The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
No bio...
User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5d ago
Freedoms come with responsibility, as they say
The "they" who say this are generally authoritarians, who sometimes write unintentional parodies of Bills of Rights in the form of paired statements of the form "You have the right to do X, you have the responsibility not to do X unless we say it's OK".
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5d ago
No, the presence of virtue is virtuousness. Freedom is something different.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5d ago
Genuinely asking, how is that assuming the conclusion?
Because the transit could be resulting in more trips (and more people) overall. If there weren't transit, there might be less density and fewer trips.
But isn't that kind of an is/ought problem (to be honest, not sure if I've used this correctly). You say: "we ought to have small cities, this will solve congestion" and that's, true, but we actually have big cities that need solutions now, and dispersing their populations isn't going to happen.
But you've been proposing transit for suburban NJ, which is not in fact a big city. In general politicians who propose these things are not trying to solve transportation problems anyway. They're in favor of big cities, transit unions, and environmentalism and against cars. So trains and the NYC subway just get slower and slower; more money gets poured into them and ends up as raises for the transit workers, motor vehicle lanes get taken away for bikes, and the resulting bike lanes get filled with crap -- in short a lot of money is spent and things get worse for everyone, except maybe the transit workers.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5d ago
Just because London/Tokyo/whatever have traffic doesn't mean their trains suck. Imagine how much worse it would be without trains.
That's assuming the conclusion.
I would very much like to hear your solution to how to transport large volumes of people in a relatively small area.
My solution is to not put such large volumes of people in a small area. There's no good solution to transportation once you've jammed everyone together, they all suck.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5d ago
It means they went to extraordinary lengths to prevent the release, including coming up with a novel invocation of copyright law and (when part of the manifesto was leaked anyway) threatening the newspaper editor with contempt charges.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5d ago
"This is not liberty, this is license" has always been a tyrant's excuse.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5d ago
London/Asian megacities do it well and they're not long skinny islands
They don't do it well. They do it "well enough" for commuting, but you'll notice the streets are jammed with auto traffic. And Tokyo is famous for its terrible conditions on the commuter trains.
If the status quo (gridlock, people hating driving/each other) sucks, why shoot down every potential solution to wallow in the status quo?
I'm only shooting down solutions that don't work and can be expected to make things worse.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5d ago
If you want Americans to suddenly start taking mass transit, build trains(not busses) going from commuterville to the downtowns everyone actually works in
Of course this requires that you have that hub and spoke system. Once you have a significant number of suburb to suburb commutes, you can't even do that.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5d ago
Well except subways (or streetcars, or even buses if done well) which you have a great example of across the Hudson.
Not really, no. The subways in Manhattan work because it's a long and skinny island with very high density. Once you're outside Manhattan there are large areas poorly served or unserved by the subways even in NYC.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5d ago
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
If only there were other transportation methods that scaled better.
Indeed, there are not. If you think NJ traffic is bad, NJ Transit brings whole new levels of bad.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
This was apparently blue-on-blue though. Can't avoid that by sorting, unless the sort becomes fractal.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
"Should be" and "is" are different, and many cars don't have rear view cameras. Mine does not, for instance. They were mandated in 2018. In fact, people backing up into a parking spot tend to take several tries at it, blocking traffic the whole time.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
There is payoff for "defection", and it's not even prisoner's dilemma payoffs. If you're "nice" and let people in front of you who you could have beaten out, they will typically be slow and sluggish drivers who hold you up. If someone aggressively cuts you off, they will typically want to be going fast and won't hold you up (but not always, the asshole who cuts you off and slows down is prevalent, though his natural territory is Pennsylvania)
The common thread between LA and NJ is there's just too damn much traffic.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
I also do this, I had no idea anyone would deride it.
The problem is backing into a parking spot takes a fairly long time and thus backs other people waiting to get to their spot.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
If you regularly do this, please put the international symbol of the road hog (four linked circles in a horizontal line) on the back of your car so I know what to expect.
Huh, I would have thought it was a roundel, quartered azure and argent, within an annulet sable.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
Only Americans could design their society around cars and then get mad at each other for having the audacity to... drive cars nearby.
New Jersey. We don't get mad, we get even.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
"Mr. Bonesaw" is the Prime Minister and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia; he's not a literal nobody. The Washington Post may not have noticed him until he chopped up a journalist, but he was already Crown Prince at the time.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
In moderate traffic and above, doing something similar requires progressively greater slowdowns in order to merge successfully, frequently resulting in a jam.
Once traffic is too heavy for it to be free flowing with one less lane, you will get a jam and there is no merging technique which will avoid it. The difference between the zipper and merging early in that case is the shorter length of the backup and the impossibility of getting ahead by going down the closing lane.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
It's giving information to the enemy (i.e. other drivers who don't want you in front of them). This can sometimes be used tactically, as when the car you are slightly ahead of in the lane you want to be in has a barely-adequate-to-merge gap in front and behind. Signal, they move forward to block, tap brakes (or just let off acceleration) and slide in before the guy behind him can do anything.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
That argues against demographics mattering. Both Iranian and Arab Islamic populations show affinity for the strictest Islamic governments.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
Iran killed any of the old less-Islamic elites who didn't get out while they could. But the populace supports the Ayatollahs. In less batshit Islamic countries, there's always a struggle against popular more-batshit Islamists. Iran doesn't have that problem because they occupy the batshit pole.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
It's the batshit Islamists who have the populace behind them, even if the elites are more moderate.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6d ago
Jordan and the UAE are monarchies (like the Saudis), so they don't necessarily align to the preferences of the people. I expect Bosnia and Indonesia just haven't reached bottom yet.
And the judge, and the police, and the lawyers who came up with the idea of the "Covenant Children's Trust" to hold the copyright. The "nothing to see here" routine has worn all the way through.
More options
Context Copy link