Drivers are assholes by me too and enforcement is low here too, but that doesn’t justify a camera watching every driver 24/7, plus pedestrians in some areas.
If you want more traffic enforcement, get the cops to do their fucking jobs.
Lol good luck with getting the cops to do anything. They love abusing traffic laws themselves.
But these cameras do not watch people. They take a picture when they detect a car is going too fast or blows a red light, not constant surveillance.
Plus cars are on public roads, peds are on public streets. I don't really care about the privacy argument tbh in this case. Much more people are harmed from cars speeding and blowing red lights then any sort of abuse involving public cameras.
Those are traffic cams dude, not enforcement cameras.
Traffic cameras watch traffic and a lot of them are open to be viewed by anyone.
Enforcement cameras take shots on motion and object detection. Just like toll cameras which snap a pic of your license plate as you drive under them, they aren’t meant to view traffic live. The cameras have very different tech as they are for a specific purpose.
It’s not pedantic if I’m addressing your assertions based on the article you linked in reply to the guy saying your not being watch via what are basically just really high tech photo cameras.
It’s beyond hilarious that flying squid would whine about someone else being pedantic, because most times when we’ve butted heads, pedanticism has been their go-to once their argument starts to falter.
But it’s especially funny here when you aren’t even being pedantic, but pointing out that the article they provided is talking about something almost completely separate.
But these cameras do not watch people. They take a picture when they detect a car is going too fast or blows a red light, not constant surveillance.
Speeding ticket like many other crimes are an issue on;y if you are poor. Making presecution more agressive and non-fines based or limiting the cars sold\registered there are probably the quick fixes to this systemic trouble.
It’s a black box we don’t have much info about in this or other states. What makes the overseer abstain from OCRing every car plate and having it’s trajectory mapped at every junction? There are many justifications to do so, like car theft or general tracking of wrongdoers, but with it’s automation comes the understanding that every ride in your car is tracked A to B without you knowing it.
If they did that, they would just have a load of people going “why aren’t you catching real criminals?” Just don’t go through red lights. It’s not difficult.
Until everyone behaves within acceptable societal standards traffic / red light cams are a reasonable part of the strategy to steer assholes towards the goal. As much as awareness campaigns, improving training, lowering vehicle velocity when it sees yellow automagically maybe…
Which doesn’t mean there aren’t unfortunate abuses by cops or city wrt shortening yellow duration to pocket more cash or such like.
And I strongly believe that cops should be doing more interesting cop stuff then enforcing traffic tickets in our days and age.
There’s also the aspect of designing roads in a way that discourages driving dangerously, like in the Netherlands. Raised crosswalks, speed bumps, narrowed lanes, physical barriers, etc.
If we make completely straight, flat roads with wide lanes going through neighborhoods, people are just going to drive down them fast because that’s what subconsciously feels like the correct speed.
I’d much rather an almost unbiased and passive camera making the decision rather than a likely racist, and certainly biased in other ways, cops enforcing the law. Certainly considering I would rather cops doing more important work than handing out tickets. Maybe even spending that time getting training to be less fuckwits.
If you said they should be put in cars, I would agree that is watching it very driver 24/7, but strategically placed cameras in dangerous areas seems like a good idea to me and certainly not watching everyone all the time.
Unbiased cameras? Obviously the bias would capitalism. More tickets more revenue. Lol who do you think is reviewing the tapes? Clearly not the racist cops and judges you spoke of /s.
I don’t know how it works in America, but in Germany and presumably most parts of Europe, red light cameras are triggered by coils under the road (similar to speed cameras). There’s usually one coil right past the stopping line (for cars being halfway over) and another coil somewhere closer to the center of the intersection (for fully running a red light).
If you want more traffic enforcement, get the cops to do their fucking jobs.
How do you imagine the cops do it so it’s the same as with the cameras? Or would you be fine with worse enforcement, as long as you do away with cameras?
There can be a middle ground between almost no enforcement and taking a photo every time someone might be breaking the law, but also the camera might be miscalibrated or malfunctioning somehow.
Last I checked, there weren’t drunk driving cameras, so I’m not sure how that’s relevant. If anything, that makes my point for me. Human cops enforce anti-drunk driving laws.
The problem is that red light cameras incentivizes cities to encourage dangerous driving, because it is now a revenue source. Multiple cities have been caught illegally shortening yellow lights because shorter yellow lights cause more red light violations, yielding more money for the city and also increasing the rate of accidents at those intersections.
Yep, that and the inconsistencies of timing. Some areas yellow are very long, some are short, and some seen to vary within the “allowable range.” In other words, encouraging people to slam on the brakes because God only knows when the lights will change.
I hate the cameras (I spend most of my work day driving city/suburban areas) and think that if they’re going to exist, they should have longer yellows to give more opportunity for drivers not to panic between getting ticketed or rear ended.
You seem to be arguing that the cameras are making it less safe by causing drivers to slam on their brakes. Can you point me to any evidence that they are making it less safe? Everything I’ve read has been unequivocal that these reduce risky driving behaviors and have increase safety.
I read up on it a few years back. Long story short, the number of “T-bone” type accidents where the side of the car gets hit decreased, while the number of people getting rear ended significantly increased (allowing that some rear end collisions also go unreported due to lower degrees of damage.)
There was a whole rethink of the use/benefits and disabling/not installing them further, but I can’t remember the outcome.
Like I said, I spend a lot of time driving, so forgive me for not pulling sources in the middle of my work day. Gotta drive to the next patient’s house lol.
Euro Truck Simulator taught me that some countries have ways of indicating how long is left in a light. Some have progress bars, some go from solid to flashing to indicate an imminent change, and some do creative stuff with extra lights
People say this all the time, and I’ve never seen any kind of proof, either.
The only thing people point to is one area in a Houston suburb where they installed red light cameras, and people were so scared of running the lights, they would stop short in the yellow, resulting in more rear end accidents. Hardly a compelling reason to be against these cameras nationwide.
There are also a bunch of court cases where tickets have been thrown out because the yellow time was too short, but maybe you think that counts as “anecdotal” because I can’t find a source to cite that’s tallied them all up.
How about instead, we make it way harder to get a license and then just let thr good drivers go as fast as they want (exaggerating, thinking more like those euro highways)?
There’ll be less cars on the road and good drivers can stop being annoyed by all the slow, confused, sleepy drivers
How does it encourage dangerous driving when it actively punishes dangerous driving?
Because the people who habitually drive badly find out pretty quickly how to game the system and not face the consequences, and/or consider the fines part of the cost of driving how they want. Fines don’t stop bad behavior, they just put a price on it.
Before you dismiss me by saying I just want to get away with speeding, consider that it’s easy to fight a ticket from a camera- in most cases, you just don’t respond and it goes away, though of course that varies with jurisdiction. If I wanted to get away with dangerous driving, I’d be all for replacing cops with cameras.
The fact it is a revenue source has more to do with people not following the law than the system.
The problem is cities reducing the timings, because it’ll go from green to red without sufficient time to safely stop. The whole purpose of the yellow light is to give you wiggle room to either stop or get through the intersection before the next cycle. If a sudden red forces you to slam on the breaks hard enough to risk being rear ended (or worse in icy conditions risk sliding into the intersection)
Plus if the timings are tight enough someone trying to stop/complete their menuever might find themselves in the intersection with opposing traffic now trying to enter
Traffic cameras are just trying to put out a greese fire by throwing water on it. If you don’t know better it seems like a good idea, but in reality it just makes the problem worse
All these cameras accomplish is forcing people to brake strongly and spontaneously, which is unsafe. In truth, they’re a revenue stream first, second, and third; for the government, insurance companies, and automotive shops. It’s a selective tax system that also nudges your bumper every other week. I don’t believe they’ve ever actually improved traffic conditions.
“For right angle crashes, the review found a decrease in overall crashes and a decrease in injury crashes. For rear end crashes, the review found an increase in overall crashes but no significant difference in injury crashes“
Impeding traffic, increasing accident rates, and arriving more slowly make for a poor lifestyle pitch. Speed differentials hurt everyone, including you.
Legitimately good bait, but preventing someone from driving exactly the speed limit, a construct lagging severely behind current safety standards, is more important to me than simply calling it out.
Arriving 10% later is well worth additional safety. And for any accidents due to drivers around me not respecting the speed limits, they are to blame. I’m honestly baffled by the “you are the problem for following rules” proposition. No, you are the problem for breaking them. They are there for a reason.
The safety standards were set when roads were not dominated by multi-ton trucks - something that eats away all the progress we’ve made to both braking and safety systems, and then a bit more.
Thinking everyone is just a backwards thinker who didn’t bother to change the limits would be far from truth.
It seems so absurd to me this could happen. For the boomers I understand, they grew up in an offline world, but the youth? They are raised on the modern web and smartphones but are often clueless too.
Was it the unsanitized, wild west internet era of the late 90s/early 2000s that hardened the millennials against online bullshitting?
It sure feels that way, explaining to kids that YouTubers will say anything to get you to keep watching, meanwhile the elderly are following Qanon bullshit.
Now that I’m thinking about the good old days of virus pop-ups and limewire cancers, has the presence of malware changed that much? Or it is less visible due to mobile architecture and pop-up blockers?
You think millennials are immune to it? I feel like it’s only Gen-X that’s both cynical enough and was here for the birth of it, to be properly skeptical of everything online.
What generation? I’m an elder millenial and I always thought Google Video/Vimeo/Youtube was/is shit for any kind of actual informential content. Music videos, meme videos - sure. Other than that, veeerrry great amount of suss on any info presented. Same goes for 90+% of people of my generation, who know what kind of a jokepool 90’s/early 2000’s internet was.
Yeah personally I’ve found a ton of informational and useful content on YT. There’s tons of lectures and presentations available from different colleges and stuff, but there’s also just a ton of people that like to spread info. For example, I found one guy thats making his own audiobooks of leftist literature to make it more accessible for the average Joe.
More like they had access to training bombs and planes, and frequently flew over enemy territory, so they put those things together and got a mad prank out of it.
I saw a presentation from one of them about the founding of Tesla, impressive stuff. Elon just takes their talking points, that’s why he can’t deviate far from a couple points.
I no longer have any device capable of playing or even reading CDs, but I still have mine on the wall as if I built a shrine to how much of an old fuck I am 😄
Recently I went and bought a vinyl, cd, cassette player. I busted the cd wallet out of the closet and bought a bunch of cassettes and vinyls at the flea market. It makes listening to music more of an experience, instead of just background noise on my phone
So’s my Ultima Online: The Second Age case, Beatles - 1, Frank Zappa - Over-nite Sensation, my Jesus Christ Superstar (movie version) soundtrack and my promotional CD from a local disco band called Boogieknights I stumbled (in more than one sense of the word) on during a pubcrawl many years ago 😁
I am turkish and i can say due go how fucking Technologically illiterate our goverment is, Distro watch is probably got banned automatically because Free Software -> Piracy. Most tech related at goverment jobs have people over 50+ That does not know how nodern technology works. I am suprised that they know what free means
That being said, the only UK foods I’ve had were made by expats here in the states. None of it was bland, with the exception of breakfast beans, “because they’re meant to be mild to start your day” as I was told by a lovely liverpudlian.
She would do fish and chips, and the batter was well seasoned. Not heavily seasoned, but some pepper, a little paprika, and a bit of onion powder to give it some aromatic kick. Well balanced, and imo, as good as any of the southern fried fish recipes I’ve had.
The chips were obviously just salted and vinegar used per person.
But when we did pot luck at work, she would bring in what she called “good english food”, which included some curry a few times.
But her shepherd’s pie? Holy hell, that was some great stuff. She said it was really cottage pie because it was beef usually. But it had the usual pepper, onion, garlic, and herbs.
And the other expats I ate with were similar. Maybe different amounts of a given herb or spice, but it was in there.
I think the UK food thing is a meme in itself, and likely arose the way things usually do, with the majority of cooks just being bad cooks, rather than representative of a cuisine or the way things are done properly in that country.
The reputation comes from the US military being stationed in the UK during the height of WW2 rationing when there was an extremely limited list of ingredients to cook with. They were unable to associate a country under an attempted siege from U-boats with a reduced supply of food.
We do have a love of beige food at times, but it’s essentially our version of chicken tendies.
It hasn’t gone away because countless students from across the globe have moved there and found it to be true. While there is good food available in the UK it seems as if the average Brit is content to eat very badly and then supplement a terrible diet with copious amounts of alcohol.
We also had rationing for a good while longer than other countries after the wars (right into the mid-50s), so we have a whole generation who were pretty much raised with limited food options. That kind of national trauma sticks around and took a while to shake off.
Boomers made that bland war time food linger. They were children during and just after WW2 so it was part of their childhood nostalgia and they fed it to their own kids. Also we’ve had Indian/ Chinese restaurants in the UK for a while but they were mostly just in major cities at first so the average person still had little exposure to foreign or exotic food until the late 1970s/ early 1980s.
My ex mother in law and her mom both can’t eat any food that’s not a certain level of bland. Too much of any spice at all and they set it aside like an autistic kid with arfid. Which… come to think of it…
Yep, this sums up everyone I know over 60 that is descended from British -immigrants- sorry expats.
Actual British people coming over now that still sound British seem to have much more refined taste. BIR-style curries are indeed very popular vs bland British “stew” / casserole
man if you make stew right it’s the most flavourful thing out there. half a bottle of red wine, couple cans crushed tomatos, chop up half your intended vegetables( Carrot, potato, onion, green onion stems, parsnips and celery for me), brown the beef, dump it all in except the other half of your vegetables, bring the level up with strong beef broth till everything is covered, and simmer covered till it all except the beef dissolves into a brown gravy, then add the other half of your vegetables and serve when they are cooked. Bay leaves and rosemary and thyme and pepper of course too. Garlic. Usually enough salt from the beef broth.
Also as an American we don’t really have room to talk. Yes there’s the iconic southern foods but even then, grits are bland and meh. But for the most part a lot of traditional American food needed to have spices rediscovered. It seems like for a long time our attitude was to use sugar, pre ground pepper, and maybe salt as seasoning for something that had any good texture cooked out of it.
An aside here: but why is it that people from major cities aren’t considered average? In many cases major cities are major because they have a lot higher density of people leading to more development and resources.
It’s the same with English beer. On the continent, people keep saying that Brits drink their beer lukewarm. When I was there, they actually had temperature displays at the tap in most pubs that usually showed something around 4°C (~39°F). For reference, that was in the Huddersfield area (between Leeds and Manchester) around 15 years ago.
Well in this case the reputation for “warm beer” is true and I’m willing to die on this particular hill.
Proper cask ale should be served at between 8 and 12C, AKA cellar temperature, cool but not cold. Nothing beats a traditional pint of ‘best bitter’ in an old pub!
Plenty of people in the UK drink lager and other styles of beer that are more highly carbonated, stronger ABV, and served colder. Personally I’m not a fan but each to their own.
I live about an hour from London in a rural area with loads of great pubs but I find it difficult to find a nice beer in most parts of London. It’s much easier to keep a keg of carbonated beer under pressure than a cask ale that you have to finish within a few days of tapping, which is why when a certain proportion of a pub’s clientele start drinking other styles it just isn’t worth it for the pub to keep real ale. Hopefully it won’t become a niche thing.
I’ve home brewed a lot of English ales and I agree that those ales should be served warmer. If you don’t, the cold mutes and kills the subtle and rich flavors.
Lagers are good, but a good British Ale is something to savory with good friends.
A lot of people everywhere don’t know how to cook. They don’t even bother to try and learn, so they rely on corporate packaged foods and restaurants. That’s a separate thing from the cuisine of a given place, or the cooking of people that do know how to.
That may seem like sophistry, but it is an important point to remember when talking about cooking when not joking around for fun. You can’t really use people that aren’t actually doing a thing, or have never learned how to do it as an representative example of what a country’s core is. It’s like athletics, you can’t say that Ethiopians are bad ice skaters if the average person can’t access time and equipment to ice skate in the first place. (Not picking on Ethiopia, it was just the first country that came to mind as not being very present in the world ice skating stage).
It’s legit to say that the US has a major food education problem, as does the UK from what I’ve heard, but that is a different issue than the national cuisine.
True, it’s not American cuisine that’s bad, apparently McDonald’s hamburgers taste better in NZ than the USA too, probably because all the beef here is grass fed.
My favourite “traditional” English meal is a good Steak and Kidney pie, made with an ale sauce. Seasoned with lots of pepper, Worcestershire sauce (anchovy sauce), onion and stock. Absolutely delicious.
I think the issue is mostly in the visuals. When you look for traditional English food, it is usually a plate full of beige stuff, sometimes paired with really unappetizing boiled carrots and beans. The gravy being on the side instead of part of the dish doesn’t do it any favors either.
Also I’d argue England has pretty low standards for what counts as “food”. I’ve had to work in England for a month, and finding something fresh, healthy and tasty to eat was a real challenge. I’ve never been as fat as when I came home.
The epitome of the wasted potential of English cuisine is the fact that it’s an island full of the best fishes in the world, yet the only fish you can find is battered cod. Why is it so hard to get a salmon fillet? You have Scottish salmon ffs!
We do have a lot of very bland food over here, but a lot of us like that.
It’s a lot more about the texture sometimes, some of us (not me) can do some amazing roast vegetables and everyone seems to have their own ancient tradition for how to make them
Chess technically has a finite number of moves. Although its a huge number and some have theorized its larger than the number of atoms in the known universe.
It’s not just repeated moves, a draw can be called if the board is in the same state 3 times at all during the game; if you get to the same position 3 times using different moves that still counts, even if it was a white move the first two times and a black move the third.
The game also ends after 50 moves with no captures or pawn moves so you can’t play indefinitely by just avoiding those board states. Interestingly those two moves also make it impossible to return to a previous board state (pawns can’t move backwards, extra pieces are never added) so if you’re enforcing both rules in code you can safely discard previous board states every time you reset the move counter.
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