Neither. The highway engineer got told to add a bike lane, said "ugh fine" and scribbled it along the side without thinking about it.
Nobody's expecting these to be used, it's some quota where they have to build X number of kms of bike lane so the politicians can placate us and hope nobody notices.
Why does it fail any more than all the other dumb American pickup trucks that also fail at being pickup trucks?
It's OK to go into debt over a depreciating asset if you can afford to default on the loan, and it substantially improves your ability to make money. Businesses do it all the time. If a sole trader could work better with the cybertruck for some reason(I've got nothing) and could borrow off their house as collateral, that's a financially savvy business decision.
But a lot of people fall victim to predatory marketing. We need to recognize that it's not just them being dumb, they were manipulated, tricked and lied to by a powerful machine.
The same thing is true here. A novice shouldn't be hosting their own instance, heck a experienced user shouldn't host their own instance unless they want a hobby.
Because it matters to the end user that all the instances are cross compatible, that's the federated part. When I first heard of Lemmy and Mastadon as "self hosted social media", I assumed that all the instances were isolated, and dismissed it as pointless. Once I learned what federation was, possibly through the email analogy, I was instantly onboard.
We're not at a stage where you can make full use of these platforms without having a basic understanding of how they work. A disinterested idiot is going to go " WTF is an instance, why is [whatever instance they landed on] so empty" and give up. The email analogy is useful for the interested skeptic and they're the people that are most likely to stick around.
In this thread the email analogy has been criticized for being not technically accurate enough and too technically accurate. That suggests it's about right.
Maybe I'm optimistic here, but I feel like most users of email and Facebook understand that you can send email from Gmail to Outlook and that those are different services, but you can't send a Facebook(message? story? idk I don't use Facebook) to a Twitter user.
I can't think of a better way to explain that activitypub is an open and cross-compatible protocol. The only other big cross-compatible protocol is the web(HTML etc), but that's hopeless, half of people don't seem to understand what a browser is.
Conservative in politics means resistance to social change. Resistance to infrastructure change is colloquially called NIMBY. A conservative in the US would generally be pro more roads, as that's doing more of the same.
Email is the only federated social platform that every normal person is familiar with. It doesn't matter that the technical specifications are completely different. The metaphor goes as far as "in the fediverse anyone signed up with any instance can communicate with anyone on any other instance, like email". For that purpose, it's a good metaphor.
When electric buses start making round trips from every main city to every suburb on a set reliable and convenience schedule,
How fucked up is your city that this doesn't already exist? That's not a pipe dream, it's the bare minimum. Your local government has failed, please go riot in the streets.
That's certainly one cause, but culture is as well. The American dream of a quarter acre in the quiet leafy suburbs, easy commute to work by car on the freeway, has been a pervasive part of culture for a long time. It's only recently that we've started appreciating the unsustainable reality of that idea.
They meant Citizens United v. FEC, a supreme court case that allowed much more election advertising.
Depends on the train obviously, but a lot less than cars at anywhere close to capacity. Why do you ask? Just look at the Wikipedia page for whichever rolling stock you were thinking of.