This article omits so many negatives from the "cyclist's paradise" vision of Hidalgo's 2 terms that I don't know where to start. Families are the first casualties: the Paris metro is nowhere near accessible to strollers except if you are willing to go to the chiropractor after each week end, and using your car - hell, even parking your family car - is a no go as soon as there is some kind of hipster sports event or just as soon as you are after 10am on week end mornings. Local parks and generally streets are so dirty that you have to wash your children from head to toe as soon as they have set foot outside. And I'm not even talking about used seringes and broken glass in certain parts of the city. I'm actually so ashamed of my city at this point.
About the accessibility issue in the Paris metro: this can be mitigated by using the buses (that's not the best experience but it works fine), and in some parts of Paris (in my experience, east and suburbs) people usually quickly help you in the stairs with your stroller (it's not convenient or comfortable to rely on others but in practice it seems to work). Anyway this is not like Paris mayor has any power on that, the transport authority though announced a few years ago that the main priority after the Grand Paris Express will be making the historical Paris network accessible. And fortunately after two years hopefully your kid can walk and you can carry it without a stroller.
> Local parks and generally streets are so dirty that you have to wash your children from head to toe as soon as they have set foot outside.
Maybe if it is a newborn, and if you don't bring the stroller nor any clothes, on rainy days it can be that bad. Don't get me wrong, Paris is not a clean city, there are empty nitrogen tanks, puffs and cigarettes lying on the ground pretty much in every arrondissement, but syringes, even on the colline du crack I can hardly remember having seen even one (but it is very dirty there! with packaging, paper, cardboard, bottles).
I still think there should be a higher priority on sanitation but I also think you are exaggerating a bit.
People took their children places for centuries without strollers and cars. The dependance on wheeled conveyances for children is baffling to me, I feel like some parents have an aversion to holding their kids. Especially the ones who clip a carseat into a stroller and never take them out.
We were gifted a big heavy modern stroller and almost never used it, when the kids were babies we wore them and now they can walk a little we just do that and take breaks. If it's going to be an all-day thing (like a theme park) we'll bring a lightweight umbrella style stroller and those are trivial to fold up and carry.
The accessibility argument makes sense for folks with disabilities but not so with children.
Accessibility is always important, regardless of what other options exist.
I loved carrying my kids as babies, and rode them everywhere on my bike, but there will always be people for whom bikes, walking or cars aren't an option, which is why accessible public transport is always important.
Only 30% of Parisians drive in the city. There are real accessibility issues, but cars are probably the worst solution. We could add elevators to more metro stations, or improve bus service, etc. But having a car in the city and parking it is a costly provilege that not many can enjoy. Also cars are super bad for public health, noise pollution and the environment.
> Local parks and generally streets are so dirty that you have to wash your children from head to toe as soon as they have set foot outside.
That's an insane hyperbole.
> And I'm not even talking about used seringes and broken glass in certain parts of the city.
No elevators to the metro? That's a problem independent from the cyclist's paradise. A city like Paris should have an accessible metro. Amsterdam has elevators at I think every single metro station (though our metro system is far less extensive than Paris' of course).
What prospects does humanity have without nature, exactly? Even ignoring the moral and aesthetic value, it underpins not just the economy but the ability to survive on this planet. If the biosphere collapses then civilization will rapidly follow.
Sorry if that sounds offensive, but you are being a bit shortsighted here. The theory just says that shareholder value serves both as a guide to what a business should do, and as a measure of how good it has done, because that measure encompasses all others. Which is debatable but far from stupid: do you really think Apple would have sold so many i* had they been ugly? Do you really think that angry people demanding taxes, regulations, etc don't affect how businesses decide to actually go and maximize shareholder value? The actual real absent in Friedman's reasoning is "eventually": externalities always come to haunt the shareholder value, the question is when do they become tangible enough that this aligns with society's perception of those externalities.
No, they didn't build iPhones to be beautiful because they would sell more, they did because they wanted to.
Ferrari didn't design sports cars because he wanted to sell the most cars. Armani doesn't design the most profitable suits. It's all completely absurd to say the point of "a firm" is to "maximize shareholder value". It's just so utterly stupid and inane... like... what about time horizon? At what level of variance? Its a lot like an unfalsifiable claim. You could say anything and say "well it maximizes shareholder value according to me"
Friedmans theory is basically a non-statement. It’s so banal as to be vacuous, except as a justification. It’s like saying the point of life is to procreate. Like no shit, but that’s not all that it is.
To put it in AI terms: you could dimensionality reduce a 1024 dimensional vector into 1 dimension and train a model on it. It may be the case that it’s the best reduction you could compute, but that doesn’t mean your entire idea isn’t shitty.
> And meanwhile the biggest threat to all our security, the climate crisis goes unaddressed.
That the climate crisis is the biggest threat to our security is the biggest fallacy of our times. It's not that climate change is unimportant, just that it needs to be evaluated to its fair potential consequences, compared to e.g. an all-out war.
Probably it's because I'm not a quantum physicist, but the argument boiling down to "the wavefunction is an object of a probability space not of physical space" seems to make the whole article moot. Can the "wavefunction" be anything else than a _representation_ of the particule(/wave)?... but then who could ever think that a representation would actually travel in space?
You see the carrot vanishing... OK. But what about the stick?
The whole point of Trump's policy is 'we forgot the stick, let's use it again'. I see this true for international policy but you could probably extend that to that infamous DOGE: Fed agencies must be 'productive' (whatever that means), or else.
CFO's perspective: wanna sell me something, anything? you're out.
However well crafted your email is, you're an unacceptable distraction from the priorities that the company has set, the achievement of which is materialized by projects of varying size and scope. Upon starting any project of any size, people do due diligence: they assess what exactly it is they are looking for, and then research the market for it. For macro-projects, consultants may be hired to help with the process, which may lead to a proper tender.
Either way, the company contacts you, not the other way round.
I don't know what makes you say that. Requiring a bit of market research from project proponents does not mean excluding anything lightweight or just new. What you don't want is some company being contracted because it talked to you first by whatever channel rather than as a result of some reasoned assessment.
How do you research something you don't know exists?
> wanna sell me something, anything? you're out.
Advertise? you're out. Have a website? you're out. Go on the Shark Tank? you're out. Do a "Show HN"? you're out.
Reply to an open call to tender? you're out.
> I don't know what makes you say that
"CFO". IBM is the classic choice of the CFO class - they dont want to get fired so they a) dont make a decision or b) chose IBM because they were not "selling them something" (except for all the sales and marketting they do)
Is your argument that you could only find out about a product or service if it’s advertised to you?
If so, that has not been my experience. In my business I typically select against products or services that cold email/call me. But that’s never been a problem. When I need to find a third party solution I start educating myself on the topic and search for vendors. It’s not that difficult.
It's the reason why it can only work at small scale: it's all or nothing. It wants to be your only communication channel. But, surprise, as soon as you live in a larger organisation, there will already be communication channels that serve part of the same purpose. Then most of the functionality become clutter.
