Ah, so pointing out the truth is "so defensive". Amazing!
Yes, there are members of the extreme right even in WA state. There's more of them in red states, but there's certainly some in blue states as well.
19,165 karma · joined June 1, 2013
Yes, there are members of the extreme right even in WA state. There's more of them in red states, but there's certainly some in blue states as well.
And yes, it's true they're kinda ugly, but it's better than baking in the heat.
Of course there are some more conservative folks who may be more resistant to those critiques, but the average American will just nod along. If you mention on this website that healthcare in the US can be insanely expensive, you'll mostly see agreement from Americans.
You could make it more analogous by saying that we could enforce stricter regulations on big SUVs and trucks in terms of, say, driver licensing, and you'd still have a huge outcry if we tried that.
The law is reasonable, but it strikes me what a double standard there is for biking vs driving. For biking, there's a danger that's noticed, and we quickly pass a law that straight up bans that type of bike for those riders.
Meanwhile, everyone knows that these giant trucks and SUVs are killing people, but we do basically nothing. Even on the off chance that we passed a law about them, existing vehicles would certainly be grandfathered in, we would never outright ban current vehicles/motorists. If we banned existing SUVs and trucks, millions of people would be screaming bloody murder about their right to drive pedestrian-killing cars.
> There remains a clear penalty for being an open LLM user. Every leaderboard consistently gets topped by proprietary models served over API. Today on June 21, 2026, Claude and GPT are at the top of the Artificial Analysis intelligence leaderboard. That’s from the performance side. The compatibility side is worse too. Claude code just works, and more generally, the big two provide nice APIs that make them easy to use, and, even if it’s a low bar, are “trustworthy” in the sense that we’ve largely all agreed we don’t mind sending them our LLM queries and trust them to handle them appropriately.
> Open models are served via various means, some by the companies that released them and some by third parties like OpenRouter. Unfortunately, both of these routes are dodgier in terms of privacy and data sharing, and I would not feel the same comfort sending API calls containing client or confidential data to them3.
> The other option or course is to run them yourself. This solves the privacy issue but is at least two of expensive, complicated, and comparatively slow.
So...there's actually quite a bit of downside, then? Why the misleading title?
The early days of Facebook, where I actually saw friends and family posting their thoughts, that was great! It wasn't dominated by people resharing political screeds or random videos from groups I've never even heard of.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious: the issue is that there's another car right there, when traffic is heavy.
The thing, it's not just about what cables you have at home, or even which ones you bring on a trip. It means if you go out on a trip with a small bag and a battery, you only ever really need one cable. It means you don't have to think about "which cables do I bring?", completely removing a question. That's really nice!
People feel uncomfortable about others who look really crazy/shady for public transit or in parks, and in response they're told, "have you considered that maybe you're just overthinking it?"
Instead of fixing the problem, we blame those who have the audacity to notice.
You send Americans over to visit Tokyo and they have zero problems taking the train. The problems isn't with individual Americans.
I wish we had something like that where there was no reposting/resharing, and links & photos were allowed but deemphasized in the UI. Also, no like button, that just encourages empty engagement.
Just getting off the freeway and back onto it will add ~10 minutes to a trip, and that's assuming the charger is fairly close to the exit, and that you don't have to wait at the charger for an open spot.
> I can't imagine spending 2-3 hours charging on that trip.
Note that "Time that charging requires != time spent charging". If you have to wait for a spot to open up at a charging station, that's not charging time exactly, but it is something that charging occasionally demands of you.
But yeah it fucking sucked. The combination of low temps and freeway speeds tanked our mileage down to like ~50% of the theoretical EPA estimate, and the ID4 seemed to charge pretty slowly too at the Electrify America stations.
Now obviously sometimes new developments really are bad, or they're being targeted at terrible spots -- you don't want a very polluting factory right next to a residential neighborhood.
But we've overcorrected drastically. The rules should be sensible and out in the open; planning committees should only be checking whether companies and governments have followed the law as written, not listening to every single possible objection from neighborhood residents about a new apartment complex affecting street parking or creating shadows.
As I pointed out in another comment in this thread, a "neighborhood group" that's using environmental rules to block a low-cost, employee-owned grocery store being added to a site that was already basically a grocery store (Sam's Club) before, is an insane weaponization of the rules. Nobody who was writing these laws ever intended environmental protections to be misused like this.
It works in smaller groups where basically everyone is engaging in good faith and willing to listen to each other. It works a lot less well on a pseudonymous message board.
Seattle is currently dealing with this for a new WinCo -- which is low-priced and employee-owned, making it particularly unobjectionable -- on a site that used to be a Sam's Club, so it's not even really a new development: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/winco-plan...
> North Seattle shoppers may need to wait even longer for a grocery store to fill a former Sam’s Club location left vacant since 2018
> Two years ago, discount grocery chain WinCo filed plans to remodel the building and reconfigure the parking lot on Aurora Avenue North. But the plans encountered opposition from a neighborhood group for their possible environmental impact.
> Last week, a hearing examiner overturned the city’s determination that the project would have no significant environmental impacts, casting doubts on the future of the project.
> ...
> For a while, everything seemed on track. The city conducted a State Environmental Policy Act process and found WinCo’s plans would have no significant environmental impact.
> Then, last fall, a coalition called Lake Washington Working Families appealed the decision. The group, which tried and failed to disrupt plans for a WinCo coming to Renton last spring, has no website and is not registered with the state — leading to online speculation about who exactly is behind the group. But Karl Anuta, a Portland-based lawyer representing the coalition, said it’s made up of King County residents.
> The coalition claimed the city’s environmental analysis of WinCo’s plans for the North Seattle site was inadequate and required further review. WinCo would have major traffic impacts, the appeal said, releasing pollutants into local bodies of water.
> In an interview Monday, Anuta, who primarily handles cases involving environmental law, said the group is not against having a WinCo store at the location but wants the city to seriously analyze the environmental impacts of such a large business.
> “The real issue for the Lake Washington Working Families was you’re going from eight years of nothing there to a larger facility with many impacts,” he said.
> “You can’t just permit stuff and expect the neighbors to deal with the consequences.”
This is why environmental regulations and processes are getting pushback -- not because people hate the environment, but because NIMBYs learned to weaponize these rules against almost any kind of development, even the kind of thing that the overwhelming majority of people in an area support.
Obviously part of that is that the EV wasn't fully charged when we started, but that's the thing -- being low on gas for an ICE car barely affects travel at all.