The term library is based on the Latin word liber for 'book' or 'document', contained in Latin libraria 'collection of books' and librarium 'container for books'.
To be fair libraries are very active places, there are plenty of quiet spaces in most of them as well for this reason. Why can’t we accommodate everyone? We aren’t talking pumping music, just basic conversation, which already happens.
If it gets too loud, there’s always the quiet places for people that want more peace ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If it’s against the rules, they’ll be kicked out, like it happens already… and if they allow the music, well you are free to choose another library that fits your specific needs. Just like the ones using the louder library since it’s already for them.
Please. People regularly ignore that social convention in public spaces like Mass Transit and Parks. Why do you think libraries would be any different?
Since I'm a Technical Consultant for my local library I can honestly say I was in one just last week. In fact I'm logged into their system right now making some adjustments to their public access computers. I know what patrons are doing when they think no one is looking and I know exactly what would happen if Libraries were open late so people could lounge around.
Many libararies are already employing Security Staff to keep things under control during regular hours and there is no reason to think that it get any better 'after dark' so to speak.
So you work offsite, rarely visit, and are making sweeping judgements on how patrons you don’t even see or interact with would be behaving in a hypothetical scenario?
the part where logging in to a computer remotely is apparently as good as visiting a place in person fucking sent me. this is what being online 24/7 does to a person.
Btw where the fuck did they say that they never visited the place?
It doesn't say that anywhere because I'm physically in there 3-4 times a month and have been for nearly 20 years. I really wonder how long its been since the people shit talking have been in a Public Library and witnessed what's going on in them these days. Our Library, in a town of roughly 60,000 people, had to get Security back in 2018 because there were too many unruly patrons causing problems for the Staff to handle.
Was there again this morning and remembering this "conversation" I asked the Executive Director, Business Manager, and the Assistant Director about it.
These were the three comments they all made, although in slightly different orders:
-"How is it going to be funded? Keeping the Staff and Security here until 10PM or later would be expensive and its not in our budget."
-"A lot of people won't come out after dark so it would likely be the same people that come and sit here all day. They'd just be staying later."
-"We have enough behavior problems during the day. I can't imagine how it would get late at night."
I also asked the head Librarian about the Library as a 3rd Space for the public. She shook her heard and said "I understand the idea but it wouldn't work. The Staff isn't here to play baby sitter so people can sit around and chat."
So there ya' go; three Administrators and a Librarian.
Now I challenge YOU to go to YOUR local Library and talk to the Administrators and Librarians there. I'm interested to know what they tell you.
I wonder if the public perception and use of libraries would be improved if they weren't these strangely silent book temples and were instead places of public learning and conversation.
Were they even that way? I mean, from as long as I can remember there was quiet and non quiet times, quiet and non quiet spaces in librairies. I've never heard of one were it is fully silent all the time. Isn't that just the case in movies for comedic effect?
In my VERY limited experience, school libraries tend to be quiet/silent while public ones are more communal with varied loudness spaces. But a lot of people only experience school libraries.
I wish. Getting scolded by an old crone for daring to use your voice in the library never leaves you. Children can be excited or loud sometimes, but libraries exist to make them seen, not heard.
My hometown library was quiet all the time in the 80s, but it was also basically one really large room and any noise carried really well so they enforced quiet. The state college library was similar, and enforced quiet when I went in the 90s because people were studying.
Most libraries in the movies are also large, open spaces and like everything else they play up the extremes or the writer's experiences. Since movies tend to stick with stereotypes, so don't expect a library scene in a movie without someone being hushed any time soon.
Something the AI that drew it left out. Dude on the couch on the left has three feet. This is as much as the AIs vision as it is the OPs, without the prompt we'll never know.
I think there is room for both. Our library has a small restaurant and hall for lounging and isn't quiet at all. But the main library is business as usual and quiet.
It's not about turning it into a place for discussion really. Part of it's just being around other people. I'm willing to bet that there are studies out there that suggest that even being around other people in settings like this is healthy and has some benefits.
I both agree and disagree, because this comic is dangerously vague.
A good example is electric cars. It would be great if everyone switched to electric cars, but it would be even better if we built a city that didn't treat pedestrians, cyclists, and public commuters as second class.
The difference being the latter doesn't let private equity make fat returns.
Honestly it would not be better if everyone switched to electric cars. Yes, we should prioritize new cars being electric, but building an electric car is worse than using an existing car all the way to the end of its lifecycle. And yes obviously public transport and infrastructure to promote pedestrians/cyclists is also ideal.
Replacing a gas car with an electric car would only be worse than running your current gas car into the ground, if you were buying a brand new EV and were junking your old gas car. A lot of people won’t do that. If you buy a used EV and sell/trade-in the gas car to someone else to use, a new EV isn’t built and someone who can’t afford EV can get your used car.
Obviously pedestrian infrastructure and public transit is preferable if viable, but it isn’t always viable for the average person (at least in the USA/Canada) to switch to those, so having both options is best
There around 1000 life cycle cost analyses that disprove this idea by now. It takes only a few years of driving electric to pay off the carbon debt from manufacturing, assuming average driving behavior.
Of course, this is complicated because we should be dramatically reducing driving. But for most people it does not make sense to keep a gas car as a daily driver.
Yeah, this is something many climate advocates say - that it is better to keep the car you have - but I don't think this is backed up by data at all. It's very clear that that EVs are able to save more carbon emissions than in a fairly short period than you would save by not continuing to drive an ICE vehicle, with manufacturing included.
If we were going to have a simple rule, replacing all ICE vehicles today with EVs will be far better for the climate than keeping them.
There are so many factors that play into that, including the energy mix of the country you live in and so on.
The studies I have seen are a bit suspicious as they seem to employ figures that just so happen to support the idea that buying new cars (EVs in this case) is good. This is not to say that these figures are false, but they fit a bit too well into what the likely funders of these studies want to hear.
The real answer is probably: drive less, and only if you absolutely can not do that, maybe consider getting an EV instead of continuing to use your current ICE car.
I'm not paying $40 to read the first, but the numbers in the second match my napkin estimations, so I assume it's pretty reasonable in its conclusions.
However, there are other considerations. For instance, if you don't drive much and have a reasonably efficient ICE, continuing to use your existing vehicle may give you the opportunity to wait for EV manufacturing and operation emissions to drop significantly.
I spent some time outlining some formulas to determine the ideal break even points when accounting for multiple factors like vehicle lifespan and rate of efficiency increase but the math got... complicated pretty quickly. And that's before taking into account the non GHG impacts of EV manufacturing.
Suffice to say, it's certainly not as simple as "always drive your ICE into the ground", but it's also not as simple as "everyone should switch ASAP". For many people with relatively efficient ICEs it can very well be worth it to wait maybe 5-10 years for the next generation of batteries to become widespread.
For a fun comparison, I usually run the numbers for our 2004 Audi A2 with biodiesel (HVO100) against the most efficient electric vehicles, based on Swedish grid emissions and then US emissions.
The Audi runs at 4L/100km (real world numbers) x 256g/L (compensated emissions according to Neste) = 1024g/100km
Versus the Hyundai Ioniq 6 (current most efficient EV according to mestmotor in real world testing) with a consumption of 15.5kWh/100km * 41g/kWh (Sweden according to ourworldindata) * 1.15 (charging losses) = 730.8g/100km.
For the US that's 15.5kWh/100km * 369g/kWh *1.15 = 6577.4g/100km.
So compared to a US EV our car runs with a whopping 6th of the real emissions. Assuming the same production impact that your article linked it would take 11tons*10000000grams/(1024-730.8)grams/km = 37517 kilometers
We need to phase out oil and shift to better technologies with room for growth and use change that fits better with future realities.
If we keep some cars it means we need oil refineries running, we need oil processed to fuel and delivered to gas stations... if though we could totally cut sections of that out then we could build solar and wind infrastructure and remove gas stations (which are a horrible thing in so.many regards, if your house is next to a gas station it's value will go up when it closes)
Electric infrastructure is different, no toxic and explosive liquids to worry about so it's possible and increasingly common to have a charging pad at a supermarket or even here in the uk there putting them in at woodland trust carparks so you can have a twenty.min walk in the woods and recharge your own.battety while the car charges.
We will likely see an increase in supermarkets and malls using their vast carpark and roof.space for solar panels, likewise remote places like national parks so cars and busses can be charged off-grid with totally green power meaning that no lorries carrying petrol or pilons need to blight the landscape.
We might also see developments in grid management tech to support them too, for example a train station carpark might have a system where all cars are plugged in then charged in batches so as to use only the available excess load currently in their system - if you know your car will be there all day then it doesn't matter when it charges but it will make it cheaper for the rail operator, likewise electric bikes of course though I imagine they'll be taken on the train more often than not where a similar system charges them before the ticket holders destination is met.
Of course this shouldn't be an overnight thing but a transition where ICE vehicles are replaced with electric at.EOL, I (rarely) drive a tiny and very fuel efficient 15 year old car which i brought second hand, hopefully it'll last long enough that my next car can be a second hand electric, even if I have to replace the battery and charge controller to whatever aftermarket system is available. Though I'd love if self-drive allows me to give up car ownership and simply call one to me when required, unfortunately Uber or traditional taxis are too expensive and unable to fill my usecase requirements in most situations.
in an ideal world (heh) – our primary choice would be pedestrian, bicycle, electric micromobility, public transit – electric cars reserved for accessibility (personal ownership) – gas cars reserved for remote sites (rent or checkout only, no personal or private ownership)
Stop apologizing for asking questions. If we accept a “I’m being friendly and not hostile here it’s a genuine question don’t hate me for asking please” tax on every single question we ever ask it’s going to slow down our entire civilization.
See? That’s all you had to say. Just be sure to submit your Hassle Rejection Form in person at the courthouse between 2 and 4 pm next Tuesday, and you won’t have to worry about a thing. After we’ve received your paperwork we’ll email you a link to our online portal where you can sign up to not have any government horseshit to put up with.
It also ignores that everything has a cost and how much corporations like to pretend that "no study proving bad stuff means there's no bad stuff" for brand new things that haven't existed long enough for bad stuff to show up.
Some bad things take a very long time to show up though; the idea of putting the brakes on any new development until we had complete knowledge of potential bad things resulting simply isn't practical.
Lets take a really basic example: chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Ammonia was--and is--used a refrigerant. It was the first one that really worked, and many large-scale industrial systems still use it. It's cheap, it's very effective, and it's environmentally friendly. Unfortunately, ammonia has two problems: first, it's highly reactive with copper, so you can't have any copper in your system, and second, a leak in a refrigeration system can kill you because ammonia gas is toxic. A number of industrial accidents in the 1920s that resulted in a lot of deaths led to the search for non-toxic refrigerants. Enter CFCs; unlike ammonia, sulfur dioxide, and other early refrigerants, they're non-toxic, so a leak in your refrigerator (or the air conditioner in your car!) does risk killing you.
...Except that CFCs absolutely wreak hell on the ozone layer. They were eventually banned. HCFCs were used for a while, because those tend to break down before they get to the ozone layer, but it turns out that if they do get up there, they do more damage than the CFCs they replaced.
But we didn't know that in the 1920s. Hell, I don't think we realized that was a significant problem for 40-50 years after CFCs were in common usage. In that time, food had gotten considerably safer, because refrigerators had become common, and were now in ever home. Without CFCs, we might have never gotten to the point of refrigeration being in common usage in homes. (For reference, the house I had in Chicago was built in the 20s, and had a bricked-over window that went into the pantry. That window used to be where blocks of ice were delivered daily or weekly to an ice box.)
We're still looking for alternative refrigerants--and insulating blowing agents--that are both non-toxic, environmentally friendly, and are can be made cheaply enough to realistically replace the current generation of refrigerants.
We should be using the term correctly so that people learn to read it correctly. Otherwise we'll have a society of people who think technology is whatever Elon Musk is up to, and that's no good at all.
Hahaha jk, but I agree in part. For the other part, though, I think there is a partial duty to a communicator to realise how words will be interpreted, and use the word as they know it will be understood. Or else they should do some work to explain their meaning.
For instance, in the comic, the word "technological" could be removed altogether, and the meaning is only clearer for it.
I think we should be getting people excited about social technologies, and using the symbols of mainstream technology hype is a good idea. Symbols tell people how to feel. If we use techbro Steve Jobs presentation symbols to advertise walkable design to techbros, maybe people will get hype for walkability. I know I'm hype for walkability.
I may sneer at the commodification of livable designs, but I guess I see your point... We've gone way beyond the scope of this comic, using a single word as a launching point to talking about leveraging hype machines for good.
Would you care to give an example? I have a hard time picturing this kind of thing as sincere, because it's usually the tip of the spear in a cynical marketing campaign to divest people of their money.
Check out the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes. He gets me super hype for walkability, transit, and bikes. His newest video is about the weirdest trains in Japan. They make me want my country to have a train network as high tech and as massive and efficient. And also more cool trains. There's a Hello Kitty bullet train. It's pink!
Those aren't purely technological solutions though (except in the loosest sense of the word, where any non-hunter-gatherer behavior a human engages in is a technology), as they involve changing the way people live.
The electric car is a mostly drop-in replacement that fits in fine with the existing car centric suburban development model. The transit, cycling, and pedestrian oriented city involves changing how people think about their lives (many people in the US ask how it's even possible to get groceries without a car) and even changing some of the ways we structure our society (the expectation that the cost of housing will increase forever, or even the expectation that housing should be treated as a commodity to invest in at all, as well as many other things to do with the intersection of finance and landuse).
To give another example inventing new chemical processes to try to make plastic recycling work is a technological solution to the problem of petroleum use and plastic waste. Reducing or eliminating the use of single-use plastics where practicable is a non-technological solution, because it doesn't involve any new technologies.
In principle I'm not opposed to new technologies and "technological solutions". However you can see from the above examples that very often the non-technological solution works better. Technological solutions are also very often a poison pill (plastic recycling was made to save the plastic industry, not the planet).
In practice I think we need to use both types of solutions (for example, massively reduce our plastic use, but also use bio-plastics anywhere we can't). But people have a strong reaction to the idea of so-called technological solutions because of the chilling effect they have on policy changes. We saw this with the loop and hyperloop. Rather than rethinking the policies that lead to the dearth of High-Speed rail in the US and investing in a technology that already existed a bunch of states decided to wait for the latest whizz-bang gadget to come out. And it turns out this was exactly the plan. The hyperloop was never supposed to work, it was just supposed to discourage investment in rail projects.
I think that innovative forms of policy are technologies. If chemistry can have chemical engineers that implement chemical technologies, then political science should have civil engineers who implement political technologies.
My background is in chaos magick, where we refer to our magic spells as techs all the time. And this approach isn't novel. Psychologists consider things like meditation or applications of the placebo effect technologies. I mean, the brain is a thinking machine just like a computer, and we consider software technologies such as websites and applications to be technologies. Psychological technology is software for a brain, and political technology is software for a society.
I think gardening is a technology, even though it's just a different way of treating seeds that already exist. Sewing is a technology, the written word is a technology, money is a technology. And words and money exist only inside our heads.
We should be getting techbros excited about actually useful technologies instead of their AI crypto bullshit. I'm a techbro for magic spells and bicycles! There should be political hype over social technologies.
Why would the comic be referring to technology that has been around for hundreds of years? To me it's clearly about the belief that we'll "technology" our way out of the overconsumption crisis of capitalism
and we’ve circled back to the missing third place – libraries as community centers, family friendly pubs and bars, coffee shops that don’t require buying half the menu to just hang out, walkable (and bikable) cities where people can go for an evening stroll without being afraid of being run over …
I used to ho to a cafe that has a small book exchange library in the back. You could just go there, pick a book and read it with your coffee then bring the book home if you wish before bringing it back once your are done with it.
our mid-sized town put in the charter that bicycling and walking facilitation be funded. And boy-howdy did they do it! I can walk on sidewalks now instead of the busy roads. There is even a six mile asphalt walking trail now. Gotta go to the meetings, organize, and put pressure on these city council people. Most are inactive by the look of them.
had to look this idiot up and to the surprise of nobody... he's a right wing fossil fuel shill.
"...And now they are going after agriculture and of course, denim, which is cotton. Cotton also is deeply rooted in Jim Crow and racism, so that’s another reason to get rid of cotton. But also they want to get rid of cotton in denim because everything causes climate change until they just eliminate people writ large. And then there’ll be no more climate change when we’re all dead, which we may be from the eclipse in a couple of hours. Who knows? When we’re all dead, there’ll be no more climate worries.”
this is the sewerage that seems to flow from his brain.
seek to 1:42:17 for the disgorgement of this priceless nugget. if you skip around his segment you will also find the usual harrasment of Greta Thunberg and all things sane - but I would not wish to inflict listening to this dreck on anyone.
The people saying "we're destroying our planet and need to stop" want to see all humans go extinct but the people saying "nah oil belongs in the ocean" have our best interest in mind? Well I fully believe him.
Yeah, the "PTF" at the end of his username stands for "Power The Future", the name of his special interest group, which is doublespeak for "do everything possible to avoid acknowledging the climate crisis and the role fossil fuels have played in getting us here."
It's possible to participate in society in such a way as to uphold our beliefs about how society ought to be.
If you want to complain about Apple's abuse of employees, don't buy their stuff.
If you want to abolish slavery, don't own any slaves.
If you want to smash capitalism, buy a used thinkpad.
Sure, there are some instances where this just isn't possible in a complete and absolute sense. For example, I despise google, have invested a lot of effort in degoogling, but there remain some google components I rely on.
However, the existence of these instances does not mean we don't need to invest any effort in supporting the changes we want to see.
I agree, that comic is bullshit. Acknowledging that the world we live in isn't the one we want but that we can make a garbage system less garbage is absolutely valid. There are initiatives like Right to Repair that bring us closer to our goals while also actively making the existing system suck less, so why not take the money you would have spent on Apple products and put it towards the cause instead?
Having only two colors, clearly delineated, makes the flag worthless as a means of conveying anything, so they had to broadcast what it means with big, braindead-obvious symbols.
Frankly, that definitely looks like a straight pride flag, in that it's boring, binary, with absolutely zero sense of style, subtlety, or iconography.
That might depend on the police force (i.e., state) we’re talking about. My colleague told me that when he hit a deer and called the police with the deer still lying around, they just shot it.
It's not just the US. I had issues with my supplier a couple of years ago where they randomly changed the supply address of my account then opened additional accounts in my name without informing me or asking for consent, and after I called them to sort their shit they added a random over 2 grand charge to my account and expected me to pay my neighbour's bill for some reason. I ended up with around 15 calls to them where every time they claimed to be confused how that could have happened and promised an immediate fix which never materialised.
When I was finally able to raise a complaint with the ombudsman the supplier didn't even bother to respond. For all that blatant fraud they got a slap on the wrist. Their only penalty was that they had to credit a tiny amount to my account (I think it was ~£100) and remove the other fraudulent charges and accounts.
The worst part is I know for a fact they're pulling that shit with people unable or unwilling to fight back. I dread to think how much of their profit is from just straight-up scamming people.
When the term "essential worker" was coined, it made many of the people it applied to feel flattered. They were considered essential! However this is a misunderstanding of what a capitalist is saying. The term "essential" doesn't actually refer to the worker. They consider the work essential. It is very important that those jobs are carried out. The worker that does it though is irrelevant, and considered fungible.
You know how corporations have a department called "Human Resources?" That's exactly the mindset. Your job is essential, but you are expendable.
I'll have to give this kagi a shot I never heard of it! DDG just doesn't ever seem give me what I want and I've been trying it forever. It's like I'm always playing this cat and mouse game with the search engine and it just gives me alllllmost what I want but not quite.
works fine for me, and their implementation of AI (only letting it use wikipedia and maybe some select other sources) is pretty nice IMO, perfect for answering questions like "how many people live in X Y Z cities in total?".
I’ve been using it for years at this point, and I really prefer it to google. For most of my common/easy searches, it gets what I want pretty reliably. Occasionally I’ll have more obscure searches where I do have to switch back to Google, but honestly Google feels less and less helpful for that as time goes on. To add, DDG has bangs which are just wonderfully handy. Turning your search into a google search is as simple as adding “!g” to your query, and it’ll redirect the search. There are tons of other ones too, it’s a really nice feature that makes DDG more convenient in a lot of cases. Very much worth trying out at least
It struggles when you have more than one word, it will ignore context and give you results with maximum number of either word. Still better than Google at this point, though.
Same, but lately Bing fucked with their pricing, and now the search results are usually garbage. I have to go re-search the query in Google way too often.
I swapped to ddg about a year ago. I've noticed their search results are not the greatest either. There is so much spam and paid articles that make it to the top search results I often end up frustrated trying to find what I'm looking for.
To be fair I think DDG has improved marginally over the years while Google is simply shit now. I feel like spam sites are quite prevalent on Google but less so on DDG.
We held a private work event at the museum one time... I got loaded on whisky and went to see all the dinosaur bones. It was one of the best nights of my life
I don't want to read at library where people are getting lit - and it misses the whole point of having a healthy third place to be. Take your book to a bar if you want that 😆
Years and years ago my friends mom was complaining about taxes for public school. I said 'but your kids were public schooled!?' and she responded, perfectly seriously, "yeah but not anymore." (We had recently graduated). I have never forgotten this. It's real. Real people think like this
I fucking hate those people so much. It's those people and the "I don't have kids" people that are the reason why teachers have to buy their own damn supplies that the kids actually need.
This isn't a charity, those teachers are working and deserve their full income (that already isn't high enough because of the previously mentioned assholes.)
Always worth reminding those without kids that someone else's kid will be the doctors keeping them healthy, building their homes, working out how to power society as they fight to hold back the immense tide of global ecosystem collapse due to humanitiy's hubris and need for constant gratification with a minimised focus on the impact decisions have on the future.
That went south quick... What I meant to say was that we need to invest in building skills in young people. Not skimping on it like it's an annoying sycophant begging for succour.
Capitalists trying to convince the public to privatize things has nothing to do with cost; even if they were free, every dollar saved by the public represents a potential profit they're losing.
Presumably not the same one no, but somebody has to cover it. Not a job that's traditionally shift work in my past of be world, so a sizeable change for existing staff.
I think a community ran version would be better for this sort of idea, or if people are aware of the less formal evening setting doesn't have to be full librarians on staff, reduced service sort of thing.
I'm pro-library, and many reduced hours during the pandemic and never picked it back up. Resources are shrinking for them.
And it sucks that there's so many society problems and places like libraries and ER rooms get slashed resources. Because these spaces serve a public good, for neighborhoods, and the unhoused.
these spaces serve a public good, for neighborhoods, and the unhoused.
This is why I don't get the generalized hate on taxes. If I worked and had to give like 90% away for taxes and was left just with pocket money I would be absolutely on board if that meant that the money went to what you mentioned above. Guaranteed healthcare, good education for kids, an apartment, basic foods. Imagine having everything you need provided to you and just having 200-300€ a month to spend on what you will. Theater, movies, a fancy restaurant, or save up for a small trip. And all the while you know you're safe, and your neighbor is safe, and in the fancy third wave coffee shop you sit next to the garbage man and the finance attorney because both have pretty much equal money to spend. But somehow just the idea of having to pay taxes turns so many people off.
In his book Humankind Rutger Bregman talks about the election of a mayor in a city in Venezuela who campaigned on the notion that he wouldn't do the job. After years of corruption and broken promises from other politicians, the people hated the mayor so much they liked this idea a lot.
Part of his job was to create a budget. So he told everybody to submit a budget, and gave them last year's as a template. The general consensus was that they'd happily raise their taxes to pay for new parks and bus routes.
(This is a half remembered summary but I highly recommend the entire book.)
I think the real reason we can't have nice things is because we don't have a way to make sure nice things can happen.
I really miss having a reason to walk all day, like when I was in university. Now I work from home, and while I can walk around the block of whatever, it just isn't nearly the same.
The same for me. Although I could and would game in the dorm as much as I liked, I'd have pretty regular evening walks with friends over 2 hours with sitting for a bit on good places around the campus. On top of regular school stuff that'd amount to 4k-5k steps, these walks would add 5k-8k more on top, sometimes totalling 20k and not a single step or minute would be boring or hard to find motivation for.
Honestly, the idea of adding another hobby to my Jenga tower of hobbies is a bit scary, but you aren't wrong that it would get me out more. Might be worth a shot (pun intended).
Get a dog, if you can't then dedicate an hour or two to walking, make it an obligation.
I WFH and walk 5 to 10km a day... If you had the time to do it before and don't have more obligations than before then it's on you if you don't do it anymore...
Well, don't limit yourself to going around the block! We've got a 10lbs dog and he's unstoppable, he could walk around the city for hours if we let him. Pop some earphones in, listen to a podcast about something that interests you and go!
It's not like going around a lake, but that's something you can do on weekends :)
The things around me have all been stuff like "what material is the power pole made out of?" "What is the road surface on ____ street?" "What are the restrictions on parking here?" Etc. but there is an advanced mode you can use which unlocks harder questions that less people answer
I have a dog, and we walk around the block(s), but it's boring. When I can, I drive my dog down to the forest paths for a walk, but that's like, a whole event.
I found excuses for myself to walk and it's made a difference. YMMV depending on what's around you, but like my friend and I walk to a nearby coffee shop for our lunch dates, and I've got a decent walk to get to the gym, which impacts how my legs/back feel hugely.
Even just walking to a corner store to get a sparkling juice or whatever is nice.
I do have a few things within walking distance, but it's like, a gas station and a restaurant. I do walk to those when I need to, but I try not to go off I can help it, just to save money. (That's another frustration - that every reason to get out costs money.)
Sadly, there's a grocery store just outside "walking range" of my house. The last place I lived, I loved walking to the store every day for fresh groceries, but here it just isn't feasible.
Fortunately I should be moving soon, though, and this is all definitely going to be in mind when we choose a place.
I WFH a couple of days per week and living in a 15 minute walkable city is wonderful for walks compared to when I lived in the suburbs. But that's me and having an endless amount of actual stuff to walk to compared to an endless sea of cookie cutter houses and grass is my idea of heaven vs hell, in that order.
I can't speak for the anarcho-primitivists but I can say I've been alive long enough to understand that a lot of miracle tech is just a cash grab or a way or distracting from the real solutions. Like carbon capture instead of just investing in renewables and zero emission solutions that exist.
Tech bros are intellectually and morally careless and if what they say seems to good to be true, it's likely not.
My point is that technological solutions to our problems exist, if we pay attention to the science and not the hype. We don't have to be anti science to save the planet.
And aren't magic. Switching fully to renewables is probably both impossible (still require non-renewable materials to make) and requires lowering of living standards (unless you want to build a dyson swarm you need to stop growing your energy use, which pretty much means recession, because our economy is energy driven - and if you need a different economic system for a technological solution to work it's not really a technological solution, is it. Also renewables are still pretty annoying when it comes to matching your output to your supply, and not being able to turn your AC whenever you feel like it is already a lowering of living standard for the richest countries).
And while we wait for them to "solve" the problem, we're already likely past 1.5°C, even if we just stick to not starving, having water to drink, and not freezing during winters from tomorrow.
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