RickRussell_CA

I think the real answer is that we end up kind of like the UK – going from the worlds ultra-dominant superpower to a sort of slow regression to the mean, as China, India and others take the spotlight.

When you look at what China is doing with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their move to dominate the transportation infrastructure of developing nations – the US isn’t anywhere near equipped to counter that. We’re still in a cold war mentality thinking that we will dominate as the world’s police force.

Meanwhile, all the actual economies will be run by Chinese companies operating with state support.

Supporting data from The Economist:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/09/05/what-to-do-about-americas-killer-cars

Yeah I’m not excusing the driver parking it like a jackass.

It depends on the use case, though. If that driver’s main concern is getting in and out of muddy work sites safely, maybe carrying cargo is less important than 4WD cred.

FYI, Fortnine is based in Canada.

Increases or decreases in the frequency of pedestrian-driver fatalities is affected by lots of things, although I suggest that poor road design and traffic laws might have a positive feedback effect when combined with limited forward visibility (e.g. a truck with poor forward visibility isn’t a huge liability in Canadian road designs might be a larger liability in typical US road designs).

Unfortunately I don’t know if we collect the right accident statistics. Perhaps the more relevant question is: are pickup trucks over-represented in pedestrian fatalities as a result of vehicle collision compared to other vehicles, and has that representation grown as truck grill heights have grown? I found a doc on Canadian pedestrian fatalities, but it classified all passenger vehicles as a single class – and unfortunately that doesn’t tell us much since most 4-wheel pickups are classified as passenger vehicles.

Fortnine has an excellent video about this issue.

I don’t pretend to know what professional landscape contractors need for their job.

I’m all for f*ck cars but people who have actual jobs that involve moving stuff like gravel and sod probably have different needs than I do, I assume?

Perhaps worth noting, there was a SCOTUS decision in the early 2000s (New York Times Co. v. Tasini) that held that freelance journalists whose contracts did not specifically include an electronic distribution clause were entitled to damages when those articles were subsequently released on the web and to electronic news services like Lexis/Nexis.

Big publications like the NYT came to settlements that allowed them to pay to redistribute the older articles (by paying the original authors), but smaller publications may not have such a settlement structure in place and may not be allowed to redistribute the original articles without additional permissions.

FYI, I have a copy of the Dragon Magazine Archive CD-ROM version that came out in 2001… only to immediately disappear off the market for this very reason!

You stop explaining and apologizing.

“We need better training data for our AIs. Let’s introduce some random scramble into search results, and when users have to hunt through the list and pick what they actually wanted instead of the top result, we can use those data to train the AI how to respond to those words when they come up in AI prompts.”

– a Google exec, probably?

Of course anybody can break the rules if they choose.

Anything that complements your career as a Cheese Greeter

Do what you enjoy. Half-ass all the things.

It’s not inadvertent. Businesses can collect aggregate statistics on race, disability, and veteran status as part of the application process. The responses are anonymized and not visible to hiring managers (except for veteran status, which may be used to provide a positive bias towards veterans for certain roles).

FYI, the new official Office default is Aptos. I’ve been making work docs with it for a few weeks and I have to admit, it looks really clean and technical.

https://medium.com/microsoft-design/a-change-of-typeface-microsofts-new-default-font-has-arrived-f200eb16718d

True, that tailgate probably precludes a 5th wheel.

I mean… f*ck cars for sure, but exotic specialty work vehicles like this are not really the problem. This is a $150000 truck; nobody is buying this to impress the neighbors. They’re buying it to haul trailers and stuff.

Relevant SMBC:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-06-24

The differences between victim survey statistics and crime reporting statistics are not easy to explain. In the US, trends in victim reporting tend to lead law enforcement statistics by a year or two, which makes one wonder whether law enforcement is padding the numbers – either to make themselves look good (when crime is increasing according to victim reports and it would reflect badly on them if LE statistics followed suit), or to make themselves look necessary (when victim-reported crime is going down and LE statistics might make LE look redundant).

RC cars. I was into local club racing in the 90s, dropped out of it when my kids were born, now I’m getting back into it.

The technology improvements in power, battery capacity, and radios have been frankly astonishing. Setups that would have cost $1000+ back in the 90s come as ready-to-run kits for $200 now, and perform better.