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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)AZ
Posts
15
Comments
907
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • The research is in (it has been for decades now): our roads are designed to be dangerous because we focus on speed of cars, not balancing safety in our considerations:

    https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2024/06/05/exposing-pseudoscience-traffic-engineering

    https://islandpress.org/books/killed-traffic-engineer

    It's almost hard to read the whole book. Each section is only a few pages, but they just keep hitting you with data about how badly our traffic systems are designed. The mixture of bad policy, bad modeling, bad engineer training, and bad community perceptions about solutions makes it very hard to get change done quickly, but at this point all new roads and any rebuilds should follow drastically different approaches than we used 80 years ago. To do otherwise is just open negligence on the part of the road designers.

  • Our roads are also designed incredibly poorly. They encourage speeding by being too wide, straight, and flat. They don't have intersections that require people to pay attention (like roundabouts do). They have high quantities of conflict points among people turning, crossing roads, walking, and riding bikes. Add in vehicles that have terrible lines of sight because they're oversized and it's a recipe for failure, regardless of the training provided.

  • Being a developed nation is a moving target. Both the requirements change as new technologies are discovered and the scale of infrastructure goes up as your country grows.

    The US stopped seriously investing in itself over 40 years ago. We've been coasting on prior infrastructure making tiny improvements here and there. What we haven't been doing is keeping up with the other developed, or even many developing, nations of the world.

    New transit infrastructure, updating the grid, building new schools, updating our systems of government, overhauling healthcare, and generally adding modern approaches to community support have never truly happened. The coasting on old wins is finally dragging to a halt. The US is rapidly losing on the education front, the healthcare front, civil rights, transit, community support, overall skills, and even military resources. We pay a lot in some areas and essentially none in others, but across the board it's not working to make us competitive on the world stage. Instead, our wealth is going to a handful of billionaires.

    Every dollar shifted to a top 1%-er's bank account i many dollars lost in money that should be spent many times making out communities better. It should be routed through a company to build a school, whose salaries get spent, which then gets used to do more things, again and again. That dollar should move around to help us build the infrastructure back into a developed nation. As it stands, it instead is denied to us, and our children are faced with an empire collapsing to a lost class war where greed overcame a nation.

  • Chicago's flag is a masterwork.

    My city did a redesign about five years ago. Our flag was in a D to F tier flag ranking. After the redesign it's much better, but still feels like a logo more then a flag. At least they got rid of the written slogan, though!

    Props to Chicago. Put that flag on everything.

    I'm hoping Milwaukee adopts of the People's flag of Milwaukee soon. That's a serious banger too.

  • Yeah, the US has reached an incredibly low standard of literacy for what is supposed to be a developed nation. The numbers on reading level are scary. Also look at how much people read as adults. We just don't learn how and then we don't practice during our lives. It's a nation of partial literacy being kept together my hyper nationalism and smart phones to distract us with 6 second videos.

  • Using a capitalist/economic solution to solve a resource scarcity problem?!? We can't have that (says the hard-line capitalists).

    Congestion pricing works and should be the rule in every notable city. We need fewer card and car trips as part of the transformation of humanity's civilization to adapt to a limited world. The line cannot go up forever.

  • Ah yes, yet another way to control and hurt women. The whole idea of medical care during birth is based on situations where you happen to need it. If things go well, they go well. Being at the hospital or having a midwife is about when things go off the rails. The vast majority of people want you and your child to survive childbirth, which is a dangerous and difficult process for many out there. Anyone who says "just don't have help you might need, it'll be fine" is either a liar or actively trying to harm you.

    This is just another branch of "under the hood" religious nutjobiness like Tradwives which all boils down to active alt-right control over women.

  • It's fine.

    It's good to know how for an emergency, but really not required, especially if you choose to live in a location with more walkable neighborhoods and modern public transit (a rarity in the US, but doable).

    About 30% of US homes don't even own a car.

    Build the life YOU want to have, not what people tell you is normal or correct.