With respect to the Apple ad, I don't think that was about AI at all - it was for the newest iPad Pro right?
I interpreted it as look at all these cool arts/creative things that we've managed to compress into a single sheet of glass. I sort of get how people interpreted it as just maliciously destroying those things as a means to an end, but that feels like an intentional reading of bad faith to a company that is generally very creativity-minded.
I wonder if it would have received less blow back if they had "hidden" the actual crushing of the objects and just showed them entering a chamber with an implied compression... but the visuals of everything exploding in the hydraulic press are pretty cool and a more dynamic way to convey the "look at what all we've packed into the product" message.
> I wonder if it would have received less blow back if they had "hidden" the actual crushing of the objects and just showed them entering a chamber with an implied compression...
Yes. You just wrote a better ad than Apple's highly paid agency.
In my opinion, marketing relies on targeting people's initial guttural feelings. That's why car commercials always show the cool part of driving, to activate the monkey brain "ooo shiny!" mentality.
So, I think criticisms of how people feel are fair game. Meaning if someone doesn't have a logical argument that's fine to me - because marketing is emotional manipulation anyway, so if your emotions got manipulated wrongly then the marketing failed.
> but that feels like an intentional reading of bad faith
I don't think it was an intentional reading in bad faith at all. I think the reaction is a result of the general public's existing perception of the state of things: big tech is here to monetize and worsen everything you love.
Whether or not that's an accurate perception, it is a very common one. The tech industry seems to view itself as unalloyed "good guys", but that's not generally how it's viewed among normal people.
These posts always feel like people are fetishizing some "utopia" where everyone should want to live in an imaginary fully walkable, meticulously maintained, pristine city. The comparisons of like a 2 square mile section of the nicest parts of a European city to areas of the rural US that have land areas larger than many European countries feels... at best, idealism run afoul.
Should we look at rural areas in Europe? I spent 3 weeks this summer in a small town in Spain. I could smell manure if the wind came from the right direction. And yet, I didn't need to get into a car, because the town center of this rural town, population 5 thousand, lives next to each other. The farmers go to the fields further away by car if they need to, but the kids walk 5 minutes to the high school.
The total land area is also irrelevant: Spain has a pretty low total population density, but that's because most of it is empty. The people live close to each other anyway. You can have a house 20 minutes by car anyway, and thus live 20 minutes away from the hospital instead of 3 minutes if you really like yards that much, but barely anyone does, because the car life is expensive and a hassle
Example of small town from "flyover state" in Denmark: i.e. area with very few jobs, very low house prices, everybody moving away, houses on the market forever. We call this for "the rotten banana" as the area is shaped as a banana and the economy is rotten.
Still very walkable and nice for kids.
Price for these houses is ca. $100_000 (some little over, some little less).
Barcelona is also a very walkable city (across the entire area of 2 million people, not just the very center) and is definitely the upper end of Spanish income.
A big part of this is long term cultural: medieval towns (and even much older) were all clustered very tightly into blocks with city walls against attacks, those slowly evolved into the vast majority of the towns & villages in Spain today, and have left a culture where flats and dense city centers are the expected norm and the primary model, even for towns surrounded by empty space. You can easily find small towns of apartment blocks and tight wall to wall houses in windy city centers, of just 1000 people, surrounded by fields for miles.
The Spanish would argue that surburanism is generally less enjoyable (walkability, community, socialability) and less secure (houses are easier to rob than non-ground floor flats) while dense apartment/etc living is better value (less land cost, shared maintainence in apartment blocks) and provides better airflow/heat management & opportunity for balcony views (attic flats etc).
my rural area had twice the population but probably 10x the size. There was nowhere to "walk" to. We are talking about a 2-3 mile drive to the only "supermarket" in the town center, which was probably smaller than many modern corner stores. everything of interest was 2-3 miles away: the schools, the church, the liquor store, and that's really all there is (they did build a 99 cent store there, so that's neat).
It's not like the land was wasted with parking lots. It's just as generic a desert setting as you can expect. Hot, tumbleweeds everywhere, Sand as far as the eye can see in any direction, etc. It's all single home housing so it could be denser, but that's pretty much the only benefit of living there; I grew up with a half acre yard (full of sand and an awkward tree in the middle, but actual land) and it gave my grandparents some piece of mind when we went out to play.
The US is not large and not sparse compared to the rest of the world in general or compared to Europe in particular. This argument pops up every time but it just has no basis in reality. There are sparse (rural) and dense (city) areas everywhere. The ratio between this type of area is different in Finland compared to the UK, just as it differs between Alaska and New Jersey. The density of the US is roughly the same as Europe. (Around 100/sq km)
But walkable cities can be both 1M population or 10k population. What applies to a footpath in a city of 1M applies to a footpath in a city of 10k too.
Truly rural areas usually aren’t the topic of these discussions nor sites like strongtowns. For obvious reasons.
Oh sorry Google fooled me, when asking for US pop density it answered per sq. mi (96) and for EU it answered per sq km (106). The numbers are less similar with the same units then….
Some sparse countries like Ukraine aren’t counted in EU however.
But I think the point you make about Sweden also applies to anywhere. How much land a country has that isn’t a city isn’t very relevant to how its cities look. If the US had 10 more alaskas or the EU had 10 more Swedens wouldn’t matter for how cities are built.
In the debate about Covid there was a trope about Sweden being so sparsely populated that no lessons could be drawn from there. Yet looking more closely it’s obvious that this is merely because most areas of Sweden have almost no people, and it’s rather Urbanized. I.e it’s actually locally dense but mostly empty.
“Mean distance between humans” is a much better measure of population density, both for city design and epedemics. Australia is a prime example where on average, 3ppl per square kilometer live. A figure that says nothing about actual population density.
Curious, have you ever lived for an extensive amount of time in a walkable European city? As a person who was born and raised in suburban East Coast car-hell and then moved to Europe, I would never want to go back. I still want a luxury car for rare drives to the countryside, but I hate it every time I have to go back to North American car-dependent cities, except for the nicer walkable downtowns.
I've given up on "arguing" with people on this thread, but FWIW, I have lived in Berlin and Frankfurt both for extended periods of time (2.5years total). I'll leave it up to you to decide if those are walkable cities or not. I also currently live in NYC, which is, if not walkable, anti-car.
My boys (one with ASD and the other with ADHD) are often extremely loud. When they are, you can hear them clearly from a surprising distance away from my suburban USA home even when they're still in the house.
It's not about everyone. It's just about building enough nice walkable cities for people who want to live in them.
It's not a utopia. It's about prioritizing people over traffic. Prioritizing the experience of being in the city over the convenience of getting there or driving through.
And it doesn't even have to be a city. The same idea also applies to suburbs. You can have good transit connections to the city, apartment buildings and local services in the core, single-family homes a bit further away, and large parks and forests within walking distance. Suburbs like this are typically more sparsely built but more densely populated than American suburbs. They also tend to be nicer once you leave your home.
*For people who can afford to live in them. I imagine most people (like me) aren't out in the boonies due to claustrophobia. We could use more walk able cities, but those we do have in the US tend to be the most expensive neighborhoods.
Don't overdo with by adding "meticulously maintained, pristine city", I mean okay this might be a side-effect once people start walking more and have the time to look at their environment close up and maybe even thrown their single-use coffee cup into a bin instead of out the car window.
European cities were in most of their cores built before the car or didn't allow highways to cut them up, followed by more demolishment for parking space. Add zoning laws that only allow single homes with no business in their center and you get suburbian where you can only escape with a car.
> I mean okay this might be a side-effect once people start walking more and have the time to look at their environment close up and maybe even thrown their single-use coffee cup into a bin instead of out the car window.
Definitely not in NYC, everywhere you see the disdain with which NYCers treat their communal environment
I hear these complaints all the time about any conversation that involves making a change for the better.
At the end of the day, there's a lot of people that are fundamentally anti-progress. If it makes things better, they don't want it. Doesn't matter what it is past that. Their solutions to our problems are either that the problems don't exist, or if they do, we should do nothing and they'll solve themselves.
Look, nobody is looking for a utopia. Nobody expects that. But making small steps in a better direction is a good thing.
Look around you at your cities. Is this the best it could possibly get? Do you truly believe this is the apex of human society? I know you don't. Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically opposed to making some amount of change? I just don't get it.
That's a fairly bold claim to say that I oppose making any change for the better lol... anyway..
Having grown up in both rural and urban areas, and having seen many articles like this one, they tend to (more often then not) read like this: "I know what's best for everyone, and if only these rural hicks would just let us do what's best for them everything would be perfect". That's mostly where my frustration lies - not with weather or not some town has a sidewalk or not.
> Look around you at your cities. Is this the best it could possibly get?
As someone who has spent significant time in parts of Minnesota very near to Northfield... yes. I genuinely think these places are as close to the "best it could possibly get" as is realistic to achieve. This is based on my experiences and my preferences having lived in these places. Your opinion seems to differ from that, which is why you seem to think that these places are in need of being changed - but do you even live in a place like the one in question?
> Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically opposed to making some amount of change?
Because it is not at all obvious that these are actually improvements for the people who actually live there. As I tried (and maybe failed) to convey, places like Northfield, MN were designed for cars - nearly everyone (~98%) who lives in Minneapolis has a car [1] and would use their car to get to the Allina clinic in question. Even if this was an excessively pedestrian friendly intersection, it would still be true that an overwhelming majority of people going to this clinic would drive.
Look around on google maps at this clinic and intersection [2] - there aren't even many residential places within walking distance in the first place. So in this case the suggested "improvement" would only even be relevant to a small number of people. And I'm not against making changes that only benefit a few people, but there needs to be a real case for people needing (or even wanting) it. And that needs to be to stand up against...
The fact that there are tradeoffs to rebuilding infrastructure to be more walkable. If there was some magic wand that just made this intersection walkable with absolutely zero tradeoff, then sure, wave your wand. But the truth is that there are real factors that matter: cost (both up front and mantainence), restricted access (during construction), and the not insignificant cost of having people idle in their cars at this intersection (which crosses a pretty significant thoroughfare for people in the Northfield to get to commercial areas from their homes - which are not a walkable distance away) to name a few.
Again, my frustration here is not that people are trying to make "progress". My frustration is that this "progress" is often defined by people who don't have to deal with the consequences, and that articles like this do not ever seem to actually account for the actual experience of the people who live in these places.
I would turn the question around to you: Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically compelled to push changes onto others and expect them to share your definition of "progress" even when they tell you otherwise?
To be clear I'm not saying you personally are necessarily opposed to all changes. But, when I see people very obviously over-exaggerate, like "looking for a Utopia", that's the impression you give off. That you're ideologically opposed to this particular change, and not reasonably opposed to it. Like, the fact any amount of this change is happening at all is too much for you.
> people who actually live there
See, again, nobody is saying this should be a thing for everyone. Nobody is really going to target rural areas with any infrastructure changes because, well, nobody cares. And that's the draw of rural areas - you don't have that infrastructure. People don't live in towns of 2,000 people they want rich public accommodations, lol.
> don't have to deal with the consequences
Au contraire, you have it backwards. The Suburbs are the ones who do not have to deal with the consequences of urban sprawl. They're subsidized, on welfare, by the dense, walkable parts of the city. Because dense areas are simply more efficient and produce MUCH more taxes. That money is then taken and given to the suburbs, who cannot exist on their own.
> are tradeoffs
Sure there are. But this position of "we've tried nothing ever and we're all out of ideas" is lame. Sorry. There are trade-offs in our current status quo but because it's status-quo you refuse to acknowledge them as tradeoffs.
Again, nobody is claiming magic wand or Utopia. You have the expectation that we can make things better for pedestrians with absolutely no friction. And when the solutions don't meet the absurd expectations, YOU set for yourself, you deem the whoooole idea bad.
That, to me, is a mindset problem. In order to justify your need to maintain the status-quo you have to construct a logical framework where change can never be good, ever.
> push changes
Simple, we're not. These things are decided democratically and you're seeing more and more people talk about it because, well, they want it. Sorry if that makes you feel as though you're becoming a minority. I don't know what the future holds and maybe in 10 years everyone will be drooling over motor vehicles and concrete again. In which case, good for you.
The reality is these ARE being talked about by the people they affect. These aren't random outside forces. These are me, and others, living in our communities who want change in our communities. We don't want change in your community. Nobody cares about the boonies and that's the entire draw of the boonies. If you want people to start caring about you move out of the boonies. Then, I'm sure, you'd be very upset.
As an outsider (as in: not American) I notice that a lot of the details, especially downsides, are left out.
I grew up in a commie block in a region of Europe where cities are fairly sparsely populated (approximately half the density of Amsterdam and close to 1/8th that of Paris proper).
I see it as a good middle ground that while still walkable, doesn't have the aforementioned downsides of dense city living, like:
-Noise, or actually the contortions you have to go through to keep it at acceptable levels. The inverse square law really does a number on people who live in a densely populated area with a night life or renovations going on (there's always renovations going on).
-Garbage disposal. I remember spending a mostly sleepless night in Bilbao because guess when is the only time a garbage truck can actually pass and collect refuse in a timely manner? Modern humans produce way more garbage than their 19th century counterparts.
-General tidyness. I want to see Tokyo one day because it appears to be the only large, densely populated area in the world which isn't filthy. I'm not even talking about trash. It's the puddles of animal (and human) urine scattered here and there.
-Lack of green spaces. Land is precious in densely populated cities, so you can't have this sort of stuff. Meanwhile when a dog has to go, they have to go, hence the previously mentioned puddles.
-Cost. Did I mention land is precious? The other day my friend showed me the sort of palace he can buy by selling his two bedroom in a commie block. Especially in recent years cost alone has pushed many people out of cities.
-Cost (of living). My car-oriented hellhole of a suburban mall where I sometimes do shopping has more stuff and at prices 30% lower than all those neat corner shops. The reason is that everything, from rent to logistics is expensive in a densely-populated area.
I could go on, but this is the gist. You couldn't pay me to live in a place with more than 5000 inhabitants per square kilometre.
I agree with most of the points, but I'm surprised about the "lack of green spaces" you mentioned. From my experience, Europe has far more and better urban parks than what I have seen in the US. The general atmosphere of European parks is something that I will forever miss while living in the US.
... but what are "these posts"? Because this post compares good and bad examples within the Minneapolis-St Paul metro area. This isn't a comparison of some cherry-picked European city with the rural US. It's a comparison of good and bad points within a mid-sized US city.
Further, a bunch of these examples seem like cases where the resources for the better design would not have been out of reach. The case where there are only crosswalks on 3 sides of an intersection so pedestrians need to walk the long way around (and wait for the light to change multiple times) would be straight-forward to have done right. The example in the "convenience" section where the path forces pedestrians to take a longer path, would have taken only a modest amount of additional concrete to address. Examples where there's too little demarcation between the sidewalk and street often have a green strip on the other side of the sidewalk. The same amount of space could have been used with the sidewalk shifted over and a green strip with trees placed between the street and sidewalk. None of these are "idealism run afoul".
I want to live in an imaginary fully walkable city. Now I live in Montreal, for the context see video https://youtu.be/_yDtLv-7xZ4
It's very good overview of what is wrong with the best* city in North America.
Not covered in this video: high rent/cost of owning compared to the local relatively low salaries (most of Montrealers agree) and in general low quality of hosing (many Montrealers got very irritated if I bring that).
And frankly, even your rural non-homestead areas could use some redesigning. Now you make it unsafe walk in what are basically villages, the quintessential walkable settlements that we've invented back in prehistory.
I'm quite familiar with Minneapolis, and you're right it is fairly suburban - but suburbs are a phenomenon of the world after the invention of the car. Car ownership rates in suburbs are incredibly high, like 90%+ in most suburban areas (https://newgeography.com/files/job-access_03.png). Minneapolis has a ~98% rate of car ownership, and places like Hopkins and Northfield were designed knowing that most of their citizens live far enough away from places like schools/grocery stores/movie theaters/offices/etc that they will need a car anyway.
And this isn't like a chicken or egg thing where people aren't walking because it's not nice to walk. The car came first, and then the suburb (as we know them) came second. These places were designed for cars. We're talking about 20-30+ min walks each way to get from most homes to the nearest "commercial area". Even if it was the walkable utopian dream of tree lined sidewalks and pedestrian-centric intersections, it won't change the fact that the vast majority of people would not choose to walk, and so it makes sense that these places are optimized for the way people actually get around.
What does car ownership rate have to do with anything? Even in a suburb with 100% car ownership, I want to walk - not drive - to buy milk, when possible. Walking the dog should ideally be possible from every single home without even having to walk or cross a road.
Walkability is as important in a suburb where everyone can drive as it is anywhere else.
There are many parts of the world where suburbs are shapes very differently, and while they support cars, they don't need them. The 0.3 acre plot, the street with no commercial activity... those aren't requirements for suburbs. Madrid has many a suburb that is far denser, grows upwards, and is centered around a train station.
And that's great for those places. But why do people feel compelled to make relatively new US suburbs more similar to old suburbs in Madrid? No one is trying to make suburbs in Madrid more like suburbs in Iowa - I'm voicing frustration that the reciprocal is not true.
This is part of a larger frustration where it feels like a very common thing that people in cities want to enforce their expectations and cultures onto rural places that already have their own way of being.
Forcing places to be a certain way by law is like writing an essay without the letters 'D' and 'O'. Possible, but it's really tying your hands behind your back.
"Their own of being" = putting a fist in everyone's mouth by <<forcing>> housing to be exactly the same type (single family detached house) and <<banning>> any other type of activity, even compatible ones like light commercial.
A sign of confidence, you know, the typical American fashion, would be to allow mixed zoning for compatible uses and see what happens, "invisible hand" and all.
And the examples given here can make the walking experience better, for a similar amount of total expenditure, without meaningfully changing the situation for drivers. Some things the author never suggests in this post:
- removing lanes of traffic to make more space for pedestrians
- reducing speed limits
- increasing gas taxes
You're reacting like advocating for a better pedestrian experience is somehow an attack on drivers, but that's totally not what this post is. Instead, the author points out places where they're already creating affordances for pedestrians (sidewalks, crossings with refuge medians, new curb ramps) but are doing it in a way that is not impactful.
You can make it a more comfortable for people to walk on the sidewalks that they're actually paying for, so the option of walking 20 min to the grocery store is more feasible, normal, appealing, without expecting that people in car-dependent neighborhoods are going to give up on car ownership.
> so it makes sense that these places are optimized for the way people actually get around
This is a misleading framing for two reasons:
- high car ownership does not imply that people don't want to also feel comfortable walking in their own neighborhoods. You can own a car, but walking your dog or walking with your family to a park or walking to the nearest store can still be a welcome option. People can get around in multiple ways, choosing different options at different times for different purposes.
- to the extent that a high proportion of trips are in a car, part of that is because the other options are crappy because of the argument you're making
We can have pleasant walkable neighborhoods and cars, and your kids can walk home from school and you can drive them to costco on the weekends. End this nonsensical pretend conflict between the two.
Suburbs (especially newer ones) were indeed designed for cars, but it is also illegal to change them, because of road requirements, parking minimums, zoning restrictions, separation of uses, etc. The qualities of a good suburb are desirable, but let's not pretend like they're a natural outcome of choices.
I'm a car person but 20/30 mins of walk to get some coffee with my dogs sounds very pleasant (iff the pedestrian crossings are safer as the article proposed)
Just because the majority are fat doesn't mean it's healthy
Sure, and you can do that 20/30 minute walk if you want, there are many parts of minnesotan suburbs that are, in fact, very walkable already. On a weekend, that is a nice thing to do - but the day-to-day life that the majority of people live shouldn't be optimized for that.
I'm not sure why you're shoe horning body weight into this - that's a whole separate can of worms that tenuously related, but not relevant to the fact that these places are so spread out in such a way that walking isn't feasible for a myriad of other very practical and immediately relevant reasons (weather, ability to organize child care/education, ability to run errands before/after work, time spent "commuting", etc.)
In a lot of places it's close to impossible to do what you're saying. There are no side walks. Many suburban streets and especially those bigger roads (stroads) are horrible. No shade because no trees because HUGE ADS SHALL BE VISIBLE FROM CARS, lots of dangerous driveway exists every 5 minutes that you can't even walk in peace lest you are run over by a huge truck, etc.
Streets are dangerous for cyclists (and I mean the regular cyclists, commuter/grocery shopping style, not the lycra-clad racers).
There are modern ways to design infrastructure, it isn't even a lot more expensive than the old fashioned way, and it makes for a lot more pleasant environment for everyone. Even drivers get to enjoy it because... people start walking (under 1km) and cycling (under about 5-7km), so a lot of car traffic just vanishes. So the remaining car drivers get to vroom-vroom a lot more :-)
Even with plunging cost and increasing capability... this is talking about infinite compute, it's essentially impossible to achieve by definition.
You could dedicate the worlds entire compute to the Goldbach's conjecture function he wrote up - it (would/might) never complete. You could 1000000x the worlds compute and it (would/might) never complete. It's not even a problem of compute speed, it's a problem with infinity.
Agreed, but there is plenty of utility that can be harvested, if we can direct our attention adequately.
Also: humans have the ability to arbitrarily redefine words, and believe those redefinitions! There is a surprising amount of leeway in this simulation.
> Agreed, but there is plenty of utility that can be harvested, if we can direct our attention adequately.
Only for problems no worse than O(n^m) where m is not much more than 1.
Greenend (the domain name in the link) is, or so goes local legend, named after an actual street in Cambridge, quite close to where I was working a decade ago; one particular job, we'd just changed a file format for a mobile app, and the upgrade process was taking 20 minutes on test devices. The other engineer insisted it couldn't possibly be improved despite the two observations (1) it was fine before the upgrade, and (2) it was fine once the upgrade was complete. After a bit of digging, I found an O(n^2) operation we didn't need, and turned 20 minutes into 200 ms.
Increase the available compute by a factor of 1024 in an O(n^2) task, only compensates for n growing by a factor of 32.
There are 28.5 million uber trips per day (~10 billion trips / year) but Uber's gross bookings are ~$37 billion. Which means the average booking is $3.70 ? That feels... weird? I paid $71 to get to the airport yesterday. Where are the $1.00 trips that offset stuff like that?
Fair enough, but to average $3.70 there would need to be literally 100 $3 rides to "offset" my trip to the airport. I guess it must be true, I'm not here claiming Uber is lying in their quarterly reports. I'd be really curious to see more detail on price per ride, and volume of total rides broken out by country (or even in more detail tbh).
Oh please, you don't even know anymore what's your argument, do you? You just hate to be reminded that the bubble you live in is in now way accurately reflective of the reality most people live in.
I am not the person you were arguing with, so sure maybe I don't know what the other guys argument is lol
I was just commenting on what I was seeing in your comments - sorry that I struck a nerve..
I'm not sure what bubble you think I'm living in, given how little you know about me. But in "your bubble" it doesn't seem like there's a way to reconcile two very antithetical propositions: 1- people don't have the resources/knowledge to invest, but also 2- they can use their excess resources to diversify away from having significant investment with solely their employer. How does that work?
And just to re-iterate, no one besides you has brought up the intelligence of "most people" when it comes to the ability to invest. So...?
It sounds like you already sort of know the answer.. you are atypical in your ability to relate to sports. You mention a couple times that it just doesn't "click" for you, and fair enough, but it might just be one of those things where you need to recognize (which you already seem to) that you hold a minority opinion.
> [You] occasionally watch e-sports and those can impress me with how people think outside of the box, doing things that no one thought of - but that are so obvious in the hindsight
This happens literally all the time in professional athletics. Strategy, and the creativity required, is absolutely at the core of any team sport - what else do you think coaches (who are paid in excess of $10m in many sports) exist at all if not for coming up with out of the box strategy? Football strategy is a constantly evolving thing, from one week to the next. There are other sports (like tennis) where strategy can change within a singular point, let alone across the whole match.
The human connection element of sports is also very real, following an individual because you like their personality or style of play is just being a fan and is based in admiration - something that is seemingly inherently human.
> I honestly don't get what impresses so many viewers so much
I mean this statement about olympic sports just begs for the reciprocal (and much more common) question of what about e-sports impresses anyone? The literal exact same arguments can be made. "uh, that looks complicated/fast-paced..." but games are all the same to me, it's all just pressing buttons - nothing in my brain fires off.
And because the same arguments can be made, maybe just assume that for as passionately as you would defend e-sports for it's creativity or strategy or whatever else, that exists in essentially the same form mirrored over in the sports world. It's the same "argument" happening, just mirrored.
> raised on sci-fi I can't shake off the feeling of it being sort of unimportant or meaningless on a global scale
There's maybe a whole separate conversation about how fantasy over-emphasizes things like the fate of humanity or how it depicts unachievable utopias under the guise of like... here's what societal advancement could look like unencumbered by the realities of actual society? There's a reason sports/games have existed since prehistoric times - I'd put all my money in on betting that there's no Star Trek future that doesn't have sports. It's just that important. You don't have to "get" it, but surely looking at the widespread popularity makes it obvious that's true?
> It sounds like you already sort of know the answer.
Maybe, but I'm also sort of stupid. Which prompted me to write all this, so maybe I'll figure it out for myself (and, hopefully, others too - surely, I'm not unique in this regard).
> where you need to recognize (which you already seem to) that you hold a minority opinion.
Yea... I had this assumption as a possible truth, but I have no idea how true is it ("am I sure?"), and what exactly is different ("why?").
> Strategy, and the creativity required, is absolutely at the core of any team sport
For sure, although I originally thought more about individual disciplines, like the 100m sprints (the primary topic here), which surely have some strategy to them as well, but I would be very surprised if it's something complex.
So I'm not even sure if people are watching sports because they relate with the athletes. Certainly not universally, and I have no idea how much it is the case.
Even with the team sports, I'm confused:
> "uh, that looks complicated/fast-paced..." but games are all the same to me, it's all just pressing buttons - nothing in my brain fires off.
Thank you for this. It totally makes sense to me, but this is also one thing that makes me question the "minority opinion" hypothesis. I haven't explicitly went into details and just barely touched that with "I don't have experience running fast so I cannot relate with runners - no clue what they're doing" idea, but I thought about it and it confused me.
I brought e-sports to the picture, because it's relatively (compared to pro non-e-sports) niche thing. I believe they are interesting to me because I can actually understand what's going on there. Just like that chess example (I don't watch chess because I don't play it) - I can watch a football or basketball or tennis match and have no idea on what the players are doing out there even if I know the rules. So I made a logical conclusion that to watch sports, one must likely understand it. And for understanding something, surely one needs to have some experience in the matter (at amateur level)? This all definitely feels true for e-sports - while one may not perform at the level - anyone can try things out (and save for extra-complex micro-level mechanics that require physical dexterity can even make it work... occasionally).
And this is where it doesn't click. I always had an assumption that e-sports are niche because player base is low (compared to the overall population numbers). Folks who play $game may watch $game tournaments, some may not play but watch with friends (rarely) - and I guess that's about it. So I tried to find the numbers, comparing involvement with engagement.
And I found a statement that about 72% of Americans watch American football, and a statement that only 5-6M people are playing it. So, there are drastically more viewers than players. For comparison, I looked up stats for Dota 2 and found that TI10 (the Super Bowl equivalent) had 2.7M peak viewer count, and there is around 14M MAU. I looked up other games and it all seems that viewer count << MAU for e-sports, while the inverse is true for non-e-sports.
Which seem to invalidate my hypothesis of "should play to watch". And that generates a lot of questions (from "why is it so different", though "am I actually right assuming that people understand what they're watching?" to "if you don't play, why learn the game?" and so on).
And the same (back to the original topic of individual disciplines) applies to the 100m sprints. Can't find the breakdowns, but it seems that there are still drastically more viewers than people who run in any capacity. Here I'm back to "our athlete vs others", as I don't have any better ideas how to explain it.
I sort of feel that the answer that makes sense is somewhere out there, really close - yet I'm still honestly confused and can't really grasp it. Sorry.
> I'd put all my money in on betting that there's no Star Trek future that doesn't have sports
Haha, no, I won't take that bet. The idea of sports may change depending on what kind of future is out there, but competition is deeply ingrained in our human nature. But the modern idea sports may not survive, especially as more people start to debate what's "natural" and what's "doping".
They may not care about the politics, but if the politics is what contributes to the economy / shortages / difficulty in getting things like food... then the politics matter, regardless of if any given citizen is consciously aware of it.
And as a reciprocal anecdote, I have family that grew up behind the iron curtain - and they were very much aware of and knew the importance of the governments politics
What can you do if you are effectively disenfranchised though? Either keep on keeping on or die in bloody revolution where there’s no certainty its not just a different oligarchy at the top when the dust settles.
Even the US suffers from this to an extent. Who the president is matters most for the people who make a lot of money from government contracts than you or I who broadly lead the same lives every presidency.
I interpreted it as look at all these cool arts/creative things that we've managed to compress into a single sheet of glass. I sort of get how people interpreted it as just maliciously destroying those things as a means to an end, but that feels like an intentional reading of bad faith to a company that is generally very creativity-minded.
I wonder if it would have received less blow back if they had "hidden" the actual crushing of the objects and just showed them entering a chamber with an implied compression... but the visuals of everything exploding in the hydraulic press are pretty cool and a more dynamic way to convey the "look at what all we've packed into the product" message.