DirtyWaterHotDog
No bio...
User ID: 625
SF is nicer, but yes, I only attempt this in places where I'm surrounded by softer liberals. Well, I wouldn't live in places with aggressive bastards in the first place......so I self-select.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Yeah, I'd put them all together as 'impaired' driving. It sucks that it isn't easy to instantly detect how high someone is.
Still think an eye tracker will help with catching pot smokers.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
The residential side streets in my area are wider and in fact have higher speed limits than that.
Yes, and yes. For instance recently I made it from Northern New Jersey to the Ithaca, NY area, a distance of over 220 miles, in less than 4 hours, in air conditioned comfort.
I don't think anyone here is against cars for long distance travel.
I am not against car ownership. Mostly just use of cars for urban transport. I have done that drive too; Niagara falls to NYC.
I think they're going to need several more lanes
yeah............sigh. You know that's what they thought when they had 20 lanes right ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation,”
Japan & Western Europe would be the obvious answers.
From the cities I've visited, it applies to - Paris, Geneva, Barcelona, Madrid & Zurich.
Manhattan, Brooklyn & Boston (before MBTA crumbled) do pretty well too.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
I empathize. America's urban problems need to be addressed whole sale. Generally, a large parking lot is easy to secure. A few cameras + security and you're set.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
That's what park and rides are for. Everyone parks at the outside of an urban core. Then walk, commute, bike into the urban core.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
since you can't totally segregate car and bike traffic
Is that true ? If a large number of people start cycling, fewer people will use cars. So you can add traffic calming measures to make cars go slowly.
Grade separated bike lanes keep cars and humans separate everywhere except intersections. At intersections, they're no different than pedestrians.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
cyclists are suicidal, law-breaking, moving hazards and that most of them are far too stupid and/or arrogant to be allowed on the road. Ever.
In small town America, 100% of adult cyclists have car licenses. What you're observing is that most people are 'suicidal, law-breaking, moving hazards'.
Only in the case of cyclists, they can't use this 'stupidity' to kill a dozen people with simple twist of their arms.
And that sort of thing is why a lot of motorists hate bicyclists. They're trying to get somewhere, and they're blocked by someone doing half the speed limit in a place where they can't be passed.
25 mph is a residential side street. You are getting blocked by signals and stop signs more than you're by a cyclist. I see car drivers zoom past past me everyday, only to have to stop by the immediate next stop sign or signal 1 block after.
On any arterial or multi-lane street, you and I both would rather have the bike be in its own lane.
As for speeding, the purpose of a car is to get from point A, to point B, quickly and in comfort.
Is it? Has it ever succeeded? Can you give me 1 reason why the 'just 1 more lane bro' (fixed link) meme is not valid criticism of car infrastructure ?
It is a national disgrace that we don't have routine travel speeds north of 100mph
You're saying that a country with the highest per-capita road deaths in the developed world ? You think people are responsible enough for that ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
This is why drivers are resentful of cyclists, at any rate. They're the favoured children at the moment.
Sigh. This is 101 golden-child behavior. If cyclists got 1% of the attention that cars do, you'd have the utopia meme in real life.
separate network of cycle paths
I agree. This + single lane neighborhood streets are the best.
that most people just don't want to arrive at their destination sweaty and/or weather-beaten with helmet hair.
Given the rates of car accidents, helmets are more useful if you're driving than on a bike. I maintain my anti-helmet stance on bikes. Good for kids and long weekend bike-athons. disqualifying for commuting.
want to arrive at their destination sweaty
I bike for a leisurely 5 miles to work everyday. It is no more sweaty than a 1 mile walk. You don't get sweaty unless you live in a swamp. Biking for commutes is interspersed with transit. Even in biking utopias, the majority never bikes more than 5 miles per trip. And I'm not even fit.
This is why drivers are resentful of cyclists, at any rate
Good. I've tried to make drivers see the total win-win that transit + bikes are for drivers and bikers alike. But I'm spent. Our lot are officially at war.
may thy
knifedifferential chip and shatter
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
I tell my friends that the first priority as a cyclist is to survive
This is my primary motto as a cyclist. Taking over footpaths, taking the full lane, using industrial parking lots, driving in the wrong direction on a residential street, rather than the right way on the main road.....what have you. If it is illegal, go sue me. My life matters more. I love grade separated bike lanes as much as the next guy. When the system enables it, I am every bit a law abiding (non) citizen. But drawing some ink to separate me and massive cars is not enough. In such a case, I'm going to do what I must to survive.
Half-assed efforts towards bike lanes are more dangerous than not having them. It creates a false sense of security. The scariest are right turns where the bike lane abruptly ends and turns into a lane for cars. I also dislike fake bollards, which are merely cosmetic. If you're going to erect a pole, I want it to be solid metal. This is my experience in SF. Lots of bike lanes, but too exposed to multi-lane traffic. Narrow single lane 25 mph streets are my favorite. Don't need a bike lane. I'll do my normal 12-15 mph and the cars can follow behind. Traffic calming measures work better than bike lanes or helmets.
killed by a drunk driver
More than lack of bikes, this is North America's biggest problem.
Bikers, public transit & pedestrians all suffer equally, as US & Canada coddle car drivers beyond every reasonable limit. Drunk driving is still the best way to kill someone in the US. No punishment. Blind old people get licenses. 17% of the US has substance abuse issues, and all of them are driving 24x7. The US has no way for drunk people to get home other than spend $50 taking an uber back. So instead, people roll the dice.
Speed limits are 65 mph, but family cars can accelerate to in 4 seconds. Why? You can cross 200 mph in family cars. Why ? It's the only country in the world where motor vehicle deaths are going up, even as cars get overwhelmingly safer. Why ? Pedestrian death numbers look like a genocide is going on. WTF ?
The government tries to hide the 2 types of deaths they're most ashamed of (drug abuse and car crashes) into 1 category : "Unintentional injuries". A category that covers more deaths than almost all the other categories COMBINED.
The US spends $400b/yr on heart disease & cancer treatment, just to increase the lifespan of geriatrics by a few years. But, the majority of accidental deaths (I consider drug related deaths to be self inflicted) among the not-old (under age 50) are caused by cars. By far, cars steal the most years of anyone's lives in the US. More than cancer or heart disease, combined.
Now, you could eliminate 50% of those deaths, by just doing a half-as-good job as Europe. Yeah, that's how much safer Europe is than the US.
How much would you need to spend ? Let's start with a sensible number. How about as much as we spend on the next 2 diseases : heart disease and cancer : about $200b/yr. Sounds like a large number. But, you could literally stop treating heart disease and spend all that money on reducing car related deaths.....and more Americans would be alive at the end of the year.
But, before we even spend a single dollar on road safety, can we start with the low hanging fruit ? Things we can get for free. I have 3 suggestions:
Qualifier - My suggestions will make some pure blooded Americans angry, but none of these are in violation of the constitution, so there is that.
Speeding - speeding was a factor in 29% of motor vehicle crash deaths
Why can you drive faster than the speed limit ? You have google auto / car play. They know the speed limit. So does the car. Why allow the person to go faster ? Sure, there might be an emergency that warrants it. But if you don't wear your seatbelt, a loud alarm goes off. Let's start there. If you go above the speed limit, then a massive alarm start blaring. Yeah, if your wife is in labor or gangs are chasing you, you can go faster. Surely, the blaring alarm is the least of your worries in this situation.
Same for the upper limit. The national speed limit is 75 mph. Why allow a car to go faster than 90 mph, ever ?
In 2022, 3,308 people lost their lives in crashes involving distracted drivers, and nearly 290,000 people were injured. NHTSA estimates that in 2017, 91,000 police-reported crashes involved drowsy drivers. These crashes led to an estimated 50,000 people injured and nearly 800 deaths.
Gaze tracking is trivial to implement. Why do we allow distracted driving at all ? A simple gaze tracker than tell when a person has zoned out, is using their phone or almost asleep.
About 32% of all traffic crash fatalities in the United States involve drunk drivers (with BACs of .08 g/dL or higher). In 2022, there were 13,524 people killed in these preventable crashes. In fact, on average over the 10-year period from 2013-2022, about 11,000 people died every year in drunk-driving crashes.
I leave the best for last. Drunk drivers are the biggest nuisance, but they have zero repercussions. Why not take away their driving license for a very long time (~5 years) unless they install expensive tracking. "They are poor and can't afford this. They wouldn't be able to work without a car.".....well, that's better than them killing a person. Let's start with getting their cars installed with a permanent dashcam and breathalyzer. Car doesn't start unless you breathe into it and register sober. A simple dashcam is good enough to make it hard to game.
That's it. With these 3 changes, American roads would already be a lot safer. Not just for cyclists, but also pedestrians, other cars and the drunk drivers themselves.
Bicycle lanes are the lowest of the low hanging fruit for many cities. They are cheap, simple, ways to reduce traffic congestion, promote healthy and active living, and protect the lives of cyclists. It is so incredibly frustrating how much of an uphill battle it is to get them built.
I am fully black (orange?) pilled on the matter. Decent public transit, bike infrastructure & pedestrian safety should be table stakes for a functioning urban society. If the government can't make progress on these amenities, then it is a sign of an unserious society.
sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
To me, that's the US traffic agencies right now.
Zoning out a little bit, the rethinking of urban infrastructure is going to be unifying issue for this generation. NIMBYism and cars will be the 2 sacred goats that the youth will try to slay.
Personally, I welcome it. I hate car brained urban Americans and I hate NIMBYs.
Yes, I mean it as a blanket statement with no qualification.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Last week was insanely productive. Had to get an application in for an accelerator. I have the end2end demo hosted and working.
Still building my 'AI moderator'. It is pretty close to ready. I'd be happy to offer it pro-bono for people on TheMotte. (Btw, does TheMotte have a moderation endpoint?)
Learnt JS and React and got my first really 'professional' looking website up and running. Lowkey, frontend development is rather straight forward in framework land. Claude helped a lot, but also, React has templates for everything. Love it. I'm surprised by how easy deployment has become. Firebase and similar tools give you fully working solutions for DB, auth, hosting, CI/CD straight out of the box with generous free tiers. Didn't try cursor, but upload your whole codebase to Claude is working remarkably well. I've lived in ML land for too long.
For the first time, I feel like I could run a 1 person company and perform every part of the job - Sales, BD, Design, FE, BE, ML, Deployment. Ofc, 24 hours is too little time in a day to do everything.....but the fact that it is possible to do by one person is a huge unlock.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Have you never met a politician. Overplaying their story & creating myths is in the job description. People in the wild are humble because they don't have to sell themselves to a full country.
I work at a tech company. The humble engineer is never picked to do public demos, because public demos are the place to be shamelessly self promoting.
Politics is this phenomenon at its peak.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
There is no world where Ukraine wins decisively. Both sides are tired and maintaining stalemates.
With the impending Russian winter, it is too late to start a fresh invasion. There isn't enough time to establish control of newly captured outpost and establish supply chains before the country freezes over.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Kamala could lose an election of the economy goes to shit, if Russia wins the war or if illegal immigrants suddenly decide to start raping pretty women.
Yeah, you're right. They could derail the campaign....but that would derail any campaign. If anything, hoping for freak events shows that Kamala holds the cards right now.
A lot can happen between sept-nov, but it is still only 3 months.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
With her resources & body guards, my immediate suspicion would be that it was Taylor doing the raping.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
extremely capable speaker
Being an intelligent & articulate speaker does not mean you're a capable speaker.
Obama is considered a generational speaker not because of the contents of his speech. It is because he can spontaneously create 'Russell Crowe Gladiator' tier moments around him, week in and week out. I used to do a lot of stage performances & skit comedy when I was younger. Obama is the greatest performer I've seen on TV. You should slow his videos down and study him. His suits, posture, micro adjustments, voice cracks, his wife, his kids.....everything is perfectly done. If you put a obsessive director in a room and asked him to micro-adjust a public speaking movie scene to platonic perfection, you'd get Obama on any random weekday. And no, this isn't me retroactively fawning over Obama's traits. Because the textbooks were written long before him. This came out years before Obama. If you saw it today, you'd think writer lazily wrote a 'what if Obama had aids' script. But in fact, Obama has modeled himself after the archetypical black inspiration that Hollywood had been doing for decades. (see any Denzel, Morgan Freeman role). Putting on that performance matters big time in popularity contests.
Public speaking is diction, content and performance. JD Vance is bad at this specific type of performative public speaking. And it's the most important one for winning presidential elections.
Pete Buttigieg is a similar type of speaker to Vance, but he adds narrative pacing to his conversations, allowing him to have little "gotcha!" wins and "damn brother!" retorts. Vance comes off.....academic. He is a 'bad' public speaker, and us nerdy types liking his speech style has very little impact on how the rest of the world perceives it.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
It's not hard. Tim is a guy everyone knows. Almost Forrest Gump-esque in his sincerity. Join the military, teaches at a school, coaches a football team and then runs for office. Minneapolis is one of the few non-coastal American cities with a positive storyline from the last decade. Dude has made no money from politics, loves his kids, is religious and just kinda does his thing.
You know when people say, "I'd vote for a random dude off the street, rather than a slimy Harvard educated lawyer."........ Tim is the random guy off the street.
In response to riots in Minnesota, Walz partially activated the Minnesota National Guard on May 28, and fully activated it on May 30. President Trump reacted to Walz's actions by saying that he was "very happy" and that he did "fully agree with the way [Walz] handled it … what [the Minnesota National Guard] did in Minneapolis was incredible". Trump called Walz an "excellent guy".
Even Trump seems to like the guy (I know wikipedia is obviously biased, but the events happened)
Kamala is clearly going for a "neapolitan ice cream" sort of campaign. She needed an inoffensive flavor combination. She picked an inoffensive VP candidate.
I feel bad for JD Vance
I don't. You saw it with Bloomberg, and you see it with Vance. The typical executive types are too used to talking to intelligent people. Politics is a craft. Like standup, you need to work your audience. Meet them at their level. Vance is like people I meet in my peer group. The main problem with Vance is he's too smart to work for Trump. He can't play a wise-cracking used car salesman because he isn't one. He was only chosen because of the paypal mafia's outside support. He knew what he was getting into. Should've known better.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
This one is Kamala's to lose.
The biggest sign was how quickly the Trump assassination story died down. The second Biden stepped down, he overwhelmed the media cycle and wiped the slate clean on both sides. Ofc, getting the support of everyone other than the crazies really helps. Every institution (left and right) is aligned on putting her in power. Look at Trump's new twitter, it has fully morphed into the caricature that Hillary claimed it was in 2016. (https://x.com/realDonaldTrump).
Kamala has picked a golden retriever of a VP candidate and has managed to be in public life for decades without expressing a substantial opinion. This is useful. It allows a vibes based campaign to flourish. If you have said nothing, they can't attack you. One big scandal from Kamala or Tim can potentially turn the tides, but so far she's been doing well.
Trump camp seems clueless too. Kamala is happy to fight in the dirt with Trump, because she too can have a full debate without saying anything substantial. So much energy was expended painting Hillary, Biden and Obama as evil, that Trump doesn't have much novel angles of attack. On top of that, JD Vance is clearly a terrible VP candidate (as much as us Rationalist types might agree with him). Kamala has avoided the obvious landmines too. She has steered clear of supporting Palestine and immediately stopped talking about the new capital-gains-tax before it could turn scandalous. She was a harsh prosecutor, so the crime angle doesn't work. Kamala has lucked into a pretty defensible position, because she is an uninspiring candidate for democratic primaries. But, her track record is pretty centrist for the generals.
All that being said, the electoral college is surely going to make this one a lot closer than it actually is. (ofc a lot can change between now and nov)
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature
Same here. Societal shifts around 'status' or 'what we value' are necessary, but they will never gain traction unless the economic incentives align as well. Economics is about money, Money is about labor, Labor is about time.
Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP
These statistics are misleading, because it doesn't measure what qualitative changes it seeks to drive.
Can women return to the workforce in high-status roles after being out of the market for 5-10 years ? Can they take long maternity breaks without being fired ? Do the fathers gets long paternity breaks to contribute to housework ? Can they afford to add another room to their house without breaking the bank ? Is it possible for the kids to set your kids up for strong economic outcomes without dooming them to a horrible rat race ?
This is just motherhood. But you have to see economic incentives for long term romantic partnerships too. Can you stay in the same city longterm without affecting career prospects ? Do you have time for dating in your 20s, or is there immense pressure to be in the office instead ?
No amount of money is going to make up for misaligned incentives on these primary questions.
The trads complain about changing values which disincentivize motherhood. Free-market capitalists talk about bad economic incentives. Both have a point. But, the latter is lot easier to fix than the former. To top it off, capitalists have economic power, while trads are bleeding social power like a slit aorta. So, pretty large difference in agency as well.
Ofc, govts pick the worst of both worlds by spending money on bad economic outcomes and accommodating some real crazies who keep moving the value system further away from the metaphorical God's light.
P.S: Alongside economics, building environment and infrastructure also plays a huge role here. That's a topic for another day.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
My regional home cuisine is very legume rich. I can recommend a few options. Legumes are only high effort because they need soaking & sporuting. Other than that, they are very easy to cook.
- Kala Chana (black chickpeas) is very simple to cook.
- Matki (moth beans) are similar and my personal favorite
- Masoor Dal This is a classic first-recipe for a lot of India when they leave home. Shit easy
- Lentils also make for great flatbreads
They may look daunting if you've never cooked Indian food, but it is genuinely super-easy once you have done it a couple of times. All of these are lazy 10 minute recipes. You just need to do 2 minutes of work the night before.
If you've never had these in a home-made style, then try out the ones you get at trader joe's. It's a good representation of what you can expect.
Generally, talk to people with celiac. They incorporate lentils into a lot of their meals.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
I have made a genuine attempt to love Chinese creative works. For one, they have outdone themselves on cuisine. Traditional, fusion and contemporary Chinese cuisine are all outstanding. 3 of my roommates are Chinese from the mainland (I'm not racist, I have a black friend), and my favorite recent individual (like many rationalists) is an ethnic Chinese man. (Lee Kuan Yew). Yes, I am Indian, but I don't really care about China-India tensions as much as your typical Indian on twitter.
I have tried. But, I've struggled to find much depth to contemporary Chinese music, Chinese movies, Chinese comics or Chinese computer games.
...written in China, by Chinese, and presumably utterly foreign to any putative Indian readers
Fair. I stretched my point there. It is still derivative of their own history, but Wukong is their big win, and deserves to be acknowledged as such.
...and yet the only American entertainment that I have consumed for the past few years is the culture war.
This has to do with a mix of wokeism, covid, the writer's strike and netflix-isms. Matt Damon talks about the death of original mid-budget films. It is more so economics than the death of art.
Now, the best stuff has moved to streaming platforms, getting broken into mini-series with low budgets, that make moderate profits instead of becoming block busters. No wonder horror and intimate character studies are flourishing. Midnight Mass, Pig, Marriage story, etc. are all innovative, gripping masterpieces of the last 4 years. Some of my favorite albums (mainstream and indie) have been produced over these years (Tesseract, Silk Sonic, Black Crown Initiate, Kendrick). Western games are admittedly in a slump but the early 2010s set the bar too damn high (Dota2, CSGO, Skyrim, GPT5,.....) and the studios are still at the tail end of the 'milking it' phrase. Hell, I dislike the wokes as much as anyone on TheMotte, but that guy ' Ta Nehisi Coates' writes a damn good book. I disagreed with everything in it, and I still couldn't put it down.
Yes, the big mainstream of American Media is in the middle of a self-fellating death spiral, but 2024 seems to be a year of 'coming back to senses'. American Entertainment is so incredibly productive, that even when popular media is failing, the lower tiers are still producing hits after hits. You need to look under the covers.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Atari
Huh, I never knew. Always thought it was Japanese.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Fully agreed on Hongkong.
In the Mood for Love
Ayy, we've all seen the every frame a painting video. I joke, but I want to sit down to appreciate Wong Kar-wai's greatest hits.
wuxia
It's odd. The best wuxia novels come from South Korea but use Chinese myths. I recently rea 'Peerless Dad' and it is legitimately good. But, all Korean. Same for Chinese history. The Qin unification story has been told a million time, but Kingdom (Japanese Manga) has somehow turned out to be the most effective.
I think it's more about living in liminal zones
That's a cool take. By definition, what makes them interesting (the thick atmosphere, the lack of belonging, the feeling of transition) is what makes them unstable and temporary.
I didn't see the thread, but car ownership in Japan doesn't save time by getting you to a place quickly. It saves time by allowing the wealthy attend to their chores in the 'back seat' of a car. Because the wealthy don't drive their own cars. They have drivers.
If you don't have to drive, walk to parking, find your own parking or maintain the car......then yes, car ownership is cheap.
You prove my point. There isn't a revealed preference for cars. There is a revealed preference for being chauffeured. It is a revealed preference for having a Butler.
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