You can't fix stupid (in America), but you also can't stop it from doing catastrophic damage.
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
Cycling on the road.
On the one hand, biking is great and they should be able to bike on any road! And we should be careful when driving near them, it's super scary being so unprotected and so close to metal speed bombs hurling around them.
On the other hand, road bikers are fucking annoying, stay in your goddamn lane and stop slowing down traffic. I'm not reading your dumb hand signals, either!
On the other hand, road bikers are fucking annoying, stay in your goddamn lane and stop slowing down traffic. I'm not reading your dumb hand signals, either!
I sometimes road bike. If there’s a bike lane I’ll stay in it. But I am entitled to a lane if there isn’t a bike lane, so on a four-lane road with no bike lane I will not go to the shoulder, I will ride in the center of the right lane to maximize my visibility. It’s infuriating how many dickhole drivers give me like a quarter of the lane when they pass me unless I take the center of the lane.
(It is legal for me to ride on the sidewalk in my county, but I cannot maintain my preferred 40kph (25mph) on a sidewalk. Too bumpy, and too many pedestrians. It is also legal for me to ride on the road.)
Hand signals aren’t hard. There are, as far as I know, three important ones. Arm straight out means I’m turning that direction. Arm bent up means I’m turning the opposite direction. Arm bent down means I’m stopping, though my bike has brake lights so I don’t usually use this one.
You're right, but also you're a perfect example that makes me continue to hold fast to my bikers-are-annoying-get-out-of-the-way mindset
Sidewalk riding is dangerous here. I ride sometimes on the sidewalk but that's awful for pedestrians and so treacherous at intersections. Better to be in the road, I just try to find routes on smaller less busy roads.
BMW drivers have the same opinions about whatever you're driving too... Even other Beemers. At least the second part.
Advertisements.
Like obviously we need to make people know things exist, it makes financial and logical sense, etc.
On the other hand, this is bullshit. It's an ever increasing blight on the senses in both online and offline spaces. It's at the point where massive companies cannot function without plastering ads over everything. Fuck that. If we can't function without some garish assault of a cacophony to our psyche every few minutes, maybe we need to rethink what we're doing with our existence.
“Like obviously we need to make people know things exist, it makes financial and logical sense, etc.“
Why is this obvious? I know it's so normal that me asking seems weird but, is this really how the world has to work? Can we not imagine a world without ads? I'd like to at least try.
I feel the same way. I understand why people do it they do currently, but I would like to at the very least dial it back and see what happens.
Gun control in the US.
Gun control would normally work in any other country, but guns are so ingrained in American culture and history that it is infeasible to simply just implement gun control and expect everything to work.
Couple that gun culture with a whole lot of systemic issues (capitalism, remnants of racist laws, wealth inequality, healthcare, police brutality, education system, firearms safety) and you get the gun violence rampant across the US.
Gun control won't work on its own. If you want to get rid of guns, you gotta fix everything at the same time, which won't happen because half the country would vote against progress and their own interests in the name of "owning the libs".
Maybe we should encourage people to keep their guns as police get more and more militerized
Australia already showed us that it isn't even that hard. And it was incredibly effective. It's just that the largest gun manufacturers can spend over 100% of their profits on paying politicians and talking heads to keep things this way.
Australia is a great parallel for your arguments. The same "we had to concur the wilderness" history and all. I believe they have not had a mass shooting since 2008 when they passed their gun control.
I'm a practicing Christian that goes to church every Sunday, and yet I believe in abortion and birth control like I invented them. I love babies and hold one most Sundays during the sermon and think they're a miracle, but also if you don't want to be pregnant don't for one second hesitate to have the abortion. Your life matters way way more than some cells.
Most Christians in Europe are like this too, tbh
Theres no such thing as "too much privacy" but at same time too much privacy can make it near impossible to catch pedos and shit like that :/
Everything has pros and cons.
Most people tend to see only the pros of the things that favour them and downplay the cons that affect others. Which is why we come to hate each other so often.
For example, life and death are a cycle. Can't have one without the other. People may have different goalposts on what deaths they think they're willing to cause in order to survive, but whether it's animals, plants or even microbial organisms, some living beings have to die in order for others to live. (But it's fine because there's so many of them and they can't think or feel pain, probably. Eh, who cares anyway, gotta eat something!)
Due to the limitations of operating at a loss, a demerit is unavoidable. The problem is having to constantly fine tune the balance in order to do the least harm. And yet even that is a self-appointed right and responsibility in lack of anything else.