It likely skews data in conservative states, but likely not by much. At least in 2020, mail-in voting was presented as the greatest boogeyman to ever threaten the GOP that week. That pushed conservative voters to vote in person in conservative states and make a big show about how much more reliable and traceable it was. Democrats already trusted the mail-in option. Conservatives in my blue area were not as polarized by this threat, in my observation, and still used the mail-in option. I imagine they knew they’d be overrun in the electoral vote so it didn’t matter if the popular vote was accurate or not.

This time around, I’m out of the Reddit loop and I’m not subjected to Fox News every day, so I’m not as in touch with the vibe.

I don’t know how I feel about the idea that conservative men create that much change by overwatching wives. I am not saying it doesn’t happen, but if these wives’ outspoken comments are believed to be true, then they’re indoctrinated before voting, not coerced in the booth. Reddit and Lemmy skews left and secular, so I feel they both underestimate the power of promising more Christianity, the power of making women beleive abortions are murder (but theirs can be repented or explained), that undocumented aliens are taking their tax money and all in murderous gangs, and that women can’t even lead. Ask their opinion of Hillary Clinton and they’ll tell you she’s a bitch. Then ask why. You might get something about Benghazi and not satisfying Bill, but that’s probably it. Her looks? Her voice? Nothing concrete.

That’s when OP realized that’s no 67-year-old woman, it’s the god damn 6,700-year-old Loch Ness monster

If a German reads 24-richard-wilhelm-theodore to an English guy, he’d write down 24RVT if going by the sound, 24RWT if knowing German pronounces the W with a V sound. This is _exactly_why the NATO alphabet is standardized and swapping things around “in an emergency” isn’t permissible. There are so many variances in pronunciations between languages like this. Since you’re writing in English, watch what happens if you hear someone use Spanish and French words like “Javier Habanero Ennui Allo”. An English speaker might know the words, or might write down HOOO. And then there’s regional differences like Spain with some hard Cs or THs instead of soft C or Mexico with some indigenous Xs that sound like CH instead of H. Not to mention the typical English pronunciation of Uniform starts with a Y sound (some groups say oo-nee-form). And it’s not xylophone in every language, so why not write down a Z?

That’s why they developed one, singular group of words for the alphabet. It’s not perfect, but it’s the group that was picked.

P is for Pterodactyl. C as in Czar.

Mr. Krabs leans into the mic, unprompted, “money!”

Tariffs. I worked for a truck equipment company in 2017 when Trump implemented 10% on Chinese steel and 25% on aluminum. My customers just about unanimously voted for Trump. It was pretty amazing to explain I was selling them the same exact equipment made from the same exact Chinese metal, but it now cost more for them to buy. China didn’t give a fuck, China sold the same amount of metal it did as before and it certainly didn’t pay the tariff - that is a US-side payment. That’s how tariffs work.

And no, ignoring the part where American production would be too expensive, we don’t even have the processing capacity here to fire up the mills. It’s not coming back.

Most of this thread is overlooking familiarity, consistency. Aside from regional/international differences, the mcdouble you order at home is gonna be exactly as the same as the mcdouble ordered 400 miles away. Your usual will be there. Many people aren’t gonna take a chance on Jeff’s Cafe on the road. Jeff’s Cafe doesn’t spend a billion dollars on ads to tell you they still have the same thing you ate a decade ago. People don’t want to spend as much time and effort as it takes to read Jeff’s menu, decide what sounds good, and then see if it matches their expectation.

“It was a clear case of a cult game failing to find a broader audience.”

The non-gamers assumed it was about the game. The gamers knew it wasn’t about the game. It failed to find any audience. And a decade too late.

710 pages into this mandate and they decide they don’t have room to talk about SS?

I’m just sharing actual information to someone who sounds uninformed. But go ahead and don’t give a fuck, because I don’t have any extras to donate to you anymore

Despite the larger size and bright colors, they’re a bit more discreet than cigarettes. Most places that ban cigarettes equally ban vapes, so they’re often concealed more. That probably has a spillover effect to areas they’re allowed. They’re only activated when sucked, so, unlike a cigarette that’s burning whether you suck it or not, most people take a puff or 3 of vape and then go a few minutes without it. It’s not as obvious as a person deliberately smoking one whole cigarette.

But maybe they’re not around you. I think the other comments covered the locations well enough, sarcasm included. But if you suddenly smell something sweet like fruit or cereal, casually take a look for someone vaping

It won’t work. They assume they’ll somehow slide into a higher, benefited bracket if the Republicans succeed. Something about trickling down the wealth but thinking they’re the only ones that’ll be fit, floating them to the top.

So, if you’d like a little education on why the comment you replied isn’t nearly as dramatic as you’ve made it out to be, pull up a chair. Both lead and mercury are pretty damn safe to handle as metals in your hand. Getting inside your body is where it becomes a problem, where it’s able to form different, body-soluble compounds and become toxic. Your skin is constantly pushing itself out, so lead residue on your hands isn’t going to have a route inside unless you have cuts or lick your fingers. And even then, the lifetime accumulation is really insignificant with this method for non-occupational handling.

Vapors are the immediate cause of concern for OP. Ingestion (eating lead paint, eating food that has ingested/leeched in lead) is where it becomes dangerous faster. If OP is diligently washing their hands but huffing all the fumes, the cleaning is entirely in vain. So yes, that’s why it’s important to make the above distinction in regards to Scenario A being nothing compared to B, C, or D: treating for A is worthless if the other 3 aren’t considered.

They did. In the 90s, the FRA figured out plastic bearing pads caused a wobble in one exact type of intermodal car that triggered derailment.

This is an excellent science fair project. This is not some hidden solution to derailment. The article is devoid of details other than the student observed great variance in truck spring condition and did extensive hypothetical testing to show it can contribute to derailment.

A contributing factor to both frequency and severity of derailment, sure, but a rare initial cause. “Springs” are not outside the considerations of the FRA. If you ever have trouble sleeping, read an FRA derailment report of some non-catastrophic event. Back in the 90s, they went so far as to identify dampening pads - thin plastic plates in the trucks - as the cause of derailment for new heavier intermodal cars. 1" thick plastic that deformed 1/8" under the 250,000lb+ load hit a harmonic frequency that led the trucks to hunt (wobble left and right but never finding a steady center) until the wheels hopped the tracks when entering a curve.

There is a massive test facility in Pueblo, Colorado that has the smartest engineers on the continent working and testing there. There’s straights, curves, a super loop, road crossings, bridges, and even a concrete wall for crashing. They pull rail cars wired more than your road car all to find something, anything in the data. So can resonant frequency be a big contributor to derailment? Yeah, of course. A push becomes a shove 3 cars later and hits some limit. But there’s absolutely no way to predict or control it because every car, ever load, and every piece of track is going to have some unique critical frequency.

And, for the record, the vast majority of those “1300 derailment per day” are low speed (which the article mentions) inside yards when assembling the full train (which the article does not mention). And, while the individual root cause of other derailments is varied, a majority of them are triggered by hard braking. It takes a few minutes for the brake signal to reach the end of the train - it’s a system operated by air pressure that’s used for both signaling and applying brakes. This means when the locomotive slams the brakes, the back of the train is still trying to shove it ahead at full speed long after the locomotive passes the engineer’s original line of sight. This force can be so great it makes the rail roll out form underneath the train. Add in coupler cushions and the train can shorten itself by a few hundred feet under this pressure, shoving couplers to the sides, taking out all the cushion slack, and adding slack towards the front as the middle and rear cars apply the brakes, creating a slinky longer than a mile weighing 140 tons per link. And yes, they’ve certainly “figured out” that empty cars in front of loaded cars is a huge contributing factor to these forces, there’s nothing easy about staying competitive. This platform shows it’s well aware of how much ground rail is losing to truck transportation. By rate and by severity, trucks vastly outweigh trains in terms of damage. The problem is rail failure is much more catastrophic and gets more news. 1 fiery derailment is news. 100 fiery trucks are a statistic. Same as planes. Way safer per passenger mile, way more deadly in failure.

And why do brakes perform so poorly? Because the benefits that come from “interchange” of rail cars between trains, lines, and companies, also comes with a massive interchangeability headache for any changes. I’m not defending the rail industry as if they’re innocent bystanders, but we should all be able to understand the difficulty in trying to convert 1.4 million freight cars to a new system for the first time in, literally, 100 years. Many of these cars reach 50 years of service before being scrapped. Someone owns the rail, someone owns the locomotive, someone owns the freight car base, someone might own the freight car body, and someone owns the cargo. These are often entirely different entities for each. You can’t really do a soft rollout, it’s all or nothing. So here, we sit, with centurion technology. Ironically, the only type that has the same loco and cars every day is the least progressive load - coal trains. It’s runs from the coal processor to the coal plant and back, nothing else. Every other freight train can be diced and hashed multiple times a day.

It’s not all doom and gloom. The East Palestine derailment put “wayside detectors” into the general public’s lexicon. They were talking about relatively simple infrared sensors placed next to the tracks to look for hot bearings. That’s old tech. There are currently massive sheds being implemented filled with cameras that record terabytes of info for each train passing through. It can identify missing bolts, cracked springs, and other failures on the spot. Control is notified and if it’s urgent, the car can be routed to a repair shop or the train can be stopped. There’s even a type with a trolley that rolls along with each truck to image the entire circumference of the wheels, looking for chips and cracks. A stall in the rolling tech doesn’t mean a stall in the industry. Make no mistake, derailment are expensive and companies and trying damn hard to sell solutions to the rail lines.

Passenger trains have their own headaches. Practically each line has its own design engineers reinventing the wheel. While some lines may buy existing designs (notable, the Amtrak Acela that runs from DC to Boston is a French TGV), they have their own design flares (such as doubling the number of trucks for the Acela). These trains do run as consistent units, so they tend to have intercar communication systems and hydraulic brakes, minimizing the overall braking time. That’s why their derailments usually come from speeding or collisions rather than “random” accidents.

Conrail has left the chat.

Farmland? Or near-residential plots?

A deer will shatter your nose fairing and snap handlebars at speed. The next object to catch the deer is your head and torso. No, the burly batwing fairings on a full dresser cruiser are not any stronger than the nose cone on a sport bike when it comes to a 200lb meat bag approaching at 70mph.

So many myths perpetuated by people who bucked classes and PRACTICE in favor of their uncle’s advice.

You can answer this yourself. Get rid of your phone and see. If you beleive it’s not a necessity, don’t say “yeah I could do these alternative things to get by”. Actually do it. I hope you’re not job-shopping

AI isn’t useless, but it’s current forms are just rebranded algorithms with every company racing to get theirs out there. AI is a buzzword for tools that were never supposed to be labeled AI. Google has been doing summary excerpts for like a decade. People blindly trusted it and always said “Google told me”. I’d consider myself an expert on one particular car and can’t tell you how often those “answers” were straight up wrong or completely irrelevant to one type of car (hint, Lincoln LS does not have a blend door so heat problems can’t be caused by a faulty blend door).

You cite Google searches and summarization as it’s strong points. The problem is, if you don’t know anything about the topic or not enough, you’ll never know when it makes mistakes. When it comes to Wikipedia, journal articles, forum posts, or classes, mistakes are possible there too. However, those get reviewed as they inform by knowledgeable people. Your AI results don’t get that review. Your AI results are pretending to be master of the universe so their range of results is impossibly large. That then goes on to be taken is pure fact by a typical user. Sure, AI is a tool that can educate, but there’s enough it proves it gets wrong that I’d call it a net neutral change to our collective knowledge. Just because it gives an answer confidently doesn’t mean it’s correct. It has a knack for missing context from more opinionated sources and reports the exact opposite of what is true. Yes, it’s evolving, but keep in mind one of the meta tech companies put out an AI that recommended using Elmer’s glue to hold cheese to pizza and claimed cockroaches live in penises. ChatGPT had it’s halluconatory days too, it just got forgotten due to Bard’s flop and Cortana’s unwelcome presence.

Use the other two comments currently here as an example. Ask it to make some code for you. See if it runs. Do you know how to code? If not, you’ll have no idea if the code works correctly. You don’t know where it sourced it from, you don’t know what it was trying to do. If you can’t verify it yourself, how can you trust it to be accurate?

The biggest gripe for me is that it doesn’t understand what it’s looking at. It doesn’t understand anything. It regurgitates some pattern of words it saw a few times. It chops up your input and tries to match it to some other group of words. It bundles it up with some generic, human-friendly language and tricks the average user into believing it’s sentient. It’s not intelligent, just artificial.

So what’s the use? If it was specifically trained for certain tasks, it’d probably do fine. That’s what we really already had with algorithmic functions and machine learning via statistics, though, right? But sparsing the entire internet in a few seconds? Not a chance.

Edit: can’t beleive I there’d a their

At least it was outside. Better out than in, I always say