joostjakob

One of the things I read about that, is that people tend to take an "average position" between all the opinions they hear. It used to be that the opinions you'd hear would be based on serious media, and your close circles. But much of the media has gone to shit, and social media amplify crazy people because it's good for engagement. So you end up hearing about the crazy position of lore as much as about the rational one. And that does influence a lot of people.

Glad you already learned this is probably nonsense. The wrong reasoning is very similar to much thought about overpopulation. The amount of people that makes for a place to be overpopulated is a function of how societies work and the technologies they have at hand. One extra issue there is that improvements in technology usually lead to population growth, so much progress gets cancelled out.

You know when we first started seeing growing populations and development of agriculture? When the climate started an exceptionally long stable period. Guess what's going put of the window now? Planting for draught because that's the "new normal" won't get you far if the next year happens to be the wettest on record. Let alone that stronger storms than ever seen before aren't exactly great for harvests either. And that's just agriculture. Climate related disasters can wipe out key infrastructure, with unexpected consequences down the line (e.g. no car production because of a certain specific part of almost all cars comes from that one specific place). And then there's the refugee problem on top of all that.

How would making states, towns or neighborhoods look richer cause outrage? For income statistics, median us a much better measure in most cases, because it reflects "the average experience" much better. If you want to highlight income inequality, there's plenty of other stats you can use, e.g. the percentage of all income going to the top 1%.

There's millions of Venezuelans in Colombia, Ecuador and further South. But their options there are for more limited than in the US.

Didn't he basically campaign with this?

There's another free OSM based app that does have some traffic data, it's called Magic Earth. Not open source though, as their business model is to sell adapted versions.

What does the size of the country have to do with it? Which good big and bad small countries are you talking about?

I think EveryDoor requires some relatively deep understanding of OSM before actually being a useful tool. So edits like this should be rare with that tool. Many of the edits like this are from when MapsMe was very popular and suddenly introduced editing, without enough nuance in the process. Bad edits do happen everywhere, you need a good balance between people who data curation and newbies making beginner mistakes. In some places, there's a lack of experienced people maintaining the data.

Isn't it as much about showing up to vote than about changing minds who to vote for?

Eh sure, though only number 20 in the world when it comes to national legislation. But when it comes to quality of life or even life expectancy, the US could do so much better given its wealth. Mostly I'm just trying to point out the automatic patriotism you see so often in Americans, even the progressive ones.

More women as state leaders you say? So we might finally see female leaders in countries like India, Argentina, the UK, Pakistan, France, Turkey, Bangladesh, Ukraine or Germany if only the US would be the shining example to the world?! I'm sorry, but when it comes to social progress, the best the US can hope for is finally catching up. Any option to be exemplary was definitely gone by maybe the 1970s