#DOT Researchers Suggested a Way to Make Big #Trucks Safer.
After Meeting With Lobbyists, Agency Officials Rejected the Idea.
The Department of Transportation allowed #trucking lobbyists to review an unpublished report recommending a #safety device that could save lives by preventing #pedestrians & #cyclists from getting crushed under large trucks.
“PLEASE delete any mention of a recommendation to develop … any regulation,” the DOT supervisor wrote in an email.
"By the time of its release in 2020, the report had been dramatically rewritten, stripped of its key conclusions — including the need to federally mandate side guards...
I love programming and thinking and talking about thinking. I have an education (BS, MS, PhD) focused on artificial intelligence and neuroscience.
I'm an advocate of the public academic pursuit of knowledge, the scientific process, peer review, and I see open source software and hardware as an essential part of the scientific process.
I see software user rights, including security and privacy, to be protected mainly by free and open source software.
I see the democratizing effects of the Internet, including distributed journalism and social networking, to be largely the effect of the collaborative development of free and open source software.
I am interested in free and open source manufacturing, including open source 3D printers and CNC machines. I believe open source manufacturing will be important for distributed manufacturing, allowing local manufacturing and local labor.
I see worker-owned coops as the way to safely transition from a non-democratic authoritarian top-down power structure of a traditional corporation to a democratic work environment, where the workers own the company and elect the board of directors, transitioning to democracy in the workplace.
I believe that socialism is a regulatory response to capitalism.
I believe that laws, money, corporations, and government are social agreements, and I'm in favor of democratic social agreements.
I believe in the organized non-violent boycott as a way to control capitalists and change corrupt systems.
I try to eat plant-based / vegan foods to boycott the animal industry, to help with the climate crisis, to improve my health, to avoid animal cruelty, and to avoid the extinction of species of plants, animals and ecosystems.
I have been diagnosed with Retinitus Pigmentosa, which is a disease of progressive retinal degeneration. I am legally blind, although I have about 5-degrees of vision remaining in my fovea. I'm interested in researching and developing BCIs (Brain-Computer Interfaces), specifically BCIs that function as vision prostheses that may help with conditions like RP, or the more common degenerative retinal disease AMD (Age-related Macular Degeneration).
I enjoy playing computer games like Age of Empires and Rimworld. I used to program computer games when I was younger and would like to get back to it one day.
I love playing music, especially bass guitar. I've been listening to a lot of Rage Against the Machine and Enya recently.
I enjoy reading books, mostly non-fiction.
I enjoy studying religions. I've found a lot of value in Buddhism, and I meditate often daily.
Nina and I have recently had our first baby, a boy we named Tyoma.
I'm currently working at Apple on the Vision Pro headset team.
"In the weeks since threatening to cause a global economic crisis over their avowed desire to reduce deficits, #Republican lawmakers are again pushing legislation that would increase deficits.
"Unlike most kinds of #government spending, each dollar spent on the IRS leads to much more than a dollar flowing back into government coffers, especially when the #IRS would use that funding to collect unpaid taxes...
Logical arguments against the state are more powerful than appeals to morality.
The state's existence relies on an illogical premise: namely, that one group of rational agents arbitrarily have rights that another group of rational agents do not.
But letting the #government decide who gets to #speak and who doesn't is NOT something you should be cheering for. #Censorship is a dangerous road; we've seen where it leads.
What if the next government decides that your#media is "#hate#speech" and #blocks it from airing, while letting Fox or OAN on-air?
Oh, I understand it alright; I've read the petition.
Regarding the government - that's exactly who would be doing this. The #CRTC is part of the #government.
As to it "comes down to the rules of conduct for business", that's #irrelevant. It's the justification for an action. The same action could be justified by any number of things.
What matters is the government's action. And letting them decide who gets to speak is dangerous.
#Private#corporations don't have the power to stop anyone from speaking. They can #choose not to carry someone's speech on their own platform, but that's all. That's an #editorial#decision, and perfectly valid. The speaker can go to any other platform and speak, including standing on a soapbox in a public park, starting their own blog - or #fediverse instance.
#Government saying "channel X must not be #broadcast in this country" is entirely different.
Folks forget we have empirical data showing that U.S. policy correlates to elite and business policy preferences, and is uncorrelated to non-elite and mass-interest group policy preferences.
Policy is not necessarily antagonistic to those latter groups, it simply is oblivious to them.
TORONTO — Meta said Thursday that it plans to follow through with a threat to block Canadians from sharing news on its platforms, after the federal government passed a law requiring digital firms to pay domestic media organizations for their content.
The #government proposed a policy requiring #Meta (and others) to pay to #link to #Canadian#news sources. Then they passed an act implementing it.
So Meta has a choice to make: they can continue to link to Canadian news sites and pay this "link #tax", or they can stop linking to Canadian news sites. There is no third option.
Canadian #politicians and #media cannot claim it is wrong for Meta to choose the second option; can't have it both ways.
"Experts say Canadians bracing for higher payments when they renew their mortgages in 2025 and beyond should start planning now in order to best manage the increase."
The Supreme #Court is laughably #corrupt and always has been. It’s not some special #institution detached from #politics, it’s just hidden behind layers of #technocracy and #institutional gate keeping so people can’t see that it’s just as corrupt as the other two branches of #government.
This is a request to all FOSS projects who only use matrix for communicating with the community.
Please consider bridging your rooms with IRC or XMPP.
India has banned Element, the most widely used Matrix client. I know it's just a client, but to be safe it's wiser to stay away from matrix for a while. So please help us in this regard.
Is the global housing slump over? (www.economist.com)