Pipoca @ Pipoca @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

In many countries, jaywalking is perfectly legal. Drivers are expected to, you know, actually pay attention to the road and to not hit people.

In many other countries, 'jaywalking' is perfectly normal and legal outside of separated highways/motorways/throughways.

I don't think the question is why do Americans cross outside of crosswalks, but why is the idea that crossing outside of a crosswalk is a taboo so common in the US? Jaywalking being bad is so ingrained in America that many people don't even realize it's not a taboo internationally.

The answer, of course, is that initially people in the US were upset by drivers killing people. Because of that, the auto industry invented the term jaywalking and spent a lot of money and effort on victim blaming. They were quite successful in America, but weren't as successful in some other countries.

That's objectively paid off for the US auto industry. In the Netherlands, the initial pushback to drivers starting to kill more and more people, the "stop the child-murder" protests lead to the Netherlands becoming so bike friendly.

I'm not the person you originally responded to?

a nice reminder that the planet is gonna be just fine

Planet is gonna be fine pf

I'm just echoing George Carlin's bit: "the planet is fine; the people are fucked". There's almost nothing that people can do that could possibly be worse than the Permian extinction or the Chicxulub impact. Regardless of what people do, the planet will be fine. The planet has survived far worse and come out just fine.

Whatever we do to combat climate change, it isn't for the planet. It's for the people.

Just as if there were a Cretaceous space program, redirecting the asteroid wouldn't have been for the planet. It would have been for the dinosaurs. The planet was fine, and it made way for us.

The planet has survived sudden and dramatic climate shifts before.

For example, the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs caused years or decades of impact winter. The planet survived fine. The non-avian dinosaurs didn't, but the planet did.

That comment isn't saying that what's going on now is a normal cycle, but rather the natural response to a non-normal event.

I don't think T Rex was thrilled when that comet hit.

But the planet is bigger than T Rex. The planet was fine, it recovered. That's not a good consolation to the T Rex, but it is objectively true.

In Fahrenheit, 0 is the temperature of ice in some random brine, just as 0 in Celsius is the temp of ice water.

Fahrenheit and Celsius are defined nearly identically. Fahrenheit just chose some weird values for its basic constants, like using a weird ice brine instead of just ice water.

Living to 120 would be great if that comes from getting four more decades of what my patents and grandparents were in their 60s and 70s: fine day-to-day, but maybe they needed a scooter to do a full day at Disney closer to the end. Not as young as they used to be, but still basically able to do everything they used to, just maybe a bit slower.

Living to 120 would be terrible if you get an extra 40 years in a memory care unit.

Allocative efficiency in economics just means that you can't make someone better off without making someone else worse off.

An efficient allocation isn't necessarily equitable.

And the first welfare theorem of economics only claims that the market will produce an allocatively efficient result if its complete, in perfect competition, and everyone has complete information. Which has the obvious problems of those preconditions not matching reality.

The easy way to remember the multiplier is that there's exactly 180 degrees between boiling and freezing in Fahrenheit, and 100 in Celsius. Just use 1.8 instead of a fraction.

Most of the shitty old people in congress started out as shitty young people in congress.

Most of the good old people in congress started out as good young people.

A good young or middle aged person is better in congress than a good elderly person, but a good elderly person is way, way better than a shitty young person.

Yeah.

I think I count 23 lanes in the bottom pic.

Ignoring the effect of heavy vehicles and assuming a free flow speed of 70, the federal highway authority's numbers would be 2400 vehicles per lane or 55k vehicles per hour. Assuming an average occupancy of 1.5 people per vehicle, that's nearly 83k.

I'm having trouble finding actual sources right now for max rail capacity, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passengers_per_hour_per_direction claims 60-90k passengers per direction on 3.5 meter lanes for "suburban rail".

Although 83k people per hour is 41.5k people per rail track. Assuming a 360 person train like the Bombardier BiLevel Coach, that's only 115 train cars per hour per track. If each train has 11 cars, that's 10 trains per hour or a train every 6 min. Not really that unreasonable, and the tracks will look mostly empty unlike that monstrosity of a road.

It's not saying that the top row can support at most 100 people.

Just that if you have 100 people per hour, you need something like what's in the picture. The train tracks aren't being fully utilized in the top pic, either.

As an aside, you're forgetting that cars are ~15 feet long on average. So you've got an hour of traffic with consistently 1 car following distance, which is fairly unrealistic. Real world capacy of a lane is closer to 2k people per hour, or 4k both directions.

The senate has literally nothing to do with either the electoral college or state policies?

The front runners in the primary are Katie Porter (49), Adam Schiff (63), and Barbara Lee (77). All three are currently in the house of representatives.

So long as people retire when they start to go downhill mentally, peoples positions are much more important than their age. Most progressives would much rather have President Bernie (82) than President Tulsi Gabbard (42).

Lee has been pretty consistently progressive. She was the only vote against the authorization of force after the September 11th attacks, she was a founding member of the congressional LGBTQ+ equality caucus, and volunteered with the Black Panther Party’s Community Learning Center in Oakland as a teen. She's one of the most progressive Democrats in the House.

The ruling is specific to NYS.

However, from what I understand, the Trump Organization itself is incorporated in NYS. So they'll be selling off everything it owns, in every state.

That includes Mar a Lago.

The proceeds of the sale go first to pay any debts and obligations - to stiffed contractors, to government fines, and to pay off the remainder of bank loans. The owners (i.e. Trump) gets the rest of the cash from the sales. There's literally no way Trump ends up poor from this, but he might find it difficult to repurchase things like Trump tower.

Inventing FUD is a bad look regardless of if you're punching up or punching down. It's not about who the target is. It's that FUD is inherently dishonest, and being dishonest reflects poorly on your character.

The Linux community should try to be better than that. We shouldn't stoop to Microsoft's old level.

Admittedly, I haven't set up a dual booted Linux machine in about a decade, so I don't know if it's gotten dramatically worse.

Parties work a bit differently in the US vs e.g. Israel.

In Israel, party insiders choose their politicians. If you want different candidates than an existing party is offering, you have to make your own new party with your own new list.

By contrast, in the US, parties run primary elections where voters pick the candidates. The specifics depend on the state, but in most states the election is held for registered members of that party.

Americans aren't idiots. Most know third party candidates don't do well in plurality elections. So smart progressives, alt-right etc. politicians don't run as a third party candidate against mainstream Democrats and Republicans. Instead, they primary an incumbent Democrat or Republican, like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, or join the primary when the incumbent retired like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Somewhere like Israel, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Joe Manchin would be in two very different parties. In the US, they're in the same party.

In places where RCV is passed, you absolutely see more candidates running and getting decent percentages of the vote. Because that isn't a terrible strategy any more. Someone like AOC might have run as a Progressive or something rather than primarying the Democrat.

Look at third parties and their success in the UK and Canada.

The last general election in the UK was 2019. Conservatives got 43.6% of the vote but 56.2% of the seats. Labor got 32.1% of the votes and 31.1% of the seats.

The biggest national third party, the Liberal Democrats, got 11.6% of the vote but a mere 1.7% of the seats.

In comparison, look at regional third parties. The Scottish National Party got 3.9% of the vote and a whopping 7.4% of the seats. Irish regional parties like Sinn Feinn and the Democratic Unionist Party got a combined 2.3% of the seats with a combined 1.4% of the seats.

Previous elections have been quite similar. In 2015, the far right UKIP won only a single seat after getting a whopping 12.6% of the vote.

Canada is quite similar. The Bloc Quebecois consistently gets more votes than the national New Democratic Party, despite having gotten less than half as many votes.

The problem in FPTP is that it works really, really badly when you've got 3 or more viable candidates in one election.

As an activist in a FPTP system, you can either try to make a successful third party, or co-opt one of the existing ones during candidate selection. Both are very difficult, but the second approach is generally much easier, because you don't have to deal with vote splitting.

But maybe the conservative strategists would see that they are courting a smaller fringe than if they had courted the socially progressive.

That would only really work if Liberals and NDP splitting the socially progressive vote doesn't cause them to consistently lose.

What's the stable equilibrium of everyone voting honestly? Each party moves to get about a third of the votes? You could reliably have an election where 2/3rds of the electorate would prefer anyone but the conservative, yet the conservative wins?

FPTP is a garbage tier electoral system.