Well, yeah, we all vote based on feelings. Some feelings based on things that verifiably happened in the real world, and some feelings based on ridiculous bullshit we dreamed up.
Guess which side has more of the second kind of feelings.
Seriously. Saying “we’re fucking morons” for being surprised by the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center might be hyperbole, except the same group tried the same thing in 1993! They were just bad at it. Instead of being a KIND OF A REALLY BIG HINT, that incident just kind of disappeared down the memory hole.
Tell me it’s 68f out and I will fight you.
Note to self: High heat levels make Canadians cranky.
Around here, 32°F is very cold in October, but an occasion to wear shorts in February. (Both are still cookout temperatures, though.)
No, that’s not it, we’re measuring in incredulity units, which are syllables.
“One hun-dred and se-ven?!” == 6 syllables
“For-ty one?!” == 3 syllables
Also, the first one has more vowel sounds to really draw out to indicate higher levels of I-can’t-even. It sounds only golly-jeepers in Celsius, and much more I’m-so-done-with-this-shit in Fahrenheit.
Case-sensitive is easier to implement; it’s just a string of bytes. Case-insensitive requires a lot of code to get right, since it has to interpret symbols that make sense to humans. So, something over wondered about:
That’s not hard for ASCII, but what about Unicode? Is the precomposed ç treated the same lexically and by the API as Latin capital letter c + combining cedilla? Does the OS normalize all of one form to the other? Is ß the same as SS? What about alternate glyphs, like half width or full width forms? Is it i18n-sensitive, so that, say, E and É are treated the same in French localization? Are Katakana and Hiragana characters equivalent?
I dunno, as a long-time Unix and Linux user, I haven’t tried these things, but it seems odd to me to build a set of character equivalences into the filesystem code, unless you’re going to do do all of them. (But then, they’re idiosyncratic and may conflict between languages, like how ö is its letter in the Swedish alphabet.)
No, Ford sells the F750 as a cab-and-frame to companies that use the chassis as the platform for building utility vehicles. That image is a custom creation.
Or, maybe this person is a radical feminist who believes that all brains are the same, and gender is entirely a social construct! /s
Indeed. Notice, too, that the concerns about Biden’s cognitive abilities have instantly stopped? He’s still the President, and still in charge of the nukes. But no more news stories.
Meanwhile, the other guy has recently developed a habit of swearing at rallies, and there are a few articles about his wife asking him to knock it off, but nothing pointing out that a sudden increase in swearing is a symptom of dementia. At a town hall in La Crosse, WI the other day, he didn’t know why he was there at first. Still radio silence from the news media.
Funny, isn’t it?
This to me comes across as reaching: It’s easy to design streets that are for people, but accommodate the occasional delivery vehicle, or ambulance. (A standard ambulance is only about 8 feet wide.) How often are people buying new couches or having heart attacks, anyway? We also don’t need most of the road infrastructure for transport of goods, and service vehicles. Every city street, county road, state highway, or Interstate highway that I’ve ever driven on, anywhere, has a vast majority of consisting of personal vehicles, with the exception of I-80/94 through Gary, Indiana. Freight-carrying trucks aren’t even allowed in the 3rd, left-most lane most of the time. Suburban streets are crazy wide; much wider than needed for freight delivery, or even the large units that fire officials insist upon. Smaller fire trucks exist, too, and are very effective where they are used. And, even if subgrade detention is the best solution in a particular situation, something like, say, a park can go on top, and offer much better infiltration than a parking lot. I know of stormwater vaults in large buildings, so they don’t necessarily preclude buildings on a site. In any case, how many parking lots have a detention basin underneath?
Lastly, you’re severely misrepresenting my point of view by comparing to wailing, “cars bad,” and thinking that’s a solution. No, I look to solutions that cities around the world (including my own, in some limited cases) have actually, successfully implemented. Adding lanes is the only politically viable solution sometimes, but it mostly just makes the problems worse in the long-run.
Hahaha, that is an amazing bifurcation fallacy! Cars or feudalism. Amazing then that Americans settled a whole continent without cars.
That aside, the truism in real estate is that the three most important characteristics of a property are: location, location, and location. Land in cities is always more expensive because its value is very closely tied up with the things it’s close to. In that sense, auto-oriented development is a massive theft of value, because everything in cities has to be further apart than it otherwise would be, in order to accommodate wide streets, and parking spaces.
Less philosophically, “more expensive” is a scale, not an absolute condition. If all of that space currently devoted to speedy car travel in cities were instead available for people to live in, yes, the central city would be the highest demand, and the most expensive. But the spatial scale of cost would be very different. My grocery store co-workers would still live on the edges, but the edges could be only a mile or two away, not 15 miles away. That, and lots of cities wouldn’t be structurally insolvent due to all the infrastructure they need to pay for.
(That last bit is a sore point for me, as city is facing a $22 million budget deficit, and they’re considering cutting things like emergency services, or even the municipal pool. While the water utility shores up century-old pipes, we’re still subsidizing the parking utility.)
That’s great for you, as an individual, but the fact is that that same pattern of distance vs. affordability holds true all over the U.S. Actually, I mean distance vs. cost. Here where I live, housing gets cheaper further from the central city, but the economic and population growth is still pushing the cost up out of the affordable range even for the “cheap” stuff.
When I worked at the local grocery, I had a cheap apartment because of long tenure and luck. All of my co-workers, though, commuted in from outlying communities. Not only did they pay half of their income in rent, but then they had car expenses on top of it.
I’m certain that my grandfather’s mobility scooter from back in the 1980’s could have covered 6km in day (there and back). I looked up the specs now, and there are mobility scooters that can go 40 miles. So, the alternative already exists. If folks can’t ride a bicycle 3km, a mobility scooter will do just fine.
The buses around here are 40 feet long. A Toyota Camry is 16 feet long; a Chevrolet Silverado 1500 is just over 19 feet long. Add in 4 feet of buffer distance when stopped, and the bus is longer than 2 Camrys, but shorter than 2 Silverados. Take the average of cars on the road, and it’s legit to say that a bus is about twice as long as a car.
I just learned the other day that 40% of the residents of my city (Madison, Wisconsin) can’t or don’t drive. Apparently, this is a bit greater than the U.S. ratio, but not by much. So you’ve just articulated a really good reason to abolish cars.
What a lot of people also don’t understand is that automobile-oriented zoning and development is one of the major factors driving up housing costs. In a nutshell, you pay a lot of money for housing in exchange for the privilege of driving long distances to it.
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
I know. At least in the US. It sounds wonky, but think it through: Cars and zoning law. Between the two of those things, there are fewer and fewer third places. There’s nowhere to go to just be around other people. First (home) and second (edit: work) are incredibly isolated, too. You get in the car and pull out of the garage, and interact with nobody until you pull in to the lot at work. At best, you interact briefly with fast food workers for a few seconds at the drive-thru window. There’s no “local,” no stores, no restaurants, no cafés in the neighborhood; you drive to those. They draw from a large area, so you never see the same people twice there.
Proximity has always been the best builder of community in human history, and we’ve done away with it.
Assuming that they’re thinking about it logically, not as an identity issue. If they’re not, the double-think is incredible. My city is about to launch an BR(ish)T transit system, and some of the NextDoor comments are wild. One woman is convinced:
In my experience, carbrains usually think that nobody will use the alternatives at all, so it’s just a waste of space and money that could be spent on cars, and that traffic congestion is the result of corrupt politicians pocketing all the tax money that could magically fix it in some unspecified way.
Perhaps the 3-day-no-poop challenge guy was one of these cave explorers?
I believe that the OP means the Imported Vehicle Safety Compliance Act of 1988, which effectively bans kei trucks from import into the U.S. because they’re not manufactured to the Act’s standards.
Or, perhaps the Chicken Tax, a 25% tariff imposed on the import of light trucks in 1964 as part of trade dispute with Europe. It’s still in effect, shielding American manufacturers from competition from smaller, lighter trucks.