Personally, I cancelled my subscription the day that they announced there would be ads in ChatGPT. Not that I was surprised on that day.
I find it kind of fascinating seeing people now debate the ins and outs of just exactly how useful the ads/affiliate schemes inside the chatbot are.
Pretty much in the same way that I'm fascinated about people debating the quality of ads shown in their browser while I've been using ad blockers for forever now and cannot imagine seeing the web without them.
France as a whole is way too centralized on Paris and it's actually hurting the country. If you do read French, there is a very interesting book from 2024 (IIRC) about this. It's called "Quand le parisianisme écrase la France".
Before reading this book I always thought Germany (where I grew up) was the exception for being more decentralized. But it looks like actually France is way more centralized even compared to other pretty centralized countries.
> Before reading this book I always thought Germany (where I grew up) was the exception for being more decentralized. But it looks like actually France is way more centralized even compared to other pretty centralized countries.
This is closely related to the concept of primate cities (you can read its wikipedia page for more details if interested). Essentially, places like France, UK, Russia (countries with primate cities) have an unusually/disproportionately high concentration of population in the largest city. There are some pros but unsurprisingly cons as well.
People keep saying Hidalgo's policies made people angry, but then voter turnout when she actually asks for confirmation of her policies is low. For example, 2024's vote on whether to triple the parking fees for big SUVs. [1]
Turnout was tiny, but the measure passed.
Well what does that mean? It certainly doesn't mean that there is a huge wave of enthusiasm for the measure.
But conversely it also means there's not a huge wave of anger about it. It's not like the automotive lobby didn't try hard to create one; the media coverage was actually kind of crazy at the time. And with the low turnout, even a small mobilization would have been sufficient to reject this measure. But it didn't materialise. So when I read articles like this one from CNN, I just have to ask myself what the agenda is behind jazzing this up as much.
I cannot read the fiery letters, but it’s quite possible, depending on how the affected metro vs the voting block overlaps, that those who vote aren’t those complaining.
Also complaining is easy, I could do it right now here on HN from any bathroom in the world; voting is comparatively much harder.
Measures like this always seem unfair to me if they aren't announced a few years in advance. A car is a large investment and people may have made different choices knowing that the rules will change. Same with the tax per mile for Electric cars in the UK.
Instead of encouraging motorists to make better choices, they just end up feeling part of a money grab
Large cars impose heavy many negative externalities on people (take up more space, make it difficult to get through a narrow street when they park there, higher mortality when they drive into pedestrians or cyclists, reduce visibility for others, aesthetically offensive). Policy is slow to shift those costs onto the people causing the externalities but it is predictable that it will happen eventually.
Very sorry for drivers' inconvenience, but if they hadn't realized how bad SUVs are for health, climate, and basically anything that's going on in the city, then announcing it early wouldn't have registered either, I think, since they clearly haven't been following any news.
Hidalgo has been very clear about her plans for Paris for many years now, and people are still in favor of them. People shouldn't feel entitled to driving their oversized trucks in and out of our city, when we have such a dense and efficient network of public transit that doesn't make everyone else's lives worse through noise and pollution.
I would take low voter turnout more as indifference than as lack of enthusiam. To take the parking fee for SUVs example, I would assume a lot of people affected by it and complaining about it aren't even living in Paris, so they can't vote against it.
The whole of France is eating quite a lot of unpasteurized cheese. If done correctly, it can be quite safe. Although of course contamination does happen if a significant proportion of your cheese production nationwide is unpasteurized, that's just a numbers game. So yes, it is par for the course, but probably not at this level where the same producer shows up over and over again.
I guess this producer must be extremely confident to be refusing a recall in such a litigious jurisdiction as the USA. Or maybe they've just made the right campaign donations and feel safe enough...
> The whole of France is eating quite a lot of unpasteurized cheese. If done correctly, it can be quite safe.
"If done correctly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The "classic" processes are generally done for exactly the reasons of maintaining safety. They create conditions where, even if bad bacteria exist, the growth is minimized in various ways--temperature, acidity, competing good bacterial growth, etc.
The problem occurs when you try to industrialize these processes. These kinds of artisanal processes are generally expensive, almost never scale, and people in the field recognize this.
Unfortunately, in the US, the overlap between "raw milk consumers" and "nitwit to be fleeced" is quite high. This attracts charlatans like these "Raw Farm" con artists, and you wind up with outbreaks like these.
And, yes, I am quite salty that these Raw Farm dingleberries somehow manage to distribute a bunch of dangerous raw milk products to multiple states while I can't even get a gallon of double cream (pasteurized or otherwise) in order to make butter.
I grew up in a location where people always drank raw milk, not from any bizarro beliefs but because for several centuries the way you got your milk was to watch for the cows heading for the barn, then about 30 minutes later send one of the kids over with a pail to collect the milk for the day. It was still warm from the cow, you put it in your fridge or, before electricity, in the basement cool room, and there was never any problem with it. As you say though, industrialisation of the processes and it taking days, weeks, possibly months between squirted-out-of-the-cow and consumption have messed that up.
And the reason I don't believe you is because my family two generations back milked cows just like you claim. And everybody in the family boiled their milk religiously.
Folk wisdom was "boil the milk" and they didn't worry much about what it did to vitamins or taste.
Even worse, they would freeze the milk afterward. I still remember the horrible taste of that stuff. Yuck.
I find it kind of fascinating seeing people now debate the ins and outs of just exactly how useful the ads/affiliate schemes inside the chatbot are.
Pretty much in the same way that I'm fascinated about people debating the quality of ads shown in their browser while I've been using ad blockers for forever now and cannot imagine seeing the web without them.
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