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Everyone should have equal rights
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To ride the bus
Boom. Solved.
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Right ≠ permission
Yes, and it’s especially obvious with the example of driving. Driving is a licensed activity where you have to pass a competency test before you’re allowed to drive without supervision.
I’ve had the thought that a lot more things should be licensed with a competency test. Like, for example, I don’t know… This is just off the wall and completely random, but maybe a person who runs for President of the United States should have to pass the same exam that people take as part of the process of becoming citizens. Probably the presidential candidates should take a much harder test, but that would require a lot of oversight to make sure the test isn’t made to eliminate specific candidates.
But Trump took a cognitive test, he is good to be president. /s
Equal access also doesn’t mean that abuse and unnecessary risk will be tolerated.
I was at my first gun show with an older friend who knew guns better than I did who I was following around to keep me from making any stupid decisions.
There’s a table with a sign for “Constitutional Carry,” where they don’t think you should need a special license to concealed carry a handgun.
My friend walks up to these two guys at the table, and says “Hey, just so you know, I hope you guys fail.”
The younger of the two kind of bristles, but the older one, a dude with a long white beard, says “Oh, why?”
My friend says “Because I worked in a gun shop for fifteen years, and I helped fill out more concealed carry applications than I can count and…” at this point she gestures around at the huge room behind us, “I wouldn’t trust 95% of the people in this room with any gun at all.”
And the old dude behind the table smiles and nods his head and says “Yeah, that’s a fair point.”
So anyway, that’s the day I bought a Ruger GP-100 in 357 Magnum.
Solid public transport would fix a lot of that but Ford and GM gonna Ford and GM.
People go “ooh, a trolley car!”, when’s the last time you heard anyone go “Ooh, a Lyft”?
Somebody watches CityNerd!
I don’t, I actually got that from my friend who’s son is obsessed with trolleys right now. I’ll have to check them out of that’s a philosophy they jive with
You have the right to exercise your driving skills, if you have them
Synthesis is: no-one should be allowed to drive
The US huge. Unless you live in a metro area and never leave you’re going to need a vehicle.
Moving state to state, generally, it will take you an entire day at a freeway speed to get 2 states over. We have 48 on the drivable side.
The size isn’t that relevant. Trains are far better than cars for long distance travel. The problem with the US is the many areas of low but non-zero population density.
To accommodate that you need a good rail network and then probably cars to take you the last few hours. This would work best if those cars were self driving, so they can get back to a hub rather than wherever you are in bumfuck nowhere.
You could similarly say that Europe is huge, or that China is huge, or that the whole planet is huge, and therefore the people living there must need a vehicle. Except, most people dont leave their local area all that often, and when they do, theres nothing that inherently requires that the vehicle used to do so much be individually owned. This isnt to say that nobody needs a car, obviously if you live way out in the middle of nowhere, running transit might not be so viable- but that does not describe how and where most people live, even in the US, and for the majority that do live in urban areas, the size of the whole country is irrelevant to if they would need cars if we just built the proper infrastructure.
Driving isn’t a right, it’s a privilege.
Driving is g a right
In a city without public transit, denying someone the right to drive is denying them personal autonomy.
A vehicle is 3000lb bullet. If you’re not competent, or irresponsible with chemicals, then everyone on the road is at risk.
No one likes picking up body parts on a road or extracting what is basically meat from a vehicle. Or meeting people who should’ve had a norm as l life and are now paralyzed from the neck down. Or, alternatively, a TBI. Broken neuro wiring like someone took an egg beater to sections of their brain, leaving them just save enough to know they’re fucked up.
That isn’t a privilege. Competency should be required with 3000lb bullets.
I don’t disagree that better mass transit is needed in some cities, but that doesn’t mean we hand drivers licenses to incompetent or irresponsible people.
You may like : « Traffic management » with Michael Douglas (Falling Down,1990)
Who decides who can drive? The cops and the prosecutors and the city governments and County officials? Fuck that.
I’m fine with the DMV deciding who can drive.
The DMV is working off the information of the police. You are fine with the police telling you what is. Seemingly unaware that the police lie as they speak.
If the tester at the DMV thinks it’s dangerous for you to drive, it probably is.
I’m gonna be real with yall, the only person that should ever have even allowed to drive is Dale fucking Earnhardt, I include myself in that but the only time I hate humanity more as a whole than on the road is in a busy Costco
The guy known for aggressive driving and died in a crash is who you think should be allowed to drive? Not sure I follow that one.
Not so fun fact: a friend of mine was trying to get me into watching racing with him. To this day that’s the only NASCAR race I’ve seen and caught it live when I was a kid.
Ain’t 3’s fault no one else was qualified to do it right! Raise hell praise Dale!
my metronome take is: everyone should have a livable wage / bigots deserve to be houseless
bigots deserve to be houseless
Eliminating homelessness goes a long way towards curbing bigotry. It’s far easier to exploit and abuse folks with no permanent place to live. And our propaganda machine loves to pin problems produced by structural failures on the victims.
Once you house the homeless, a lot of the low hanging fruit of fascist agitation fades away. And a significant pool of young, uneducated, easily exploitable people are no longer in easy reach to radicalize.
If you succumb to road rage, then YOU are in the half that shouldn’t be allowed to drive.
You can recognize people around you are driving like an idiot and probably shouldn’t have a license without succumbing to road rage.
If you don’t pay attention to other drivers, then you won’t get road rage, but since you’re not paying attention, you shouldn’t be driving.
But once you start paying attention to other drivers, you’re bound to notice what bad drivers they are, at which point, you will likely feel road rage, and you shouldn’t be driving.
To get past that, you need to change the way you drive to compensate for the terrible driving around you. This way, at least the bad drivers won’t interact with you too much. The easiest ways to identify the worst drivers are that they follow close, brake hard, and change lanes frequently.
You can minimize their interaction with you by driving better. And the number one thing you can do is to significantly increase your follow distance. Note that you’re not driving slower. You’re just following further behind. Don’t get upset when people get in front of you. That’s actually part of the point. People drive badly when they can’t get into the lane they need to get into.
If you can change this one thing and follow further behind, you’re well on the way to becoming a person who should be allowed to drive.
Following distance is the most common way I see people drive badly. On major roads I’d say 90% or more are driving too close. My car has automatic cruise control which makes keeping a safe distance require zero effort, though I have no idea how close it follows if you decrease the distance setting - I always have it 1 off max.
I feel like I should have paid attention to this comment. Or maybe not…
road rage is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be… unnatural
Takes the bus, next stop : Narkina 5
