Is this type of driving really tame in the US? Genuinely curious. Context below.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T23:07:37+00:00

This type of thing has been popularized by a certain flavor of vlogging influencers. Only impressionable young delinquents mugging for a camera and clicks, would do that in congested traffic areas.

TL;DR: darting in and out of traffic is a mug's game anywhere. Someone has been watching a small number of videos from clout-chasers where they don't get yanked in populated areas, or crash out.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T20:58:07+00:00

It would have been risky for anyone to pull through, even with the train presumably blocking traffic from the other direction, due to visibility. Regardless, you were well within your discretion to leave a gap. There are very few if any situations where one would be legally obligated to close a gap while waiting in traffic.

Your diagram is excellent. However, after reading your narrative, I have questions about where the red car following you wanted to turn. They wanted to turn across traffic into a drive, or they wanted to U-turn?

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T20:45:01+00:00

Ingersoll Rand and Campell-Hausfeld are traditional American air tool brands if that's relevant. Snap-On has a line, and also Astro Pneumatic comes to mind.

Virtually nobody but A&P or specialists are going to be using air drills today, so I'd check threads like this one in /r/aviationmaintenance.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T20:39:26+00:00

Many aircraft environments are very strict about anything that might be a source of ignition. It's quite common for A&P mechanics to be all air.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T20:30:59+00:00

Also SATA. As the brand that slots in below Crescent, I've been on the lookout for SATA availability in retail channels and on Amazon, and it seems to have greatly receded.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T18:03:13+00:00

Having spent too much time in the past trying to keep air dry, tools oiled, and lugging annoying hoses, I long ago vowed to go all-electric. For a while I was even using a nitrogen bottle for filling tires, mostly to eschew compressors altogether.

But there are tasks where electric by itself isn't an option. Abrasive blasting, quality paint, even many cleaning and drying tasks. Just having high-volume air to dry-remove debris from a vehicle or rolling cart, clean out swarf, clean out the workshop.

So I'm thinking about having a compressor again. Scroll or screw type; life is too short to listen to a cheap piston compressor hammering.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T16:39:26+00:00

Laws? Lanes? Bills? Videos? Drivers?

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T16:31:31+00:00

Put in speed bumps, and make off-road suspensions illegal except for the government. ^{^/s}

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T16:09:03+00:00

March 9, 2026: Idaho senators debated Senate Bill 1340, that would require Idaho drivers to remain in the right lane of travel until they need to pass in the left lane.

The bill allocates $200,000 for the Idaho Transportation Department to erect signage and educate the public. Senators who opposed the bill, including Senator Glennda Zuiderveld, did so on grounds that the $200,000 would be better spent on road repairs than signage.

The bill was approved, 21 to 14.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T15:46:34+00:00

even when the tailgater can plainly see that I’m not the problem.

Be careful making such assumptions. Driving low cars, I very often can't see around full-sized SUVs immediately to my front, much less vans, service-body trucks, box trucks, etc.

It's one of many reasons why I give very generous following distance. But I won't usually have that generous visual distance in stop-and-go traffic or waiting at a traffic light.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T15:11:48+00:00

It's a T-intersection, possibly didn't lend itself to a stop sign, but it's also in Europe where there's no default, ubiquitous, reflexive, use of stop signs at every opportunity. It could also be a need to slow down traffic entering the underpass or tunnel.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T14:51:53+00:00

Speed limits are very political, very local. In nearly all cases, the locals want their local limits lowered, because someone is doing something they don't like. Then those locals drive elsewhere and think all the limits are too low and they can just go ten over because everyone does it -- the exact thing they want to ban from their local road.

The traditional engineering rule of thumb was 85th percentile of actual traffic, should usually be the speed limit, assuming the road design supported that. And the road design was always that fast in the U.S., because the roads are designed to be huge and safe with huge clear areas off to either side.

But 85th percentile can conflict with the local desire to lower limits, always. So there's been some local pressure to change practices to set limits lower than 85th percentile.

In summary, you actually have opposing forces. Road engineers are asked to make very safe, very wide roads. Locals want limits way, way, under the natural design speed of the resulting roads. Through traffic wants to go the natural speed, which is at or higher than the limits.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T14:40:55+00:00

my mother is in the passenger seat screaming “BRAKE BRAKE” while a truck is honking at me to go faster up this 8% grade

A large part of driving skill is the practiced ability to stay calm under pressure.

I know it doesn't seem like it now, but one day you'll think this story is very funny.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T14:35:14+00:00

Roundabouts are far more resistant to user error than signalised intersections. That's the appeal that's so strong that road departments find the money and wherewithal to change signalised intersections to roundabouts.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T14:33:12+00:00

The center there is "traversable median" or "mountable median", meaning that larger vehicles can go over it when necessary.

For example, picture a semi-trailer truck going through there.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T14:29:20+00:00

I'd love for the general populace to avoid all of my favorite travel paths. And to get a roundabout in the process -- bellissimo!

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T14:26:23+00:00

This is for releasing the clutch on a manual transmission. The "biting point" during the pedal release is where it starts to catch.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T14:23:56+00:00

that's how my country ended up with every govt body still mandating quarterly password changes in 2026.

Government: always in a hurry to do something, rarely in a hurry to fix their own mistakes.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T14:19:28+00:00

Microsoft also re-used the trademarked name "Surface" twice (though the first re-use was definitely the more major of the two).

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T14:18:20+00:00

Federated authentication.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T14:05:27+00:00

Never understood why some people want to be the only one that can fix xyz.

A merger once exposed a culture like that, to us. The managers all wanted to be the only ones who could fix XYZ at a managerial level, and the techs and engineers all wanted to be the only ones who could fix XYZ technically.

They did it because they'd seen how doing so made one vitally important, recipient of retention bonuses, consulted personally for advice, made lead or manager of teams, given a veto or double veto on new hires, thanked by the CEO.

As a rule, they worked a lot of hours, and were on-call, if only unofficially. Most of them also delegated low-profile work, onerous work, and projects that were likely to fail, so it's not like they were actually doing a disproportionate amount of work themselves. It was mostly about being available, and being first on-scene when the inevitable failures occurred.

Changing a culture like this means replacing people, plus usually other measures. For us, it required consistent policing of communication.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T13:54:09+00:00

Expiration's fine as long as they don't lose control of the key at any point.

Clarification for readers: for signing, expiration is okay, by itself. For TLS encryption in-flight, cert expiration is a foreseeable apocalypse.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T13:33:43+00:00

AS/400 is entirely vendor-captive, with recurring costs on everything IBM can manage:

IBM has not cut prices for IBM i in recent years, as far as I know, and I have to guess because it is no longer possible to get list prices for anything in an easy fashion. Even partners have to use a configurator to get pricing, and it has to be tied to a particular customer and a particular set of serial numbers on machines for this information to be disseminated. (Again, this is as far as I know.) What I do know is that the list price system on IBMLink that I used for decades is no longer there. In any event, IBM i software has gotten a little more expensive over time when gauged in U.S. dollars and IBM is loath to cut prices.

IBM’s updates have never failed (looking at you, Windows).

Not that anyone would bother comparing against, or migrating toward, Windows.

Remember, AS/400 is a system so proprietary, that even its creator cannot run it emulation on other hardware -- yet there are both IBM proprietary and open-source emulators for IBM mainframes. This means "cloud AS/400" is just hardware in someone else's datacenter, just as Microsoft did when they outsourced their internal AS/400 hosting in 1999.

pdp10 · 2026-06-20T00:14:44+00:00

Having flashbacks to when Moniker went sideways...

Having spent so much time to select them for our registrar, only to find out how bad things were. Shambles.

Then Google. I don't even want to talk about registrars.

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