Crap, took a calculated risk on that one, sorry. I know England is getting rough with car dependency, but I wasn’t expecting Ireland to be that way. Derry Girls lied to me.
Another swing and a miss on my part. I was trying to make a joke at my expense by being an American who got his knowledge from TV shows. Anyway, that’s not an apology. I’m sorry for making that assumption.
I already posted, but this post bothered me so much that I wanted to say my peace. You can tell that OP and everyone resonating with them is from Canada or the US a country with car dependency. How? Because our urban environments are uniquely awful, since they’re built for cars, not people. The suburbs are far from anywhere you’d like to go, and even if you had the gumption to walk or bike a mile or more each way, the infrastructure to do so is flat out dangerous or hostile in a lot of cases. The suburbs keep a low population density, and there’s no real cause to meet anybody else ever since they have no third spaces, so unless you hit the neighbor jackpot, the suburbs are a super lonely experience. Big box stores, chain pharmacies, and chain restaurants being the dominant businesses in your area is also a car-centroc urbanism thing, since if you have to get in your car to go shopping, you’re just going to go where you’ll only have to make one stop or where you won’t have to leave the car. It’s even in the meme: parents too busy to teach [them] how to drive, which matters because the city is fucking inaccessible otherwise.
I live in a city of 90,000 in California and, while California is generally head and shoulders above the rest of the US in bike infrastructure, it’s still goddamn hostile to try and get across town on a bike or on foot, and that’s assuming the weather isn’t miserable. I’ve had five exchange students from different countries (Japan, HK, Russia, Netherlands, etc) and they all found the suburbs / US urban design to be isolating. All of them were used to just being able to bike/tram/bus/train across the city and even between cities completely on their own and it was no big deal at all. It’s easily the hardest thing for them to cope with.
It’s not this way in the rest of the world, and it hasn’t even been this way forever. It got this way due to decades of deliberate policy choices, and it can be changed. Your local city and county government has a shocking amount of power over this kind of stuff, and those are levels of government that, unless you live in a big metropolis, are actually accessible to laypeople. Start organizing, get your friends together, make some noise, let them know what you want; local politics can actually be pretty responsive to this stuff.
Edit: in case you want more information, there’s several really good channels about this stuff, but I’d recommend NotJustBikes and AlanFisher on YouTube for a start.
Edit 2: OP is not, in fact, from the US or Canada. Took a gamble and lost.
I’m more anti-authority and further left than your average US liberal. You’re not wrong, though. I once melted a Republican colleague’s brain by explaining that libertarian is different than liberal.
That’s a tricky one. The problem is that power is, more often than not, a one way street. Once organizations or people have it, they tend to not want to give it up. It takes a LOT of effort over long periods of time to walk that power back, and particularly when the money’s against it. The US is already practically a fascist (and I mean this in a textbook, unsensational sense) economy what with how tightly the public-private partnerships run, so you’re fighting a three way battle between getting the government, the investors, and the corporate leadership to all agree all at the same time to decrease their power. The corporates and investors have been getting some really sweetheart deals put of this arrangement, and they’re not going to want to walk away from easy money guaranteed by market coercion.
I think the path of least resistance here is going to be widespread local action, at the level of the state or below. It’s not unprecedented, this is more or less how marijuana legalization went mainstream. If we waited for the policy to change at the federal level, well… [Gestures wildly at the house of representatives] maybe your grandkids will live to see some moderate change. But the states and especially local government have a frankly shocking amount of power, and they beat the feds in legal battles a surprising amount of times when their laws come into conflict, though this is largely dependent on the views of the circuit of appeals court that presides over your area. The fifth circuit are a bunch of authoritarian whack jobs that once heard of the constitution but think it sounds like a pinko hippie, for example. But we’ll never get there if we don’t try, and effecting change at the local level is both possible and realistic. For my part, I’m working on creating the first YIMBY group in central California, and I want to work with others to pressure central valley urbans to have better urbanism, cheaper housing, more public transit, and all around be more livable and affordable.
My views align much more closely with Anarcho-Communism than US conservatism. I’m not an Anarcho-Communist because all evidence I’ve seen thus far suggests that truly functional Anarcho-Communism (which has existed historically) is dependent on small enough communities that there are few to no truly anonymous interactions and/or a strong social cage of norms that ends up being morality police with extra steps.
Basically, yes. Speaking as someone who’s voted third party before, there’s no hope of changing the system by voting third party at the federal level. Game theory on first-past-the-post elections and the absolutely insane amount of money in our elections practically ensures it. The best way to effect change there is to go to some form of transferrable vote or ranked choice vote at the state and local level. There are already some states whose electoral college splits its votes in this way, and the two main parties (and their big donors) hate it because it erodes their ability to take a state’s vote for granted and weakens their duopoly.
I don’t know how to feel about this election as an ameribro.
I’m left-libertarian (upper case left, lower case libertarian) on the political compass, which is practically not represented in US politics, so I’ll take whatever I can get. Biden is, realistically, the best I can hope for this election cycle. He’s not great, there’s a lot of big policy issues I diverge with him on pretty sharply (both on left and libertarian), but the other candidates for the DNC are a hot fucking mess. As for the libertarian party, it’s actually insane. Gary Johnson got booed for saying he’d want people to have driver’s licenses to drive. That’s a no go for me. And as far as the conservatives go, they run the gamut from not an instant disaster (I guess) to the loud, proud, and complete end of the republic.
Biden has at least done some things that I kinda like, and doesn’t seem keen on destroying the republic. I’d love to get a reformer in and sweep Reaganism out on its wrinkled, swampy ass forevermore, but I don’t think that’s realistic at this point. Where I start getting worried is that the Biden campaign seems dead set on repeating some frankly terrible HRC '16 strats, which, well, we saw how well that worked for her, but the pro-Biden response is “Trust me bro, Trump is actually unelectable this time”. I’m also concerned because, let’s face it, Biden’s old enough that he could get struck down with a stroke or what have you at any minute.* Every day, the cosmic dice are getting more and more weighted against him. The democrats have done very little to make a case for a possible candidate/president Harris, where the republicans have laid a LOT of groundwork against her. If Biden bites it or gets incapacitated, Harris is going to have a huge uphill climb in front of her.
I guess where I get uneasy is that it feels like the democrats are making a lot of avoidable and predictable mistakes, and they’re just banking that it won’t blow up in their face this time because, uh, what, that was that time, this is this time? They could do better, but they’re just going to choose not to, and be shocked if shit goes sideways.
*I mean, so could Trump, but I’m not hoping that he wins.
The hell of it is, some people would still be happy to buy his apples. Look, I ain’t got time or health insurance to be fucking around climbing an apple tree, here’s some cash, apples pls. But that’s not good enough for the investors, who want guaranteed 5% growth every quarter, so now we’ve got to pour kerosene on the extra apples and force people to go hungry.
It isn’t necessarily the case that everyone who does this has ADHD, nor that everyone with ADHD has this as a symptom. You could just have an auditory processing thing. For me, I think it’s related to my ADHD because it doesn’t happen when I’m on medication for it.
So, one way my ADHD manifests is that my brain will just fucking fumble incoming sounds, particularly if I’m not paying attention beforehand. I’ve been near someone who just turned on the radio to the middle of a song and the music made no sense to me at all, like, it was just really weird noise that sounded like it should make sense but didn’t, until it suddenly clicked and the music made sense again. With words, it happens all the time. Someone will just ambush me with words and instead of “hey, can you put the cap on the blender?” It becomes “hey, can you pole a cat fender?” Or sometimes it becomes just “dsfargeg”. I know that nobody would say either of those things to me, so I use a dual track strategy of both playing with what I think I heard to try and make it make sense as well as asking the other person to repeat themselves. Sometimes, I work it out before they repeat it, sometimes I don’t.
It’s bewildering to me that, after decades of getting (deservedly) dunked on by Europeans for our shitty systems, not only are American leaders still giving the whole flaming garbage heap the five finger salute, but European leaders are now saying “well, yes, the American system is awful, but we swear it’ll work for us.” And people are believing them. Unreal. I can’t even imagine the frustration you must feel.
We’ve talked about moving to Denmark or NL, but we’re just not there yet, and with NL getting their own dollar store (there’s a Dutch joke in there somewhere) Trump, I’m not so sure if we ever will be.
Big problem here is that the freight railroads are all being run like vulture capital operations. They own the trackage, so it’s their responsibility to maintain it, and it’s not like they don’t have the money. Norfolk Southern’s profits (not revenue, this is after costs) Sept 30 2022- Sept 30 2023 were over 8 billion dollars. Union Pacific did $14 billion in 2022. They can afford to maintain their shit, but they’re not; they’re just letting their tracks and rolling stock go to hell and shrugging when it blows up. Just flat out not paying your cost centers is not a thing a sane business does if it wants to keep doing business for long. I’m convinced that the major rail carriers long-term plan is to just not pay to repair a goddamn thing until the rail infra is completely broken, declare bankruptcy, and then sell it to the government. The government will make CONRAIL 2 (see: CONRAIL, which is what happened the last time they pulled this shit), spend an ass-ton of taxpayer dollars fixing this bullshit, and then sell it back to the privates for pennies on the dollar because of FrEe MaRkEt EfFiCiEnCy.
If Trump loses in 2024, do you think he'd run in 2028?
This is too relatable (lemmy.world)
America: Getting ready for another election. Rest of the world: (lemmy.ca)
Apples for sale (lemmy.ml)
Let me load it (lemm.ee)
Low-hanging fruit 🥱 (lemmy.world)
“It’s not that hard” (sh.itjust.works)
Get it together (lemmy.ml)
A lesson in Input Validation (startrek.website)
Here's your horoscope. (lemmy.world)
It's been a stressful week in Engineering (startrek.website)
California in a nutshell (lemmy.today)