I see- your arbitrary line is better than my arbitrary line.

Yeah? I mean if you're trying to see if your country is doing well or badly then you are best of comparing it to countries that are in some way comparable. Compared to much of western Europe, yeah the UK is doing decently well in this regard. Not the best, but pretty highly ranked.

That seems reasonable. Our infrastructure ought to be much better than an ex Soviet state with a fraction of the gdp per capita. The only point of making such a comparison is to know if you've fucked up really hard.

Let's just look at it this way- you're more likely to be a victim of a violent crime walking in London than you are be killed by a car in the US as a pedestrian.

A good part of that is because the US has made itself so astonishingly hostile to pedestrians that everyone drives if they can. And speaking of which:

London has 116 murders from a population of 15 million. The US has 41000 road deaths from a population of 340e6. So you're 15 times as likely to die on the roads in America as you are likely to be murdered in London. But if you insist on just pedestrians that was just 7500, meaning you're only 3x as likely to die as a pedestrian in America as you are to be murdered in London.

Yeah yeah I know you said violent crime not murder. But you're comparing pedestrian fatalities to non fatal injuries in order to make America look less like a poor ex Soviet state in this regard. It would be much more reasonably to compare pedestrian wounding and death to all violent crime including murder. But that way America would still look bad so...

Yeah so despite you trying to pain London as murder streets it's still 3-15x safer than simply being on the roads in America. I reckon I'll take my chances in London.

That's the problem with UI and UX designers. Even when something is already good they're looking to change it to something else if for no reason other than for the sake of change itself. Design something good and leave it the hell alone. The icons can change when there's a major revision to the OS. Otherwise it's pointless wankery.

I can't think of one meaningful change Apple or Microsoft have made to the look and feel of their respective operating systems over the last two decades that was absolutely necessary. Most of it has been shuffling stuff around or trying to make it look new and shiny. Invest that time in making it faster and more stable instead. I don't need major changes more than once a decade. It's unlikely there are many things actually worth changing anyway.

When they die I hope that they have to spend a minute in purgatory for every minute of someone's time they wasted with pointless UI changes over the years. I can think of a few who will be stuck there for a small eternity. Some might even be beyond redemption. I can easily imagine them trying to rearranging the circles of hell.

These sound like they're being used to build and test software. That's an important part of development, but it's not critical infrastructure that the business absolutely needs to be up 24/7. If they buy the cheapest Mini, it's $600 each and that's $120,000 in hardware costs. They may have some replacements over the life of the hardware, but they'll be able to use those for another five years at the least. Someone needs to wrangle those machines so add another $120,000 for that. Apple's chips are quite efficient so while they will need to pay power and cooling costs to host their own hardware as well, it won't be that bad. All in all it's going to be a lot less expensive for something that doesn't really need to be in the cloud or gain much from being there aside from easy scaling of resources.

No, I'm saying that all things being relative, the UK has murder roads compared to several countries in the EU as well.

I get what you're saying and I'm saying it's a specious argument. The UK is one of the best in western Europe and indeed the world. Better places exist, but it's ranked very high. The US is substantially worse than the entire EU, and much much worse than western Europe.

Rationalize that all you want, but the US is not very good in this regard.

Anyway I dispute your "2x" numbers.

That the US was 2x worse than "Europe". As I said you had to cherry pick very heavily.

I have already pointed out that you selectively chose Western Europe,

Americaaaaaaa fuckkk yeaaaah!

America has always been grouped with "the west". Which typically included western Europe. It's a pretty normal grouping. And even if you pick the whole EU 27, the US is still twice as bad. But you're better than Belarus!

We were comparing death rates without regard for miles driven.

I quoted deaths per km not deaths per capita. A mile of your roads is more dangerous than a mile of roads in Europe. Deal with it.

No, it's an opinion held by a group of people.

Your feelings don't trump facts. I get that facts>feelings is ethnocentric bullshit in your world.

And no, while most stroads exist in the US, most of the US is not stroads in the slightest.

Just about every town I drove through was stroads. Even Santa Fe which has an actually old centre was full of stroads outside.

I think that just about confirms the ethnocentrism.

European quotes a fact: "waaah that's ethnocentric". European points out that the facts come from Americans and Canadians: "waaah that's ethnocentric". You have found a very effective way of blocking your ears to inconvenient facts, I'll grant you that.

Rest well knowing that the US has the traffic system that the US populace wants, and votes for

You voted a sex offende and fraudster into high office. Just because you wanted that doesn't make it a good idea. Likewise you vote for murder roads. Wanting murder roads doesn't make them not mudrer roads.

And the UK is still twice as bad as the Netherlands. You'd have to be just suicidal to walk on those roads! /s

Your argument is it's somehow OK that American has murder roads because one much safer country is worse than another much safer country? I don't get it.

Anyway I dispute your "2x" numbers. I combined https://w3.unece.org/PXWeb/en/... with population data and American isn't looking very good. Deaths per million (population from wikipedia):
America: 21.7
Italy: 8.4
Germany: 8.4
Poland: 13.8
France: 5.8
Spain: 6.1
Portugal: 9.3
And since we're on the topic:
UK: 5.3
Netherlands: 2.3

You have to leave western Europe and go to low population countries 1/6 the GDP per capital find anywhere comparably bad to the US. That's not the brag you think it is.

You just aren't going to bend.

Why would I bend away from a rational position? I'm certainly not going to change my position when you attempt to use personal attacks like that as a method of argument.

Per unit of distance is obviously going to be in our favor, as we drive more, at current fatality rates, than you do.

Eh? Deaths per capita would be higher in America all things being equal simply because you drive more. Higher deaths per km means your roads are worse.

objectively?

Yes. Objectively. This has been studied by traffic engineers and is known. Mixing high and low speed is a terrible idea. That's why interstates don't have little side junctions. It's well known this mix is dangerous yet America is mostly stroads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This "ethnocentric bullshit" as you say has been studied extensively by your fellow countrymen, and they've come to those conclusions. Antiamerican traitors, I assume, headed right for the HUAC. The Canadians are even worse! They might have the same road design but their nasty flappy heads mean they are just all wrong! Can't believe a word they say. It's all about moose and hockey anyway. Plus Zambonis don't go fast enough to be dangerous, eh?

Look at it this way- for all of your EU mandated safety measures, how on God's Green Earth, are some EU countries over twice as bad as the US?

We're on to poor road design here, which also affects a lot of drivers too. Overall deaths per km:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

By "2x as bad" you mean "very slightly better than Belgium" and worse than all other western European countries often by a lot.

And back to pedestrians. I found a chart for the EU27!

https://road-safety.transport....

Page 7.

Romania (pop 20 million): a little under 2x as bad.
Bulgaria (pop 6.4 million): as bad
Literally all other countries: better.

EU27: 2x better

So by "some" you mean "one". So if you cherry pick the worst part of the EU, it's worse than the American average. The EU is twice as good, and you have the poorer, eastern European countries skewing the numbers up. If you compare to Western Europe only, the place that's more economically similar, holy shitballs your numbers are terrible.

Maybe you'll one day get over the reflexive "America Fuck yeah! U!S!A!! U!S!A!!" attitude at which point you might be surprised to find America is actually not the best at everything.

I was talking about western Europe, but as you say the EU27 is worse than the UK but still better than the US.

As for the US not having murder roads, you might want to look at the general death rate per capita, per unit of distance, however you like it, it's not very good.

You do have cities of a different nature and the different nature is you legislate for horrendous road design which is somehow incredibly expensive, unusually dangerous, hostile to pedestrians, bikes and public transport and tops it off work not being very good at shifting cars.

The design of mixing high speed features (wide, straight, multiple lanes) with mixed use low speed features (lots of intersections, make turnings for shops etc) is objectively poor.

Or alternatively look at it like this, America is richer than almost all European countries and spends far more power capita on roads. Went are they not better, and often so much worse?

Nope. The mistake was to nation build in a tribal state. Post WW2 Europe, sure. Iran, Afghanistan no.

The post-9/11 invasion. No problem. Kill them, remove them from power, then leave with the warning don't make us come back and do this again.

Again, your ignorance is showing. Saddam worked to hide the fact he had no WMD. He wanted the question to be an unknown to scare off Iran. This shit aint gonna fly post 9/11. Either prove you are clean or we are coming in to see for ourselves. The mistake was, again, to stay around and nation build.

Wrong again, the ISSI/Daesh mindset is a recurring problem. They have, century after century, been put down by the local muslims who get fed up with their shit. The problem was allowing mass migration. The allowed the locals to flee rather than stay and fight and end the problem, as they have century, after century in the past.

The US did not arm the Islamic State. The US fought them.

We took no oil. We defended allies. We took down a dictator who violated the peace agreement he had with the US from the previous war. We took town the after the fact accomplices of 9/11.

Bagdhad was looted by locals. Thank God some of their culture survived in the safe hands of Britain and France.

The Buddhist statues were native to Afghanistan not China. And Buddha was from Nepal not China. Buddhism spread to many areas including Afghanistan.

Repatriation may put art in the hands of ISIS or likeminded individuals. Some of the looted art is safer where it is.

Sorry, politically incorrect, but realistic at times.

This is an article about the FBI. If it were the CIA they would've already overthrown the Canadian government and installed puppets to do their bidding without openly asking. The FBI is too busy entrapping retards into committing terrorist acts in the U.S. to have time to go after Canadians, retarded or not. Canada should ignore them. They're probably more harmless than the ATF that would shoot their dogs and possibly even their moose. Just tell the FBI to send any requests through a respectable and fearsome agency like the BIA or USDA if they want an actual response.

Ger a fairphone?

No bloatware, 7 years of updates, unlocked for whatever OS you want, spare parts sold and easy to replace. Tool free battery replacement in less than 10 seconds.

But then again, you did erroneously imply that pedestrians are safer in European streets (absurdly untrue- per-capita death rate for a pedestrian is double the US rate in Europe)

Where on earth have you got your statistics?

Because they don't remotely match any of the ones I'm looking at, especially for my par of Europe (UK).

The USA has murder roads by comparison for drivers and especially pedestrians, and that's even given how few of the latter you have. I mean speaking of which you can get to zero pedestrian deaths by simply banning pedestrians entirely, but that's not really meaningfully safer.

Which was better for the consumer? Netflix, back when they were *the* streaming platform? Or the situation today, where streaming is balkanized?

What's good for the big game studios is different from what's good for gamers. As long as Steam remains consumer-friendly, they can (and will) keep their monopoly.

Why? So Isis/Dash/Taliban can destroy the pre-Islamic art?

"Built in the 6th century, the Buddhas of Bamiyan were two monumental size statues, standing at 115 and 174 feet tall, carved into the sandstone cliffs of the Bamiyan valley in central Afghanistan. These statues best exemplified the Gandharan Buddhist art school, as well as the greater cultural landscape of Buddhism and its influences during the 1st to 13th centuries. In 2001, the statues were destroyed by the Taliban over the course of 25 days. Although Islam became the dominant religion in the region, these Buddhist monuments were still integral to Afghan history and were a source of national pride, and their destruction has been seen as a great loss to many Afghan people. In 2003, the Bamiyan Valley was declared a World Heritage Site; however, the damage that has already been done to the site is irreversible. Though none of the bodies of the Buddhas remain, the empty space that they once occupied remains, cavernous fixtures carved into the mountainside."
https://whoseculture.hsites.ha....

I think that's your bank PIN. Your luggage would be 1 2 3, or the TSA compatible key from Ali Baba. :-)