People will reply to you calling you crazy, but SF/bay is the only place I have ever experienced where many people will literally leave their cars unlocked because a broken window isn't worth the hassle. Yes, locking your parked car is a hazard here... and the reason is obvious.
In the 70s in SF my father had his car window broken by someone who wanted to steal his parking space. He found his car pushed in front of an adjacent driveway, and ticketed.
When I read this kind of stuff I am always happy I live in a normal country/place - Singapore. Absolutely insane lmao. Must be fun sitting in your Waymo hitting some panic button and it gets blocked LMAO
Foreigners who consume sensationalist media often end up with a skewed perception of the USA. If you spend some traveling around the country you'll see that it's normal in most places. The violence and societal dysfunction is largely confined to a few cities that have been ruined by failed progressive policies. That's sad and as a country we ought to fix those places rather than just writing them off, but as a practical matter most people can just avoid those places.
As a Brit who has spend time in both Singapore and SF, I'd say Singapore seems more normal currently. The tents of homeless people shitting in the street and dying of overdoses is weird, like something from Dickensian London.
I live in SF and I absolutely love so much about it, but here and especially in Oakland where I also lived for years, I'd welcome bringing back caning if it meant we could live as safely and securely as in Singapore
I wish people would also care about human rights like sanitation, clean clothes, accomodation. But hey, people wearing shit-and-piss-stained rags shitting on the sidewalk?
They blocked the Golden Gate Bridge which included ambulances, other emergency vehicles and thousands of people trying to get to work. I'm happy that the DA is throwing the book at them, I hope they bankrupt themselves trying to defend themselves and then spend a lot of time in jail.
Except the defense has shown that the police blocked opening an additional lane even after the protestors specifically requested it for emergency traffic, and in fact blocked more lanes unnecessarily.
> Defense attorneys argued that many of the risks to people stuck in traffic could have been mitigated — including the traffic itself — if the median had been moved to open a fourth lane on the southbound side. They said a protester designated to communicate with the CHP specifically asked for that to happen to allow emergency vehicles to access anyone who needed one.
> Northbound traffic was also stopped by the CHP as a multitude of emergency vehicles responded to the bridge, which defense attorneys pointed out would have created the same type of risks the prosecution said people were experiencing because of the protesters.
While politically i'm on the opposite side of those guys, i do think that such severe prosecution is unwarranted and politically motivated (and may be intended to create chilling effect on all future protests no matter the cause) - blocking a road is a well established traditional form of protest which traditionally is expected to end with (if the judge is in a bad mood) something like disorderly conduct citation/fine, not anywhere close to felony.
Well, if they caused you any specific loss nothing prevents you from suing them in civil court like in any other situation when somebody causes you a specific loss. That though is a completely different thing from criminal prosecution.
Waymo and specific people there responsible for that programming/bugs could probably be charged with criminal negligence by an enthusiastic prosecutor, yet haven't been. Why? Probably common sense. Like recognizing that there weren't criminal intent. And such situations is a price of progress. The same with protests. They weren't conspiring to block ambulances. And such situations is a price of freedom of protests and speech. Though if somebody dies that way, i think they would have a civil case against the protesters. The same way like affected people can have a civil case against Waymo in the situations mentioned above.
Neither of those are acceptable. Why would you think Waymo not following the law is somehow a justification for it to continue to put people’s lives at risk to enable protesters to do the same?
