OTOH if this system was required in every car sold, the resulting economies of scale would likely push the costs down fairly quickly.

At the risk of moving the discussion away from amusing reductio ad absurdums and in a constructive direction... the actual question to be asking is: "are the benefits of mandating this technology worth the costs?"

The benefits here are obvious: reduced deaths, injuries, and property damage.

The costs are: increased vehicle prices (to compensate for the development costs and materials required by the new technology) and potentially some accidents introduced in cases where the technology performs poorly enough to cause an accident rather than preventing one.

My intuition is that the technology is mature enough at this point that it makes sense to mandate it, but that's only an intuition; the NHTSA doesn't operate on intuition, it operates on extensive studies, so its opinion here is worth a whole lot more than mine.

SF is no different than any other city other than having a climate that makes it easier for the homeless to not die of exposure. Cities are dirty, cramped places. I don't understand why people willingly choose to live in them, but they do. They vote liberal because they lean young, and young people lean liberal.

Their politics have almost zero to do with cities being s**tholes. Republicans manage to turn beautiful places into s**tholes just as quickly. They just ruin things in different ways — Democrats by not mandating psychological treatment for people who are wandering the streets because of severe mental health problems and by allowing them to ignore the rules of society without consequence, Republicans by cutting funding for the mental health services that they need to keep them off the streets and by throwing people into jails where they don't get adequate mental health treatment and end up coming out even more screwed up than they were when they went in.

Both parties absolutely suck, and people who claim otherwise are kidding themselves.

Gnome might not be the best example. At least TWO distros were inspired by the desire to avoid Gnome shell. At least one to avoid SyetemD. Linus had to yell at the SyetemD people to stop them from crapping up the kernel.

The recent debacle with the xz based security hole explains well why Debian likes to think twice about updating package versions.

We need to anounce the coming of the salt shaker to get those slugs moving.

Hoover. Dyson is a sphere, and you can't have a spherical cow in a spherical vacuum.

If by "about to", you mean September of next year, then maybe it might, but I suspect you're thinking of the Boeing Starliner crewed test in a couple of days. Completely unrelated.

• Soyuz: Russian capsule (and service module and orbital module, but the capsule is the interesting part) used for getting people back from ISS (capacity 3).
• SpaceX Dragon: U.S. capsule used for getting people back from ISS since April 2021 (capacity 4).
• Boeing Starliner: U.S. capsule intended to have a second alternative to Dragon for ISS flights (capacity 7).
• Orion: Combination of a capsule (Lockheed Martin) and crew module (Airbus) for Artemis missions (capacity 4).

They're all capsules, but Dragon is basically intended as a replacement for Soyuz, Orion has the ESM (European Service Module) attached, which lets it be useful as a habitat for longer missions, and Starliner has more crew and cargo capacity, I think.

The other key difference is that Orion is designed for reentry from higher altitudes (more heat shielding) than Dragon or Starliner, which are both designed only for LEO (e.g. ISS). A version of Soyuz (Zond 5) did fly past the moon, but I have no idea if the current versions are built to withstand high-altitude reentry.

The hard part is finding a spherical cow that can survive in a vacuum.

Jello Biafra for president!

The whole thing violates a reasonable expectation of privacy. They don't need to know your name to make sure you don't have any weapons on you.

And that's a fair concern. Of course, that's really just one of many reasons to use real doors instead of those craptastic panel abominations that are so common in U.S. restrooms. (Another good reason is that normal doors are more likely to still be on the hinges and have functioning locks after a decade or two, which was a big problem in my high school with those cubicle restroom doors.)

One very left-leaning university I know of solved the problem in a different way, by putting in plastic strips that sealed the gaps. That works, too.

Either way, it's nothing that can't be solved. You just have to convince the owners that it is important enough to solve it. It's still way easier than trying to guarantee that you can correctly determine everyone's biological sex just by looking at them. :-)

There's a lot wrong with that, so it's hard to even know where to begin.

First, they're lumping together bad behavior in shared restrooms with bad behavior in "unsafe, isolated locations". The fact that unsafe, isolated locations even exist is solid evidence of inadequate staffing, so we can start from the assumption that these schools aren't otherwise safe to begin with. No bathroom policy will change those, and lumping them together disguises the signal that they're complaining about (women being abused in shared restrooms) with a giant pile of noise.

Second, it goes without saying that in a school situation, a shared restroom has to be monitored. Even if you didn't have people getting raped, you'd still have people sneaking in to have sex, smoke, drink, do drugs, and so on. The real problem is not the shared nature of the restroom, but rather the lack of monitoring.

Also, you can bet that there are incidents in those same schools where people have been beaten up in the restroom, but nobody is complaining about those, because that doesn't give them an easily defined group of people to hate. Yet the same fix — proper staff supervision — would fix both problems, whereas a non-shared restroom only fixes one of those problems, and potentially doubles the number of staff needed to fix the other one.

Finally, the "or are forced to go to the bathroom outside" part is the point where most rational people would simply write off the entire argument as nonsensical in the context of any rational discussion of the United States unless you go back a hundred years or more.

If you lump in enough unrelated signals, you can absolutely create something that *looks* like a signal. I can do that, too. In Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and San Francisco, people with hunting rifles kill [insert number of people] every year. Therefore, we need to ban hunting rifles in San Francisco. See how absurd that sounds when it is used to defend something the left would be more likely to support? It sounds just as stupid coming from the right.