It’s totally normal. I can find a bunch of news stories about children and teachers killed by cars that hit schools by searching online. There are some about kids hit and killed by school buses, hit and killed by cars when getting on or off school buses, hit and killed by cars while walking to or from school, and ton about groups of students dying in car crashes together. We’ll collectively forget about Chatham, IL by Friday.

On a hunch, I found more than one company selling crash-rated bollards specifically to protect schools and daycare centers, so, at least there’s that.

ETA: I saw the AP News story was featured on one of my local news sites, so I visited and found that a doctor is dead and her daughter and husband in the hospital after getting hit by a car while they were walking yesterday, another crash injured a driver and created a chemical spill (which was a different incident than the tanker truck on the other side of town that was leaking fuel after hitting something on the street), as well as a driver arrested after crashing into a horse pasture.

Capitalists People in just about every system ignore negative externalities, which are defined as costs borne by other people for the benefits that they receive themselves. Ironically, capitalism might be the best short-term solution, if only we had the political will. One of the major functions of government is to internalize negative externalities, via taxes and regulations. It’s easy for a factory owner to let toxic effluent flow into the nearby river, but if it costs enough in taxes and fines, it’s cheaper to contain it. We just need to use government regulations to make environmental damage cost too much money, and the market would take care of re-balancing economic activity to sustainable alternatives. The carbon tax is a well-known example of this technique, but we’ve seen how well that has gone over politically. Still, it’s probably easier to push those kinds of regulations in a short time frame than to fundamentally revamp the entire system.

Thanks. That is what I’d expect, and highlights the disconnect I saw in this comment chain: I think what some other folks were trying (less-than-artfully) to say is that there’s a difference between what one might expect case-insensitive means as a computer programmer, and what one might expect case-insensitive to mean in human language. All three of those should be the same filename in fr_FR locale, since some French speakers consider diacritical marks to be optional in upper case. While that might be an edge case, it does exist. English is even worse, with a number of diacritical marks that are completely optional, but may be used to aid legibility, e.g. café, naïve, coöperation. (Whether that quirk is obvious or not, or whether it outweighs any utility of case-insensitivity is not something that I have a strong opinion on, though.)

You’re correct, my memory took a shortcut. Thanks for the very thorough explanation!

I don’t have Windows here to test, so I keep wondering, are all of these forms the same?

• facture-février.pdf
• FACTURE-FÉVRIER.PDF
• FACTURE-FEVRIER.PDF

Americans can’t buy them new because of the so-called Chicken Tax. We can only import them if they’re speed-governed, or at least 25 years old.

Even with those restrictions, lots of Americans want them, including me. There are quite a few importers bringing them over, including one that just started up in my area. They’re desirable enough that major media outlets are running articles about how people who need to get real work done covet kei trucks.

Yes, Americans would buy them. Americans are buying them.

Muskegon

Google Translate for Conservativese:

LAW ➡️ The exercise of state power, or its agents. e.g. “The law is at the door.”

ORDER ➡️ Social hierarchy. e.g. This pardon restored order by putting this woman a back in the social hierarchy where a white conservative belongs, rather than at the bottom, under the bootheel of the law, with the brown people.

A friend years ago clued me in to the Rosetta Stone for understanding conservatives: At base, they have a deep, abiding self-hatred. Yes, people often say it’s fear, but everybody’s motivated by fear of something. The conservative is motivated specifically by fear that they’re worthless, that they don’t measure up.

It makes so much sense when you game it out: They’re constantly needing external validation that they are good, or at least, better than somebody else. The basis of racism becomes clear as day in this light, and the desperate need to be special is just kind of axiomatic.

Sorry, I’m not in a position to know. It would be very interesting if an investigative journalist looked into the state of employment from the perspective of workers these days to put together a bigger picture than one store.

Really? This is an example why I’m done with Democrats.

Would it be worse than a fascist dictatorship?

It depends how you define it. I first installed Slackware at work on a retired IBM PS/2 in '94 or '95, because somebody was working on MicroChannel bus support. (That never materialized.) Later, we checked out Novell Linux Desktop, maybe Debian, too. At a later job, we had some Red Hat workstations, version 5 or 6, and I had Yellow Dog Linux on an old Power Mac.

At home, I didn’t switch to Linux until Ubuntu Breezy Badger. It was glorious to install it on a laptop, and have all of the ACPI features just work. I had been running FreeBSD for several years, NetBSD on an old workstation before that, and Geek Gadgets (a library for compiling Unix programs on Amiga OS) before that.

Skill issue. Should be doing both at the same time.

The President has historically had wide latitude to act in times of emergency. The instigator of the insurrection should’ve been in Gitmo on January 21, 2021.

Sure, call me extremist, but look at where we are now. I’m fucking right. But, barring the correct action, Biden could’ve followed the moderate, decorous course of launching the prosecution that day. But no, it took TWO. GOD. DAMN. YEARS.

I’m so done with Democrat excuses.

Centrists: Don’t vote for third parties, because they can’t win. Work within the Democratic Party.

Also centrists: Not like that!

Off-topic, but: A filtered shower head? Now, granted, I don’t even bother to filter the tap water that I drink, but it feels like this isn’t a case of people feeling the economic pinch, because a filtered shower head is so far beyond anything like a necessity. It’s just people with plenty of money being cheap.

The grocery store in which I used to work has been desperate to hire cashiers for years, really since the start of the pandemic. There were some days that we had only two lanes open because that’s all the staff that we had. During busy times, the store manager, the store owners, and sometimes the managers-on-duty would go up to the front to do check-out. The store installed more self-checkout lanes out of necessity.

Nowadays, I go shop there only in the evenings, and there are enough cashiers because they’re all high school students. But the help-wanted sign at the front of the store is still offering open cashier jobs. They’re certainly not eliminating jobs that people desperately need.

Computer-vision has been a thing for years, though it’s now bundled under the moniker “AI”. I know that the self-checkout cameras at the store where I go use AI to “watch” customers. I would assume most of them do, now. Heck, the cheap camera that I bought to point out my front window for fun pretty reliably detects animals, vehicles, and people.

The store nearest my house, where I shop a lot, is a bit more upscale. They’ve installed fancy self-checkout kiosks that tell you to continue scanning items while waiting for the attendant to come deal with an issue. The giant, discount grocery store with locations on the edge of town have enough room that they’ve installed self-checkout lanes that have about a 2-meter conveyor belt to a large bagging area. It’s enormous.