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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • nix@midwest.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.mlAI is a Lie.
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    5 months ago

    Tangential fun fact:

    Snake oil is a real thing, that actually helps with the some very specific problems. But it has to be made a specific way from a specific snake. We associate the term with scams because of the large number of scammers that advertised fake snake oils, or advertised it being useful for tons if things it wasn’t.

    My point is, many of the most effective scams rely on something that has a kernel of truth.



  • I use mailbox.org personally. Disroot is probably fine. Do they have 2FA? That would be the most essential thing you want here if you’re worried about being hacked by an outside party. 2FA would even mitigate a password leak in most cases, since they’d only have 1 of the authentication factors.

    If you’re worried about hacking, you can do some things to mitigate the damage that would cause. Download important old emails and delete them from the server, this is pretty easy to do in a desktop client (like thunderbird or outlook) where you’d just move them to a local folder. That way if someone gains access, or they sell to someone that processes the data, they won’t have the old emails (unless they for some reason retained a separate copy, which seems doubtful).

    Sign your email up for https://haveibeenpwned.com/. Then you’ll get notifications if there’s any data leaks, including of your email provider. Obviously this is only useful if nobody has stolen your account before the leak is reported, but that’s more likely than not (unless you’re a particularly valuable target for some reason).











  • At least for the STL Green Line example here, the choice of LRT over BRT seems to have less to do with that kind of analysis and more to do with the source of the income. A lot of the money was raised on the promise of a N/S rail, and that’s made it difficult to advocate for anything else regardless of metrics. Some of the money is also grants specifically earmarked for rail. Don’t know if that applies everywhere. I think the flashiness of rail makes it easier to raise revenue for, regardless of if its the right decision for the situation.


  • I actually couldn’t find a single example of a light rail system in the entire United States which needs the capacity of light rail and couldn’t get by with buses.
    

    Could it be that light rail is a form of future proofing for population growth? My understanding is that a lot of light rail is more recent development, but I can be wrong.

    Yea, I think it’s really difficult to predict how many riders you’ll get long term. I think someone that agrees fully with this article would probably say you can do BRT now for cheaper, and do LRT when the demand exists later.

    I tend to think that rail will probably attract more riders over time than buses do, and have more ridership growth. But I don’t have evidence for that. I think you’d need a long-term study to really establish that. If you’re operating from what we currently know and can show evidence for, I think this article makes a lot of compelling points I can’t really disprove.