the road lanes were 9ft wide instead of 12 to 20ft wide,

As a trained traffic engineer, I will inform you that that just isn’t true. In reality, lanes in the US are typically 9-12 feet wide, and NACTO recommends against anything greater than 11.

The only places you’re going to plausibly find widths greater than 12 feet are 1-lane freeway ramps and streets with unmarked on-street parking (which means it’s really two lanes, not one).

pedestrian crossings were never more than 20ft long (rather than 100ft wide for our 8 lane stroads)

This is a function of the number of lanes – i.e., the number of cars, not the size of the cars.

Finally, cars are so big these days they often take up two parking spots because the vehicles are too big for the drivers to consistently park within their lines or if you park next to a gaint SUV / pickup then the owner will wait for you and scream in your face (this has happened to me more than once.)

No, they do not “often” take up two parking spots. You can go look at any random parking lot to see how nonsense that claim is. Alternating patterns of filled and empty spaces are just not a thing that happens anywhere.

TL;DR: I agree with your point and I’m supporting it with an argument that comes at it from the other direction. You’re arguing that big/fast/fun cars aren’t worse, while I’m about to argue that small/slow/economy cars aren’t better.

The main point of this community is to spread the word about how cars ruin cities. The reason they do that is, in large part, a matter of simple geometry: it’s because they take up so much space, both on roads and especially while parked. Specifically:

• Big trucks take up one parking space each
• Fast sporty cars take up one parking space each.
• Electric cars take up one parking space each.
• Small economy cars take up – say it with me – one parking space each.

All cars take up the same amount of space, so all cars ruin cities equally. All of them contribute to traffic. All of them beget zoning with mandatory minimum parking requirements, which forces parking lots to be inserted between destinations and ruins walkability. All of them incentivize sprawl-y, low-density development, with things like drive-thrus and big-box stores. All of them insist on being catered to in terms of infrastructure and policy, contributing to drivers’ sense of entitlement and privilege.

Substituting small cars for big ones does not solve the problems cars cause. Substituting electric cars for gasoline ones does not solve most of the problems cars cause. The only thing that solves the problems cars cause is substituting them with other transport methods entirely.

Folks, you do not get ‘credit’ for driving a small car instead of a big one or a fast one. What all the people here acting holier-than-thou about the evils of big trucks specifically are actually trying to accomplish is to absolve themselves of their responsibility for the problem as drivers, by scapegoating another subset of drivers. You are not entitled to do that! If you drive, no matter what you drive, you are part of the problem. End of!

Frankly, I consider everybody in here who rails about trucks (or some other scapegoated subset) instead of all cars to be a borderline reactionary concern troll.

These entitled assholes have no fucking clue about how congestion works or anything else. Continuing to enable (in the addiction sense) cars will only make congestion and costs spiral out of control even more until there’s nothing left but a bankrupt Hellscape of dysfunctional sprawl.

Why are any of these countries even allowed to set +2°C, +3°C, or even +4°C or higher as a goal in the first place?! That’s not a fucking goal; that’s a suicide pact!

This is especially true if your enemies are billionaires, petroleum energy execs, or others with exceptionally large culpability for climate change.

Okay, but (as per the article) the allegedly-“top” court that made the ruling, the European Union’s General Court (EGC), is not the same as the court that the lawsuit would be appealed to, the European Court of Justice (ECJ). How can the EGC be the “top” court if the ECJ is above it?

Besides, the bottom line is that saying “the top court ruled on this” strongly implies that it’s a final decision, but that’s not the case here. Regardless of the details of which court does what, that’s misleading and therefore clickbait. Don’t write headlines telling me it’s hopeless when there’s actually hope!

Wait, how is this a “top court” if the decision is still appealable? Seems like a clickbait headline to me.

In general, you’re not wrong in your summary of how the Web developed. The problem is, though, that you seem to be assuming that since the Web did develop that way, that it had to develop that way. I disagree with that: I think other possibilities existed and might have been viable or even dominant if the dice of fate/random chance had happened to land differently. (And I think that they would’ve been much more likely to be viable or even dominant if some of the regulatory environment had been different, e.g. if residential ISPs hadn’t been allowed to get away with things like drastically asymmetric connections and prohibiting users from running servers. More enforcement of accessibility and standards compliance, instead of tolerating companies deliberately abusing things like Flash and Javascript to unduly restrict users, would’ve also gone a long way.)

and make it look/function the same across different screens and different brands of computers.

That was not only totally optional, but also arguably considered harmful. HTML was intended to leave presentation up to the client to a certain extent, by design. Megalomaniacal marketers and graphic designers demanding to have pixel-perfect control and doing a bunch of dirty hacks (e.g. abusing <table> for page layout instead of tabular data) to achieve it were fundamentally Doing It Wrong.

But I do wonder if anyone is thinking about how foss replacements and competition will gain any ground because honestly they either pay the bills with donations and ads, or they charge a subscription fee because these things cost money to run.

Or they implement a distributed architecture that offloads the bandwidth and storage costs to users directly, a la Bittorrent, IPFS, Freenet, etc.

Atlantan here. Idk, go ask !shermanposting@lemmy.world or something.

Or let all the commercial site go out of business and fucking die, so that the labor-of-love websites that dominated the net in the '90s can return to prominence. And nothing of value would be lost.

Ew. Speaking of technological illiteracy, the author is irresponsibly contributing to it by insinuating that subscription fee ad blockers are somehow inherently better than free ones, which is not only absolute bullshit but also pretty much anti-Free Software propaganda.

Realtors are a specific group of real estate agents. But real estate agents and real estate attorneys are entirely different things: the latter are lawyers while the former are not. Real estate agents are salespeople who search sales listings and give home tours and negotiate deals and whatnot. They have a duty to act in your interest, but they are not qualified or licensed to practice law.

In America, the way it’s supposed to work is that your parents aren’t supposed to need your financial support.

Jeez, what a shitty featureless high-rise car-hole.

They do if you go to an Asian market.

• Make sure you get a knowledgeable and thorough home inspector.

You say that as if evaluating quality to decide which realtor to hire is any easier than evaluating quality to decide which home inspector to hire.

• Keep you from getting the shit sued out of you for one of numerous mistakes.
• Make sure you fully understand the giant pile of paperwork you’ll be signing.

These two are the job of a real-estate attorney, not a realtor.

Exactly; fuck BSD too.

It’s worth noting that Apple has (for example) gone so far as to replace bash with zsh just because the GPL v3 was too copyleft for them to handle. In other words, fuck Apple.

Literally “sinking” isn’t the issue. Becoming uninhabitable due to frequent inundations and saltwater contamination of their aquifer is the issue, and that’s starting to happen already. “Within their children’s life time” is incredibly optimistic.

The soundtrack