As a counter-point to streaming services and to try and provide an alternative, I'm busy building https://jam.coop - the intention is to be a music store owned collectively by artists and the people who build it. I think it's really important to explore alternatives in this space.
What evidence do you have for that? I was involved in adopting a code of conduct for a local tech meetup and we did that because a couple of incidents that weren't handled very well left other people feeling unsafe and unwelcome. Having some guidelines in place reassured folks that we took those concerns seriously and gave us a framework to deal with unwanted behaviour.
From my experience, writing rules directly after incidents and as a reaction to incidents do not produce good results. New members of the community 5-10 years later will have no understanding of what the rules are trying to do or why they exist, and when a new incident occur the rules get rewritten again and again. The only effect is the optics as in sending a message that "we take those concern serious", but without substance, and again from experience, those people who was leaning to leave will still leave regardless.
What has worked in communities I have been active in is to have continuously conversations, in combination with a no-blame culture that provide social safety for people to bring up issues and also room for people to improve without feeling personally attacked (which is the opposite of social safety).
Anti-meritocracy was in in some CoCs, arguing in its favour was a reason for exclusion from an event / project. Even if the argument happened somewhere else on the internet and not in the project.
Whenever I see someone dying on the hill of fighting for 'meritocracy', in the words of another poster in this subthread, I have found them to be:
> ...a zealot about their cause. Deflecting and uncompromising, very unagreeable. They would be the last persons to know how to make a community comfy.
... And typically with a giant chip on their shoulder. The real world's a little bit more complicated than the spherical cows that the near-religious faith in it requires.
It highly depends on what you understand that word to mean. At first it was just meant to to pronounce fairness. Nothing more to it. It was used in a context to explicitly disregard who people are and focus on what they do.
And of course it wasn't meant as an instruction manual for how to run a society. It was quite explicitly a message that you are not judged by who you are. That is it, there is no ideology, there is no grand idea. That is media garbage that filled your head with a phantom.
And honestly, that did a much better job than most COC I read.
I'm not sure how your comment is relevant. No one is fighting for meritocracy here. Only providing the requested information about a case where CoC pushed a specific political view and excluded others.
> nobody reads intermediate commit messages one by one on a PR, period.
I do! I find it the easiest way to review code when the author has taken the time to structure it in that way. I'm lucky to work with some great people.
There's already some existing co-operative music store/bandcamp alternative projects that are selling music and accepting new artists.
https://jam.coop is the one we are building. We launched last year in response to the sale of bandcamp and the uncertainty we felt in our communities of musicians who depend on Bandcamp for some or part of their living. In contrast to subvert we've decided to take an incremental approach. We're incubating jam inside an existing worker co-operative, building the features that our users need, and working towards an "exit to community" where jam will become a multi-stakeholder co-op owned by artists and workers.
I'm also familiar with mirlo and ampwall who are working on similar projects.
With sufficiently dense urbanisation, and dedicated transit rights of way (heavy rail, light rail, trolley busses, trams, ...), the "getting to and from the bus stop" and "on the busses schedule" problems both disappear. The bus stop is nearer than your car park would be, and the schedule operates with headways of 1--8 minutes such that waits are minimal.
With dedicated rights of way, transit doesn't compete with private or delivery vehicles for road space. Further enhancements give priority signalling to transit vehicles.
Sufficient density also means that services and functions are located nearby: school (for the kids), shopping, entertainment, healthcare, government services, and employment (assuming you still need to go to an office or similar space).
"Sufficiently dense urbanization" has a similar scent to "sufficiently smart compiler". It does exist for some cases, but I'm not going to count on it showing up for me.
The greatest impact on private automobiles hasn't been on commutes, sex lives of teens, or the lore of the road trip. It's been on land-use patterns of urban regions (writ large, think metropolitan statistical areas rather than strictly city limits within the US).
With automobiles, low-density sprawl residential, commercial, industrial, educational, and recreational developments become not only possible but largely inevitable.
The corollary is that to change land-use patterns, it is necessary to change transportation economics.
The other factor is, of course, that there is tremendous inertia in land-use patterns, and urban regions which pre-date automobiles have preserved at least some of their earlier densities. One sees this in the old cities of Europe, of the Eastern US (largely east of the Mississippi, though most notably along the Atlantic Seaboard), and in a very few of the original West Coast US cities such as San Francisco (spatially constrained by its geography) and Seattle (old town regions). Los Angeles and San Diego which both saw explosive growth after about 1920 far less so, likewise for most of the Southern US which grew following both the automobile and air conditioning.
How rapidly this works in reverse, and whether or not low-density cities, towns, and urban regions can reconsolidate is a quite interesting, and critically important, question. I suspect that it may be possible, though we'll see some strange hybrid / transitional land-use patterns initially, and there will likely be much opposition (NIMBY / landowners / pull-up-the-drawbridge types).
We're beginning to see much higher costs of automobiles as EVs hit the roads, leading in part to the increased popularity of electric bicycles and motorcycles (though to a very small extent). Point remains that it's much easier (and cheaper) to electrify small vehicles than large ones. There are congestion tax proposals, enacted in London, on hiatus in New York City. Higher fuel costs can have an impact.
I believe that simply sprinkling majyckal transit pixiey duste over urban sprawl fails miserably. I also agree that changing urban density patterns takes time. However there are existing regions with those patterns, and they may well start to see increasing appeal to those who don't wish to be car-bound. That's already part of the explanation of high housing costs in cities such as SF and NYC (though that's another complex matter and is hardly specific to those cities).
But my point remains that density and transit go together like bees and honey, utterly addressing your initial objection.
Possible future scenarios, even highly plausible ones, do not "utterly address" my immediate practical objection about where many of us actually live. And I still don't think busses will ever be a perfect substitute for having your own vehicle. Indeed, per your arguments, if I'm ever living in "sufficiently dense urbanization" I very much expect to rely on an ebike or somesuch.
I'm strongly in favour of e-bikes, they're a highly appropriate solution.
They don't suit all needs, however. The elderly, young, disabled, or ill, for example. There are circumstances in which transit fits needs better, particularly for longer-distance or high-volume commutes. Bikes need less parking space than cars, but still require parking. Bike-share or similar solutions only partially address this given high-demand peaks and low-demand troughs. Weather and geography work against bikes in many places, electrified or not.
Low-headway rail, trams, and busses are still one of the most effective means of moving large numbers of people and baggage over intermediate distances.
This was fun to play with. I was initially expecting to be able to search for single notes or instrument sounds, e.g. I tried "warm synth tone single note C4" but afterwards I realised its library has mostly fixed tempo loops.
Like the idea, would be great if you linked back to freesound for each sample so I could explore the author's other sounds.
With my web audio hat on I'm imagining an interface that lets you mix, edit and add effects to the sounds you've found to help create new ones.
Since the 1990s the term has been consistently used in academia to imply the move from welfare state to laissez faire economic management, particularly associated with the promotion of free market ideals in the late 1980s by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US.
