Aye. pedestrians try really hard to be pedeadstrians some days.
Part of the problem is I've seem people post that "pedestrians *always* have right of way!" Which is wrong and dangerous. (even if you are right- you will be dead right.)
Meanwhile 16 other pedestrians died to human drivers that day in the united states and everyone is fine with that.
Also, pedestrians *are* found at fault all the time if the roadway has controlled crosswalks and the pedestrian enters the road at an uncontrolled location.
Being poor doesn't make it easier or harder for people to brake when you enter the road too close ahead of them from the shadows. Standard reaction time and then stopping distance apply.
Even in places where you have right of way- you may be 100% in the right and yet still be 100% dead. Don't be stupid and walk in front of a car or cut in front of an 18 wheeler, Bus, Garbage Truck, etc.
Despite earlier reports, it turns out that the car was driving the speed limit. Which means anything less than 60' in front of the car they are going to get hit full speed unless an F1 race car driver is actively driving the car.
Why do you think everyone else shares your reaction speed which the data from multiple studies shows is on par with a professional race car driver or high level martial artist?
That's the average time used by national traffic safety sources. A controlled study in 2000 (IEA2000_ABS51.pdf*) found average driver reaction brake time to be 2.3 seconds. The range of human reaction time is between 0.7 and 3 seconds.
"A few states, including California, have adopted a standard driver reaction time of 2.5 seconds. The United Kingdom's Highway Code and the Association of Chief Police Officers ACPO Code of Practice for Operational Use of Road Policing Enforcement Technology use 3.0 seconds for driver reaction time. The National Safety Council (NSC) recommends 3 seconds minimum spacing (3 second reaction time) between vehicles traveling in the same lane. "
Even assuming you had superior, superhuman reaction speed, you'd travel about 35 feet before you could react.
Driver Reaction Times 0.7 sec -- about as fast as it gets 1.0 sec -- old standard 1.5 sec -- common use 2.0 sec -- common use 2.3 sec -- AVERAGE 2.5 sec -- used in a few states 3.0 sec -- NSC and UK Standard
---
This is why driving safety courses tell you to drive with a safe distance and tell you to "drive ahead"... i.e. look past the car ahead of you (or thru it) to see what's happening down the road so you can react to it.
---- None of this is to contradict the fact that rare individuals like F1 race car drivers and a few top atheletes and martial artists have faster reaction times. However, that reaction time also includes anticipation and experience. If they are caught in a completely unpredictable situation for which they have no experience then their reaction times drop substantially (tho they are still very fast compared to most humans unless they get confused.
---
In this case, the car was going down the road and the pedestrian literally appeared from no where out of the shadows. The police said, from the video data it appeared that the pedestrian was at fault and that it would have been very difficult to avoid hitting the pedestrian.
You probably know but some other considerations include:
Past male domination of the industry.
Limited career of most female actors (high when young and pretty- low when older without regard to skill for most).
The average box-office take for films based on gender (and both sexes admire a handsome, strong, male and will give more money tho that's changing some as females spend more of their disposable dollars on other females).
When salaries are public information, people with lower salaries will attempt to find work elsewhere. And then they will find their own skills are not as good as they thought since no one will hire them at the higher salary. Or, they will be hired and companies won't be able to take advantage of passive and ignorant people.
It also exposes a lot of inequities where management makes a mistake and pays too much for a new unskilled employee who causes extra work for existing employees.
It's not orders of magnitude but it is better than humans.
This is based on january, 2016. So much more primitive cars than we have over 2 years later in 2018.
https://www.fastcompany.com/30... "The researchers concluded that the national crash rate of 4.2 accidents per million miles is higher than the crash rate for self-driving cars, which is 3.2 crashes per million miles."
" âoeI suspect preliminarily it appears that the Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident," said chief Sylvia Moir.
Herzberg was "pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags," according to the Chronicle's Carolyn Said, when she "abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic."
After viewing video captured by the Uber vehicle, Moir concluded that âoeitâ(TM)s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway."
Moir added that "it is dangerous to cross roadways in the evening hour when well-illuminated, managed crosswalks are available."
The police said that the vehicle was traveling 38 miles per hour in a 35 mile-per-hour zone, according to the Chronicleâ"though a Google Street View shot of the roadway taken last July shows a speed limit of 45 miles per hour along that stretch of road. "
It appears the pedestrian entered the street away from controlled crosswalks.
If you are traveling 40mph (the speed limit on that side of the street prior to early reports that the car was "speeding" 5mph over the 35 mph limit (you can confirm the signs on google maps for yourself).
Reaction distance before you can brake: 59 feet. Typical stopping distance at that point: 80 feet.
So if the pedestrian entered the road from 59 feet or less, a human wouldn't even react until the car had traveled 59 feet.
Obviously -more time to react if you see the person before they enter the road and no clue what uber's self driving cars reaction speed is (should be faster than human but it's still not instantaneous).
by the way... 16 other jaywalkers were killed today too. And over 2,000 pedestrians were killed in traffic in 2015 and 2016 by human driven cars.
Absolutely and if I get a call from a number I haven't whitelisted, then I answer the phone, say "hello" and set it down as I continue to do other things if I do not recognize the number. Often while I listen to a video with people talking on youtube. I usually have the volume turned down these days because some of them were foul-mouthed.
I also record numbers as spam and activated the auto-reject of spam numbers.
Obviously we need some form of 'real id' for phones to correct modern abuse.
But we won't be getting it from this corrupt organization.
Essentially- pedestrians have right of way in crosswalks. In many states, they are at fault when jaywalking. Not just don't have right of way- they will be the one found at fault if there is an accident and they are outside of a cross walk.
For Arizona in particular, Arizona: Vehicles must yield the right-of-way to pedestrians within a crosswalk that are in the same half of the roadway as the vehicle or when a pedestrian is approaching closely enough from the opposite side of the roadway to constitute a danger. Pedestrians may not suddenly leave the curb and enter a crosswalk into the path of a moving vehicle that is so close the vehicle is unable to yield. Pedestrians must yield the right-of-way to vehicles when crossing outside of a marked crosswalk or an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection. Where traffic control devices are in operation, pedestrians may only cross between two adjacent intersections in a marked crosswalk.
Additionally, as I've been taught in every driver's safety course. You can be 100% right and still end up100% dead.
You need to decide if enforcing your right of way on that 18 wheeler loaded with steel piping is worth your life.
I have not joined miles of other dead stopped cars in traffic jams on roads completely shut down by accidents on numerous occasions.
Also, I use waze because my personal knowledge of the road never beats it by more than 30 seconds. And often attempting a personal shortcut resulted in being much slower.
But that's just me, I guess.
I also use google maps occasionally but I'm not as comfortable with it.
The thing I absolutely hate about waze is that wave to talk feature which randomly interrupts my drives and forces me to interact with with the device because my elbow moved over the phone. And I can't find a way to disable that feature.
The ads bug me a little but they only come up when the car isn't moving so not too much. I know someone has to pay the bills.
I don't know why I don't use google maps more. I just don't.
Taxing business on revenue rather than profits would have huge negative effects on low margin businesses while resting lightly on high margin businesses.
It is a stellar way to drive grocery stores out of business while also increasing food prices dramatically. That would be brutal on the poor.
I think we need to stop resetting the "basis" of investments when people die. If a $112 stock had a $100 profit, then that should be carried forward (or even realized on death). The new basis should not be set to $112. That's a pure giveawaya to the superwealthy.
I think we spend too much on the military by about 20% and that's 100 billion that could be used elsewhere.
I'm completely shocked that the republicans have just in the first year are on track to add another 7.8 trillion dollars to the deficit by the end of Mr. Trump's first term.
With the rise in productivity by 100x over the last 100 years, we should be able to easily afford for everyone to live by 1920s standards. People should not be homeless. And with automation and centrialization (like amazon vs toys r us) destroying jobs aggressively (empty malls everywhere), people may not even have money to pay taxes. They'll be on the public dole in some way. We can do that by criminiizing them but that costs $31,000 to $175,000 per year. By comparison welfare only costs about $18,000 a year.
A huge share of the reduction in demand occurs due to LED lighting.
My electrical demand has dropped tremendously as most of my lighting solutions have dropped from 60w-75w to even 180w for one room to about 60w for the entire house even lower 11w later in the evening.
And LED bulbs do not add heat to the house that must be cooled with air conditioning units that draw 2400w in operation.
Likewise teleisions and monitors sip power compared to CRT's of old.
The things that kill bugs don't affect humans most the time.
Plants do have toxins which affect mammals to various degrees. For example, after a drought in Texas the surviving grass was fairly toxic to cows and it put off seed that produced grass that was fatal to cows.
Many foods humans eat require fermentation, cooking, aging, grinding, washing, deskinning and other preparation methods.
And it's a problem when humans eat these food "raw". Raw vegetables can be bad for you. Juicing uncooked Kale, Broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables are known to enlarge your thyroid when eaten raw in larger quantities.
you know a domestic router that you buy for $49 at best buy is a good solution for a household with 1-4 people. It's not good for a small business which requires a more expensive router. And that router's no good for a corporation with tens of thousands of employees.
The senate is broken. We no longer appoint senators. We've made other changes as well to the filibuster rule.
Think about this. Say a wealthy family thru a series of bills passed, real estate purchased, and companies driven out of business managed to drive everyone else out of Wyoming such that it was just the three or four people in the "state" of wymoming. Would it be broken enough for you then?
Basically 4 people would get two senators, a representative, the governorship, the state legislature, apply for federal funds to assist their 'state'. Those two senators could demand a lot of money for their 'state'. And that's essentially what has happened- just a little less extreme.
One thing that could happen is that states are broken up into roughly 5 million citizen states. sure, wyoming and similar states would still be outliers but the difference wouldn't be so extreme. So california would become 6 states-- 4 liberal and 2 conservative. Texas would become 5 states- 3 conservative and 2 liberal. and so on.
Our republic is failing under the strains of the current system. We need to address it.
No... roads, sewer systems, health care programs, international highways, bridges, funds for education.
Red states have pretty terrible economies because they don't invest in their citizens and they drive their best and brightest out of their states to other states.
So red states depend heavily on the federal government. States like wyoming with 280,000 citizens per senator vote themselves federal money paid for by states with 19,000,000 citizens per senator. It's atrocious.
I wonder just how low the population of these states has to go before the system breaks down.
You know, if california just paid 40,000 of their "liberal" folks to live in wyoming that would flip wyoming blue.
40,000/38,000,000 seems like a pretty good deal to me.
The devastation from hurricanes Irma and Harvey, the two weeks of catastrophic flooding, and the toxic aftermath should have been opportunities for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency to snap into action. Had Scott Pruitt done so, it would have been in stark contrast with his tenure so far, which has mostly consisted of making the case that the regulatory power of the EPA should be undermined and advocating that his agency be made smaller in size and scope, be deprived of a robust budget and enforcement power, and shift focus to what he likes to call âoeregulatory certaintyâ for polluting industries.
In the past, the EPAâ(TM)s job in the aftermath of storms has been to help ensure that victims do not return to homes and neighborhoods that are toxic cesspools. The environmental aftermath of Harvey and Irma has been particularly devastating, with Superfund sites that have flooded, pipelines that have have leaked, forced evacuations because of explosions at the Arkema chemical plant, and a hazardous mix of floodwaters and sewage.
A week ago, George W. Bushâ(TM)s EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, wrote a scathing assessment in the New York Times of how Pruitt has been performing on the job. âoeThe agency created by a Republican president 47 years ago to protect the environment and public health may end up doing neither under Mr. Pruittâ(TM)s direction,â she noted. When reflecting on Pruittâ(TM)s performance during Hurricane Harvey, she added that the EPAâ(TM)s recent actions, including the EPAâ(TM)s attack on an AP reporter, âoeare only the latest manifestations of my fears.â
Whitman may have missed some of Pruittâ(TM)s other activities. During the two hurricanes, the EPA administrator has appeared in far-right media, blasted the Obama administration and the mainstream media, disparaged discussions about climate change, and rolled back more regulations. Here are some noteworthy Pruitt sightings that took place during the recent weeks when severe weather battered the United States:
Trump and Pruitt further sought to significantly shrink the EPA over the past year, proposing drastic budget cuts and offering buyouts that reduced staffing. From December 2016 to January 2018, the size of the agency has shrunk by 1,500 people, according to the Office of Personnel Management, and its current total of 14,162 employees is fewer than worked for it under President Ronald Reagan's administration.
The agency additionally altered its policy on the scientific boards that advise the agency, blocking any researchers from participating if they received grant money from the EPA.
--- And governor Snyder set up the Flint Michagan disaster by assigning managers who could override local governments. Hundreds of kids poisoned with lead. They are still on bottled water. It's just that bad.
It gets very tricky buying clothing and a few other product categories on line this way.
You can't try it out in the store or even really see what it looks like. Then it doesn't fit and you get dinged for returning it.
To make things worse- amazon sells everything. So you may be banned from returning music because you returned burned vitamins. Vitamins are bad so often that you really should't risk them outside of november (or even December) to april. They sit in uncooled warehouses and smell rotten on arrival. Either buy extra in the winter or buy locally or buy from a retailer who ships directly.
If you have any product you are likely to return (like clothes) then it's best not to buy it from Amazon.
For regular products which you expect to arrive in good shape and which don't depend on the peculiarities of personal fit and where you will have a normal return rate (and maybe because the item is obviously broken but I'm not sure they give you credit for that), you are probably (probably) okay.
Slashdot Mirror
Aye. pedestrians try really hard to be pedeadstrians some days.
Part of the problem is I've seem people post that "pedestrians *always* have right of way!" Which is wrong and dangerous. (even if you are right- you will be dead right.)
I see dozens of posts a day from people on various forums whose expectation for A.I. self driving car is perfection. No accidents ever.
The parent post probably had those in mind.
Meanwhile 16 other pedestrians died to human drivers that day in the united states and everyone is fine with that.
Also, pedestrians *are* found at fault all the time if the roadway has controlled crosswalks and the pedestrian enters the road at an uncontrolled location.
Being poor doesn't make it easier or harder for people to brake when you enter the road too close ahead of them from the shadows. Standard reaction time and then stopping distance apply.
Even in places where you have right of way- you may be 100% in the right and yet still be 100% dead. Don't be stupid and walk in front of a car or cut in front of an 18 wheeler, Bus, Garbage Truck, etc.
Despite earlier reports, it turns out that the car was driving the speed limit. Which means anything less than 60' in front of the car they are going to get hit full speed unless an F1 race car driver is actively driving the car.
In any case, you shouldn't walk out in front of moving cars.
One of us is quoting studies and the other one is talking out of his ass.
I stand by my data.
And let's put it this way.
Why do you think everyone else shares your reaction speed which the data from multiple studies shows is on par with a professional race car driver or high level martial artist?
That's the average time used by national traffic safety sources. A controlled study in 2000 (IEA2000_ABS51.pdf*) found average driver reaction brake time to be 2.3 seconds. The range of human reaction time is between 0.7 and 3 seconds.
"A few states, including California, have adopted a standard driver reaction time of 2.5 seconds. The United Kingdom's Highway Code and the Association of Chief Police Officers ACPO Code of Practice for Operational Use of Road Policing Enforcement Technology use 3.0 seconds for driver reaction time. The National Safety Council (NSC) recommends 3 seconds minimum spacing (3 second reaction time) between vehicles traveling in the same lane. "
Even assuming you had superior, superhuman reaction speed, you'd travel about 35 feet before you could react.
Driver Reaction Times
0.7 sec -- about as fast as it gets
1.0 sec -- old standard
1.5 sec -- common use
2.0 sec -- common use
2.3 sec -- AVERAGE
2.5 sec -- used in a few states
3.0 sec -- NSC and UK Standard
---
This is why driving safety courses tell you to drive with a safe distance and tell you to "drive ahead" ... i.e. look past the car ahead of you (or thru it) to see what's happening down the road so you can react to it.
*
http://copradar.com/redlight/f...
----
None of this is to contradict the fact that rare individuals like F1 race car drivers and a few top atheletes and martial artists have faster reaction times. However, that reaction time also includes anticipation and experience. If they are caught in a completely unpredictable situation for which they have no experience then their reaction times drop substantially (tho they are still very fast compared to most humans unless they get confused.
---
In this case, the car was going down the road and the pedestrian literally appeared from no where out of the shadows. The police said, from the video data it appeared that the pedestrian was at fault and that it would have been very difficult to avoid hitting the pedestrian.
The situation is much more complicated than that.
You probably know but some other considerations include:
Past male domination of the industry.
Limited career of most female actors (high when young and pretty- low when older without regard to skill for most).
The average box-office take for films based on gender (and both sexes admire a handsome, strong, male and will give more money tho that's changing some as females spend more of their disposable dollars on other females).
And there are probably other factors as well.
You know what fixes the Dunning-Kruger effect?
More Information.
When salaries are public information, people with lower salaries will attempt to find work elsewhere. And then they will find their own skills are not as good as they thought since no one will hire them at the higher salary. Or, they will be hired and companies won't be able to take advantage of passive and ignorant people.
It also exposes a lot of inequities where management makes a mistake and pays too much for a new unskilled employee who causes extra work for existing employees.
It's not orders of magnitude but it is better than humans.
This is based on january, 2016. So much more primitive cars than we have over 2 years later in 2018.
https://www.fastcompany.com/30...
"The researchers concluded that the national crash rate of 4.2 accidents per million miles is higher than the crash rate for self-driving cars, which is 3.2 crashes per million miles."
Also, the police chief has just said that the uber car is not likely to be at fault.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...
"
âoeI suspect preliminarily it appears that the Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident," said chief Sylvia Moir.
Herzberg was "pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags," according to the Chronicle's Carolyn Said, when she "abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic."
After viewing video captured by the Uber vehicle, Moir concluded that âoeitâ(TM)s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway."
Moir added that "it is dangerous to cross roadways in the evening hour when well-illuminated, managed crosswalks are available."
The police said that the vehicle was traveling 38 miles per hour in a 35 mile-per-hour zone, according to the Chronicleâ"though a Google Street View shot of the roadway taken last July shows a speed limit of 45 miles per hour along that stretch of road.
"
It appears the pedestrian entered the street away from controlled crosswalks.
If you are traveling 40mph (the speed limit on that side of the street prior to early reports that the car was "speeding" 5mph over the 35 mph limit (you can confirm the signs on google maps for yourself).
Reaction distance before you can brake: 59 feet.
Typical stopping distance at that point: 80 feet.
So if the pedestrian entered the road from 59 feet or less, a human wouldn't even react until the car had traveled 59 feet.
Obviously -more time to react if you see the person before they enter the road and no clue what uber's self driving cars reaction speed is (should be faster than human but it's still not instantaneous).
by the way... 16 other jaywalkers were killed today too. And over 2,000 pedestrians were killed in traffic in 2015 and 2016 by human driven cars.
Absolutely and if I get a call from a number I haven't whitelisted, then I answer the phone, say "hello" and set it down as I continue to do other things if I do not recognize the number. Often while I listen to a video with people talking on youtube. I usually have the volume turned down these days because some of them were foul-mouthed.
I also record numbers as spam and activated the auto-reject of spam numbers.
Obviously we need some form of 'real id' for phones to correct modern abuse.
But we won't be getting it from this corrupt organization.
Just one of *many* similar sites which also correct your misinformation...
http://www.ncsl.org/research/t...
Essentially- pedestrians have right of way in crosswalks. In many states, they are at fault when jaywalking. Not just don't have right of way- they will be the one found at fault if there is an accident and they are outside of a cross walk.
For Arizona in particular,
Arizona: Vehicles must yield the right-of-way to pedestrians within a crosswalk that are in the same half of the roadway as the vehicle or when a pedestrian is approaching closely enough from the opposite side of the roadway to constitute a danger. Pedestrians may not suddenly leave the curb and enter a crosswalk into the path of a moving vehicle that is so close the vehicle is unable to yield. Pedestrians must yield the right-of-way to vehicles when crossing outside of a marked crosswalk or an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection. Where traffic control devices are in operation, pedestrians may only cross between two adjacent intersections in a marked crosswalk.
Additionally, as I've been taught in every driver's safety course. You can be 100% right and still end up100% dead.
You need to decide if enforcing your right of way on that 18 wheeler loaded with steel piping is worth your life.
I have not joined miles of other dead stopped cars in traffic jams on roads completely shut down by accidents on numerous occasions.
Also, I use waze because my personal knowledge of the road never beats it by more than 30 seconds. And often attempting a personal shortcut resulted in being much slower.
But that's just me, I guess.
I also use google maps occasionally but I'm not as comfortable with it.
The thing I absolutely hate about waze is that wave to talk feature which randomly interrupts my drives and forces me to interact with with the device because my elbow moved over the phone. And I can't find a way to disable that feature.
The ads bug me a little but they only come up when the car isn't moving so not too much. I know someone has to pay the bills.
I don't know why I don't use google maps more. I just don't.
Absolutely correct.
It's why privacy is essential and folks have signed theirs away for pennies or less.
They repeatedly violated user privacy rights, changed settings without warning, and I finally cut ties with them. I've never gone back.
They are not trustworthy.
You are the product being sold.
I rarely go to a second page on wikipedia. I frequently hit 12+ more pages hitting TV Tropes.
Taxing business on revenue rather than profits would have huge negative effects on low margin businesses while resting lightly on high margin businesses.
It is a stellar way to drive grocery stores out of business while also increasing food prices dramatically. That would be brutal on the poor.
I think we need to stop resetting the "basis" of investments when people die. If a $112 stock had a $100 profit, then that should be carried forward (or even realized on death). The new basis should not be set to $112. That's a pure giveawaya to the superwealthy.
I think we spend too much on the military by about 20% and that's 100 billion that could be used elsewhere.
I'm completely shocked that the republicans have just in the first year are on track to add another 7.8 trillion dollars to the deficit by the end of Mr. Trump's first term.
With the rise in productivity by 100x over the last 100 years, we should be able to easily afford for everyone to live by 1920s standards. People should not be homeless. And with automation and centrialization (like amazon vs toys r us) destroying jobs aggressively (empty malls everywhere), people may not even have money to pay taxes. They'll be on the public dole in some way. We can do that by criminiizing them but that costs $31,000 to $175,000 per year. By comparison welfare only costs about $18,000 a year.
A huge share of the reduction in demand occurs due to LED lighting.
My electrical demand has dropped tremendously as most of my lighting solutions have dropped from 60w-75w to even 180w for one room to about 60w for the entire house even lower 11w later in the evening.
And LED bulbs do not add heat to the house that must be cooled with air conditioning units that draw 2400w in operation.
Likewise teleisions and monitors sip power compared to CRT's of old.
The things that kill bugs don't affect humans most the time.
Plants do have toxins which affect mammals to various degrees. For example, after a drought in Texas the surviving grass was fairly toxic to cows and it put off seed that produced grass that was fatal to cows.
Many foods humans eat require fermentation, cooking, aging, grinding, washing, deskinning and other preparation methods.
And it's a problem when humans eat these food "raw". Raw vegetables can be bad for you. Juicing uncooked Kale, Broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables are known to enlarge your thyroid when eaten raw in larger quantities.
you know a domestic router that you buy for $49 at best buy is a good solution for a household with 1-4 people. It's not good for a small business which requires a more expensive router. And that router's no good for a corporation with tens of thousands of employees.
The senate is broken. We no longer appoint senators. We've made other changes as well to the filibuster rule.
Think about this. Say a wealthy family thru a series of bills passed, real estate purchased, and companies driven out of business managed to drive everyone else out of Wyoming such that it was just the three or four people in the "state" of wymoming. Would it be broken enough for you then?
Basically 4 people would get two senators, a representative, the governorship, the state legislature, apply for federal funds to assist their 'state'. Those two senators could demand a lot of money for their 'state'. And that's essentially what has happened- just a little less extreme.
One thing that could happen is that states are broken up into roughly 5 million citizen states. sure, wyoming and similar states would still be outliers but the difference wouldn't be so extreme. So california would become 6 states-- 4 liberal and 2 conservative. Texas would become 5 states- 3 conservative and 2 liberal. and so on.
Our republic is failing under the strains of the current system. We need to address it.
No... roads, sewer systems, health care programs, international highways, bridges, funds for education.
Red states have pretty terrible economies because they don't invest in their citizens and they drive their best and brightest out of their states to other states.
So red states depend heavily on the federal government. States like wyoming with 280,000 citizens per senator vote themselves federal money paid for by states with 19,000,000 citizens per senator. It's atrocious.
I wonder just how low the population of these states has to go before the system breaks down.
You know, if california just paid 40,000 of their "liberal" folks to live in wyoming that would flip wyoming blue.
40,000/38,000,000 seems like a pretty good deal to me.
We had rivers catching on fire and the government got serious about the pollution.
It remained serious until fairly recently. It's been backsliding in republican areas for a while.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics...
https://www.motherjones.com/en...
The devastation from hurricanes Irma and Harvey, the two weeks of catastrophic flooding, and the toxic aftermath should have been opportunities for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency to snap into action. Had Scott Pruitt done so, it would have been in stark contrast with his tenure so far, which has mostly consisted of making the case that the regulatory power of the EPA should be undermined and advocating that his agency be made smaller in size and scope, be deprived of a robust budget and enforcement power, and shift focus to what he likes to call âoeregulatory certaintyâ for polluting industries.
In the past, the EPAâ(TM)s job in the aftermath of storms has been to help ensure that victims do not return to homes and neighborhoods that are toxic cesspools. The environmental aftermath of Harvey and Irma has been particularly devastating, with Superfund sites that have flooded, pipelines that have have leaked, forced evacuations because of explosions at the Arkema chemical plant, and a hazardous mix of floodwaters and sewage.
A week ago, George W. Bushâ(TM)s EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, wrote a scathing assessment in the New York Times of how Pruitt has been performing on the job. âoeThe agency created by a Republican president 47 years ago to protect the environment and public health may end up doing neither under Mr. Pruittâ(TM)s direction,â she noted. When reflecting on Pruittâ(TM)s performance during Hurricane Harvey, she added that the EPAâ(TM)s recent actions, including the EPAâ(TM)s attack on an AP reporter, âoeare only the latest manifestations of my fears.â
Whitman may have missed some of Pruittâ(TM)s other activities. During the two hurricanes, the EPA administrator has appeared in far-right media, blasted the Obama administration and the mainstream media, disparaged discussions about climate change, and rolled back more regulations. Here are some noteworthy Pruitt sightings that took place during the recent weeks when severe weather battered the United States:
Trump and Pruitt further sought to significantly shrink the EPA over the past year, proposing drastic budget cuts and offering buyouts that reduced staffing. From December 2016 to January 2018, the size of the agency has shrunk by 1,500 people, according to the Office of Personnel Management, and its current total of 14,162 employees is fewer than worked for it under President Ronald Reagan's administration.
The agency additionally altered its policy on the scientific boards that advise the agency, blocking any researchers from participating if they received grant money from the EPA.
---
And governor Snyder set up the Flint Michagan disaster by assigning managers who could override local governments.
Hundreds of kids poisoned with lead. They are still on bottled water. It's just that bad.
And in that case, they are basically dumping.
It gets very tricky buying clothing and a few other product categories on line this way.
You can't try it out in the store or even really see what it looks like. Then it doesn't fit and you get dinged for returning it.
To make things worse- amazon sells everything. So you may be banned from returning music because you returned burned vitamins. Vitamins are bad so often that you really should't risk them outside of november (or even December) to april. They sit in uncooled warehouses and smell rotten on arrival. Either buy extra in the winter or buy locally or buy from a retailer who ships directly.
If you have any product you are likely to return (like clothes) then it's best not to buy it from Amazon.
For regular products which you expect to arrive in good shape and which don't depend on the peculiarities of personal fit and where you will have a normal return rate (and maybe because the item is obviously broken but I'm not sure they give you credit for that), you are probably (probably) okay.