I got pulled over and given a warning when someone passed me to the right.
I told the officer I totally support the policy.
In my defense, I was overtaking other vehicles to the right and moving at the speed of the vehicle ahead of me, but as I was driving a large vehicle I was preserving a longer follow distance than the tailgater (err, driver) who passed me thought I needed...
Nope. And so many of these traffic laws often neglect to take actual safety into account. I’ve certainly been one of those annoyed drivers behind large vehicles taking forever to pass. Ultimately it’s the driver of that heavy vehicle to determine what is safe or not and not the impatient asshole behind them. That being said, it’s often difficult from behind to differentiate between the safety conscious and the inconsiderate who just like to park on the left.
I probably tend to be in the top 10% of drivers regarding speed on any given highway. I’m usually the passer and rarely the passee. I stick to the right lane when traffic is light, but may cruise in the left when it requires me to weave in and out for no reason. But I keep an eye on my mirrors and make sure to get out of the way for the few who are faster than me. Sometimes even if that means I slow down a bit to get right. My goal when on the highway is to not make others put on their brakes or react because of me. My second goal is to not put myself into positions where I have to brake myself. That means good follow distances so minor changes in traffic speed doesn’t cause a chain reaction of tail lights that lead to traffic snakes.
Most of what I have seen that causes dangerous situations is when people act abnormally. If the cruising speed on a highway (regardless of posted speed limit) is 80mph and you’re cruising at 70mph in the left lane you are causing a higher risk of accidents regardless of whether you’re doing the speed limit or not. If the roads are covered in ice, you should absolutely be ticketed for driving the “speed limit” when most everyone else is crawling along. So much of traffic boils down to “we live in a society” and so much of what makes traffic miserable is the same folks who can never understand that concept.
One factor: 38% of population in NYC had air conditioning in 1970, 90% do now.
The OP mentioned this as a symptom - "20 years ago I rarely used AC in the summer, now its on nearly every day from May to September." Increased AC use and the associated waste heat is a significant contributor to the urban heat island effect. https://news.asu.edu/content/excess-heat-air-conditioners-ca....
"""Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media, with 31% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly,” similar to last year’s 32%. Americans’ trust in the media -- such as newspapers, television and radio -- first fell to 32% in 2016 and did so again last year."""
Such studies sometimes ask about the outlets; for some reason conservatives feel Fox news isn't the MSM, while CNN and MSNBC are.
Asked about their "non-MSM" outlet, suddenly it is VERY trustworthy.
And these stats hold for liberals as well; they feel their outlet isn't the "MSM", but that Fox is and is untrustworthy.
Since the job of news is now to sell ads and not tell the truth, a lot of "supporters" only hear what their side wants them to hear, and not the facts.
The real problem of course is that each party has different policies; but if we as citizens don't agree on the facts and problems facing us, then there is no way to evaluate the strength of the policies against the problems.
Even the "facts" are politicized. Government statistics are falsified or manipulated at the source. Then the media picks and chooses what to report so as to favor the view they want to push. Honest media outlets hold government accountable. I think the best thing for the average person to do is listen to a variety of sources, and compare the news to their own and their friends' experiences. If you're up for research then you can do that along with seeking out true journalists.
I'm sorry that having never had these relationships, you cannot comprehend the loss. In seeing this series and the comments, I see both the sweetness of the relationships and the hint of the grief at their passing.
Yes, we recognize that having loving parents is an immeasurable blessing. While their passing is not a world-ending tragedy, it is precisely because we know how precious that interaction is, that we mourn their passing - and encourage others who have it to treasure it.
But there are other precious relationships and interactions that we can establish, build, and treasure.
Oh but I do. There's no shortage of phony self-centered people in the world around me. Through a little effort and a ton of luck I ended up living and interacting with a lot of entitled people, obsessed with their petty tragedies which they hurry to encase in heavy golden frames and put on public display in the most prestigious art gallery in town.
I live in the world where about half the inhabitants don't eat meat out of "moral concerns" absolutely ignoring the grim reality of most of the world that will eat whatever food they have, and a lot of the time would have none.
People who protest about political causes in lands and cultures they don't understand because a propaganda ad featuring a bruised child in a pile of rubble made them feel sad.
People throwing themselves at the police at another pointless protest rally, only to be greeted at the police station by a mug of hot chocolate and be dispatched home to sleep in their soft and cozy beds.
There's nothing deep or special in this "loss". It make sense to mourn the loss of a life of a young man committing suicide because he was abandoned by the world around him. And I've seen that. It makes sense to mourn the loss of life of a young woman who got hooked up on heroin and died of overdose after an attempted recovery--and I've seen that too. It makes sense to regret the loss of young child's life, whose entire family was killed by poorly planned and poorly executed missile attack. Because such loss of life was avoidable, it took something that had a potential and squandered it. Old people dying of old age is nothing like any of the above. It's what's supposed to happen. It's how I want to go. It's how I want for everyone I care about to go.
I've spent enough time with ER to develop strong feeling of disgust for people who start crying "oh but my mom, she was only ninety-three!" and then latching onto the doctor's sleeves preventing them from tending to other patients. These also tend to show in large family groups and block the entire department for hours by driving attention to themselves with loud wining, arguing with the medical staff and other people in the ER. Demanding unlimited attention due to their "devastating loss". Demanding that the medical staff instantly produce all sorts of forms, perform all kinds of unnecessary procedures, basically, only to drive attention to themselves.
Absolutely agree. So far, the transistor (i.e. computation, internet, mobile, AI) has been less transformative than earlier breakthroughs like refrigeration, the automobile and the airplane.
In my view politics is largely a sideshow compared to technological advancement as it is mostly about how to divide up the pie as opposed to growing it. While people can communicate various political ideas more freely, it actually doesn't matter than much unless the political situation gets bad enough that it leads to a dark age. Therefore technologies that merely make it easier to communicate political ideas are less impactful than technologies that directly improve life (e.g. most people would not trade their fridge for a Twitter account). Of course, I am glad that both exist.
I agree with your overall point, but I would add that technology has significantly increased leisure time, and the fact that communication platforms are how many people use that extra leisure time proves their value beyond what you might expect just looking at a hierarchy of needs.
I'm not sure that it has. The workweek remains at 40 hours and most people still work about 40 years. Furthermore, in advanced economies the per household cumulative hours worked has roughly doubled since the transistor was invented. The dishwasher and washer/dryer are the last technologies that actually increased leisure time and predated the transistor.
I'm hopeful that AI + robotics will improve the situation but so far there have been very little quality of life improvements due to the transistor (coding is very fun however).
I don't hate your argument, but the Arab Spring citation is some idealism from over a decade ago. The Arab Spring mostly failed and almost all of those countries remained autocracies?
True, but the fact that a revolutionary social movement was organized across an entire global region was enabled because of the internet was what I was trying to highlight.
Oh come on, that take is too cute by three halves. The internet was the biggest change in human society of the 20th Century, if not the millennium. And while you’re peeling that one apart, the transistor also laid the bedrock for GPS, modern medical devices like pacemakers and insulin dispensers, mass-communication/mass-media with live broadcast capable of reaching billions of people, and like 10 even bigger things my brunch-addled mind isn’t thinking of at the moment.
I know it’s a cool thought exercise to go “what if the things I like/care about actually aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things?” But at the end of that exercise you’ve got to come back to reality.
And the internet has been taken over by bad actors (Meta, Xitter, TikTok etc) with the result that the public is swamped by lies and thus democracy and post Cold War peace is being replaced by global war and dictatorship. So refrigerators look pretty good right now...
I don't think technology is really making things worse. The free flow of information comes with pros and cons. It is hard to imagine that unidirectional communication is net better in the final analysis.
I love the idea of this but jeez these things are ugly. I wish someone would make a simple kit or prefab that actually had a nice design. I’d consider buying it.
We used windy.com earlier this year to choose our location for the total eclipse in Texas. Worked out perfectly - great view for the eclipse, then the clouds rolled in...
Free software releases often include the "free as in puppy" implication as a disclaimer of responsibility for the effort you may need to expend to make use of it - "if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces".
I told the officer I totally support the policy.
In my defense, I was overtaking other vehicles to the right and moving at the speed of the vehicle ahead of me, but as I was driving a large vehicle I was preserving a longer follow distance than the tailgater (err, driver) who passed me thought I needed...
AITAH?
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