Oh and indeed we will be ubering, if only because our time there is so limited and I don’t wanna waste it travelling between places of interest. Gotta sit down and make a simplified chart of crime stats comparing Detroit and Sydney or something.

Kinda figured that most violent conflict starts with some kind of instigation. Don’t fight people and they won’t fight you. What a concept! Thanks for your input.

Love this, cheers. Bookmarked for the next irritating conversation with an uninformed busy body.

Yeah, I’m truly not expecting anything I would expect from cities here other than supermarkets that stay open after sunset. Made this post in the spirit of due diligence in case I’m being overly optimistic, but mainly to compile some retorts to the things my wife keeps hearing that damn near convinced her to call this off.

Thanks for the recommendations! The Christmas market wasn’t on our radar at all, but I’m keeping it on mine.

Thank you! I mean, there are “dangerous areas” where I live too, where the reality is you have maybe a one in a million chance of something awful happening, as opposed to the one in two million you’re used to. When I became an independent teen and actually spent time in all these areas my parents had described so derisively, it all just boiled down to lower median income, higher proportion of disadvantaged people drawn to cheaper housing, and a greater chance that someone’s going to ask you for spare change.

My wife’s extended family lives in Canton, so I think it’s fair to say they do live in Detroit, but also that their opinions of downtown are informed by something they heard. Maybe “that one thing” they heard happened years ago. Who knows.

I’m actually really glad we’re working Detroit into this trip too, and it’s partly because I want to see first hand how distorted everyone’s perception here is. Everyone here seems to have an opinion on this trip, and they all make that 😬 face about Detroit. Definitely keen to hit up the museums, art institute, and whatever else we can before jetting out.

Well I’d much rather be shot than stabbed, given the choice, I suppose.

I’m glad we’re talking about this.

Panel #7: Regret

“Why did I take so long to get here?”

💙

I just wanted to say that I have the same questions, and it’s a relief to see it posted by someone with more courage. I’m too ignorant to contribute to the discussion though. I don’t know how a government or private entity could pressure a FOSS project in this way, unless that pressure was put on the project’s git platform. At which point the repo just moves elsewhere.

My first thought was “this is incredible, but I can’t handle it right now”. It’s stationary art with jump scares. Saved for later.

I would prefer to use a standardised, client–agnostic messaging protocol than anything that requires a specific app.

I stopped using WhatsApp because using a Meta product makes me feel icky. I use Telegram and Matrix to contact drug dealers. My work requires a combination of Google Chat, Teams and Slack. Some of my friends like to stick to Discord.

What would be really great is if we could all decide on one protocol for sending end–to–end encrypted text and media over HTTPS to a globally unique ID and have everyone use whatever client they like. Like SMTP but more streamlined and secure. Google, Apple, Samsung etc can ship devices with a default client, but allow users to install another one that they like more.

But OEMs don’t like things to be open. Apple has iMessage, Google has RCS, and Samsung probably does some bullshit I’m not aware of since committing to the Pixel life. So I will probably always have a folder with 15 different messaging apps.