mklingen

> Given that the various "tictac" reports appear not to be natural phenomenon,

[citation needed]

It did! It found them to be hard, and empty.NASA studies strongly suggest they are just hematite accretions. https://www.intechopen.com/books/mineralogy-significance-and...

WTF does Andy Ngo have to do with "persecution" in academia? Is Any Ngo an academic?

Just come out and say what you mean instead of slimy implications. It's obvious you believe in the false narrative that conservatives are somehow being "persecuted" in academia. This is a disengenous lie spread by right wing propaganda networks like fox news from a few cherry-picked examples. And even if it were true, people disagreeing with your position and calling you out on it is not "persecution."

Occam's Razor: postulate as few as possible new entities to explain an event. Aliens causing UFOs not only postulates that aliens exist, but that they're intelligent, and have visited Earth. That's a lot of new entities we have to consider. On the other hand we know foreign governments exist. We know foreign governments test new aircraft. So the only entity we have to assume here is that an aircraft with these properties exists.

That said I think there are other alternatives that are even more likely: that these sightings are sensor malfunctions or natural phenomena that have been blown out of proportion by popular myth and deliberate disinformation -- (which is certainly the case with all other UFO sightings).

This is how I took notes in college as well. TeX people may scoff but word is way better for taking math notes quickly. Just learn the key combos and you can do almost anything rapidly. The only thing I found tedious was matrix/vector stuff.

[needs citation]

> When workers can’t afford to live within biking distance of work, then it’s not a viable solution.

This is a catch 22 because the way our cities are designed in America makes them unaffordable. American zoning in most cities prohibits the kind of dense mixed use development that makes low cost housing near work possible. We need to reform the zoning code in most cities and improve bike safety, walkability and public transportation to make headway.

In areas where cities are dense enough for public transportaiton to make sense, adding a new line does indeed lead to induced demand. For cities that are spread out and unwalkable (read: almost all US cities), public transit isn't efficient enough to move enough people from point A to B, due to A and B being very far away -- never mind the fact that once you get to B, you can't even walk to many destinations due to the city being designed in such a sprawly, pedestrian hostile way.

For public transportation to work, we first need to make our cities denser. The best way of doing this is by outlawing use-based zoning and moving to form-based zoning. That means getting rid of the concept of a "single family zone" and a "commercial zone", etc. and just specifying stuff about the materials and shapes of buildings. It also means outlawing parking minimums. Many cities around the world (and even a few in the US, re: Philadelphia, NYC) have this kind of zoning which allows for much denser development.

The Boring Company's "solution" is a [sad joke](https://slate.com/business/2018/12/elon-musks-los-angeles-tu...) that belies Musk's utter disconnect with reality. The fact that the man openly mocks public transportation while crying about LA traffic only makes the matter worse.

It's a problem because it's a positive feedback loop. More highways = more traffic, which leads people to want to build more highways to supposedly ease congestion, and this continues ad infinitum. Our cities grow more spread out, less walkable, and less sustainable. Overall it makes our cities worse both for the people who live there and the environment.

If we didn't subsidise highways so much, demand for them would be reduced, and it would make more sense to build denser housing and provide public transportation.

> Where's the money coming from?

The federal highway program. Highways are heavily, heavily subsidized by state and federal dollars. That's why their true cost isn't born on drivers, and it's something that greatly exacerbates the problem of urban planning the U.S that leads to vast sprawl, urban decay, hell for walkers/bikers and environmental degredation. If all highways were toll roads, most would cease to exist and our cities would become denser, doubly so if all those highway dollars were diverted to public transit.

What I mean is that the definition of what counts as "politically correct" has expanded to include lots of stuff. It's such a nebulous term that it can be applied to anything the reader dislikes.

only wealthier people (which in America means white and educated) have time and money to be "activists" for any cause.

Exactly. I think people have been conditioned to see "political correctness" as something bad, and have different views of what it means. You can oppose "political correctness" and have literal nazis and KKK members nodding along because they think it means "anything other than white supremacy", while at the same time you can have centrists nodding along because they think it means "using the correct gender pronoun in all settings."

I think this is a result of an intense propaganda campaign on the right that has distorted the meaning of political correctness so that it can mean anything the reader dislikes.