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Residents Report Bright Streak Over Bay Area Friday Evening
The Chabot Space and Science Center has received numerous reports of a bright object flying through the sky in over northern California Friday night, as noted by The Washington Post, NBC, and others. According to NBC's version of the story "Chabot astronomers in Oakland said the meteor was not related to the asteroid passing near Earth. Gerald McKeegan, an astronomer at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, said he did not see it, but based on accounts he thinks it was a 'sporadic meteor.' Sporadic meteors bring as much as 15,000 tons of space debris to Earth each year, according to McKeegan. He said it was likely smaller than another meteor that landed in the Bay Area in October, which caused a loud sonic boom as it fell." The eyewitness accounts make it sound pretty spectacular, though; too bad we don't have quite as many dashcams going as there are in Russia.
In Russia, they are used as evidence collectors because of all the shady folks trying to game the system. Here in the US, anyone with a dash cam is laughed at by a majority of people. I have a dash cam and people at work assume I have it to catch accidents and think it's a gruesome reason. Also, since people don't throw themselves in front of buses as much as Russians apparently do, the dashcams are not as widely used here.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Russian dashcams are largely encouraged by insurance companies for that very reason. The problem is, if that were done in the US, the insurance companies would mandate a single very specific, very faulty model of dash camera (per insurance company) that doesn't fit in most cars, can be disabled via remote by any law enforcement official or Homeland Security member, is illegal for the end-user to even touch, is ungodly expensive for its functionality, encrypts and DRMs all its recorded video, and is designed to resist any form of accessing the video on it unless you're an employee of the insurance company. Otherwise, they can't trust it and won't believe any evidence gathered from it.
Makes sense. First one overshot and hit Russia, second undershot and hit US. They're going to calibrate for somewhere in the middle and fire for effect soon.
Have you even seen A SINGLE ONE video showing a person throwing itself in front of a passing car in any of the million of russian dashcam videos?
Just a single one? Here's about 2 dozen.