The good things in the current age in tech

Instead of responding to the comment, you engage in ad hominem - a classic sign of no argument.

You're right about that. Some projects work well enough for the person who wrote it and was kind enough to release the code, but they aren't necessarily interested in attracting a huge userbase. It's often "Hope this helps someone else out" and that's about it. Still, there are some incentives for writing and maintaining popular open source software. Bragging rights if nothing else.

> I just hope it's not related to the "Great Replacement" theory.

Would you not envision a hypothesis because you’re afraid of reaching the same conclusion? It’s pretty clear given the quantity of muggings/harassment in my neighborhood (formerly posh CBD) that it’s here, and 67% of French people in average think it’s happening (IPSOS 2021). The only question that raises people’s doubt is, was it intentional.

> Or do you agree it’s caused by human activities but you think it’s not going to be as bad as some people say?

I just despair that the people pushing it are constantly pushing other goals for society, goals that we didn’t approve, that have been kicked out by the main door and coming back through the window.

- Either it exists, and the complementary solution is to depopulate. Clearly the land cannot withstand so many people, and if you also have a humanist goal to offer each person a decent living, then each of them will need to emit for travels, consumption, heating. But that would be incompatible with their other goal which they also want to implement. To see whether people are ideologues using Global Climate Change (GCC) for political gains or whether they are genuinely solely fighting GCC, ask them whether they would be ok to make a concession on their ideology if it meant better fighting GCC. They don’t. They really want to overpopulate the land with people who vote for them, while asking others to do the efforts for climate. Again the only way to durably not weigh too much on this land in EU is to profit from the natural decline of population to lessen the burden on Earth.

- Either those global changes are stronger than us and independent of our atmospheric CO2, after all everything fluctuates naturally, and in 30 years, after limiting the development of the Western countries, they will tell us “We’ve solved it.” Or “You didn’t do enough”, it doesn’t matter since they won’t be here.

I have studied the science side of other similar topics and I can confirm it is possible to reach wrong scientific solutions for political gain, at a massive university/researchers scale, convincing everyone from the lowerclass to the world leaders. It wouldn’t be the first time.

So, if someone uses fear and the sense of urgency to trigger an action from you that severely hampers your life, it’s important to find its opposite and study it too.

One thing which is clear, the people currently pushing are not going to solve it.

There are a few good things, but mostly, much of the modern tech is nasty and just not good - honestly. I am in my 60's now, and still remain a pure hacker of tech - really. I built a working IEC fusion reactor in my basement, I run a 12+ node LAN at the Farm, and recently bought another car. I love the idea of Tesla, and the F-150 Lightening, but the Tesla SUV is $120,000 in Canada, and that is just too much. But I do have Elon Musk's Starlink dish, and it is just magic wonderful. It's $145 per month here, but we can afford that. Some tech is truly great - but an awful lot is just terrible. You need to know this. And it gets worse each year. Honestly, aeriously. My partner has a MacBook Air - the SSD just died. We are lucky, since it is a 2012 version. We just ordered a 250gb upgrade (and the damn little 5-point screwdriver to open the back of the damn thing. But we expect to be able to fix it fine. But since 2018, the vermin at Apple have been soldering the (failure prone) SSD chips to the mainboard. We find the old-tech is good ( I run mostly Linux boxes - for various needs). Honestly, everything is getting crappy and nasty. You need to appreciate what I saw when younger - the first Moon landing - and the last on in 1972, with the electric car on the moon. It's 2021, and we could not go to the moon, if Earth's life depended on it. I watched and experienced the transition from propeller drive Viscount aircraft, to DC-9s, and then 747's. As a kid in University, I flew to England, on Wardair, and we drank cheap drinks in the upstairs lounge for most of the flight. Way better than Concorde! I put email into a major Gov't Ministry (as an independent consultant, and I watched it make major changes, as a stiff, old-world style org was flatlined by the technology (we used Novell Networks). We installed a DecSystem 2020, and changed completely how a big, powerful group operated. We watched the Space Shuttles debut, and promise space-travel for all nations, with the ISS, which was billed as a stepping stone to the planets and maybe even the stars. I bought and demonstrated a Z80 Northstar 64K, with a working Pascal compiler which could do what the DEC 2020 could do, at a tiny fraction of the cost. We saw the disruption of the disruptive tech that was only a few years old. I paid $6000 for an initial IBM 5150 P/C, with dual drives, which had a Fortran compiler, which was solid and good and gave the right answers. And I bought one of the first lunch-box sized cellphones, which was just awesome, science-fiction level cool - and then replaced it in a few years with a Motorola handset - and then a flip-phone. The technology was wonderful, it was reliable, and bloody well made. Now, it is crap. Seriously. It still is sort-of workable, but I find everything has some kind of trick, or some kind of gotchya worm built into it now. Stuff fails regularly. Products are released, and the public customers are used as testers. Early versions of anything now are riddled with bugs, flaws, and are horribly, badly engineered. Boeing builds expensive aircraft on the cheap, and the dogshit crappy software flies perfectly fine aircraft into the ground. The USA gives up on space - were it not for Elon Musk, they would have no civilian space transport to the ISS. Electronics are built with custom ASIC chips, not industry standard hardware - so that failure in in-built, and hardware has to be thrown away every few years. The internet, which promised knowledge and access-for-all, has morphed into a shit-stained back alley, dominated by scammers and hard-core criminals. Everything good, useful or honest is behind a paywall. I have to grit my teeth to use it now. This was not how it was supposed to be. It's wonderful to see the videos on the little helicopter flying on Mars - really very amazing. But exploring by sending robots is tragic and cowardly - and offers so little. Honestly - we need to change the program. We need to deregulate basically everything. Everything. It sounds crazy, but otherwise, the future is going to be 20 or 30 billion people, choking on their own fumes, fighting over the few remaining resources. We need to drive the technology forward with a military-grade urgency. I know it's possible, because I saw it happen when I was young. And it is not happening now.

Taxi prices and permits are government regulated so there's no free market competition per se. The density of urban areas and the fact that people generally don't own cars help quite a bit since taxis are considered (somewhat) part of the public transport system and hence often utilized by the public (which I suppose means that taxi drivers idle less and this drives down the cost?) The cars are generally cheap (but reasonably sturdy) Toyotas, often old models, so the price of the vehicle doesn't drive up the costs. (I recall some places use luxury brands?)

Interestingly quite a few taxi drivers drive a taxi not so much for the money (it always helps) but rather to ward off boredom post-retirement (flipping properties in HK used to be almost as profitable as flipping crypto). This might be "competition" of sorts but not sure. I think drivers generally make slightly higher than median income if they work long hours, but don't know how it compares with other places.

The service level is generally shit though, some drivers literally refuse to make money if they deem your request a bit out of the ordinary (eg. refusing to take you for a short ride even if the fare per distance is higher than that of a long distance ride).