I’m sure a Swiss person will be along shortly to inform you how that is an inaccurate comparison, and furthermore, Switzerland is better than an HOA for several reasons, firstly the trains, secondly the efficient civil service, thirdly…
For reals though: at least in the French side I feel that there's a decent comedy scene, notably with the Montreux Comedy Festival. Two of my favorite humorists (Marina Rollman and Thomas Wiesel) got nicked for a time as panelists for some well known French radios (can't argue with the bigger exposure).
I went to see a recent swiss comedy film - "Bon schuur Ticino" - and it was hilarious. Granted, a lot of the humour might go over the heads of people who haven't lived in Switzerland, but there's definitely comedy
Great way to avoid extreme weather... if you're part of the working class. Most of these pedways are private property acting as a public space, so any undesirables can be ejected.
We need to stop the privatization of our public spaces.
Most private underground pedestrian tunnels are basements of existing buildings. Do you think the government should be using tax payer money to be cease/buy basements instead? Seems like a really odd use of resources just to not be able to kick out people who aren’t using the path for the intend purpose… but more so: Seems like something most local governments in North America would be too inefficient to handle without it turning into a project that takes 50 years and millions of dollars to complete 1 mile.
Usually the primary complaint about making them private, is that coordinating wayfinding for a bunch of private rights of way is very difficult, so what may be a complete network can be hard to use as such. Some landlords may not want you to realize you can go to a different property a few blocks away to complete your needs.
From @smallmouth's message below ("filthy dirty mess in disrepair and reeking of powerful weed, and fresh human feces and urine.") it sounds like you should be a lot happier now.
I don't have an authoritative answer or enough information to form a complete opinion, but getting BTU/h or kW (depending on if your country went to the Moon) out of the petroleum byproduct may be a better way to reuse than the green wash of the fantasy of recycled plastic.
The mining/drilling energy overhead is already embodied in the material, so it may be better not to waste that by burying it instead of getting some useful energy out.
The plastic container diverted for the bicycle pannier market isn't likely going to do anything to dent the flood of plastic waste.
This doesn't need to solve the issue of plastic to be a good way of diverting some away from landfill or reusing them. It's a type of reply/thinking I see on HN a lot, along the lines of "well this doesn't solve the entire issue", incremental progress and partial solutions are good, trying to come up with the uber solution to solve the entirety of the climate and waste issues just leads to analysis paralysis and solutions too large to effectively implement.
I didn't mean to dismiss the reuse aspect of the panniers, and I may have misunderstood the intent of "reduce, REUSE, recycle" higher comment but I interpreted it to be saying that burning the plastic wasn't a reuse.
My assertion is that burning it is also a form of reuse and possibly better than putting the balance, after containers and so forth that can be readily used, into a recycling system that significantly ends up in a landfill.
For example, my municipality only actually accepts 1 and 2 plastic in a recycling bin, but if it was being used for power generation maybe all of the numbers could be in there excessive 1&2 and all of the 3-7 go to the power plant? I'm not sure.
Right now if 3-7 are in there they just have to be landfilled.
The person doing this needs a bicycle pannier. If you account for the pannier that did not get made from scratch, surely reusing these cans/buckets has to be a win.
I agree there should be a limit to speed and size. We've been okay putting restrictions on guns for decades. 2020 Firearm deaths: 45k, 2020 Vehicle traffic deaths: 40k.
Reminders of scale aside, I posit that the limit for vehicles needn't be speed or size, but braking distance. If a manufacturer can make a 6600 pound SUV that stops from 75 mph in the same distance that a 3300 pound sports car with track brakes and extra grippy, super-wide tires, brakes from 75, I say more power to them.
Until then, this metric will naturally lead manufacturers to downsize, and for the ones who still produce SUV's anyway, they will need to be as good at stopping as regular cars, which might make them more cost-prohibitive and dissuade their ownership via market pressure.
After all, it's not speed or size that cause automotive fatalities, it's cars being unable to stop in time before impacting other vehicles, pedestrians, or impassible barriers.
Note that I did not actually claim that it was the third leading cause of death, just that it eclipses auto deaths and firearm deaths combined and doubled.
It’s a subject that gets quite hot quite fast, but as tactfully as possible: Looking in from the outside, the restrictions on gun sales in the US are pretty tame compared to a lot of other countries.
Pizza packs well, is ordered in large quantities, is easy to store on the seat, is fairly high margin, stacks, and the stores doing this delivery have dedicated drivers with good estimates for how much volume they'll be doing in a night and a fixed supply of drivers with guaranteed wages. They also didn't deliver as far.
App drivers are constantly playing this game of guessing where the next order will come from and where they'll end up.
Also Pizza companies doing their own delivery may be happy with the delivery fee being less than their cost of delivery if it gets them more orders than they would otherwise as long as the order is profitable. e.g. $10 pizza with $2 delivery and $8 cost of production and $3 cost of delivery in range. Each hand picked up pizza makes $2 profit, each pizza delivered makes $1, but if the amount of net new orders from doing delivery is >2x the amount of people that switch from pickup to delivery then the business profits.
In the app case, the business may still benefit (except now the apps have pressure to try extract discounts from the business), but that -$1 for delivery is either being subsidised by VC funding which won't last, or by paying the delivery staff less than their real costs.
a) traditionally, the delivery driver keeps the entire tip in cash. there's no bullshit "delivery fees" added to an order which actually don't go to the driver.
b) it used to be a lot less costly to operate a basic car in the US/Canada on a dollar per mile or km basis
To point A, delivery fees have been around for a while and have never gone to the driver. Is there some app or scenario in which the driver doesn't keep the entire tip? Because I'm not aware of any.
To point B, how is this tech-specific? The question was about why someone driving their car to deliver for Domino's is OK but driving their car to deliver for DoorDash is exploitation.
point A, app based food delivery services with "delivery fee" charged to the customer and not passed on to the driver is a new thing.
15 or 20 years ago if you order a pizza from your local pizza place, the price you pay for the pizza is fixed and known, and you tip the driver in cash. there's no extra 3rd charge line item for "delivery" anywhere.
point B, the advent of app based food delivery in the past 8 years happens to coincide with greatly increased cost of operating the car. I was explaining why traditional method of delivery used to be much more economically viable. Two things happening simultaneously, increase in cost of fuel and operating cars and the increased popularity of app based food delivery does not mean correlation equals causation.
tips weren't that good back in the older days. most people only tipped a $1 if anything and thought the delivery fee went to the driver which in a way it did because they usually got paid hourly plus a small fee.
I'm guessing at least part of the reason is that old school delivery driving doesn't have to be profitable, only the whole business does. If you have a healthy margin per pizza, that margin can subsidise the loss made per delivery. You just have to make sure that the profit from the increased number of pizzas sold makes up for the cost of delivery and you're good.
Food delivery services, on the other hand, have to make the delivery itself not only profitable, but profitable enough to produce a somewhat livable wage for the driver once expenses like gas and car wear are accounted for, and the whole company has to live off of whatever it can siphon off from what the drivers get.
$300,000,000 in investor money to earn back, software people earning $300,000/year, managers for them, etc. Divided amongst a lot of premises, yes, but still expensive. Instead of just a couple guys answering a phone.
There weren't any significant problems with the legacy model. Pizza delivery staff didn't try to talk you into accepting a cheese pizza instead of pepperoni. They didn't lie about their credit card machine not working. They showed up just like the new services, and specifying the order in English usually also worked well. Which were all problems with taxis pre-Uber.
Pickup customers subsidized the cost of delivery. drivers earned money folding boxes, delivering flyers other prep work. and drivers would take upto 4 orders at a time.
> Why is it now "bad" when a tech company does it? The scale?
I think it's because of how badly they're doing it. They're operating at a significant loss, with unhappy customers, unhappy drivers, unhappy restaurants, and poor service.
