A big part of the way people “used to” organize relied on physical infrastructure and institutions that often no longer exist: walkable “third places,” fraternal organizations/social clubs (outside of college), etc.

Worth noting that aside from some lawsuit exposure, fed unions are not allowed, by law, to strike. (Reagan terminated thousands of air traffic controllers when they struck and replaced them with scab labor as an example)

The shit we’re going through to today is what happens when striking workers don’t break the scabs’ kneecaps, “legal” or not.

You could maybe argue that the meme is an example of the trope, but you’d have to be bad at memes or arguing.

In short, a mod.

GTFO with the victim-blaming bullshit. The perp’s ridiculous paranoid bigotry was 100% his own problem, nobody else’s.

“That’s the idea” says Trump, Putin’s fanboi.

Oh good, so we’re at least going to stop preventing Native Americans from doing traditional forest management with proscribed burns, right?

…right?

Also the margin is irrelevant for a vehicle’s danger to pedestrians or its consumption, only its mass and velocity (because the energy of a moving object is proportional to the mass and to the square of the velocity), which is why even a bicycle can be deadly to a pedestrian if going at a high enough speed.

Let me put it this way: there’s a reason why cyclists and pedestrians can safely coexist on multi-use trails without so much as even lanes or stop signs at trail intersections, but adding even little kei cars to that mix would be a ridiculous disaster.

If being run over by a kei car is already enough to kill you anyway, then it’s not as if being run over by a big truck instead can somehow kill you “more.” And sure, there’s some small difference in probability, but in terms of danger to pedestrians, a kei car is way, way, way closer to a big truck than it is to a bicycle.

Also, again, every car, regardless of size, takes up a whole parking space (even kei cars in places outside Japan that don’t design special small parking spaces for them). Every car, regardless of size, takes up a whole travel lane width. Every car, regardless of size, takes up the essentially the same length of road while in motion (because spacing between cars is dominated by minimum safe following distance, and the length of the car itself is negligible in comparison). Every trip taken by car, regardless of car size, is one not taken by cycling or transit. Every person who owns a car, regardless of car size, needs somewhere to store it and is therefore contributing to demand for parking spaces/loss of walkability.

The negative effects of cars on walkability and urban design are absolutely dependent on their number, not their size.

I can get it if your detesting of cars is an absolute thing with no specific reason, but I suspect that for most of us our detesting of cars is anchored on various very concrete reasons, and personally danger to pedestrians and other road users such as cyclists and polution are two of the biggest ones for me, in which case it makes sense to detest even more a trend in car use that makes them more dangerous and more poluting

Okay, but you need to understand that both of those problems are also absolutely dominated by the sheer number of cars, not the size of them!

Going from a 55mph road with no shoulder with big trucks zooming down it to a 55mph road with no shoulder with kei cars zooming down it would hardly be any safer for cyclists at all. In contrast, adding separated bike infrastructure to such a road would make it way safer for cyclists, even if the cars using it continued to be big trucks.

Going from a big car to a small car might be up to about 50% more efficient (and that’s making a very generous assumption) – and that margin applies equally to going from a big gasoline car to a small gasoline car, or going from a big electric car to a small electric car. In contrast, going from an electric car to an e-bike is 20 to 35 times more efficient. Even the smallest cars still weigh thousands of pounds; there’s a limit to how efficient they can get. The big wins in reducing pollution are achieved by getting people out of cars entirely, not by getting them into smaller ones.

Attention/political capital is a limited resource. Spending any of it on reducing the size of cars instead of their number is borderline misguided and unhelpful, in every case.

I think a point could be made that larger cars are environmentally more damaging as well as more dangerous to pedestrians and other road users

The margin between a large car and a small car is negligible compared to the margin between any car and a bus or bicycle. To dwell on large cars is to give small cars a pass that they do not deserve.

But if we don’t call it a “disaster,” how can we disparage the copyleft GNU tooling and push the corporate-exploitation-friendly, permissively-licensed alternative instead?

(Not saying the video is doing that – I haven’t even watched it yet – but it’s something that happens all too often in general.)

Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it!

The opportunity was there at the time to strengthen the system and prevent precisely what Trump has done over the past 8+ years, but nobody did anything about it.

That’s not strictly true. The right wing noticed and has been working tirelessly to exploit it ever since.

You keep talking in future tense…

In theory, this is what the “unorganized militia” is for. A.k.a. you and me and every other able-bodied adult male.

“There’s no excuse for any American not to be a millionaire, if they’d just stop buying their cigarettes and their dope for a few weeks.”

To be fair, the first half of that is true. What’s wrong is the victim-blaming nonsense, failing to correctly attribute the reason to wages’ failure to keep up with worker productivity.

It’s true: I was attacked by a road-rager a couple of months ago, and I surprised myself by being unwilling to hit the guy back even after he punched me in the face, for fear of further escalation. Not gonna lie: I was more disappointed than proud of myself, even though I’m pretty sure I made the more responsible decision.

I was also surprised that it didn’t hurt nearly as much as I expected. Maybe the other guy was 4000% less effective than he imagined too, LOL.

Not throwing the election by abandoning the working class would’ve been a good start.

Gives me shivers just thinking about it.

And that’s just the “kayaking in the Strait of Magellan” part, let alone getting eaten by a whale!

sl | lolcat

TFW you have to remove your own comment as misinformation. 🤥