Florida shortened yellow lights to increase red light camera revenue [video]

I'm sorry, but this sentence doesn't make sense to me. Did you mean:

> the traffic lights turn yellow even when the "do-not-cross" signal is still flashing

If not, could you explain? If so, where do you live that the lights do this? I've never seen that behavior (although I'm the first to say I haven't lived many places).

Even giving these things, these are of course no reason to never quote her. Hell, there is a time and a place for quoting even Himmler.

For myself, I'm a 40 year old that leans Libertarian so I tend to agree with some of her political philosophy. I even tried reading Atlas Shrugged but it was so boring I put it down after about 100 pages.

One is that her ideas were not particularly original, and not particularly well-expressed. Self-centered philosophies are far from new, and actually are pretty well-trod ground, but her work does little to address already-existing critiques and, as literature, is not particularly good (her characters tend to be one-dimensional, plots lack good development/tension/resolution, etc.).

Another is that she has become a frankly cult-like figure, with people approaching her work the wrong way around: rather than "this statement is correct, and Ayn Rand said it", too often there is a seeming attitude of "this statement is correct because Ayn Rand said it". The Objectivist movement (people who follow her work and philosophy) is particularly infamous for this, having an established history of venerating her and doing some rather extreme turns when she was alive and particular people from her circle fell out of her favor.

Finally, most of her work is easy to critique with only very basic reasoning/argumentative skills, despite presenting itself as a solid, rationally-justified framework. More realistically, Rand's philosophy consists of appeals to emotional responses, based on the idea of self-evaluation of one's own greatness and the notion that this greatness exists more or less in a vacuum (one of the famous examples is "going Galt", wherein all of the great people who produce value simply retreat and form their own separate society, to spite the "parasites" who "leeched" off their work).

To continue with the fiction theme, one of Heinlein's stories ("The Roads Must Roll", 1940) anticipated and harshly criticized the type of philosophy Rand ended up promoting. One of the asides there is to a philosophy of "Functionalism"; the founder of the philosophy advocates evaluating people -- and giving them power and prestige -- based on what "function" they can perform, and how valuable it is to society.

The result is large numbers of people who do not really make any unusually-significant contributions, but who all come to the conclusion that whatever they do is the one truly indispensable thing, and if they stopped doing it the whole society would fall apart, so they should be given more power or prestige over others in recognition. As Heinlein puts it, "With so many different functions actually indispensible, such self-persuasion was easy." Heinlein also offers a description of the founder of "Functionalism" which critiques the philosophy and in many ways critiques Rand's later work as well, when he says:

The complete interdependence of modern economic life seems to have escaped him entirely.

(see Wikipedia for a summary of the story, or look it up -- it's been republished/anthologized: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll)

Or, more succinctly, "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers

I drive rather than walking everywhere because I have better things to do with my time. I ignore, rather than specifically evaluating Ayn Rand quotes because I have better things to do with my time.

Oh sure, she might have accidentally said something both true and interesting every once in a while. And Mathgen[0] might accidentally produce a valid proof, if you run it enough times.

[0]: http://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/

From an outsider's perspective it just seems... odd.

I am worried about the case where the driver, distracted, looks away from the intersection for a second. Returning their gaze to the light, they see it red. They never observed it yellow, and thus they have no idea how long it has been red and whether or not it is safe to run the light. Perhaps this is why we have yellow to begin with--as an redundant means of clocking the time until the opposing light turns green.

If you are in doubt about whether you can safely stop when the light turns yellow (and you have very little time to make that judgment), it's much safer to err on the side of running it.

The longer the yellow light is, the more likely you are to be able to correctly judge whether you can stop on time. The shorter yellow lights are in your area, the more likely you are to to slam on the brakes to avoid running the red light. Slamming on the brakes is far more dangerous than running a freshly changed red light, to say nothing of running a yellow.

Nevertheless, we do have some red light cameras here. One day I was stuck at an intersection with a camera, and I was waiting to turn left. I had a red left turn signal, and it suddenly stopped cycling. It was rush hour, and after three cycles with no green arrow, I called the non-emergency dispatch and told them the problem and asked the cop what I should do. She told me to take the safest course of action I thought I could. I told her that was running the red light during a break from oncoming traffic, but that I would be given a ticket for this. She said she couldn't invite me to break the law, but just do the safest thing. The legal move would have been to change lanes to the right and go straight through the intersection on a green, but this was also the most dangerous choice because of the heavy traffic flow. Thankfully the light cycle following my conversation with the cop, I got my green arrow, but it sucked to feel so helpless--knowing the safest and correct action (running the red once oncoming traffic allowed it) and knowing I would be penalized for it.