my knee-jerk reaction is: and because streets aren't just for cars!
But more pragmatically, vehicular cycling is often the best choice because of visibility and predictability, and also as regards driver awareness and expectation: it at least seems safer if drivers are accustomed to sharing the road than if they never have to.
Definitely. Brussels was designed for cars (and Belgium is very car-centric in many ways) but it's got much better for cycling in the ~15 years I've been here, thanks to a mixture of incremental improvements and political "big pushes".
Absolutely. This was recycled almost directly from some of the prompt material I gave while refining. I've learned more about "prompt engineering" (as it seems to be called) since and think it would be relatively easy to smooth these edges out.
Upping the sensitivity and switching to the soft rim cap makes a huge difference. We have ThinkPads at work and I'm not surprised most of my colleagues don't like the Trackpoint with its default cap and settings; Lenovo aren't doing it and favours.
What would make it a frivolous charge? I mean, if the test is reasonably reliable and shows the driver had more than the legal limit of alcohol in their blood, What's there to contest?
Between the way the laws are written (tons of discretion given to the officers) and the way the cops operate (they're taught to use word play and field sobriety tests that are specifically designed to let the cop write a police report that makes the suspect look plastered despite reality being otherwise without technically lying[1]) lots of people who are well below the legal limit get charged with DUI. They then spend thousands of dollars on a lawyer getting those charges reduced to "reasonable" stuff (in sarcasm quotes because it's blatant revenue enforcement) that still carries thousands in fines but isn't life ruining.
Don't get me wrong, real DUI is a real crime but for every person charged with that there's another one that thought they were successfully attempting to be lawful by being below the limit who also got charged because that's what the laws permit and that's what the financial incentive is.
So "tightening the DUI laws" here means giving cops greater latitude to charge people below the legal limit - as opposed to, e.g. increasing the penalties for people who are above it?
Here (well, UK and Belgium) I think the police would not charge you if you passed a test (but they might several times).
One explanation I was given for comparatively poor & worsening road safety in the US was the lack of serious penalties for drunk and dangerous driving.
> So "tightening the DUI laws" here means giving cops greater latitude to charge people below the legal limit - as opposed to, e.g. increasing the penalties for people who are above it?
It meant getting eliminating some those crimes the cops don't charge people with but the courts can let people plead down to as lesser offenses and upgrading others to be roughly as life-ruinous as a DUI. This would have caused all those people who caught a DUI charge at .05 because they didn't play their cards right to walk instead of take a plea deal for a lesser charge, much to the detriment of government coffers. I don't think that's necessarily a bad outcome but the point I was making at the time was that financial incentives pervert justice in this case.
(The state in my example was Washington FYI)
>One explanation I was given for comparatively poor & worsening road safety in the US was the lack of serious penalties for drunk and dangerous driving.
And people also complain that the US is a bunch of tee-totaling puritans. Things vary widely by state. I think there's a couple in the midwest that are more lax. Drunk driving has been on a pretty much constant decline since forever so I'm generally suspect of it as an explanation for anything anywhere.
Mandatory helmet laws for cyclists are a red herring intended to shift blame and attention onto cyclists' behaviour rather than address the real problems, namely: bad infrastructure, cars, and drivers. As long as policymakers do nothing to counteract the current trend of cars that are increasingly dangerous to other road users and that at the same time encourage / tolerate inattentive drivers, it would simply be in bad faith to adopt a policy that would impose legal penalties on the victims of this trend.
A better way to make cyclists and pedestrians safer would be more stringent laws against dangerous car designs, and some enforcement of the existing laws. We are starting to see US-style monster pickups and SUVs here in Belgium and they are a fucking abomination - far too large for city streets - and their extra weight and height plus reduced visibility make them dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists.
I'm in favour of requiring a much stricter driver's license to drive those big pickups and SUVs. And maybe some other measures to discourage their unnecessary use.
I’m not religious so I can’t really understand the emotions first hand but the book is blasphemous, the Catholic Church has executed people and gone to war over less.
I’m sure this is /s but for real Iran treats this guy like the UK treats Margret Thatcher so I’m not about to stand on some high horse and be like “clearly the intense emotions and anger of 80 million people are completely invalid and irrational” and instead take a step back and realize that clearly I lack some critical knowledge and life experience that helps me empathize because nobody gets that angry for no reason.
I found those burners too weak for stir-frying. I suspect that unless you have special ventilation, a burner that's hot enough for wok cooking will not be safe for indoor use.
Ours is used outside because that's where the gas bottle has to be kept and because apparently it generates too much carbon monoxide to be safely used inside. And because we have three small children and this thing burns with a foot-high flame like a jet afterburner. It's great fun
