The irony being, of course, that it is surrounded by an area where it is basically impossible to get by without a car.
My wife and I once left Gatlinburg after a week there and our tire blew out on the way out of town. It was a Sunday morning. Literally our only option to get it replaced that day was a Walmart location 15 miles away. So we had to wait for AAA for an hour and a half to tell us we were stuck using a donut to get there.
Minor observation: you were in east TN, so chances are if you'd stood by your car with your thumb out, the next car would have stopped and happily offered you a ride to Walmart. (Said as someone who's hauled more than a few random people where they needed to get to in east TN)
Part of Tennessee's charm is how far you can get with a smile and "Gosh, I hate to bother you, but could you..."
Isn't that standard though? If I get a flat, I hop out and replace it with a spare. Then I drive to a shop to have that flat tire either patched or replaced entirely.
I know some new models don't include spares, but they often have run flats and temp sealant kits included.
Ya, changing a flat tire was once part of learning to drive. Also, manual transmissions, jumpstarting, swapping a fuse, and basic low-speed maneuvers like rocking out of snowbanks or crossing large potholes. All that is now gone. Most care owners dont know what a tow eye is, let alone where to find one. It is so bad that there are now university-level "adulting" courses for millenials. First up: changing a tire.
> It was a Sunday morning. Literally our only option to get it replaced that day was a Walmart location 15 miles away. So we had to wait for AAA for an hour and a half to tell us we were stuck using a donut to get there.
I would describe that as "inconvenient" but actually very fortunate!
Walmart was only 15 miles away? You have a donut/spare, or AAA has provided you with one? That's lucky! Nowhere near "problem" territory at all.
Just an interruption to your schedule, but that happens on road trips.
But it does sound like you didn't know how to repair a flat. Any hardware store and most gas stations will have either a plug kit, or some of that horrible blow-in sealant in a can. Either will get you back on the within an hour.
(Fyi, if anyone reading this does ever use that sealant stuff, when you get to a proper repair shop TELL THEM about the sealant before I pop the bead and spray it all over the shop.)
I would add a jumpstart kit and/or cables, preferably with the knowledge of how to use them safely. (Even teslas occasionally need to be jumped.) On long drives I also bring a small fire extinguisher (I take the one from my kitchen). Never had to use it but you don't need it until you do.
Most mechanics charge double time for working Sunday, even if they had not work at all the previous week (which doesn't happen, but if it did). Retail is open weekend, but mechanics like just about everyone else wants to work their 9-5 monday-friday job so they get weekends off.
In the US, I've only lived in Chicago, Portland (OR), San Francisco, Dallas, NYC, and Auburn, but I don't think I have ever seen an automobile garage open on a Sunday unless it was a WalMart, Sam's, or Costco.
Where do you live that has garages open on a Sunday morning? I don't think I've ever seen a tire shop or auto repair place (other than the big box and wholesale warehouse places) that's open on a Sunday.
I decided to take a very non-representative sample, and found that in many (but not all) parts of northern California, locations of the chain tire shop that I use are closed on Sundays, but most locations in the LA area are open 7 days a week. This chain has a lot of locations. It could be that they're responding to what their competitors do in both cases. So maybe getting tires on Sunday is a so-cal thing? TBH, I personally am more used to expecting the tire shop to be open 7 days a week, unless it was a small, locally-owned place.
LA is an anomaly. Most places are 5-6 days a week, tops. Around where I'm at currently, if the place is open on Saturdays, they're closed on Monday to compensate. There's a lot of those
The problem was less that we had to replace it and more that it was a fairly significant distance away. (A distance made longer because we weren’t on the freeway but heavily trafficked roads in a tourist-heavy area.) We were near downtown Gatlinburg, and there were places that were closer, but they were all closed because it was a Sunday.
We also would have had a better shot at not having our tire blow out if the closest gas station wasn’t 10 miles away.
15 miles is nothing on a spare tire. I'm not sure how many poor people you've spent time around, but I regularly see Nissan sedans driving around with multiple spare donuts on them.
Oh I know. Carlos Ghosn got them to focus more on the fleet market. I'll always be a Toyota/Lexus man, but I owned a Datsun wagon for a while and I followed the industry closely when I ran an import repair shop (which was never open on a Saturday or Sunday).
It's wild how that one man managed to change the entire path of a once great brand.
I think of it as one too many levels of management. At some point, your nearest understanding of the business is powerpoints about powerpoints about powerpoints... and then dumb ideas start to seem reasonable.
My husband and I were driving a camouflaged CUCV (military bronco) from VA to WV around Thanksgiving. Towing a trailer full of stuff and had four large dogs.
The truck died. In Virginia, one mile from the WV line. Someone picked me up and dropped me off at the first gas station so I could call AAA. I had to talk with several CSRs; the last one told me the closest tow truck was in Charlottesville, hours away from where we were on I64. I was beet red, smoking like a chimney, and making up curse words.
Once we kinda agreed that there was likely a closer alternative, the young woman asked how the tow truck driver would identify the truck since it was camo. I told the men, they chuckled, and I told her it was CAMO, it was not covered by a cloaking device. I hung up.
The young man at the gas station/coffee shop called a local tow truck and we were dropped at Gate 3 of fair grounds in Fairlee, WV.
Ended up that the camo/cloaking device paled in comparison to the later challenge: It was the first day of hunting season and most garages were closed during the week of Thanksgiving.
Exactly, more rails would not be useful because there is lower density in the US. Denmark is 141 persons/km^2, whereas the U.S. is about 36 persons/km^2 (census data).
Even if you built train lines everywhere outside urban areas, any stop you step off at would still require a 20 minute drive to get to where you are going. (Or in your case 15!)
You could make the same argument about highways if you didn’t have the massive federal funding. Maintenance of an interstate averages around $15,000 per lane/mile. Bridges are 7-12x.
We had a viable rail network all over the country as recently as the early 1950s. Federal policy blew it up because dispersing the population was seen as a civil defense priority for an atomic war, and cars and airplanes provided an economic engine to keep workers and returning soldiers employed.
Later, the shift to rural industry and trucking was a way to break unions. Meatpacking transformed from a good union gig back to an oppressive industry fueled by undocumented labor. If the workers acted up, the owners would realize they knew where a bunch of undocumented people lived and call in INS/ICE.
Also google the “Clay report”, there’s a bunch of books and sources from there.
At this point, (1955) bombers and fission bombs were the threat. That’s why we had AT&T invest in hardened long lines facilities, shelters and duck and cover.
The reality of hydrogen bombs and ICBMs kind of took the wind out of sails of civil defense. You’re not going to drive out of Manhattan with 20 minutes notice and get to a place where you’ll survive. This really affected the people associated with this — the think tank guys at RAND and other places assumed they’d all be dead by the mid 1970s, and I can’t help to think that it didn’t affect their points of view.
If Denmark population 6 million people and 141 people per/km^2 has zero issue with trains then Florida a flat state population 22 million population density 163/km^2 should be full of them.
And it’s not alone. MD has 6 million people and 246/km^2, Massachusetts 7 million 347/km^2, New Jersey 9.3 million and 488 people / km^2.
Further, if you consider the road network the overwhelming majority of roads are in high populations density areas. NYC alone has ~1/6 as many road miles as the entire interstate highway system which criss cross the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System It’s a classic edge to surface area problem, 10,000 acre farms need 1/100 the roads per acre as 1 acre suburban homes. The same kind of scaling applies to rail networks.
There are plenty of places where it would make sense, actually, but Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg are very much not on that list. They are towns surrounded by mountains where once you get off the strip, you may not even run into a gas station or grocery store for a while.
Also, that was 15 miles, not 15 minutes. I think it took us more than an hour to get there with all the traffic. Excellent example of a tourist trap.
It’s not just surrounded by mountains, it’s just outside the border of Great Smokey Mountains National Park. It’s essentially a dead end for rail because to continue on you need to either go up a mile in elevation in a very short span or tunnel mountains inside a national park.
One of the worst places for rail east of the Mississippi.
It is funny the author chose Denmark as an example because Greenland is technically a territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, and with Greenland included the Kingdom of Denmark has a population density of 2.68 per km^2.
Does this mean it is not worthwhile to build public transit in the European part of Denmark? If not, then why does the population density of the entire US matter in a discussion about Tennessee, a state 80% denser than the American average?
By the way, Finland has both a smaller economy and a way lower population density (18.4 per km^2) than Denmark and the US. Would railways be not useful in Finland because of that?
The US is a very large country. If you limited your population density numbers east of the Mississippi and the fast west coast from California to Washington you will discover population densities very similar to parts of Europe that have great transit.
This is good to have. A few months ago I was testing a S3 alternative but running into issues getting it to work. Turned out it was because AWS made changes to the tool that had the effect of blocking non-first-party clients. Just sheer chance on my end, but I imagine that was infuriating for folks who have to rely on that client. There is an obvious need for a compatible client like this that AWS doesn’t manage.
I mean, threads can be awkward discussion mediums, but what’s democratizing about them is that they can atomize engagement. If every tweet is a roll of the dice, it raises your odds of reaching an audience when you have a bunch of them. And if you hook someone with just one, odds are that user will be super-engaged by the end.
It’s also worth noting that social networks like Twitter tend to discourage just sharing links, whereas a thread that sucks someone in REALLY engages them. It’s interesting that he chose to cite Doctorow here, who is probably one of the more aggressive thread-sharers around. On Mastodon, where he still does it, it can clearly feel like a lot, especially given that there’s no algorithm.
On Bluesky, threads are honestly a little less effective because links are not downranked. But the downside is that people may never click the link, leading to context collapse. Some of that is on you, the creator, to set the expectation. Some of that is on the end user. But the algorithm (yes, Bluesky has one) can make it hard for you personally to set that tone.
As a blogger/newsletter guy with a decent-sized audience, I tend to favor Kev’s stance. But I think you have to consider what social networks are doing—and how much it reshapes/misshapes what you create. I don’t post on Threads because I find its algorithm too aggressive and believe it harms context (and it also discourages linking). But Bluesky and Mastodon are pretty good at avoiding that issue.
I actually helped with some of the beta testing for it. They worked on it very early on in the Apple silicon Mac lifecycle, and it hasn’t been updated in nearly half a decade. I consider it a proof of concept.
As a 20-year Mac enthusiast who knew a thing or two about Hackintoshing, Marcan got me excited about Linux. The idea that someone could just say, “we can solve this difficult problem and make it work, with little external help”? That is the core of FOSS right there, and he helped so much work happen, so quickly.
Loved following his various social feeds. I was sad when he stepped away from the fediverse. I hope he comes back as just a regular hacker without this massive weight on his back.
The problem with a list like this is that a “bad website” is in the eye of the beholder. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with you personally not liking the Shopify or the Semrush blog. But I think that everyone else has their own calculus.
It’s the same reason why social media blocklists can be problematic—everyone’s calculus is different.
My suggestion is that you promote it as a starter and suggest that users fork it for their own needs.
Seems like a kit that can be personalized across broad categories might be a better bet. By putting the onus on one list you don’t solve the main problem, which is that the list might block things you’re fine with.
Some kind of community notes consensus system could make sense here to find common ground. When a diverse set of people agree that a site should belong to the list, only then it is added.
Feel like the solution to this problem is probably to offer an app that turns magic links into notifications. As well as to probably untether the magic link from the cookie in the browser, so that you are not required to hit the magic link in the same browser that you called the link from.
Yes, this is correct. There seem to be a lot of people confused about the benefit of this in the thread, but it’s very simple: This tool exists essentially as a replacement for doing a full Hackintosh build of a system. You install Proxmox on a machine with a GPU, set this up, pass through the GPU and any other PCIe cards you want to run, and you’re in business.
It turns a days-long process into something that you can be up and running within like an hour. With OSX-KVM you have to set up the machine to be ready to do all the stuff like passthrough. This leverages the fact that Proxmox makes all that stuff super-simple.
It has to be AMD specifically, with some cards working better than others. Really old Nvidia cards work if you’re willing to go all the way back to High Sierra, though I haven’t tested it with this specific setup.
Intel iGPUs work on bare metal up until about tenth gen Core series, but I don’t know if you can pass them through with Proxmox.
My wife and I once left Gatlinburg after a week there and our tire blew out on the way out of town. It was a Sunday morning. Literally our only option to get it replaced that day was a Walmart location 15 miles away. So we had to wait for AAA for an hour and a half to tell us we were stuck using a donut to get there.
There is a trolley system but it is anemic.
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