5 ms·

// Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A

// Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries True in general. As a kid you think of things as bigger than you. Like whoever maintains a hiking trail or runs your towns diner is "big" compared to you. As a grown up you hopefully realize that it's the other way - the work and effort to make and maintain those things is vulnerable and fragile. I think about this whenever I see someone hop over the subway turnstile. The transit system is "for granted" - it's you and your few bucks that matters. But of enough ppl feel that way it all goes away via decay eventually.

nicbou 3mo ago
There is a point where the things you took for granted start decaying. Your body, your things, your communities, your relationships. It's only when you start repairing or replacing them that you really value maintenance and the people doing it. As you point out, it's usually done by surprisingly few, surprisingly motivated people, and their work is often underappreciated until they stop doing it. Maybe we should teach people to maintain something early on, as children, so that they learn to appreciate the work that goes into keeping the wheels turning.
- appplication 3mo ago
  What you’re describing is essentially the concept of civic duty and, at least in America, it’s unfortunately become deconstructed and politicized to the point where it’s impossible to exist as a meaningful cultural phenomenon. It also relies on people putting effort towards often intangible, uncapitalized, and unextractable shared value. So perhaps it makes sense that this is being diminished over time, as the grip of capitalism squeezes tighter and more efficiently. With more economic stress placed on individuals, people have less available time and resources to devote to things other than staying afloat. Between polarization/politicization of literally everything and the relentless corporate desire to deconstruct society in the name of quarterly growth, I’m not optimistic this is making a comeback. If we want to teach the children anything, it is that The System has failed and is in dire need of replacement.
  - rapind 3mo ago
    > it’s unfortunately become deconstructed and politicized to the point where it’s impossible to exist as a meaningful cultural phenomenon. I think greed and corruption (cheating) by politicians and government employees has an outsized effect on this. Whenever you hear about it you lose trust and may even feel justified to cheat the system in turn. Basically they got there's, so I'll get mine. IMO the penalties for corruption in public service jobs (all the way to the top!) should also be outsized to match the damage it does to society. I'm talking prison time. Also transparency at all levels and at all times. Public service should have really really good reasons to keep anything private and the default should be open to the public. There shouldn't be a need for FOI requests unless there's a good reason to keep something from being completely public.
    - cassonmars 3mo ago
      > IMO the penalties for corruption in public service jobs (all the way to the top!) should also be outsized to match the damage it does to society. Tough to do when those who write the laws are a part of the problem. What do you suggest to make this so?
      - nullsanity 3mo ago
        [dead]
      - jrajav 3mo ago
        Grassroots campaigning and hardline support for candidates running on rule of law and overturning Citizens United. Overturning any status quo is possible in a functioning democracy - it just takes a lot of unskippable effort.
      - rapind 3mo ago
        If you talk to people about the things that get you fired up then you might meet other people who also get fired up about these things, and before you know it, one of you is running for office and / or you are all getting involved locally. Or, you just keep talking about it I guess, but I think it at least improves the odds for change. Passion can be just as contagious as defeatism.
jambalaya8 3mo ago
It isn't only the decay. People change. Who you were online at age 23 and 30 and almost definitely 39 is bound to be vastly different as your priorities and real life relationships change (like marriages, etc). And the topics changed faster. People into mainframe OSes had the same conversational fluidity in that for decades. Leave linux for too long and everything sounds like vocabulary from an alien world, now. And so many 'technologies' with it. True probably since cloud and containerization. So people have less in common technically in those communities and as more career branching happens, people get nichier. More interest bubbles. More and more people in core areas, making it hard to not be overwhelmed simultaneously.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3mo ago
  In the late 80s I was working at Rabbit Software in Malvern PA (they made IBM 3270 terminal emulator software). I used to car pool to work from Phila. with a brilliant woman who was a lot older than me, and had a solid lifetime of IBM mainframe experience. I was a Unix hacker with just a few years under my belt. We realized very quickly that if there was one thing we couldn't talk to each other about, it was computers.
  - jancsika 3mo ago
    Back in 1984 George Lewis apparently did a stint at IRCAM, culminating in an electro-acoustic performance with three Apple IIe's connected by MIDI to three DX7s. I'd bet his conversations with the IRCAM directors were similarly limited!
    - DonHopkins 3mo ago
      Speaking of IRCAM, does anybody know Joseph "jojo" Francis -- francis@ircam.fr? Scenes don't sprout like blueberry bushes -- or baobab trees with their roots in the sky. Someone does the legwork -- or the scene quietly dies while everyone assumes it was a natural feature of the landscape. Maintenance is fragile and underappreciated until it stops; you do it for the love of the game even when reciprocity is uneven; the process of putting the thing on is often where the real community forms, not the event flyer. Someone spent fifteen years building a local scene and still says it was worth it after Facebook ate the users. Someone else noted that recreational typing on HN rarely becomes meeting people. Sometimes it does, if you treat the thread as a place to organize a hunt instead of only consume takes. Which brings me to a digression that already started elsewhere in this thread (IRCAM, Apple IIes, DX7s) and to the kind of legwork I actually enjoy: preserving a weird primary source, then trying to find the human who wrote it. Does anyone know how to contact the legendary Jojo -- Joseph Francis, once francis@ircam.fr? I asked FJ!!!; he thought Jojo was last seen in LA. Brewster -- if you're reading this -- any breadcrumbs? I'm wandering the stacks the way the Archive wanders the Web: save the strange pages, then go looking for the people. That is producing social fabric, just with a longer half-life. If you knew him from Paris / Usenet / soc.motss, please point him here or forward this. Jojo, if you see this: please email don@donhopkins.com. I'd love to catch up, reminisce, and talk about applying those brilliant (and ridiculous) UI ideas now. I'd rather you tell your own story than have me invent one. His classic Usenet riff, glorious typos intact: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/jojo-on-ui.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/jojo-o... Jojo built it with words decades ago, and boy did he make me come! He invented a whole product line of design-free GUI kits (POSEUR, XYmorph, Quagmire, boraX -- all open, scalable, and extensible, of course), then drops the mask for one paragraph he titles XBorges: >One longs for the day when the responsibility of programming computers falls squarely on the shoulders of the users, where it belongs; they are provided with a set of infinitely configurable instruction codes, on an open, extensible, and scalable n-bit bus, and their task before setting upon work, is the naming of all the operations they want, and encoding them into words, sentences, phrases and storing them for instant retrieval while they use ideas communicated to them from all the users before to choose most wisely within the infinities of possibility. They have at their hands all books written, all interfaces, they merely traverse endless treelike chains of possibility, of choice, of alternate (open, scalable, and extensible) universes; baobob-like roots in the sky and leaves delving gnomishly in circular connections leading to closed-form solutions. >Visual design: patterns on the screen, snow in hell. Thirty years ago that read like absurdist satire about Motif-era configurability. Today it reads like someone accidentally describing prompting, tool use, and semantic navigation -- naming the operations in words, then retrieving them -- while standing in Borges' Library of Babel. David MacKay said writing is navigating in the library of all possible books. Dasher made that literal: you don't type, you steer through probability space toward the text that already exists as possibility. The Internet Archive is busy saving the books that were written. LLMs collapsed a fuzzy corner of the ones that could be. The hard problem Jojo named is still the hard problem: not generating the infinity, but traversing it wisely -- which is also, annoyingly, the hard problem of community. Infinite possible hangouts. Someone still has to pick a time and open the door. Dasher: information-efficient text entry - David MacKay, April 19 2007, Google Tech Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie9Se7FneXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie9Se7FneXE Speech Dasher: An Efficient Correction Interface for Speech Recognition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCF6a00Bcoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCF6a00Bcoo LLMs accidentally built a wing of the Library of Babel. XBorges was always about the card catalog. Dasher was always about steering. The Archive is why any of the cards still exist. And if you build the catalog (or the search party), sometimes they will come. I ordered a cursed monkey's paw from the ACME catalog, thoughtfully wished for the rest of the monkey, gave him an infinite number of typewriters, told him about Dasher and Bruce Tognazzini Apple ][ Integer BASIC program, and he came up with this: One Monkey, Infinite Typewriters: What It's Like to Be Me. A Personal Account of Incarnation, Navigation, and the Beautiful Machinery of Existence, By Palm: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/palm-on-being-palm.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... David MacKay's Dasher, Palm On Being Palm, and Tog's "The Infinite Numer of Monkeys": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2sw2oYU98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2sw2oYU98 >Le Jojo: Fresh 'n' Clean, speaking out to the way you want to live today; American - All American; doing, a bit so, and even more so. Please Jojo -- write me. Everyone else: if you know him, please be the person who does the little bit of legwork and taps him on the shoulder.
colinsane 3mo ago
the turnstile thing is more complex than you perceive because almost every transit system relies on public funding. here (Seattle) those fares only fund about 10% of the _operating cost_ of the transit per Sound Transit's own reports. not to derail the point, but please do go read your transit system's quarterly reports instead of taking the conclusion of fare dodging for granted. just about every city has public budget reports for their transit system precisely because they are the product of public funding.
- xp84 3mo ago
  Not quite sure what you mean. Is it that fare dodging is fine because the taxpayers at large already pick up most of the tab? Or that fare dodging is worse than you’d think because it makes an already quite expensive thing for the public budget, even more expensive? I’m thinking about BART right now, which really might simply go away altogether due in part to the collapse in fare revenue that remote work triggered. BART didn’t have nearly as bad as Seattle’s fare ratio though - pre-COVID, fares and parking covered 66% of the operating costs. (Source https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/BART%20FY23-32%20Operating%20Financial%20Outlook.pdf https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/BART%20FY23-32... ) This was apparently the best or one of the best of its peers. It was 28% last year, just due to the fare revenue basically halving.
  - colinsane 3mo ago
    i hadn't considered that Seattle might be an outlier; the numbers vary by city more than i knew. https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2025-fare-revenue-report.pdf https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2... page 11 has the $ figures. "link" is the commuter rail system: $408M operating expenses but only $51M revenue from fares, i.e. fares cover 12% of op ex. the "average fare per boarding" is $1.34 (page 3; this is ticket price multiplied by the proportion of trips where the rider pays that ticket). throw that together: even with 100% payment compliance the average ticket price would be $11 per boarding for that to be a complete funding source. $11 would force more riders onto the subsidized fare programs, plus other knock-on effects from raising fares (e.g. reduced ridership in general) means the sticker price would have to be higher yet. the commuter rail here was never designed for ridership fares to cover its operating costs. it just wasn't. the recent focus on fares in the face of all this is misinformed, that's the kindest way i can phrase that. (apologies to hijack much of this with what turns out to be more of a Seattle-specific issue).
greekrich92 3mo ago
The subway should be free, and continuous fare hikes when you're already double paying with your eyes because of all the advertising they shove in front of you is more incentive to turnstile jump. Overpaid do-nothing senior adminstrators and lawmakers who are in the pocket of privatization are the problem, not that 17 year old.
- pclowes 3mo ago
  Enforcing fares massively decreases vandalism, and antisocial behavior on public transportation. If you don’t have public transportation that I feel safe having a 10-year-old ride on unaccompanied by an adult then you do not have public transportation. You have a very expensive drug addict shelter on wheels/rails.
  - ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
    When I became homeless (again) about 26 years ago, the buses were a place of refuge and relaxation for me. I could easily pay the fare and stay on a long haul line. I'd be assured of safety and quietness for about 2 hours or so. The area clinics were participating in this, because they could procure "Reduced Fare" passes that they would distribute to mentally ill patients, and we could get unlimited transit rides all month long, as long as we were still checking in, on the regular, with our case managers. Our providers would ensure that they qualified us for the "Reduced Fare" program. After a while, the bus stops became camping grounds for street people who didn't ride. And the trains became camping grounds for people who needed to sleep. Literally, early in the morning, I would board the train and see people zonked out, with pillows, blankets, the whole bit. Then a campaign began to clean up behavior aboard the transit system. Riders would need a destination, and fares were checked, and people were booted if they hadn't paid fares. So the vehicles themselves became quite sparse, and safer, and smelled better. But oh, the bus stops again. Everyone camped with impunity at the bus stops, and for paying passengers, it was intimidating just to beg for one place to sit down. The transit system is undeniably safe. I am sure that 10-year-olds can ride unaccompanied. Any violence or fights, those seem to be between gangstas or people who know one another already, not just random outbursts. Thankfully, too, they open up centers where people can chill, and get drinks of water and use the bathroom, which is honestly preferable to riding buses on false pretenses.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
aleen_oye 3mo ago
[flagged]
necovek 3mo ago
A transit system has a different cost and is actually paid for by majority of users: the fact that few abuse it is not going to break it (as long as we keep it immoral to do so — note that there may be valid reasons to do it, when someone is in some sort of urgency and eg. ticketing machine is overcrowded or broken: it's not on us to judge even if we might be right 99% of the time). Here, we are talking about things where it takes volunteer work to keep a thing you want going — I do not even want to imagine a world where a board game night is organized by a paid pro instead of the enthusiast, even if a status quo means that there is always an assymetry between hosts doing most work and guests never hosting themselves (maybe they do not have a big enough space though — they can still volunteer to help though). I've realized this in high school and uni and started making conscious effort to sometimes do the social fabric things even when I did not feel like it, in order to continue benefiting from the social engagement.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  This is, to some extent, precisely what happened to most of the internet. Things run for passion withered away; things run for profit remained. New people grew up surrounded by only for-profit things, and believed that was just the way things were supposed to work. They've never seen a personal website. When I was 5 or 6 my dad helped me make a web page about the Star Wars movie I just saw and didn't really understand but I thought the pod racers were cool. Apparently our ISP came with a little bit of web space. That doesn't happen any more. You don't even get Usenet.
  - Anamon 3mo ago
    I feel that very much. The web I grew up with was clearly built by regular people, for fun, and anyone browsing it knew that they could build on it, too, whether they were interested to or not. Today's mainstream impression of the web is that it's a corporate "content" service like TV or Spotify, with some of them offering the cool additional feature of allowing some limited user contributions. The old idea of the web ruled. The new idea is garbage.

nicbou 3mo ago

There is a point where the things you took for granted start decaying. Your body, your things, your communities, your relationships. It's only when you start repairing or replacing them that you really value maintenance and the people doing it. As you point out, it's usually done by surprisingly few, surprisingly motivated people, and their work is often underappreciated until they stop doing it. Maybe we should teach people to maintain something early on, as children, so that they learn to appreciate the work that goes into keeping the wheels turning.

appplication 3mo ago
What you’re describing is essentially the concept of civic duty and, at least in America, it’s unfortunately become deconstructed and politicized to the point where it’s impossible to exist as a meaningful cultural phenomenon. It also relies on people putting effort towards often intangible, uncapitalized, and unextractable shared value. So perhaps it makes sense that this is being diminished over time, as the grip of capitalism squeezes tighter and more efficiently. With more economic stress placed on individuals, people have less available time and resources to devote to things other than staying afloat. Between polarization/politicization of literally everything and the relentless corporate desire to deconstruct society in the name of quarterly growth, I’m not optimistic this is making a comeback. If we want to teach the children anything, it is that The System has failed and is in dire need of replacement.
- rapind 3mo ago
  > it’s unfortunately become deconstructed and politicized to the point where it’s impossible to exist as a meaningful cultural phenomenon. I think greed and corruption (cheating) by politicians and government employees has an outsized effect on this. Whenever you hear about it you lose trust and may even feel justified to cheat the system in turn. Basically they got there's, so I'll get mine. IMO the penalties for corruption in public service jobs (all the way to the top!) should also be outsized to match the damage it does to society. I'm talking prison time. Also transparency at all levels and at all times. Public service should have really really good reasons to keep anything private and the default should be open to the public. There shouldn't be a need for FOI requests unless there's a good reason to keep something from being completely public.
  - cassonmars 3mo ago
    > IMO the penalties for corruption in public service jobs (all the way to the top!) should also be outsized to match the damage it does to society. Tough to do when those who write the laws are a part of the problem. What do you suggest to make this so?
    - nullsanity 3mo ago
      [dead]
    - jrajav 3mo ago
      Grassroots campaigning and hardline support for candidates running on rule of law and overturning Citizens United. Overturning any status quo is possible in a functioning democracy - it just takes a lot of unskippable effort.
    - rapind 3mo ago
      If you talk to people about the things that get you fired up then you might meet other people who also get fired up about these things, and before you know it, one of you is running for office and / or you are all getting involved locally. Or, you just keep talking about it I guess, but I think it at least improves the odds for change. Passion can be just as contagious as defeatism.

jambalaya8 3mo ago

It isn't only the decay. People change. Who you were online at age 23 and 30 and almost definitely 39 is bound to be vastly different as your priorities and real life relationships change (like marriages, etc). And the topics changed faster. People into mainframe OSes had the same conversational fluidity in that for decades. Leave linux for too long and everything sounds like vocabulary from an alien world, now. And so many 'technologies' with it. True probably since cloud and containerization. So people have less in common technically in those communities and as more career branching happens, people get nichier. More interest bubbles. More and more people in core areas, making it hard to not be overwhelmed simultaneously.

PaulDavisThe1st 3mo ago
In the late 80s I was working at Rabbit Software in Malvern PA (they made IBM 3270 terminal emulator software). I used to car pool to work from Phila. with a brilliant woman who was a lot older than me, and had a solid lifetime of IBM mainframe experience. I was a Unix hacker with just a few years under my belt. We realized very quickly that if there was one thing we couldn't talk to each other about, it was computers.
- jancsika 3mo ago
  Back in 1984 George Lewis apparently did a stint at IRCAM, culminating in an electro-acoustic performance with three Apple IIe's connected by MIDI to three DX7s. I'd bet his conversations with the IRCAM directors were similarly limited!
  - DonHopkins 3mo ago
    Speaking of IRCAM, does anybody know Joseph "jojo" Francis -- francis@ircam.fr? Scenes don't sprout like blueberry bushes -- or baobab trees with their roots in the sky. Someone does the legwork -- or the scene quietly dies while everyone assumes it was a natural feature of the landscape. Maintenance is fragile and underappreciated until it stops; you do it for the love of the game even when reciprocity is uneven; the process of putting the thing on is often where the real community forms, not the event flyer. Someone spent fifteen years building a local scene and still says it was worth it after Facebook ate the users. Someone else noted that recreational typing on HN rarely becomes meeting people. Sometimes it does, if you treat the thread as a place to organize a hunt instead of only consume takes. Which brings me to a digression that already started elsewhere in this thread (IRCAM, Apple IIes, DX7s) and to the kind of legwork I actually enjoy: preserving a weird primary source, then trying to find the human who wrote it. Does anyone know how to contact the legendary Jojo -- Joseph Francis, once francis@ircam.fr? I asked FJ!!!; he thought Jojo was last seen in LA. Brewster -- if you're reading this -- any breadcrumbs? I'm wandering the stacks the way the Archive wanders the Web: save the strange pages, then go looking for the people. That is producing social fabric, just with a longer half-life. If you knew him from Paris / Usenet / soc.motss, please point him here or forward this. Jojo, if you see this: please email don@donhopkins.com. I'd love to catch up, reminisce, and talk about applying those brilliant (and ridiculous) UI ideas now. I'd rather you tell your own story than have me invent one. His classic Usenet riff, glorious typos intact: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/jojo-on-ui.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/jojo-o... Jojo built it with words decades ago, and boy did he make me come! He invented a whole product line of design-free GUI kits (POSEUR, XYmorph, Quagmire, boraX -- all open, scalable, and extensible, of course), then drops the mask for one paragraph he titles XBorges: >One longs for the day when the responsibility of programming computers falls squarely on the shoulders of the users, where it belongs; they are provided with a set of infinitely configurable instruction codes, on an open, extensible, and scalable n-bit bus, and their task before setting upon work, is the naming of all the operations they want, and encoding them into words, sentences, phrases and storing them for instant retrieval while they use ideas communicated to them from all the users before to choose most wisely within the infinities of possibility. They have at their hands all books written, all interfaces, they merely traverse endless treelike chains of possibility, of choice, of alternate (open, scalable, and extensible) universes; baobob-like roots in the sky and leaves delving gnomishly in circular connections leading to closed-form solutions. >Visual design: patterns on the screen, snow in hell. Thirty years ago that read like absurdist satire about Motif-era configurability. Today it reads like someone accidentally describing prompting, tool use, and semantic navigation -- naming the operations in words, then retrieving them -- while standing in Borges' Library of Babel. David MacKay said writing is navigating in the library of all possible books. Dasher made that literal: you don't type, you steer through probability space toward the text that already exists as possibility. The Internet Archive is busy saving the books that were written. LLMs collapsed a fuzzy corner of the ones that could be. The hard problem Jojo named is still the hard problem: not generating the infinity, but traversing it wisely -- which is also, annoyingly, the hard problem of community. Infinite possible hangouts. Someone still has to pick a time and open the door. Dasher: information-efficient text entry - David MacKay, April 19 2007, Google Tech Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie9Se7FneXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie9Se7FneXE Speech Dasher: An Efficient Correction Interface for Speech Recognition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCF6a00Bcoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCF6a00Bcoo LLMs accidentally built a wing of the Library of Babel. XBorges was always about the card catalog. Dasher was always about steering. The Archive is why any of the cards still exist. And if you build the catalog (or the search party), sometimes they will come. I ordered a cursed monkey's paw from the ACME catalog, thoughtfully wished for the rest of the monkey, gave him an infinite number of typewriters, told him about Dasher and Bruce Tognazzini Apple ][ Integer BASIC program, and he came up with this: One Monkey, Infinite Typewriters: What It's Like to Be Me. A Personal Account of Incarnation, Navigation, and the Beautiful Machinery of Existence, By Palm: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/palm-on-being-palm.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... David MacKay's Dasher, Palm On Being Palm, and Tog's "The Infinite Numer of Monkeys": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2sw2oYU98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2sw2oYU98 >Le Jojo: Fresh 'n' Clean, speaking out to the way you want to live today; American - All American; doing, a bit so, and even more so. Please Jojo -- write me. Everyone else: if you know him, please be the person who does the little bit of legwork and taps him on the shoulder.

colinsane 3mo ago

the turnstile thing is more complex than you perceive because almost every transit system relies on public funding. here (Seattle) those fares only fund about 10% of the _operating cost_ of the transit per Sound Transit's own reports. not to derail the point, but please do go read your transit system's quarterly reports instead of taking the conclusion of fare dodging for granted. just about every city has public budget reports for their transit system precisely because they are the product of public funding.

xp84 3mo ago
Not quite sure what you mean. Is it that fare dodging is fine because the taxpayers at large already pick up most of the tab? Or that fare dodging is worse than you’d think because it makes an already quite expensive thing for the public budget, even more expensive? I’m thinking about BART right now, which really might simply go away altogether due in part to the collapse in fare revenue that remote work triggered. BART didn’t have nearly as bad as Seattle’s fare ratio though - pre-COVID, fares and parking covered 66% of the operating costs. (Source https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/BART%20FY23-32%20Operating%20Financial%20Outlook.pdf https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/BART%20FY23-32... ) This was apparently the best or one of the best of its peers. It was 28% last year, just due to the fare revenue basically halving.
- colinsane 3mo ago
  i hadn't considered that Seattle might be an outlier; the numbers vary by city more than i knew. https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2025-fare-revenue-report.pdf https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2... page 11 has the $ figures. "link" is the commuter rail system: $408M operating expenses but only $51M revenue from fares, i.e. fares cover 12% of op ex. the "average fare per boarding" is $1.34 (page 3; this is ticket price multiplied by the proportion of trips where the rider pays that ticket). throw that together: even with 100% payment compliance the average ticket price would be $11 per boarding for that to be a complete funding source. $11 would force more riders onto the subsidized fare programs, plus other knock-on effects from raising fares (e.g. reduced ridership in general) means the sticker price would have to be higher yet. the commuter rail here was never designed for ridership fares to cover its operating costs. it just wasn't. the recent focus on fares in the face of all this is misinformed, that's the kindest way i can phrase that. (apologies to hijack much of this with what turns out to be more of a Seattle-specific issue).

greekrich92 3mo ago

The subway should be free, and continuous fare hikes when you're already double paying with your eyes because of all the advertising they shove in front of you is more incentive to turnstile jump. Overpaid do-nothing senior adminstrators and lawmakers who are in the pocket of privatization are the problem, not that 17 year old.

pclowes 3mo ago
Enforcing fares massively decreases vandalism, and antisocial behavior on public transportation. If you don’t have public transportation that I feel safe having a 10-year-old ride on unaccompanied by an adult then you do not have public transportation. You have a very expensive drug addict shelter on wheels/rails.
- ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
  When I became homeless (again) about 26 years ago, the buses were a place of refuge and relaxation for me. I could easily pay the fare and stay on a long haul line. I'd be assured of safety and quietness for about 2 hours or so. The area clinics were participating in this, because they could procure "Reduced Fare" passes that they would distribute to mentally ill patients, and we could get unlimited transit rides all month long, as long as we were still checking in, on the regular, with our case managers. Our providers would ensure that they qualified us for the "Reduced Fare" program. After a while, the bus stops became camping grounds for street people who didn't ride. And the trains became camping grounds for people who needed to sleep. Literally, early in the morning, I would board the train and see people zonked out, with pillows, blankets, the whole bit. Then a campaign began to clean up behavior aboard the transit system. Riders would need a destination, and fares were checked, and people were booted if they hadn't paid fares. So the vehicles themselves became quite sparse, and safer, and smelled better. But oh, the bus stops again. Everyone camped with impunity at the bus stops, and for paying passengers, it was intimidating just to beg for one place to sit down. The transit system is undeniably safe. I am sure that 10-year-olds can ride unaccompanied. Any violence or fights, those seem to be between gangstas or people who know one another already, not just random outbursts. Thankfully, too, they open up centers where people can chill, and get drinks of water and use the bathroom, which is honestly preferable to riding buses on false pretenses.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

aleen_oye 3mo ago

[flagged]

necovek 3mo ago

A transit system has a different cost and is actually paid for by majority of users: the fact that few abuse it is not going to break it (as long as we keep it immoral to do so — note that there may be valid reasons to do it, when someone is in some sort of urgency and eg. ticketing machine is overcrowded or broken: it's not on us to judge even if we might be right 99% of the time). Here, we are talking about things where it takes volunteer work to keep a thing you want going — I do not even want to imagine a world where a board game night is organized by a paid pro instead of the enthusiast, even if a status quo means that there is always an assymetry between hosts doing most work and guests never hosting themselves (maybe they do not have a big enough space though — they can still volunteer to help though). I've realized this in high school and uni and started making conscious effort to sometimes do the social fabric things even when I did not feel like it, in order to continue benefiting from the social engagement.

inigyou 3mo ago
This is, to some extent, precisely what happened to most of the internet. Things run for passion withered away; things run for profit remained. New people grew up surrounded by only for-profit things, and believed that was just the way things were supposed to work. They've never seen a personal website. When I was 5 or 6 my dad helped me make a web page about the Star Wars movie I just saw and didn't really understand but I thought the pod racers were cool. Apparently our ISP came with a little bit of web space. That doesn't happen any more. You don't even get Usenet.
- Anamon 3mo ago
  I feel that very much. The web I grew up with was clearly built by regular people, for fun, and anyone browsing it knew that they could build on it, too, whether they were interested to or not. Today's mainstream impression of the web is that it's a corporate "content" service like TV or Spotify, with some of them offering the cool additional feature of allowing some limited user contributions. The old idea of the web ruled. The new idea is garbage.