If you had spent it, you might still be alive, and if you aren't, it's hardly wasted, since you no longer need it.
Jokes aside, I live in the UK, and occasionality I see vehicles here that are entirely too big and unnecessary for our roads.
There was a lady driving what I think was a Defender 130 (I don't know modern LRs too well), it was far too big for the parking spaces in the tiny car park we were in, she could only just see over the steering wheel, and she had no chance of seeing my 5yo child I was walking back to my car with; who's quite tall for 5 but didn't reach over the height of the bonnet.
I’m not sure, a lot of people seem quick to blame children for “darting” in to the road instead of accepting responsibility for operating a dangerous machine.
People lay the blame on children and their parents because if they choose to do their best bipedal impression of a deer there's really nothing a driver can do. One could be going 10mph and if a child darts out from parked cars at the right time you're gonna hit them. Heck, adults get hit by forklifts and other heavy equipment going single digit speeds all the time and even workplaces that separate traffic nearly completely don't eliminate them at scale.
Ignoring extremists is easier than preventing (or reducing to a point that you stop complaining) these accidents at the limit, so that's what society does. Tough luck.
The average car driver is NOT putting enough active attention into their driving and could in many cases break fast enough to prevent the accidents that do happen. Furthermore, the average car driver has not been trained on how to actually handle extremely rapid braking situations. A lot of people are downright wusses about dealing with the "whiplash" of actually hard braking their cars. I'd even claim that over half of all drivers have not seriously applied their brakes at 100% at a speed above 20mph EVER!
Slow reaction times, of the kind that could be easily corrected by more strict laws around who and how licenses are given, are easily the #1 reason for preventable pedestrian deaths from cars.
This is a solvable problem and the Euros have far less of these stupid kinds of situations for a reason. I WILL blame most drivers who "kill children" for their laxidazy assumption that they can reduce their idle concentration just because "it hasn't happened to them".
Also all of this discourse is really arguments for requiring all cars to have active automatic emergency braking for pedestrians and other cars.
Reducing speed limits to 30 kph where there might be kids running out from between vehicles is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, yet drivers oppose this.
SUVs parked on the side of the street make it difficult to see even adults as they try to cross the street. It’s not the humans doing a reindeer impression, it’s the cars doing a forest impression
If nothing else, they'll roll up and off the hood of a typical subcompact instead of be pancaked by the 60" vertical wall that is the front of most modern trucks and SUVs.
The main point here is that it sounds a lot like a zero sum game, people are struggling to catch a bigger share of a limited "safety" pie while manufacturers instigating the mass war are watching their profits increase.
It's not clear at all to me how a crash involving two SUVs is much safer than, say, a 2 bike crash, and in fact there is a particular type of accident (front-overs of children) than trucks are strongly susceptible to and would never happen with lower mass / shorter vehicles. This all points towards a runaway tragedy of the commons that can be solved by limiting vehicle mass.
Except they're not though. Buyers are juggling many more criteria and safety is only a "nice to have" after fitness for purpose is achieved. Like no amount of internet fanboys screeching about Volvo's safety record will make someone who wants a roadster buy one over a Miata.
While I'm sure there is some amount of the affect you're describing the lion's share of it is likely CAFE rules favoring larger footprint vehicles effectively discounting SUVs causing them to be a better bang for your buck.
>It's not clear at all to me how a crash involving two SUVs is much safer than,
It is by the simple physics of having more distance to dissipate force over and less distance between the occupants and stuff in the cabin.
> This all points towards a runaway tragedy of the commons that can be solved by limiting vehicle mass.
Which will never happen because the same exact upper middle class demographics that screech all over the internet about safety are the exact same people who would see their buying choices degrade as a result of such.
If you would have to pay for mass (taxes etc) that would most probably influence people to go lighter. It also makes sense because heavier cars cause more road damage.
Is this a personal theory, a hunch, or do you have data or citations?
> of having more distance to dissipate force over and less distance between the occupants and stuff in the cabin.
So what we need are bigger vehicles made out of lighter materials, to increase the distance and reduce the forces, perhaps some comically large Styrofoam bumpers protecting our bikes? Now, I can get behind that.
> safety is only a "nice to have"
Buyers are a diverse group, you know. There is a substantial segment that rates safety as a the top priority, and there is very little doubt the SUV mass race is strongly related to the "perception of safety" larger vehicles provide, of course not to the actual safety reality and externalities they incur to the rest of society.
Another substantial segment is driven by the "perception of masculinity" their large vehicles provides. You couldn't make up this level of lameness.
>Is this a personal theory, a hunch, or do you have data or citations?
Find any "professional" talking on record about small car safety and they will lament the reduced space for crumple zones, reduced distance from head to structure, etc.
>Another substantial segment is driven by the "perception of masculinity" their large vehicles provides. You couldn't make up this level of lameness.
I suspect the number of people who see a big truck as projecting masculinity is in fact smaller than the people who enjoy that other people will assume they bought the truck for that reason and dislike or be offended by it.
You're giving people way too much credit here. People and, more specifically, Americans (who I know) will do some incredible feats of mental gymnastics to avoid taking personal responsibility -- despite what their bumper stickers and favorite politicians say. It's always someone else's fault and they're always (somehow ...) the victim.
Did you learn the kanji for the first 1000 words? Looking into learning Japanese as well. I tried the Remembering the Kanji by Heisig but that felt rather abstract after a while.
It's mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but I've had good success with WaniKani[0]. As an aside, the company behind it, Tofugu[1], also have a lot of good free resources.
The main tag line on the WaniKani website, "2000 Kanji. 6000 Vocabulary words. In just over a year." is very optimistic, I'm around level 12 (of 60) after that long. It might be possible to do it all in a year, but you need to put in a lot of work.
Shameless plug: I created a free and open source alternative to WaniKani https://shodoku.app/ using open dictionary data and the same SRS system as anki.
It actually has a very different learning philosophy from WaniKani so it is not really an alternative.
* shodoku teaches writing as well as reading, the point being that writing it helps you remember it.
* You learn components (radicals) and vocabulary at the same time as the associated kanji.
* The order doesn’t need to be by simplicity. This is deviates from both WaniKani and Remembering the kanji.
* You rate your self, just like anki.
I find it is actually more important to learn the kanji in the words you are learning, if a new kanji has three new components, it is not hard to simply learn these new components at the same time (and create a story / connection of them). And learning the reading of the kanji is easier if you learn words containing it. So what I do is I bookmark a couple of words each time I start a new kanji card, and during reading review, if I remember how these words are pronounced, I rate it as good.
Here is my general approach, I attempted to learn Japanese in many different ways and the one I outlined before allowed me to finally break into being conversational.
1. Go through hiraganas a few times (however you prefer, I would write a few down on paper and try to memorise them but now I'd probably just get an Anki deck for it)
2. Once you feel generally comfortable with that, move to words (100 or so) using hiraganas only (try not to get words converted from kanji to hiraganas but actually common words that are always written in hiragana - use ChatGPT to generate a deck for you)
3. Once you feel you arw comfortable, move to the most common 1000 kanjis. There are tons of decks but I really liked the G-Anki one. Go through it once.
4. At this step, you can read and speak much more than you imagine, time to practice it. Here you would move to writing, reading or speaking (depending on personal goals and preferences). I found a tutor which spoke in a way I could understand and that I felt I could relate to (and I wanted to learn a bit of Kansai dialect, so that also helped). I did that on Preply as it is easy to see people's introduction videos and trial a few if needed.
5. As you write, read or speak with natives, every time you use a word you didn't know but you think you should (be picky, add a phrase which seems simple but don't get but don't necessarily add some extremely technical jargon you'd never use ever, at least not for now).
6. Keep going. This is a marathon, not a sprint. This stage, if you did the Anki decks daily, you could reach it in 1-2 years, depending on your inclination, how much Japanese you were previously exposed to, etc.
I am now at my 5th year, still learning with anki decks, speaking to my tutor (who became a really good friend) and adding new words. I started reading some short stories fully in Japanese, and almost played through Pokemon Scarlet completely in Japanese. I still cannot follow animes without having to stop and read the text but that's not my goal for now.
He recommend Proton Mail. However there's been a few comments lately on hn that its privacy isn't really sufficient. I'm wondering what I can use instead? Self hosting seems not only burdensome but likely less secure.
Email is insecure. Protonmail is no less private than any other normal email host. Its convoluted e2ee setup may be more private.
You can selfhost just IMAP storage, and pay an email service provider to receive and store your mail for you, periodically archiving it to
your own long term storage and removing it from the provider.
I always wondered why the B-52 didn’t get replaced by converted airliners (787 has quite similar dimensions I believe). Would be much cheaper to run and could do practically the same thing, no?
There was thought given to using 747s as cruise missile carrier aircraft.
Each 747 CMCA would have carried dozens of AGM-86 nuclear-armed cruise missiles on rotary launchers that shuffled around the plane's cargo bay on rails (the missiles would be ejected one at a time from a small door near the rear of the fuselage).
I read something about those systems, they really have that already in service? Damn.
Those kind of system would be really „cheap“ to deploy, you overwhelm a lot of air defense systems with it and well it’s transportable outside of air defense range.
They look the same to a layman, but they are very different airframes, with a different wing sweep and different load capabilities, among many, many other differences.
of course the b-52 is a completely different airframe. Just wondering what the reasons are you wouldn't be able to convert airliners to be used in that role. It's been done for fire bombing!
