I guess what bothers me about this wording of how people are “overlooking moral culpability”, even if it’s accurate, is that it sounds very accusatory. Like “How could you buy an SUV? Don’t you care about the kids you’re bound to run over?”
This particularly stings when a person thinks they are doing something normal like buying a car large enough to meet their family’s needs.
Determining the moral culpability of actions and complaining about it is one thing. And it’s by far the easy part. The harder and more important part is to craft a message that doesn’t sound like an attack on a person’s morality.
Interesting and agreed. Is it more secure (or less detectable) than Ethernet? I suppose Ethernet has some form of magnetic radiation. I wonder what all this infrared light bouncing around will do to us monkeys.
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is the largest charity in the UK by membership. People do take a lot of direct personal action on this topic.
> As autistic myself and student of philosophy, I’d say: probably, yes. I’ve read books that contain testimonials from Kant’s students and collegues. He showed ASD traits such as: (emotional and almost pathological) attachment to very strict routines; inability to control irritability and stress; inability to focus properly in certain situations (a famous example was given by his students: one day at a lesson he got stressed and refused to continue his speech because he felt unable to concentrate due to a missing button on a student’s jacket); he admitted to feel the inability to tell lies, even if for good purposes; in his writings he excuses many times for not being able to be clear about what he meant because he had an hard time putting himself in the reader’s shoes; he was described as socially akward and indifferent to social norms and costumes (famous was is dated and old-fashioned way of dressing), and to social relationships. We can’t of course be sure about Kant being autistic, but there is a possibility.
His "regular schedule" was more than that... It was a very detailed and strict routine which he was extremely attached to. I think his way of thinking so abstractly and also being unable to summarize himself are also things that resonate for me.
One of the most astonishing Kant facts I've read (I've no idea how this could be verified) is that despite the sea being an hour away Königsberg, where he lived his whole life, he never felt the need to go and see the sea.
In suburban London and the surrounding countryside, so much of the noise is caused by a handful of motorbikes that have been made deliberately, I think usually illegally, noisy.
Stopping noisy vehicles would improve millions of people's lives and moderately upset a few thousand bikers.
I have no idea why it isn't a more popular cause.
One person doing laps of a built up area in their modified car is likely waking up tens of thousands of people. The police do nothing. If you had a party that caused equivalent nuisance it would be shut down instantly.
Many "grown-up" countries do care about this. This problem is non-existant in Austria, or Germany for the most part. Roadside police checks consist of decibel metering, which they are trained to use. They will impound the vehicle on the spot if its over the legal limit. Even race tracks have strict sound limits, the scrutineering process has a sound measurement part.
I can tell you this problem does exist(and is getting worse) in germany, and it's terrible. Calling the cops doesn't help, because they really don't care, I mean they even don't care anymore if cars are parking on the sidewalk. I live in a small "town" of around 10.000 people, I really can't imagine how bad it must be in bigger citys.
A lot of cities already have a communication channel in place to notify authorities about noise (like sending them an email about the culprit).
But its difficult to gather evidence of noisy vehicles, and could be a nuisance to notify authorities.
I wonder if a "NoisyVehicleRecorder" app/device would be able to capture the evidence from the comfort of our apartments or yard?
The device and app should be able to
- Take accurate(ish?) noise levels, and start recording above a certain decibel
- Store the recording somewhere
-- AI_Vision can then spot if there is a car in the video, if not then delete the video
-- AI_Vision can then extract the number plate from the video, if no number plate then delete the video
- At the end of the week the app should send yourself a report of the culprits in descending order of most infringements per license plate
- The user then decides to forward these to the authorities (this email address could be pre-stored in the app somewhere as well per city)
- Would be great if this app could be open source so it can be tweaked per country according to their laws
Possible issues:
* Recording cars without permission might be an issue
* The device might be too expensive, as it might need to be waterproof / burglarproof
Not just London. I've written about this on here before. Last time I was in the Peaks all I could hear were revving engines coming from somewhere miles away. It's getting really hard to get away from these bastards now.
The worst part of cars and motorbikes is they can't hear it. Motorbikes helmets are ear defenders too. The cabins of cars protect users from the engine noise. It's just everyone else that has to put up with it.
I've heard the safety argument before and I find it astonishing. If you can't drive safely without making a noise audible from miles away, your vehicle isn't fit for the road. However this argument does hint at what bikers are often doing, which is racing on public roads and massively breaking speed limits.
I think modern scooters are also held to strict noise standards, the noisy ones have been made noisy deliberately.
I think if you talk to responsible motorbike riders, you’ll easily find people who have had near or actual collisions because because a car didn’t see them and the driver wasn’t trying hard enough to check for the places a motorbike might be. It’s easy for a motorbike to be hidden behind the A-pillar of a car if that car is entering a roundabout and the bike is going round, for example, so if a driver isn’t paying enough attention and moving their head to see round blind spots, they can hit a bike. Similarly for any manoeuvre that involves crossing lanes: drivers often don’t notice smaller motorcycles or scooters (or cyclists).
This happens regardless of the noise the motorcycle is emitting though. In slow traffic, the advantages of noise are low. At speed, you can't hear the engine of the bike before its too late.
Cars are way too well isolated nowadays for the noise to be a major factor in collisions with bikes in my experience.
I’m not trying to claim that the loudness theory is correct. If I try to imagine what it’s like to be a biker who has had one or several near-misses/accidents due to careless drivers, whose biker friends espouse the loudness theory, it’s pretty easy for me to see that person feeling a louder bike would be better.
And yet cyclists don't install loudspeakers so cars would notice them. A motorbike is more visible than a bicycle and can go with the flow speed so unless one drives dangerously it should be safer than cycling even without loud engine.
Cyclists are slower and plenty of cyclists will have had actual collisions or near-misses with eg car doors being suddenly opened into the bike line, cars cutting across the bike lane without looking, and so on.
Both riding a bicycle and driving a motorbike is less safe than driving a car because they are harder to notice and less protected but there should be some compromise between safety for a biker and noise pollution or a large are around the road.
As to cyclists to be slower: 1. a motorbike driver can choose to go below speed limit is the situation / road configuration makes it unsafe to go fast. 2. low speed is not always safer - on a straight road outside intersections speed of the flow (or just below) is safer.
I ride a pushbike a lot and I only hear those stupid motorbikes right as they go past me. Even the headwind from cycling at a moderate speed like 30 km/h is enough to completely drown the motorbikes out. Usually all they do is scare the shit out of me as they come flying past.
I imagine inside modern cars that completely seal you off from the outside you wouldn't be able to hear them at all.
I'd bet these sort of people derive their pleasure almost exclusively by knowingly annoying others. Power and speed are just bonuses. The main thing is annoying everyone else.
Sure but weren't mufflers invented specifically to address this? I think the OP is trying to talk about people who modify or remove mufflers in order to actively make their car louder.
Pretty much every car for the last thirty years has had fuel injection, but most of them aren't very loud.
No doubt engine noise is caused by lots of factors. You can modify they exhaust to make it louder or quieter. I understand a lot of bikers modify their exhaust to make it louder.
As I understand it, there is a legal limit on noise emissions
some for vehicles. To get round this bikes are supplied with a quiet exhaust and a second loud exhaust. They tell customers the loud exhaust is for use on private race tracks but obviously this is widely ignored.
You can call out hooliganism or whatever the bad behavior is without making ridiculous claims about how engine noise is somehow illegal. That not only detracts from the point, it makes the poster look sort of ridiculous.
There are legal standards for both vehicle noise and vehicle emissions, at least in the UK. When owners modify their exhaust to make them noisier, they are likely breaching one or both standards. It is specifically illegal.
https://www.gov.uk/noise-pollution-road-train-plane#:~:text=....
People like you are the real destroyers of communities. You're doing nothing against the guidelines, but arguing "just because" and trolling.
Your comments have added nothing of value to the discussion.
A agree you can't 'get all the guns back', but there are still reasons to consider more stringent controls, two spring to mind:
1) It's about the social permission you give to people by making guns easily available. For example, in many European countries, bars, pubs and drinking are an absolutely central part of life, whereas in the US drinking establishments often have a much more 'taboo' vibe about them. Alcohol consumption is much lower in the US than Europe. Obviously there are questions about cause and effect, but I suspect that if the US made gun ownership into a more transgressive behaviour, there would be less gun crime.
2) Sometimes a tiny bit of friction makes a big difference. In the UK you can only buy paracetamol (Tylenol) 16 capsules at a time. Nothing stops you buying more by going to multiple shops, or by going back in the same shop multiple times. But that extra bit of friction has dramatically reduced the amount of paracetamol lying around in people's homes, and suicide from paracetamol has radically reduced as a result.
I get the principle you are articulating, but, in practice, it's probably quite a bit more nuanced. Texas isn't likely to be a state full of criminals, rather it's a state with different social norms around firearms, and permissive gun laws.
> Sometimes a tiny bit of friction makes a big difference
I have three firearms in my safe right now that were 100% legal when I purchased them. They came with a copy of a letter sent to the manufacturer by the ATF that clearly and explicitly states that they are legal as configured. January 31st of this year, the ATF decided that not only are they illegal, but they've always been illegal. If I don't destroy, modify, or register them they will each carry the same penalty as if I had manufactured machineguns in - checks calendar - 22 days.
Oh, and the registration process requires me to sign a statement indicating that I have committed a felony. The ATF has promised not to prosecute me for it, but... well, forgive me if I don't trust the ATF.
This is not the first time I've had hundreds or thousands of dollars of my legally-acquired property declared retroactively illegal.
I'd love "a tiny bit of friction", because this is ridiculous.
If you're a city dwelling blue tribe member, read and reread this comment until you can understand where it's coming from. Most "gun control" legislation has resulted in arbitrary technical restrictions, utterly ineffective for their stated purpose, enforced in a draconian manner where everything is either perfectly legal or an immediate federal felony. Calls to "ban all guns" are a choir-preaching pipe dream, and there's little reason to believe that such a push would produce a different result this time.
What we actually need is consistent legislation across the board that removes the minefield for most gun owners, while focusing on graduated regulation of the states of people who own/carry any type of gun, making sure they're mentally competent and attached to reality - especially as social media pushes more people to become detached.
The federal Assault Weapons ban started in 1994 and ran for 10 years.
Assault Rifles have universal background checks complete with fingerprints, a multi-month waiting period, and a $200 transfer tax - and have since the 1930s. No new assault rifles have been available for civilian purchase in almost 40 years.
"Sometimes a tiny bit of friction makes a big difference."
If it is a tiny bit of friction, then SCOTUS would likely allow it. If not, it could be struck down. But what tiny bit of friction is being proposed that will have an impact on homicides?
It seems your argument is that reducing the number of guns will reduce shootings and that we can reduce them with "a tiny bit of friction". But the courts are generally holding that if the restrictions prevent qualified individuals from obtaining a gun, then it is not a tiny bit of friction, but an infringement on rights. It seems these are incompatible.
The semantic space that "lager" covers in German is around storage/collection: so it covers concepts that in English are distinguished by worlds like "camp" (storage of people; and is therefore applied to prison camps) and "warehouse". Lager beer is matured in cold storage (like a cellar), hence "Lagerbier" just means "beer kept in storage", roughly.
Because of differing semantic coverage, a lot of words between German and English are not 1:1 mappings. A reverse example is that in English we often speak of generic entrances, while in German you would normally distinguish between an entrance you drive through ("Einfahrt") versus walk ("Eingang").
Wow, I didnt know einfarht bs eingang. For most folks speaking English, such a distinction is not needed. For me, in my work, I have to speak of vehicle versus pedestrian all the damn time.-
One could put together a phrase where that one would clearly come out when speaking it out, though not (or not as clearly) in written form, e.g.:
"Frag mal den Wirt, welche Alkohol-Konzentration s'Lager-Bier hat"
