Armenia and Cambodia are screwed.

Back then, it was questions about early indicators of dementia. Wow, how wrong we were! /s

I seem to recall a President who decided that the only way to deal with an inconvenient, political loudmouth was to kill him with a drone. And then kill the guy’s teenage son with another drone.

I have to point out here that the Obama administration laid down the legal reasoning and set a precedent for killing accused civilians without trial.

Here’s the crux of the difference of opinion: No, Pres. Harris would not have been talking about luxury hotels on the rubble of Gaza. Israel, however, has been talking about it for years. The U.S. President has very little influence over Israeli intentions, and whether the U.S. President talks about it sounds like an objection based on style rather than substance.

Wealth inequality is in the inevitable outcome of a market system. It’s mathematically baked in. A tax system like this just makes it faster.

I get the thinking here, but past bubbles (dot com, housing) were also based on things that have real value, and the bubble still popped. A bubble, definitionally, is when something is priced far above its value, and the “pop” is when prices quickly fall. It’s the fall that hurts; the asset/technology doesn’t lose its underlying value.

You are correct. I forgot to qualify my statement to say that it applies on city streets. Apologies, I can’t find the YouTube video that discussed the study right now.

Hi-viz doesn’t do anything. There’s no statistical difference in casualty rates between people wearing it and people not. Consider that drivers routinely plow into the back of emergency vehicles stopped by the side of the highway, completely wrapped in hi-viz, reflective material, and with million-lumen flashing lights. This is victim-blaming nonsense.

How DARE people move around the landscape in the traditional way that humans have been locomoting for tens of thousands of years without considering YOUR needs!

(That is, if you can’t see what’s in front of your car, you need to slow down.)

e: typo

Because the rest of us have a right to life, too. Ever heard the saying, “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins”? That’s colorful, but it’s not even true; people have an expectation of a certain reasonable amount of space around their bodies, and even entering it with your fist might be considered assault. The concept that one’s actions and choices affect other people is what’s important here.

That’s the problem with giant pickup trucks: They affect other people on the road, and the problem with giant pickup truck drivers is that they either refuse to recognize this fact, or they enjoy infringing on the rights of other people to enjoy life. Either way, it’s bad for society, where we all have to live together somehow. Mullets and man-buns, by contrast, don’t materially affect anybody else in the slightest.

That’s why I keep my eye on Joe Rogan. I mean, folks tell me I’m nuts to think that a charismatic entertainer could make the transition to being President, but I’m not so sure. (/s, to be extra clear) I notice that he’s taking care to distance himself from the regime’s more-unpopular actions, but not break with it wholly.

Ah, the old Sen. Sumner treatment!

I have to, take issue with this, one. The rules of commas are, pretty, easy actually: Use a, comma where you’d, pause when speaking. If, you read it out, loud and sound like Captain, Kirk then you put, a comma in the, wrong spot.

“Carbrain” is a real mental disorder, though. How else do you describe somebody who looks through a windshield and sees a long line of idling cars into the distance, and thinks, “clearly the problem here is bicycles.”

(e: improved punchline)

Of course, I drive (I kind of have to because of the way our landscape is designed to mandate it), so I have to include myself in this. It’s well-established by psychological research that drivers have very little empathy for other drivers, but especially little empathy for bicyclists and pedestrians, viewing them as less-than-human annoyances. Add in that driving in a city requires that one subject other people to the noise, the pollution, the danger, and the arrogation of space by one’s vehicle, and you pretty much have to suppress any empathy for the people who live there, otherwise it’d be unbearable to do. That lack of empathy is textbook sociopathy, induced by the activity of driving. It just happens to be widely normalized, but we still see posts even here on Lemmy from new drivers who are struggling to suppress those thoughts.

Putting the shoe on and loudly announcing that it fits?

Getting trapped in a building with a mass shooter is something very, very unlikely. On the other hand, I face the danger of death by automobile at least twice a day, on my ride to work, and my ride home. More, if I go other places. It may seem not that bad because it’s so normalized. Dying in or under the wheels of a car is something that happens to people every single day, and it barely rates a mention in the local news. Sometimes the victim doesn’t get even get a name. By contrast, the stochastic nature of mass shootings makes them scary, like plane crashes or terrorist attacks, the natural order of things is upended. Death is death, though, and I wouldn’t be less dead if it were a texting driver rather than a gunman.

And the texting driver is a whole hell a of a lot more likely. So, yes, it’s entirely logical that I’m afraid of that. Not being able to understand and denying that fear is exactly the kind of car-induced sociopathy that I’m talking about.

Throwing insults is not a discussion, by the way.

You don’t understand what fear is like?

They’re not the same. This is privilege speaking, I know, but gun violence mostly occurs between people who know each other. I’m not in those circles or neighborhoods, so only the occasional mass shooting might affect me.

But cars? They’re omnipresent. There’s a steady stream of them in front of my home, so I can’t avoid the danger. My life is threatened by cars every damn day, and my quality of life degraded by them. And you can’t tell me that driving a car around a city is anything but sociopathic disregard for the well-being of others, because that’s what it amounts to.

Cars as bad as guns? No, they’re worse.