Pipoca @ Pipoca @lemmy.world

Posts

0

Comments

606

Joined

2 yr. ago

Another hypothesis: American stroads are an unusually deadly design. Before the pandemic, though, rush hour limited speeds and artificially made the roads look safer than they were - it's hard to kill people in stop and go traffic. The increase in hybrid and remote work since the pandemic means rush hour still isn't back to pre pandemic levels.

That doesn't quite work.

Trump's lawyers argument is that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution on any official act, even if that official act is illegal or unconstitutional; that the only remedy is impeachment.

The judge brought up ordering seal team 6 to assinate a rival as an example of an obviously illegal official act. Trump's lawyers response was "obviously he'd be impeached, but yeah, I guess if he weren't he'd be immune from prosecution".

Shooting Trump at the debate would be a prosecutable private action, according to Trump's lawyer. What Biden would have to do is to tell seal team 6 "If Trump gets on this stage, shoot him".

I mean, it's not something he himself said, so they don't even really need to do that.

Basically, what happened was his lawyer was arguing that the only remedy for official actions taken by a president is impeachment; they can't be prosecuted in court aside from that.

The judge said "a president ordering seal team 6 to assassinate a rival is an official act, yes?" Trump's lawyer said "He'd quickly be impeached for that!", then when pressed more, something about Marbury v Madson presupposing something or other, then finally when pressed for a yes or no as to whether he'd be immune from prosecution, said "qualified yes".

The whole exchange is pretty bad and worth a listen.

I don't think you'll find anyone who suggests that bikes as a single mode of transportation is the solution.

No single mode of transportation is the solution. The solution isn't "subways". The solution isn't "busses". The solution isn't "trams". Or "cars".

Instead, in cities, the solution is a mix of modes. Sometimes that's using one mode locally and a different mode to get across the city. Sometimes that's multimodal trips - taking a bike to the train then biking the rest of the way, for example.

Bikes are particularly good at solving the "last mile problem", which public transit is pretty lousy at solving. That's why, if you go to train stations in the Netherlands they have bike garages. Because trains and bikes are better than trains without bikes and bikes without trains.

In the US, 80% of people live in metro and micropolitan areas, and only 20% of people are truly rural.

Bikes are never going to be the solution for everyone, or for every trip. What they can be, though, is an 80/20 solution. Particularly in combination with public transit.

That is to say, bikes can be a large part of the solution for the average person, even if the general solution still requires electric cars for the last 20%

No.

That's not "all fares added up to 104 thousand", that's "the fares of people jumping turnstiles and walking in emergency exits added up to 104 thousand".

Keeping the status quo of not replacing turnstiles would have been cheaper. But making fares free would be more expensive.

The largest share of MTA revenue — $7.222 billion — comes from dedicated taxes and subsidies the Authority receives from the cities and states that we serve. Another $6.870 billion comes from fares and tolls. Federal COVID-related aid, which the MTA received in 2020 and 2021, adds up to $2.877 billion.

Which isn't to say that it wouldn't be worth it. Public transit is hugely valuable due to the economies of agglomeration it enables and the infrastructure you don't have to build because of it. It benefits drivers, retail businesses, employers, etc.

An R160 subway car can hold 240 people; they run in 4 or 5 car sets. The E train has 15 trains per hour during peak times, and runs 10 car trains. So that's a capacity of ~36k people, and it shares tracks with some other lines at various points

A highway lane can support 2.2 k people per hour in free flowing traffic. That single subway line can move as many people as a 16 lane highway, assuming that there's no bottlenecks at the exits. Plus the cost of all the parking garages for 36k cars.

You might be able to do a naked short, though.

Sure - if you assume that fewer than 17.1 m acres of the 62.8 m acre category of "other grain and feed exports" (i.e. less than 27% of it) are animal feed, and none of the wheat exports end up in feed, then the total acreage of food eaten by someone and food eaten by animals are equal.

That seems pretty unlikely, though.

Global numbers aren't great, because diets are really different in different countries. The meat eaten by the average American dwarfs the amount of meat eaten by the average Latvian or Peruvian person.

Public transport and bikes require the exact same thing: density, mixed use and paying attention to walksheds.

A lot of the US is suburban sprawl with Euclidean zoning. Neither public transit nor bikes work well there now by design: there's long distances between destinations. A bus that drops you off at a Walmart parking lot isn't all that useful unless you want to go to Walmart. A bus that drops you off in front of a dozen businesses is way more useful.

Parts of that are solvable. For example, mixed use zoning, and pedestrian paths that cut through the mazes of residential cul-de-sacs. It's much easier to bike to a corner store or pub that's .5km or 1km from your house than one that's 5km.

It requires massive political will to build something closer to traditional streetcar suburbs rather than modern car-dependant suburbs.

Yes, that really only works for people in cities and suburbs, but most people live in cities, small towns and suburbs and not on a rural farmstead.

Look at the numbers on the map behind the text.

77.3 m acres of crops eaten directly by people.

127.4 m acres of feed crops. 52 m acres fallow.

The feed crops alone dwarf what's eaten by people. Both feed and fallow is over double the number of acres of crops eaten by Americans.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ is where I first saw that number, though it's paywalled now unfortunately.

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed says

The proportions are even more striking in the United States, where just 27 percent of crop calories are consumed directly — wheat, say, or fruits and vegetables grown in California. By contrast, more than 67 percent of crops — particularly all the soy grown in the Midwest — goes to animal feed. And a portion of the rest goes to ethanol and other biofuels.

Yes.

There's assorted waste byproducts that aren't good eats but can be fed to animals - for example, spent brewery grain or sugar beet pulp. Some number of chickens and pigs can be raised sustainably. Not very many,
but some.

Some number of deer can be hunted sustainably. Likewise with wild boar.

100 people doing meatless Monday is the same as 14 people going vegan. And 100 flexitarians who eat meat on average one day a week are worth 85 people going vegan. Any amount of reducing meat intake is better than nothing.

Yes, nutritionally speaking chicken feed isn't the best substitute for chicken.

A good vegan equivalent to chicken vindaloo on rice isn't corn vindaloo on rice. It's chickpea vindaloo on rice.

A good vegan substitution for chicken tacos isn't a corn taco. It's black bean tacos.

Yes, beans are a little lower in protein than chicken. No, that doesn't really matter ,reasonable vegan diets will have adequate protein. And there's a reason legumes and a grain are a staple in many cultures - black beans and corn, lentil soup with bread, tofu and rice - it's tasty, nutritionally sound and an efficient use of cropland.

This is technically true, but rather misleading.

Meat animals eat plants. By not eating meat, you don't need to grow the plants to feed to the animals. Animals aren't perfectly efficient. To grow 100 calories of chicken breast takes way, way more than 100 calories of corn.

In fact, more land is used to grow feed crops than to grow crops directly eaten by people, even though most calories in our diet are from plants. And that's not not counting pasture and rangeland, which makes up an absolutely absurd amount of the US.

So yes: you'll increase the amount of runoff from chickpea and lentil fields, but you'll more than make up for that from much larger decreased runoff from soy and corn fields.

Or is the answer simpler than that - is it the rise of SUVs which don't have to comply with normal vehicle safety standards?

The answer the answer is honestly much more complicated than either.

Some is increasing vehicle size and weight that make crashes more deadly to pedestrians. Some is road design that encourage unsafe driving habits, as well as designs that are actively dangerous to pedestrians. Some is new distractions for drivers.

In the US, at least, AI works are inherently public domain. Because copyright only applies to works with a human author.

It's not just car-centric Euclidean zoning and suburban sprawl.

The US also builds really dangerous stroads that you don't really see in most other countries.

5+ lanes of 55mph traffic next to a sidewalk and tons of driveways for businesses is inherently unsafe.

It's also interesting to note that the biggest spike in fatalities was during the pandemic.

The best explanation I've heard is that bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic essentially disappeared with the switch to WFH during the pandemic. Streets artificially looked safer pre-pandemic due to drivers getting stuck in traffic at peak periods. The pandemic just revealed how inherently unsafe American stroads are.

So why was there such a big spike in deaths during the pandemic, essentially limited to the US?

They have phones in the Netherlands, too, but didn't see the spike in deaths. Are the Dutch naturally more responsible drivers or something?

NYS guarantees 12 weeks of paid postnatal parental leave, paid at 66% of your salary.

Which isn't great, but is better than most states in the US.