> America has undergone a VERY rapid secularization.
If I understand correctly, connecting the dots from the article and your comment, beginning in 2020, everyone moved away from religion towards atheism in some kind of rapid shift?
You can kind of tell when people think about only themselves or the community when they present arguments for things like smoking and vaccination.
"I don't want to be controlled" is a perfectly valid argument, and I prefer humans can make choices for themselves and have reasonable autonomy when it does not have a negative affect on others.
Vaccination and smoking affects people around you. Drinking does too - in certain cases, but much less directly, in most cases. For example, drinking and operating vehicles is already illegal. Drinking and punching someone is already illegal!
Is taking concepts to logical extremes a good way to govern?
(No.)
But are you saying we don't care if things have negative effect on people? If we go to extremes, well then obviously everyone should have 100% autonomy? Oops that doesn't work.
So, this is the hard part - you have to find balance, compromise, a reasonable middle ground. That's always going to be the hard part. Not black or white, but the grey areas.
When I was a kid I was taught not to walk in the street.
When you walk, you go in the opposite direction of cars and can see them coming and, if necessary, move off to the side more.
I know it's survivorship bias, but it worked for me.
Now I get that population density is increasing, and probably so is traffic. Though so are automatic safety features that cause cars to brake rather than hit things.
Are there statistics on vehicular fatalities in suburbs?
Pedestrian traffic deaths are going down again after peaking in 2022.
Accidents are less survivable in the US due to bigger cars and higher hoods.
Quote from CDC
During 2013–2022, U.S. traffic-related death rates increased a relative 50.0% for pedestrians and 22.5% overall, compared with those in 27 other high-income countries, where they declined a median of 24.7% and 19.4%, respectively. Across countries, U.S. pedestrian death rates were highest overall and among persons aged 15–24 and 25–64 years.
The cars are getting bigger. That means that the impact is more deadly, and the line of sight is higher - making it easy to overlook a child. The sensors often won't react at low speeds which are common for residential neighborhoods, and at high speeds they are late anyway.
Wasn't there a trend in the US away from pompous SUVs and towards smaller cars, people even starting to re-evaluate some European-favored "city" cars more?
Also aren't cars also getting ligther, with less heavy / metallic exterior over time?
There is some bimodal distribution. I routinely encounter trucks where I cannot see over the hood. I suspect most of these vehicles have never carried so much as a 2x4 in the bed.
This is not true at all. People who buy cars were willing to pay higher prices for cars where they sit higher up and take up more space, even specifically as a defensive maneuver to be safer in the event of a collision.
Obviously, as a business, you have to give customers what they want or else you will go out of business.
The government is, however, very lax on prioritizing the safety of people outside of vehicles (which would mean limiting vehicle size and speed and enforcing harsh penalties for unsafe driving).
It's not even "in the street" I'm worried about -- it's the lunatics who drive like they are the main character in a single-player RPG. Not looking for bikes or pedestrians, crashing into parked cars and houses.
Overall this is a neat result, and the interviews are a nice part of the process. I've tried to (on occasion) make a habit of asking about more (mundane) details from my elders. But knowing what to do with that data...
And that brings me to my point. I've been thinking a lot lately about digital legacy. When I was a kid, it was neat to see photo books that showed my parents as kids, living their lives, having fun. Though those memories stand out to me, it's not something you revisit often. With digital memories, you can share them constantly, in great quantities. But what if you want them to stick around?
First, I think in early 2000s brain, and I think about how I've got domain names and web sites, and some of them include family photos and forums. The only way to keep them around is some kind of durable host, and a way for someone interested to get to that hosted data. Cloud + domain names = unmaintained software but subscription-based expense in perpetuity.
What about a box? A server you could plug in anywhere, uses dynamic DNS to "hook in" to the internet, and you just maintain a domain name. You could update it while you're alive, but eventually it would just be a "photo book" people could choose to pass around and connect if they so wished. And the domain name could be pre-paid for a while, but eventually die, many years after you.
Now whether you need/want a digital legacy is probably more a question of ego, and how much those you leave behind want a way to revisit memories of your life and the lives of those you touched. But if you do want that, it's not as easy as printing out a photo book, or printing photos and sliding them behind those plastic sleeves, and passing that from household to household.
I'm currently in the very early stages of going through several DVDs worth of digital photos my late grandmother took, and thinking of ways to organize them and share them with my family. And I'm wondering if I can make whatever I come up with "reasonably" durable.
The benefit of digital things is that they can be copied much more cheaply than physical things. There’s perhaps migrations and upkeep though.
On the technical side perhaps the shared nature of this helps - if you can have something replicated so that you and several other members are all running replicas there’s a
On the non technical side, take some photos and print them on good paper. Print out stories on paper.
That doesn’t cover video and perhaps other things but it’s simple and does actually work for lots and lots of stories and pictures. It’s also immediately doable right now without anything new.
Looking/thinking about this and all the digital photos that are spread across multiple phones and accounts led me to My Family Archive. I haven’t pursued it yet, but they seem to have thought about some of this.
Perfect is the enemy of good: Don't obsessively edit. Cull obviously bad photos. Find a few pretty good ones. Pick one at random. Edit lightly.
Photography can focus on captures or edits: analog photography necessitates a focus on the capture. Be in that moment, frame the shot you want, and your only edit might be some color correction.
While the above might not make you a 99th percentile photographer, that probably isn't a goal you need concern yourself with. I always find photos online that blow me away. Artists with the patience to plan and wait for the perfect shot, possibly for hours. Artists that meticulously cull until they find an exceptional photo. Artists that spend a half hour editing a single photo adjusting sliders.
If that's not you, you still don't have to give up editing photos if you like the result better than the camera's JPG. You just have to focus on the parts you enjoy, and find balance in the quality of the end results.
(And personally I love DxO PhotoLab. Purchased once on sale, no subscription. Fun to use, and I love the results!)
Show the math.. only about 12% of buyers buy new cars. Economical, efficient EVs can be had for $20k. Renting a big truck occasionally can be as little as $20, but even at $5000 for a truck rental... most people are buying trucks that cost $10, $20, $30K more than an enconomy car.
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