I’ve seen cars improve a lot over that last 10-20 years. Faster, smoother, quieter, and safer, they can cruise all day at 80-90 mph.
Sadly, this is completely incompatible with 25 mph city speed limits. Thus, the need for engineering kludges like automotive speed limiters.
I’d really like a new vehicle classification, perhaps along the lines of Medium Speed Electric Vehicles. Designed with a top speed of 40 to 45 mph, they might make a reasonable primary vehicle for many, and a good second car for even more.
This distinction has been made with engine capacity (number of CCs) for scooters or motorcycles in many places including in the US.
I think what you're most experiencing is a result of cars over 2 wheeled vehicles. Cities would be much better if the average American commuted around it with 2 wheeled vehicles, mass transit, or the occasional taxi for trips when traveling with larger items.
If you have not traveled around Asia, I recommend it. You start to see a lot of the sickness in American culture. The biggest is a culture that revolves around cars.
In Europe this exists with the l6e an l7e class vehicles - which lead to a number of interesting microcar designs, often for 2 people with a top speed of about 90km/h and ranges around 150-200km. Great commuter vehicles.
Such a vehicle wouldn't be able to travel on a freeway at all [1], which means the market for them is very limited. Even in cities, people will want to hop on a freeway to cut across town more quickly.
[1] Most states have rules around operating a minimum speed with the flow of traffic, so cars inhibiting the flow or otherwise driving significantly slower than the cars around them are considered to be a safety hazard.
Some states are more objective by posting both minimum and maximum speed limits, though I personally find that freeways with speed minimums tend to actually have more people driving slow enough to cause disruptions.
Today. But, no reason why we couldn’t change the rules to let these vehicles travel in the right lane only. Just as trucks are restricted so on certain highways.
Technically, everyone is expected to drive in the right most lane unless they are passing or there is a left-hand exit coming up.
This would just force average speed drivers into the left lanes and slow traffic down overall, and contribute to more traffic jams as the uneven speeds cause ripple effects.
My hybrid SUV halves its mileage over 40-45 mph which is enough incentive for me not to be a maniac. I treat the average mpg as a game, trying to maximize it for my driving pattern.
Sucks when I have long stretches on the highway though.
One of the things you see where I live is they pave roads with lower speed limits with rougher surfaces. You can drive 60km/h on a 30km/h road, but it'll be very uncomfortable.
People will drive as fast as comfortable or as they feel is safe. Making roads less comfortable at high speed is not hard. Making roads feel dangerous at high speeds while still being safe is not hard.
You can't just put up a speed limit sign and expect it to work. You have to adapt the design of the road to the speed limit.
Why restrict it there? If you up it to 65 or 70, far more freeways become accessible. Maybe not in crazy ass 85 mph speed limit Texas, but that ain't my problem (luckily).
“The event started Tuesday morning and ended Thursday afternoon. A source in the room this week explained that the event was “very unstructured.” On Tuesday, engineers wandered around the room discussing how to accomplish DOGE’s goal.”
It’s possible there were some good, rational developers present, but this reads like a nghtmare retreat.
They are a good opportunity - now that everyone is seated - to stick your head up and verify the locations of the nearest emergency exits. And maybe other people will take notice and do likewise.
It appears there are no checks and balances in place. Congress could impeach, or the Supreme Court could enjoin (is that the word?), but I see no prospect of either happening soon.
It would help if people could outline exactly what they are concerned about.
As far as I can tell, nothing that that Musk et al is doing is unusual when an organisation changes hands. This is normal for a change of government or a corporate aquisition.
Perhaps there should be certain, limited, aspects of executive decision making that require congressional oversight, but because left weren't decrying the lack of checks and balances previously, they now come across as sore losers, worse, dishonest sore losers who are cloaking their pettiness as concern.
Secondly, the left lost the public support so badly that the republicans control congress now, so even if such oversight existed, it would also be controlled by the republican party.
A person who has not gone through a confirmation process is running an agency not provided for by Congress and not vetted for security clearances which is taking actions that violate employment laws and union protections.
That is what we are concerned about. This violates all kinds of norms, regulations, and laws.
The left did not lose "so badly". They lost a handful of electoral college swing states by small margins. These people do not have a mandate, no matter how much they say they do.
Trump won the election. The left need to accept that.
He has a mandate to significantly reduce the size of the federal government, and he has the authority to appoint Musk to act in this way.
You can complain about it violating norms all you like, but norms aren’t laws and taking into account the preferences of the left isn’t something Trump is required to do nor is it something the Democrats have done in the past for the right.
As for violating employment laws, there’s no evidence of this. It appears you just threw that in there hoping no one would challenge you on it.
Federal employees are unionized. There are procedures to dismiss employees. They are not following those procedures.
So, no, I didn't just throw that on there.
Even if there weren't, are you so callous and heartless that you can't see how this blow-it-all-up approach is making chaos of people's lives? Is that what you're here for... to make things hard on people?
The Republicans won the election. That doesn't mean trample the entirety of the country to fit their vision. The Democrats have done nothing like this.
I'm sure calling them such names makes sense in your echo chambers, but to the overwhelming majority of people this is an inaccurate and inappropriate label.
Calling people things which they are not, does not hurt their reputation, it simply makes your fringe of the political spectrum look immature.
But you don't care about immaturity. You voted for Trump. The guy who said he can "grab them by the pussy, they let you do it".
It's just lockeroom talk. Right?
The entire Republican chorus backed up this juvenile locker room talk excuse. Trotted it out for the whole world to see. Not very mature. Did you love it?
Trump lost the 2020 election and Trump's kooks didn't accept that. Instead they engaged in violence at the request of Trump, while he was still president, on the basis of Trump's election denialism.
Peaceful transition also isn't the law. It was a norm. Until Trump pissed on it.
Trump ordered the vice president to overturn an election, and when Mike Pence refused that order, Trump sent a mob to have the VPOTUS assassinated.
And then, in possibly something like mass hysteria, they vote for Trump again. Or maybe it's an addiction to depravity, anger and drama. Like drug addiction.
Trump voters voted for a rapist, for president. This how low and desperate they've become. They kicked Mike Pence to the curb - all the boilerplate Republican policies they claim to want, but Pence wasn't good enough. It's pretty clear the right wanted an abusive personality.
Don't expect reasonable people to become docile about that.
Musk has no authority. He operates only under the pleasure of the authority of the president and the officers of the USDS under which he is a federal employee.
You needn't be an officer to gain access to and analyze payment systems.
Has no authority but is taking authoritorial actions. Right. He's not a federal employee afaik as he hasn't passed any of the requisite checks or been approved by the Senate.
No. The story I read was for "Interim Top Secret". If you have a clear National Agency Check (arrest and convictions), and do not flag as a drug user / mental case, then you can be given an "Interim Top Secret" while waiting for the clearance adjudication. Does not allow access to SCI, or NATO Cosmic, but does allow access to regular Top Secret. There is also an "Interim Secret". Over 90% of the people with interim clearances are positively adjudicated.
Normal thing. Provided they are using the same criteria for the Interim Clearances.
Top Secret is also a fairly common clearance, despite the name it is not a clearance level reserved for highest levels of intelligence or anything like that.
Huh? This isn't a corporation, nothing about corporate change of control applies.
Political, not civil, servants taking over these systems without any oversight is truly brazen. Sounds like you're saying that since there wasn't a prior act of Congress declaring this illegal, it's just whining. Please clarify.
You're right that oversight would be influenced by the party in power. Generally, the inspectors general would be relatively independent but guess what, they all got sacked just a few days ago. And Republican congresspeople behave as if they represent the president, not their constituents. The system functioned with some level of decorum before, but this looks like war.
I think this is a case where it’s becoming clear that some US laws were vague and there always needed to be some specification. I mean, what does checks and balances mean? How do you execute it? By sheer force of will apparently.
The actions that are being taken by Trump, Musk and co is normal in both governmental and corporate organisations when a change of control occurs.
Oversight in these systems tends to be illusory, because for the executive branch to function it fundamnetally needs to have the authority to make the decisions that are currently being made.
The Democrats have, broadly speaking, not cared much for oversight when they were in power, so suddenly caring about it now that republicans are in power comes across as, and probably is, just them being sore losers.
No, the US has been able to have a clean transfer of power without sending in random goons who won't identify themselves & who download key/secure OPM data onto random hard drives & leave with it.
This is all batshit insanity, an assault on democracy.
> Clearly your framing is driven by ideological hatred
Is that the current trope in American political discourse? If someone points out there are brazen acts which haven't happened before you just tack the label "ideological hatred" or "partisan" and think that covers all ground?
They are random goons, DOGE wasn't signed into existence by Congress, the "officer" in charge of DOGE has not been through the process of confirmation by Congress/Senate. Those people are getting access to the Treasury without any checks and balances process.
I cannot believe that Americans are falling for this, you were supposed to fight against the tyranny of highly-concentrated power in a single person's hand and yet now it's ok to do it because it's a team you support? This is all so stupid to watch from the outside, a bizarro-world of hot takes without any regards to civics, government function, nor democratic distribution of power across government branches.
What is infuriating is that any argument against it is then met by some twist of an ad hominem boiling down to "this is partisanship/ideological hatred". It's just all so, so stupid.
Edit: also forgot, I don't think anyone like you shouting "partisan" or "ideology" has ever heard about "The Network State", I recommend going through it to see the playbook you are all participating in.
The feds can screech all they want. The people have spoken. Their jobs won't be missed. That the feds that tyrannically oppress the people hate this so much is some of the strongest evidence DOGE might actually get something done.
It is time for their civics lesson, not ours. Hopefully they can learn to code.
Wreck everything in this case means a return to constitutional basis under which the feds have a narrow scope limited by the 10th amendment rather than the pretend one invented under FDR era and stamped under threat of packing the courts.
The screeching about Mao and Nazis doesn't work anymore. Accessing payment systems isn't the holocaust and you've cried wolf too many times for it to work anymore.
Who the fuck is "you"? I'm not American, I don't live in the USA, I'm just watching from the sidelines how fucking bonkers all of this is unfolding, and for some reason you don't even consider that maybe it is that fucking bonkers. Even if you support what's being done just the sheer pace of it won't drive it forward anywhere bright.
It's just some pent up rage and anger, now being used for retribution against something not even tangible, it's just wrecking for the sake of wrecking.
The only way to see through if it's "crying wolf" or heeding some warning calls is when you're way past a turning back point, it's speeding fast to that point and you are actively choosing to blind yourself because you feel there's an "other" (as your usage of "you" in there) that is only against what's happening because of some distorted notion of bucketing people into camps of ideology and only thinking through that lens.
I don't even know how to try anymore to shine a light on how absurd each step is growing to be on top of each other, if even the cohort of Americans who have absolute access to information, knowledge, are supposedly well-educated can just blindly follow through the master plan in motion and call anyone trying to warn you there's danger ahead as the opposite-you I simply have no respect left for the general American populace.
You do deserve the reckoning that is very likely to come, perhaps after that we can talk about who is crying wolf or not because this "no, you" rhetoric does work, it's fucking exhausting, it doesn't lead anywhere, and there's no room for talking to be done if you cannot ever reflect on your own position to admit that some stuff doesn't look nor feel right.
For all the fearmongering of a New World Order the conservatives in general have been stoking it does seem, yet again, that every accusation is an admission. Your government is rapidly getting taken under control of a few select people with a plan to fundamentally change how the fabric of your State works (and it's not under the 10th Ammendment or whatever the fuck else is in your fossilised Constitution). The plan has been talked out in the open, they've been talking about it on podcasts, on interviews, on articles, and yet it seems that any warning call is just "crying wolf".
What does this mean? You are just going in circles and basically saying "no, you" to a pretty valid criticism about a power grab.
It's fucking scary to see how easily people can jump into camp A or camp B, and simply blind themselves to any sort of criticism because actions come from their own camp.
American politics is done for decades, I don't see how you can recover from the erosion of public discourse steadily degrading for the past 30+ years, it just got worse and worse. The final nail in the coffin seem to be social media, it really hastened this downfall, there's no common narrative, no budging from your position; it's all based on shitstorming and hunkering down in your own trench.
It's just so stupid and sad, Nikita Khrushchev would be in fucking glee "We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within". And the thing is, I don't even believe Putin/Russia did that much, it was all self-inflicted, you are just imploding by your hands...
My own observation is that more “aesthetic” code is often more readable.
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