I don't know LA enough to comment on that project, but my experience with similar projects is the bike trails created like that are a beautiful ride to nowhere. A great trip to take on a nice Saturday, but nobody will use them to get anywhere. (other than the bars that happen to be near the trail)
That's my experience as well. My town converted an abandoned rail line to a biking/walking trail. It does run through downtown, but beyond that it basically goes noplace very desirable. It gets recreational use by a small subset of the community, but it's not a big difference-maker in making cycling practical.
In Pasadena, we just spent a ton of money trying out the Metro bike-sharing program [1]. Unfortunately, it turns out the key to making a biking culture is not just putting down a ton of rentable bikes. [2]
I'd love to see safer bike highways, but the city doesn't seem able to do more than mark the pavement with sharrows. I understand that Pasadena's urban planning model frequently pits cars and bikes against each other - but, I wonder if we could cut into some of the significant lawn space on each side of the street in order to make bike lanes?
If you're interested in reading about the darker side of gambling, I recommend this long-form from The Atlantic: "How Casinos Enable Gambling Addicts."
"Did Scott Stevens die because he was unable to rein in his own addictive need to gamble? Or was he the victim of a system carefully calibrated to prey on his weakness?"
"Prof Tim Pychyl, from Carleton University, Ottawa, who has been studying procrastination for the past few decades, believes it is a problem with managing emotions rather than time."
You can enable a nice intercom feature if you want "Alexa call kitchen"
She also makes clocks obsolete "what time is it" also arithmetic and spelling is near 100% accurate, although obviously very slow because of the speech UI. "Alexa what time is it in Brisbane?" "The time in Brisbane is 11:27 pm" uh OK I'll call client tomorrow.
Control the lights, thermostat, intercom system, playing music, ask the time, set a timer (especially helpful in the kitchen with sticky hands), ask the weather, wake up alarms, and on and on.
It’s just in live MVP right now, but launching in September down in the Southern Hemisphere market by market, then hopefully up north for 2019 Spring if we can scale down here.
I agree. Mobile internet is a double-edged sword: super useful, super distracting / addicting. Several years ago, I rooted my android to add sites such as reddit and nytimes (news junkie) to map to 0.0.0.0 in the hostfile, effectively blocking them. Then, I removed the file navigator (ES File Explorer).
HackerNews also seems to be designed to be less addicting and immediately rewarding, don't you think? It's more geared towards technical deep reads than BBC or something similar.
To add on to other commenters: Uber/Lyft are services, not entertainment or distraction. I don't know anybody who "zones out" of life by ordering cars.
Disclaimer: recently signed up for lightphone 2 pre-order. Personally, I just super like the minimalist e-ink display and I hope it will help me disconnect from the news cycle.
>and I hope it will help me disconnect from the news cycle.
I remember long time ago I read a paper which suggest news is more addicted then drugs or porn. News include anything from Financial, Politics, Entertainment, etc. At the time I thought it was lots of BS. Now I am starting to believe we spent too much time in the "news cycle" from Twitter, Facebook or whatever it is distracting us.
Anecdotally, the news cycle has been the hardest (internet) addiction for me to break.
I can justify deleting social media (Facebook, Reddit) because 95% of my use of it is garbage. But the news is useful, engaging. It's "entertainment with a higher purpose". Can I really justify not reading the NYTimes at all because I just "read too much"? (I was reading the news from various sites for 3 or 4 hours a day.) In the end, I decided that yes, I had to block news sites, because it was a ridiculous use of my time for a software engineer.
On the other hand, I know of no one else in my life who's had this problem.
>On the other hand, I know of no one else in my life who's had this problem.
That is my case as well. But this also remind me they really don't know much else apart from their domain. Housing Policy? They don't care they got a house already. Zoning? None of their business. Universal Health Care? They can afford their own. Tax reform etc? Just choose one that benefits them most. K-Pop, Kids new interest? They had no idea.
I have been thinking whether generation gap is partly a age and experience problem, and partly because older generation ( as compared to kids ) just don't give a damn about what is going on with the world any more.
Uninstalling the BS apps helps you also disconnect from the "news cycle" (whatever that might be) [1]. The advantage of lightphone is that it is a next-gen dumbphone. It has high battery uptime, yet has a touchscreen (e-ink) with some basic functions. I find it very expensive for what it delivers, but right now its a unique niche (e-ink wise).
[1] I do not visit Facebook or Twitter nor do I have their apps on my smartphone. I do visit HN though.
This isn't the first generation to live in a "corporate pseudo-cultural production" world.
Movies and movie conventions. Baseball cards and other popular collectibles. Sport events. Music events. All those things are just "corporate pseudo-cultural productions". Yet they're also the culture, because - for better or worse - commerce is part of our lives too.
[1] https://www.railstotrails.org/trailblog/2017/october/02/bike...
Edit:
The webpage for the LA River project: http://lariver.org/
The webpage for the LA River Trail: https://www.traillink.com/trail/los-angeles-river-trail/