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veen  ·  54 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

Americans hate transit because it’s usually not a viable alternative to driving. Not always though - 65% is no joke.

The first law of transit is that people will always drive unless transit / cycling is fast enough. If the travel time of transit is below 144% of that of driving, more than half of people will choose transit. Your 45 minute bus trip is a 26 minute drive (Maps tells me) so it’s just on that threshold. You’re totally right in assessing that for a lot of people and a lot of trips it’s garbage, because it just takes too fucking long and the bus doesn’t even go where you need it to go.

The second law is that transit needs to do everything right to succeed, whereas cars need to suck real bad for people not to use them. That 144% assumes the transit system is working, people know how to use it, and it’s not just perceived as a plebeian can of sardines. I don’t buy that the geography of US cities prevents good transit, I just believe it’s transit on hard mode. Canada’s superb suburban bus networks prove that you can make a successful transit network even in car-dependent suburban hellscapes. That does require buses to be fast, to get priority and to have an agency and city that really get that. A friend and transit professional of mine objected to a pedestrian crossing that the city wanted to place, because that street saw 26 buses an hour each way and if you calculated the extra cost just in terms of paying bus drivers that €2000 of paint would cost the transit agency over €120K a year, let alone the time it asked for everyone riding it. So they didn’t.

veen  ·  140 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 8, 2023

Celebrated my third decade ‘round the sun this week! We are also taking a week off. Yesterday we found a fantastic new spa nearby, today we’re off to Antwerp to visit friends for two days.

veen  ·  154 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 25, 2023

Aquarium update: after waiting probably too long for the new tank to settle, I decided to add livestock (some neon tetra's and panda corydoras). It's been going great.

I also had totally forgotten that Cities:Skylines 2 launched this week. Supposedly it's optimized more poorly than Cyberpunk was at launch, making 4090's sweat if you have the wrong settings. But I was due for a GPU upgrade anyway - my ancient 1060 couldn't manage a playable framerate in CP2077 even if it were in optimal condition.

veen  ·  196 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 23, 2023

Got an idea for a TV show that I'm exploring with kleinbl00. Could be really awesome, could go nowhere, the only way to find out is to attempt it.

The aquarium's up and running! Planted it a few days ago:

veen  ·  210 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August, 2023

The shed is coming along. It was more work than expected, and the weather turned for the worse, but the roof is now watertight, it's like 5 times stronger than it was and I think I used up two thirds of the wood for the exterior.

i do feel a bit...saddened now that it's only five days until I start working again. I could get used to this pensioner lifestyle. There's still a lot to do in my mind - mostly DIY projects, and hobbies like learning Solidworks to scaping my new aquarium and I doubt I'll finish it all before Monday rolls around again.

veen  ·  217 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August 23, 2023

Tearing down the garden shed this week with my dad to rebuild it next week. The goal is to stemgeheim the structure and give it a green roof. We’re just at the point where we now know how big the task really is. (Quite big…) I’m exhausted but it’ feels good to work hard like this.

veen  ·  231 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August 9, 2023

When I initially set out the goal of spending half of my time this holiday on home improvement and half on seeing friends & family, I didn’t meant it as “7 days of DIY followed by 7 days seeing people” but here we are. Spent the day today being a good uncle to my sister’s three toddlers. I haven’t visited them that much the past year and I should do better. Seeing them 4 times this month is a good start I think.

veen  ·  232 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Progress July 2023

Even though I understand probably 5% of what you’re doing, I love to see your progress and it looks awesome. Wish I could appreciate it more but that’d take a degree in mechanical engineering I’m afraid.

veen  ·  301 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: May 31, 2023

Was good to meet NikolaiFyodorov last week! Hope you had a good time in Amsterdam.

I let my physical therapist know that I'm good for now. I've had a ton of energy the last few weeks (although most of that is going into job hunting). My regimen seems to work most of the time so I wanna know what it's like without the training wheels.

The weather has been fantastic lately. We planted a bunch of sun-bathed plants, some of them are immediately growing while others are unmoving and/or wilting away a bit. Gotta find out what works and trial & error is our way to go.

I can only imagine how much further your L.A. range would be if you'd sport an ebike instead.

The iron-clad laws behind urban geography is that speed and travel time dictates how far away people will live from each other, and that transit only makes sense when said transit is faster than driving. The decades-long attitude of US transportation planners, channeling their inner Robert Moses, is that driver speed is the penultimate measure of success. Thus the biggest argument against transit and bicycle lanes is that it will slow down car traffic, whilst ignoring that it's a bit of necessary collateral damage. Thus the U.S. urban topography throws people as far away from each other as possible, with everyone in their own solitary steel bubble moving to their solitary McMansion bubble. (Didn't Bowling Alone have a large section about this?)

More and more people are realizing that a) the shittiness of suburbia is by design, b) that cars are a large part of the problem, and c) that it doesn't have to be this way. Ever heard of Carmel, Indiana? I have:

veen  ·  496 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Is this the end of crypto?

It is truly bizarre how clear the upside has been measured and how silently it's been ended. What a shame.

    The early assessments were rosy. Scholars at Columbia University developed a monthly measure of child poverty that is much speedier than the official annual data. Between June 2021 and July 2021 their estimates registered a large drop in the child-poverty rate—from 15.8% to 11.9%. Put another way, the number of children in poverty fell by 40%. That was the result of all covid-related relief programmes, but the monthly payments alone drove a 25% drop in poverty in their first month.

    As uplifting as the result may have been, the converse is as dismal. Since the payments lapsed, the researchers calculate that most of the gains made against child poverty have been reversed (see chart). In December 2021, the rate was 12.1%. “By the end of the six months, in December, we saw close to 4m children being kept out of poverty,” says Megan Curran, policy director at Columbia’s Centre on Poverty and Social Policy. By February 2022, it had returned to 16.7%—meaning 38% more children (or 3.4m) were in poverty.

gift link to the article that's from for the interested.

veen  ·  700 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: April 27, 2022

We bought a house! The only thing that needs to happen now is to finish the mortgage application, but that should go smoothly. We got lucky and were able to buy off-market a house that the previous owners almost entirely renovated (which saves us a LOT of money now that materials and construction prices have doubled). They did such a solid job that we can already start thinking about the interior and furniture, instead of first having to think about renovations. The house is in a cute little car-free street and once we move in this August I’ll be able to bike to work in half an hour.

veen  ·  721 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: April 6, 2022

I'm now on my third post-covid-fatigue week. I now feel good enough to work a full day tomorrow, prolly for the first time in a month. The SO got a worse deal with a cold this week on top of the fatigue. We'll survive but it still sucks - this year I really wanted to leave health issues behind me but it's been the worst three months of health in a long time.

On the bright side we are now actively looking at buying a house and made our first offer. We lowballed it and got a polite "nah" back, which is better than a GTFO. It's funny how buying a home is such a weird mix of excitement, fear and wargaming.

veen  ·  896 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 13, 2021

Have a week off from work. I almost always enjoy a quick break in between Summer and Christmas, as it's always the busiest time of year in terms of work for me. We had some travel plans, but ended up simply taking time off to do whatever instead. I've been praciticing the piano and reading a bit more, and spent a few hours cooking an extravagant dinner the other day.

Today we visited a framer for a piece of art I'd bought two years ago - a Stanley Donwood piece in his Holloway series. We also spent a good while figuring out how best to frame some beautiful maps that we really want to give a beautiful spot in our home.

Yesterday I spent the day making a start to a new side project. Basically, I want to make a website that's as nice & approachable as How Many Plants, but for (Dutch) shared mobility solutions, to solve the problem of discoverability and lower the barrier to access on my own. I don't know if anyone else wants that to exist, but I do.

veen  ·  916 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: They just don't get it, do they?... HBR: Who Is Driving the Great Resignation?

And the other half is casually looking around for opportunities...

veen  ·  1097 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Bank Effect and the big boat blocking the Suez

There’s also this, which doesn’t help:

veen  ·  1172 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What books are you reading hubski?

Three, actually! I'm slowly going through A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel. Yesterday I almost finished reading Ezra Klein's book Why We're Polarized. Which didn't do much for me; I'm not sure if it's because I am still not quite ready for more dense pay-attention-nonfiction (I haven't been reading any since last March) or because I'm just not quite the target audience. He makes a few good points, but mostly jumps from topic to topic seeming more eager to string other people's interesting work together than to help people follow it all. Or maybe I am just too easily distracted listening to him, as I am used to listening to his podcast where I can half-hear things and still follow along.

My light fiction read right now is Hank Green's A Beautifully Follish Endeavor, because I finished the first book yesterday. It's alright, it's basically YA scifi and he tries a bit too hard at times. I'm hooked on the mystery though so I want to read on.

veen  ·  1253 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 21, 2020

I'm having a wonderful week off. Have an oversupply of paid leave that needs to be down to zero by Jan 1st, so I'm taking this week off, a long weekend early November and almost all of December.

Most of my week so far has been spent reading, cooking, and getting to a bunch of things I had postponed until further notice. I had been cooking more the last few weeks, but this weekend I got Ottolenghi's Simple as an early birthday gift so I got a pack with a bunch of exotic ingredients, made an extra grocery trip to get a bunch of veggies and declared Ottolenghi Week in our household. I've always liked to put something great on the table, but until last year that'd mostly been a handful of self-made or altered recipes from random sources. This year and especially the last week we've expanded our spices cabinet almost twofold and I love exploring new tastes and techniques and learning how to use them properly.

I started writing morning pages the other day. The only goal I have is to try and cathartically write how things are going and what's bothering me for five to ten minutes at the start of my day. I've been keeping a simple diary (did this, did that) for a year or two now but have never been very happy with it. This so far feels a nice addition to my morning routine. It helps me clarify and articulate my thoughts better. There is a markable difference between late-night tired worries and early morning, coffee/tea in hand worries, with the latter being much more important and worth thinking about. Since writing is a form of thinking for me I think this'll be a valuable new habit, not just in the short run.

Yesterday I realized which kind of contemplative mood I'm in. I always get contemplative when I am away from work for a while. I use the mental space I gain to endlessly ponder over bigger questions in life, as that's the only way I know how to deal with them productively. But it's always coloured by what's top of mind, and this week it's the woes of people in their thirties and early forties. Kids, building a family, thinking about what you've built up and what you still want to build up, that kind of thing. Devoured a book that was basically a collection of reflections and stories of someone turning forty, and I bought the game Eliza which has overlaps. It doesn't help that my mom is asking me out of the blue if we have wedding plans yet. Basically I'm looking for experience about settling down, while also realizing that I don't want to be gently coerced into doing so. Thus the need to figure out what part of that is for me and what part isn't. Put differently, I desparately don't want to be that friend of mine half brainwashed into wanting a mortgage equal her net salary in an overheated market, or the other friend getting a divorce because it just didn't work out anymore.

veen  ·  1310 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: All of my spam is now in German

Zukunftig werde ich dich Gübster zu nennen. Das ist der einzige Weg.

veen  ·  1330 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August 5, 2020

My summer holiday starts in ten days. We have pushed Covid down hard, but now a bunch of metrics are picking up again as people come back from holidays abroad and young people are gathering and going to parties kinda like the old days. They're now at similar levels as they were ten days before my previous holiday early March. R has been above 1 since July 1st. Not looking forward to a second wave.

This time around we're staying in the country, going camping somewhere in the remote parts that were almost unscathed last time around. Away from business and people for sure. When we come back, my sister's getting married; really hoping for her that that day won't be ruined.

veen  ·  1372 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 24, 2020

Helped my SO's parents move the other day. They live about 45 minutes drive away, and we're now in an electric car sharing programme and a public transport semi-lockdown so we reserved a car. There's a bunch of Renault Zoe's but there's also a few Model 3's and since I'd only driven a Model S as a test drive, I was eager to try it out.

I came to realize that Tesla fundamentally likes technology more than experience, whereas other high end electric cars have the opposite. And while I thought I did so too, and for example really like a bunch of software tricks the car has up its sleeve, the total package just isn't as good as it could be. It relies too much on the mega-ipad to get anything done - to open the fucking passenger seat box you need to dig around menus to find the software button. The steering wheel has two nipples and you're just left to figure out what every interaction does. There's nameless buttons in the software too, and there's no easy way to see your remaining range and power consumption. Or to do anything useful while driving other than what you can do by arousing the steering wheel.

In other news - I'm on track to hand in the revised, hopefully-final version of my peer reviewed academic paper in next week. A final proofread and i-dotting and we should be fit for print!

It's also mildly hot here. I realized early April that I'd go ravingly mad if I'd had to work from home in my non-AC'ed apartment in the summer, so I got a mobile unit. They're all marked up or sold out now, while I got it at a good discount. Yay foresight!

veen  ·  1376 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Voting Age

I'd argue you have much bigger problems on your hands regarding giving everyone a fair chance at voting in the first place.

veen  ·  1415 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The dam breaks: Twitter Will Allow Employees To Work At Home Forever

Those two experiences can live in parallel. I used to have 2 or 3 days WFH to get shit done, and 2 or 3 days at the office to see people. I do my own time-tracking, so I can even quantify the degree to which my office days are less productive, yet I still choose to go there. Not to concentrate, but to grease the wheels of projects and work relations by being there in-person.

I think it's detrimental to a team to go all-remote when the grey area of sometimes-remote contains the best of both worlds.

veen  ·  1440 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski Craft Fair v4.5 - April 17, 2020

Painted my last wall tonight, hoping it dries up neatly. Lesson learnt: don't ever fucking paint your walls with heavy grain textured paint because it is a drag to repaint what is essentially sandpaper. After two layers of primer I still had to buy double the amount of paint.

Will post pics somewhere this weekend once I've cleaned up our mess!

veen  ·  1468 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay

veen  ·  1512 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski, February 5, 2020

I'm rushing through the Ruhr valley at 300kph on the German high speed train network, on my way back from our yearly company ski trip to Austria. After weeks of mild weather and little to no snow, the weather decided to drop all snow all at once with 8-9 BFT wind and some rain to go by. So I had one day of wet snow skiing, and one day of braille-skiing as my colleague called it (visually impaired, all white, and only being able to trust your extremities). But it went pretty darn good! My skiing lessons have definitely paid off, and I have made some damn good progress in these two years.

We had a 40 minute transfer time in Zurich today. I couldn't help myself but spend my first time in Switzerland buying a new watch that I've been eyeing for forever now; a small Mondaine watch in the SBB station clock design style. It fits my incredibly small wrist well (I recently found out my wrist diameter is a notch smaller than my girlfriends' wrist), and I not only love the design because it signals my love of trains but also because it's incredibly easy to read the time on quickly.

Yesterday the skiing weather was so sucky (not only iced up pistes, but also severe avalanche warnings and even more rain) that I finally got around to finishing up the submission details for my academic paper and handing it in to the journal. Fingers crossed! I kind of expect it to be thrashed, but let's see. I have something I'm proud of and that's what matters.

I wanted to post this too. There's a few red flags that makes me doubt their prowess, but it seems this is exactly what happens when people with no morals go into facial recognition tech.

veen  ·  1540 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: January 8, 2020

It's almost a tradition now, this idea of writing a letter to myself as a way to reflect on the year!

LEAVE IT IN 2019

I'll admit it, I have been in the red when it comes to work stress too much last year. We had a bit of a capacity issue in my team, so when my work is very hard to transfer and I see colleagues equally busy all I could do was work harder and grit my teeth. I've always wanted to be the kind of person people can trust, can fall back on, so I do whatever it takes to succeed in what I commit to. But when taken to an extreme that means I work too much and don't ask for help. I hope last year I've learned my lesson.

A bunch of things have fallen to the wayside last year. I haven't read as much as I'd like. I haven't excercised much. I was very slow to make progress on my academic paper; I spent half the amount of time in 2019 on it as I did in 2018. Gonna put more effort into that this year.

Another realization is that I judge my actions on their consequences and never on my intentions, and that that's hurting me more than I thought. If the result of my work is that people are happy with it, I'm happy with it as well. But if they're not, I am very quick to judge myself for it. If I hit all my goals for the day, I'm happy with it even if it cost me a tremendous amount of effort. If I don't hit my goals, even though I had a great workday, I still feel bad. Behind this fallacy? of mine is that results are controllable, and that results are all that matter. Which is not true - if I do my best, and the result doesn't work out, I still did my best.

Finally, I really want to cut down even more on meetings. For my yearly review I was scolling back through my calendar and was a bit surprised at the number of meetings that ended up not really mattering. There were many meetings I went to because I was invited, not because it was necessary for me to be there. I also want to create more breathing space for impromptu conversations and room to follow my curiosity.

BRING IT IN 2020

I feel like I've made a lot of progress this year as a person. 2019 was the year that I finally feel like a proper adult, instead of just a college student. It's a sense of responsibility but also of being able to fully support myself and the people I care about that I find freeing. I also feel like I'm much more comfortable being myself all the time. That I'm more confident, more true to my values, less hesitant to say or do what I want. As far as I'm concerned, my girlfriend is the kindest soul I know, and the way that rubs off on me is that I'm also more kind to myself.

Professionally I also made a leaps ahead. I feel like I can work much better with people now. I know my shit, and know when to call out other people's BS. I've given a bunch of talks in front of large (international) audiences which even a few years ago I would find incredibly challenging to even consider.

I have also started to break out of the expectation that I have to solve everything by myself all the time. My gf mentioned the other day that we've been conditioned for our entire lives in the school system to fix almost everything ourself and never ask for help, because that's cheating/plagiarizing. But now that I'm part of a company surrounded by smart and capable people, I would be foolish not to ask for help regularly. Last year I started which is why I want to continue to remind myself that not everything on my plate is mine to eat, that I can and should make things easier for myself by reaching for the resources that are all around me.

Because I worked a bit too much in 2019, I have a lot of paid off-days this year (almost fifty, actually). I'm looking forward to using the hell out of that to be more creative, do more fun stuff and travel some more this year.

veen  ·  1575 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 4, 2019

With all the conferences and talks and project presentations I've been doing this fall, I've always had a Next Thing In A Week or Two to work towards. That series of sprints ended with my trip to Belgium recently. Now I just have one minor presentation this Monday and then it's waiting for Christmas break to kick in. It's funny, as soon as short-term urgent matters drop to the wayside and I have some space to ponder my plans I always seem to overshoot and end up at the Big Questions of Life and What to Do with It.

It doesn't help that it's the end of the year. Maybe I'll write another reflection like I did the past two years, that was a useful exercise to do.