As a pedestrian, I‘ve literally never had an issue with vehicles turning right on red. That's because I'm an intelligent human being who understands that it's important to make eye contact with the driver of that vehicle, or otherwise ensure that they are clearly not going to start moving when I step in front of them.…

Nah, leave it up to local municipalities to make their call. I’ve had countless hours of my life wasted yearly due to having to wait at intersections at red lights where absolutely zero cars passed through the intersection for the entirety of the light cylce as I was waiting for green. I’d add ban the bs left turn…

The power of foreshortening in the choice of camera lens and magnification.

It’s all in the lens. Here is the same intersection from a different perspective:

also anyone who gets permitted to leave the USSR to tour the states for 10 weeks is a dyed in the wool true believer.

In the end (and perhaps, quite predictably in Stalin’s USSR) the two find American culture has been wrapped into a vapid, one-dimensional worship of money and wealth which makes them miss their socialist homeland.

There are no Marxists anymore because they are all Leninists

USSR, Socialist Workers Paradise which did the Holodomor in 32-33

It’s typical of the bass ackwards sound bite over substance handling of passenger rail. The Northeast Corridor is the best use case for high speed rail in the country and runs on the oldest routes in the country. The unglamorous, politically difficult and expensive solution is a massive track improvement including…

I took the Acela for the first time a few weeks ago from NYC to DC. It was neat to do 150mph for a few short stints, but I’m not really convinced I’d ever do it again when it’s only 30-45 min faster than driving. Plus, that’s not counting extra time you’re spending getting to/from the train stations and your actual…

And complicating the problem is that the rail network exists for freight traffic, not passenger traffic; the lines are built for 50mph freight consists, which have right of way over passenger traffic. Realistically, high-speed rail would require separate right-of-way, and as we’ve seen with the California high-speed…

Rail, the nineteenth century solution to eighteenth century transport problems.

Trains are never going to be big again in the United States. The distances are just too great to manage it nationwide. So no matter what happens, it’ll always be confined to limited regional routes like Acela and slow longer routes like the current Amtrak offerings.

This. The argument always seems to get boiled down to “range anxiety” and I’m not sure that’s the right term. I would say mental load is what drive a lot of people away from EVs right now—the idea that having an EV adds another layer of mental preparation devoted to finding chargers when it comes to driving. Right now…

@neverspeakawordagain - we’ve come a long way from 1999 and the nicad batteries that were most notorious for that memory effect. today, in 2023, yes, most people charge their phone every night. I did with my galaxy s8, for six years (2017-2023) and only got rid of it because it because a security issue with the lack…

Gas-optional is great. Electricity only (no option) is not great. I don’t have range anxiety and would be happy with an EV that only went 150 miles on a charge IF I knew I could count on charge stations that were as common as gas stations. But they aren’t. And when you do find one it’s in some God-forsaken corner of…

Do people leave their phones on the charger every night? When I first got a cell phone, in 1999 or thereabouts, I was told that to maintain the life of the battery you should never start charging the phone until it had completely run out of battery; never stop charging the phone until it had completely filled up to…

Cool, cool. Now can you do me a favor and make my work install a charger (just for me) and maybe one less than 8 miles from my house.

I feel bad for a lot of traditional watch manufacturers right now. Citizen makes good watches, but smartwatches aren’t watches, they are tiny tablet computers that happen to fit on your wrist.

In a past job the issue of the business I was working for being impacted by ITAR came up.