domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
I think there was a case of this in 2020, guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade.
First case that brought this tactic into "public consciousness" I'm aware of is the Nice truck attack of 2016, it triggered a bunch of copycats to the point where, for a while, any European hearing "vehicle drives into crowd" would have "oh, another Islamist terrorist attack" as his first thought.
Partially it has to do with urban design and crowdedness.
For you to really kill a lot of people you need people who either incredibly packed together or otherwised trapped in some kind of mixed use area where you can get with a large car (preferably a truck). Street festivals are a good target for this kind of thing.
Getting an automatic weapon into some sort of enclosed space where you can gun down trapped people is often easier and enables you to better target some specific group of people, making it a much more attractive option IMO.
cjet79
3hr ago
I think there was a case of this in 2020, guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade. There was also the Unite the right rally in Charlottesville where a guy drove his car into a crowd. So it does happen sometimes.
Maybe people who go on these killing rampages often want to make it a murder suicide event. Guns make the suicide part easier at the end, whereas the car murderers tend to get caught.
Mass car murder also seems like a crime of opportunity, you need the right circumstances to actually pull it off. Most sidewalks are full of hard things that will wreck a car, including up to concrete barriers that are specifically designed to stop a car. Larger vehicles are necessary. And crowds of people in a flat non barrier area that are not so dense that the vehicle will be immediately stopped, and not so sparse that they can easily see what is happening and move out of the way.
It's a messed up person in the first place that wants to commit mass murder. But I think they usually want more choice in their targets, they want to be dead afterwards, and while cars and trucks are ubiquitous they are actually more expensive than guns and ammo. There are ways to get large vehicles, like theft or working a job site with them. But those are still a little harder to pull off than just buying guns.
I think there is a steady supply of crazy and crazy mixed with the wrong meds that if we magically banned all guns in the US you'd probably see more car based killing rampages. But guns have a specific purpose and they are good at that purpose, so I think they will remain in use.
Folamh3
3hr ago
why doesn't this happen more often?
Gwern asked the same question years ago: https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror
Folamh3
3hr ago
Day 12 of NaNoWriMo, and I've just crossed the 20k mark. I'm really enjoying the whole process, I forgot how much fun it is to get into that creative flow state where the ideas are just pouring out of me.
My initial understanding of NaNoWriMo was that one had to write a complete novel of at least 50k words in the month of November. To that end, when mapping out the structure of the story in October, I'd envisioned it being made up of 5 "acts", each roughly 10k words. But of course, I quickly found that I had much more to say than that: act 1 is already 14k words and it isn't even finished yet, and at this rate a complete first draft will be more in the range of 70-80k words. Fortunately, the rules of NaNoWriMo stipulate that you can use the month to write a 50k-word novel or the first 50k words of a novel, so I'll still win the competition even if I don't have a finished first draft by December 1st.
aardvark2
3hr ago
That Greenland shark with "negligible senescence" has so slow metabolism (and correspondingly swims so slow) so after correcting for it its lifespan not meaninhfully longer than that of humans. Some parrots, however, rival human life expectancy while having faster metabolism
faceh
3hr ago
Probably a lot, if they are pursuing actual promising ideas and not spending time on crypto scam #4192.
Real question is how many people, if they weren't trying to "live life while they're young" would actually be able to switch into hardcore productivity mode for that long.
I think part of the reason Johnson is able to do such absurd things to regain youth is because he's already the type of person with the ability to commit to very hard, very uncomfortable, almost psychotically meticulous projects.
THAT'S the part that will stump most people.
My understanding is that this sort of mass killing is actually fairly common in China though targeted at schoolchildren as often as not. However my source is "a bunch of youtube videos I watched on the subject last year" so I can't be of much help there.
Particularly I remember that vehicular mass-killings are on the rise and that some schools are training their staff and equipping them with mancatcher devices (sort of polearms) to take down knife-wielding assailants.
The gist was that these attacks are being perpetrated by young men who have failed economically and want to 'get back' at kids with futures ahead of them and society in general.
How true any of this is, I don't know.
George_Costanza
3hr ago
Danger of killing yourself with a Car is very high
SerialStateLineXer
3hr ago
Some guy in China killed 35 people by driving a car around a running track.
Not that I'm complaining, but why doesn't this happen more often?
Much is made of the fact that US has more guns and many more mass shooting incidents than other wealthy nations, and this is commonly attributed to the fact that guns make it easy to kill a lot of people. But so do cars, and those are widely available in most wealthy nations.
So why is it that the US has a lot of mass shootings (yes, I know that they're a tiny percentage of total homicides), but running cars into crowds is fairly rare in countries that don't have such easy access to guns? Are Americans just especially prone to running amok? Are mass shootings a meme? Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?
I don't have any good theories; I'm just noticing my confusion.
oats_son
3hr ago
It is unusual for a Christian group to not let someone join them, since they usually believe that their way is the only path to salvation.
From what I've seen of the Amish, they could probably use some more people in the community who don't share DNA with them. But that's not realistically something people would think about. I agree with the rest of your points.
jeroboam
3hr ago
Discussed below. I think this is unlikely given that Uber has not reduced car ownership at all.
Rov_Scam
3hr ago
The impression I got from OP was that he was referring to the benefits of privately owned autonomous vehicles and not necessarily a subscription model. In that case, you can't just eliminate parking and replace it with a dropoff area. And while that may work for something like a Wal-Mart where there's a lot of space, I don't see how you'd implement it in an area like a downtown where the nearest parking structure could be a block or more away from the destination. A business district where I live has a four lane road running down the middle, and with disturbing frequency I'll be stuck in a traffic jam because an Uber driver making a pickup has effectively eliminated a travel lane. I can't imagine a situation where this becomes the usual mode of travel.
No_one
3hr ago
It is a great answer, I'll give him that.
See, you say a lot of things that are helpful, which probably explains why religion spreads. None of it seems remotely plausible or truthful to me.
Inferring a benevolent creator from this vast bloody altar is just too darn odd. And various gnostic shades of shit, where you posit an actual great deity behind an evil one. (sigh). Even worse outcomes, even more preposterous.
DradisPing
3hr ago
There's an inherent scaling problem with cars and dense cores.
It becomes especially problematic because some people love driving and have a very entitled view and won't accept that investments in things like commuter rail benefit them by reducing the number of people on the road.
Spookykou
3hr ago
I used to donate plasma, and they would refuse to do it if my blood pressure was too high (I was of average fitness but I had to walk a decent distance to get to the donation place so the often made me wait for ten minutes). Maybe I should do some blood letting at home for my hypertension, since i doubt they would let me donate.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4hr ago
The part of the grey tribe that actually had the potential to make a tribal core got re-absorbed. There's still random dissidents from that group, but they're basically atomized.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4hr ago
I still think that the circumstance the investigations appear to have found nothing is only strong evidence of the investigation not having been conducted properly - based on my understanding of US election and vote-counting procedures I would estimate the probability of there being no voter fraud in any national election at a single-digit percentage (3%, maybe, with the probability mass dominated by scenarios in which I systematically underestimate the checks and balances?). It's just that I would expect fraud to exist benefitting either side (P(fraud only for one party|fraud) is low), and don't have a strong prior as to which side benefits from it more in a given election. My expectation is that the "investigating bodies" know that any truthful answer takes the form "we found abundant evidence of fraud, but no evidence that the number of fraudulent votes each party got isn't basically roughly the same", but they do not believe that making this common knowledge is something that the American electoral system could survive.
Hieronymus
4hr ago
Maybe it's because I was a teenager, but it sure felt like there was a gray tribe in the '90s. The mores of Slashdot weren't blue tribe mores, but the mores of Reddit now are. The Eich affair and CoCs in open source made it clear a change had taken place.
I'm enough of a red-triber that I don't know how it happened, only that it did. And I think we lost something important.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4hr ago
Hm. This line of argument does not seem persuasive to me because (1) I see the same "threat to democracy" rhetoric, at the same level of intensity, being levelled against candidates and parties running on an anti-establishment line in other countries (Germany, Italy), where there has so far been no indication of them refusing to acknowledge official election outcomes, and started in 2016, not 2020; (2) given that Trump did in fact cede power, I find discussion of counterfactuals to be unproductive since it's not like there is a trusted neutral party that can provide us with particularly likely ones; (3) between the "faithless elector appeals" in the US of 2016 and cases such as the recent elections in Georgia (the country) where the same suspects are actually backing an opposition's refusal to accept election results and currently trying to instigate a violent overthrow in the name of "democracy", the idea that "democracy" and not contesting election results is correlated seems ill-supported.
I do recognize, though, that if you do not accept context from other countries, an argument about Trump on this basis seems more compelling - I guess you would only have to accept that the 2016 rhetoric about him being a threat was properly prophetic, as opposed to self-inflictedly so in the "claim someone is violent to coordinate provoking them into proving you right" way.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4hr ago
He then nailed me to the wall by saying, “Surely a man of your diverse intellectual interests and wide-ranging curiosity must have tried to find God?”
(Eureka! I had it! The very nails had given me my opening!) I said, smiling pleasantly, “God is much more intelligent than I am — let him try to find me.”
This answer from Asimov pleases me immensely. To be a humanist Jew, a top-notch scientist, and world-famous author, and to taunt the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in this way, pretty much guarantees a response.
I’ve been trying on a bit of theology recently, the idea that YHWH is the “God of the lost,” in the way other people call Thor the god of thunder and Hera the goddess of marriage. My dad has always instructed my siblings and me to pray as soon as we notice something is missing, because God knows where it went. It only makes sense to start any search by asking the One who knows literally everything and has a O(0) search time complexity, and can have prearranged everything in the universe since the beginning of causality to decrease my own search time.
Maybe I am missing something, but don't Airports already solve this problem? I feel like you could trade the 500 car parking structure for something like an arrivals/departures lane that could quickly and easily see 500 people into their cars and on their way. Apparently 60,000 people go through Dulles every day, and their arrivals area is four lanes for about a quarter of a mile (from eye-balling it).
Lazuli
4hr ago
Yes. It's excellent. I'd even argue one of the very few adaptations that's better than the original material.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4hr ago
Instead of owning a car people could use cars as a service.
No, because of the peak load problem. A very significant percentage of those cars get used all at once.
Are you thinking of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waukesha_Christmas_parade_attack?useskin=vector
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