I don’t drive anymore because I live someplace with transit and sidewalks, but when I drove I always signalled turns. Low effort, high safety.

I had an argument about this with a friend once. I was saying if we just abolish the police, private enterprise will probably step in to fill the gap. I don’t want that. I don’t want amazon offering policing services (as part of Prime. vomit).

I think the police need to be split up into smaller institutions, and have a lot less murder powers.

Someone needs to address the “Someone broke into my house and stole my TV” problem, without a profit motive and with accountability.

There should be something to address “My neighbor is screaming at his wife and I think he’s hitting her” that doesn’t involve some low empathy assholes with guns rolling up to mock the woman.

I don’t know how to fix this.

The guys in those hypothetical lynch mobs are the cops today.

At least in this scenario you could get your buds and shoot back at the klan fuckers, maybe.

I looked it up, it’s $15 currently. Suburban NJ to Manhattan.

$15 is still kind of a lot when you’re a kid

Part of why I moved to the city was wanting to escape the car based nightmare of the suburbs. Couldn’t do much of anything without a car or an extremely risky walk.

I could have walked a mile to the train station with no sidewalks , and then paid $20 for a ticket into the city on a train that stops at like 10pm, but all of that sucks. I stayed inside and played a lot of video games.

Can also get an emulator and enjoy all the classics of yore. Chronotrigger holds up, for example

People are kind of stupid and lazy, and if there’s no immediate benefit for doing something or punishment for skipping it, they’ll do whatever’s easiest. We’re all like this to some degree, in some contexts or other.

It is a little funny to me that some people just don’t have professional standards. I would make a good faith effort to respond completely to a work email because that’s the job. But I don’t think that’s it for a lot of people.

There’s a lot of ADHD and friends in the world, and a lot of it is untreated. They’re not skipping questions out of malice. They’re probably trying their best. Still failing, but trying. That counts for something.

A lot of people also don’t read well. They won’t likely show up on a texty medium like this, but they’re out there. It may be uncomfortable and embarrassing for them to try to read your email, especially if the level of diction is high and the vocabulary extensive. Most people are emotionally kind of fragile, and won’t put up with that shame for very long. I think that’s why a lot of people want to hop on a call or have a meeting when it could’ve just been an email. They can talk fine, but communicating in written words is harder.

I thought you were exaggerating that he’s 91. Our government has too many ancient farts, maybe.

Depends on how the assassination is done. If it’s a headshot on trump, Vance will likely be president. If someone flies an IED drone into the two of them and they both die in the explosion, that’s different.

At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.

Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.

We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.

I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.

There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.

Usually a brief “I just read/played/watched such-and-such”

If they know it, we can chat about it. If they don’t, and they’re interested, we can chat about it. Otherwise, the conversation moves on and the social rite is concluded successfully.

I live in New York City and have no desire to move to the suburbs or countryside. It’s great here.

• I can walk to most of my needs. Several grocery stores, pharmacies, a big park, bars, restaurants. I don’t need a car.
• there’s a thriving music scene. I can go see live stuff of many genres every night if I want
• a deep dating pool. Lots of people. Lots of queer people too, if that’s your jam.
• I like there being people around. The empty streets of the suburbs feel spooky and hostile to me.
• more people means it’s easier to get group activities going. Join a soccer team. Brass band. Bird watching group. Knitting community. There’s everything. Usually more than one, in case a particular group isn’t your vibe.
• stuff is open later.

Some of the things people imagine about cities aren’t really true

• it’s not constant noise
• I typically can’t hear my neighbors
• people don’t typically interact with you on the street, but if you need help someone will usually step up
• it’s not shoulder to shoulder constantly. People seem to imagine it’s always times Square on NYE, but it’s just not.

While you’re not unseen like you might be in the countryside, no one really cares that they do see you.

Some people want “more space” but I don’t really know what for. A one bedroom apartment is fine for me. What would I do with more rooms?

If I had kids, I wouldn’t want to put them in the suburban hell cage like I had. Nothing to do. Can’t get anywhere on your own. Don’t like the few dozen kids in your school? Well that’s your whole pool of friendship options. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could just get on the train and go to the beach, or go skating, or go to a punk show, or whatever. I had to beg my parents to drive me anywhere interesting, and usually they didn’t want to.

Also today we do have systems like social security.

Not for much longer at the rate things are going.

Meanwhile, the US is trying to go to 60 hour workweeks and 6-day workweeks.

Labor needs to organize, and the rich need to be broken.

If we were all in the room, we could strangle Sam Altman or whatever other capitalist dog was calling the shots.

every American worker pays into the social security system as a tax on income.

One irritating note on this: there’s a limit to how much social security tax you pay per year. So if you’re making a lot of income, you just stop paying this tax partway through the year.

This is pants on head stupid and regressive. It should be the other way around. Your first, let’s say $10,000 should be exempt from the tax, and it should get steeper as income goes up.

Rich guy absolutely does not need the bump in take home pay from hitting the cap. Poor guy definitely could use the extra income early income not being taxed.

I’m just so mad all the time about people licking the boots of the rich. They don’t need breaks! They’re rich! They’re going to be fine!

certainly aren’t seeking out the kinds of spaces that would be partisan on it in some way. their opinions on this are accordingly malleable based on “does this feel good or bad,”

That’s in line with what I was saying - that most people’s takes on congestion pricing (and honestly all other policy) is just vibes. I’d hope that stats and facts would sway them, but I’ve met people. But then again you cite there a large change towards supporting it as evidence builds, so maybe there’s hope.

you’re describing a small percentage of the population here

do you mean a small population on this community, or in life?

I live in NYC and most people haven’t brought it up to me, a handful have whined about it. But I also know a lot of urban nerds that love it.

This is good to read, but I feel like the people who oppose congestion pricing / are pro-car operate on feelings and vibes. Facts won’t really convince them.

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/ ?