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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I was skeptical about your claims about weight having such an outsized effect, but it looks like there’s merit. Seems like it’s a super complex area of study, and we have observational data that gives us rules of thumb that transportation and pavement engineers use to estimate pavement damages over time. Thanks for bringing that up, I’ve learned stuff today!

    I still don’t think it’s as simple as taxing trucks though. Registration is part of the solution, but so is gas/sales/tire/oil disposal taxes, weigh stations, tolls, parking fines, crush charges, etc etc etc.

    There’s a lot of things that would need to happen in order to effectively capture and recompense road damage in California, if that were a goal of the state. Unfortunately I have very little faith that California can do it - for all the good things about California, effective governance or municipal problem solving is not really on the list from what I’ve seen. It’s a shame, because they really have the resources, it’s just all such a mess.


  • I lived in California for 11 years and had out of state plates for the entire time, legally. Not even weird. There’s so many ways and reasons that you can live in a state, or work in a state full time and legally be able to register your vehicle in another state.

    Registration fees are simply not the way. There HAS to be some kind of equitable use tax or fee.

    A gas tax seems pretty dang effective to me. It doesn’t capture electric vehicles correctly, but honestly right now we WANT to encourage the use of electric vehicles so I don’t think it’s quite time to flip the table and try to implement a new system.

    We’re still in a transition period and we need to do everything possible to discourage gas powered vehicles, and taxing the shit out of consumer unleaded and diesel is an awesome way to do it. Honestly, anyone suggesting otherwise raises my hackles. There’s not that many electric vehicles on the road in the USA, even in urban California.

    I’m suspicious of any new laws that would reduce the costs of fossil fueled vehicles while offloading more costs to electric ones.


  • Not obvious, there’s tons of holes in that plan and I’ll throw down a couple I thought of while I brush my teeth. I lived in California for years.

    -Out of state plates are not included. Sooo many out of state vehicles

    -This has an outsized impact on shipping and industry such as work vans, small business trucks (can be argued that it should be, but I’m not convinced that the cost should be borne by those areas vs the bajillion people that don’t carpool to/from LA everyday)

    -A heavy vehicle pays a premium at registration, but what if it’s only driven a couple times a year? Vs a lighter vehicle that drives 40k miles in a year. Has to have some kind of use component to plan.

    I’d argue that it’s way more complicated than any sentence that starts with “the obvious thing to do…” Everyone wants a simple and fair solution buddy life is not that simple and California’s traffic, transportation, road maintenance, and road based industry is about as complicated as it gets.






  • I can’t speak for others, but when I joined I was definitely confused by instances, federated internet, moderation variances, and how to operate the various ~ 4 beta apps I downloaded at the same time.

    I’m definitely not a tech normie, but it was still unfamiliar and I would never have migrated if I hadn’t been fed up with Reddit.

    Most people don’t want to have to look up guides to figure out how a system works, they just want to download an app that their friends all use and move on with their day. Blocking instances you don’t like? Doing research to find a “home” instance? Ain’t nobody got time for that.



  • Nice incoherent rant bro

    You know that people used to pay for newspapers right? Local tv news was free on maybe one or two channels, but anything else was on cable tv (paid for) or newspapers.

    We WANT news to cost money. If you expect it to be free to consume, despite all the costs associated with getting and delivering journalism (let’s see, big costs just off the top of my head: competitive salaries, travel to news worthy sites, bandwidth to serve you content, all office space costs, etc), then the only way they can pay for it is to serve outrageous amounts of ads in tiny, bite sized articles that actually have no substance, because the only revenue they get is ad views and clicks.

    That is NOT what we want. Paywalls aren’t bad unless we’re talking scientific research. Please get out of the mindset of everything should be free, don’t sneer at “authors need money” mf they DO if you want anything that’s worth a damn.






  • You’re mixing some things up. Yes, some agencies will have some POLICIES about not wanting to hire personnel with a history of drug abuse/use, but that is separate from the clearance adjudication process.

    A secret clearance is a secret clearance, and you’re correct that it’s much simpler to get a basic secret than it is a TS-SCI or to be read into certain programs. But there isn’t a “FBI” secret and an “Army” secret.

    There’s no timeline for how long it’s been since you’ve smoked pot, or number of times, or anything. I think a poster said that it’s about whether the investigation finds you trustworthy enough for the level of eligibility they’re investigating you for, and that is correct - and there isn’t a hard and fast rule necessarily.

    If you do an investigation and are asked if you’ve ever used any illegal drugs and you say no, but in your criminal record you have a possession charge, that’s bad. You’re obviously lying, and not even being smart about it. If you say you used to smoke trees every day and are blazed right now, that’s bad because you obviously don’t give af about laws and stuff (not my opinion, this is the opinion of the Fed that still thinks it’s illegal). If you say you used to smoke with your friend for a couple months in college a year ago but stopped and think that was probably a dumb decision, that’s not necessarily bad, it all depends on how the interview goes. They’ll ask for the names of who you smoked with and how you got the weed - so they can check if you were hanging out with known cartel members or just some other joe schmoe at UCWhatevs.

    At the end of the day it’s all based on context and a ton of factors. They dig a lot deeper and have a much higher standard for more selective clearances or programs, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone? But it’s all about whether you’re trustworthy to keep certain sensitive information from unauthorized people.