The I Miss the Old Days Complaint Thread
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Worm race? Made me think of this!
@ McGyver ...totally in agreement.
When I was in high school back in the Midwest many eons ago, the classroom portion of driver education was a mandatory course The road portion was optional unless you intended to get a licence (mandatory by the state). The instructor had a similar personality and one line he mentioned always stuck with me "the safest part of the car is the nut that holds the wheel" (it wasn't surprising when some in the class who took the road portion would look oddly at the centre of the steering wheel for a moment after they got in as they obviously didn't get the drift of what he meant).
Anyway, where I live now (Portland OR) such coursework isn't mandatory in the schools and the two biggest fail points, parallel parking and backing up in a straight line are often no longer tested for, which is why I am often amused by some people's feeble attempts to park along the curb (I've seen drivers in small cars like Toyotas, Hondas, or whatever give up a space I could easily get a four door 1969 Buick LeSabre into [not quire a Lincoln Continental, but still a bloated "boat"]).
Here in Portland there is apparently no traffic enforcement as the police seem to have "other priorities" on their mind (like the nearby doughnut shop or harassing a street person). Hence it seems almost a "free for all" on the city streets. The city has tried to make crosswalks safer by installing islands in the middle of the street with very visible signage as well as others with signals to stop traffic so people can get across, but motorists often simply drive right through them. even though the law says if a pedestrian is about to enter a crosswalk, all traffic must stop.. The other day at one of these crossings I counted 5 cars that just zoomed right through while I had already stepped off the curb (if I could collect the 250$ fines for not yielding the right of way, I'd have more than what I need to upgrade my workstation for Windows11). In my area of town there are also a number of one way streets at which I always look both ways before crossing as you never know when some numbskull will be going the wrong way (seen it happen more than enough time).
It all comes down to patience and common courtesy which seem to be at a critical shortage, particularly given that many motorists tend to exceed the posted speed limits, and not just by a couple mph but 10, 15, or even 20. Being a cyclist or pedestrian here tends to be a scary experience.
I think the drivers that annoyed me the most were the ones who wouldn't maintain a particular speed.
I really don't care if they drive under, over, or exactly at the speed limit. I just wish they would pick one. One version of this is the people who will drive well below the speed limit until I try to go around them, at which point they suddenly start speeding faster and faster because they don't want anybody to pass them. And if I finally decide to just get behind them again since they're going faster, then they start going well below the speed limit again.
The other version is the people who are just constantly going faster and slower because when it comes to pressing a pedal, granularity is not their strong point. Usually they will slow down dramatically while going downhill, and speed up dramatically while going uphill. I assume they don't know that they're really not using gravity to their advantage. I also assume they don't look at their instrument cluster at all. They just assume it's been long enough that they should switch from one pedal to another by now.
@McGyver: Unfortunately, if they take a person's driver's license away, many times it means nothing to the person....they keep driving anyway!
OK, now for a joke:
A person was riding wiht a friend, and after a while, asked him why he was stopping at every intersection, even though he didn't have stop signs in his path. He answered, "My brother is out driving today, and he never stops at stop signs!"
Dana
Well I have a complaint ......I've gotten no notifications from the threads I follow since the 2nd of January ......
I haven't bothered with notifications in years. They either didn't work, or came in dozens and dozens at a time. I just use the My Bookmarks page, keep it open in one tab, and refresh it now and then to see the new post count in orange yellow. Much easier, and doesn't fill my email inbox up.
Dana
Same here, I think? I thought it was because my extra storage on my Google Drive was expired.
...sadly so true here in the States. I often read about someone involved in a wreck whose had his or her licence suspended or even revoked and it is something like the fifth or even tenth offence of driving without a valid licence. Some here treat driving as if it is a right guaranteed by the Constitution rather than a privilege.
A number of other nations have much stricter laws than here, a few which are rather severe.
I saw gook come from someone's nose and I vomited.
And so many people get caught, repeatedly, for excessive drinking while driving.
Well, at least it seems that way if you are addicted to cop shows and YouTube videos of stupid people.
But what's worse is when they don't get caught and they're running around unfettered.
Drive defensively. Or as my aunt would say "Drive friendly".
There was at least one place in my city where they decided to place a bus stop and a crosswalk in the same location.
Had a small thunderstorm the other night. I wanted to take a look at the sky and see while I could, but I only got to see flashes - not the streaks that made them. I could have put on my jacket to step out into my backyard but I just stayed in my room poking my head out the door instead. Hm, oh well.
The problem with unlicensed bad drivers is the penalty is generally a fine, sometimes a big fine, but nonetheless it's nothing substantial enough to discourage repeat offense.
Take the damn car away... if someone lets someone unlicensed (revoked or suspended for criminally bad driving) use their car, they get fined too or the car is impounded or completely taken away depending on the circumstances and severity of the situation.
And fines shouldn't be just set amounts, they should adjust by income... it's done in Europe and works pretty well... $500 is steep for a fast food worker so it might serve as a deterrent to driving recklessly, but it's pocket lint to a rich person... adjust that amount to $500,000 and it's not pocket lint anymore and maybe they'll think twice.
Unfortunately none of that is probably ever going to happen because as long as bad drivers are allowed to keep driving, the more they pay, the more money keeps going to the insurance companies who are quite happy with that arrangement... implement a system that culls dangerous or stupid drivers from the motoring population and that's a lot of lost income and that cute little Gecko will starve and be forced to eat that Emu... or possibly even Flo... and god only knows what a desperate General is capable of.
That guy's brother must live around here... two blocks away is a four way stop that has a collision every other week... totally visible, no blind approach... yet somehow it appears that two cars seem to miss the very obvious red octagon on stick simultaneously, each believing the other will stop first (or at all) and they usually end up on the guy across the street's lawn... he's kind of a jerk, so I don't really feel so bad for him, but he often gets complimentary car parts that have been left behind by the wrecker drivers (I believe they are required to remove crash debris) to put out with his trash which must be quite annoying.
The interesting thing is that you get two cars that'll blow the stop sign without any caution, both moving fast enough to cause significant damage (or in some cases, flip one car)... so even if they individually believed they had the right of way, it should have been obvious the other car was not going to stop and someone should have hit the brakes soon enough to avoid the inevitable.
But nah... "I've got the right of way" seems to win out over "hmmm, it seems like he isn't going to slow down..."
Either way they probably individually figure, worst comes to the worst, the Geko or the Emu will sort it all out and they'll be just fine.
I love a good thunderstorm with lightning... nature's fireworks, only thousands of times more powerful!
Talk about stupid. When I was a teen, me and my one friend use to lie on his roof and watch the storms, yes even when it was lightning out. If my kids did that when they were younger I'd go ballistic.
Non-complaint: Far away lightning.
When I was in college (Melbourne, Florida. Late '60s) I lived in one of the few dorms on the new campus of Florida Institute of Technology. It was one of four three-story, unimpressive, cinderblock, rectangular box architecture, housing about 70 men in 32 rooms, but, at the time, the biggest buildings on campus. None of that is important but I did succeed in dragging you through that overly comma-ed sentence.
Regardless, from my room on the top floor, several times during my years at FIT, I watched massive thunderstorms form over the ocean (only a few miles away to the east.) Without intervening clouds between me and the huge stormclouds I could watch the lightning jump up, down & sideways within the individual thunderheads. Intercloud bolts were much more frequent than cloud to cloud, or cloud to ground, or ground to cloud bolts. I was fascinated by the spectacle and would watch it for a long time. I even began to catch-on about where electric charges were likely building up, and even tried to predict where the next bolt might come from.
"Fascinating"
Little did I know that just a few years later (early '70s) I'd be working at the Kennedy Space Center, involved(among other things) in a massive research project studying lightning and our purpose was to gather electric field measurements from all around the Space Center and calculate field strength topology maps to actually see where the charges were building up on the ground and try to predict where the next strike was likely. Ultimate purpose was to advise Launch Control if it might be dangerous to try a launch until the high electric charge either moves away or dissipates. There were 25 electric field meters (called "Fieldmills") on the ground that had to be installed in cleared, 50 foot diameter circles of mowed grass or swampland maintained every week. Each fieldmill had a dedicated wired power and signal cable routed to it out there, miles into the wild lands of the Space Center. The 25 data cables ran to my lab where 1-inch wide, analog, magnetic data, tape drives recorded the field strength 50 times a second, for archival or later research analysis. The fieldmills had to be recalibrated every couple of weeks(lots of busy work for field techs). Then the data was digitized (on bulky 1960s era equipment) and sent to my two computers for conversion into map form and digital transmission to the weather office. There was also a NASA airplane that would sometimes go up and fly around inside our clouds to get z-axis measurments to try to work out 3D locations of the charged areas. It was a wonderful time for a young engineer in his 20s.
The efforts, as primitive and perhaps as overly instrumented and costly as they were, did have ongoing benefits. A sub-branch of the lightning research at the Kennedy Space Center in the '70s used what we called LDAR technology (Lightning Detection And Ranging) using radar instead of field strength as the data source. LDAR technology is only reactive, not predictive. But your local TV weatherman is now able to show you maps of the general area where lightning is occuring. However, as for predicting where and when it will occur, that is still iffy.
Note: FYI: The Electric Fieldmills that we used were about the size of document storage box and had two circular, 12 inch diameter, metal platters stacked on top, separated by about a quarter inch. There were a few radial slits in the platters and the top platter would rotate(thus the epithet "mill"). I don't know exactly the physics of how it measured the electric field, but just was glad it wasn't me keeping them working & callibrated. I'm glad I didn't have to tromp around in the swamp, dodging alligators, mosquitos, and snakes, while mowing a 50 foot circle of grass around a small metal record player, twenty-five times a week.
You stopped?... I get yelled at if I'm caught... apparently attracting lighting to the house is frowned upon.
When I was a kid, I was close witness to a huge oak tree getting obliterated by a lightning strike... probably around fifty feet away, but DAMN, what a rush!!
Only me and one other kid present were of that opinion, the others not so much.
The air after something like that is practically alive... it's an amazing thing to feel... it's like you are at the cusp of having superpowers.
Oh good... the forums keep timing out and there's still no way to upload images except from an external source!
2023 is looooooking gooood!
but only if hosted externally.
Feels like an average day for the forums honestly
That probably explains why the pictures I taped to the outside of my computer wouldn't upload... I'm a terrible host and didn't offer them snacks or refreshments.
(Imagine a picture of a Dell desktop with several photos taped to the case posted in this spot... I can't upload one, but if I could, I suppose I wouldn't be making this joke)
Ugh... That's pretty awful... I feel like my ability to be humorous is seriously lagging today.
Please ignore this... I'll try again later perhaps with something better... it's kinda hard sometimes to fully utilize one's satirical commentary when current events are mostly off limits... it usually limits one to dad grade jokes, cats, obscure historical references and conspiracies involving Bigfoot and ninja penguins.
When I was a kid 69 million years ago, all the houses had lightning rods attached to them.
The lack of them on today's buildings leads me to believe that maybe it was a bad idea.
Maybe.
The idea to stay safe in a lightning storm is not to be the tallest thing standing. And keep off the grass...near the tree that's being hit. Lightning goes to ground, and if you're near to the strike, it could still get you!
Dana
Flo had it coming.
Also, it appears that, at least in the United States, all drivers have been trained to react to a pending collision by using the horn instead of the brake. When I ultimately become the ruler of the "Western World", one of my first iron fisted rules will be that all horns must be connected to the brakes. So it will not be possible to blow the horn without causing the car to come to an abrupt stop. I genuinely believe this will save lives.
I want to go to bed but it is too early in the evening for that?
Trying to upload a picture. No luck so far?
Pride Eggos? (In your picture)
I got something to upload!
This is the image I've been testing with... Target's new curbside customer relief facilities...
I can't get cell service with a major cell company because my id is expired. I can't renew my id online because I think I waited too long or something else.
...in my neighbourhood, there is an intersection where motorists on the street without a stop sign tend to stop while those on the cross street with one often drive right through it. Surprised there isn't at least one collision a day there. Something at that location must be causing short circuits in brainwave activity as it has been happening for the last 6 years.
Maybe the bakery at the Safeway? Or quite possibly the ghost of the fertiliser plant that used to be across the street.
As to insurance I remember when it wasn't mandatory as it is today. I still had coverage as I took a pre law class and realised the financial consequences of not having it. Hence, companies offered all sorts of deals and discounts to get you to sign on. I got a great one, 106$ a year (collision and liability for a college student with a 4-speed Olds 442). What helped was the town I was living in had a permanent population of about 24,000 residents (there were only had three intersections with traffic signals at the time).