Car depend infrastructure is amazing to families. A mom can take her children to the grocery store in a car in relative safety without worrying about mentally ill homeless people on the subway.
Why would you need to get on the subway to go to the grocery store? When I lived in Paris I was within a five minute walk to at least three general grocery stores plus various speciality shops. Always plenty of parents all around. This is not uncommon in properly designed non-car dependent cities. Not to mention deliveries are just that much easier and all without a car.
Surely the priority should be to help those with mental issues and those without homes? It's bizarre to want to live in a society that prioritises car use so that people don't have to see those discarded by the same society.
It's pure facts. I used to live in a city where me and my wife were terrorized by homeless people on the light rail. Now we live far away from public transportation and no longer have to worry about the safety of ourselves or our children and our neighbors are fantastic people.
Car dependency and castle doctrine is essential in a low trust society with a legal system that puts violent offenders right back on the street.
Moving in a private vehicle is statistically the most dangerous activity an otherwise healthy young person routinely participates in. Your family is almost certainly at higher risk of death and serious injury now because you based this decision on your perception of safety rather than evaluating the reality of it. Speaking of "pure facts."
Right, except it wasn't, like objectively. Like factually. As in its not up to your opinion.
Driving is more dangerous, and it's not even close. For example, in NYC you're over 100x more likely to die in a car on the roads above the subway than on the subway.
I know this article is focusing on legal responsibility, but if you are going to consider moral culpability for inaction you must also factor in capability.
If a very weak person does not have the strength to perform CPR, they should not feel guilty for failing to perform it.
You also have to consider the costs involved. Somewhere out there is a homeless person who is going to die in the cold tonight. I’m not vastly wealthy, but I could afford to save them if I dropped everything I was doing, searched for them, and found them in time. It is in my power to save them, but at great personal expense. Therefore, I do not hold myself morally responsible for not doing so.
Now consider the billionaire. By merely uttering the command, the smallest effort, they could feed, house, provide medical care, and educate an enormous number of people in poverty. Remember what Uncle Ben said. With great power comes great responsibility. The blood is on their hands.
There is already a way to completely avoid writing SQL strings in your application code, and it’s not even an ORM.
In your SQL database create lots of views and functions. Don’t be shy. There is no limit to how many you can make. Every single time your application needs to do a parameterized query, have it call an SQL function instead.
This method probably increases how much SQL you have to write overall. But it allows you to completely separate the SQL from whatever other programming language you are using. All the SQL exists in one area with whatever framework you have for handling schema migrations. Your application code now interacts with the database via an API of functions you have designed and never actually builds a query.
Even my tiny little personal sites got hammered by bots. I was very reluctant, but I feel like I had no choice but to go to Cloudflare. It was the only free option, and for tiny little sites it’s not worth paying for a solution.
If you go to some youth sports league, it is common that every kid will get a medal or trophy regardless of which team in the league won or lost.
But it also exists for adults. Go to the NYC marathon? Everyone gets a medal. I’ve participated in a lot of organized bicycle rides. The rides aren’t even competitive like the marathon is. They are not races. But at the finish line everyone gets a medal regardless of what distance they rode, or how quickly.
The harsh truth about the participation trophies is that boomers complain about them the most, but they are the ones responsible for them! I’m a millennial. I remember being in a youth basketball league in middle school. Our team did not win. At the final day, every kid on every team got a tiny trophy. I was very confused by this at the time. I expected only the best team to get anything. But who was running that league and decided to hand out those trophies?! Our boomer parents!
Marathons and long bikes at least require you to perform a major amount of training and focus.
Not everyone that starts at the line gets a medal because there are people that don't finish and they don't get their medal.
Once you start moralizing about only winners should get medals or trophies, then you have to start looking at arbitrary distinctions like men's and women's different divisions, age divisions, weight divisions, pro versus amateur, college versus high school.
Really the extension of logic is that only the champion of a given sport or event at the very highest level should get a trophy.
I think what rubs a lot of people about youth sports participation trophies, is that you're basically rewarding just showing up, well devaluing actual focus training preparation or genetic advantage of the better players.
A participation trophy is for finishing a sports season, or finishing an event (maybe a martial arts event, maybe a marathon). Finishing is something that can be especially challenging to finish/comit to week after week as a kid when your team isn't even winning, or you know you have zero chance of coming in first.
I have also met some people who worked at large old insurance companies. They originally used old mainframes and TUI, and the companies still exist. They told me of various things that were done. Of course migrations happened. And interfaces were built so that modern systems could speak with the old, sometimes via terminal emulator. And of course, some old systems still in use far beyond their time.
> but it's amazing how much the billionares would seem to say the opposite;
The Democratic establishment are in favor of maintaining the status quo, which is very favorable to corporations and the wealthy.
The Republicans think even the status quo isn’t billionaire friendly enough. They want to go as far as possible as quickly as possible to eliminate even more of the middle class. Their real goal is to disenfranchise labor entirely, hence the push for “AI” and eliminating jobs.
Of course billionaires prefer one over the other. But from the perspective of the left, both are unacceptable. Neither of these options will actually pull in the other direction, tax the rich, restore the wealth of the middle class, etc.
This is quite literally the opposite of what is happening.
Republicans started going after CDL drivers who were issued licenses when they can’t read road signs in English.
The result is basic economics…truckers who speak and read English get paid more now.
Whether we are talking about healthcare, student loans, public school or even housing…everywhere the federal firehose gets aimed in the name of helping things get more expensive and hurt the middle class.
The disaster that is the ACA was easy to see coming before it was even formed. The Ben Carson plan is the only economically viable plan that could have reduced the cost of healthcare, but we got ACA instead and costs have skyrocketed every since.
Look, I think that redistributive policies impact markets in unpredictable ways, often with negative externalities on prices. But the idea that Mr 300 million dollar gilded ballroom is practicing anything remotely resembling fiscal responsibility is bananas.
Yes, health care costs will probably go down, as demand falters when poor folks die from lack of healthcare. Yes, education costs will probably fall if you dramatically reduce the number of people who can afford education. But personally? Not a great trade off.
Prior to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) it was mostly illegal to sell dietary supplements that weren’t legitimate. You couldn’t have homeopathy on the shelves at a drug store since it wouldn’t get through FDA approval. You couldn’t put so-called structure/function claims on the box such as ”for flu symptoms“ either. You couldn’t even do things like sell smoothies and claim that they boost the immune system.
Once the DSHEA passed, snake oil was back on the menu. It has now become a multi-billion dollar industry. If science and facts win out, a lot of people stand to lose a lot of money.
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