johnfabian
2mo ago
All through my childhood the stories of people supposedly kidnapping or mutilating animals were all, as far as I know, fictitious. But it was a common enough type of rumour that you'd hear it every couple of years - yeah my friend says that his older brother found this dog that was all slashed up with a knife. They think some kid in the neighbourhood is doing it.
That being said the next neighbourhood over from me in Toronto is currently dealing with an actual teenage catkiller at the moment, so this particular story has finally had a proven example for me.
johnfabian
2mo ago
I think that's slightly underrating Trump's competency as a candidate. He's obviously a very polarizing figure, but also a very energizing one, or at least he was.
But that was 8 years ago now. The man is 78. People should have seen the writing on the wall. His mental decline was shielded in part by his nature, in part by his rabid fanbase, and in part by the fact that Joe Biden was doing a more visible and advanced version of the same.
johnfabian
2mo ago
There have been various attempts to produce carbon-light concrete (or some similar replacement) but as far as I'm aware they are all decidedly inferior as a construction material.
Part of the problem with climate change is that reducing emissions gets harder and harder the farther you go: there's low-hanging fruit like coal-fired power generation which basically has no downsides to eliminating, but every element after that becomes more difficult. You need concrete and steel to build the hydro dams and nuclear reactors and train lines you want. You need oil to produce food and clothes and electric cars. Plastic is universal because it is universally useful. Our entire modern existence and quality of life is rooted from fossil fuels and so it's very difficult to pull out the bottom Jenga piece without the tower falling over.
johnfabian
2mo ago
Like others I'd say the frontier. Smaller cities were also less oppressive in terms of the environmental pollution. London in particular had infamously bad air quality. The crux of the problem is though you're assuming you have options: the reason so many people ended up in these awful situations is because they were chasing what limited employment and opportunities were available to them. It's not like the rural exodus was just because people decided they didn't like farming.
johnfabian
2mo ago
Generally whenever possible you would try to make the larger jumps within daylight so that you could see any potential bad weather coming. Obviously the Romans didn't stay off the nearest coast the whole way to Alexandria but the actual sailing routes tried to practically limit the time spent in open ocean.
johnfabian
2mo ago
If you're poor in the US the military is a fantastic option for upward mobility. But the US also hasn't fought a war like WWI for 80 years, so the potential downside is significantly lower than the prospect of someone signing up for the Great War.
johnfabian
2mo ago
By "ocean-going" I assume you mean ships you might actually want to leave sight of land with; then the answer is no. Roman ships traded up and down the Atlantic Coast of Hispania/Gaul/Britain and across the Indian Ocean to India, but with the same kind of coast-hugging galleys they plied the Med with.
Of course this makes you wonder: well how did the Vikings get to North America then? Well they hugged the coast too. @hydroacetylene if you use the trade winds you inevitably arrive in the Americas in the tropics, not from the north like the Viking expeditions did.
The development of the caravel was a marriage of deliberate conceptual design of an oceangoing vessel that was smaller, more flexible, and more capable of weathering storms; as well as technological advances/borrowings in terms of construction and sail design. Kind of a counterfactual thing but it's not easy to imagine the Romans building them. They didn't have the need or the ability.
johnfabian
2mo ago
It was an interesting twist of WWI that for many citizens of the UK getting drafted into the army was a substantial increase in their quality of life. If you were a common prole you were likely medically or physically unfit for the high danger roles, and now you were getting 3 square meals a day and proper medical care for the first time in your life.
johnfabian
2mo ago
It's good to be in London circa 1900 if you are wealthy. If you are poor you have to deal with all the effluent of all that progress. Terrible air quality, tenuous access to clean water, cramped, unsanitary living conditions, brutal work, endemic malnutrition. Persistent assaults on every facet of your health is your lot in life as an urban prole at the turn of the 20th century. (Though even 1900 is substantially better in these respects than say, 1860; or at least for London it is).
johnfabian
2mo ago
Where can actual men engage in unrestricted intellectual discussion in a truly properly masculine fashion without effeminate finger-wagging jannies from California all too frequently interfering to whine about "antagonism"
I'm just a manly man looking for a super-masculine place to do the highest-T activity possible: whinging about what people are saying on twitter
johnfabian
2mo ago
The German war plans offered limited flexibility - not NO flexibility as the General Staff pretended - but once the decision was made to go in against France, Belgium was done for regardless. As units on the Belgian frontier were activated they were already moving across the border to secure the way for those coming behind them. The German deployment schedules which were so rigorously developed in the pre-war period required either a conquered Belgium or a pliant one. There were no alternatives.
johnfabian
2mo ago
The whole "oh the Germans just didn't have any plans for all the prisoners they were going take" is something I might believe from someone who knows literally nothing about WWII, but if you have any sort of passing interest you know about things like the Commissar Order, the Einsatzgruppen, the Barbarossa Decree, Generalplan Ost etc. If you have slightly more interest you would know about army- or unit-specific examples like the Severity Order.
The Germans absolutely had a plan for the millions of captives they were going to take. That plan was death.
johnfabian
2mo ago
I'm going to abandon this one because the topic is genuinely infuriating to me for whatever reason. I find it hard to not be insulting and that's just not great.
It takes great patience and forbearance in trying to be a pro-cycling activist because my natural urge is to call everyone who opposes me fat. In my experience of real-life community meetings about bike lanes it is almost always the case that the concerned party is some flavour of overweight if not obese.
johnfabian
2mo ago
Just as a related thought, not tied exactly to your point, but I also subjectively feel like since the advent of smartphones, the quality of driving has dropped sharply; and I wonder if this is supported by evidence. I don't know if there's anyone tracking the frequency of, for example, someone failing to turn left when they get the left-turn arrow, because they're watching their phone instead of the light; and how many quality life-minutes that's costing society.
At least in Toronto the number of hit and runs had doubled in the five years leading up the pandemic. The speculation is that these are mostly distracted drivers on their phones or other screens. The incident cited in the article where someone was hit sequentially by two vehicles both of whom fled is awful.
I can't imagine things have improved since then.
johnfabian
2mo ago
Cyclist culture wars: reporting from the front lines
It's been a bad year for cyclists in Toronto. Five people have died so far this year, and a few dozen injured. Vibes in general are bad. There is a general feeling that drivers are getting more aggressive - construction has been very bad this summer and congestion is worse than ever. To add to that spaces meant for cyclists are now increasingly taken up by international students doing food deliver on e-bikes with very limited fidelity to traffic rules; very frequent to see e-bikes ridden on sidewalks or the wrong way down cycle lanes. Our new progressive mayor has been significantly less active on the cycling front then people had hoped - there was actually great progress made during the previous conservative mayor John Tory, especially during COVID - but only 100 km of new lanes are being added by 2027. And these are generally not the kind of physically-separated infrastructure cyclists prefer, but "painted" lanes that can still be quite dangerous.
Last month a woman was killed while cycling in one of these lanes when she was forced to merge out of it because a construction company had illegally put a dumpster in the middle of it; this sparked a widespread fury among Toronto cyclists. I remember the day after the accident biking to a friend's party and during the 20 minute ride overhearing three different groups of cyclists talking about it. It also launched a kind of guerrilla campaign reporting illegal blockages of bike lanes (example here). There is a sense of frustration that we are putting our lives at risk every time we go out. Personally I have become much more cautious and will take more time in order to keep to routes with better infrastructure. As the late Rob Ford said we are "swimming with the sharks" when we're out there and there is very low trust in the capabilities of drivers.
I'm writing this post now because last night NHL star Johnny Gaudreau and his brother were killed by a drunk driver while cycling in New Jersey. They were supposed to be groomsmen in their sister's wedding today. Johnny left behind two babies and a widowed wife. There's a lot of shock and anger in response, and frustration that many news agencies have characterized this as a "biking accident"; it appears the drunk driver attempted to pass them on the shoulder and instead rear-ended them, killing both instantly.
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 think there's this enduring perception from people who exclusively drive that bike lanes are something for hobbyists rather than a way for people to get where they need to go. Every attempt to get new lanes built is met with a torrent of backlash. I try to do my part by showing up in support at community meetings and the level of vitriol always astonishes me. Yes there are bad cyclists, it cannot be denied. But they are not in charge of two-ton death machines. Bad drivers never are perceived as a systemic issue. Recently a pregnant mother with two young kids was killed by a driver near me; no one gave thought to redesigning the road, or restricting licenses for the elderly, or treating it as anything other than an unavoidable tragedy.
I tell my friends that the first priority as a cyclist is to survive. Every now and then you get people who yell at you for no reason, or throw bottles at you, or almost turn into you, or door you, or whatever. Don't engage because it's not worth it. It's like bringing a butter knife to a gun fight. You have to make your efforts at the political level.
johnfabian
2mo ago
have you seen Black Mirror? There are a few episodes which brush up against this
johnfabian
2mo ago
Germany: political center (Berlin), legal center (Karlsruhe, weirdly), financial center (Frankfurt), tech hub (Munich)
Some of these are debatable because Germany is extremely decentral
johnfabian
3mo ago
yeah it's nice to get a taste of it every now and then. On the rest of social media it's all degenerate lefties, I need to see some degenerate cons to keep me in balance
johnfabian
3mo ago
I don't think there's a coherent way to pass the Nazis off as left-wing. Yes they were the nSdap but the word "socialism" has forever and always held a flexibility which lets anyone and everyone use it as they please. Hitler's view of "socialism" as a concept was - and I'm only roughly paraphrasing - "if it's good for the Volk, it's socialist." To quote more directly the historian Richard Evans said that Nazism was akin and different to Bolshevism in that racial struggle held primacy instead of class struggle.
johnfabian
3mo ago
civ 5 still has a very active multiplayer community playing lekmod
johnfabian
3mo ago
That was just the style of the '90s nu-metal scene. Yes this was at the end of the '80s but Faith No More was basically proto-90s stylistically. White guys with dreads? That's just what skaters, bums, and layabouts looked like. You never heard of Korn?
See the music video for "Epic" from the first album with Patton. Same style.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I previously sang the praises of Only Connect, my favourite game show. It is now back for series 20, with a brave youtube user evading the BBC censors for us. The first episodes of each new series are generally easier with it ramping up in difficulty towards the end.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I would never claim that poverty has no effect on crime. I think besides being on some intuitive level obvious there are very broad relations one one can see, that go beyond simply that people who commit crimes tend to have the same kind of cognitive impairments that also keep one poor.
But this supposed iron law that crime is purely the product of poverty is something you see repeated everywhere where even the simplest of glances at the correlation can see how patently false that is.
There are people who still desperately cling onto the notion that crime is directly a result of poverty. It is very hard for them to explain how Baltimore (GDP per capita of ~$60k USD) has more murders annually than Italy ($35k).
Oh, Italy also has roughly a 100x larger population (60 million vs 600 thousand). But of course they are famously free of organized crime.
Maybe the real underlying cause is that murder rate is inversely proportional to pizza quality?
need to carry your shield and spear the whole way like a proper hoplite!
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