DirtyWaterHotDog
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User ID: 625
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
I prefer Occam's razor.
Trump is a rich american man, holding the world's most powerful position, with none of his assets tied up with Russia. He isnt in Putin's pocket, because Putin has no leverage.
Even sexploitation is not useful anymore. Niether the stormy daniels nor hunter biden stories could sink either campaigns.
No one wakes up to having been compromised overnight. It is a decades long process of conceding leverage to a foreign authority. There are breadcrumbs everywhere and clear narratives emerge.
I cant imagine a single scenario or natrative where any sitting US president can be compromised by a foreign Govt. Trump or otherwise.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Unfortunate, but fair. The west city crime/homelessness problem is the biggest self-own. LA, SF, Portland and Seattle stand out. But there is no crime problem on the east coast. Urban areas of DC, Boston and NYC are very safe. Safer than most nice suburbs in the US. Not much homelessness either.
I haven't been to non-coastal American cities....so won't offer my opinion there.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
I'll keep the conversation to urban areas, with dense urban cores. So.....Tokyo. I don't care much about towns or rural places.
Among developed cities, Tokyo has the lowest car use in the world. About 12% of trips are completed with a car,
In Tokyo, the majority does not drive cars.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
The most miserable cities to get around are also the ones with the most car infrastructure (LA, Houston, Atlanta).
This isn't rocket science. Transit is a win-win for car lovers and transit lovers alike.
Cities have finite amount of people. These people have to get to places. Cars occupy the most space per person and transit is more compact. If those people use bikes, buses, trains and footpaths, then they occupy less space. So yes, when car lanes are converted to transit/bike corridors, traffic still goes down. No one benefits from transit as much as those who 'need' to use cars. We have the numbers to prove it. The bike-pilled Dutch happen to have a great driving experience.
Now, transit & biking in most American cities sucks balls. If that's your experience with it, I can understand why it feels horrible.
But, isn't it even a little bit curious that North America is the place where this car-only idea has any uptake ? Everyone else agrees that transit and bikes are good.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
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.
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)
How do you become a better writer ?
I think and speak in a casual rambly manner. It is good for story telling in person. I'm animated and do quite a lot of voice modulation, so long sentences don't feel as bad. It's allowed me be quick on my feet and can give an impromptu speech with zero notice.
But, in professional settings, it feels cumbersome. I hate reading my own writing back to myself and my elevator pitches feel lacking. The sharp edge of a well-made point gets lost in the layers of qualification and verbose filler.
I want to get better at being concise and pointed. Any suggestions for where I can start ?
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