Bike lane congestion is wholly unlike car congestion. It happens, and for busy routes, you do need affordances in the bike lanes and infrastructure.
That said, I've never missed a light cycle while bicycling, even in rush hour in major metro areas with many people on bikes. The busiest bike intersection in the world, in Copenhagen, devotes less space to bikes than most US streets devote to one lane of vehicle traffic.
Every single US city I have seen has ample space for bicycle infrastructure. Many have lots of roads with sufficient space for dedicated transit lanes, and bicycle lanes, and widened sidewalks while still maintaining space for personal vehicles.
Even if we take your hypothetical to the extreme, with only bicycles and no personal vehicles, every US city has enough space for the bike traffic on its existing streets.
> * Some people have mobility issues and can't bike or walk but can drive.
A simple bullet, but with many nuances buried. There is no single answer. Below are several observations. No one of these is intended to be an answer. But there are a panoply of choices a city can make that improve access and mobility for all.
Yes, and good bike/ped infra is good for them, too. Everything that makes a good bike lane (smooth pavement, wide enough for passing, minimal bumps and potholes, at grade without having to go up and down to cross streets) also makes a great place for a mobility scooters.
Not everyone uses a mobility scooter. Cities with extensive pedestrianized areas typically do not close these to deliveries, and many leave them open for pick-up/drop-off for those with mobility issues.
The items mentioned above are about stopping general car traffic either in portions of a street or on a whole street.
Not all traffic reduction necessarily means a reduction of car-navigable streets. Traffic reduction can take the form of reducing through-traffic. There are many implementation mechanisms for this. One mechanism is a modal filter, which allows through-traffic for non-motor vehicles, but prevents through-traffic for motor vehicles (side note, such filters can be constructed such that emergency vehicles can still pass through). Thus through-traffic is prevented, but door-to-door vehicle traffic is still possible.
But modal filters can make routes more circuitous. Yes. Optimizing a city does not mean optimizing just the transport infrastructure, and optimizing transport infrastructure does not mean just prioritizing a single mode above all others. That said, generally reducing traffic improves driving experience and reduces times, because there is less traffic. A more circuitous route can be made faster with sufficient traffic reduction.
But circuitous routes increase emissions. They increase emissions for those cars which make the trip, but save emissions based on all trips that are shifted to other forms of transportation. Even those marginally longer trips for the remaining cars may be emission-neutral (or at least not as bad as naively expected) based on reduced idling time and smoother travel.
Nothing above is to say cars should be banned. Just observations about design choices that are routinely made around the globe that are generally considered good urbanism and have not led to major negative outcomes. Nothing to stop you or any individual to choose a car, just design decisions that do not prioritize cars above all else.
> * Cars give you environment isolation when it's freezing, sweltering, or pouring rain.
Yes, so do all forms of public transit. Shelters are routine in good transit systems, and any form of metro or rail will typically have buildings or underground stations.
There is, of course, wait time for transit, which is all the more reason to optimize a system for frequent service with dedicated rights of way or grade-separation. Frequency is also one of the greatest drivers of ridership.
In urban areas it is common that a vehicle is not directly outside your front door or in a covered garage. Similarly, that parking at the destination may be some distance from the door of the destination. This is analogous to the walk to a transit station. Obviously this varies by person and situation.
Cars avoid the dwell time at a station, emphasizing the value of shelters and facilities at transit stations.
Certainly a car is more convenient than transit in inclement weather. This is not a reason to design transportation infrastructure optimizing solely for personal vehicles.
> * Cars make it much easier to haul stuff around.
The vast majority of day-to-day trips do not require hauling, unless that is part of your job. Certainly, if it is part of your job, you either have such a vehicle or it is provided by your employer.
Such hauling-based jobs are vastly improved by traffic reduction measures. Less traffic means better delivery times, and more importantly, more reliable time estimates for delivery. I know of no one in logistics who would decline to trade a small fee for improved times and reliability.
For personal use cases, as I mentioned hauling is rare. For the vast majority of people, the justification of hauling is better met financially by a van or truck rental as needed than by owning and maintaining a vehicle full time.
To be 100% clear, I am not saying, "you should not have a car, because vans are good at hauling." I am saying that "I occasionally need to haul things, so I need a car" is a specious argument. I am not saying you or anyone else should not have a car. I am simply pointing out that "occasional hauling" is not a good reason to own a car. If you want a car, have a car! If someone else wants a car, let them have a car! If you value the convenience of using your own vehicle for hauling at a per-use rate that is a large multiple of the rate of renting a van/truck, that is your own value judgment and you are welcome to it.
This is simply an observation that for the vast majority of people, the financial analysis suggests not a car, but a van/truck rental for hauling purposes. If you are not part of this majority, then please recognized that I am not trying to say that you are.
Hauling is a totally valid use case for vehicles and I've never seen anyone make an argument that the transportation of goods and stuff should be forbidden. Certainly I hope no one interprets my statements above as such an argument. The need to transport things, again, is not a good reason to build an entire transportation system in a city to optimize always for personal vehicles.
Again, a very common feature of reduced traffic, and even traffic-forbidden areas in cities is that they are close to most traffic, but still allow deliveries and mobility assistance vehicles.
And also, again, a reduction in traffic is a boon for those use cases.
> * You are much safer being in a car when hit by another car than when not being in a car. This is something a lot of bike commute advocates sweep under the rug. They talk about how biking is overall safe, but then you ask them if they've ever had an accident and so many have been hit by cars and broken bones.
And you are much safer not having an accident in the first place. If we want to observe the world, there are cities that have done a great job at reducing all vehicle related fatalities and injuries: those injuries to drivers and passengers in any vehicle involved, and also those injuries to anyone outside of the vehicle.
There are two commonalities in these cities: 1) they have many viable options for transportation, including high quality bike infra, pedestrian areas, trains, buses, metros, trams, and personal vehicles; and 2) they reduce traffic and speed in all areas where personal vehicles are potentially in conflict with other forms of transportation.
You'll recognize in the first point the same refrain I have been repeating: optimizing a transportation system does not mean optimizing primarily on just one mode of transit. It's not about forcing one mode or banning another. It is about options. There is a near universal observation about transit times within and into/out of urban areas that the time for car travel tends toward the time for public transit. This is generally understood to be because humans optimize their transport, and if one option is faster or more convenient, enough people choose that until it is not.
The second thing those cities do, though, is the leading cause for the reduction in accident frequency, lethality, and severity of injury: the reduction in traffic quantity and speed.
The road-street distinction is very important here. If you are not familiar with it, the distinction is this: roads are high speed connections between places, optimizing for vehicle throughput; streets are complex environments where a wide assortment of destinations are, where living is done, businesses exist, and the general activities of life and city happen. If you want more detail, this video is a good primer (linked to a relevant portion: https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM?t=536); the video is coming from a very strong place of opinion. I am not asking you to accept all the opinions, but am simply sharing the video, because it provides lots of good real-world examples in laying out the distinction.
It is essential that, within a city, there are affordances for people out of cars and people in cars. This is simple reality. If we recognize this reality, and we understand that humans are imperfect and prone to failure, then the conclusion is that if we want to reduce the injuries and deaths associated with traffic, we must build systems that tend toward this outcome. The practical implementations of such systems that are proven to be effective in achieving this outcome are:
1. separate through-traffic
2. ensure mixed-mode areas force low volumes and speeds of cars
The first is by designing transportation networks that force through-traffic to roads designed for it.
The second takes many forms, generally known as traffic calming. I have mentioned a few already. You can search for more. The other side of this is recognizing that cities are for people (the people in the cars and the people out of the cars, though at some points the people in the cars become people out of cars). There must be areas where people want to go. And those areas where people are must minimize the risk of negative interactions with vehicles. Again, traffic calming and pedestrianizing.
Regarding injury: the most likely cause of death and severe injury for a shockingly wide swath of adults in the US is a car accident, whether in the car or out of it. I do not make this as an argument against cars. I make this as an argument for design of car infrastructure in ways that makes me safer regardless of which side of the steel I am on.
First of all, it's about an entrepreneur traveling to the US for a startup, which is directly relevant to a significant proportion of YCombinator founders themselves.
Beyond its direct relevance to the core founding audience of HN, it is not clickbait or wantonly inflammatory, and is clearly of interest to many based on the comment activity and votes.
This is ironic. I thought there was a big push from the right for less censorship and less moderation in social media. Now we’re flagging posts because the comment section may get heated.
This has been HN policy since the beginning, and while HN is usually still quite unpleasant, policies like this one are largely responsible for preventing it from being worse. There are social contexts where discussions of topics like US immigration policy can do good rather than harm, but HN is not one of them.
This is not true, at least according to dang if I recall correctly. There was a change in moderation strategy since the pg days. The way I remember dang's own explanation was that pg was more hands off in his moderation of political topics. Sure, you can say that it wasn't the same community back then, less flamewars etc, but the fact of the matter is the creator of this site moderated things slightly differently.
Maybe you won't find it ironic, but the creator of HN is often sharing posts on twitter that would be flagged to oblivion if someone other than him posted it on here. Regardless of all the reasonable explanations (this is a tech site, journalists/politicians are on twitter), it's still an interesting datapoint that the creator of this forum in this day and age thinks it's more important spending his own time talking politics on twitter more than talking tech on this forum. I'm going to go out on limb and bet that he does this not because he enjoys or prefers talking politics but because he feels compelled to do so more due to the unprecendented nature of certain events.
I think people who say "do it on twitter like pg, instead of HN" forget that pg's positive twitter experience is largely due to the fact that he has a million plus followers on twitter and people in other fields know who he is so he is able to get high value engagement that counteracts the trolls. Your average HN user is not going to have pg's twitter experience, and so they'd rather try their luck posting in the best forum that's hospitable to them, HN.
>But that greatly predates the changes in moderation strategies or hiring dang
dang explicitly states they do it differently than pg it:
when a thread turns into a political flamewar, we moderate it more than pg used to. There were many past submissions that neither users nor moderators would allow today [0]
Are you kidding? There are so many VCs here who have the resources to push for fair treatment of immigrants and foreign visitors! HN is the perfect place to discuss this.
I am not kidding. The problem is that the discussion collapses into an unpersuasive and uninformative partisan flamewar, so it does not improve the choices that those VCs will make. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43413819 for a more in-depth discussion.
Sometimes things get messy discussing important topics, we should err on the side of sunshine rather than darkness for these discussions. HN has a lot of powerful and wealthy people who have a responsibility to protect the system they relied on to become rich and powerful, but instead these people ignore the discussion because it doesn’t mesh with their ideas that America is the greatest.
See my connect from a few comments ago where I mention how interesting it is we can discuss authoritarian slides everywhere else except when it happens in America. It’s almost a conspiracy, IMO.
Also, I can understand demonizing the current admin, they’re flaunting the most important laws that protect us, and for some here the USA is poised to upend their lives or worse.
In any case, this discussion isn’t interesting, and constant complaints of bad behavior are stifling the actual discussion more than those flagged, dead comments that started shit.
I regret that you think that, but I’m not explaining to you why you’re wrong, it’s as pointless as you trying to convince me that I’m demonizing anyone with that comment.
Have you read this discussion? It was already heated, although the comments posted recently have been better.
Before greggyb asked why it was flagged, the top comments were about "the dumbest bully from their grade school" and "team grade school bullies". Does that not sound like flag-worthy discussion to you?
Name calling like that buries legitimate discussion, like the claim that she was not in fact eligible for a TN visa because she "worked for" a startup she co-founded (Holy! Water).
"NAFTA specifically prohibits self-employment for TN visa holders. This restriction poses challenges for entrepreneurs who wish to start a business in the United States."
When the people in charge are acting like the dumbest bully from my grade school, then yes, it does sound like valid critism and a legitimate point of discussion.
It's a race issue. We only know about this story at all because the woman is a milk-white Canadian. It's not supposed to happen to people like her, which is makes it extra outrageous.
While I agree with you, it is observably true that many people take different positions on the issue and then demonize those who disagree with them, converting it into a partisan issue.
Another commenter (now deleted) made the claim that, saying an issue shouldn't be partisan is “just saying ‘everyone should believe what I do’ but in the lexicon of people who look down their nose at the general public.” They added, “The only nonpartisan issues are the most basic of things that all societies have like ‘don't murder people’ (but even then the minutia become debatable).” Although the comment has been deleted, I think this merits a little further exploration, because it's a widely held viewpoint, and there is some truth to it, though I disagree more than I agree.
There are definitely people who mean, "Shouldn't be a partisan issue," that way, but what I mean when I say it is that from the clash of opposing opinions comes the spark of insight, and partisan struggles in which arguments are soldiers do not permit that process to happen: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...
I have frequently observed variants of the following exchange in mathematics classrooms:
Professor [writing on blackboard]: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.
Student sitting in the third row of the audience: No, it's x³ + a.
Professor: Hmm. [pauses]
Student: Because the x from substituting f doesn't cancel.
Professor: Yes, you're right. So you see that this just reduces down to x³ + a.
Sometimes it goes the other way, and the student is the mistaken one. Neither participant goes into the discussion on the premise that "everyone should believe what they do"; rather, they believe that by discussing the issue they can arrive at an agreement, which may involve changing their own mind. Converting the discussion into partisan struggle prevents that from happening. Imagine what would have happened in my example if the discussion had instead gone as follows:
Professor: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.
Student: No, it's x³ + a.
Professor: I don't remember paying tuition to come and see you lecture.
Or, alternatively:
Professor: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.
Student: You didn't even do a modicum of research. It's x³ + a.
Or, how about this?
Professor: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.
Student: No, it's x³ + a.
Professor: You're being manipulated into thinking that this factor is being canceled incorrectly by the horrible evil professor.
Or, how about this?
Professor: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.
Student: "x²" ? Êtes-vous fou ? Restez avec x³ !
This difference comes out in its purest form in mathematics, but it's also possible for discussion and consultation to reach agreement on empirical and even moral issues. But partisanship is an obstacle in that process.
And here in lies the problem: wedge issues. Taking something, blowing it out of proportion and turning into a partisan issue on purpose. Abortion, LGBTQ rights, immigration. It becomes impossible to have nuanced, rational discussion about those topics, and its on purpose. One side thrives off of making them emotional, hot-button issues. Shunning discussion of it here or elsewhere because it's an emotional, hot-button topic, is just conceding to the side making it like that.
Abortion, LGBTQ rights, and immigration are inherently deeply emotional issues, but that doesn't in itself make them partisan. It increases the risk that they will become partisan, but often enough and in enough places they have not been. Politicians—not just on one side or even on just two sides—generate support for themselves personally and for the political class as a whole by converting them into partisan issues. Venkatesh Rao has written a very thought-provoking analysis of the current dynamics of the situation in https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/.
> The question we all need to ask is - how many people are personally victimized by transgender Americans? Gay Americans? Green card holders? Once you start asking those questions, the current conservative zeitgeist becomes untenable, and the platform quickly crumbles.
I agree that that statement is technically correct, but I have observed various forms of it in American media, and here's my issue with it: the Conservative platform seems to not have run on it at all.
Broadly, I don't see the point in straw manning (conflating all immigration with illegal immigration, for example) in a good faith discussion. I've seen it a huge amount in left wing media, but I think honestly have to dismiss that discussion as bad faith and try and desperately search for the remainder.
Specifically, they haven't run on "gay Americans" that I've seen at all (I'm not sure what that would look like, even), and they haven't run on green card holders. They have run on trans ideation and surgery for children, and trans women in female spaces, and illegal immigration, it's true, but that is far more specific, and it's those precise issues that got them elected.
This is simply not true. If you turn on Fox News or even listen to the current administration talk, they are talking about transgender people.
Hell, Ted Cruz ran an ad depicting transgender children as big burly men who want to hurt YOUR daughters on the soccer field. He's a senator. He's got bigger fish to fry than that.
Even if you truly believe conservatives aren't making a boogeyman out of nothing, which is very hard to believe, but even if you do - if you look at the legislation being proposed it doesn't target the narrow cases you think it does. It harms all trans people. A lot of it targets gender-affirming care for adults.
And then immigration. How many people have illegally been detained now? Are we in the few hundreds? Where's their due process? I won't mince words. If you think the Trump administration is only targeting "illegal" immigrants, you are stupid.
Not that we didn't see any of this coming. For months leading up to this administration, the left warned about Project 2025 and it's radical ideals. We reminded you that this has nothing to do with children. With illegal immigrants. This has to do with every American. But you, evidently, continue to fall for obvious lies. After a certain point, we must deduce that you have subscribed to some religion, and it is out of our hands.
To be blunt, your perspective does not align with reality.
The reality is that transgender Americans have been doing these things, all these things, for many decades. And nobody, and I do mean nobody, cared. Ultimately you are not inspecting penises in the Men's room. You, yourself, do not care.
What do you believe transgender people did in the 70s, or 80s, or 90s? You've never thought about it because you know, deep down, it's not a real issue. But, if you do think about it - or better yet, just ask them - you'd know they've already been doing these things.
Women do not run into burly men with beards when they go to the women's room. Do you know why? Because those transgender men have always gone to the men's room, and have never been questioned. Never been questioned, until conservatives decided to question it.
I have been alive for a long time now. We always knew trans people existed. Nobody batted an eye. Conservatives too, including conservatives that exist still, and including even you. Yes, that's correct - I am speaking for you, because I know you were not protesting these things in the 2010s, or the 2000s, or the 90s, or the 80s, or the 70s.
So no, you don't care, and no, you yourself believe these are not real issues. You might not say that now, because as I've already stated, the conservatives brought it into the zeitgeist to distract you. And now, you are distracted. Before, you were not.
And, to you and other conservatives, you should focus. The economy is in danger. Due process is being violated. Our constitution is in hot water.
The American right has been able to propagandize you, and others, so completely and so severely, that you not only do not pay attention to these issues, but you legitimately think you willingly chose to not pay attention. You didn't choose anything, this was carefully crafted for you. I challenge you to think back to an earlier time you were alive and question what you saw then.
> The reality is that transgender Americans have been doing these things, all these things, for many decades.
Do you have any evidence for that?
For example, do you have evidence of any of these happening in the US before, say, 1990?
- any openly transgender athlete participating in sports on the team of their preferred gender rather than their sex assigned at birth?
- large numbers of children receiving "gender-affirming" hormones or puberty blockers?
- transgender prisoners being housed with the sex they identify as, regardless of whether they actually "present as" that sex?
- a transgender woman being accepted to attend a all-women college?
Maybe all of these happened quietly, so common and uncontroversial that they were totally unremarked upon. But surely there's some evidence that they occurred?
For me it simply doesn't pass the laugh test that a trans woman with a penis could walk into a nude spa in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s without anyone batting an eye.
Nice steel manning, of course transgender people without bottom surgery don’t walk into nude spas. If you find a single example, great, find me the hundreds of examples you folks claim there are which threaten you. You’re not arguing honestly, just coming up with wild situations that don’t match reality. You may be uninformed, or misinformed, I suggest you actually read more than surface articles on Fox News.
I don't claim that there are hundreds of examples of this.
My claim:
- A: today, the left, broadly construed, insists that there is a right for transgender women to go into women-only spaces, including nude spas. For my point, it doesn't matter how often this "right" is exercised - merely that the left asserts that there is such a right.
- B: this was not true of the left 6 years ago (or 45 years ago).
- Consteval's claim that the left is merely defending "settled," uncontroversial rights that trans people have had for decades is therefore wrong.
Evidence for A:
In 2021, a 52 year old sex offender who had been convicted in multiple instances of indecent exposure went into a nude spa. It caused a huge controversy with dueling protests and counterprotests.
In San Francisco, a Russian nude spa announced a policy that 1 night a month would be "ladies only" for people who were assigned that sex at birth, to provide a "phallus-free environment." For that decision, they were investigated by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. They reversed their policy after this intervention.
In Washington, a Korean spa which requires nudity for some services restricted people from male genitalia from entering the facility. A transgender woman with male genitalia was denied service at the facility and sued: https://www.courthousenews.com/after-banning-trans-women-was...
So it seems to me that either:
- transgender women without bottom surgery could go into nude spas in 1970 without issue, or
- I'm wrong about A, and the left doesn't actually insist that trans women have a right to women-only spaces, or
- Consteval is mistaken, and people on the left are in fact pushing for more rights for transgender people that were not settled 6 years ago (or 55 years ago).
I'm asking for some evidence I'm wrong, you're just saying it doesn't really matter if I'm wrong - it's unlikely to affect me personally. Maybe! Nevertheless...
Are you interested in hearing from the perspective of a trans person who mostly doesn't agree with the person you've been replying to, but does feel there's gaps in your perspective here?
I ask this way especially because I don't know if you'll actually see this since I see one of the comments is flagged, and given how it's been most of a day already.
I would be very interested, thank you. The flag is probably justified since HN is not really the place for these culture war things :) but I'm genuinely trying to understand the perspective here, because it does seem like a big gap between my understanding (the Democratic party has moved left on these issues) and theirs (the Democratic party is just playing defense on these issues).
I personally wonder if people were arguing and complaining that America was moving left or failing back when racial integration was the big fight. I’m sure there were people arguing that letting non-whites drink from the same water fountains was dangerous for white women. Think about that a bit while you lament transgender people.
You're proving my point here - the original comment claimed that the left was merely defending the pre-existing, settled rights that trans people have "always" had against the right's aggression, I'm saying that the left has been actively pushing for change and new rights. I think the left sees trans rights as a continuation of the civil rights movement. This is an empirical question, entirely separate from the question of whether this is a good thing.
No, I'm saying you're derailing the conversation with your "empricism", congratulations. That's what you people do around here. If there are simply a few examples of the "danger" you people claim, then why is it such a problem? Answer is that there is no problem, it's a made up issue that is being used to divide us politically, like abortion or gay rights or weed. It doesn't matter if "the democrats are moving left", you're either for the rights of people to exist as they wish, or you are for limitations on how people can express themselves in this way. I'm finished with this line of conversation, you have wasted enough of my time.
Could you explain the racial analogy in more detail please? It's not obvious how restricting males from using female-only spaces is similar in concept or principle to racial segregation.
> For me it simply doesn't pass the laugh test that a trans woman with a penis could walk into a nude spa in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s without anyone batting an eye.
They weren't, and they still aren't. The idea that transwomen want to be around ciswomen and hang brain is a conservative fantasy. You would very much like to believe that is true, because you believe transwomen are inherently perverted sexual deviants. Not unlike how conservatives viewed homosexuals. Of course, this is not so. This is one of the most classical forms of a projection. Meaning, you cannot view transwomen in a light that isn't sexual, so you project your own sexual objectification onto them. Again, exactly how was done with homosexuals in the past. Even today, there are a lot of people I've met who can't see a gay man without thinking "dick in ass dick in ass!". That's not the homosexual's fault.
On the topic of gender affirming care: the primary recipients of gender affirming has always been cisgender people. I take testosterone myself, because unfortunately I lost my testicles to cancer. I identify as a man and I want to present as a man as much as possible, so I take testosterone. And again, with puberty blockers, same thing - mostly cisgender people.
To be clear, gender affirming care for minors typically includes things like a new haircut and new wardrobe. In some cases, particularly for teens, puberty blockers may temporarily be used. The idea that minors are mutilating themselves is, surprise, another conservative fantasy.
But, even then, the Conservative's desire to get in the way of the rights of parents, their children, and their doctors, is very out of character. If you told conservative's 10 years ago that the government is going to want to vet what treatment their children can and cannot receive, they would be aghast. Even today they would be. After all, a lot of them have a big issue with the principle behind vaccine mandates.
> They weren't, and they still aren't. The idea that transwomen want to be around ciswomen and hang brain is a conservative fantasy.
I think you're probably right that the vast majority of trans women are completely uninterested in such a thing. And yet:
In San Francisco activists protested a policy that excluded trans women from a nude bathhouse one night per month for a "phallus free" womens night. They were investigated by the city's Human Rights Commission after numerous reports and reversed course - no more "phallus free" nights. In Washington State a trans activist sued a nude female-only Korean spa for not providing her with service because of her male genitalia.
Are these specific people merely fighting back to try to retain a right that was already "settled" back in 1970? Or are they trying to claim a new right?
While these sub-ideologies did exist, they were fringe. This is now a primary issue for conservatives and it has been brought into the zeitgeist and their political platforms. That is different. Most, close to all, conservatives were not considering this in the late 70s. I know you know that.
Not as fringe as you may believe. Raymond's book sold a lot of copies. But more impactfully, radical feminist ideas on this topic and others continued to develop, and became increasingly influential from then to now.
One aspect of this that often isn't considered is how women with shared feminist ideals but differing political backgrounds have been working together across the aisle. As a result, radical feminists on the left have had significant influence on conservative policymakers via these informal collaborations. Look at EO 14168 for example.
I grew up in locker rooms. I started swimming competitively at age 7. The whole, "you were actually surrounded by trans people your whole life and never knew it till 5 years ago!" is absolutely delusional and my guess is you don't actually have much experience in men's rooms at all.
This will blow your mind: in Hawaiian culture, transgender people held a place of honor and respect. Hawaii is part of America (illegally overthrown), so there’s a cultural history of transgender people that you can point to here that is respectful, though today a lot of Hawaiians use it as a derogatory term due to hate brought in with Christianity and continental culture.
I don’t get why it’s such a threat, please explain that rather than trying to erase transgender people. Gays also have a very long history, and they’re also in the crosshairs today, why them? Did gays not exist to you in the past as well?
I have, of course, been in Men's rooms. In my experiences in Men's rooms, I have seen remarkably few penises.
These transgender people did not suddenly pop out of nowhere. For context, I know several trans women who are in their 50s, and transitioned a long time ago.
I see with transgender people what I saw with homosexuals. That they were some type of phenomena, a new social contagion. That they are on the attack. I thought, surely the general population would never be stupid enough to fall for such an obvious falsehood yet again. Of course they've always existed.
All of the boys in the swim club changed together. All the boys in middle school and high school sports changed together. As an adult, working out at gyms and rec centers, all the men change and shower and talk and joke butt naked. Half the YMCAs I've been to over the years have a group of old guys that will tease you for being shy. The high school swim team I was on was... wild, I guess I'll say. Not buying what you're selling, sorry.
There are children who are transgender today and they're not changing in front of other's.
I don't know where this delusional that dudes are just hanging brain around women is coming from. You're right, that doesn't happen. That's a conservative's wet dream. I'm sure you, and others, would be beyond ecstatic if transgender people were doing that. Maybe then, you'd have a smidge of justification for all this.
For the record, nobody actually cares if you're "buying what I'm selling". You're missing the big picture here. These people aren't a threat to anyone, and to suggest otherwise is un-American. You can either face the reality that lays before you, or you can continue to be ridiculed for having obviously false beliefs. The world around you doesn't rely on you "buying" anything.
> I don't know where this delusional that dudes are just hanging brain around women is coming from. You're right, that doesn't happen. That's a conservative's wet dream. I'm sure you, and others, would be beyond ecstatic if transgender people were doing that. Maybe then, you'd have a smidge of justification for all this.
Me: "I want our society to allow businesses to prohibit people with penises from receiving certain services, for example a nude massage at a women-only spa."
You: "This is not happening, it's a conservative's wet dream, maybe if it were happening you'd have a smidge of justification for all this."
If it's not happening, why not allow businesses to prohibit it? Like, if no trans women want to hang out naked with natal women, is it a problem for Wi Spa or Olympus Spa or Archimedes Banya to say "as a nude facility that serves women, we are uncomfortable having phalluses on the premise"? Why are there protests and lawsuits and investigations when people implement these policies?
Do you personally think that those policies are objectionable? Do you think they should be illegal?
> If it's not happening, why not allow businesses to prohibit it?
Well, we aren't.
But, more specifically, the stuff the left does have a problem with is not doing this. You, and other conservatives, are trying to play innocent. This "what, lil ole me?" approach to policy making and the publicity associated with it does not fly.
If you read the bills, any of them, take your pick, proposed by states across the US you would understand they aren't doing innocuous things like this. They are targeting transgender people and crossdressers in a much more extreme fashion. Limiting adults access to medical care, enforcing dress codes in public, and even making their very existence untenable.
You, as, I'm assuming, a proponent of government restraint should be against these. These affect non-trans people as well, and set a dangerous precedent for what the government is allowed to know. It harms privacy, autonomy, healthcare.
When these other vast downsides are brought up, you, predictably, put on the "nooo we're not going to do that!" charade. Surprise, after this administration we can no longer believe that. Practically everything everyone thought was off limits is no longer so. You can continue to play stupid, yes. But you should be careful - after a certain point, people might start believing you are just stupid.
You seem more interested in debating the imaginary version of me in your head than in having an actual discussion here, so have fun, I think you can do that on your own.
You and another poster in this thread keep trying strawman me with "trans people aren't a threat" stuff but I never said anything about any threat. I responded, explicitly, to your post that trans people have actually been passing in their preferred changing rooms forever, and I can tell you from years of personal experience (perhaps if I said, "my lived experience", you'd listen better?) that they have not. As another posted has pointed out, women have been complaining about this for decades. Your paragraph about "hanging brain" and conservative wet dreams is simply unhinged and your attempt at putting words in my mouth is unimpressive.
> They added, "The only nonpartisan issues are the most basic of things that all societies have like "don't murder people" (but even then the minutia become debatable)." Although the comment has been deleted, I think this merits a little further exploration, because there is some truth to it, though I disagree more than I agree.
I don't think there is anything to be gained from enumerating the cases when one or another society has condoned killing people, which are so numerous and diverse that they may have accounted for the majority of all of the people who have died. Everyone is aware that such cases exist, I think.
> While I agree with you, it is observably true that many people take different positions on the issue and then demonize those who disagree with them, converting it into a partisan issue.
Sure, but you have to draw a line somewhere. Even on HN, there are opinions that you can't express (repeatedly) without being banned, even though there are clearly people with such opinions. Otherwise it's the Nazi bar problem - everyone who's not a Nazi will eventually leave.
Where exactly to draw the line is left as an exercise to the reader, but I suspect that some people just don't like where the line is currently being drawn.
I am not sure what opinion you thought I was trying to express. Evidently some sort of anti-censorship argument? To the contrary, my comment was explaining that the issue of US immigration has become highly polarized, and discussing highly polarized issues on HN is generally destructive, so probably we shouldn't attempt to discuss the issue here. This is closer to being a pro-censorship argument than an anti-censorship argument. (Later I added an illustration of how well a discussion can go without polarization, and how radically that differs from the current comment thread, but you may not have seen that.)
Your comment begins by signaling partial disagreement ("Sure, but") but then makes no argument tending to show that the issue is not highly polarized or that HN is a good place to discuss highly polarized issues. Instead, it discusses other topics relating to social group dynamics, but not in a way that is relevant to the comment you were replying to.
You're advocating for avoiding polarised discussions because they degenerate quickly. I'm only pointing out that that's not the only option: you could allow these discussions while ruthlessly silencing bad faith actors (for whatever definition of "bad faith" you want to adopt). Those are both "pro-censorship" stances (although I prefer the word "moderation" to "censorship"), but they're going about it in different ways.
That's what I mean by the Nazi bar problem[0]: you can't solve it by just not allowing certain topics to be discussed, because eventually in some completely tangential situation, a nasty flamewar is going to erupt and people who are not Nazis will be appalled that there are Nazis here.
[0]: I'm explicitly not saying that certain opinions expressed on HN are literal Nazi opinions, the Nazi bar problem is just a convenient analogy for the situation when one group of people holds opinions that are utterly appalling to many other people that frequent the same space.
I see. Thank you for clarifying. I indeed had not understood you.
It sounds like you think the problem is the wrong sort of people. But almost everybody retreats into ego defense and partisan struggle under sufficiently threatening circumstances, even though some people are habitually more prone to that kind of thing than others. It's more about minimizing the frequency of the wrong sort of circumstances.
Additionally, though I think everyone is happy that I'm not the one running the site, I have observed elsewhere that your favored "ruthless silencing" approach has some side effects you may not be anticipating.
Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for anything specific because I understand that the problem is hard. But I feel like some people want to have their cake and eat it too. If you don't silence certain types of discourse, you alienate certain participants (and HN understands this to a degree - you can't use racial slurs here, for example). Maybe that's acceptable - but you just have to be honest about it.
Unfortunately, it also seems to be true that the guidelines aren't enforced on discussions about the Trump administration. We used to have informative, curious discussions about politics here, but it seems like Hacker News is no longer capable of that, so I think these flamewars are best left to one of the many willing political battlegrounds like reddit or X.
I've noticed this a ton lately. So, so many posts completely brigaded. Regardless of if the flag is removed, it can easily stop discussion and visibility of the thread. I emailed Dang about it when I first noticed it happening, and the response...
```
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you—it's been a crazy last few days!
Users flagged that one. We can only guess why users flag things, but there have been so many posts about the current political goings-on that I think there's a lot of fatigue about it. In this case the article was more of an opinion piece than a factual report, so it's probably not one that we'd override the flags on.
Daniel (dang)
```
So the system is setup to allow this abuse. It's weaponizing the flag system. I'm sure this type of flagging is already automated by how fast some posts disappear on /new.
What's to stop someone from buying enough old accounts and mass flagging other topics to chill discussion / dissent? This could easily be done for a few grand. Rotate accounts doing the flagging and make sure they engage in some "high quality" discussion from time to time to avoid detection. Make sure the same groups of accounts aren't flagging the same posts, etc.
E.g. "I never want to see a freaking post about Rust again"...
Note: I had to wait hours to post this comment because my account was rate limited. I'm assuming because I'm involved in this discussion at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35157524
Now by the time I can actually post, this thread is well off the front page. This site is really good at effectively silencing people.
Dang, I'd like to know the specific comments where I am going over the line, or are too "low-quality". I have been called out once or twice over the last decade by you, and have agreed that I could have conducted myself better in those instances and tried not to fall back into those patterns.
there's no need to buy old accounts (lol?), there are hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have extremely strong anti-immigration beliefs, who continue to cheer on the Republican-backed express cruelty for whatever reasons, and some of these people are active on HN
There is if you want to do this systematically rather than adhoc.
> there are hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have extremely strong anti-immigration beliefs
Totally understood, and know they are here and will flag things they disagree with while still being a real human.
I wasn't saying that is specifically what's happening with this post. I assume that's more what's happening when posts in /newest are flagged within a few min.
That part was just saying "this really wouldn't be hard to do if anyone put in just a little bit of effort, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was happening".
I’ve emailed Dan and received the same response. My suspicions completely mirror yours.
I find this line particularly weak:
> We can only guess why users flag things
It’s not that hard to do some clustering analysis to see if bad-faith actors are repeatedly flagging posts in a coordinated manner. Maybe he’s trying to avoid giving away anti-spam secret sauce, but that doesn’t seem likely given the language of the copypasta. Speaking for myself, I would like any sort of assurance that anything other than a 100% laissez-faire approach to flag abuse is happening.
Sure, you can take anything to the extreme and then they'll have to mop that up.
Until that's reality, the system mostly works. Let us know if you ever figure out the perfect flagging system where someone can't "buy old accounts en masse" or something
Sorry, I strongly disagree. Comparing detaining someone for 10 days (for, apparently, a genuine violation of immigration law - self-employment on a TN visa) to killing twenty million people is in no way reasonable, and it's certainly not informative or curious. It's just a snarky ideological barb and a violation of those guidelines.
The plainly explained point is that democratic backsliding is gradual. The road to 20 million dead isn't someone suddenly declaring "we are the baddies", then a week later they start digging the mass graves.
If someone appears with invalid paperwork to a border crossing you simply turn them away, or in the case of international flights you keep them in a room for a couple of hours and send them back next flight home. You ban her for X years.
She was in some kind of kafkaesque simulacrum of a legal system with "constitutional free zones" and for-profit "detention" centers. Nobody knew anything inside or outside, only with a considerable amount of resources and luck they we are able to find her in the system. This is closer to the stories of my family during a dictatorship, moving earth and heaven to find close ones in jail when initially the police "didn't know anything about that". They were lucky, a lot of people never found their loved ones.
Sure, the US is not there (yet), but even then she could've been there 10 months or more there if she wasn't Canadian or wealthy.
So no, it's not a "snarky ideological barb" it's a good point that doesn't meet your aesthetic standards, at most the "skeptics like you" part makes it a bit too personal. Your strawman about his point seems worse imo.
> The plainly explained point is that democratic backsliding is gradual. The road to 20 million dead isn't someone suddenly declaring "we are the baddies", then a week later they start digging the mass graves.
This is so important and so often overlooked. The Nazis took power in 1933, but the persecution of e.g. Jews ramped up very gradually. At first, it was mostly boycotts and prohibiting Jews from working in government jobs. In 1935, they were stripped of citizen rights. In 1938, Jews had to change their names and carry a mark in their passport and Jewish children couldn't attend school anymore, and later that year Jewish shops were systematically destroyed and many Jews rounded up and imprisoned. But it wasn't until the start of WWII in 1939 that mass killings actually started taking place, and only in 1942 at the Wannsee conference was the holocaust as we know it today actually planned.
Many Jews stayed in Germany until it was too late because they didn't think that it could get worse.
That ellipsis that you put in my comment really is doing some heavy lifting here. Seems like you ignored everything else I said between those statements. It wasn't about one person being in jail for 10 days at all. I actually didn't mention that because I don't think it's one of the most pressing issues even if it is another example on the pile.
I was responding to someone dismissing concerns as "reflexive hysteria." Historical parallels aren't uncivil, they help examine patterns. The HN guidelines discourage flamewars and personal attacks, neither of which I did. I challenged a characterization, not the person. If discussing historical parallels to current events is now considered inappropriate for HN, that would significantly narrow meaningful conversation beyond what the guidelines actually state.
HN has never been unbiased. It is funded by a tech VC company and targeted at tech entrepreneurs. It has always promoted crypto and AI scams to an eager audience and pumped up one useless company that added nothing of value to the world after another.
Despite that there has been a general interest in "tech" and clever things and intelligent discussion here that appeals to a reasonably broad community so the place works.
The massive wealth concentration and power amongst a very few, the Paypal mafia, Andreeson etc has led them down a path that puts them at odds with the rest of us. Regardless of our diverse politics regular engineers aren't going to have more individual or economic freedom in a world controlled by a small group of oligarchs. They care about us about as much as we care about ants.
I wouldn't say the tech world has blessed the regime but many unquestionably revere the financiers of the tech world. We (techies) for all our talk of individual liberties have a problem with cult like thinking. Most of us aren't stupid and we can justify our positions, any position. And while some flagging of discussions might be sock puppets or bots, the truth is a lot of people still thoroughly believe the hype.
Not sure it's that HN has blessed the regime so much as it's flagging them so it can get back to tech etc rather than 527 trump/musk stories. There's always reddit etc.
As someone on neither side of that aisle I can tell you it is the smothering effect of attempting any logical discussion in those topics. The smothering effect comes from one side more often than not.
The best part of it all is that you can post like the above with no clear side chosen and the people whom it applies to will react to it negatively as well.
It is a good point, and I've long been a proponent of this, that everyone needs to flag the excessive elements of "their side" more in the current climate.
Humans are humans. Some humans are dumb and emotion-prone. Some humans who are dumb and emotion-prone think their bad behavior is justified because they're on the side of justice/righteousness.
It's not enough, in our current climate, to look the other way because someone is on a similar team...
Reinvigorating honest, fair discussion requires everyone interact more positively.
In my experience during this last Trump campaign, the most effective way to rile conservatives is not to lie, but rather to tell the truth. Meaning, taking Trump at his word and repeating the words he said, in direct quotes.
I think what's happening is that a lot of his constituents like him due to his personality, but they don't necessarily believe he is honest. So, they're betting on his dishonesty and using that as a justification for their support. Meaning, supporting Trump is really not so bad if you assume Trump isn't going to do half the things he says he is. Then, it's like you're supporting an almost normal candidate.
Well, in that case Trummp has done a fantastic job proving those people wrong. But that still confuses me: who can like this personality when it's on the world platform, and not just a TV stereotype?
Could we at least elect someone likeable like Bill Nye if we're voting based on "personality"?
Most Americans don’t care for someone put together. That’s interpreted as pretentious.
They want someone a bit stupid, who says stupid things. They want someone who’s an asshole because asshole is basically synonymous with badass protagonist.
I think there's also a reasonable proportion of readers who want "political" topics removed from HN, even if the topic intersects with HN-relevant topics.
(I'm not one of them, but I believe many are. I appreciate where they are coming from.)
I hadn't noticed that, but I believe it. Many Americans I know are in "blinders on" mode because the intensity and frequency of American political angst is overwhelming them.
I doubt it's even percentages. It may be as low as a dozen users lurking on /new (or automating the process) to flag based on keywords from the title or article.
There is a lot of discussion in this thread on the implications to tech - you see people actively changing their travel plans as a result. We are going to lose tech workers because of how dangerous it is becoming to make the slightest misstep while traveling in the US.
> There's little-to-no discussion about the implications on tech, based on my reading of the comments.
You commented 3 hours in on a topic that was flagged for hours. How much discussion did you expect period?
The implications are obvious: other countries's businesses will be terrified reading this and refuse to enter the country. No one wants their liasons arrested by a foreign country. I can imagine many businesses in he EU marking the US as a no-fly zone over this story
Given your concern for accuracy why don’t you provide specifics about what the issues with her side of the story are, or at least a link to an article that does? Because so far you’ve only made vague accusations. What illegal drugs was she selling? The article mentions the company she worked for made a drink with hemp. Is that what you’re referring to?
1) It violates the HN guideline that if it's covered by mainstream news it's likely off-topic.
2) It's too political in nature, and violates the HN guideline that political topics are likely off-topic.
3) It violates the HN guideline that the content should be things that good hackers would find intellectually satisfying. Raging partisan hate at each other about the latest political/social snafu is not intellectually satisfying. It has nothing to do with engineering, science, technology, etc., it's purely a social/political issue.
4) Such a submission only draws a mass amount of hate and partisan flamebait which, once again, does not belong on HN. You have every other site on the internet available to discuss political issues.
5) Your appeal to popularity, saying it has lots of engagement and therefore belongs here, has zero connection to the HN guidelines for what belongs here. I don't care if 1 person or 1 billion people engage with it. It doesn't change the fact that it's off-topic and decreases the quality of the site.
It's about someone with an denied visa trying to work around due immigration process (going to a consulate) by attempting instead to get to a far away border crossing and attempting a crossing there because, in her own recollection of the events, she knew/assumed the office was less strict.
And while it's a non story it's framed as a scandal because it resonate with the current political climate and the character is sympathetic to the narrative (productive and upstanding character compared to the ones dominating the previous news cycle on the topic)
A question for the author or anyone else who has experience in similar solutions.
Is there any good solution for discovering new content? Much of the time, I want to stick to my subscriptions, but I do enjoy content surfaced by the algorithm at least once weekly, sometimes more often. My concern in taking my viewing off-platform is twofold: 1) going to YouTube will prompt me with all the stuff I've already watched off platform, and 2) any changes to my viewing habits won't be reflected in algorithmic suggestions.
Am I making any bad assumptions or missing anything that would be useful?
As an example, I usually get conference presentations surfaced for me, but I don't track conferences to know when I should go looking for presentations. YouTube is good at surfacing these for me.
I view Discovery as a social problem where the content you want is almost always clustered between a relatively small number of creators, regions, etc.
Technically it then becomes less of an indexing everything problem and more of a find a few cornerstone creators, say Khan academy, and occasionally branching out.
So to answer your question I don’t thing the cost/benefit for automating discovery is much better then spending 20 minutes and finding enough cornerstones to fill you for 100+ hours of content. Or similarly finding a social group like an rss feed, say in ios development it would be fatbobman, and sourcing it from there.
Time to source content isn’t the bottleneck worthy of software solutions, yet for monetization reasons discovery is the vice grip of social media and made to be the most important thing.
There’s a lot of truth to this but one of the most powerful elements of a discovery algorithm is finding things you completely did not look for, ie Christopher Columbus and the western continents. Like your cornerstones are iOS and recipe videos but you discover the right dance video and it changes your whole life.
> you discover the right dance video and it changes your whole life
You're going to have to explain this one, how would a dance video change my life? Being exposed to something new that becomes profoundly life changing seems like a romanticized notion and not a realistic one especially within a monetized environment.
We're exposed to new stuff everyday, just because .0001% is truly impactful doesn't justify watching 100_000 short reels of ads, even if Google and Facebook REALLY want us to.
Well I’m sure there others who will agree that something small and completely unexpected has had a profound influence in their lives. The simplest example is something so novel and interesting opens you into a deep rabbit hole that changes your career and or who you meet, befriend or marry. The lack of a good recommendation algorithm is exactly the problem where these content platforms is you feel like you have to watch 100k videos to have a chance at such an encounter.
If you were to have something local build you an algorithm, what signal would you want it to consume and how far from the median would you want it to deviate? Would you want it to use signal from online socials?
Certainly, ingest all the signal you’d like, and then emit a feed for clients to consume (or to be republished). Could run locally, could run in a container, could run on an AT protocol PDS. It is an algorithm/discovery/recommendation sovereignty play.
I looked into this as well since I find the YouTube algorithm terrible, but couldn’t find any API for exploration. Which makes sense they want to control what you watch and hence monetize. In a perfect world you could just pick an open source recommendation algorithm from a marketplace and YouTube would just be a wrapper around s3 buckets and some index.
You have to store bits somewhere, and an S3 compatible target optimizes for flexibility and optionality. It can be local (Minio), it can be remote, the client does not care where it is. Even the Internet Archive's API is S3-ish.
I am almost a month into having a Perplexity subscription and I am not sure I can not have a deep research subscription at this point.
I have found youtube videos this month that I don't know how I would have found otherwise that were just part of the sources for what deep research came back with.
It has really created the opposite problem for me is I have so much good information I don't even know what to do with it right now. I am probably taking a month off to just sort through what I found this past month.
I've been using Unhook[0] for years that it's almost a jumpscare for me to see a recommended video or the Youtube homepage. Your social circles and natural serendipity should be plenty for finding new creators. And in general, avoiding algorithmic feeds will help with ADHD and mindless scrolling.
I use a Firefox profile to watch specific videos while logged-out just for the focused recommendations.
I've also noticed that I getting more recommendations for small creators with little to no views/subs when I'm browsing from a smaller, developing country.
I readily follow youtube links offered on HN discussions. If anything, I could use more of these.
But otherwise I agree with your concern. Video recommendations on youtube was far from perfect (very repetitive in my experience), but was uncovering useful stuff.
good question. I don't think I have a definitive answer but I'll try:
- pure luck. sometimes I discover a channel/creator/blog by pure accident, I'm an avid rss reader and HN adept so content comes to me naturally, so to speak.
- following a feed (be it a website's rss feed, reddit/YouTube) sometimes made me discover related feeds, simply because someone wrote about a cool project a peer made and links their YouTube/github/blog
Past ~20mph-30mph, tire noise matches engine noise.
In the US, at least, this means that the vast majority of streets will not see much benefit from EV transition, at least with regard to road noise. The quality of the noise will change, but not the total volume.
As an anecdotal reference point on road noise, I live within a couple miles of an interstate, and the noise I tend to hear does not have discernible engine noise. This is, of course, from vehicles moving at a very different speed than any within a neighborhood.
This is true in a scientific, not practical sense, in any American city.
Engine noise always dominates, because 1% of cars are simply purposefully obnoxiously loud, and you need to be powerful and well connected to get enforcement of existing laws about vehicle noise in your neighborhood.
Yeah I don't mind the traffic noise outside of our house - it's mostly road surface noise which is dampened to white noise, and most petrol engines aren't that loud at those speeds. But it's the occasional sports car or moped that is the most annoying. Those are getting replaced by electric models too, but I wish they did something about the noise decades ago.
For me, while I find the 1% of purposefully obnoxious engines to be annoying, the thing that grates on my nerves is anything more constant. So for me, road noise dominates in what gets under my skin, not engine noise.
I cannot speak for you or anyone else, except to say that you have no right to speak for anyone else, either, who has not granted such right to you.
Hiring so many new people is a false assumption. US Federal employment numbers have grown at incredibly low rates relative to US economic growth or federal spending.
The attrition rate of the federal government is 6-7% per year. This is about 150,000 new hires a year if you maintain the same size government. You can even see it from the DOGE website showing hundreds of thousands
So yes, the vast majority are new employees. The idea that the government hasn't grown doesn't mean that new employees haven't been hire.
I'm shocked at the number of people that are defending government hiring when government jobs have been the butt of jokes for decades. Government headcount needs to be cut drastically. It doesn't have to be demeaning the way it's currently being done, but the 8 month offer was pretty generous in my opinion.
>I'm shocked at the number of people that are defending government hiring when government jobs have been the butt of jokes for decades. Government headcount needs to be cut drastically.
Or maybe you are wildly off base about how many humans it takes to corral the federal government of the US? Maybe you are more filled with propaganda of government jobs?
Maybe the people like you making government jobs the butt of jokes have been part of the problem? Maybe we should respect civil service and have high expectations of it but also understand how important it is.
Being mildly in debt is no reason or excuse to destroy democracy.
Maybe you are the one who is wildly off base as to how many people it takes to do the work in the government? Maybe you are filled with Trump Derangement Syndrome and everything he does is wrong no matter what? I actually worked in the government and saw how ridiculous things were and this was a couple of decades ago. It's only worse now.
$36T is mildly in debt? 50% of our tax revenue will be used to pay our interest on the debt in the next 5 years. It sounds like you have no understanding about how much debt we are in, especially considering that most of our debt has been bought by the Federal Reserve, which is essentially printing money.
Nothing about this destroys democracy. Managing our debt and spending allows us to enjoy more democracy not less.
How could any rep either not think any of this is important or not be actively involved? This is some of the craziest shit the US government has ever seen.
Obviously Democrat politicians will make noise over this, but Trump just won an election and the Republican may believe that this is what their voters want, or at least they don't really care about it. They may be unaware of how things are actually playing out.
Repealing Chevron deference implies that everything which used to be left to regulatory agencies must now be passed via legislation or litigated in court. Which of those sounds like faster change?
That said, I've never missed a light cycle while bicycling, even in rush hour in major metro areas with many people on bikes. The busiest bike intersection in the world, in Copenhagen, devotes less space to bikes than most US streets devote to one lane of vehicle traffic.
Every single US city I have seen has ample space for bicycle infrastructure. Many have lots of roads with sufficient space for dedicated transit lanes, and bicycle lanes, and widened sidewalks while still maintaining space for personal vehicles.
Even if we take your hypothetical to the extreme, with only bicycles and no personal vehicles, every US city has enough space for the bike traffic on its existing streets.