admiralteal @ admiralteal @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

my experience with them is great when people aren’t total morons

It really doesn't matter. They're safer and better even if -- maybe ESPECIALLY if -- total morons are going through them. They just change the geometry of how an incident could even happen and leave everyone safer.

They tend to be significantly larger in new construction because small ones don't really cost a lot less than big ones and most designs prefer to do something nice with the landscaping. Plus, bigger ones flow better. But you can retrofit ones that aren't vastly larger in size.

All of this is equally true of a road with bike lanes vs one without them... yet cities always seem to be able to find the space, typically by dieting the road a bit. There's typically lots of options. Narrow lanes, reduce lanes, eliminate some/all on-street parking, cannibalize the median, etc..

Neighborhood traffic circles are a pretty easy drop-in replacement for most of the worst-offender small intersections, too, and they can be achieved with as little as painted lines.

These climate-based arguments for why we should maintain cities primarily designed around the car are just... dumb. Don't fall victim to them. There is only one effective way to reduce congestion long-term and that is reducing the need for cars. Creating streets that are safe and pleasant for people outside of cars promotes alternatives to driving. And in doing all of this, you'll have a huge impact on the climate instead of a worthless marginal one.

Road user cost is an EXTREMELY well-studied field with hundreds of complete manuals and textbooks written on the subject. Most states have their own full guidelines. You can very, very directly quantify what the impact of things like work zones is in terms of dollar figures based on theoretical impacts to travelers. So yeah, in those terms, the DOT does put a dollar value on congestion, absolutely. Just as the EPA creates a metric for putting a dollar value on a human life when analyzing impacts of pollution.

The actual traffic study for this would be comparing an intersection with ROR AB tested to without ROR, modeling the increased delay for drivers, and translating that into a figure. A minute or two delay... actually doesn't amount to very much, and that's what a typical case would be of forcing a driver to wait an additional cycle. Not to mention that, in a world without ROR, there is no a very good reason to force engineers to do their fucking jobs and design the intersection to work better without that dangerous crutch.

The Philadelphia paper is the seminal work on all way stops being safer than signals in urban contexts. It is pretty definitive and similar studies have confirmed the results, cementing them into most complete streets design guides.

Studies on roundabouts being safer are... even more conclusive and abundant. I really can't cite just one because damn, there's so damn many.

I feel goal posts shifting away to any response I make. Pass.

That quote is ignoring the fact that it was his fellow conservatives who went after him to destroy his life. It is his fellow conservatives -- the ones he chose to stand among and support -- that enjoy this outcome.

You cannot be surprised when bullies bully. And the people who hang out with bullies because it benefits them to do so? They are also bullies.

And unfortunately, I think that's exactly why you're wrong. The issue isn't partisanship. The issue is bigotry. These people outed him because they hate and want to destroy LGBT people. There's no shades of grey here. There is no moderate position. This story happened even with no one from the opposite partisan position being involved.

In general, urban signal-controlled intersections are just the traffic engineers screaming "I've tried nothing and am all out of ideas."

We use them pretty much by default in the US, but most urban areas should be vastly cutting back on them. All-way stops and, of course, roundabouts are both provably FAR safer often with no impact or a positive impact to overall congestion. Plus, pretty universally much cheaper to build and maintain.

Signal-controlled designs should be reserved for intersections where it is literally not possible to fit a more passive design while maintaining sight distances or for places where truly huge traffic volumes are involved (a significant interchange) where no other traffic flow redesign is possible.

Using traffic lights is ALL about increasing level of service. Which is just code for "The city values keeping more cars moving faster over both safety and financial responsibility."

All that to say, I bet a lot of the intersections that would be most annoying without right on red... don't really need to have lights controlling traffic flow in them at all.

Genuine question since the article doesn't mention it -- how does the AP know conversations were destroyed? I would assume a properly-designed, E2E encrypted app like Signal wouldn't leave obvious evidence of shredded conversations.

My guess is it is based on testimony from some of the involved parties that they had these conversations and then later the chat histories were gone? But I'd like to know more.

Moreover, do we know the conversations were destroyed AFTER they were ordered to preserve them and not just routinely destroyed?

UK and Germany, for two.

Meanwhile western nations are falling over each other to deliver military aid to Israel, a nation that clearly does not need it and is using those tools to manufacture fresh child skeletons as part their religious war.

That's not what the word "apologist" means.

To apologize for something is to defend it. It's indefensible. Israel is going to wipe these people out, systematically, just as they've been doing since before nearly any of us were alive. There's only one thing Israel could do to lead to lasting peace in the region and that is give back the land. Anyone who thinks that is going to happen is delusional.

Anything less than returning people to their homelands is just going to lead to continuing violent resistance.

Manchin's a shit. He is not worthy of the office. The coal industry should not get to own a senator and they clearly do in this man.

Even knowing that the next person to hold that seat will almost certainly be worse, I hope to see him go.

There's no peace for the region so long as the Palestinian identity continues to exist. Everyone knows it, none less than the Israelis.

Even if Israel were truly of mind to "make peace", far too many Palestinians remember the deals reneged on from the previous generation between Israel and the PLO. The origin story of how al-Mujama transitioned into the militant Hamas. When the best possible treatment Palestinians could get from Israel was wage slavery, settlement, total dependence on foreign aid, and not even having the right to travel freely. Second-class residents, not even citizens, in their own homelands. And the idea that anyone would have more faith in Benny than Peres or Shamir is sort of laughable.

The outcome of this may as well be carved in stone. Israel will do to Palestine as was done to so many other victims of colonialism. Corner and oppress the people who were of the land until none of their childrens' children can remember a time when it was their land. Turn any injustices into notes from history, to be discussed and studied but never repaired.

But hey, the planet is dying either way I guess.

I never understood why so many from the more techbro political alignment find this argument so convincing.

It doesn't really matter whether the original data is present in the model or if it was reduced to such an abstract form that we cannot find it anymore. The model only can exist because of the original data being used to make it, and it was used without proper license. It doesn't matter how effective nor how lossy your compression is, mere compression is not transformation and does not wash away copyright.

The argument that it is in some way transformative is more relevant. But it's also got a pretty heavy snort of "thinking like a cop" in it, fundamentally. Yes, the law protects transformative works, so if we only care what the written rules of the law says, then if we can demonstrate that what the AI does is transformative, the copyright issues go away. This isn't a slam dunk argument that there's nothing wrong with what an AI does even if we grant it is transformative. It may also simply be proving that the copyright law we have fails to protect artists in the new era of AI.

In a truly ideal world, we wouldn't have copyright. At all. All these things would be available and offered freely to everyone. All works would be public domain. And artists who contributed to the useful arts and sciences would be well-fed, happy, and thriving. But we don't live in that ideal world, so instead we have copyright law. The alternative is that artists cannot earn a living on their works.

The upside is, in city management it's a very powerful cautionary tale that can be involved around myriad P-PP deals

Does literally anyone scan an RFID chip from a business card?

I just... don't believe that is a thing that happens. Seems like a way to look "high-tech" that an actually high-tech person would never bother with.

Business cards are for reading a name, title, business name, phone number, email address, and MAYBE a business URL. What the heck are we even doing here.

Whatever business use is being achieved with these paper RFID tags... if it isn't for some kind of security gate to prevent shrinkage, a barcode would work just as well and is dead reliable.

Just barge on talking about something entirely irrelevant to the article you didn't read. Don't look back or doubt yourself for even one moment.

One would think that it is important for a ship's counselor to remain pretty detached from the day-to-day decision-making of the crew. That it would be a very bad idea for the counselor to be regularly fraternizing with what are basically her patients.

I wonder how this works in, for example, the Navy.

Cool, cool.

The article is talking about Apple services you can use on Android or Windows or even regular Linux PCs, though. There's no "free computing" alternative to Apple+ , other than the high seas.

The dumbest thing is if you look at actual crash test statistics, SUVs don't actually perform better than passenger cars, by and large. Maybe a bit, but definitely not enough to justify the huge difference in size and cost. Smart cars are a great example -- they actually perform super well in crash testing in spite of being so tiny.

People get so confused about the whole relative size thing. They think being in a bigger vehicle makes them inherently safer -- but that isn't really true. Being in a SAFER vehicle makes you safer. Big SUVs with their poor suspension and stiff frames, in many kinds of common accidents, perform very poorly.

The confusion comes because people forget there are two vehicles involved in the kinds of accidents they are scared of. They think that if their vehicle is bigger, it means the other vehicle is smaller. And of course, if the vehicle you're in a collision with is smaller, you will be safer. But it doesn't matter that it be smaller than you. It needs to be smaller in absolute terms.

And in a crash with a stationary object or rollover, being in a one of these trucks is pretty much universally worse.

Of course, the entire appeal to "safety" is nonsense anyway. US roads are just not safe. They are not designed to be safe. Safety is not a priority. Level of service is the priority. We can and happily do sacrifice safety for the sake of reducing congestion all the time. Just look at how nearly-universal right on red and sliplanes are, or how often we put in expensive urban signalized intersections instead of all-way stops.