In a world where it is reasonable to have the road always be a slower speed for pedestrian, especially school, traffic this is by far the best option, imo.
I've been reading the law, linked in the news site; and, the document says, among many other things, in 316.0776(3)(a),
(emphasis mine)
"the county or municipality MUST NOTIFY the public that a speed detection system may be in use BY POSTING SIGNAGE
indicating photographic or video enforcement of the school zone speed limits. Such signage SHALL CLEARLY DESIGNATE
THE TIME PERIOD DURING WHICH THE SCHOOL ZONE SPEED LIMITS ARE ENFORCED using a speed detection system"
So it looks like the flashing light is a backup and enhancer and that the more important field is the current time of day.
Under the assumption that the time range text is easily visible, not covered in trees, not tiny, able to be seen by a person driving at the regularly posted speed from a distance that they can safely and reasonably slow down, etc, then it doesn't seem terrible.
THAT SAID, they should absolutely *FIX* the blinking lights.
In part of the article, it is declared that the traffic cameras caught 500,000 violations this school year ("since fall") across Florida, which is ... concerningly high. That's several thousand per day. Across all Florida, but still. Only about 3000 people protested across that; and, assuming all protests were genuine, that's less than a 1% broken light rate, which means broken lights are probably pretty quickly fixed.
I hope the signage either already has prominent time ranges and/or will have prominent time ranges in the near future. My thoughts on this are certainly complicated.
We have a 3 way intersection with lights outside my kid's elementary school. 30 min before and after the school day begins and ends, there is no right on red. There is a sign that says "no right on red during x times". There is a red arrow for the right hand turn. The crossing guard stops cars EVERY DAY that try to turn. The cops come out and ticket once a week during the school year and it persists. So yeah, I can see 500,000 violations a year. A majority of drivers really don't look, so yeah, f'em.
The previous context was, "Why on earth would there be a 40mph road next to a school"
The surrounding context was a comment about how the flashing light WASN'T on and how the speed limit was, per the sign, only enforced when the flashing light is on.
So, "why would it be 40mph?" because it's a stroad - a main thoroughfare through a town that's like maybe 5 or more lanes wide (including both directions and the 'turning lane'.
There's value in asking the question why there's such a wild variance in speeds between "normal" speed and "school open/close" hours, and that's a useful question to ask and likely comes down to the car-centric politics that filled the United States for well over 50 years, and will take a very long time (and a lot of political clout) to fix.
Depending on the size of the town, that may also, literally, be "the only road" that makes sense for that school to be on, so you have conflicting interests of a major, high-speed arterial road as well as the safety of children during particular hours.
And to add *even more* to that, if you're going 40 and expect the speed limit to be 40 and everyone around you also expects the speed limit to be 40 (because that's the posted speed limit, and the sign isn't flashing), then you going 20 creates a 20mph differential between you and the rest of the traffic around you and now you're *going* to cause an accident.
Have you seen modern US schools? They're basically setup like prison yards because of all the school shootings. There's no way the kids are going to run into the street without first going through a parking lot (and, often, a line of bollards).
On the bright side, there's zero reason to slow cars down when kids aren't being actively picked up or dropped off.
(Not that there was a reason to slow the cars down during off hours in the past, since the law has always been "When children are present" in places I've lived, which is good enough.)
To be fair, US schools have been very 'shaped like a castle with walls' for longer than school shootings. When I was in school, there was no way to get to the road, outside of entering and exiting the whole compound.
Your comment seems to imply that parking lots around schools are somehow strategically positioned to prevent school shootings? I'm not from the US but I'm intrigued by how that would work.
They retrofitted fences in the last decade or so. The only break in the fence is usually near the administration office / pickup / dropoff zone, which is generally next to the parking lot.
It doesn't actually prevent school shootings. There were 330 in the US last year; 349 in 2023. They're also adding cameras, weapons detection systems and "resources to address students’ emotional and mental well-being"
Across the US, only 70% of students live within 3 miles of their school, and only 20% of students are within 1 mile. Toss in weather, carrying supplies for after-school activities, tight schedules (e.g., going from some before-school activity to the actual school building), a general fear of kidnapping, a car-centric culture, and the fact that buses are cheap and school dropoff is often easy to squeeze into a parent's schedule, and you'll find that various forms of driving are extremely common.
It only works if you are lucky enough to live the side of the school with the pedestrian entrance. A colleague lived near the side with car entrance so walking their kids to school required walking the extra 1/2 mile around the grounds as they weren’t allowed int he car entrance.
I am suggesting that having a major road that suddenly drops to half speed, without significant signage, then speeds back up is bad, yes. That's just a form of speed trap.
I'm aware of how natural speed limits work. And my point is these are frequently major roads that are miles long, not residential streets. Major arterial roads, sometimes state highways.
In the kinds of places I am thinking about, step one is choosing not to build directly on a major road, miles away from residences. Which is not always realistic, when residences are miles apart from one another. The decision for safety needed to be made about a dozen decisions ago in those situations. What is left is busing kids home.
Enforcing safe speeds a few hundred meters around a school doesn't help much for biking or walking when the rest of the infrastructure remains deadly. Placing the school there is just a bad choice if you want children to come to school independently from their parents.
> is fantastic UX but never gets implemented because there’s never time
Wouldn't the change take something like an hour the first time you implement it and then 10s of seconds for calling the centralized function henceforth?
I don't think the problem is "there's never time"; and if that is the problem, I don't think an LLM will "solve" that, especially since studies have shown developers are slower when they use LLMs to code for them.
Most banks (all?) provide Interac cards that can operate with Visa/Mastercard protocols. They won't allow you to incur debt, but you can use them as a credit card.
It's helpful when traveling abroad to places that do not have Interac.
The disclaimer said the article was drafted with the help of an LLM - if they just did the list of things you mentioned I wouldn’t think they would need to put up a disclaimer (you don’t see disclaimers saying this article was written with the help of Google or Wikipedia) - the fundamental issue I think is that they are letting the LLM actually write the article, which I think people know, pretty viscerally, that they disagree with.
I had the same reaction, which is that I do not want to read something that was written by an LLM and immediately backed out - which is great I really appreciate their disclaimer, it helped me not waste my time on things I don’t personally want to consume.
Alternatively, they could be very, very conscious of being hyper-honest. There is a huge amount of overlap between people with a “strong sense of justice” (and honesty about using controversial technologies could be covered in that), and people on this forum.
You might not think that’s sufficient for a disclaimer; but if I was worried about AI use and wanted to be super duper up front, I would put that on my own journal if I used it for the things I mentioned.
One of the best porn web comics (which I recommend, though like all web comics it has its highs and lows) is Oglaf [1], and the artist drawing the sexy pictures is Trudy Cooper... a woman.
If somehow the puritanical mob banned stuff like that, I'd be genuinely sad.
For those fortunate enough to have made absurd amounts of money, think of what you did when you had it. You kept making for whole different reasons. You kept making, kept doing.
The only thing that stops is tolerance of actual garbage bosses, abusive companies and saying “yes” to decisions that require you to be immoral.
> For those fortunate enough to have made absurd amounts of money, think of what you did when you had it.
I quit my job. A handful of my coworkers did the same.
Most people, when given the chance to stop working, they stop. Just look at pensioners, including those who get a pension at 50. The vast majority simply stop working.
You quit working in the conventional, modern, hierarchical contract employment system - a very tight and specific definition of "work".
But I'd be very surprised if you didn't still spend a goodly proportion of your time beavering away at endeavours that were productive to yourself or others in your family and community.
The discussion is around sustainability: when people quit paid work they no longer contribute to the very tax base that is necessary to sustain a basic income.
Most UBI proposals I've heard of are the equivalent of $5.00-7.50 per hour wage. If what you imply were true - that upon achieving that level, people simply said "goal reached" and ceased to be further productive - then the USA median hourly wage would not be $22.
Even if UBI is set so low that it's not sufficient to live, change still happens at the margin. You will have people who were thinking about retirement that may now realize that with UBI they can bridge the gap until they get their full pension a few years from now. There will be people who are unmotivated and will now choose temporary work for part of the year and rely on UBI to make meets end. People work because they want money; reduce that incentive and fewer people will work.
That argument still relies upon the debatable premise that less formal employment means less human productivity.
For example, those "bridging the gap until their pension" are as likely to be reducing childcare costs (which are otherwise often subsidised by government/tax) for their descendants, spending more time on their own health, reducing the $health burden upon government, and any number of other potential reductions of the need for government spending. In equal proportion to the reduction in formal employment load upon the individual.
Aside from half of those who stopped working going back to school, there is a simple reason why a lot of people will stop for a while when universal income or a similar scheme first starts:
People are burned out. They are overworked. Over-stressed. Most of them were just hurled into careers by the system without much choice because they had to make a living. Most of them didnt even have time to think about their choices. A majority has spent decades struggling for survival amidst financial insecurity. When universal income starts for the first time, all of these people will stop for a while and start revising their lives. Something which they needed to do way before, but were not allowed by the system. Its natural.
When they get over the burnout and do their reflection, they will go active again. We see this in the case of the privileged minority who are able to retire early or take sabbaticals. They rest and do random stuff for a while, then they go back to doing something they want to do. Especially in tech, that has been the case.
> Well, 25% stopped apparently. Which is somewhat telling.
The report also says that half of those who stopped working went back to school! So that's no more than 13% who really became "idle". And there are also questions we should ask about that group, like their age composition, for instance. If of the 13% that quit working without returning to education or training, many of them were older people, wouldn't that meaningfully change the picture as well?
I bet you wouldn't, at least not until your 70s. Here's my anecdote-based argument to the contrary: every single recent retiree I know (having $basicIncome as a pension) has taken 6-12 months off work and then started working again (where they are physically capable of doing so). The reasons vary from necessity, boredom or wanting to feel "useful". This seems to drop off sharply the mid-70s. I'm not saying that working is hardwired in humans, but it seems to be a strong part of our sense of self-worth.
There are plenty of ways to volunteer or do art that are indistinguishable from loafing. Even if you work hard at volunteering or art, if the result isn't useful to others, at some point we will start wondering who is going to grow food and do plumbing while everyone is volunteering & arting.
Exactly. Instead of a floor of $0 and you earn more than that by working, you have a floor of $1,000/month or whatever, and you earn more than that by working. The idea is to provide a cushion, not replace wages.
do you have some kind of evidence that enacting a ubi, which comes with absolutely no condition of "not working," will stop a majority of people from taking paid work and making more money? Do we need 100% of the population to work in order to fill vital positions? I don't think so.
The article said 3/4 of people kept working, a significant portion of the 1/4 went back to school, and a hell of a a lot of people are in this comment section saying they would never stop working even with UBI.
That's because the kinds of people who make those huge amounts of money usually have that ambition and lack of satisfaction. But what about the parts of society that aren't go-getting yuppie strivers? There is a vast majority of people who never consider grinding leetcode to get a job at Jane Street so that they can later pivot to B2B SAAS for timeseries data.
Honestly, I think you think too little of people. A *lot* of people love to invent, create, explore, dream, participate and so on. I would argue the vast, vast majority.
People I know grow crops, make food, paint, draw, build worlds, write stories, create programs and so on. And these are people from every area in life.
I don't deny that people love to do creative things like that. But society can't survive off creatives and gardeners and the other fun things. Those activities are nice for the people who do them but they don't help support the rest of the population - we need truckers, aged care workers, farmers, cashiers.
Just picking out this one out of curiosity, not arguing the broader point.
In a world where people have more freedom on what to spend their energy and time on I would expect some things to return to the realm of unpaid labour. Child care, mentoring, care for the elder, local community contributions. Probably not replacing the demand entirely, but surely some shifts in supply and demand would be observed.
