In 1897, the Indiana General Assembly attempted to legislate a new value for pi, proposing it be defined as 3.2, which was based on a flawed mathematical proof. This bill, known as the Indiana pi bill, never became law due to its incorrect assertions and the prior proof that squaring the circle is impossible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
Since then a million other "million _____" websites popped up. I saw a site selling one million text lines for $1 apiece. Last I saw they sold one line, now the site is gone [edit: INCORRECT].
There were hundreds of prosecutions. Then SCOTUS declared the president immune. Then the bad guy got reelected and pardoned everyone. Then started launched truly malicious prosecutions of political enemies. Cases which thankfully are dying due to lack of merit.
One side is doing all the bad things and the other is simply struggling to stop them. Being cynical helps nothing.
A consequence of that large political movement and its leaders is that numerous people have been murdered. MAGA can't wash its hands of the consequences of its beliefs and actions.
I had a fridge slowly die on me. Previously I had hand-picked an amazing set of washer and dryers that I'm sure will last me decades. Then I searched for the perfect induction stove. Then a microwave with convection heating. I paid more than average for these appliances because I wanted them to last for a long time, and I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. So when it came time to buy a new fridge, I could not find a "premium" model. They all capped in price unless I bought a fridge larger than the standard size. I ended up buying a similar model to the previous, this time with a five year warranty. I'm confident it will die out soon, probably right after the warranty expires. Maybe because of the fact that it's running 24/7?
In short, I don't like shopping for fridges, and I'm glad fewer Angelinos will have to.
Fridges are really easy to repair and it is not as if we have made breakthroughs in compressor and insulation technology in last 15 years. You could probably jury rig control board from esp32 and weekend of coding - i mean it is couple of thermocouples and pid or bang bang algorithm.
A local window blinds company ran an ad before a movie. Clearly AI. Besides the obvious fake humans, how can I trust that the AI blinds in your ad match your real product?
Reading these comments, a common through-line seems to be cars. Hit and runs, drive by shootings, cars without plates, cars speeding, breaking into cars, etc. But the concept of disincentivizing cars never seems to be brought up. Close down urban roads to private car traffic. Increase public transportation. Remove subsidies on gas. Build bike lanes.
Cars are weapons. They kill people quickly with momentum, and slowly with pollution and a sedentary lifestyle. We need to start treating them as such
Time to re-read what "urban" is defined as. My town, for instance, is counted as "urban", yet there is a single bus that will take you anywhere near to true urban center that comes twice per day. It's six miles (~15 minutes) from the nearest non-shit grocery store/Starbucks.
My town is "densely developed" (key phrase) residential with nearly no commerce to speak of. The largest employer is the school district, which isn't that big.
The nearest city with major employers is 45 minutes away outside of commute hours.
Reducing unnecessarily bulky trucks with low visibility, increasing fuel efficiencies, and removing gas subsidies absolutely helps the suburban and rural population
I do everything I can to avoid public transportation. It's not worth the risk or the annoyances with aggressive and dangerous people. If I lived in Asia (which I did before), I'd love to use public transportation because the people are not aggressive, won't attack or kill me. That's not the case in the USA
Most of the places within public transportation range are also within biking range, so I prefer biking. The end result is the same: one less car off the road.
Now if you say "What about all the crazy drivers??" think about this: have you ever considered that you might be the crazy driver? Maybe not 100% of the time, but maybe one day you're stressed so you speed up to get through a red light, or you really need to read this text because it's important. You only need to be a crazy driver for 30 seconds to end someone's life. Something that's almost impossible to do on public transportation or on a bike.
Yeah I don’t bike for that reason. There’s no way I’ll ride a bike around cars and I can’t believe others put their life in the hands of people texting and driving.
But you are okay driving around these crazy people, even though one of them could cause an accident costing you thousands of dollars and potentially a source of transportation?
There's an asymmetry with cars and traffic calming. You can spend a few thousand on putting in speed bumps (well, when you can; most municipalities put in obnoxious restrictions to "justify" a speed bump), road diets, buffered bike lanes, etc. But you only need one car to run a red light and hit a pedestrian crossing the street to kill them.
The rise in enthusiasm for ALPR is mostly a consequence of this asymmetry. Previously you'd have law enforcement go around patrolling to keep safety but the number of drivers in the US is growing faster than the number of LEOs and LEOs are expensive and controversial in certain areas.
I advocate for traffic calming all the time. But the asymmetry is real and, honestly, quite frustrating. A single distracted driver can cause you to panic brake on your bike and fall off and hurt yourself.
I don't think it's a growth in drivers as much as it is a shift in policing away from traffic enforcement, something that's only gradually being unwound as people realize how much they hate lax traffic enforcement.
This probably depends on municipality. I think that's part of it and a hangover from concerns around traffic stops in the BLM protests. But also I think LEO salaries are getting higher and VMT is increasing. That and a post COVID norm of not following traffic laws in general. At least that's what we've seen in our municipality.
People bring up the concept of disincentivizing cars all the time. Many activists in local politics in urban areas have ideological problems with mass car use, and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies.
The problem is, cars are extremely useful to most people in the US, public transit has very real inherent downsides, and local policies that disincentivize car use are very unpopular when actually implemented. Voting citizens get mad when the price of gas goes up and demand that their elected officials do something about it (also electrification of cars, which is proceeding apace, makes gasoline prices less important for ordinary people and also reduces some of the real negative externalities of cars).
I have used both urban public transit and cars regularly to get around, I'm personally familiar with the upsides and downsides of both, and while I definitely do want public transit infrastructure to be good, I frankly do not trust the motives of anti-car urbanist activists. I think they are willing to make the lives of most people on aggregate worse because they think private car ownership is in some sense immoral and so overweight the downsides of cars and underweight the downsides of public transit.
Also using drive-by shootings and car-break-ins as an anti-car argument is pretty disingenuous. This is a problem with criminals committing directly-violent crime or property crime against ordinary people, not with cars per se. Criminals absolutely commit crimes against people using public transit, and indeed one of the major problems with public transit is that it puts you in a closed space with random members of the public who might commit crimes against you (e.g. the Jordan_Neely incident, the random stabbing of Iryna_Zarutska, the less-widely-reported random crime incidents that happen regularly on urban public transit systems). One of the most important public policy measures that could be enacted to make public transit better is severe and consistent policing of public order crimes on transit - and of course more severe policing is also a potential solution to car drive-bys and break-ins.
> and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies
If you're lucky. Sometimes you just get anti-car. I'd love to not need a car at all, but where I am now it would mean Ubering instead because they've made driving worse while transit isn't expanded to fit the gap.
Trains can take you to the beach and away from civilization. Build a station where you want to go. At one point trains were the most practical way to get to national parks.
How often are you building treehouses that you need to pay hundreds of dollars extra a month to justify the cost, versus a one-time delivery fee?
You must be an American, because plenty of trains exist to bring people to nature elsewhere. You know, when you drive a car to a nature place, you put it into a parking lot, then you are no longer in the car, right? Same works for trains.
Man I love this silly debate. The original comment just wanted to travel 500 miles to "somewhere" and most instances of "somewhere" that people travel to could be accessed by train.
Also no one has said that no one is allowed to drive ever again anywhere. I'm trying to be generous but the victim complex is crazy.
