Someday I have a dream that the ADA relaxes its guidelines for certification that need everything to be so industrialized and monitored. And then, we could start selling meat of the “problem animals” that we have way too many of, like deer and boars. As long as they can stop people from breeding them (Hanoi Rat Massacre problems all over again) hunting could be a somewhat lucrative activity, and we wouldn’t be contributing to global production problems by eating meat.
Of course, we’d need people to be aware that someday once those populations are under control, we’d have to change habits. And we know how people react to change…
I think the point is that the microphone should be close to your mouth, but not in the direction of your breath, so as to avoid pops. That’s why headsets have the microphone a few inches away from where your breath would go through.
Hence, the preferred holding position would have both the speaker and microphone in optimal spots.
I can’t describe this well, but this happens because the cat doesn’t like eating in a way that pushes its whiskers against the bowl’s sides. Those are very sensitive nerves, so pushing its head into a metal space can hurt. so it’s basically only scraping the top. The problem is alleviated by using a shallower, flatter bowl.
I remember when movies/games first started using UBS sticks to contain important plot-macguffin data, it seemed very high-tech and expensive. Of course, now high-capacity sticks are incredibly cheap so anyone can have a whole drawer of them.
I know it’s rare, but there have been times I intentionally clicked on an ad - if it genuinely seemed like a unique or useful product I had some interest in.
I imagine the fake-social-post type of ads are worth blocking though since it’s based in dishonesty and deception.
If we ban betting on sports, they’ll just move betting to some other random indeterminate outcome. Like…which industries and markets are going to perform better than others month by month.
The scary thing, then, is lessons like “Look both ways before crossing the street”. You fail that sort of lesson the hard way, and you don’t get a chance to learn anything.
Putting aside that I’ve seen some relatively old people continue to stay healthy on bikes (often as leisure, not utility), generally the hope would be that public transit would cover the needs for longer distances. As you said, many current forms are pretty bad, but that’s because our money is spent (that is KEY - we SPEND the money either way!!) on road maintenance and new parking garages, and of course individually on car maintenance.
We also have these long distances to cover to stores in part because of the big wide roads and parking lots that elongate our trips. As it turns out, civic centers don’t have to be so spread out.
I’d also expect most people not to need to go into the city for all forms of shopping. If you just need groceries for the week, but your town has nothing to offer in walking distance, it almost sounds like there’s a business begging to be built there, even if it’s a two-room local affair.
The pedestrian-friendly cities I know often allow vans and trucks to resupply stores on the walking streets, even if normal traffic is disallowed. They’re also encouraged to deliver in the morning.
Trying to point the issue to disabilities is often extremely counter-intuitive; it’s often hard for disabled people to use a car for everything (picture wheelchair transfers every time), as well as walking across huge parking lots or inside megastores. It’s often far better if they can just make it to a small store directly without excessive worry about high-traffic crosswalks. Public transit is often wheelchair accessible by default.
The mindset of completely banning cars is not one I’ve joined up with; as you say, contractors or the slim minority of workers transporting heavy goods should likely still be using cars. But that experience of driving is often terrible when every single person (on their own with no heavy cargo) is using a car for every trip.
The reason you haul entire shopping carts at once is because the trip to the grocery store is a big planned deal. That’s also the reason people buy bulk items and then let half of them expire.
The “ideal” for bikers and train riders would be easier, quicker trips to small stores to get ingredients for the next few days. I find I’m able to fit most of my needs into one pannier.
That sounds like the most backward design even of a rural area. This is not a dichotomy between cities and towns complete with pedestrian bridges and electric crosswalks, it’s also about planning that amounts past random, long-distance scattering of destinations.
I’m trying to even understand how you claim those towns become unwalkable, since that’s not due to lack of development - it’s a matter of overdevelopment of roads with wide lanes. A small grid of old buildings with dirt between them is perfectly walkable. If someone built those stores 4 miles apart from each other all in different directions, then even for car users that’s a design failure.
If you insist there is no money to develop anything in those towns or re-plan the environment, that’s an unfortunate diagnosis for the area, but that also means EVs won’t work there because of lack of charging infrastructure, and the town will die out since nothing is being maintained. Let’s keep the discussion to just places that at least have enough money to reconsider their 8-lane stroads.
What do you mean “not ever likely to build public transport”? That is literally how the West was first settled, and the reason many of those towns exist. We already had train networks, and abandoned them only because of car trendiness.
I’ve read accounts from people who actually live in those small towns - even if they exist a long way from cities, they’re still generally walkable (because of the low traffic volume in the area). Any place where each individual home and store has been spread out such that literally every trip for any purpose necessitates private transport is just forcing its own worst-case scenario and would benefit from a redesign either way. As long as there’s any kind of civic center with a few stores, it becomes reasonably practical to at least have a bus route.