I wouldn’t say that those bills are anti-car, or anti- at all, since they authorize and promote new things instead of banning anything. I’d say that they’re “pro-people”.

It’s totally normal. I can find a bunch of news stories about children and teachers killed by cars that hit schools by searching online. There are some about kids hit and killed by school buses, hit and killed by cars when getting on or off school buses, hit and killed by cars while walking to or from school, and ton about groups of students dying in car crashes together. We’ll collectively forget about Chatham, IL by Friday.

On a hunch, I found more than one company selling crash-rated bollards specifically to protect schools and daycare centers, so, at least there’s that.

ETA: I saw the AP News story was featured on one of my local news sites, so I visited and found that a doctor is dead and her daughter and husband in the hospital after getting hit by a car while they were walking yesterday, another crash injured a driver and created a chemical spill (which was a different incident than the tanker truck on the other side of town that was leaking fuel after hitting something on the street), as well as a driver arrested after crashing into a horse pasture.

You’re correct, my memory took a shortcut. Thanks for the very thorough explanation!

Americans can’t buy them new because of the so-called Chicken Tax. We can only import them if they’re speed-governed, or at least 25 years old.

Even with those restrictions, lots of Americans want them, including me. There are quite a few importers bringing them over, including one that just started up in my area. They’re desirable enough that major media outlets are running articles about how people who need to get real work done covet kei trucks.

Yes, Americans would buy them. Americans are buying them.

Google Translate for Conservativese:

LAW ➡️ The exercise of state power, or its agents. e.g. “The law is at the door.”

ORDER ➡️ Social hierarchy. e.g. This pardon restored order by putting this woman a back in the social hierarchy where a white conservative belongs, rather than at the bottom, under the bootheel of the law, with the brown people.

A friend years ago clued me in to the Rosetta Stone for understanding conservatives: At base, they have a deep, abiding self-hatred. Yes, people often say it’s fear, but everybody’s motivated by fear of something. The conservative is motivated specifically by fear that they’re worthless, that they don’t measure up.

It makes so much sense when you game it out: They’re constantly needing external validation that they are good, or at least, better than somebody else. The basis of racism becomes clear as day in this light, and the desperate need to be special is just kind of axiomatic.

It depends how you define it. I first installed Slackware at work on a retired IBM PS/2 in '94 or '95, because somebody was working on MicroChannel bus support. (That never materialized.) Later, we checked out Novell Linux Desktop, maybe Debian, too. At a later job, we had some Red Hat workstations, version 5 or 6, and I had Yellow Dog Linux on an old Power Mac.

At home, I didn’t switch to Linux until Ubuntu Breezy Badger. It was glorious to install it on a laptop, and have all of the ACPI features just work. I had been running FreeBSD for several years, NetBSD on an old workstation before that, and Geek Gadgets (a library for compiling Unix programs on Amiga OS) before that.

Yeah, nobody’s buying this bullshit.

Once again, this is a silly argument, which this tautology makes obvious: Most Americans live where most Americans live. A full third of the U.S. land area is USFS or BLM land on which nobody lives, and the sparsely-populated areas of the rest are just that: sparsely-populated. Utah has only 3.3 million inhabitants, which is 0.9% of the national population. But even they’re not rural! Most Utahns live in a handful of metro areas; the Salt Lake City region has areas with population density over 5,000 people per square mile.

The United States is overwhelmingly urban, and the number of people who live in really rural areas is basically a rounding error.

It’s not just spending money. In my city, we’re poisoning the groundwater with road salt to support winter driving. One well near me has sodium levels in the water high enough that the water utility has issued a no-drink advisory for people with hypertension.

In case anybody was actually wondering, the difference is sudsing agent. The manufacturers originally put a chemical in laundry detergent to make more suds. That doesn’t make them clean clothes any better, it’s just for psychological effect. Customers feel like it’s working better when they can see suds.

But too much sudsing in front-loading machines can cause leaking from around the door seals. (Same as putting dish detergent in the dishwasher.) So the HE detergents are the same thing, but without the sudsing agent. They work just fine in top-loading machines, too.

But does anybody remember those TV ads for Biz detergent which pitted a woman using it against man using “Hiz” detergent? Hooray for casual sexism!

This is why I like marine devices. By necessity, they have to operate offline. There’s no cellular service in the middle of the ocean. I have a Xantrex LiFePo BMS and a Victron solar charge controller on my boat, and neither requires a cloud account to use the app.

Reminds me of a meeting my co-worker and I had with the IT staff of a company that is a customer using research instruments in our facility. The meeting was to ask us to enable data synchronization through SharePoint. (We’re a Linux shop.) We asked what the issue was with getting their data files with SFTP. They said, “It’s open source.”

Then, a few beats of silence as it sinks in for us that there is no next step in the chain of logic. That is the totality of their objection.

That’s amusing to me. Back around 2010, I used a lot of state legal forms that they only released as PDF files, but not fillable. It was annoying to print them and fill them by hand, and terribly fiddly to use the PDF annotation tool on the computer.

So I just used OpenOffice.org to create almost-pixel-perfect versions of the forms, with fillable text boxes, then exported them as PDF. Word couldn’t do it at the time.

Now, at work, I use Microsoft365 because that’s what everyone uses because of the site license. I wish we’d switch to something else, because Outlook fails so hard at basic email stuff.

The first time I had ever heard of the word “tankie” was on Lemmy. It’s just not a thing that about anybody I know offline is, or has heard of. So I don’t understand the obsession with them. Even if they’re doing every evil thing claimed, it’s a) the metaphorical tempest in a teapot, and b) not even working, based on the number of people here who seem to make hating on tankies part of their identity.

I’d say that 20-50 years is generous. Maybe if they’d won every election, but that’s now how US politics goes. When one side stages a coup, and history shows they’re going to win an election again within the next cycle or two, not throwing the leaders of the coup in Gitmo by January 21, 2021, at the latest, sure seems like enabling fascism.

We talking about 19th century land grabs? There’s a really interesting (to me) law called the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The United States needed fixed nitrogen, and therefore could just take it?

The history of the US—the real history—is wild.

India’s cities are jammed up with car traffic. It’s one of the major sources of pollution. That’s what this professor is addressing. Africa is a whole, huge continent. containing many countries with greatly varying levels of economic development. The poorer ones don’t even have much of an infrastructure base. And lots of people there do ride bicycles. All that considered, my question stands.

Wat?

Why the fuck is the nearest produce section 15 miles away? That’s a major planning failure. Most trips that Americans take are less than 3 miles, so planning by population would be a lot more sensible than planning by land mass.