The cops always park in the bike and pedestrian lanes in prospect park, and it makes me so mad.

Personally I feel like if you park in the bike lane for any reason that’s not life or death, people should be allowed to do what they want to your car. Maybe move it. Maybe key it. I don’t care. It’s a hazard for everyone.

I’ve lived here for almost two decades and I’ve almost never had a problem with bikes.

I did once see a driver make a right turn and hit a delivery bike kid, drag him for a few feet, and then speed off. Luckily, teenagers I guess are indestructible and the kid got up and rode away after a few minutes.

If you want better bike and pedestrian safety, the solution is probably build better bike lanes. There are a lot of spots with nothing, or a painted suggestion. There’s a spot near prospect park where they expect the bicyclist to turn right, pass through a lane of traffic, and then just hang out in the center lane with all the cars. It’s a nightmare.

Well, the context used to just be there. Now it’s not, and this is worse.

Fines should scale with wealth. Millionaire wants to speed? Okay, pay a $100,000 fine.

These same accounts keep denouncing tickets and speed cameras.

This is common conservative “Outgroups to bind, in-groups to protect” dysfunction. They’re bad people.

I’ve read that if you want to kill someone, the best way to do it is to hit them with your car. The authorities will just be like “Oh, well, he was walking and you hit him what a terrible accident. Well, couldn’t be helped.”

Maybe Kraft has a murder fetish. Probably he’s just a scumbag, though.

This kind of false equivalence is kind of annoying.

Doctors and serial killers both cut people, but they’re clearly not the same, are they?

I don’t know how difference france is from the US, but I generally believe people are kind of ignorant and thoughtless. These will pull in people. People click on “Four things that are secretly unhealthy - #3 will SHOCK you” chum all the time.

I’m just going to assume these are republicans and furthermore call them scumbags, hypocrites, and heretics.

Matthew 6

1“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

2“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 3But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

5“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

I don’t know how anyone takes them seriously. They should be laughed out of the room and shunned by polite society. But there are a lot of bullshit “christian” churches peddling nonsense, I guess.

No one’s going to rally around creepy Mike Johnson’s corpse. No one cares about the guy Luigi (allegedly) shot.

Is this an age thing? I’m about 40 and I never had instagram, barely used facebook, and didn’t use any others really. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem where someone backed out because I didn’t have instagram. But I also don’t have a big group of casual friends, and maybe that would be harder.

Discord sucks, but I’ve noticed a lot of social groups use it. A couple meetups I go to all use it for communication. Maybe that’s more bearable than instagram?

I haven’t! Seems similar to Falling Down

A friend and I were talking about what’s wrong with the world, and one of the things we discussed was there aren’t any consequences for minor infractions. We’re all too polite. Someone does something shitty, like this person in their car, or someone taking up 4 seats on the bus, or throwing their trash on the street, and no one does anything. No one wants to start a fight or make a scene.

Many people operate at a very basic level of moral reasoning: avoid punishment. Some people, some of the time, achieve higher levels of reasoning like “I should follow the rules” or even “I should do what’s good for society.” But many people chill out at the toddler level of “I don’t want to be punished.” So it follows that when these oversized toddlers never get punished, they think they’re doing just fine.

But concurrently, the institution we have to enforce laws and norms, the police, sucks dog shit. Racist, corrupt, no accountability, and lazy. If I see a guy littering, I’m not going to call the cops. They wouldn’t even come, for one thing, but I also don’t want to bring a bunch of armed assholes into the scene.

I don’t know what the best way forward is. My friend suggested local “guardian angel” volunteers that patrol and “Deal with” people who are shitty, but that feels like it could just turn into the police-but-worse. But I really want people who shit up the world to stop, and it feels like they don’t have enough empathy to understand anything more complex than “you took up four seats on the bus and were blasting youtube out of your phone, so we threw you out. Enjoy walking home, asshole.”

I saw that one too and thought similarly!

I had an issue with installing mint. Never figured it out. Got the older LTS and it worked fine though. Maybe try a different version?

You’re probably not telling the total truth, but maybe consider that one person being unpleasant 30 years ago isn’t a good reason to abandon an entire form of media for your entire life. Let it go. The librarian is probably dead by now, and they don’t have to matter to you anymore.

I say this all the time! I use it to try to discredit conservatives when they make up reasons why we can’t have good things. Like, look, you love the library, and you know conservatives would make up all sorts of reasons why it couldn’t ever work. When they’re going on about how free buses (or whatever) couldn’t work, it’s the same

Maybe was thinking of https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ ?

That was an interesting read. Thank you. I’ll have to do some thinking on it, and read more carefully when I’m not befogged by a head cold.

I still want, like, emotionally, the horrible people to face justice (or at least vengeance), but i can see how that can have myriad unwanted consequences.

Getting people to actually organize is hard. One of the consequences of what Luigi (allegedly) did was people at work started to actually talk about politics, where before it had been a little more gauche (pun intended). Will anything come of it? Probably not.

At that job, I feel like I was planting seeds of radicalization just by talking to people about US history. Several of them hadn’t grown up here, and had a very glossy marketing understanding. Just telling them about how like Jim Crow is a thing from living memory, not centuries ago, was eye opening.

Why is it counter productive? I guess because uninvolved people clutch their pearls and then support the police/capitalists?

The huge support for Luigi makes me think there may be a change in the air. But also that was precisely targeted, not just randomly murdering. If he had set off a bomb and killed 30 people in midtown New York, even if one was a hated CEO, I don’t think people would support him.

This is a good point. I hadn’t thought much about how some of the skills and such from unionizing might transfer to other things. Thanks