Yahoo Japan is a separate entity from the US juggernaut of ancient times. They run a transportation app called Yahoo!乗換案内 or roughly Yahoo Transfer Information. I live here so I can read enough Japanese to get by. But there is no English version.

There used to be a non-Google English competitor that faded away a few years back. The network is quite dense here in the big cities and disruptions happen. So you’ll need something that alerts you to problems along the route. They stopped being tied into whatever API that requires. And it’s been so long I forgot what they were called. I prefer the Yahoo one to Google Maps because their algorithm that finds best connections works better in my experience. But that’s coupled with me knowing my way around Tokyo okay as well. YMMV.

I see the thumbnail but the picture fails to load in full screen view (Boost app on Android)

Somebody is going to jump into this. But I would keep my eyes open beyond just the Chinese market. Vietnam and Thailand are interesting places to watch. V because of the relative sweetheart deal with the trumpist of tariffs. And T because they already do a lot of SSD manufacturing. And China, more than any other country, will be at the mercy of a particular person’s bowel movements on Pennsylvania Ave.

You could argue my take is too accepting of the current situation and I would agree with that. At the same time, I would argue yours is simplifying things quite a bit. Subscription TV channels came after free-to-air channels with commercials. This may depend on where you live in the world but most places have at least one local station or a selection of them broadcast through the air, not cable or satellite, and not subscription based. Financed through commercials or in some countries also through a license model (like in the UK). Cable/satellite/subscription channels are iterations on the model brought to you by capitalism. Ads in public transport can lower ticket prices. Billboards can help lower rental rates in buildings and their revenue adds to the tax intake of the community they’re in. If you think it already takes too long to get potholes fixed, it would take even longer without them. Not all roads are toll roads. I get it: you don’t like billboards. You’re going to get all these unintended side effects if they were banned tomorrow.

Online ads are insufferable. I’m running 3-4 plugins to avoid them. I’m also normally watching broadcast TV on DVR so I can skip through the commercial breaks. I bail on any subscription service that adds ads.

The problem online is the cause of the problem. It’s the simplicity with which data can be collected and the lack of regulation. It’s also generally still paying off a debt incurred when in the early days of www users got accustomed to getting everything ‘for free.’ Traditional media has lowered the price dramatically of its own offerings to get new eyeballs online while older streams of income still paid for most expenses, like the income from TV commercial revenue or sales of printed paper. And as these traditional sources of great rivers of money decreased over decades, the ones that replaced it were digital trickles in danger of drying out. That brought about a “militarization” of online ads, ever more targeted and annoying. This problem needs a multi-pronged approach including regulation of data collection and new financing models for media in general.

Chose your own dystopia. Where no ads exist and everything is pay per view/read/report/etc. Or the one we’re in.

The bigger problem with traffic deaths is that we developed a system of transportation that relies heavily on cars that are mostly driven by humans. Removing billboards is not going to improve on that that much. But underwear model billboard pileups are a thing. But so are those caused by drivers on their phones and my guess there are way more of those.

Tracking and selling of information has gotten out of hand, no doubt. It is political decisions or a lack thereof that got us here.

Btw everybody thinks they’re immune to advertising. And we’re not.

The unofficial wisdom of marketing is that half of any advertising budget is wasted. They just don’t know which half. So they continue. This whole thing boils down to the fiduciary responsibilities to provide as much value to shareholders again, the bane of capitalism. They cannot afford to check which half is wasted.

And just for some context here: personally I don’t mind billboard ads to be honest.

I think the abundance of tools available to block ads online hints at a movement in itself. We don’t need a leader or a central committee.

The wrinkle I see here is that a generalized ‘everybody’ hates ads but ‘everybody’ is also aware of the fact that they finance a large swath of stuff that we would have to pay for otherwise.

None of those ch’s are guttural and you skipped an h;)

Try to bear with me anyway.

The delightful thing is that it works in reverse also: ask a native English speaker to pronounce “Eichhörnchen.”

A mixture of urbanization and climate change pushes bears into human habitats. At the same time, it’s a nation of retirees with 60-somethings hiking or farming plots in bear habitats, and thus becoming fodder themselves. And at the same time still they cannot come up with good legislation and a ranger service that can regulate the population of bears by shooting them if they have to without falling fowl of the strict gun laws. It’s a clusterfuck.

Sorry, can’t help you there because I don’t have a clue. I’m in Japan and landed on the Yahoo Japan app because in my experience they do better than the G’s and A’s here locally.

This depends on which area you want to navigate in, how well OSM is maintained there, and on the interface situation between the providers of public transport and the open internet. I think the latter is the biggest problem. Is the transport data available and available in a stable format that OSM can tap into? And the answer is most likely no. The Googles and the Apples have teams that take care of their maps offering and that work through the patchwork of APIs and formats to come up with not totally bad solutions to this mess. Unpaid volunteers will have a harder time getting to the same level. So OSM is not the way to go here - most likely. I’m sure islands of great data exist.

Best boss I ever had.

It’s an assumption that many people will be unemployed and unemployable in other functions. So far, every big change (like the Industrial Revolution or the advent of computers in the workplace) have lead to temporary displacements, and the longer ago it happened violent side effects. But in the big picture, we have found ways to put the human resource back into the machine. Accountants were supposed to go extinct with the arrival of Microsoft Excel. But their numbers have increased because they can do more useful things with their time than doing the math. The assumption may be more fear mongering. (And it’s too early to tell if you ask me.)

So I don’t think they will kill us off just yet because it isn’t entirely clear that we’re not needed. It’s also possible that so-called AI frees up people and resources that can be channeled into what are chronically underfunded professions today, like teaching or medical care. We have a tendency to think in Matrix or 1984 terms of the future when more positive outcomes exist.

Etar allows notifications after an event has started. In your example you would have to do the math in your head but you could make it work.

In kennels in different houses 500 miles apart.

By physically separating them until they’re all done with puberty.

As an aside, not all siblings hate each other. Or what feels like hate growing up dissipates quickly when they reach adulthood.

Passt ins Stadtbild.

Is this a bad use of so-called AI? Yes. Is this illegal? I’m going to say no. One of the reasons why Google tried this is because in various markets they’ve been dragged to court or coerced to fund news initiatives because they used snippets from publishers in their search results word-for-word. A not insignificant number of publishers has been lobbying pretty hard against them for giving you their headline and a couple of phrases as a snippet. Those publishers are dumb if you ask me but they were able to bend laws to their will and limit the usefulness of the link, the cornerstone of the internet. So you can sort of understand their motivation why they would try this. And it was only a test from what I’ve heard. So bash Google for all the truly evil shit they’re up to. This issue is dumb but not really worth the outrage.

[Icey breath] No.