Lurker > Antifar

The Yakuza soundtracks

TheMikh posted...

how did americans even park in the 1960s-1970s fuselage era of automobile design

are cars getting too big or parking spaces getting too small

I could just tell you to read the article, but the tl;dr is that parking spaces are designed around the 85th percentile for vehicle size, which has remained basically the same even as the average vehicle is much bigger than it was even just 20 years ago.

Turtlemayor333 posted...

All billionaires are Elon Musk

His weirdness, pettiness, and lack of competence is not the exception

When you're right, you're right

Here's the actual article, in case you want to read how little he has actually learned from this:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/he-deported-thousands-of-people-then-learned-he-was-undocumented/ar-AA17XjP3

https://twitter.com/_JakeRussell/status/1630354594541838338

lol

PizzaPatty posted...

Absolutely disgusting and wasteful gas powered cars need to be banned now. If you don't drive at least a hybrid stay off my roads. The whole idea of a personal vehicle is so stupid and selfish and totally encapsulates the worst of america ideology. Just ban cars I am so sick of them.

so what would you say your deal is?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3pyzx/american-cars-are-getting-too-big-for-parking-spaces
...

The design vehicle is a statistical composite of a car, compiled by the Parking Consultants Council, a professional association of parking lot designers. Every five years or so, the Parking Consultants Council analyzes the U.S.s car sales data. It then calculates the 85th percentile car size, or the size of a car that is bigger than 85 percent of cars sold but smaller than the other 15 percent.
...
This approach to designing parking spaces has historically served the parking industry well, ensuring space sizes accommodate the vast majority of American cars and leaving about 20 inches of space for people to open their doors and maneuver on either side. But, due to a statistical quirk in how the data is analyzed and implemented, it may no longer be working.

Increasingly, cars are too big for parking spaces, especially in parking garages and other paid parking lots where developers pay close attention to space size. Like the proverbial frog in a slowly heating pot of water, our cars have gotten ever-so-gradually bigger with each passing year, but the parking space standards have barely budged. Now, in the third decade of the growing car size trend, people are starting to notice.

The width of a parking space is the result of a carefully balanced determination between convenience, economics, and circumstance. While there is no uniform law covering all of the U.S.s parking spaces, there are design standards that are relatively consistent across the country. Most parking spaces are between eight feet six inches and ten feet wide, but the most common size is nine feet (108 inches, with four inch wide lines). However, parking spot sizes vary depending on what kind of building theyre for. For free parking lots with high turnovergrocery stores and shopping plazas, restaurants, etc.nine feet wide is the standard. Spaces outside office buildings are often six inches narrower because people come and go less and are more familiar with the design. Spaces at a Costco or Home Depot where people need more space to load their cars may be 10 feet wide.
Naturally, everyone wants bigger spaces. When Warren Vander Helm, a partner at Parking Design Group, first meets with a client on a new project, one of the first things they will say is they want the spots to be big. But once Vander Helm walks them through the local zoning regulations that require a certain number of parking spaces, how much more surface area big spots will require to meet that minimum, and how much more that will cost, the enthusiasm for big spots wanes.
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As parking lot designers scrutinize every inch of their work, car designers have been wantonly adding inches to theirs. American cars keep getting bigger. Car companies keep killing off small and medium-sized cars. In 1985, about three out of every four vehicles made for U.S. sale were sedans or wagons. To be sure, some wagons were quite boat-like, but mostly this represented the small car category. The rest were trucks, minivans, vans, and pickups, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Today, that ratio has precisely flipped. About one in every four vehicles is a sedan or hatchbackwagons are essentially extinctwith the other three quarters the larger vehicles. It is the subject of much debate whether this was a trend driven by consumer preference or the fact that automakers can charge a lot more for bigger cars where the profit margins are significantly higher and therefore consistently invest billions of dollars a year in marketing campaigns to convince people they want or need bigger cars.

Regardless of the cause, the end result is roughly 50 percent of the American car market switched from sedans and wagons to SUVs, especially midsize and large SUVs, chunkifying the average American car. Consider someone who switched from a Honda Civic to a Honda CR-V. This added about three inches in width. A CR-V to a Pilot, a large SUV, would add five more inches in width. This may not sound like much, but repeat for half the cars in a parking lot and it adds up. For example, in a 700-space garage, if each car is four inches wider than its predecessor, that is 233 additional feet in car widthfrom the goal line to the opponents 23 yard line on a football fieldthat needs to be accommodated.

Plus, the SUV-ificiation of American cars is only part of the equation. Existing models put on pounds and inches with every design refreshwhen a car commercial announces the all-new version of a model that has been around for decadesa trend that has been especially pronounced in the SUV/crossover segment. Motherboard researched the width of dozens of popular car models in the U.S. over the last 20 years and not a single one got narrower. The vast majority got wider, with only a few remaining within an inch of its predecessor. There are only a handful of modelsunpopular ones at thatunder 70 inches wide for sale. For example, a new Toyota Rav4 is five inches wider than the 2003 version. A Honda CR-V is three inches wider than its 2003 counterpart. Even sedans have slightly grown. The Camry and Accord are about 1.6 inches wider than they were in 2003.

Again, these inches add up. Parking designers plan for 20 inches of extra space in a parking spot to accommodate people coming and going from their cars, loading cargo and children, and so on. In a standard nine-foot wide space, that leaves 88 inches for the car itself. Modern cars fit by these standards, but only just. Drivers have to pull into spaces more or less perfectly to not encroach on neighboring spaces with their door swing. Even a few inches to the left or right will be a problem. And getting into that spot just right is harder than before, given that the cars are not only wider but longer, increasing the distance between the front and back wheels, which makes the turning radius bigger and maneuverability worse.

As a result, there is a phenomenon in American parking garages almost anyone who uses them will recognize. A car will be pulled into a spot just slightly off center. The car next to it will have to park further over in order to get out, and so will the next one. This will continue until one car will have to encroach on the space next to it, rendering that space useless except for perhaps a compact car, which almost nobody has.

In theory, the sales data the Parking Consultants Council analyzes will have taken all of these market changes into account and adjusted space width accordingly. This is, after all, what happened in the mid-20th Century, when cars became huge, boat-like cruisers during the 1950s and 60s when gas was cheap. Spaces got bigger. Then the oil crisis struck, gas prices skyrocketed, and fuel economy became all the rage. Car sizes shrunk and parking spots did too.

Scheeman said this time is different because, while there are obvious changes to the size of American vehicles, the 85th percentile isnt budging. Its a statistical quirk that reveals the shortcomings of the 85th percentile methodwhich, incidentally, is the same method departments of transportation use to set speed limits, measuring the speed of all cars on the road and determining the speed of the 85th percentile car, an approach that has also revealed itself to have tremendous shortcomings. In short, the 85th percentile method is not capturing the changes in the car sizes. The size of the 10th percentile car has exploded. The size of the 50th percentile car has grown tremendously. The size of the 70th percentile car has also grown. But the 85th percentile car is essentially the Ford F-150, which is much taller and longer than it used to be, but no wider.

The Go Off Kings make me laugh, mainly

UncleJunior posted...

If capitalism is so bad, why do parents in other countries send their kids alone or accompanied by shady smugglers to America to work these jobs in these conditions?

Do you think they don't have capitalism in El Salvador?

It's soccer season

https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2023/01/26/private-school-vouchers-expansion-florida-parents-house-bill-desantis/69844069007/

A proposed massive expansion of Floridas private school voucher program easily cleared its first House stop Thursday, despite drawing blistering criticism that it would drain billions of dollars of needed cash from public schools used by 2.9 million students.

Analysts estimate the universal choice plan backed by House Speaker Paul Renner could result in Florida steering $2.4 billion to private schools from public schools as early as next year, as even more students leave.
But voucher proponents hailed the approach.

Government education in this state and this country for too long has been a monopoly, said Rep. Spencer Roach, R-North Fort Myers. And the only way you break a monopoly is to inject and allow and encourage competition. And thats what we seek to do here.

Roach said the legislation (HB 1) gives more parents a choice.

If you want your child to attend a government school, which I believe oftentimes results in an inferior education and condemns them to a life of government dependence, you have the option to do that, he added. But how dare you tell me that I have to make that decision.

Opponents, though, said the Houses plan would create two systems, of K-12 education, public and private, with both relying on taxpayer dollars.

Public education has been the bedrock of democracy, said Sarah Butzin, with the League of Women Voters-Florida. This voucher system for years has been chipping away to fund private and religious education at public expense. HB 1 now adds a sledge hammer.

Rev. Rachel Gunter Shapard of Jacksonville said the legislation is seen by supporters as freedom for all, but it is really freedom for a small few, that could result in the utter devastation of our public education system.

Advocates included a large contingent of Americans for Prosperity activists who helped pack the House committee room. AFP, a libertarian group created and funded by Koch Industries David Koch, has long supported the voucher effort.

Families should be the primary decision-maker in their childs education, said Tiffany Barfield, with Yes Every Kid, an education policy organization.

She called all nonsense, the idea that the voucher expansion harms the education system.

The Florida Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning research group based in Orlando, has studied the redirection of public dollars to private schools. Its estimate of $2.4 billion being redirected from state coffers represents roughly 10% of the $24.3 billion spent this year on public schools.

The state is currently sending about $1.3 billion to private schools through voucher programs, with that level climbing to $2.4 billion next year with the expansion now before lawmakers, FPI estimates.
...
Efforts by Democrats Thursday to impose a cap on tuition increases at private schools participating in the program and another adding language to bar these schools from discriminating against students for sexual orientation, hair-style or ethnic origin were defeated by Republicans.

Also defeated was an amendment by Rep. Angie Nixon, D-Jacksonville, that would have barred families with a household income of $1 million or more from getting a private school voucher.

This bill will give handouts to wealthy families by redirecting public tax dollars to institutions with zero oversight and accountability, while defunding public schools that serve over 90% of our students, Nixon said later in a statement.

The legislation eliminates financial eligibility standards for the states Family Empowerment Scholarships, which now are confined to families earning at or below 400% of the federal poverty level or $111,000 for a family of four.

The maximum scholarship award amount for the 2021-22 school year was $7,408 per student.

cool

UncleJunior posted...

Republicans were called conspiracy theorists when we tried to expose this.

You'll probably get this account banned before reading this, but the things you're referring to that Republicans tried to expose were figments of their deluded imaginations.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

That's precisely wrong! It is their undocumented status that renders them vulnerable and gives employers the leverage to exploit them.

Now, just a third of migrant children are going to their parents. A majority are sent to other relatives, acquaintances or even strangers, a Times analysis of federal data showed. Nearly half are coming from Guatemala, where poverty is fueling a wave of migration. Parents know that they would be turned away at the border or quickly deported, so they send their children in hopes that remittances will come back.
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Calling the hotline is not a sure way to get support, either. Juanito Ferrer called for help after he was brought to Manassas, Va., at age 15 by an acquaintance who forced him to paint houses during the day and guard an apartment complex at night. His sponsor took his paychecks and watched him on security cameras as he slept on the basement floor.

Juanito said that when he called the hotline in 2019, the person on the other end just took a report. I thought theyd send the police or someone to check, but they never did that, he said. I thought they would come and inspect the house, at least. He eventually escaped.

Nobody has to do this shit to cross from California to Nevada, a completely open border.

Inshallah

TurboTax uses that money to lobby the government to keep tax filing too complicated for most people to do on their own (or to keep the government from doing it automatically, as is the case in some countries). They are a public nuisance

Bump

https://web.archive.org/web/20230226134526/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html

It was almost midnight in Grand Rapids, Mich., but inside the factory everything was bright. A conveyor belt carried bags of Cheerios past a cluster of young workers. One was 15-year-old Carolina Yoc, who came to the United States on her own last year to live with a relative she had never met.

About every 10 seconds, she stuffed a sealed plastic bag of cereal into a passing yellow carton. It could be dangerous work, with fast-moving pulleys and gears that had torn off fingers and ripped open a womans scalp.
The factory was full of underage workers like Carolina, who had crossed the Southern border by themselves and were now spending late hours bent over hazardous machinery, in violation of child labor laws. At nearby plants, other children were tending giant ovens to make Chewy and Nature Valley granola bars and packing bags of Lucky Charms and Cheetos all of them working for the processing giant Hearthside Food Solutions, which would ship these products around the country.

Sometimes I get tired and feel sick, Carolina said after a shift in November. Her stomach often hurt, and she was unsure if that was because of the lack of sleep, the stress from the incessant roar of the machines, or the worries she had for herself and her family in Guatemala. But Im getting used to it.

These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.

Largely from Central America, the children are driven by economic desperation that was worsened by the pandemic. This labor force has been slowly growing for almost a decade, but it has exploded since 2021, while the systems meant to protect children have broken down.

The Times spoke with more than 100 migrant child workers in 20 states who described jobs that were grinding them into exhaustion, and fears that they had become trapped in circumstances they never could have imagined. The Times examination also drew on court and inspection records and interviews with hundreds of lawyers, social workers, educators and law enforcement officials.

In town after town, children scrub dishes late at night. They run milking machines in Vermont and deliver meals in New York City. They harvest coffee and build lava rock walls around vacation homes in Hawaii. Girls as young as 13 wash hotel sheets in Virginia.

In many parts of the country, middle and high school teachers in English-language learner programs say it is now common for nearly all their students to rush off to long shifts after their classes end.

They should not be working 12-hour days, but its happening here, said Valeria Lindsay, a language arts teacher at Homestead Middle School near Miami. For the past three years, she said, almost every eighth grader in her English learner program of about 100 students was also carrying an adult workload.

Migrant child labor benefits both under-the-table operations and global corporations, The Times found. In Los Angeles, children stitch Made in America tags into J. Crew shirts. They bake dinner rolls sold at Walmart and Target, process milk used in Ben & Jerrys ice cream and help debone chicken sold at Whole Foods. As recently as the fall, middle-schoolers made Fruit of the Loom socks in Alabama. In Michigan, children make auto parts used by Ford and General Motors.
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Far from home, many of these children are under intense pressure to earn money. They send cash back to their families while often being in debt to their sponsors for smuggling fees, rent and living expenses.

Its getting to be a business for some of these sponsors, said Annette Passalacqua, who left her job as a caseworker in Central Florida last year. Ms. Passalacqua said she saw so many children put to work, and found law enforcement officials so unwilling to investigate these cases, that she largely stopped reporting them. Instead, she settled for explaining to the children that they were entitled to lunch breaks and overtime.

Sponsors are required to send migrant children to school, and some students juggle classes and heavy workloads. Other children arrive to find that they have been misled by their sponsors and will not be enrolled in school.

The federal government hires child welfare agencies to track some minors who are deemed to be at high risk. But caseworkers at those agencies said that H.H.S. regularly ignored obvious signs of labor exploitation, a characterization the agency disputed.

In interviews with more than 60 caseworkers, most independently estimated that about two-thirds of all unaccompanied migrant children ended up working full time.
...
At Union High School in Grand Rapids, Carolinas ninth-grade social studies teacher, Rick Angstman, has seen the toll that long shifts take on his students. One, who was working nights at a commercial laundry, began passing out in class from fatigue and was hospitalized twice, he said. Unable to stop working, she dropped out of school.

She disappeared into oblivion, Mr. Angstman said. Its the new child labor. Youre taking children from another country and putting them in almost indentured servitude.

I posted a few reviews back around 2008, 2009 or so, on my previous account.

lilORANG posted...

Lots of old rock bands do this, so there are probably lots of big age discrepancies out there.

Yeah, this is precisely what came to mind

Kloe_Rinz posted...

not keen on anything sony related since they went full censorship on a lot of things

Which things

thronedfire2 posted...

even if he reinstated those regulations the next republicans would just remove them again

Make them.

To this sort of rhetoric, I say: what about the 45 percent of Ohioans who voted for Biden? Do they deserve this, too?
https://twitter.com/JordanUhl/status/1629172106578604038

One big downturn per decade has been pretty much the pattern

Bump

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

And this is part of the problem, any sort of ban on this stuff is inevitably going to raise the barriers for entry for some people to have to deal with in ways that suck.

https://youtu.be/ajFf2RaiZu4

Could be cool

Hell yeah

https://twitter.com/danarubinstein/status/1628899616027512834
https://twitter.com/danarubinstein/status/1628900339398090752

Bump

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1628007889993363459

I was just thinking yesterday how people in the 80s must've thought the "Bueller" bit was the funniest thing in the world. It permeated decades of pop culture; people who have never seen the movie are familiar with it.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/vivek-ramaswamy-launches-longshot-gop-white-house-bid/ar-AA17MuWf?OCID=ansmsnnews11

Vivek Ramaswamy, a wealthy former biotech executive, jumped into the Republican presidential race Tuesday night, announcing his candidacy in a video released on Twitter and with an appearance on Fox News.

The 37-year-old Ramaswamy is running his longshot campaign as an "anti-woke" capitalist who opposes what he considers liberal "woke" indoctrination in corporate investment based on E.S.G., or environmental, societal and governance principles. Ramaswamy has written two books, including "Woke, Inc" a popular text in conservative circles due to its push to bring a culture war to the corporate world.

"We're in the middle of a national identity crisis. Faith, patriotism and hard work have disappeared," Ramaswamy said in his announcement video. "We hunger to be part of something bigger than ourselves. Yet we can't even answer the question of what it means to be an American."

Ramaswamy said that the "woke left" has "created a new culture of fear in our country that has completely replaced our culture of free speech in America."

Ramaswamy had already made trips to early primary states, including Iowa, before he officially filed with the FEC on Tuesday.

The multimillionaire Ohio native has ties to Republican Senator J.D. Vance and billionaire Republican donor Peter Thiel. Ramaswamy, Vance and Thiel started the hedge fund Strive, which encourages investments that stay away from so-called "woke capitalism."

Ramaswamy is the latest Republican to formally announce a bid for the presidency in 2024. Other notable candidates include former President Donald Trump and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who also served as Trump's U.N. ambassador.

Real potential to be the Republican Andrew Yang

My name

Touch posted...

Huh. What about it did you dislike?

Idk it was like 10 years ago.

Have you tried having diarrhea

How would you have died?

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

It really could. Deadly industrial accidents are quite common in this country.

Bump

BlackOmnimon posted...

Like how Russia is losing right now.

So with tens of thousands of people dying, then.

Sanction them with what power?

A significant driver of these heated debates over media consumption is people's growing feeling that there's no realistic route to affect change through the government. There are, IMO, some good reasons for that feeling! So they try to achieve something using the lever they have available to them: the marketplace.

BlackOmnimon posted...

And they would lose because the blue states are richer, fragment even more.

What would that loss look like, in your view?

I dunno I think jumping straight to accusations of foreign assetry is overlooking the real and signifcant capacity for Americans to want this stuff all on their own. It'd be convenient if all the bad actors were doing secret treason and just waiting to be punished for it, but I don't think it's true.

Kloe_Rinz posted...

Government regulation to stop problematic behaviour

Saudi Arabia is not a democracy; they don't listen to their own citizens, much less the citizens of the US or UK that are participating in this discussion here.

The US, and the rest of the world, would do very poorly if Republicans were given unchecked control over significant fossil fuel reserves.

https://twitter.com/ShackletonCI/status/1627730998677962752

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

This one has Mark Zuckerburg wanting to profit off of it. It's only significant in that it is the pet project/business scheme of one of the world's richest people.