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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I’m not a lawyer, but it strikes me that this could be exactly what is happening. The ambulance company’s insurance wouldn’t pay the hospital directly, they aren’t health insurance. So instead, the cyclist’s health insurance footed the initial bill. Then they went after the cyclist for his deductible/copay/whatnot. Now he has to get the money from the ambulance company. If this was vehicle on vehicle violence, he would have gone to his auto insurance, who would have in turn went after the ambulance company’s insurance, but he might not have auto insurance or auto insurance might not be willing to get involved because he wasn’t driving. So he has to go direct to the company. Wouldn’t be shocking if the company pushed off any non-legal petitions from him because he doesn’t have the name weight of an insurance company with lawyers on retainer, so now he is seeking a legal remedy. Insurance doesn’t just work always, there is often a degree of negotiating and litigation involved in these exchanges, especially if one party disagrees with another on matters of liability




  • This passive language bullshit is so obvious sometimes. “Oh, I wonder what the cyclist did to get run over? And that poor SUV driver getting charged for murder because of this event, Paris is really going off the deep end finding ways to attack innocent drivers.” And yet, per the article, the SUV driver ran down the cyclist in a fit of road rage. That sounds an awful lot like an active choice by the driver, not some passive circumstance that the headline implies. If this person got angry and attacked someone with a knife, and the victim died, the headline wouldn’t be “Knife owner charged with murder after person stabbed”. But use the “right” weapon and all of a sudden we put the kiddie gloves on



  • It’s maybe worth pointing out that the analysis covers 10 years and appears to account for $0 in GDP growth (and corresponding tax base growth) dependent on those policies. If I’m reading this correctly (big if to be fair): Assuming the government continues to capture 17.5% of US GDP, Harris’ policies would need to generate roughly 4% GDP growth per year (no small feat, granted) to be net zero relative to absolute debt levels and less than that to be net zero relative to debt as a percentage of GDP. Government expenditure is not like consumer spending because almost every dollar it spends looks less like consumption and more like an investment, and leveraging investments is actually a valid strategy, especially when you have the economic momentum/inertia of a nation state to balance the risks involved with debt, and that is before you even get into fiscal monetary policy



  • Are you assuming that AI in this case is some form of generative AI? I would not ask chatgpt if a mushroom is poisonous. But I would consider using a convolutional neural net based plant identification software. At that point you are depending on the quality of the training data set for the CNN and the rigor put into validating the trained model, which is at least somewhat comparable to depending on a plant identification book to be sufficiently accurate/thorough, vs depending on the accuracy of a story that genAI makes up based on reddit threads, which is a much less advisable venture


  • For me, I think it’s the fact that I have to prepare for both a social interaction and a monologue depending on whether they answer or not. As someone with mild social anxiety, the uncertainty and the fact that I am unequivocally initiating the interaction messes with a lot of the ways I would cope with joining a normal social interaction and throws me off my game



  • How quickly do you think these things happen? Billions of those dollars have gone to projects like CAHSR, Brightline West, and the NEC maintenance backlog, among a host of other projects. The fruits of this spending are something we will really see around 2030 for the most part. Also, worth pointing out that subways are usually funded separately from intercity rail, which was the focus of that announcement. Separately, that same act funded 700 million in new rail car purchases for 7 public transit systems (4 light rail systems, 2 subways, and 1 Commuter rail), 1.7 billion for new lower emissions buses for a number of systems across the US, 13 million for a new transit oriented development pilot program, and a number of other programs. It’s not as flashy as the turn of the century subway system build outs in Atlanta, DC, and San Francisco, and there’s just so much room for more because the US is absolutely starved for transit, but calling that an empty promise is just an absurd mistruth



  • It’s definitely not that. They are just pointing out that the right to free speech prevents the government from impeding someone’s ability to say something, it doesn’t (despite implications made by a lot of people who cry out that their right to free speech is being impeded) force others to listen to or agree with that thing being said. If anything, the people that abuse the name of free speech by implying that it means people need to agree with them, or need to amplify their message, are attacking free speech by mudding the water around what it means and making it harder for good faith entities to invoke that right



  • Vivian was victimized by her father’s heartless disregard and rejection of her identity. Elon is now going around stating a narrative that her coming out to him is at least a significant contributing reason he is a fascist (“I lost my son to the woke mind virus”), a narrative that this headline plays directly into. You can take the same sequence of facts and headline it as “Musk is going public with the same bigotry that he wielded against his transgender daughter. A lot of trans people have family members like him” that doesn’t make it sound like Elon Musk would have been politely building his rockets and evs in a corner if only his daughter hadn’t come out as trans, and doesn’t make it sound like Vivian indirectly donated 10s of millions of dollars to Trump’s 2024 campaign by coming out as someone that that exact campaign wants to suppress. The headline as written is almost a threat to closeted trans people. “Yeah, your parents may be Schrodinger’s bigots right now, but come out and they will go full scorched earth to dehumanize you and you will be responsible for their shift”.

    I’m pretty sure you are agreeing that that isn’t the case, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the text of the article is also aligned against that message, but the headline (probably written by an editor hungry for rage clicks) is solidly aligned to it, and should be called out for that




  • Am one of those “assholes”. Kamala was far from my favorite candidate in 2020, but I just donated a hefty (for me) chunk of change and will be volunteering. I didn’t need perfection, just a feasible path to victory in November and now we have it. I’m so pumped right now, project 2025 no longer looks like an inevitability. LFG!


  • Yes, I’m just speaking to the point the comment was making, that solar panels over parking lots that are at car factories particularly benefit from the hail defense aspect because the parking lot owner (the factory) has a vested interest in maintaining the condition of the parked cars. This isn’t an argument for any point of view, it’s an explanation of what was clearly ambiguous language by the original commenter, based on your misinterpretation. The sass is unnecessary