Interesting, I’ve nothing bad to say about the typical ride experience. I usually get a car quickly and can get to where I need to go. That said, there was one person who was not a great driver. They managed to miss an exit, putting us a few miles our way while I was sitting in the back seat with a broken arm. That was… interesting. That’s where taxi companies are general better, since there is a higher barrier to entry.
I’ve never experienced surge pricing, but from what I understand it is successful at its aim: getting cars to where they are needed fast. That said, I can understand feeling fleeced.
But yeah, my main complaint is really that big businesses were able to essentially subsidize rides initially, then take advantage of their position once they cornered the market.
I do 99% of the time, but public transportation is often either very slow or not present at all. Take going out to see my aunt. Luckily I can take a light rail train most of the way. However, I then have to get on an infrequent bus. It can mean a trip taking an hour and a half, both ways. And that’s in a relatively good transit city for its size and being in North America. Late night also tends to not be great for transit, though I can bike just fine then.
Basically, I rely on bike and bus for most of my transportation, but use Uber/Lyft to fill in for the times when those preferred options won’t cut it.
Lyft/Uber. They had a strategy of eliminating their taxi company competition by flooding the market with such low fares that the taxis couldn’t compete. That said, the taxi companies had a miserable reputation in many cities. They often came late or not at all, they usually required a phone call to dispatch, and they were quite expensive. But still, the tactics Lyft and Uber used to gain market dominance was dirty and monopolistic.
The flip side of this is that I can avoid the trap of car ownership, with all of its problems and expenses.
I can’t form a response if all you’re going to do is link me to that document yet again without even saying how it contradicts me. Was it encirclement? That can’t be, because the document doesn’t address that. Was it weakening Russia? The document is focused on that, but I straight out said that the US is trying to weaken Russia. So what is it that I’m supposedly lying about?
The encirclement claim does not match with the facts. Around 6% of Russia borders a NATO country. 6% falls quite a few percentage points short of 100%. And in case you didn’t notice, NATO has no interest in fighting Russia. It could have directly stepped into the conflict in Ukraine at any point and absolutely crushed Russian forces. It has not because the consequences would be so dire. That said, weaken? Absolutely. But hopefully future relationships can normalize again once Russia’s elite get over their Great Russia imperialist ambitions.
That cartoon is a little rich coming from state media of a country that appears to be doing some aiding of Russia’s war efforts.
Ruins of Russian buildings that were bombed to justify the Second Chechen War. It is widely believed that it was a FSB false flag operation.
I generally like Lemmy’s design, with one exception. There is no formally structured recognition of rules for a community. There’s just a blob of text that the community moderators have to somehow structure in a visually appealing way. Because there is no recognition of rules, the reporting dialog box does not allow for simply selecting in a drop down, since there is nothing to select from.
As the prevalence of bots and AI systems continues to increase, people may begin to lose trust in online interactions altogether.
I’ve noticed on Lemmy that a few users that disagree with me politically occasionally accuse me of being a bot. Not even a paid shill, but instead a piece of AI generating text. This possibility is already oncoming.
Or when USA decides no more free war machines.
Thing is, from the US’s standpoint this is, to put it coldly, a great cost-benefit ratio. The cost to the US has been chump change, with much of the transferred equipment nearing end of life anyway. Meanwhile, European allies are fiercely determined to make this very painful for Russia so there isn’t a repeat performance.
I also wouldn’t call Russia’s actions imperialist as everything going on in eastern Europe the Russian response to NATO expansion.
If you buy the narrative about NATO expansion being equivalent to imperialism, sure. Or you could see it as a bunch of countries being afraid of Russia, so they joined NATO to gain protection. The narrative that NATO is going to attack Russia is simply wrong. It never has attacked Russia, and even with sending weapons to Ukraine it is supplying a nation purely with weapons against a foreign invader. Russia citizens could be immune from NATO supplied weapons tomorrow if Russia stopped the invasion.
By whom, please show actual evidence for this fantastical claim.
The source was a book that I don’t have access to. I’m trying to find an authoritative source that explains the exact practices. So far I found this article that I’m loath to pay for:
I also found this article from 2008: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20192237
My impression is that especially under Xi, the NPC has turned even more ceremonial. Note how the vote to allow Xi another term, a break with a tradition that lasted since Mao, had only two dissenting votes in a body of thousands of people. There’s no way that less than 0.1% of people in China would have preferred to stick with tradition. I can fully believe that he’s popular, but he’s not that popular.
In practice, political elites set the agenda and the NPC is there only to give it the appearance of legitimacy. It’s no mystery why as part of China breaking the back of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, one of their first moves was disqualifying any candidates who might not toe the line.
Okay, I’m in the middle of reading over the material. So far, I noticed that the structure nominally puts the grassroots as the supreme power via the National People’s Congress. However, that body has been characterized as a rubber stamp parliament, with the party leadership able to manipulate elections at all levels of the congressional election system. To use the nervous system analogy, while commoners are technically the source of power, the leadership can apply anesthesia whenever and wherever it wants.
I’ve been scratching my head over this for a while as I’ve been reading up on the structure of China’s government. It sounds like only the Central Committee operates on democratic centralism. But that seems to have little to do with the a democratic mandate stemming from the people, since the Central Committee is largely chosen in private.
I guess if you define democracy extremely loosely as “I feel represented” this works. It’s just not a very systematic way to provide representation. It’s also extremely susceptible to manipulation in a very locked down media environment, which describes China pretty well.
- @pingveno@lemmy.ml to
- •
- rustconf.com
- •
- 8 meses
- •
From what I can tell, neither country has a particularly strong claim to them. It’s just that the South China Sea has a strong strategic value, both militarily and as a passage for shipping goods. The US has for decades been doing freedom of navigation operations with the aim of disrupting any norm around disputed claims, particularly when island building is involved.