The parent said "For MANY MANY years after the scientific evidence was completely undeniable". Maybe he's saying that both sides aren't equally valid and taking their opinions as soon is a waste of resources.
I did present reasoned positions. You just looked past them as your anger welled up.
For me the jabs were about skewering repetitive propaganda from staggeringly wealthy lobby groups with deafening megaphones that emerges from the mouths of the easily duped.
I want to make sure that the easily duped felt seen.
Can you really drive on those at high speeds, is it dangerous?
There's a few short blocks in NYC that are still cobblestone and even at 30mph it sucks.
Honestly on some roads, I'd argue that's a feature.
It's ridiculous when there is a wide, flat, straight asphalt road surface with a speed limit of 25mph. Build it out of cobblestones, and 25mph suddenly feels a lot faster!
The problem is that today's cobblestones are pale imitations of the old ones, and won't last nearly as long. There's a parking lot near me built about 5 years ago, and they tried to be decorative with part of it and made it from concrete shaped to look like cobblestones. Because of the grooves and surface treatment it is much weaker than standard concrete, and it's crumbling.
I'm with you on the speed reduction. An urban planner friend talks about how you're best motivating a speed limit by the environment (tighter road, bends, etc) rather than a literal limit and threat of fine.
But how would cyclists fare on cobblestones, especially if you were talking about suburban streets with kids playing, bikes going around, etc?
Imagine you are trying to get businesses to invest in your town, build a factory, whatever. Much of that is about image, right? If you only have gravel roads it gives off the impression that you are failing/backwards.
Businesses will often invest in their own roads. The issue is the town over expanded and then their base shrank. Unfortunately, you have to cut items — roads to dead businesses are the easiest way.
If manufacturing comes back they will often invest in their own roads anyway. City can then cut a deal to rebuild and maintain roads with company splitting cost
Well yes, that's one reason it probably isn't being raised. But if you could let the people know that "hey, this is going directly into fixing the roads, and your property tax will only go up $8 per month to afford it, otherwise your roads will stay shitty", I think most people could be convinced to go along with it.
"The Democrats claim for just the cost of Pizza each month we'll save our roads but we know what's really going on (pause) (dramatic music) and this is just the beginning.
Next it will be a Chinese takeout meal to help a library (show red Chinese flag to increase fear slightly), then the cost of a new refrigerator to pay teachers more (stock footage of a liberal looking nerdy professor), when will it end?
The tax and spend Democrats have an agenda and all they are looking for is an opening. (stock footage of snake slithering into nursery during the night)
We have to be vigilant to protect our families future (stock footage of 60-70 year old man, slightly overweight, wearing a red plaid shirt, jeans, and standing in front of an American flag) vote no on proposition 205 and say no to big government
(paid for by the committee of republicans and their rich supporters who need to convince poor people to vote for them)
It's possible that the city is currently in equilibrium between tax rate and quality of roads. You can check the road that it getting fixed on and it's ok [1]. There are potholes here and there but otherwise it's perfectly drivable. There are roads of similar quality in much wealthier places in Bay Area. It's possible that reaction from poor people in town to increased taxes for roads will be - why? it's ok as is now.
I also checked a few random streets in the town and pavement is actually pretty good with few if any potholes. Random street as a point [2]
#1 is pretty rough especially as this is the summer w/o frost heaves. That is also from Aug 2019 and it's now 2022.
Separately, but related, I have always found it interesting that no one tries to calculate the wear on vehicles for things like bad roads, salt use, etc. Bending a wheel, accelerating suspension breakdown, and other issues from bad roads could easily outweigh some arguable savings of waiting longer. I'd rather push for adding less roads, allowing some paved roads to become dirt roads where low traffic weights & #s exist, and better maintenance of the remaining ones.
It’s likely hard to quantify and would require an in-depth survey of people over the course of 5-10 years with extreme diligence.
There is another quality that is missed out in these discussions too - which is the quality of life improvement. If you’ve ever driven on a nice road - you know it and you feel it. It’s pure bliss compared to most of the roads out there. Your car might go from feeling cheap and unbearable to luxurious - and if you have a nice car already then it feels sublime.
That aspect is one part where I’d gladly pay more for roads. The other aspect is prevention. I see very little emphasis put on the prevention of deterioration of roads. I think road quality could be improved if there were crews working all the time to keep the roads in shape and if people felt like their city would listen when they issue a complaint about the road. I figure this might save money and improve QOL over the long run.
It would be helpful if you could just go to a website, enter in a code from your property tax bill and see exactly how every dollar of the taxes you paid were used. This is one of the valid uses of a public ledger I can think of. In my opinion, all tax funded spending should be traceable like this with each transfer recorded and reported to the tax payer.
Money is fungible so it doesn't really make sense to ask where your specific dollars went. But in most if not all places in the US you can see the city or town budget and see where money came from and went in general. (It's mostly to schools in the majority of places with the per student expenditure actually often higher in more urban populations.)
While you cannot trace the money all the way through the economy, you can definitely trace the funds allocation by the articles of the budget, and pro-rate the amounts to the sum of the taxes paid by a person.
It's similar to the way you see amounts that went to taxes, insurance, etc on your payroll.
I don't feel like that addresses the part of the comment I was speaking to:
> "hey, this is going directly into fixing the roads, and your property tax will only go up $8 per month to afford it, otherwise your roads will stay shitty", I think most people could be convinced to go along with it.
At a minimum, you could create a system that takes the budget and shows a percent breakdown of where your money goes. If you packaged it nicely so that you could understand it at a glance it would go a long way towards what the comment I was responding to was talking about. After looking at my city's budget, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement. For my municipality at least, it seems to be a mix of specific and extremely nebulous items. I can see that the fire department purchased several new vehicles and even the type of vehicle but the road works department just lists additions to their "fleet" and the sanitation department just lists "new vehicles". I see items for sidewalk and street repairs along with the name of the street but no indication of how much pavement was repaired or what the breakdown of labor vs materials was. I think knowing all of the details would help the public assist their representatives to correct overages and would be a bulwark against corruption. e.g. If I run a business that sells fasteners and I see that the city government is overpaying by 30% for the bolts they use to put up new street signs I could bid on the contract next time around or maybe tip off the newspaper if it's more like 200% over retail.
On a property tax bill, it tells you which entity is paid what from the bill. It’s broken down to the entity (city, pensions, schools, parks, cemeteries, libraries). If you want to dig deeper, you can go to the budget for each one of those entities
Maybe adding a surcharge for walk-ins or having a separate line for them seems like the way to go. Or maybe don't allow them at all and lay off the staff saved.
A lie is intentional. I'm not saying this is the case here because I haven't checked but if they believed that masks weren't effective then later changed their view because of new information or whatever that's not lying.
As a scientific organisation the public expect them to have opinions that are supported by data.
Already, today appealing to the autority argument while data are widely accessible is graceless. But abusing your expert position is outright deceitful. A scientific should be able to say that they don't have enough information to form a position.
I think medicine more widely is in crisis as they still have not incorporated the digital transformation.
And that can be seen even at your local doctor level. The patients are very informed (and often wrongly) and are coming to the appointment with a lot of data. A lot of doctors simply brush off those concern and go about with their standard diagnostic process.
What patients expect is that the doctor take their proposition at face value, congratulate them for listing their symptoms and coming with a lead, and repeat the process with them, pinpointing the eventual inconsisencies in the symptoms or simply offering them another diagnostic that is also compatible but statistically more probable.
That's the behaviour of the new expert, enjoy sharing informations and discussing them.
I never thought that my wireless headphones had enough juice to fill my house with smoke, to burn for 15 minutes, or result in chemical burns to the user.
They're made of thermoplastic, practically everything plastic burns except for the few things around which are regulated to be impregnated with fire retardants (children's clothes, furniture, etc). Unless what you're holding is made entirely of metal or ceramic, you can be pretty sure that it is some degree of fire risk, if it contains a battery or not.
The energy densities of modern batteries are a couple factors lower than that of gasoline, and much lower than TNT. Gasoline is incredibly energy-dense, but its energy density is comparable to butter. Do you worry about sticks of butter exploding on you? No, you don't. Gasoline is dangerous because it really likes to evaporate and the mixture of gasoline fumes and air ignites at the slightest provocation. Batteries are dangerous because they can go into thermal runaway from an internal short if the barrier between the electrodes fails. The energy density is not what matters here.
Everyone here, maybe. Almost everyone I know of is certainly not aware of any dangers (or goes with the classic "it will certainly not happen to me, what are the chances of that?").
I still have to remind my relatives not to just throw a charging phone wherever it lands (like under the pillow). The risk of it going off may be small, but the cost would be very high.
No,
"Ninety-five percent of Americans identified misinformation as a problem when they’re trying to access important information."
"According to the poll, 79% of Republicans and 73% of Democrats said social media companies have a great deal or quite a bit of responsibility for misinformation."
Talk about "fact checking" you just make a statement about what people think and provided no evidence to back it up. That's the main problem here. Also "old media"?
Thinking "misinformation is a problem" is not the same as thinking "politically biased corporations should censor what they deem to be misinformation in accordance with their own biases."
Most of that time period was before Delta or Omicron were dominant, not to mention the effectiveness of the vaccine wanes greatly over a ~6 month period, so the situation today is likely higher than 8 percent.
I'm not sure I follow the thread on how plenty of folks that are vaccinated have died (from being exposed to COVID-19, likely from those unvaccinated) means that the vaccine is not safe. The article you linked says those unvaccinated are 40x more likely to die (although it might be more like 14x with more recent data). Similarly, unvaccinated are more likely to spread COVID-19.
Unvaccinated are more likely to contract the virus from a family member. [0]
> According to the analysis, 25 percent of vaccinated contacts exposed to a household member with an infection contracted one themselves.
> In contrast, 38 percent of unvaccinated contacts got an infection.
> The study results suggest that because the viral load of vaccinated people drops off more quickly, their infection may be infectious for a shorter time than for unvaccinated people.
