Zagorath

…5 years ago, which is presumably why you chose to crop out the date before reposting.

without a major total rebuild of my city, adding public transfer infrastructure etc… cars are necessary for me to go to the grocery stores

Yes, that was my point when I said that actually, if you use a car today in motornormative societies, it does not count as true enthusiastic informed consent, because you do not have another viable option.

Bottom line 500 things need to be done before they start restricting cars

Not really. You start by doing what New York is already doing with congestion charges in inner-city areas that do have good alternative options. You make licensing requirements stricter, including removing the ability to drive "yanktanks"/"wankpanzers"/"emotional support vehicles"/whatever you want to call those absurdly dangerous impractical vehicles that are some of the most popular cars lately on a regular car licence, and instead require an upgraded, more expensive type of commercial/truck licence.

To do much more than that, yeah, you probably need to start doing more. Building separated bike paths as standard in all new roads and roads getting resurfaced (if there's more than 2 lanes) or lowering the design speed & speed limit and adding modal filters (on smaller 2-lane streets) is kinda the bare minimum, and costs precious little, since you do it at the time you'd be spending on maintenance anyway

serve pretty much no practical use in civilized society

100%. I'm not at all trying to draw a perfect equivalence between guns and cars. Only to point out when people—even well-meaning people—may be reinforcing harmful motornormative ideas. America's gun problem is for sure far, far less excusable and far easier to address. Which is the reason that so many other countries have addressed it, most famously when an Australian conservative politician fronted up to a crowd of angry gun owners wearing a bulletproof vest when announcing Australia's new gun laws after the Port Arthur massacre, and yet motornormativity still pervades Australian culture to almost the same degree as American. And Canadian culture. And even the UK, though to a much lesser degree.

except, potentially protect yourself from someone with a gun

Disagree. Owning a gun increases your chance of being a victim of gun violence. There are valid reasons to own a gun. These are pretty well covered under Australian law which should serve as a model for America, if America actually wanted to become a sensible country. But self-defence is not one of them.

Everyday I consent to get in my car. I do not consent, to say, getting shot in a public location

I get that your main point is to debunk this guy's defence of guns, and that's a worthy goal, but this is motornormative bullshit. Cars kill thousands of people who gave no such consent, like pedestrians and cyclists. The analogy doesn't even line up properly. A more apt analogy would be to compare consenting to carrying a gun yourself being equivalent of consenting to get in your car.

And even that implies that you really did give full and uncoerced consent with viable alternative options. Which, if you live in a typical car-dependent American (or Canadian, Australian, etc.) city, you did not. Because your city lacks adequate public transport options, lacks safe cycling infrastructure, and things are too far apart to walk in a reasonable time. !fuckcars@lemmy.world

Guns are also bad and anyone who thinks America doesn't need radical change in gun culture and gun laws is fucking insane. But don't let that fact be a reason to also defend motornormativity.

There was a lot left to explain in that dimensional prison

Agree.

using it as a finale to neatly wrap a lot of different plot threads was great

Sort of?

IMO it felt very hamfisted in the way it tried to wrap those plot threads. And it felt like it should have been the culmination of a large number of episodes scattered across multiple seasons. Not a follow-up to a single episode earlier this same season. But if they had spent more time laying the groundwork to explain how the gorn Alien impregnation relates to the Great Cosmic Evil (and why the Great Cosmic Evil is even a relevant theme to explore in this world), then choosing to wrap that all up in a dramatic finale could perhaps have been awesome.

there’s two massive red lasers with the same power as a star beaming in through the balcony and none of the natives there were bothered by it enough to get out of their seats

All the scenes on the planet gave me that sense. It really felt obvious they were acting in front of the Volume. When the main characters just walk up and assault the portal guards, nobody reacts. When they discuss what to do next right there, nobody reacts. When the giant lasers shoot down, nobody reacts.

The planet design was really cool

Agree! I wish we could have explored more about them and their culture, and how it links to the culture of the previous planet the Great Cosmic Evil was on.

It’s interesting that the planet has no warp travel but still makes contact with alien races

I got the sense (sadly, the episode wasn't interested in exploring these aspects at all) that it's because they were contacted by the Orions, who don't follow the Prime Directive.

I've gotta be honest, I'm not completely sure what actually happened here. What was actually happening to allow that time-skipping future? It felt like a cross between The Inner Light and All Good Things, but in both of those the cause was pretty clear. Here, it felt like just something that they wanted to insert, so they did.

Which, tbh, is how the whole premise of the episode felt. Why is Batel suddenly magically connected to this Cosmic Evil? The last episode we had with them didn't really feel like she was especially key to it. Not to mention that using what seemed like a one-off villain to return in the season finale in a way that felt like it would be more appropriate for an established recurring big bad really dragged the episode down.

Pelia's Dr Who joke was funny, I'll grant her that. But I really don't like the idea that Dr Who and Star Trek could be in the same universe. Both have explored far too much of space for me to accept that, for example, The Federation has never encountered the Daleks, and Dr Who himself has never before encountered the Borg. The fact that the joke came from the most insanely irritating character the franchise has ever introduced (and I already hated Neelix enough that I would have thought nobody could take that role off him) certainly didn't help there. Seriously, wtf are the writers and actor even doing with that character? She might have been ok as a one-off comic guest appearance...which is what she seemed like when she first showed up. Then they just...made her a member of the core cast?

I dunno, how many people still live in Midsomer despite what seems like a rate of one murder per week?

you brought up top month and I don’t see how you’d want that to work

The truth is I don't want "top month". What I really want is "best result, filtered by this month". But unfortunately that doesn't exist, and in the absence of that, I use "top month".

It's a sparsely-populated country. We actually only use 4. 02 for NSW and the ACT, 03 for Victoria and Tasmania, 07 for Queensland, and 08 for SA, WA, and the NT.

There are then a further 2 digits (or 1 digit for the most populous areas) used for more fine-grained regions, like 073 for Brisbane and 0747 for Townsville. But at least when I was young, those digits would be part of the phone number you would memorise and type, even for other people in the same subregion. I'm not sure if they were compulsory or not. So my phone number as a child was 3XXX XXXX. If I had been on NSW trying to reach that, it wouldn't have worked, and I'd have needed to know that it's 07 3XXX XXXX. And internationally it would be 617 3XXX XXXX.

There's this meme of 'why is ChatGPT expert on everything but the area I have knowledge of'.

That's just Gell-Mann amnesia applied to chat bots.

translated to something like ratio

Ratio is exactly the word we use in English bittorrent.

At least on my part, you guess correctly.

A billion being 10^9^ is, at this point, universal. To my knowledge, only the very old in the UK still hold to the "long billion".

I find that fascinating, because everywhere I've lived (and everywhere I haven't lived but have had reason to be aware of the phone scheme), mobile phone numbers (which often aren't formatted in the same way as landline numbers) are 10 digits and start with a leading zero.

Growing up, landlines usually didn't include area code, and would be 8 digits, starting with a non-zero number. But adding an area code would mean adding 2 digits, the first of which is always 0.

So basically, if I see a phone number without a leading zero, I'm going to be very confused, unless I have reason to believe that it includes country code.

Not really the point.

But no, it's not only used by rail workers. At the very least, I know it's also used in cricket.