daltotron @ daltotron @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I dunno an extra second or two to me, at the green light, isn't that egregious to me, really. If you're at an intersection, sometimes the far lanes of the crossing road can be both empty, and totally hidden by a slew of cars waiting to go forward. This is more commonly the case, and more commonly dangerous, for traffic approaching in the furthest lane from you, since that lane can sometimes be a turn lane where right turn on red is allowed, and all it takes is one idiot driver to fuck up your whole day. Most of the times, traffic lights account for this, but it still happens. Not necessarily the end of the world if someone takes a second, and, as the meme says, it doesn't mess up my day to have an extra second of delay.

No, the real problem, to me, is the people behind the first person at a green light, and acceleration. Follow distance is purely a property of the speed at which you are going, and lower speeds are much less consequential. There is no reason not to follow the car in front of you almost to the letter, and scale your speed to match their movement. It's very annoying to me that many people will wait a full one or two seconds to "let the car in front of them go", before they even start to move. This increases the traffic delays behind you, and can have substantial ramifications for traffic throughput over time, which can be kind of a nightmare in cities with more traffic. Obviously there's always going to be a very minor delay in terms of raw reaction time, like, 250ms, in an expected environment like this where really the most that can change is that the car in front of you brakes very suddenly, so in all circumstances, you're going to need a gap that allows you to react to that, and then progressively more as speed increases, consequences increases, and the novelty and unpredictability of the environment increases, you're gonna need at least two seconds of gap and probably more like four to adequately react.

Likewise, you can cut down on traffic if everyone just accelerates a little more. Most people, I have noticed, are very conservative with their car's acceleration, which makes sense in lots of environments, as sometimes you're just rushing to get stopped by the next light down and most everyone will make it to the next light in any case, since light timings are worked out like that in advance, so it doesn't matter too much. In many cases, it would actually benefit them to go slower, as going slower might allow them to retain some level of momentum through the next light, which might help them save on gas. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast, sort of thing. On the other hand, there are some circumstances in which throughput is severely limited by a lack of acceleration since every car behind you is going to be limited by the maximum of your acceleration, so having a more conservative approach can kind of hurt traffic throughput a lot.

I wish they taught this shit in driver's ed, I wish driver's ed was mandatory, and I wish people knew how to fucking drive well. It's kind of crazy how bad lots of people are at driving in general even though it's kind of seen as a necessary thing in most of america to get anywhere.

So an interesting thing I've noticed people doing is basically claiming that whatever other side is being astroturfed by the "real evil", right. "Fossil fuel is funding renewable FUD of nuclear reactors!" or "Fossil fuels is funding nuclear FUD of renewables!". You can also see this with liberals claiming that anyone who disagrees with the DNC is a Russian bot, and with people who disagree with libs claiming that libs fund radical right-wing candidates as an election strategy and that this is one of the reasons why they are basically just as bad as those right-wingers.

The core thing you need to understand about this, as a claim, is that they can both be true. They can both be backed opposition, controlled opposition, astroturfing. Because it's not so much that they're funding one racehorse that they want to be their opposition, so much as they are going to fund both sides, plant bad faith actors among both sides, bad faith discourse and division, thought terminating cliches, logical fallacies, whatever, and then by fueling the division, they've successfully destroyed their opposition. The biggest help to the fossil fuels lobby isn't the fact that conversations about nuclear or renewables are happening when "we should be pushing, we should be in emergency mode, everyone should agree with me or get busted" right, as part of this "emergency mode" is us having these conversations. No, the biggest help to fossil fuels lobbies is the nature of the discourse, rather than the subjects of the discourse.

Also I find it stupid that people are arguing for all in on one of the other. That's dumb. Really, very incredibly dumb. Mostly as I see this discourse happening in a disconnected top-down vacuum separate from any real world concerns because everyone just wants to be "correct" in the largest sense of the word and then have that be it. Realistically, renewables and nuclear are contextually dependant. Renewables can be better supplemented by energy storage solutions to solve their not matching precisely the power usage curves and trends, but a lot of those proposed storage solutions require large amounts of concrete, careful consideration of environmental effects, and large amounts engineering, i.e. the same shit as nuclear. It can both be true that baseload doesn't matter so much as things like solar can more closely match the power usage curves naturally for desert climates where large amounts of sunlight and heat will create larger needs for A/C, and it can also be true that baseload is a reality in other cases where you can't as easily transition power needs or try to offset them without larger amounts of infrastructural investment or power losses. Can't exactly preheat homes in the day so they stay warm at night, in a cold climate, if the r-values for your homes are ass because everyone has a disconnected suburban shithovel that they're not recouping maintenance costs of when they pay taxes.

These calculations of cost offsets and efficiencies have to be made in context, they have to be based in reality, otherwise we're just arguing about fucking nothing at all. Maybe I will also hold water in the debates for money not being a great indicator of what's possible, probable, or what's the best long term solution for humanity, too, just to put that out there. But God damn this debate infuriates me to no end because people want to have their like, universal one size fits all top down kingly decree take of, well is this good or bad, instead of just understanding a greater, more nuanced take on the subject.

If you wanna have a top-down take on what's the best, you probably want global, big solar satellites, that beam energy down with microwave lasers.

damn that actually sounds like a great read, never heard of that one before

Yeah, I think this problem is mostly solved if people were more willing to take their obviously highly produced and edited scripts and just make those publicly accessible with sources and whatnot, which they presumably need to basically do anyways in order to have good captioning on their video. The main problem isn't so much that they use videos, to me, but that we have no way to sort through leagues of text documents and blogs now. Harder for me to subscribe to and read a blog in a dedicated fashion, I guess. I dunno, I guess ultimately I'm just saying that the two mediums need more connection, which would be mutually beneficial, I think.

I mean the government pretty much already has a death note, of a kind. If you're not Gary Webb, then they could always just slip some shit in your water main or whatever, or otherwise just kinda kill you however they want. So it's not all that useful for them to have, other than being cheaper and maybe making some political assassinations much easier.

You know I do kinda wonder what effect that would have culturally, especially if that became a kind of trend or mainstay. Like, obviously a big investigation would take place as to the cause of death. Doubt they would come up with anything, but obviously, huge scandal. After that, do the successors keep getting killed since they'd probably be the same or worse, or what happens? What would happen in response to that? Would they rename the party, launch further investigations, would they attempt to dissolve the party? Would they attempt to believe in different ideals out of a kind of fear or natural selection, or what? Would they all just devolve into extremely conspiratorial thought as they desperately tried to ward it off?

I mean, if they figured it out, then they might even just start putting them out under aliases or fake names or something.

Well, yes, but generally not for the reasons people think they were

Google maps won't give you a route at all in public transit if you include multiple stops. I think generally, for public transit, you either have to use google maps to extensively look up and plan your own route, or you have to use a different app. There's one just called "transit", which I think people generally use, has good integration, and sometimes local agencies have their own app or will use a different one, there's a handful of generalized ones.

But yeah, in any case. Probably, Google should be better about that.

I mean we did okay-ish with japan, and that was in the immediate post-ww2 period. There was a bunch of gaishas for a while that were complaining (iirc) about sexual assault from american troops, the nation immediately in the postwar period was fomented with a ton of nationalism and we didn't really do a great job of undoing that. Though, their trajectory nowadays is pretty good, and it's not like you can really blame all of that on the american occupation, really.

South korea, though, even though I don't know as much, I'm pretty sure we fucked up that one, since that war basically never ended and nowadays the country is a late stage hypercapitalist hellscape where plastic surgery to make you look more western is incredibly common along with the prevalence of cults and a wealth disparity that's pretty US-adjacent.

So I dunno if we did super well on those. Probably better than, say, Iraq, but I think our trajectory overall has been on a pretty consistent downwards trend since ww2.

I agree with your entire comment except the end.

I'm not sure the US has the greatest track record when it comes to those sorts of occupational wars, realistically. I think the only times we've ever really seen it turn out well is maybe in vietnam, where we actively just like, lost the entire war and got sent packing, and they're still having to deal with the ongoing problem of their country being contaminated by chemical incendiary weapons that produce larger percentages of birth defects. So, even given that Saudi Arabia is kind of a theocratic monarchic shithole, I dunno if us overthrowing it would realistically do any good, you know? I dunno. I'd probably need to see more on the numbers of dissent amount the saudi population. I think probably capitalizing on a popular movement for regime change, much like the arab spring, would probably be the best route if that was possible, and it would probably have to be more grassroots than something that the US might intentionally attempt to foment in the population, I'd imagine.

In totality though I'm not really sure to what extent it's in the US's best interest to destabilize saudi arabia. I think the US would probably prefer predictable fascists compared to, say, if they decided to rapidly nationalize and democratize their oil supply. Another, relatively understated, good reason to move away from petroleum, I would say.

“Dicks fuck pussies, and Dicks also fuck assholes”. Greatest speech ever

Yeah, that's what I was referring to. The movie came out in 2004, you know, the year after we invaded Iraq, as was the context of the movie. If you pay attention to that speech, it's basically just saying that US hegemony is good and US exceptionalism is real, and that our actions are a net positive for the international community. That the international community needs us. That we need to "fuck this asshole". In combination with the movie making fun of celebrities that had non-interventionist views, and calling them a homosexual slur that will probably get flagged on lemmy, saying that they suck up to dictators. It being satire doesn't suddenly make the movie mean the opposite of what it meant, that's just classic irony-poisoning.

I mean Team America was a pretty lowkey pro military intervention and pro america movie, to be honest. He'd probably have the opinion he would have if he had watched that movie and especially if he'd listened to the classic longwinded matt and trey speech that they throw in at the end to kind of spell out the message, it's just that nobody really watches or remembers anything other than the like, first 20 minutes of that movie, where the protagonists get hit with kind of a low point and "america" kind of looks bad, because those first twenty minutes make the most memorable use of the gag.

This is the case for basically every issue, yeah, this is generally why telling people to start with politics at the local level isn't really a great suggestion for most people.

You can't fund inter-city trains at the local level, really, that has to be done at the state level at the very least, usually in a state like california, only, and usually it has to be done with federal funding. If you don't have inter-city trains or public transit, then it's hard to make a walkable city. Basically what I'm saying is that it's not atomizable, it has to be integrated with the rest of the network, which is why even the best US cities are pretty car-centric.

This is true for a litany of other political issues besides just public transit.

Fuck that shit, all the gas lawn tools should be backwards converted to run on hydrolysis-produced rocket fuel, feasibility and efficiency and safety be damned.

I dunno, maybe with a 12 gauge slug, or maybe buckshot, but, with anything lesser than that, I'd be pretty skeptical that it's a my preferred choice of death.

Because gun manufacturers are fucking morons that think ease of use for anyone and everyone is an appealing priority over safety protocols on the weapon that can, as we have seen, very easily kill you. If you can't train to take the safety off when you need it, if you can't spare the tenth of a second it takes to turn it off, you probably shouldn't be using a gun.

I'm gonna be honest most times when I write a response I'm taking a shit and not paying very much attention to the thread which it belongs beyond my vaguest recollection to what was said

Huckleberries. I never see them as a commonly available thing in stores, eaten alongside things like bananas, which sucks, because bananas are some plant grown like a thousand miles away and I can go outside and go gather my own huckleberries if I wanted. It should be really easy, I live in an area where they grow.

So, that, but also just more broadly I kind of think that after learning enough about different regional botany, we've both crippled basically every ecosystem with a bunch of invasive species, we've crushed the human experience into a very narrow square set of experiences which includes the biodiversity that you can see around wherever you are, and we've made food worse. Because we're not using local plants for our food, you see, we're just using a bunch of generic ingredients that are sort of unnaturally made out to be universal across entire hemispheres, maybe even across the globe. No regional variation outside of specialty goods, only Mcdonald's.

The thread's gonna be against this opinion broadly, I think, but there's not like, it's not just the huckleberry, you understand, there's a lot more out there that you don't know about, both edible and not.

You know it's kind of funny but at the same time I do think it's somewhat dystopian to see like, a natural phenomenon, right, a creature, and a creature that we need a name for, named after a brand of toys. Whenever I see this stuff it's funny but it's also sad and kind of dystopian, and kind of undignified. It's like, I dunno. Imagine a kid points to a picture of a spider in a little book and asks their parents what the name of the spider is and instead of being like "that's a tarantula" they gotta be like "yeah, that's the hot wheels spider". It's a shitpost, it's funny, it's existentially hilarious, but it's also so fucking depressing.

I mean I just don't think it's so much a calculated effort by the ruling class as kind of a natural evolution of the market taking hold of and exploiting the human mind to the nth possible degree, such as they have always done.