Some people see participation in any sense as a sort of tacit agreement or endorsement of the system as a whole. So by casting any vote, even one of protest, you are legitimizing the system as a whole.

This assumes that there we are always afforded the option to choose whether or not to participate. If you are a bus driver and your full bus is careening toward a cliff, and you have the opportunity to swerve into a procession of nuns crossing the street (toward the cliff? What kind of street is this?), not choosing is still a choice. You can’t say, “well, I’ll just sit this one out. I can comfort my conscience with the knowledge that I’m not making a choice.” The people on your bus are still going to die, and it will be your fault. Now, if you swerved, the nuns would die, and that would be your fault, too.

A person who comes of age in a country with suffrage is a part of that system; they are not afforded the luxury of not casting a vote guilt-free, even if they tend more Kantian, because they were placed in the driver’s seat of that bus on the day they became an adult. In fairness, they share that seat with hundreds of millions of others, but they still face a choice between two bad options. No matter which they choose, even if they choose neither, bad things will happen.

I guess what I’m saying is, when the stakes are high enough and stacked up against you enough, you have to become at least a little bit of a consequentialist.

Oh hey Hurst! They package these in my city. Back in college I used to make a pot of these and a huge batch of cornbread regularly all winter. Good memories.

Random fun fact: back in college, my girlfriend’s best friend (and my best friend’s girlfriend) was named Elisa. This being the early 2000s, I used an old school flip phone that had T9 for text entry. But “Elisa” wasn’t in the T9 dictionary, so I would hit 3-5-4-7 and it would prompt “Elis”—presumably expecting an “e” after—but once I hit that last 2, it would change to “flirc.”

It’s interesting that that’s actually become a thing now.

I’ve got a kitsune gunslinger in a homebrew campaign who kind of talks and acts like Captain Picard and a dwarf barbarian in Abomination Vaults who is basically “what if Gimli’s laugh after Legolas asks him if he wants a box was a character?”

Plus I GM a game for my kids and their friends. That one’s super fun.

Whoooaaaaa I heard the next update is gonna be HUGE

The leaks say they’re adding millidays and a whole new second

Yeah, the more I think about it, the less I think they should get rid of the lane. If anyone at all relies on it, it’s worth the lane.

That is incredibly frustrating.

Five miles. Dang, I hadn’t processed that. Even at highway speeds, that bridge would take more than five minutes to cross; if you’re a strong cyclist, you could do it in, what, 30 minutes?

Still, you’re right. The next closest way for a bike to get around would be something like 20+ miles out of your way in one direction or the other, it looks like. So it would turn any hour-long errands you might be able to run by bicycle into day trips of 4-8 hours.

I dunno. Tough choice.

America-good, not Europe-good.

I believe the Bay Area has pretty good transit, but I don’t know the specifics at this location. The bus is probably more theoretically efficient, but I would wonder about usage in this case. I believe it’s slightly too suburban for light rail.

It’s a well-known fallacy in urbanism that bike lanes “see almost zero use.” Bikes have much less visual weight than a car, so one driver in a lane will look like a lane being used while one bicyclist in a lane will look like the same lane being “half-used.” In addition, bike lanes are much more efficient at keeping travelers moving at a constant rate so that they don’t bunch up, meaning that a busy road with backed-up traffic will look like it’s getting more use than an adjacent bike lane, when what’s actually happening is that the bike lane is just moving travelers more efficiently.

Furthermore, the “induced demand” phenomenon means that adding capacity actually doesn’t reduce traffic, at least not in the long term. We have decades of data proving it. The amount of cars that the lane can accommodate will invariably be taken up by people taking that route who had previously taken a different route. The only way to reduce traffic for a given route is to either create more routes or remove traffic from the road. Bike lanes do both.

In reality, for most routes, if you compare the number of people being moved on the bike lane, you’ll often find that it equals or even exceeds the number of people being moved on the car lane immediately adjacent to it. More importantly, they also tend to reduce the number of drivers on the same route and nearby routes as they encourage travelers who would ordinarily be afraid of biking to ditch the car.

I can’t speak to that specific bike lane, of course, but in general the argument that “it’s not doing anything!” is a fallacy, and replacing the bike lane with a motor vehicle travel lane would almost certainly result in worse traffic, not better.

Yeah, I mean, it’s not the end of the world if the coverage doesn’t happen, but it still sucks for the people who are still there. It would be nice to not have to deal with that, and ADP has the ability to help but chooses not to.

Easy to say if you’re not the one burning. I’ve been there.

You still need to know who isn’t going to be there so that you can get coverage for the absence and such.

My first reaction wasn’t, “Oh, the manager is trying to decide whether or not to grant it,” but rather “oh, the manager needs to put it into a calendar and find coverage and they can’t if there’s no name attached.” Super frustrating, especially if you end up asking the requestor to cover their own PTO because you don’t know who it is.

As a Christian, who has actually read the Bible, I think the venomous bigotry actually self-selects them out of Christianity. “They’ll know you are Christians by your love for others” was maybe Jesus’ clearest definition of what it meant to follow him.

This may be similar to “actual libertarianism,” but I wouldn’t know, not being a libertarian.

Ah, well, Fox thought it was very important to frame it as a “Dems in DISARRAY!” story, so I guess that makes sense. But nobody there has talked to an actual Democrat since the Kennedy administration, let alone an actual leftist, so you can pretty safely ignore their caricature.

Yeah…sometimes I think we should just tear it all down.

This is such a great observation.

In thinking about it I think it kind of works backwards for them, too: they hear that we do care about something, and then they decide that they have to aggressively not care about it, or care in the opposite direction. Like the whole paper straw thing; nobody on the left really cared about it, but there were some conservatives who really thought they were ownin’ the libs by using plastic straws.

You remember it incorrectly. The most pro-Hunter Biden thing I ever heard was the first word of “If it’s true…”

Everyone I ever heard speak on the matter said that any case they could make should go to trial, and that Biden shouldn’t have pardoned him.