saltharp

I’m an Australian who has spent a number of years living in the US, and to be honest I’m not sure roundabouts are that great anymore.

Roundabouts might be more efficient for pushing cars through an intersection, but they’re less pedestrian-friendly. Yes that’s right, in this specific case, American cities are more pedestrian friendly than Australian and European cities. At best, a pedestrian has to take an awkward circular detour with a roundabout, and most Australian roundabouts DON’T have a zebra crossing like the picture in the article - so unlike a four way stop, pedestrians don’t have the right of way. If they did, it would likely destroy a lot of the (car-only) efficiency gains in busy areas.

The other benefit of the four way stop is that every American just knows what to do when the traffic lights fail, since the rules fall back to the four way stop rules. In Australia, this can be a very dangerous situation until the cops arrive to direct traffic.

(For the Australians who don’t know how to navigate a four way stop: you arrive at an intersection where all four entrances have a stop sign, so you stop, and then go through in the order that you arrived)

My father in law applied for a visa to come to Australia about a decade ago. As part of this he had to do a medical checkup, and this caught some cancer that he didn’t know he had. Luckily this was early on, and after a few rounds of surgery he was in remission.

If he hadn’t applied for the visa at that time, it’s almost certain he wouldn’t have caught it and wouldn’t be alive today.

He had no trouble getting approved for the visa - we were sponsoring him so we had already signed an agreement saying that we would pay for any government benefits he might receive over the next 10 years. So I don’t think people in this particular visa situation can be a burden on the system.

But this might not be how every visa in Australia works, I’ve got no experience beyond that.

I rarely carry cash (or even a wallet) around anymore and I agree it's convenient. But one thing that bothers me is that we've allowed something like one percent of our entire retail economy to go directly towards supporting a rent-seeking American duopoly (Mastercard and Visa).

The crazy thing is that we've got a payment system that is free (Osko) but we can't be bothered moving to it.

> That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky.

"At best"? The average commute in the US is 27.6 minutes, according to the Census Bureau. My commute is a 10 minute bike ride. Luck had nothing to do with it, just a different set of priorities in life.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...

I don't think it's enough that Chromium is open source. Yes it's very different from the MS IE monopoly, but Google has a very different business model compared Microsoft.

The value of IE to Microsoft was to lock people into Windows - both developers and users. They recognized that the web would become a software platform in its own right, and knew that if everyone ended up using web software then it'd be a lot easier to use non-Windows platforms.

Google gets much of its revenue from web advertising, so the value of Chromium to Google is to keep the web profitable for them. For example, Mozilla can't do to Google what Apple did to Facebook. They can do things like veto any move away from cookies as the primary tracking mechanism, at least until they have an alternative ready to go.

An open source license doesn't fully solve the problem because forking Chromium isn't enough. All the software on the web is built on top of APIs that Google gets a say in, and these are designed to be useful for ad/tracking networks.

When was the last time you tried to memorize (or even type out) a ZFS block pointer address though? The ergonomics don't matter for ZFS, and so what's left to consider is address space exhaustion.

For IPv6, people memorize/type IP address all the time. So the IPv6 designers needed to balance the address space size with ergonomics - and they did this poorly, imo.