Comments | andrewducker: Interesting Links for 05-10-2016

andrewducker

Interesting Links for 05-10-2016

Oct 05, 2016 12:00

2016 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards (tags: funny animals photos ) On Writing For Half-Life (tags: writing design games valve ) Don't want to build a car park? Why not subsidize Uber instead? (tags: transport usa ) Finance sector should junk the jargon (tags: banking finance language ) I really hope Netflix don't fuck up A Series Of ( Read more... )

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Comments 14

bart_calendar October 5 2016, 11:04:48 UTC

OMG. Don't fucking subsidize uber!

Jesus christ building car parks creates good blue collar jobs with benefits. Encouraging uber instead is simply helping out the one of two companies in American that may be more evil than Wal-Mart.

Beyond that car parks stay around a long time. Uber won't exist five years from now.

skington October 5 2016, 17:55:44 UTC

What's the second? Esso? Altria?

danieldwilliam October 5 2016, 11:15:45 UTC

I have long thought that one of the benefits to come from driverless cars is the land currently used for car parking freed up. If Uber and a small town can make it pay to run a basically a micro-bus scheme when they are paying drivers then I expect driverless cars (when they arrive in 2035) will make those sorts of schemes workable in millions of places.

andrewducker October 5 2016, 13:00:22 UTC

I'm fine with that - but I wish it wasn't Uber. I'd much rather have a taxi company that employed qualified drivers.

danieldwilliam October 5 2016, 13:25:23 UTC

Well yes. Uber do not stike me as the acceptable face of capitalism. In several ways.

I wonder if the reason Uber can make it pay at $2 a trip is that their not paying their drivers very much.

Or is there some car-sharing involved in the process?

theweaselking October 5 2016, 17:03:06 UTC

Not so much "car sharing" as "the driver's own personal vehicle". All expenses related to the car are paid 100% by the driver, not Uber.

Thread 10

skington October 5 2016, 17:54:47 UTC

That BBC footage of a drone flying down the Crossrail tunnels is quite spectacularly boring. And I see they still insist on serving up video in Flash format for desktop browsers (and apologise for it not working because you don't have the plugin), even though if you pretend to be an iPad they'll quite happily serve up HTML5 video that just works.

skington October 6 2016, 03:14:03 UTC

That BBC article has completely and utterly misunderstood the blog post it's quoting.

The blog post is all about reading comprehension levels, which basically means long sentences and long words. Based on that metric, terms of art like "bear market" or "a short position" score superbly. Moreover, even as technical terms they're not that difficult - they're useful shorthands for fairly understandable terms, and thus you'd expect them to be used all the time.

Jargon is not bad. Use of jargon to baffle and bamboozle people is bad, but you can use perfectly ordinary words for that, or even no words at all.