• 7 Posts
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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2025

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  • Cool. So there’s this intersection near my house where there’s a right-turn slip lane onto a 3-lane stroad. Used to be, it’d have a green arrow at the same time as the opposite direction had green and left-turn green arrow. It saved time by shortening the light cycle. Drivers are supposed to make a turn into the nearest lane of the street they’re entering, so you’d think that two cars could enter three lanes simultaneously, but nope. Too many conflicts with left-turning drivers crossing all three lanes into the far lane that the right-turning drivers were also entering.

    So the city changed the light timing.

    But, fuck, man, drivers think their shit don’t stink because they don’t even bother to learn all of the laws they’re violating.

    (P.S. They also roll through most stop signs.)







  • Not ar all. The GOP were angry, or left in stunned silence for weeks; it was fascinating at the time to watch them re-frame the narrative in public, in real time. In the first days, though, I doubt they would’ve objected. And so what if they did? Biden was the President, how would they stop him? If there had been a MAGA uprising, it could have been crushed, just like Occupy Wall Street was.

    Also, plenty of people objected to the flouting of due process in 2002. The difference is not that some people objected.


  • In the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attack, the government captured and held hundreds of men without due process, which it justified as exigent circumstances. In the aftermath of the nation’s democratic institutions being attacked, which was an exigent circumstance if I’ve ever seen one, it did nothing. There were thousands of people involved, and lots of evidence to collect, but we knew who the ringleaders were. They should have been in Gitmo by the end of the day on January 21st, 2021.

    But, as the OC said, this country never holds the powerful accountable.



  • Headlines have their own, unique grammar rules in English. They elide a lot of words to save space.

    In general, the semi-colon joins two distinct clauses that could each stand alone as sentences, but it implies more of a relationship between them than a period would. In this headline the implication is that they have not finalized the deal despite good progress because of the President’s hesitation. In contrast, colons join two clauses with the explicit meaning that one clause introduces, or elaborates on, the other. Here, headlinespeak kind of abuses that usage to show that the ideas expressed in the first clause are explained as originating from Vance. It’s much more common to put the name of the person first, like, “Vance: Iran and US…”

    So, the headline is saying that according to statements by JD Vance, Iran and the US have made good progress on a deal, but [REDACTED] hasn’t approved it yet.



  • Fitting perfectly into an economy airliner seat is 10/10, the once every 3-4 years that I do that. But cars have their own issues when you’re below the average size: Bad sightlines, arm rests too high, seatbelts that saw at your throat for the whole trip rather than cross your shoulder, increased injury and mortality rates because of those seatbelts and airbags, which are optimized for taller drivers, controls out of reach, and such.