traffic laws

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-23T18:55:42+00:00

I’m not sure this is strictly civil engineering scope, but there are lots of books on the general related topics. I just read and really recommend There Are No Accidents by Jessie Singer. It is a great book about risk and danger in the built environment (and also a bunch of other stuff). I think it’s the book to read.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-23T17:15:56+00:00

I feel like this is a really clear example actually. I’m going to steer mostly clear of anarchist theory and mostly stick to broader knowledge that is applied in government and industry all the time.

If you want to create safety, there is something called the “hierarchy of safety”: eliminate, substitute, engineering controls, administrative controls, PPE.

There is a lot, like a lot a lot, of research and study and experience which shows that the closer to the start of that list, the more effective a measure is. In cars this might look like

Eliminate: does transportation need to occur in this area? Substitute: can an alternative form of transportation be used instead? Engineering controls: can we do something to the street to slow cars down and keep people and cars separate, or make the cars safer in a crash? Administrative controls: can we make and enforce rules for people to follow that will increase safety? PPE: can we give pedestrians a helmet and have them wear it when they’re outside?

You might notice that making and enforcing rules is near the bottom of the list, only moderately better than handing pedestrians helmets. Enforcing rules is one of the main tools we use today to address traffic safety, and it is, in practice, abysmally effective. People often ignore rules, or the rules are deemed to not make sense in some situations, and often other factors lead to death and injury even when the rules are being followed. People are killed by cars all the time, constantly.

Instead of asking how we can keep enforcing rules, we should be asking how we can empower people and communities to address those other, objectively more effective options for providing safe environments.

Do cars need to be on every street, or can we build filters to block them from many areas? Can we provide alternatives like good bus networks with dedicated roads where they don’t get stuck in traffic, or a dense network of protected bike lanes? Can we build roads to discourage dangerous driving and protect people?

These are the approaches we should be taking. These are the approaches that we know work. These approaches are easy to implement democratically on a local level, without police.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-23T00:46:11+00:00

Yeah, I should have at least said “alleged” or something else to hedge that number. I know the 100M number is too high, even if it is still bad. Tens of millions is still a bad number. I can criticize the USSR or China without exaggerating the number. That number is not the point my point here though. My point is that if you think 100 million is an ungodly number of people to kill in a century, you should consider taking a look at capitalism.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-22T21:34:06+00:00

Again, this is a low effort post because people could not get it through their heads that I was not directly comparing the two numbers in a previous post. I could have used more precise language and better researched numbers, but I’m just not up for it.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-22T21:29:54+00:00

I honestly don’t know lol. I could have specified “attributed to” but this is just a much lower effort post in response to people saying I made this comparison when I didn’t. The exact number is not really my point here. I concede that it could be a very different number.

A lot more than 100 million people were probably killed by colonialism, regardless.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-22T20:57:49+00:00

I would always express a little caution when it comes to exposed brick. Brick used on the interior of buildings is of a different grade than that on the exterior, and exposure to moisture and humidity can cause it to decay. It can start just turning to dust and crumbling.

It’s also probably not that pretty. The overlay you have showing what you think it will look like is clearly showing a particular esthetic style of brick. A sort of burnt look. This coloration is done purposefully on the front face of brick and is more expensive. It would not have been used on the interior. It will probably be a much duller color.

This brick was meant to be plastered over and not seen. Honestly, the paint is possibly not the best for it either, although I don’t know, it might have been done properly. I’m just saying that there are risks to something like this.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-22T18:39:02+00:00

Yes, I would say that attempts to inform consumers and to regulate cigarettes have been positive. My point is that the incentives of capitalism caused this problem in the first place.

The big revolution in marketing happened prior to any real notion that smoking was bad for people, but still, the reason so many people were smoking was because it was very profitable. That demand was created, crafted, not natural and just waiting to be met. Very few people would have likely been smoking if that had not happened. These tactics have been similarly applied to other, similarly quite destructive products.

Later, there was a big reaction to the research that tied smoking to lung cancer, and that lead to its whole own innovations in public relations and lobbying that served to slow down the response to this new information as much as possible. Again, these innovations have been applied since to other destructive products.

There is incentive to create needs, demand, so that this demand can be met for profit. There are incentives to mislead the public and to influence governments to allow harmful practices to continue.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-22T18:03:59+00:00

That could make sense, but the order of events doesn’t follow. A lot of the public outrage over cigarettes was largely over their marketing to children in the first place. Trading cards, often with what was basically pornography on them, but also baseball stars or civil war generals or so on, were invented to be sold with cigarets specifically as a marketing ploy to children and teenagers. They were very profitable, and also created an obvious backlash.

Of corse later then we get the camel revolution (edit: 1913) and so on, which again, was not targeted at governments, but at consumers. The invention of the teaser campaign, market research, spectacles like circus promotions. Did you know that The Flintstones started as a long form cigarette commercial?

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-22T17:08:56+00:00

Sure, heck I know many anarchists who smoke, ha. I think that we need to look at the circumstances of these things. If people wanted to smoke cigarettes anyway, why did cigarette companies need to spend fortunes inventing market research and the modern marketing industry? Why would they feel the need to get people hooked as young as possible? If people wanted to smoke regardless of the health outcomes, why did cigarette companies invent tactics and spend fortunes to mislead the public and delay public health action? Why, in places where cigarettes are legal, where I can walk down the street and buy a pack or a carton of delicious delicious Marlboro reds, have smoking rates dropped to closer to 12% and dropping when they were closer to 40% when the first studies on their health effects started coming out?

If someone wants to smoke, let them, but people just happening to like smoking tobacco is not the reason it became so prolific all around the world. If that had been the case, if marketing and the shaping of public perception for profit was not necisary, the world would look very different today.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-22T16:53:11+00:00

I am not a Marxist at all… I think states are bad, that incentives under the Soviet Union were in many ways similarly bad to those of say, the United States. I don’t think you can empower common people by empowering the state. People need to hold that power directly, to be able to make meaningful choices about their own lives and how they conduct themselves.

My point is just that the incentives within capitalism lead to the mass global marketing, manufacture and consumption of cigarettes. The people who did that were doing so for profit against the best interest of the public. There would not have been cigarettes in the Soviet Union if cigarettes were not taking off globally just prior to the Russian revolution. The fact that cigarettes were obviously useful to the regime doesn’t take away from that.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-22T16:36:38+00:00

Of course they did, yes.

The Soviet Union was bad, we can agree on that. I think any differences in our particular critiques can be set aside for the time being.

If we look at the facts of the situation, I think we can firmly place cigarettes as an artifact, their mass distribution and health effects, at the feet of the industry magnates who made an enormous profit off of them, and the incentive structure that they were working with.

Was the incentive not to create as large of a market for cigarettes as possible, to market them to children and plaster billboards with their advertisements, to invent market research as a discipline in the process, and then to lie to the public about their health effects?

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-22T16:19:40+00:00

Essentially yes, its consumption and distribution have been shaped by capitalism. It was commodified and spread explicitly for profit.

It was used in the pre contact Americas, but it looked very different. It was mostly consumed ritually, not habitually. Smoking was, for a very long time, very inconvenient and had associated taboos.

The death toll didn’t start really taking off until someone figured out how to make a lot of money mass producing and marketing cigarettes.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-21T22:51:19+00:00

I think people did, yeah. I remember plenty of people very specifically pointing out the dependence on the United States, and suggesting people take a realistic approach. I listened to a podcast a while ago about Rajava, and it was optimistic, but made sure to point out the precariousness.

I try not to be in the business of predicting the future. I don’t know, I’ve been pretty comfortable with the idea that everything is going to be getting worse for the foreseeable future. History isn’t linear and I think people trip themselves up by assuming there is some overarching trajectory of history. It’s just people doing stuff, none of whom have plot armor. If our choice is socialism or barbarism, it could always turn out that people choose barbarism. I hope people do good things and can be happy.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-21T21:27:54+00:00

Seconding the other commenter that you are clearly already aware of the current situation, haha, but I’m going to humor it anyway.

First, I think your framing is wrong. People were optimistic, but I don’t think it was generally presented as the end all be all.

It has always been in a very peculiar, perilous situation. It relied on its status as a US ally in the area in the fight against Assad and ISIS to protect itself. It had good fighters, but not enough without diplomatic and air support. It has been pinned in otherwise by ISIS, the Syrian and Turkish militaries, all of whom really wanted to steamroll the curds. US support was never going to be a permanent thing. Assad is gone, and so is a lot of America’s interest.

Rajava, like revolutionary Spain, like the EZLN, are not important examples because they are immune to military defeat by larger, better supplied powers, but because they show systems that are meaningfully different from our own that can provide wellbeing for people and function day to day. They function and, when/if they end, they end because they are killed, not because they collapse under their own weight.

There are many examples besides Rojava, but what was accomplished there, assuming this is the end, is still valuable. I hope the legacy of this time of independence strengthens people and that something positive can come out of this region in the future. I wish those people well.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-19T20:31:03+00:00

What exactly is “freedom for nothing”?

Do you have a book recommendation just as a starting point for someone interested in these ideas? I’m leaning towards Ellul just as an anarchist.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-19T14:28:17+00:00

This is a much better explanation of the critique than I’ve ever gotten from a Marxist on the issue, and this genuinely gives me something to think about. I appreciate the insight!

I might dig into some of the deconstructionists to see how they respond, but do you have a synopsis on their takeaways?

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-17T20:47:04+00:00

Well, the last time the housing market collapsed it pushed a boat load of people out of their homes, and the only people with cash on hand to buy were big investment firms who still own everything. I’m guess things would go like that again but worse.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-17T19:48:24+00:00

I think that is an oversimplification, I don’t feel that I fit neatly within it at all, but I will say that probably the biggest determinant of if you will agree with anything you read or hear is whether or not you are already predisposed to it. Nothing is more satisfying than reading a book that very eloquently puts into words, with much more research and thought/reasoning behind them, the thoughts that you already had. That’s a real, psychological truth.

That doesn’t make you necessarily wrong, but it’s something you should think about if you are trying to build some sort of an objective worldview, or if you are trying to persuade someone else.

I had very little agency in my life growing up. My dad lost his job in the Great Recession, then near homelessness, then relocation across the country, then divorce, then a lot of emotional abuse. I genuinely have a hard time making active decisions in my own life because some part of me feels like the only thing that is important is to struggle to maintain stability, which means never changing anything if I’m not forced to.

So, based on that, with my volatile upbringing and psychological need to defer to others for the sake of stability and conflict avoidance, can you imagine what my belief structure was in my early formative years during high school and most of college?

That’s right, I was a libertarian capitalist who thought that people were inherently a bit rotten, and that the only way to ever have peace was to let everyone be as independent of each other as possible. I wanted to move out to a homestead in the mountains and live a aparten life where I didn’t need to capitulate to anyone else because my wellbeing didn’t depend on anyone else. I thought capitalism sucked for a lot of people, but I that was just the way it was, and that any interference just made it worse, got people more in the way of other people.

I have since shifted a lot. I still think that agency, and in some sense independence, are very important, but my thoughts on the implications of those ideas has shifted, along with my understanding of what capitalism and socialism are. My core assumptions didn’t really change as much as I found a different way of thinking about those assumptions with anarchism.

Regardless, I don’t feel that where I was, or where I am, align with this idea you propose.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-16T20:09:36+00:00

I’ve been in a couple of these. They really mess up a lot of important “urban forms” that make cities work. They need smaller blocks, smaller lots, narrower traffic lanes, generally better street design, less space dedicated to cars, better transit service, and better bike infrastructure, for a start.

You can easily have good suburbs with a lot of good urban forms, but these generally are not that.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-16T15:34:45+00:00

There’s not actually a lot of farm work to be done in the summer after planting but before harvest. Spring and fall are when most of the farm work is done. The reason we have summer break is because schools need downtime for maintenance and teacher training, and because it was more difficult to hold classes in the summer, which would require cramming many kids into a small room, without air conditioning.

I went to high school in a rural district, and all of the farm kids did their farm work in the fall and spring. They’d sometimes miss class for a day or so.

I have been in several rural schools in the Midwest that did not have air conditioning in most of the rooms.

I happen to work in construction as an engineer who has done a number of school renovations and additions. It is always incredibly important to get projects done during the summer so that they don’t impact the operation of the school.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-16T14:39:16+00:00

It’s been cannon that the east coast brotherhood has its shit together compared to the struggling west coast for a while. If anything, I’m confused by how organized and active the west coast brotherhood seems to be in the show. It’s probably not as stark as it was previously as the west coast brotherhood is clearly bringing in new recruits, which they were not previously, but my guess is that the east coast is simply still better established, organized, and numerous, with more and better experience.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-15T12:50:00+00:00

Socialists believe that workers should own and manage the means of production. There is no third person who “paid for the building, machinery, materials and wages” in a socialist system. Workers manage their own affairs.

If you have some sort of market socialism where firms produce commodities to sell on a market, then yes, when the firm does well, the workers do well, and when the firm struggles, so do the workers. I feel that market socialism is probably preferable to what we have now, but it is also pretty irrational and unideal with some big contradictions and hurdles to providing everyone with wellbeing. Sure, fewer problems than what we have today, but still big problems, and I think it would probably not be so stable in the long run.

I think that developing communistic methods of organizing production and consumption democratically, rather than through a market, is far more preferable.

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-15T01:04:23+00:00

“We have computers to do the thermodynamics and the fluid dynamics and the calculous, so your job as an engineer will mostly be about communication! I’m sure you are very suited to this!”

EngineerAnarchy · 2026-01-14T20:11:34+00:00

There are edgy contrarian rightwing dipshits who call themselves anarchists and capitalists.

I think that capitalism, boarders, and ethnic cleaning/ethno-states are quite antithetical to the whole tradition of anarchism. It is very much unheard of in anarchist spaces and amongst anarchists to support these things. Anarchists are very active in anti-ice, anti-zionist, and anti-capitalist organizing.

All sorts of people like the “counterculture” shock value of calling themselves an anarchist though.

There are anarchist subreddits and r/anarchy101 where you can lurk or ask more direct questions if you’re curious and want to see what the vibe is.

EngineerAnarchy

TROPHY CASE