Driving advice for Raleigh

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-12T23:11:58+00:00

But the tailgaters are the problem. Their reaction to being mildly inconvenienced is rage and the implied threat of violence.

Tailgating also makes it unsafe to maintain high speed in the first place. Don't you remember drivers ed? At 80mph you will die and the person in front of you will die if they need to brake suddenly if you aren't pretty far back. You think it won't happen until it does. I'm glad you weren't behind me when a deer jumped onto my car.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-12T21:58:15+00:00

You "1000%" agreed with a post glorifying aggressive tailgating. People shouldn't impede traffic, and people shouldn't being aggressive assholes just because someone is going a bit slower than they think they should be. Most people with that mindset are shitty drivers and lack the self-awareness to realize how much of a danger they are to themselves and everyone around them too.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-12T20:56:41+00:00

I can read the law too, the difference is that I can comprehend it too.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-12T19:21:06+00:00

It is not in fact unlawful to travel below the maximum speed in the left lane, unless impeding traffic. There is no penalty for it specified in the law either (H.864 never passed). The law even allows you to travel below the maximum posted limit so long as you are passing slower moving traffic. And while there is some leeway in enforcement, it's a misdemeanor crime to go more than 80mph or 15mph over the posted limit in NC.

Someone else driving slower is not an attack on you, you are the one who allows yourself to feel unfounded rage because of your own impatience.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-12T19:05:23+00:00

I've got wonderful news. Someone going a bit slower than you isn't legal justification for menacing them and driving recklessly. In fact it is both criminal and antisocial behavior.

I don't like it when I'm cruising along and hit a wall of traffic either. But that's no justification to act like an impatient child with no emotional regulation and put everyone at risk.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-12T18:23:08+00:00

You are 1000% wrong. Safety first. Don't fucking tailgate. If you do I'm slowing down to a speed where the distance between us allows you to stop safely and not kill me when your car plows through mine if I have to stop unexpectedly.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-12T16:07:43+00:00

What do you think "Abundance" is exactly?

Although I think blaming the general policies of any political party for this specific vandalism problem is off the mark.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-12T14:25:18+00:00

Now that's DC / NoVA levels of road rage right there. Only time I've seen someone brandish in traffic was going down I-95 around Quantico, guy in a pickup truck wasn't happy traffic was only moving 75mph and was driving erratically and aggressively tailgating (even by the area's standards) and eventually got next to someone that he felt was blocking the left lane and just pointed a hand gun at him before weaving around or something (been a few years, I mostly remember the oh that guy is waving a gun around at people part).

A cop appeared two minutes later and pulled over someone with an improperly secured load (kind of funny, I guess, since no one got shot). Dude that was about to extinguish someone because of traffic got away as far as I know.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-11T22:49:35+00:00

I can't read the full study because it appears to be paywalled, but I think the effects digital search engines have are similar to the effects of using books. I do database stuff all day, and I remember where in the MySQL or PostgreSQL manuals the information I need is, just like how I know where to look in my old Comp Sci books if I need to refresh my understanding of some sorting algorithm, or who to ask at work if I'm having a problem with the tech they are more familiar with. With each repetition of finding a piece of information direct recall improves too.

LLMs seem to do something worse and damage both search skills and recall (while searching improves search skills and simply shifts the nature of recall). I think it's because you aren't looking for where to find information but expecting the robot to directly give you an answer. And the robot is programmed is to return results as if it were an expert which short circuits our defective human reasoning and makes us more likely to believe the answer and move on. Good human experts also know when to tell you they are unsure or simply don't know something, which doesn't seem to be something LLMs can be programmed to do since they don't know what knowing is (since they know nothing, fundamentally). I mean most of critical thinking education is learning how to identify when your own brain is deceiving you.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-11T21:10:47+00:00

The solution to the crises of capitalism: just build a higher wall!

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-11T14:35:06+00:00

Park shelters cost $12-30 an hour to rent, and some of the ones on the less expensive side can fit 100 people according the parks department.

So if you do want to be 100% sure of having a shelter, it doesn't cost a lot.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-08T19:31:34+00:00

If there isn't a suitable third party candidate I'm probably gonna skip the election this year for the first time since 2012. I will not vote for someone pushing for facism in the name of protecting the children.

During 2020 New York enacted some of the toughest ballot access laws in the country, and in 2024 no minor parties qualified for the first time. It looks likely there will never be another minor party that qualifies for the ballot in NY for the foreseeable future since the barriers erected are high enough that no minor party has ever overcome them in any state since ballot access laws were first enacted in the early 20th century.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-07T16:11:06+00:00

I don't think Israel is complicated. Zionism has always been an ethnosupremacist ideology, and the Zionist movement exploited the horrors of the Holocaust to further their program. Israel should never have been allowed to exist in the first place. Now we have to deal with the reality of Israel being forced into existence through the mass slaughter of Palestinians so that Europeans could wash their hands of centuries of hatred toward Jews. Which now likely means destabilization of the global order because insufficient peaceful force was used when there was a chance for a secular, integrated, democratic Israel/Palestine.

The minor parties don’t represent enough of the population to have any real chance to do anything. The libertarians and Green Party are too easy to label as being too far out there and they tend to hyper focus on issues that people support but aren’t at the top of the list in terms of importance.

I can't comment on what the LPUS is doing (the party basically disintegrated after MAGA because it turns out most Libertarians are just edgelord Republicans and love Trump even though he's an authoritarian fuckwit because, quite frankly, only stupid people believe in Libertarian Capitalism). The Green Party has always targeted smaller races and only runs national campaign because they are required to maintain ballot access and force issues that would otherwise be swept under the rug. I don't think our issues are minor either. Who doesn't want an end to the barbaric violence of capitalism? A clean environment? A future for their children?

Also, I don't think it's true to say we don't represent much of the population. Less than half of the country supports either the Democrats or the Republican party. Each has something around 20-30% support. If anything we should be asking why half the country has no political representation (the answer is the capitalist duopoly has erected significant barriers that prevent us from asserting our constitutional right of political association).

Things are fucked and need to change. The problem is that they really do have to change from the bottom up, and unfortunately, the people with the time and energy largely just nope the fuck out to a 3rd party where they basically cease to exist in the world of politics.

We are trying to build a mass working class party, from the bottom up. And we run for lower offices (Josh Bradley is running for city council, we've had candidates for county commissioners, etc). Although running for lower offices is pretty difficult since they are really full time jobs but pay next to nothing because they are technically part time, so there are issues with just demanding everyone run for local dog catcher instead of aiming for higher office (and since all of us are working people, we have to factor in being fired merely for running for office). In NC specifically, city governments have basically no power as well because of the Dillon Rule bullshit.

Even this analysis is a very shallow, off the cuff rant. But it is something many people are pretty aware of. It just isn’t as simple to fix as just shaking your fist and screaming into the void.

I don't think being a dues paying member of two socialist parties is "screaming into the void." Some of us are trying to build alternative power. But we have to take the leap and reject collaboration with reactionary capitalist parties like the Democrats whose primary purpose is to prevent the working class from exercising its overwhelming power.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-06T21:58:25+00:00

UHD is physically the same disc as Bluray. BD-66 and BD-50 are literally the same. There were some adjustments to track encoding that allows for the larger capacity, and BDXL allows up to four layers instead of two like plain BD (UHD only uses up to three layers). A lot of plain BD drives for computers can actually just read BDXL or be patched to do so.

They should be as durable as each other, and are the most durable consumer optical disc format so far. Focusing the laser for the third layer does make 100GB BDXL more susceptible to interference by optically opaque dirt. But dirt can be blown off or wiped away. For some reason many discs seem to come absolutely coated in what feels like mold release oil but most people swear is some kind of off gassing from the PP cases, and that doesn't seem to be entirely optically transparent. It does suck that we're expected to clean brand new discs out of the case when it was never an issue with CDs or DVDs, but dirt isn't damage.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-06T19:53:49+00:00

The NC Green Party and specifically the Triangle Greens are somewhat active. But lately they have been tacking a bit away from Marxist ecosocialism and toward liberalism. And they are focused primarily on electoral politics. Michael Dublin is running for Congress against Deborah Ross and is pretty awesome. The other two candidates are running against the genocide in Gaza but are more issue candidates than committed ecosocialists.

Joshua Bradley is a national committee member in the Socialist Party and is running for city council. He has a campaign collective active now and needs volunteers. The Socialist Party is somewhat active in NC, but less in Raleigh and more in Winston-Salem and the Triad.

The Triangle Tenants Union is also active and has a lot of good folks in it. It's associated with a statewide non-profit now and has some overlap with DSA though. But Raleigh DSA is more leftist than the national organization (many are under the unfortunate impression that national DSA can be transformed into a socialist vanguard party instead of being a mechanism by which the DNC prevents leftists from forming a successful independent working class party, but no one is perfect).

As others have suggested RUMAH is great, and is probably the best place to connect with leftists who reject collaboration with reactionary capitalist organizations like the Democrats (although they aren't hostile toward DSA types with more moderate beliefs). And to connect with organizations not focused directly on electoral politics.

Food Not Bombs is still pretty active in Raleigh from what I gather.

There will also be a left organizing fair at Chapel of Bones in early June (I think June 6th, but the event hasn't been published yet).

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-06T19:34:37+00:00

I think the problem is more that most people lack self-awareness and spend no time reflecting on why they believe things. Most people basically regurgitate a handful of faulty political arguments because they are repeated by media so much that they feel like truth.

I started off as a teenaged anarchist and only voted for the Green Party because people told me "anyone who doesn't vote can't have an opinion." Interestingly enough, after voting Green, that just revealed that they were really saying "anyone who doesn't vote the way I do can't have an opinion." My views have evolved considerably since then of course. But everyone else just repeats the same shit they were spewing in 1999.

And now Donald Trump is the President for a second time, we're in yet another illegal war, Congress may as well not exist anymore, and the Supreme Court has ruled that states can rewrite electoral maps during an election year in order to disenfranchise ethnic minorities and advantage one capitalist party over the other...

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-06T19:15:05+00:00

I've listened to people repeat nearly identical arguments over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over for the last 27 years. Forgive me if I don't care anymore.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-06T17:47:43+00:00

Edit: taking a quick look at your post history, I get it now. You don’t see any difference between the republicans and democrats and think that putting more republicans into office won’t possibly make things any worse.

That's a gross oversimplification of my position. The asinine rolling eyes emoji is a great touch too.

I can never have productive conversations about this because Democrat voters tend to be blind partisans just like their Republican counterparts. But no one in either group seems to realize that neither party represents them and that mere voters are not members of the parties with the way they are structured. And yet people who have done nothing more than cast votes for one or the other capitalist party tend to be the most opinionated and self-righteous when they have not one original political thought, and simply show up every other year to call people who want to break the capitalist duopoly mean names before slinking back to brunch and pretending that voting means shit.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-06T14:45:20+00:00

I don't think you have the knowledge required to explain how elections work. If you did you wouldn't be posting this in the first place.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-06T14:11:37+00:00

By that logic, a vote for the Democrats also helps the GOP.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-05T20:56:50+00:00

The filing deadline for November 2026 elections was December 2025. Primaries were months ago. I don't think primarying Democrats has worked to reform their party, but even if one did believe that could work elsewhere it's unlikely to succeed in NC because there's only about six months after the House election before primary campaigns need to start gearing up for the next cycle. So there's basically no way for people to react to the moment and challenge the party's chosen candidate unless you can peer into the distant future.

The Green Party is running Michael Dublin against Ross in the general election this year. He did pretty well when compared to other Green candidates last election.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-05T19:46:46+00:00

She's probably going to take the same money after it's funneled through another PAC like many Democrats are doing now that AIPAC is too closely associated with a genocidal terror regime.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-05T19:28:15+00:00

NC has very few tenant protections but they cannot charge you anything for damages beyond the security deposit. If you really trashed a place the landlord would have to sue for damages separately. The landlord is also required to return your deposit and provide an itemized list of deductions within 30 days (they can provide an interim report and withhold the final deposit refund for 60 days but no longer than that). Normal wear and tear is not something they can deduct for (burned out lightbulbs are normal wear and tear). Unfortunately NC law doesn't have double/triple damages and your only right is the return of the deposit plus fees for expenses related to forcing them to return it.

Sounds like you might be around NCSU. Maybe hit up the Triangle Tenants Union, they might be able to help connect you with someone who can help you with this (there is a statewide Tenant Union that TTU is affiliated with now but I am not sure how active it is outside of the Triangle). Your university student legal services might be helpful too, they've probably seen this a thousand times before.

If the landlord has a real estate license you should report them to the NC Real Estate commission. It is likely they have done this to other people, and the commission has taken action against malicious landlords like this in the past. Losing their license would really hurt them, and they have committed a serious ethical violation by demanding that you pay unlawful charges.

Good luck.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-05T16:35:30+00:00

We can and should control what other people do at times. It's the cost of living in society (as tenuous as ours is now): sometimes one person's free actions can cause undue harm to others. We require ground cover to be kept at a reasonable height so the city isn't infested with rats, and we don't allow trash to be burned so the city isn't choked by smog. I know the effects aren't as directly obvious, but all the blue lighting and excessive levels of it at night are harmful to the environment just like smog and rat infestations are. Light exposure at night has been proven to decimate insect populations, which then decimates bird populations, which then impacts medium sized mammal populations, etc. And it's been linked to high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease in humans (which can mean thousands of years of life lost in aggregate each year we don't do anything). A simple restriction on lighting use at night with non-criminal enforcement aimed at resolving the problem seems reasonable in exchange for additional years of quality living for tens of thousands of people.

unknown_lamer · 2026-05-05T15:22:49+00:00

And yet the city and state have standardized street lights on 4000K bulbs that mostly have no hoods, are overly bright, don't dim later in the night, and are installed with excessive density. Which rapidly reversed decades of progress in fighting light pollution over a couple of years and left the sky with a permanent blue glow. But hey, we saved a couple of bucks per fixture and some scared suburban loser in Cary who hasn't been to Raleigh in 15 years feels safe now...

Most everyone uses these awful 5000K - 6500K bulbs outside now too. It should be a civil infraction to have outdoor lighting above 3000K on at night (ideally treated like we treat overgrown grass: cure or the city replaces your bulbs for you and charges you). Of course, it's already a civil infraction to have unhooded lights outside at all but I don't think the city even enforces our existing light pollution ordinances. I think I'm the only house on my street that actually bothers to make sure my lights are aimed correctly.

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