentally friendly?
Yes, I realize that most of our electricity comes from coal, natural gas, and nuclear. However, that fact doesn't preclude the idea of using solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal energy to generate all electricity. It's much more difficult to use these energy sources to power automobiles than it is for trains.
I read your Hacker News post and was very impressed by your skills. I would like to talk to you about a career opportunity that I'm sure you would find very interesting. Please contact me if you are interested.
My new business plan:
1. Abandon the city for the wealthy suburbs
2. Leave the poor behind, defund infrastructure
3. Sell tours and photos of neglect and destruction
4. Profit!
Some things to consider:
* While the population of Detroit proper has fallen, the total population of the metro area has remained fairly static over the past 40-50 years http://www.somacon.com/p469.php
* The Detroit suburbs are just as nice as your typical American suburbia.
* The State of Michigan is training hundreds of Emergency Financial Managers who now have the power to go into any municipality the State deems "financially unsustainable," dissolve local governments, and terminate any contracts (union or otherwise) in order to force a balanced budget. So while urban areas continue to be defunded by the state and by fleeing wealthy residents, they are put in the precarious position of trying to balance their budgets or risk a hostile takeover.
* Meanwhile, we all have a good time looking at the pictures.
You'll also need plenty of hafnium, titanium, and molybdenum. Not exactly abundant resources. All that just to get a 4% solar->electricity conversion rate. You can put these panels under your solar water heater and get slightly hotter water with an additional trickle of electricity into your home. Maybe you could power a pair of USB heated gloves.
I've created a quick fork of tmuxinator (originally used for defining sessions for tmux) to also generate iTerm setup scripts: https://github.com/dkastner/tmuxinator
I think context matters here. The article was discussing GUi word processor usage.
When using an app like Pages or Word, the mouse will be faster because keyboard navigation in those apps is terrible. You may be able to save some mousing with command-p, but for general editing tasks like highlighting and moving text, the mouse will always beat the keyboard.
In vim, however, editing via keyboard is well designed and always faster than mousing.
The true test would be to compare editing LaTex with vim versus a rich text document with TextEdit.
Seriously, though, this is a complete waste of time. Mass transit has been solving the problem of getting people from point A to point B without them having to do the piloting for a hundred years. What we really need to be spending our money on is rebuilding the streetcar and intercity rail systems that used to connect nearly every town in the country and electrifying them. This will drastically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels (because oil is the only portable energy source cheap and powerful enough for automobiles) and reducing greenhouse gasses. Instead, we're talking about an overly complex solution involving creation of an automated driving system on all our highways and compelling thousands of users to upgrade to driverless cars, which may or may not be electric.
In other words, Google's driverless car is to transportation as Dart is to DOM scripting.