What’s worse is that there is a witness statement - the OP standing there loudly complaining about being run off the road. We were able to investigate crimes even before video cameras existed. Yet now neither the video nor the OP victim statement is somehow sufficient.

Ahh! Malicious compliance. Beautiful.

A fact is something that has specifically been observed, zero inference. It is a fact that this apple I dropped fell to the ground. It is a fact that Earth orbits the sun. It is a fact that the solar system orbits the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.

I wouldn’t even go that far. We didn’t even know that galaxies existed as a concept until about 100 years ago, believing that spiral smudges we saw in the telescopes were just weird nearby nebulae. It was at the Great Debate of 1920 that the consensus shifted into believing in multiple galaxies spread across large distances. Galileo notably got into trouble for promoting the other mentioned theory. If you start calling these “facts”, you yourself are giving into OP’s world view that a theory becomes fact if it is strong enough.

Fuck, I would have personally benefited from these bike lanes! Whenever I’m in Astoria and want to bike on 31st Street, I always have to do this slalom between the columns. When lanesplitting in the driving lane there, there is not enough space for cars to pass safely, and New York drivers WILL NOT suffer the indignity of driving behind a bicyclist. So I have to slalom into the parking lane whenever a rush of cars approaches from behind, then slalom back when they have passed to stay out of the door zone, because there is not enough space in the parking lane to pass safely either, again because of the columns and also double parkers. It’s challenging but tiring. Ironically the reason I want to be on 31st Street is because that’s where all the businesses are! For now it’s just too annoying though so I usually just go eat elsewhere.

The very wiki article quoted says average to mean mean (made explicit later). OP showerthought was calculating life expectancy in a way different than commonly understood. The first nitpick was correct.

fraud

Sabotage. Property made unusable. Passengers were literally stranded in the middle of a journey.

It’s worse. They are saying that the EU copyright law, as written, only allows decompiling/reverse engineering to “fix bugs”. A bug fix would involve a software patch of some sorts. But the security researchers did not have time to write a patch yet, what they did is tell the customer “Yep, it’s fucked. Your vendor put in a killswitch to make the trains brick themselves.” So that does tell them where the problem is, but it is not a bona fide bug fix from the Bugfix region of France, and therefore illegal.

Newag [train maker] claims that the Dragon Sector [whitehat hacker] team endangered passengers’ safety by modifying the software without proper experience. But Newag then turns right around and claims that Dragon Sector did not modify the software at all. They point out that EU law only allows reverse engineering of software in order to fix bugs. And if Dragon Sector did not actually modify the software, it cannot have fixed any bugs, in which case their reverse-engineering must be illegal.

Yep, that right here is the kind of pattern-matching you have to be careful about! Read what you wrote carefully:

cooling effect … temperature gradient

The vat is literally cooler. You put a thermometer in it, will show a lower temperature than thermometer in air. This is not a fake effect “only shows lower because it’s wet”, it’s a real temperature. You put your stirling engine cool coil in the vat and hot coil in the air, you got yourself a temperature gradient. A small one, maybe 10 degrees C, but more than zero.

The people saying Maxwell’s demon/“cannot separate” are mistaken. They’ve pattern-matched to the wrong concept. This is possible and is the way swamp coolers operate. They exploit the difference between ambient temperature and dew temperature of the liquid, say water. As long as relative humidity is below 100%, some water will evaporate, leaving your vat colder than environment. The separation is simple - the wind carries away the 100% humid water vapors, replacing it with fresh low-humidity air. You can then use the temperature difference to drive a stirling engine or something.

The point where your free energy ends is when you run out of water. You need to take your 100% humid air and cool it down somewhere else to get the water back by condensing it. In nature this happens automatically at nighttime when the heat radiates into the cold of space and air temperatures drop. If you are running a closed-loop cycle though, like on a spaceship, you need to provide your own source of environmental heat (the Sun) and your own heat sink (the cold of space), and at that point you should just be using a regular high-efficiency heat engine instead of this swamp cooler.

What you smoking? No one in New York is ever charged with vehicular manslaughter. It’s all an “accident”.You can even flee the scene like happened here, and if you are found you will still not be charged (leaving the scene of an accident involving injury or death is a crime but never enforced for some reason, a small traffic fine at worst). Just look, if they ever find this driver, all they’ll do is ask some questions and let them go. You can even drive drunk, kill someone with the car, flee the scene, evade capture for days, and then maybe you’ll be charged, but the charges will be dismissed anyway because now days later you being drunk cannot be definitely proven.

I have conflicted opinions on this. Disrespecting a person’s tragic death is wrong, but consider also if someone is so desperate for a stuffed toy that they would lift it off a memorial then maybe they really do need it hard enough to deserve it. The toy would just lie around in the rain otherwise and eventually go to waste. It’s better use for the toy and better respect for the memory of the deceased if the toy ends up in the hands of a child of the desperate parent. Even if the thief has no children and is just crazy, wanting the toy for themselves, even a madman’s comfort from having a toy has value.

The only situation where I can wholly condemn the thief is if they are taking the toys and flowers with intention to resell later. That’s no better than digging up flowers from someone’s yard!

Pedestrians are much more terrified of bicycles than cars, makes sense to put the guardrail there to protect them from vicious cyclists.

The guardrail can serve the don’t-drive-off-embankment function equally well positioned before the sidewalk. The problem is when an out-of-control car strikes the guardrail at a glancing angle, it takes a long time (by design) to grind down to a stop. This creates a bowling alley effect. The guardrail keeps the speedy car centered right on the sidewalk. Any human bowling pins are toast. Some of the most horrific traffic death videos I’ve seen involve that. Whole families wiped out.

Is that a bicycle path and a dirt running track, or is the desire path in the dirt the official bicycle route and the side road behind the guardrail is for horses or golf carts or something?

Saw an example of correct guardrail usage today, with the overgrown path that some other commenters were worried about.

(Lincoln Highway Hackensack River Bridge in Newark)

Let me tell you one thing, I would 100% rather ride on this overgrown sidewalk than on the shoulder of the 55mph highway without a shoulder. This is the official bicycle/pedestrian bridge crossing. I wasn’t sure whether the bridge path is even open or exists, but it does and there were even other people using it. (There is a second mesh fence on the embankment side, more so to protect the bushes than to stop you falling over.)

And then take a look at this other beauty today:

(Weequahic Park Drive, New Jersey)

Correct guardrail usage AND perfectly maintained path! Alas, pedestrian only, but not a problem to ride on 25mph street. Proof that putting the guardrail before the sidewalk is perfectly possible, both legally and practically. (There is a lake down the embankment. Don’t walk into the lake.)

There has never been a law that someone selling something must offer the same price to everyone. Outside of some government regulation, like banning discrimination based on a few specific protected groups under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, government-set energy prices on state-granted monopoly electrical grids, annual rent increase percentage caps, etc. merchants have always been free to set any price on any product or to any customer.

In NYC they put parking meters on the sidewalk behind metal bollards. Note that they do not put bollards on street corners at pedestrian crossings. Even in the modern intersection redesigns with the wider sidewalk cutouts, the DOT still only ever uses collapsible plastic bollards at best, if at all. Every time I wait for a crossing light as a pedestrian in one of those brown-paint-only sidewalk cutouts at street level, I look over my shoulder to one of these parking meters up on the curb behind their bollards and awe at how much more protection a dumb piece of metal street furniture gets than the squishy me.

In NYC, 99% chance it’s gonna be a deliverista on an e-bike. So the screenshot is literally wrong. Elsewhere in the country - yeah…

If NYC uses ranked choice voting in the general

It does not, for some weird reason. City primaries only.