You just have to look at the state of transport for those outside of London, even within the M25 to see this has nothing to do with rhetoric.
Sure "war on drivers" may be the wrong phrase, but there is nothing being done to encourage those who are not privileged, or live in London where transport is excellent, to use alternative means.
ULEZ, high insurance, fuel, tax, neglect of infrastructure, unfair parking charges for old/non-electric vehicles, etc, for those who can't afford electric vehicles or for whom they're not practical, who have older vehicles because that's what their budget allows for, and who require them for their trade, or because they have to travel further to find work, those for whom it's cheaper to drive than pay exorbitant rail fairs, at the cost of their time due to greedy rail providers with poor services, I'm sure for them it can feel like a war against them.
It's easy for those who live in London, or are able to cycle or walk everywhere they want/need to say; I lived in London for ten years and never needed to own a car; but for those out in the rest of the country, who have a family, have a disability, work in different locations day to day, or a plethora other reasons, that's just not reality.
What you're describing isn't a war on drivers just poor infrastructure and bad decisions. For all these issues no alternatives have been made no ones benefiting.
I've already pointed out that may have been the wrong phrase, but, I'm not suggesting anyone's winning, but plenty are losing by stupid decisions consistently being made, that disproportionately affect the under-privileged.
I'm not talking about drivers vs cyclists, or whatever, I'm talking about people who _need_ to drive for their livelihood; it shouldn't be reserved for those of us who can afford the annual insurance increases, nice new or electric cars and what-not, UNLESS something is being done to replace the need to drive, and it just isn't.
I'm not pro-driving and drivers, I'm pro not making stupid moves from a position of privilege while others are left in the dirt. "War on drivers" was just the catch-phrase that came to mind, and I failed to elaborate my point, that was my mistake, but it seems everyone has latched onto those three words and missed the forest for the trees, or just made some other assumption like I'm hating on cyclists or something that is sometimes associated with that phrase.
But using 'war on drivers' is very politocally charged slogen that stands for opposition the pretty much anything to with anything other then 'more highways'. Its literally a far right wing slogan.
I agree that there are lots of unneed subsidies for rich electric car buyers. And investment for those people.
Parking however geneally should be far more expensive, they are massive actually gigantic subsidy that drivers have been benefiting from for decades.
Insurance increases could be reduced by having less accident in total, meaning slower streets, better road design, more bycicles. Not sure what else governments should do about insurance. The NHS is already a huge subsidy for drivers over people who use public tranist or walk.
Better public bus networks are prettu urgent, and thats something even the tories realized. That can do a lot for making people need to drive less.
In terms of infrastructure funding, road networks and highways get a lot and have been getting a lot continiously for 50 years. Its just infrastructure that degrades very fast.
I am not against maintaining existing roads and highways but absolutly no new highways should be built. And new roads only in a few exeptional circumstances.
I would say things like low concetion zones, road diets, bike lanes and change like that are actually good for drivers.
These are all things 'war on cars' people normally are against.
I would suggest that we make it so cars are far more expensive if they are large and heavy. And that includes EVs. Poor people should be encouraged to drive small cars even if they are not EVs.
What things do you think should be done (or not done) for poor drivers?
Well today I learned something; and I'm about as far from far right as one can be.
> What things do you think should be done (or not done) for poor drivers?
What you've said makes sense, and I agree with it all. As for poor drivers, a quick thought would be: We make public transport so good they don't need to drive, and for those who must, perhaps subsidise some purpose-built EVs (small vans, milk floats etc) that enable them to work (and in many cases provide an important service).
None of that is a short term goal, but I don't see any progress towards it, even in the medium term, try not to make driving for work unaffordable, but perhaps restrict the driving of "problem" vehicles to work-only; not everyone can cycle or get a bus to work, and not everyone can work from home.
It seems to be the status quo in this country (and probably others) to push on with banning/restricting things that are bad, for brownie points, without actually doing anything about replacing the purpose they serve.
Ultimately it doesn't matter and that battle is already lost, even adults overly trust the output and never question it. I've had colleagues insist to my face that something wasn't possible in a piece of software I'm an expert in because ChatGPT told them it wasn't possible.
I think Engineering a Compiler is a great next step after Crafting Interpreters. It's both easier to get into (in terms of writing style and structure) and, as you say, generally more practical than the Dragon Book.
Do you have any thoughts about how to read some of the next step books like Engineering a Compiler/Dragon Book? I don't normally read large technical books end to end so I'm curious how others approach it. I am going through Crafting Interpreters right now and I like how it has well defined checkpoints that help me know that I can move on when I understand the current material. I skimmed Engineering a Compiler and it looks like it has exercises as well, do you recommend all/some of those, or any other methods?
Also I did some searching to see past discussions of Engineering a Compiler and found this interesting comment thread from Bob Nystrom for anyone interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725581
I think everyone has to pick a strategy for consuming material that works best for their brain. For me, when I read textbooks, I tend to read them front to back. Only a fraction of it sticks on the first read through, but I accept that. I've tried to go really slow and do all of the exercises to make it all stick, but I usually just run out of steam and give up. I'd rather just get through the whole thing.
Then, in the future, when I find myself needing some concept from the book, I usually remember at least that it is in the book. Then I go back and read that part more carefully. Now that it's relevant to a real problem I have, I tend to remember it much better after the second read through.
Thanks for the perspective, I sometimes have completionist tendencies so it's hard to skim without feeling I'm missing parts, but also it can certainly lead to motivation running out at times. And thanks for Crafting Interpreters, I am really enjoying it so far!
Indeed, while simultaneously doing little of note to address the issue (beyond further propping up the house of cards with schemes like the lifetime ISA).
* Significant white space, and the rules around whitespace are very convoluted.
* There's no pattern or regularity to how infix / prefix / suffix operators are used which makes splitting program text into self-contained sub-programs virtually impossible if you don't know the exact behavior, including priority of each operator.
* There's a tradition of exceptionally bad names for variables, inherited from the realm of mathematical formulas. In mathematics, it's desirable to give variables names devoid of everyday meaning to emphasize the generic nature of the idea being expressed. This works in the context of very short formulas, but breaks entirely in the context of programs which are usually many orders of magnitude bigger than even the largest formula you've ever seen. There, having meaningful names is a life west.
* It's impossible to make a good debugger for Haskell because of the language being "lazy". Debuggers are essential tools that help programmers in understanding the behavior of their programs. Haskell programmers are forced to rely on their imagination when explaining to themselves how their program works.
* Excessive flexibility. For example, a Haskell programmer may decide to overload string literals (or any literals for that matter). This is orders of magnitude worse than eg. overloading operators in C++, which is criticizes for defying expectations of the reader.
One of these points would've been enough for me to make the experience of working with a language unpleasant. All of them combined is a lot more than unpleasant.
From the point of view of writing a parser, Haskell's whitespace syntax seems like a hack. So, the grammar is defined with braces and semicolons, and to implement significant whitespace, the lexer inserts opening braces and semicolons at the start of each line according to some layout rules. That's not the hacky part; what makes it a hack is that to insert closing braces, the lexer inserts a closing brace when the parser signals an error. You can read about it here [0].
Also, on an aesthetic level, I think a lot of infix operators are kind of ugly. Examples include (<$>), ($), and (<*>). I think Haskell has too many infix operators. This is probably a result of allowing user-definable operators. I do like how you can turn functions into infix operators using backticks, though (e.g. "f x y" can be written as "x `f` y").
Agreed. Electric cars are frankly a pretty poor solution to the issue of carbon emissions. A far better, more long term solution already exists - high density, walkable neighbourhoods and high frequency, well run public transport systems.
Am I missing something? Is it not just a glorified fitness tracker? I can certainly understand privacy concerns but I don't get how a smart watch is the signifier of a 'broken' world.
While I agree, depending on where you're staying, 'aparthotels' (hotels where rooms have little kitchens) are becoming increasingly widespread and affordable - can be a good alternative to Airbnb for long stays in many cases.
Indeed. I haven't looked too much into this particular site, but I don't really see the utility of this kind of service in most large Western cities. I've rented in Zurich and am looking for somewhere in Munich - unless your budget is particularly high, it's very much a matter of just taking whatever you can get. From what I've heard, this is the case in many/most large American cities too.
Agreed. UK tabloids are an absolute blight. I wouldn't generally advocate for the censorship of reporting on such a case, but if it's going to happen, then tabloid 'newspapers' would be at the top of the list of organisations to restrict.
