Have you seen what roads are like in third world countries?
It’s utter chaos at high speed without any sort of traffic control most of the time.
Not personally, no. On TV and such but I figured it can’t be as bad as it looks, but apparently that’s not the case - it’s worse!
It’s not. This is a mis-characterization. Traffic in many other countries proceeds according to different rules than you’re used to, but according to rules nonetheless. It may seem chaotic to you, but to drivers used to that traffic flow, it’s orderly. And there is traffic control. I’ve been to Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Dubai, Mexico, Argentina, several European countries and have never seen a country without traffic control. In fact, in most other countries, there’s a larger traffic police presence than is typical in the United States. Drivers in Bangkok stop when the light is red and go when it’s green. Pedestrians in Hanoi cross the street on well marked pedestrian crossings when the light says to cross. In Siem Reap, there are often separate parallel roadways for slower traffic like bicycles, ox-carts and duk duks.
Here’s a relevant passage from the article on Bangladesh:
In Bangladesh, about 20 people die in road accidents every day, according to the Bangladesh Passenger Welfare Association.
Road deaths in Bangladesh per day: 20
Population of Bangladesh: 163 million
Road deaths in the USA per day: 89
Population of the USA: 323 million
My math tells me I’m more likely to die in a traffic fatality in the U.S. than in Bangladesh…
On the other hand, the US has 910 motor vehicles per 1000 people and Bangladesh has 3.
That’s a fair point.
The captioned pictures are a total riot.
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Not that I condone murder per se, but I do wonder how the super-rich haven’t been revolutioned already.
There are too many unused lampposts.
Wait till the next Depression.
I have to say, my experiences with Hanoi traffic were of the “ohshitOhShitOHSHIT Oh, hey, that’s how this works!” variety. Everybody knows where they’re going and everybody knows where everyone else in their immediate vicinity is going. It’s when you hesitate, when you don’t move with purpose, that you disrupt the flow. You don’t want to disrupt the flow.
Yeah, I was just there in April. This was true at some intersections. You just step out into traffic and it parts around you like the Red Sea, scooters passing by inches away on both sides. We sat at a coffee shop and watched traffic circle a roundabout for an hour at one point, fascinated by how it worked. But, given all the horror stories I’d heard, I was surprised to find that most major intersections in the Old Quarter have cross-walks and pedestrian signals. And even the unregulated crossings aren’t all that scary once you get used to it.
No idea where to put this. Is it a conspiracy theory? No, not really, cuz the conspiracy seems to be real. Basically, three Mar-a-Lago members — the head of Marvel Entertainment, a luxury doctor, and an ambulance chaser — are secretly running the Veterans administration.
It really feels like the best use of lobbyist money right now would be buying a Mar-A-Largo membership and going to dinner there every night. Establish a presence, buy rounds for everyone, then just talk the President’s ear off when he comes by every weekend.
#workingasdesigned
What. The. Fuck.
(Not political but eh.)
The tick, the Asian longhorned tick (or Haemaphysalis longicornis ), has the potential to transmit an assortment of nasty diseases to humans, including an emerging virus that kills up to 30 percent of victims. So far, the tick hasn’t been found carrying any diseases in the US. It currently poses the largest threat to livestock, pets, and wild animals; the ticks can attack en masse and drain young animals of blood so quickly that they die—an execution method called exsanguination.
Key to the tick’s explosive spread and bloody blitzes is that its invasive populations tend to reproduce asexually, that is, without mating. Females drop up to 2,000 eggs over the course of two or three weeks, quickly giving rise to a ravenous army of clones. In one US population studied so far, experts encountered a massive swarm of the ticks in a single paddock, totaling well into the thousands. They speculated that the population might have a ratio of about one male to 400 females.
Between those ticks and the spotted lanternfly, I think these insects were imported specifically to cause damage here in the US.
More evidence for the thesis that there are very fine people on both sides. The description in the full thread is something else.
Somewhere, we had a political book thread, but my search-foo is weak, so I’ll just put this here.
I’ve been reading Rick Wilson’s Everything Trump Touches Dies (audiobook version, narrated by the author).
I like Wilson’s cruel humor and his reading is pretty good. The depictions of all the Trump rogue’s gallery are entertaining… That said, things are moving so very fast that it feels like what’s covered by the book (basically everything up to about two months ago) is ancient history. I chuckle about something and shake my head saying “man, if he’d just waited to write the book for two more months, this whole chapter would be different.”
It also kind of feels like a “Mean Girls” screed. Oh, i agree with everything he says in the book, and I do kind of enjoy hearing someone who hates Trump as much as I do go on about how bad Trump is… but after a while it kind of starts to blur together. The book is long on venting and howling and short on pretty much anything else.
Chuck Rosenberg is my favorite talking head.
I like him too. Not histrionic, just the facts.
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Australia has another new PM: