Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • In our case the lanes were in for quite a few years. As I mentioned, we cycled through a couple of city councils before enough of the politicians that had spearheaded the initiative were gone and the new ones could do a study without feeling like their reputations were on the line.

    And I should note, for those who are downvoting me, that I’m simply describing what happened. I ride my bike, I like bike lanes, but if bike lanes get put in bad places then popular support for bike lanes in general is harmed. If you like bike lanes too then you should be advocating for them to be placed where it’s optimal for bike lanes to exist, not to place them in every possible location regardless of utility.


  • Not necessarily. In my home city a few years back there was a big initiative to install bike lanes, city council was proudly declaring “X kilometers of bike lanes installed.” Turns out that was literally the only metric they cared about, the number of kilometers they could announce, and as a result the lanes were added wherever it was easiest and cheapest to turn an existing road lane into a bike lane. Most of them weren’t being used, they were just wasting space. An election or two later a major study was done and many of the bike lanes were turned back into car lanes again.

    They should be clear about the criteria, but if a similar situation has happened it makes sense to roll some of it back.






  • Yeah. IIRC the only out-of-pocket costs from my whole experience was the occasional cafeteria food and the parking fees.

    Of course, none of this is to say that we shouldn’t always strive to be better. There’s always room to improve, if only because medical technology itself is steadily improving so we need to keep up with that. But it’s good to recognize that the situation’s really not all that bad as it is right now.


  • It’s complicated, but this might be considered a war crime. A key quote from the article:

    A booby trap is defined as “any device designed or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object,” according to Article 7 of a 1996 adaptation of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which Israel has adopted. The protocol prohibits booby traps “or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.”

    The prohibition is presumably intended to make it less likely that a civilian or other uninvolved person will get injured or killed by one of these seemingly harmless objects. If you’re booby-trapping military equipment or military facilities then that’s not a problem, civilians wouldn’t be using those.



  • Albertan here. A couple of years back my brother and my dad both died of cancer (an unrelated coincidence) and I had the same experience - there was never a moment of stress about money. There also never felt like there were any untoward delays; when a situation was urgent we were able to jump straight to the surgery/MRI/whatever. There were a few times where we had to wait a few weeks for an appointment, but those were always the low-priority or followup things.

    I know a lot of people think of Alberta as “North Texas” and imagine it’s an American-style hellscape, but even if it might be a little below the general Canadian standards on some things it’s nowhere near. It’s important to be aware of the baselines that things are measured relative to.