“Tolerate” is doing a lot of lifting here. You responded to someone saying treatment and support make addiction manageable. In the United States we had drug companies devising as many ways to make a profit off pain pills for years, so there’s tolerance, but when people started losing their jobs and their minds in mass due to the poison these companies were knowingly getting their customers addicted to, there was no plan or inclination for treatment or support.
Even when a transit system is bad, you often find people use it anyway in situations where large events make driving a fool’s errand. There’s a hard incentive and comfort hurdle we’re decades from alleviating via impossible fuel prices for your average Joe
There are a lot of unviable transit in the US. Most transit systems have large unviable parts even if there is a viable core (generally in the city center). People often blame the unviable on lack of density, but there are examples of viable transit systems elsewhere in the world that have US suburb density.
Nothing specific, but when you look at European cities you discover many of them have areas with similar density to a US suburb and yet have good service.
I do browse on Google Maps from time to time, and I do see areas with similar-ish density. I also see a lot of cars. I've known a few people who have lived in such places, and they say their transit is near useless (poor service intervals, limited hours, doesn't go everywhere, etc) and most people drive if they can. Which will be less than in the US, as operating a car is often considerably more expensive there than here, tipping the math towards just accepting the poor transit service.
Which is why I was curious about specific experiences.
And I do say, better than many US suburbs which have absolutely no service at all.
I'm sure people in those areas do drive a lot. However, the question was about transit and from what I can tell the trans system gets enough ridership to support decent service that is a bus every 10 minutes which is not ideal but acceptable.
I definitely agree, when it comes to connecting into the larger metropolises the rail is pretty effective from what I hear from those places, and once in the big cities its usually not too bad.
Maybe with gas inching towards $9/gal we'll finally get people in the US demanding actually decent transit options.
The busses around me are either natural gas or EV, so they're pretty disconnected to the current energy crisis.
Well, who knows? The trajectory has been set in and it is downwards. After Nero and the year of the four emperors the Roman Empire still had ways to go. So, I would say also the US can potentially recover. On the other hand the saying 'it cannot possibly get worse than this' has also been disproven may times in history. In any case, I like to sum it all up by saying "The US is a superpower attempting to become a third world country".
I would much rather rely on data on this kind of question over vibes. Efficiency means things move quicker and cheaper, and a few people get richer. It does not by any means inherently increase safety. The effects of a fuckup in a hugely efficientized industry often scale directly with just how much efficiency was mined away from caution and human-interaction.
Bubba flipping burgers getting his dirty hands on your meal might make you sick, but Bobba inspecting the meatslop production line with constant pressure from upper management to be as efficient as possible according to whatever recent regulations were stripped back might accidentally spray the horse-meat product decontaminizer on the pig-meat product, generating a national pandemic.
But there isn’t one size of food producer. I would think there are diminishing marginal returns on food safety after a certain size. At that point perhaps the blast radius of mistakes offsets the advantage of scale. It’s a false dichotomy to consider only national producers and local producers.
Why though? There’s nothing inherent about speeding production up, producing more at once, or increasing profits that makes things cleaner or safer, and the obvious argument is the opposite. If the regulations that force cleanliness and safety get peeled back too far, you could be left with all of the conditions for worst case scenarios because of how much more efficient the thing has become.
What data might that be? I've looked and there doesn't appear to be any authoritative source of long-term data for either # of reported foodborne illness outbreaks or # of individuals sickened in this way per year, either of which would clearly demonstrate a dip in sickness rates if industrial-scale food production does, in fact, result in cleaner production.
Containers. When it's nice out, they live outside. When it's not nice out, they move indoors. yeah yeah, not op, but it's possible. If you're growing food to sustain yourself for a whole year, I'm assuming you're willing to sacrifice some indoor space to accommodate.
Also, the GP doesn't read to me the way you're interpreting it. To me the GP has grown produce and purchased produce this year. The purchase hit him while the grown at home did not.
It would be... unusual... for an American home to contain enough space to grow the family's annual supply of lettuce.
> If you're growing food to sustain yourself for a whole year, I'm assuming you're willing to sacrifice some indoor space to accommodate.
It would be unheard of for it to contain enough space to produce the family's annual supply of food. And pointless. If you're growing that much food, there's no reason to build walls around it.
> It would be... unusual... for an American home to contain enough space to grow the family's annual supply of lettuce
I grow leafy greens in containers, and while not totally self sufficient, it provides a decent amount. I have multiple pots that I rotate through offsetting planting so new seedlings are going in as older plants are harvesting. If you're wanting head lettuce types then it's different, but if you just want leafy greens, you can totally do more than I think you're thinking you can.
2) assuming I had enough space to subsistence farm for my household (I don't), I wouldn't try growing lettuce year-round. Lettuce in the cooler months, peppers and tomatoes in the warmer months.
3) the majority of the lettuce I've prepared in my home this year did come from my patio
I'm going to give you a really strong counterexample to this. One of the most commonly acquired parasites that comes from gardening is toxoplasmosis.
But doesn't toxoplasmosis come from owning cats?
Nope. The correlation between cat ownership and toxoplasmosis is basically zero. Because toxoplasmosis comes from stray cats who poop in your garden and you catch them through the gardening. Something like 40% of toxoplasmosis cases come from gardening with people unaware that stray cats poop there. (The majority comes from eating undercooked food, like pork, because the pork grazed in fields where there was stray cat poop.)
So essentially doing your own gardening creates a risk vector that is significantly less present in industrial-level gardening of vegetables.
The FDA suggests that the proper preventative measure against this is "thoroughly wash your dishes and produce." which is something I was gonna do anyway, with both the store-bought lettuce and my own. Doesn't sound like a big deal to me.
Am I the only one who doubts how thoroughly anyone's ever washed produce at home?
Like, it's not like we're scrubbing every crevice of every leaf with soap. We're spraying some water on a whole pile of it, and then like shaking it off or spinning it. It feels like theatre more than it does food safety.
And I'll confess, I don't even buy or consume fresh produce normally, besides apples and bananas.
That would be a massive improvement. “I don’t know, maybe these other smarter more expensive models with more recent training data might… here are some questions you could ask them:…”
Simply those first three words out of an LLM would be a massive improvement: "I don't know". "I am not sure". "My confidence in the following answer is low due to a lack of reliable information in my training and online sources ..."
“Coding” can be more like communing with an otherworldly presence via esoteric gesturing nowadays than ever. Superstition leads countries and companies.
The outcry has RAPIDLY changed in the last few years and the corpses being propped up in our government buildings by deep-seated corrupted interests have long gone deaf.
lol yes. IF something like that were to happen, the US military is and always has been ready and willing to respond to attacks and that has been the case LONG before our CIVILIAN police started arming up to the teeth, like they’re ready for war.
The cartels have long been wary of US armed response to their actions, and the militarization of the police in the US, while certainly a further deterrent, is much closer to a deterrent against CIVILIAN misconduct and works insanely well as a chilling effect against protestors and unruly gatherings. Yay America!!!!
If the USPS were fully privatized without strict government subsidies or mandates, rural and remote Americans would likely face exorbitant delivery surcharges or lose service entirely.
Language is a flawed vessel for conveying truth and the more people accept that they will never truly (like at a deep, fundamental level - not just truth-like via utility) be understood or understand, the more humility they might approach difficult discussions with, potentially facilitating the cooperation and coordination that language can be great for, rather than the dharma-combat people’s egos have them fighting every time they perceive a verbal slight or challenge.
reply