As a long time Pixelmator user, this really worries me. I loved DarkSky and then Apple acquired and killed it without a good replacement (I switched to Wunderground because Apple Weather is inaccurate, especially for precipitation predictions).
It's ironic that the example he gives for driving across LA already has a fast train connection:
> People that live in LA, I mean try to get from Pasadena to El Segundo during rush hour. You can fly to another city faster than you get to crosstown LA. And you have to drive the whole way.
You can take the Metro A line from Pasadena, then transfer to the C line to get to El Segundo. No driving necessary. Musk sells cars, so of course he has a massive incentive to say more cars are the solution to peoples' transit woes. But it seems like throwing more cars at the problem will simply make traffic worse, and from my experience living in Chicago, the best solution to avoid traffic (and parking!) is to take an alternative mode of transit that can bypass it (e.g. train, bike, electric scooter).
Unless you think LA should go London/NYC style and build a load of stations, there is still the problem of what to do if you're not near a station at the start or end.
If it involves a bus connection, people will just drive
LA is already doing quite a lot in its transportation system. But just spending a bunch of money on a bunch of project isn't enough. They need to evolve into a higher level thinking about transportation. Currently its just 'money here for project X', 'money here for project Y'. And then they need to evolve again and think about the whole city in a new way. Transportation and land use planning a 100% linked, to have good transportation you need good land use planning. That requires reforms in zoning codes, building codes, parking regulation, road regulation and a number of other things.
In some sense US cities are actually well prepared, they have tons of space on their gigantic roads to have priority bus lanes, bike lanes and many other things like that. Road safety and transportation could be improved by a gigantic amount with simply changes in road design and investment patterns.
How to achieve that politically, well, I don't know.
There are other alternatives. Short commute by bicycle to main stations a la french/dutch style. Requires less investment for safe bike lanes but it pisses off car people.
Trams are also much cheaper than metro or train lines and serve metropolitan areas pretty well but they anger house owners and nobody wants to take public transit, thats poor people stuff.
It will take a lot of disillusion from cars before any decent alternative gets traction. Took long in Europe and is still ongoing for most of it, it will take even longer in the US.
People might be stubborn enough to only turn away from cars when the big traffic jams are all made of self driving electric cars with one or two people inside going all to the same places.
LA is literally filled to the fucking brim with parking lots, so many fucking parking lots. You have enough space for more stations then Paris.
And yet somehow in most large cities people use trams and bus in large numbers and don't 'just drive'. Crazy to consider that some people don't even have to own a car in such a city. If you have proper transportation infrastructure, those buses/trams can be faster then private car traffic.
Its called a 'transportation system' for a reason, walking, biking, buses, trams, trains all work together to provide something that practically moves millions of people a day even in the largest cities in the world.
Musk: Mom, can I have national infrastructure on which I can safely and reliably operate my semi autonomous vehicles?
Mom: We have infrastructure at home.
The Infrastructure: a rail network with communal seating, infrequent service, and a minimal set of fixed route options.
If, through the accidents of human history, we spend the next century repurposing highways as railroads for rubber tired carriages then I suppose that’s a good enough outcome. In the century after that maybe we’ll start to reclaim the highway land back, a la Dr Beeching’s shuttering of post war British railway infrastructure.
I think roller skates are an underrated mode of transportation, but there is a learning curve for people new to skating. If these Moonwalkers are easy to use with no prior experience, I think that's a big step (or roll) forward.
Have you spent much time in Chicago? I've lived here in Lincoln Park and the loop (downtown) and haven't had any issues with crime, unless you count people smoking on the CTA train. Obviously it's not perfect, but conservative media's portrayal of Chicago as a crime-ridden city doesn't match my experience at all.
> "conservative media's portrayal of Chicago as a crime-ridden city"
Maybe check police crime reports [1] of your city before going after the conservative media. There's gun related violence every week in Chicago and often there are multiple homicides on a single weekend. I understand it's a big city, but it's still a big problem. Lincoln Park is indeed nice and safe and parts of the loop are safe cause they are very touristy with heavy police presence. But there are many neighborhoods that are not that lucky. Also, the public school system in the city has major problems. In one year when I lived there there were 21 kids from the public school system around the city who got murdered in gang related shootings.
* I just picked the city wide report for the last week. 7 murders. last year same period 14 murders. 2023 numbers seem better than 2022 but still. For comparison, my city of about 110K people has 1-2 murders on average per year.
> But there are many neighborhoods that are not that lucky
I think this is probably the most important point. Much of the crime is concentrated in the city's far west and far south sides, where I generally don't go. These stats are old, but the map is roughly correct and shows the disparity I'm talking about:
The effect is that most of the city is safe, but people on the far south side are impacted by crime. Not to defend the situation—I of course wish that all of Chicago was safe and want to see our city make progress on that. Just trying to provide nuance.
Recently visited Chicago for the first time, and have been back once or twice since. I really liked the vibe there. It felt like it had a lot of energy (similar to New York) but felt much less claustrophobic, a bit more open, and a bit friendlier? I don't know if that is Chicago's reputation, but I really liked it there. Great freakin food too. Monteverde, so good.
That's pretty much exactly Chicago's rep; it's the US city most like New York City, and it's of course not really like it at all, and some of the many ways it's different (alleys and garbage collection, seeing the sky) are improvements.
That's how I feel, too. And I do think that the city has a midwestern friendliness (especially in the neighborhoods, outside of the loop). I haven't been to Monteverde, but I'll check it out!
Commenters here are overreacting due to misunderstandings:
- the per-install fee doesn't kick in until you've passed BOTH the annual game revenue and install thresholds (i.e. >$200k annual revenue on the game and >200k lifetime unique downloads)
- the fee isn't monthly, it's per unique download (poor wording in Unity's chart)
- you only pay the fee on the number of downloads over the threshold
This new pricing will actually decrease the price of using Unity for many developers. Before, if your company's total annual revenue was >$100k, you had to buy a paid Unity license no matter what. Now those company's can use Unity totally free until their game reaches $200k annual revenue and 200k lifetime downloads.
This licensing scheme is actually very similar to licensing the AVC/H.264 video codec from Via LA (for example, if you want to ship a build of Chromium with MP4 enabled). In their case, licensees self report the number of units they've distributed per year and pay a small fee on the number of units over 100k. If you ship under 100k units, there is no fee.
I think a lot of people are just fundamentally rejecting the structure of a deal like that. The numbers will matter a lot to individual org's decisions but at least to me the emotional reaction here is unrelated to the specifics of the thresholds and rates. It's just "game engine company should not be doing that."
Probably true since it doesn't appear like they're a game engine company any more. The enshittification machine is rumbling to life.
I do appreciate that if you make something that's always free, no matter who you work for you don't need to worry about which license to use, and by making it revenue for the last 12 months we don't need to worry about every dev taking down all their old Unity games to avoid fees. But it's still not a great deal. Even if they somehow can exclude pirated copies and malicious reinstalls, there's still plenty of absurd scenarios with it.
A developer decides to make their game that was a hit almost a year ago free? Now they might have to pay Unity more than the $200k they made on the game earlier!
Or if they throw it in a charity bundle, they get punished for their attempt to help people in need!
Honestly, this seems like a win-win for humanity. We get entertainment, money's raised for a charity, and Musk & Zuck get a unique experience and maybe a reputation boost. Unless one them is killed or seriously injured, in which case that might alter the course of their companies—but it seems like the benefits outweigh the risks (for us).
