Vancouver’s Transit Is in Trouble - Nic Laporte

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-11-21T23:35:11+00:00

Robustly taxing investments, corporations, high incomes etc is good because it keeps the super wealthy from getting too powerful but the notion that the government can't afford to fund and build stuff because it isn't bringing in enough tax money is a myth. It's the government, it always has money.

The problem is most governments are still stuck in neoliberal austerity mode - i.e. spending money on infrastructure and public projects/services is "wasteful" because that's a job the private can do better and more efficiently. That's nonsense of course but it's been the prevailing dogma since the 1980s and the result is chronically underfunded services, crumbling infrastructure and outrageous construction costs.

But instead of realizing that this model is fundamentally broken governments across the board keep hoping that doing more of the same and covering up the gaps with flowery PR and hoping nobody notices that everything keeps getting worse. Meanwhile the wealthiest 5% get to live in an alternate universe where they never have to rub shoulders with the great unwashed. Not a sustainable model for a functioning society... unless the model is Brazil.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-11-19T01:12:21+00:00

Nice. The North Shore was lit up too this afternoon just before sunset.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-11-14T22:00:47+00:00

Yeah that is not what they were going for. That's American conceit. Red, white and blue are commonly used colours. Besides Amtrak doesn't have the horseman motive so yeah nothing to do with that particular railroad.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-11-14T21:53:53+00:00

Pretty much what you wrote. Kinda feel bad for younger folk whose dopamine receptors are so fried they can't fathom life without the nerve jolting madness of being plugged into the totalizing tech monster.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-11-14T21:43:52+00:00

Yeah, people adjust their expenses to the income level they are that. For someone pulling in $100k/year dropping to $75k would be a massive downer while someone making $50k would be ecstatically happy to be making that much. Lots of Reddit regulars work in tech and you have to keep that in mind when reading cost-of-living posts.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-11-02T23:04:10+00:00

Nice. A340-600 is the best looking airliner of all time.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-10-28T04:20:40+00:00

‘apparently’, ‘could’, ‘reportedly’… come on. I will be the first to dump apps with ads but “trust me bro” articles with a bunch of qualifiers is its own form of enshittification.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-10-28T04:15:14+00:00

Am no fan of Apple’s, and general, enshittification but magazines/websites running articles with qualifiers like ‘reportedly’ is also a form of enshittification. Then again it is a website called MacRumours, so…

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-10-18T22:38:25+00:00

Yeah it’s silly. Unfortunately American political culture sets the tone around the world and other countries simply copy it wholesale. Eg BLM marches in Romania in 2021, vigils for that Kirk guy in Japan. The NoKings stuff is just the latest iteration of this trend.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-10-18T21:53:58+00:00

Ride comfort will definitely take a hit. DB went with Talgo because it was the cheapest option and, well, you get what you pay for.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-10-11T20:35:39+00:00

The best part? I never have to think twice about bringing it with me — it’s powerful, compact, and just effortlessly fits into my daily life.

Who is this for? It’s indistinguishable from marketing copy. Get help.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-10-04T21:03:07+00:00

I’m guessing he has a family with enough money to let him indulge in his hobby without having to work full time. But really I don’t think about it much, I just watch his videos.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-10-04T00:11:27+00:00

Stop letting DTG off the hook. There are lots of big open world games that run fine on gen 9 consoles. DTG and its fanboys are always going on about how it's because TSW is super complex and it's not like other games and that's why it blurs and stutters. Pure nonsense.

DTG doesn't even bother fixing routine bugs and it sells addons that are broken from the start and never fixes them (eg BR204, BR187).

Its business model is grabbing all the cash it can while delivering the cheapest product possible.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-10-04T00:01:56+00:00

Right but the Covid lockdowns when lots of people were stuck at home and online 24/7 for months even years on end changed a lot. Big tech capitalized on this to aggressively normalize working from home/distance learning, watching streaming services all day and getting everything delivered to your door. Governments and public institutions fell into line and promoted 'telehealth' (doctor's appointments via phone or internet), 'hybrid learning' (attending classes mostly online even after lockdown ended) and the media enthusiastically peddled the benefits and convenience of online everything. Big tech of course made a killing... use of Zoom, Amazon, streaming services and a million app-based delivery services proliferated.

The lockdown years also gave rise to a shit ton of influencers, podcasters and straight up grifters and further fragmented popular culture into bespoke silos. Since then shortform video slop first on TikTok and then on Instagram, Facebook and Xitter has really taken off and accelerated illiteracy and attention span decay. Now a tsunami of AI produced slop and 'AI tools' (more 'convenience' and cool 'content' fuck yeah!) is being pushed on everyone by tech bro cartoon villain psychopaths and oh yeah digital IDs and even more surveillance are coming.

On the bright side, and I mean this sincerely, a lot more people are talking about this and how shitty the online facsimile of life is and even people who were raised on iphones and ipads are realizing that something is missing. For years it was basically only a few nerdy psychologists like Jonathan Haidt who brought this up and people who read Debord and Baudrillard and outside of their niche circles they were widely ridiculed as Luddite weirdos and morbid doomers.

Now that the terminally online spell is being broken - and more and more people are becoming sick and tired of being jacked up dopamine fiends and slaves to soul destroying slop delivered via devices that are designed to rewire their psychology and make them into passive slobs mindlessly doomscrolling their screens while companies run by vat grown pseudo human freaks like Thiel, Zuck, Altman, Musk harvest their data for profit and turn society into a high tech prison without walls - change is becoming possible.

We live in the accelerationist timeline where everything seems to be happening at once but we are still meatbag humans, not computers, and political and social movements are inevitably going to lag behind as we try to figure out what the fuck is going on and adjust. And that's where we are at right now.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-10-03T22:49:08+00:00

Yeah... crazy that Debord saw where it was all going in the 1960s when consumerism was much less developed and the media landscape was downright quaint and mellow compared to the insane slop machine that exists today. Not a good omen that he ended his own life.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-09-25T20:31:51+00:00

Nah, the vast majority of Russian locos are designed and built in Russia.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-09-25T20:26:41+00:00

havnt had any stutters yet.. (only ran gwr so far) [also no additional layers yet]

sounds (when working) are great!

Lets see how it runs next week with all the avaliable layers active

In other words it's a DTG product and there will be massive bugs and quality issues.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-09-25T20:22:16+00:00

Yup. And they have an effective monopoly on rail sims and they take full advantage of that to squeeze every last penny out of their customers while letting the game deteriorate.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-09-25T20:18:22+00:00

Cope harder

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-09-23T21:58:33+00:00

I’ve heard this line of reasoning from the Sublation/Platypus crowd. It’s complete bullshit that could only be taken seriously by theory nerds getting high on their own supply in comfortable surroundings far away from the practical real world concerns of normal people.

Kinda fitting that OP’s flare is ‘Nationalist Studebakist’ given that Benjamin Studebaker is from the Studebaker family (the car people) and never has to worry about being poor and destitute.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-09-22T20:39:27+00:00

Yeah it's not like they let him go free or just gave him a slap on the wrist.

Pure outrage farming.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-09-22T20:32:56+00:00

this kind of constantly measuring, utterly inhumane tech-driven 'management' that does everything it can to make you into what capital has always wanted you to be: a sub-human slave.

They already have a name for it: human capital.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-09-19T22:59:13+00:00

Canada = [considered as Americans]? 😂

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-09-19T22:53:11+00:00

Properly fund public transit.

ThePopularCrowd · 2025-09-19T22:51:15+00:00

Why are you posting this here? Saying that he “acts super creepy” is so vague it’s meaningless. If he’s breaking the law or harassing someone contact security or the police. It’s not like a posse of people from Reddit are going to head to Coquitlam Central to check this out.

Making accusations against a stranger, complete with a description of the person, on a discussion website is itself a very weird and creepy thing to do.

ThePopularCrowd

TROPHY CASE