Logistically yes, again there’s only a certain amount of places a bike lane can be and still be effective. If we put it only in front of council members houses it wouldn’t be a good bike lane. Same if we bulldozed their houses and put up a parking lot, the people who lost parking would probably not be close enough to even park in those lots.

We as a society recognize that to complete certain projects some people may loose out on previous privileges. If we don’t we descend into nimbyism and nothing ever gets done.

It’s not their parking, it’s street parking on public land. If the public decides through a council that the safety of the citizens is more valuable then a couple peoples parking spaces they can choose to reallocate that land. These people still have private driveways and garages to park there car whereas bike lanes can only go in certain places.

The city planners who made the decision to make the neighborhood car dependent are long dead or retired. These council members are trying to make it less car dependent and you want to bulldoze there houses for trying?

If we want to move away from car dependence we’ll never get anywhere if we have to stop and consider every minor inconvenience that motorists may suffer and conive someway to put that cost on the people trying to change things.

Kinda defeats the point of a climate protest if you’re idling in a car.

These prudes would be terrified of San Francisco, whole city is clothing optional. No one ever really does it cause it’s too cold though saw a couple out today for pride. Sucks there banning it in a place that would actually be comfortable to do it.

ultra-orthi battalions

That’s what they’ve been doing. They station them in the West Bank and they we’re doing so many atrocities that even Biden considered sanctioning the specific battalions , he didn’t actually do it because he’s a spineless coward, but he did consider.

For the sake of Palestinians I hope they split up these nut jobs.

What’s your issue with big tech?

I know a lot of libertarians oppose corporatism because they say the corporations market power and monopolies derive from government, but for big tech they mostly come from economies of scale and network effects, neither of which I think right wing libertarians oppose.

If you oppose it because corporate power, even if gained through fair free market principles, is a barrier to liberty than I think your on the left for a libertarian. The recognition that corporate power can be just as tyrannical and coercive as state power is not an idea held by most libertarians in the u.s. who tend to focus solely on state power. Recognizing both puts you to the left of most of them, and on the far left you have Chomsky who identifies as a socialist libertarian and thinks corporate/capitalist power is so much more of a threat than state power that we should give the state more power to be able to reign in corporations.

Trump said in a Truth Social post Tuesday. “Biden’s hatred of Bitcoin only helps China, Russia, and the Radical Communist Left. We want all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!! It will help us be ENERGY DOMINANT!!!”

Didn’t COMMUNIST China ban it mostly because it was putting strain on their grid? Not sure how wasting states worth of electricity to fuel a glorified ponzi scheme is going to help with energy dominance but who am I to question the self-proclaimed genius.

Inflation is not purely a boon to the capitalists and rich. If you’re a working class person with a student loan, or mortgage or any type of long term debt you benefit from inflation as the value of that debt goes down over time. Meanwhile if your the bank holding that debt then inflation hurts you as the bond backed by that debt will go down in value over time. So assets that are backed by loans (bonds) go down in value while assets backed by equity( % ownership in a company/stocks, real estate etc) are uneffected like you said. This is why a lot of capitalists favor static or even deflationary currency as the value of their bonds will go up while not effecting their stocks. Deflation for the poor though can result in debt traps, where the value of the debt you owe goes up over time and makes it impossible to get out of, which is great for banks, the longer your paying minimum payments and interest without touching the principle the better. This is why populists in the western u.s. demanded inflation in the late nineteenth century because they were drowning in unpayable mortgages, and the rich eastern bankers refused since they were raking in all the money from those mortgages.

Also you’re putting the cart before the horse, inflation is caused by a lot of things, but one of the main causes, and the main cause in this last round, is rising wages, not some government conspiracy. If we’re looking at the economy from a Marxist view that when an item is sold a certain amount of it goes to fixed costs, a certain amount goes to labor and a certain amount goes to capital. If say a toothbrush costs $5 , and $3 goes to fixed costs, $1 goes to the laborer who made it and $1 goes to the capitalist who owns it. Now say that laborer uses there new labor power obtained from unionizing or surviving a pandemic that put a lot of people out of the labor pool they can demand an increase in their wage, say to $2. This extra dollar can’t come out of the fixed costs, ideally it would come out of the capitalist share, but since the capitalist controls the price they will just raise that, and maybe add bit extra. So the laborer has to deal with increased prices, so they demand more wages which creates a feedback loop leading to ever increasing inflation.

In this sense inflation is the natural result of class conflict in a capitalist system where capital controls the prices. The government in this case is usually tasked with reigning in inflation rather than creating it. Early on in the Nixon years this was done through price controls and wage controls, neither capital or labor could increase there price. Nowadays it’s done through interest rates to cause or at least make people think there’s a recession so that labor will stop asking for higher wages.

It’s not the capitalist auto companies who are going to get hurt though. The price advantage of the Chinese companies comes from low labor costs and government subsidies, so the auto companies will just move there production to whatever country offers the most subsidies and least labor costs because in our current globalized world capital can move freely.

The real losers will be the unionized auto workers who’ll be abandoned while capitalists maintain or even increase there profits in the third world. These sorts of race to the bottom always harm workers, whether it be with clothes and shein , or EVs.

… But no one is being thrown into the woods with a random stranger or a bear. Like the original question this is a hypothetical meant to prove a point. The original point seems to be “the average man is dangerous” , this is meant to show that point can be prejudiced/sexist. It’s meant to show that the argument that some people are saying they’re afraid of a group therefore we must validate that fear can lead to some bad places and shouldn’t be used. This argument is at the core of what the comment I replied to.

Would you say the same if the argument was about the inherent danger of black men? If a bunch of white women were online saying black men are dangerous we wouldn’t say that black men calling it out were “magically claiming false victimhood” we’d say those women’s fears, even if they are truly felt, are a product of prejudice and unfair and they’re spreading of these ideas is damaging.

It looks like they didn’t even get the money, these were “student loans” so the money just went to pay for the tuition.

Could be very lucrative if you are already in porn and want to make some money from your likeness. This guy’s gonna pay me $500 to make a video and I don’t even have to do anything?

Could also be very good for porn stars who have “aged out” but can still make videos using their younger bodies as weird as that may be.

There’s already laws against using someone’s likeness for commercial purposes without their consent, I’m guessing this will require the same fuzzy cutoff and basically just be up to the jury to decide or the judge to dismiss.

Adam ragusea has some good video explaining both why we use volume and why we don’t use metric

Authorities should also “urgently” consider outlawing the publication of the “weights,” or inner workings, of powerful AI models, for example under open-source licenses, with violations possibly punishable by jail time, the report says

Fuck that, so only huge corporations can have access to it. You won’t even be able to have start ups to challenge the behemoths because this would shut down any open scientific papers explaining how AI works to get started.

If you want to make a case this technology is an existential threat equivalent to nukes and any proliferation is dangerous then treat it like nukes and nationalize it and make it so only government can produce it. At least the government is nominally subject to the people instead of a bunch of companies who will happily destroy the world if it makes them an extra buck.

We’re probably nowhere near that threat though so something like this would only serve to widen the gap between the current batch of huge AI companies and smaller scale developers and enthusiasts.

I do care about pedestrians, I walk way more than I cycle, that’s why I’m proposing a solution that will make both safe. The city would maybe spend a bit more money up front to put down some paint , but long term it would save money because cars wear down the road much more than bikes. Cars are the thing that’s draining the city budget by forcing constant road maintenance.

I don’t understand what you want , if you want bikes to stop being on the sidewalks and for the city to save money along with a bunch of other benefits put down a bike lane, unless you have some better solution. You haven’t suggested any solution though which makes me think you want to just be mad at cyclists and stew in your anger without doing anything, which doesn’t sound like a good way to live.

If you do want to get mad at something get mad at cars which are an exponentially larger threat to you as a pedestrian then a bike. Unless your main means of transport is a car and you can’t get mad at them so you take it out on cyclists instead.

We both agree that bikes on the sidewalk are a problem that needs a solution. Making it illegal to ride on the sidewalk isn’t working so the way I see it there are three other solutions:

1. Increase enforcement so that bikers will get consequences for riding on the sidewalk
2. Restrict e-bike use
3. Add more bike lanes

The first one will cost more than the third and could lead to chases that further endanger pedestrians. Theres also no guarantee it will work as long as there’s gaps in the polices views. This also will discourage e-bike use which gets us to two. Restricting e-bikes could stop them from being in the sidewalk but encourages more car use which is bad for the environment and you as a pedestrian. That leaves three which solves the problem and encourages alternative transport which we need to do if we want to stop climate change.

When there’s a problem with a viable solution you have to find out what system is preventing that solution and direct your anger there. Getting mad at the individual only disperses your anger away from the underlying forces that are making that individual do something that will remain. If you report that cyclist and the police actually do catch them and give them a ticket that’s not going to stop them. Even if they confiscated there bike some day another person’s just going to zip past you.

If your boss fires you in favor of an undocumented immigrant who they can pay under minimum wage, getting mad at the immigrant and having them deported isn’t going to help your problem, your boss will just hire a different one and laugh as they watch the poor people fight each other. You need to have solidarity with that immigrant and realize the boss and the immigration system are harming both of you and direct your combined anger towards them.

Was there a protected bike lane next to you when they zipped passed you? It doesn’t matter if there’s a bunch of unused bike lanes in the city if they aren’t where you need to go. There are tons of sidewalks and car lanes that sit unused most of the time but we keep them open because people will eventually use them.

If we treated bikes like we treat cars and pedestrians and give them they’re own lane on every street none of this would happen, cause bikes don’t want to ride on sidewalks just as much as pedestrians don’t want them on the sidewalks. Weaving through pedestrians slows you down and is dangerous. You may be just as scared of bikes as the bikes are of cars but the cars aren’t nearly as afraid of bikes as bikes are of pedestrians. If your in a car and you hit a bike your going to be fine physically cause your surrounded by a metal box meant to protect you. If your on a bike and hit a pedestrian , you may come out better than the pedestrian, but you are way more likely to be physically injured or dead then if you were a driver. There’s a shared stake in avoiding collisions between pedestrians and cyclist that cars don’t have.

The solution has to be more bike lanes and not less e-bikes because e-bikes are better for the environment and people’s health than cars. Even looking at it as just a pedestrian your better with an e-bike riding in a lane next to you then a car, there less dangerous, quieter, and don’t emit a bunch of toxic fumes and brake pad dust that you have to breathe in. The cars are the enemy, not the e-bikes.

Blame the city not the biker. An person riding an bike will always choose a protected bike lane over having to weave through pedestrians on the sidewalk. If you want to get mad at someone get mad at the city for not putting down a bike lane instead of the biker just trying to not get hit. Pedestrians and cyclist need to have solidarity to take back the road from there dominance by cars. Fighting between each other over the scraps they give us only helps them, we need to demand more.