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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • I have a cargo van. It’s impossible to see any traffic coming from the passenger’s side when backing up, and there’s a big blind spot even on the driver’s side. It’s a larger vehicle, and it’s much easier to maneuver into tight spaces in reverse. (It’s why we learn to parallel park in reverse. Try it in forward once, and see.) Also, backing into a parking spot can be accomplished with just a steady gaze at one of the wing mirrors. (Driver’s or passenger’s side depends on which way you’re turning.)

    That last point will also be important someday when I’m older and don’t have as much flexibility to turn and look backwards. (I was appalled once at a city transportation committee discussion about back-in parking stalls when a city alderperson said that he doesn’t look behind his car when backing out, because he can’t twist his body. If you can’t drive safely, you shouldn’t be driving!)





  • Simple: Visibility and speed. You look at a parking spot, and if it’s empty, it’s definitely empty. It’s virtually guaranteed to stay that way as you back in, so you don’t need to monitor what’s in it. No cars, cyclists, pedestrians, emergency vehicles, et cetera, are going to enter the parking stall as you back in. That’s not true of a street or lane when you back out into it. It’s often difficult to even see traffic coming, as backup cameras don’t have the wide-angle coverage, and there’s always the possibility that you didn’t see somebody.

    As a result of both of those factors, with practice, backing in can be done in seconds, and pulling out is a breeze. Pulling in forward is a breeze, but for most people, backing out is a slower, more nerve-wracking maneuver. (At least that’s my assumption from watching how long it takes.) On the other hand, the people who just YOLO it back out into traffic are psychopaths.



  • I would go further. Most cars don’t belong in places where people live. They injure and kill people on the regular, the noise pollution causes mental and physical health problems, the light pollution disrupts sleep, the particulate pollution causes cardiovascular disease and dementia, as well as damaging ecosystems, driving adds to obesity and issues related to a sedentary lifestyle, the physical space they take leads to sprawl and ecosystem destruction, and the sprawl also bankrupts cities and towns. As well, driving in traffic just plain sucks as an activity, and makes people angry and miserable.



  • It’s a good question, though people tend to treat it as a thought-terminating cliché rather than exploring the implications. Why should murderers be punished, actually? Enacting punishment is an external incentive, a stimulus, supposedly structured to make the cost to the potential murderer higher than the benefit they hope to get by killing. Belief in punishment, therefore, is consistent with the non-free will position. But if there’s no free will, then why not instead try to “solve” murder, and not have murderers anymore, by discovering the root causes that drive people to murder, and mitigating them? We’d all be better off!

    On the other hand, free will implies that the mechanism of punishment may or may not be punishing to the murderer. We don’t know what they feel in response to stimulus; they have free will! Like in the story of Br’er Rabbit, trying to determine a foolproof method of punishment that’s hateful to the murderer is an exercise in futility, since we can’t know their mind.