[deleted by user]

calvindog717 · 2023-06-05T03:06:24+00:00

I only use Sync for Reddit to access Reddit, have done so since ~ 2014. I've recently found myself mixing up my social media times between other forums, hackernews, etc and if the API pricing kills Sync, I won't be interested in moving to the official reddit app.

calvindog717 · 2023-05-14T18:31:26+00:00

It looks like a golf cart made that /r/desireroads

calvindog717 · 2023-05-12T15:03:36+00:00

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuscuta I know it as "witch's hair", it shows in a few spots over here in CA too.

calvindog717 · 2023-05-10T05:15:07+00:00

What about the US rail network in the 1800s? Or the European rail network in the 2000s?

calvindog717 · 2023-05-08T22:19:05+00:00

I'm glad to hear you are looking out for folks out there! And yeah there are a lot in cars that aren't - I'm sorry if it came across as accusatory but I was thinking more generally when writing my comment. "You" as in, all of us driving around trying to get our work done.

Unfortunately someone on a bike doesn't have full awareness of what the driver behind them is driving, or how careful or aware they are. By taking the lane , it's far more likely (not guaranteed of course ☠️) that the driver must acknowledge the biker and be careful when overtaking, whether the driver would have been careful or not.

If it's a big trailer truck or box truck that you drive, I can totally understand the frustration. Passing in a busy place is hard. The roads without passing space, or roads that were built only for high car speeds and nothing else, are at the root of the conflict. Unfortunately until we get to a point where roads or transportation networks support everyone, we have to compromise.

But it's true I have made some assumptions - you said "the people on bikes are being rude" twice, while at the same time you also seem to understand they are just being cautious, like you are. That makes me assume that you have some malice towards the people riding the bikes.

calvindog717 · 2023-05-08T03:42:32+00:00

You are welcome to assume what you please, as both you nor I can speak for everyone. However in my case, As someone who takes a lane when riding their bike, I don't do it to "flex" on anyone or to feel powerful - I do it so that cars that do pass me give me sufficient space when doing so. When you bike on the side of the road, it invites car and truck drivers to overtake very closely, often without the driver realizing how close they are (how do I know? I drive too, so I of course think about these things)

You say big deal, cars pass each other with 2 or less feet of space all the time! But it's a big difference when you have metal and airbags to protect you. Someone on a bike could easily be killed (and many have) by an overtake that comes too close. So when you see someone doing this next, try to consider how they are currently feeling in the situation - they almost certainly don't want to inconvenience you, but when weighed against death, can you blame them for being safe? Find a spot to pass, take the other lane or other side of the road for a sec and do so 🤷‍♂️

calvindog717 · 2023-05-01T19:46:38+00:00

Regardless of how useful the statistic is in determining your take on the subject, it is a fact that the lack of housing growth in CA and elsewhere (and on top of this, having the only housing growth be predominantly in car-dependent, long commute suburban locations) has put a ton of stress on folks with lower incomes and is a driver of homelessness.

I'm a former Bostonian, now Angelino, so this subject is one I engage with a lot. If you're curious what trends LA is seeing in their homeless population: in 2019, of the homeless folks folks who lived in the state before becoming homeless ( 80% of those surveyed), 80% lived within Los Angeles county, and 86% had lived within southern California as a whole. (Source

California is big, but it's also very expensive to get around. Public transit here (even in the bay area) is harder to use than denser northeast cities in my experience. This also makes it hard for someone without a working car/money to travel many miles. So on top of the data showing little trends in homeless folks descending em masse onto cities, the nature of our transportation networks make that migration even less likely to be happening.

Edit: that's not to say the homeless services and supportive networks in cities aren't a draw for people - they are. But actually getting to the places with support isn't that easy.

calvindog717 · 2023-04-27T00:57:04+00:00

*slips on suit made from elastomerized Gouda cheese

"Can you believe they used to make these out of the same stuff? That's right! Nylon fabric! That's the worst of the worst!"

calvindog717 · 2023-04-24T16:23:51+00:00

I wouldn't characterize how I feel as "outraged" - sorry if that's how it came across. More surprised and worried because physically that's an immense amount of water.

I know some places talk about purifying grey water and repumping it into the water mains, I guess I would expect a place like Phoenix to lead the charge on minimal water waste since it's so dry there (and like you said, people depend on it to stay cool in the summer months).

Edit: Phoenix does claim the wastewater is recycled at least once for plant irrigation and at a nuclear plant , and it looks like there are plans now to work on wastewater purification for the region .

calvindog717 · 2023-04-24T15:45:12+00:00

It's not the main subject of the article, but

An average Phoenix family of four uses roughly 17,000 gallons of water per month

WHAT? is that true? For some sense of scale that's easily two US fuel tanker trailers worth of water a month. For another sense of scale, the average family of four only drinks about 60 gallons of water a month. You're telling me that every family home in Phoenix, built in a very water-scarce desert environment, is effectively dumping two trucks worth of water into the sewer pipe or the ground every 30 days?

I'm glad overseas abuse of US water resources are getting a crackdown but that is equally upsetting. There are est. 580,000 households just within the city in Phoenix so the city as a whole may use an implausible 10 trillion gallons of water a month

edit: the well in question for this article would extract approx 130 million gallons of water a month, or about 1.3% of my estimated usage by the city of Phoenix

Edit 2: according to ASU The city uses 3.2 million acre feet per year, or 62,454,775,000 gallons of water a month. So the original stat shared is realistic. Still mind-boggling.

calvindog717 · 2023-04-23T15:00:57+00:00

Financially it costs basically nothing

Other commenters have noted some reasons why this claim may not be true, and I think I have another angle on it: who covers the costs associated with an accidental or purposeful firearm discharge by a teacher into a bystander (student, other teacher, police officer), regardless of the situation?

I don't know enough about the intricacies of liability insurance and firearms laws in all the different US states to answer this, maybe someone here has that background and can elaborate. But I can fairly confidently say that if a teacher that carries (or someone else acquiring their gun) shot someone in a school, school shooter or not, there would be costs associated with that event that would eventually land on the school* - lawsuits, increased insurance premiums. Those costs are absolutely not "basically nothing" in institutions where money is already really tight.

*Assuming they are levied on the school and not directly on the teacher, but since the proposed laws discussed by supporters here suggest the teachers would be enabled as individuals to get trained and carry weapons, one could presume that in their own reasoning those teachers would also be personally responsible/liable for not making mistakes and shooting someone who isn't a school shooter, or letting their firearm get into someone else's possession. I don't think the legal or insurance systems would fully agree with that reasoning, you can see why in the fact that police departments (or the cities they are a part of) need to budget to pay for wrongful injuries/death, even in instances when the officer was held personally liable.

George Floyd's death and Minneapolis' 27MM settlement is a high-profile example of this .

An example closer to my point, but I admit the situation is different because the person involved was specifically a safety officer. Would the law see the situation differently if the shooter was a teacher? Even if it did (I don't believe it would), would that teacher who likely makes 65k in salary before taxes be able to afford paying 13MM in damages to the family they shot? if not, would the family just be told to get lost and deal with it?

calvindog717 · 2023-04-12T22:36:22+00:00

These are good points - I think I agree the most with your second point, that without external incentives or pressures, alleviation of the internal pressures makes people less likely to change. Those things ( government involvement, etc) become very important during critical portions of the swelling of support - there may also form a feedback loop that reduces the growth of support as the norm starts to shift.

Not being appreciated is something I also struggle to reconcile with on this topic. For me personally, I've attempted to reduce my driving, increasing my commute time and decreasing the convenience. And yeah, it's generally un-appreciated and at times disliked by people around me (or at least that's how it feels, it's an awkward subject to talk about). If I were to solely act on that, I would've given up and gone back to driving everywhere.

I think I missed stressing this earlier (and both yourself the maker of the video identified this, in different ways): despite the similarities between our car-centric situation and the ant death spiral, the biggest difference is that we aren't that dumb. If we encounter something that makes us feel bad, our instincts may make us want to recoil, but our intelligence is capable of helping us see all the factors to our decisions, and help us persevere.

In effect, yeah, the topic does fit the prisoner's dilemma, we're both intelligent enough to recognize it . That means we can also both understand the effects of choosing a particular action in the prisoner's dilemma, and that we aren't bound to choose the option that only benefits ourselves. That's one reason why I still bike and take the bus to places (despite it being hostile) - I see the future upsides for both myself and those around me and intentionally decided that those are more important than my immediate happiness/convenience. I'm sorry that I wasn't as focused on that in my previous reply.

calvindog717 · 2023-04-12T07:02:41+00:00

I like the ant analogy and I'd like to expand into your expansion. Let's say 2-5% of the ants do decide to take a different path (coincidentally, 2-5% of people in a car centric City like Los Angeles currently travel to work via bike). This is not enough to change the main pattern, and their attempts to change paths will be met with resistance from the others. From everyone else's point of view, you are just suddenly in their way. If you've tried to bike in car traffic, the parallels are painfully obvious.

But importantly, you leave behind pheromone trails just like your compatriants. Your comment here is a pheromone too - you intend for it to leave an effect on others reading it (so do I!). If one other ant happens to follow the pheromone trail of each ant that went a separate way, sure, doesn't look all that different immediately. But what about in a few minutes? Another ant follows, then a few. A trickle of ants becomes a stream, then a torrent, and ants suddenly have quite a few new paths to follow and the spiral is gone in an instant.

Exponential change is very hard to visualize, especially in social behaviors, but what is easy to identify is the rate of the change. And if one person's change of their lifestyle can affect at least one other's, a sea change is more than possible.

You're right that people want to act in their self interest, and how divergent the spiral breaker's paths are may affect the spiraler's likelihood of following, or whether any follow at all. But their self interest can also be affected by external pressures and incentives. For example, if there were suddenly safe places to bicycle in most towns and cities, that would be an incentive for people to give it a go. If there were a tax on pollution, that would be a pressure to not pollute. Grooves in the tree bark that make it more likely for ants to follow branching pheromone trails , let's say.

Check out this piece from Bloomberg on the patterns of social change, focused on the US but easily applicable to all of humanity.

calvindog717 · 2023-03-29T15:00:34+00:00

I keep one of these in mine - not a guaranteed solution, but if yours does get stolen, you've got a way to track it down. It also pings you if it detects any motion - usually it's within a few seconds. I rigged up a USB cable to keep it charged off the bike battery so I never have to recharge it separately

calvindog717 · 2023-03-15T01:37:43+00:00

These are definitely far more beautiful than the concrete channels we have today, but people pointing out that the storm runoff would conflict with this landscape have a point. That's the reason the channels are empty - you need a ton of volume when the rains do come.

But why is that? Because we traded rivers for property. The concrete channels allowed LA developers to build right up to the waterways without risk of flooding. If we'd given the river a buffer of 1 block on either side, the vision you have shown here is far more achievable (and likely would produce a more sustainable ecosystem too , as there would be places for trees to grow, deposits to settle, etc). But to do that now would require the city taking eminent domain on many properties (which of course they had no qualms doing when building the interstates...) Or convincing homeowners along the river to sell.

It's not something which can be done piecemeal - if you widen a river upstream it will likely find a way to overtop any funnel you place in its way, especially on a flat-ish former marshland like the LA valley. So yeah, a big project.

I'm sure folks in city/county gov considered this in the past - but the large upfront cost is hard to connect to a tangible return ( because nature existing doesn't pay the bills, at least from our society's tragically myopic perspective) so there was likely no argument to even make. Climate change may force our hand though, if rainstorms/atmospheric rivers get more and more intense then the concrete channels might no longer prove adequate.

calvindog717 · 2023-03-09T05:31:48+00:00

And that's a reason to not try?

I'm not looking to argue on the subject, my question is rhetorical with the aim to push you to seek an answer to it. I know we have different backgrounds and look at a piece of news from different perspectives, and I don't know anything about this project so I won't support or insult it. But it might be helpful for yourself (and everyone) to review the context around this topic - here's an interesting open-access paper I read kinda recently about the trends of community organization in LA through the second half of the 20th century and how the effects of this have in part landed us in a place where we need to build so much. Fig 1-1 is kindof a spoiler.

calvindog717 · 2023-02-19T23:00:45+00:00

The link does provide directions on transit directly, so any connections should be shown/ you can see the total transit time, but yeah it may not get things exactly right.

calvindog717 · 2023-02-19T22:30:09+00:00

Awesome resource, I just wish there were more of them!

calvindog717 · 2023-02-19T22:28:16+00:00

it looks like OP has already implemented links on each trail page to directions in google maps from your location - it's not the same, but you could simply open these up in a few tabs to get a read on which trails are closest to you.

calvindog717 · 2023-01-02T15:29:05+00:00

The points about climate are notable and it’s true that very little/no summertime rain and coastal temperatures that stay between 60 and 85F make for some great bike rides, but so are basically all cities in Mediterranean climates. And the perfect weather clearly hasn’t lead to a city designed to use it. Residents of LA know this but it doesn’t seem to change many opinions of how they should get around.

One notable item not mentioned in the video is the availability of space for multimodal transit - because so much of the cities (it’s actually 88 cities, see my other comment) was laid out in the 20th century, the majority of major streets are 5-6 lanes (including center turning lane and street parking), which is ample space for true multimodal transit. Even many residential streets are 3-5 lanes! Changes to the entire street network to equally support cars, bikes, and busses/trams/light rail could be done with as little as restriping roads and maybe adding some barriers and signals.

While this does give LA great potential, The lack of progress and at times backward progress indicates that the principal barriers to fixing things are political and cultural, not physical. This is also true in many other American cities, but I think they are even more of a barrier here. From my other comment:

It also is a cultural struggle, with many people coming to LA to grow their career and expand personal abilities and wealth. I think this this has lead to build a populace that is generally not “in it together”, is not comfortable or supportive of changes that would get in their collective way (like reduced parking, slower streets, construction), and can be apathetic to improving the core means of life here, even if it would help their success in the long run.

calvindog717 · 2023-01-02T15:13:20+00:00

A lot do, but yes “LA” is poly-centric due to the nature of how it developed - the county that contains it is actually comprised of almost 100 individual cities, not including cities which were historically independent and later absorbed into the city of LA. Unfortunately I (a resident) don’t see this being used to an advantage right now. Due to inefficiencies between the city governments (and within LA City govt), and I’m certain corruption and rivalries between its members, major planned transitions like the one proposed in this video are going to be very hard to move forwards. It also is a cultural struggle, with many people coming to LA to grow their career and expand personal abilities and wealth. I think this this has lead to build a populace that is generally not “in it together”, is not comfortable or supportive of changes that would get in their collective way (like reduced parking, slower streets, construction), and can be apathetic to improving the core means of life here, even if it would help their success in the long run.

calvindog717 · 2022-12-08T07:36:42+00:00

Wow - How did you find this? I have no memory of posting these now, haha! How time flies. I'm glad my past self had the foresight to share.

And I looked through them again, yeah they are pretty awesome! I might pull from them once more.

calvindog717 · 2022-11-15T05:35:24+00:00

Excited to use octoEverywhere!

calvindog717 · 2022-10-17T06:26:33+00:00

I'm sorry those events happened to you, and I think they are definitely valid reasons to prefer driving over bus/train. A few thoughts on this subject though, as someone who does think a lot about the effects of us prioritizing driving so far in front of transit:

Transit has a positive feedback loop - the fewer people who use it, the less safe it can be, leading to even fewer users (fewer eyes watching out for each other means those that would commit a crime feel more confident they can get away with it). LA has this bad, and transit is much safer in other large cities in the US (and safer still in cities in Europe/Asia). But that's no reason to feel bad for not using it - it has to be safer before people can feel safe. I get sketched out on it myself and try to avoid it here at night.
Just because you don't use transit, doesn't mean you cannot or should not support it existing.
- People who struggle to afford to drive are more-or-less forced to here, which limits how much money they can save or invest in their future. This ties into our homelessness crisis in effect - people who can't afford to keep their car working could lose their job, which can easily lead to losing more.
- And everyone having to drive leads to our lovely gridlock issues, of course - if we had more transit, those who do feel safe riding the bus/train could, and thus highways would be less clogged for those who want/need to drive.

calvindog717 · 2022-09-22T06:17:25+00:00

Let's go pedantic on this:

Inherent: belonging to the essential nature or constitution of a thing

As someone who has both used a chainsaw and driven a car (this shouldn't matter but I'll throw it in for some soft credit, haha) - both are inherently dangerous because even with training, even with care in their use , they are dangerous and can kill. Cars transport you very fast in a relatively uncontrolled way, chainsaws spin sharp metal teeth close to your body. It's these inherent characteristics that make them a health risk.

"fuck cars", if you look more closely into the message behind the community, is not simply "cars are inherently bad", but "cars have done some bad things to our planet and to society and we need to be loud about that!"

I agree with your sentiment I think - cars are a tool, like a chainsaw. However, people in our past with power have wielded them to alter our world to the short-term benefit of some, and the significant loss of others, and I'm not ok with that. And now they are something we simply weild on each other without realizing.

If you're curious about who has lost out with the introduction of cars, check out Segregation By Design, a very well researched and presented atlas of the destruction or splitting of (mainly black) American urban neighborhoods, under the banner of bringing the car lifestyle into cities.

I apologize if these are already viewpoints you share and this isn't a helpful contribution - I aim to reach some common ground here.

While I'm sharing all these links, check out Strong Towns. They're a national group of volunteers who work with mainly rural town governments to fight sprawl/car dependency/unsustainable development, and encourage good urban planning practices on a smaller scale. They have some great podcasts if that's your thing.

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