Indeed. It's because of the fashion preferences of American SUV and pickup buyers.
I can attest to the fact that minivans are much more comfortable. I picked up my Pacifica hybrid minivan in early 2021 before the price hike and it was a steal compared to SUVs and pickups. When I was doing paperwork for the vehicle at the Chrysler dealership, I was chatting with some sales guys and discovered the shocking fact they had recently sold a luxuriously loaded-down pickup for over $100K. I was fortunate to easily haggle with them over my minivan because they don't make much money on minivans so they focus on pickups, Jeeps, etc.
A couple decades ago, I had started looking to replace an old hand-me-down car from my grandma, and had been mulling over whether I could ever justify spending $30K on an Infiniti at that time. My boss at work got a new pickup, and he was rather proud of it, and I innocently asked if it cost $25K because plenty of my Texan relatives had driven them over the years and I assumed they were a no-frills working man's practical vehicle. After a brief pause, he answered, "It was a little over 40 thousand." That was over 20 years ago.
When I was at Rice University around the turn of the century, I remember playing with a large expensive monitor running a Windows computer. It was so futuristically fantastical that you could touch the screen to do things. Extremely clunky, but cool. Just a bit too tedious to do anything more than play with it, because trying to get actual work done on it all the time would have been a chore.
Many years later, I was working for a startup called kWhOURS in a little old house in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our target users were engineers used to paying thousands for the rugged and expensive Windows laptops we needed to deploy our Adobe AIR tablet app onto since they had a touchscreen. Still a clunky UI, but our software was usable. Then the iPad was released, and it was literally worlds apart, something people have long taken for granted. All of us, including Adobe, were taken by surprise, because all attempts at tablets prior to that were so far inferior to Apple's version, and competitors spent many years trying to catch up.
Yeah, he's wrong about many things. But hurling epithets and constructing an argument via ad hominem isn't necessary. You can defeat his claims directly.
And FWIW, the claim that eating unprocessed "whole" foods is healthy is almost certainly true.
If it died due to disease that's one, rabies and any prion diseases would be easy to accidentally transfer due to mistakes in handling. Parasites. Mites and fleas which also can harbor disease. Uncertain length of decomposition. Possibly died due to poison, either intentionally or unintentionally which can the poison the eater.
We're discussing roadkill bear. Meaning a bear that was killed on the road (by a vehicle).
It's technically true that it still could have any of the scary afflictions you mention, but that's no different than any hunted game, or any industrially farmed animal.
Barring prions or poisoning (incredibly and quite rare, respectively), all of those issues can and would be evaluated by someone who intended to consume the animal.
I'm curious if you consume meat, and if you've ever been involved in the slaughter or processing of animals.
No, we're discussing a bear that was dead by the road. There's never been a claim it was killed by a vehicle. He found the bear long after whatever occurred did. Also, he then dumped it in central park, so even he thought it wasn't "good meat".
Your interpretation is wrong, and potentially disingenuous.
Animals killed by vehicles on the road are pretty easy to distinguish from animals that coincidentally died on the road.
> He found the bear long after whatever occurred did. Also, he then dumped it in central park, so even he thought it wasn't "good meat"
So your argument is that there's something wrong with roadkill because it might be afflicted with something that would make it detrimental for human consumption; now you admit that he was able to evaluate its fitness for consumption, and avoided consuming something that wasn't "good meat"?
What point are you making exactly?
Yours is the same argument as right wingers screaming "ewwww insect derived protein is gross, don't you know insects can cause ____".
While the mental image of eating roadkill is also unappetizing to me, I have to admit my reaction here is irrational.
Eating roadkill isn’t much different from eating wild game you hunted — except with roadkill, it was someone else and their car that killed it accidentally, rather you and a gun intentionally.
If you didn't see it die you don't know what it died of. Shooting something healthy and then dressing it while fresh is different from finding windfall after some unknown amount of time.
This is just one of literally thousands of resources answering this exact question. There are other resources to help evaluate other potential consumption risks. There's no need to pretend that the only animals people can eat are the ones they witnessed being killed; people do otherwise, and have for millennia.
There are a lot of deer killed by cars around here and people do harvest them. With even ordinary supermarket steak pushing $30/lb it's not completely crazy.
These evil people want us sick and hospitalized with chronic disease from eating this crap. Now that it's political, hopefully people will see it for the bullshit it really is.
As a Ruby dev who has built a couple Flutter apps, I was surprised how pleasant Dart was compared to JavaScript and TypeScript, and I sincerely hope it largely replaces those on both client and server.
I know it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but many years ago I tinkered with RubyMotion, and in recent years I have successfully launched in the app stores with the mobile versions of Jumpstart Pro using way less effort than a Swift or Kotlin developer would due to the way Jumpstart Rails integrates nicely with their iOS and Android templates.
How strictly do you define need? I've been living as an adult long enough that there have been countless times I've searched for photos and emails from one or two decades ago. I distinctly remember the first time I met an Inbox Zero person. It was so important to her to militantly delete everything she had dealt with, and to me, the disadvantages from that practice far outweigh the advantages.
That's simplistic. Actually, to better understand the situation you must follow the money. Many 2nd Amendment supporters are reasonable, but unfortunately, over decades their casual support has been utilized by lobbyists whose goals do not necessarily align with many supporters. The challenge is to communicate that message in a way that reaches everyone.
We just need to reduce the number of guns. I've not met a 2nd amendment supporter who understands this basic idea. They are always convinced one of the following retorts should be the end of the conversation (they also proudly think you've never heard these cliched arguments):
- They have knife stabbings in China. (Yes. A gun is more lethal.)
- A bad guy can still get a gun. (Yes.)
- Hand guns are more dangerous than rifles. (This means let's reduce both.)
- The gun doesn't kill people. People kill people. (This means let's reduce how many people have guns.)
- Mass shootings aren't the majority of gun deaths. (Let's reduce the total gun deaths and mass shootings then.)
Come up with as many ridiculous retorts as you like. If you had reduced the total number of guns, most of the shootings could not have happened.
This list is spot on, and the biggest fuel on the fire is the problem of huge financial incentives. I can assure you there are some supporters out there who do understand. Some who do not understand have certainly been fed talking points by entities who may or may not care about the intent of the 2nd Amendment exactly, but definitely do care about making money.
Don't you think the populace needs to be armed though? I think its a given that eventually the government will be intolerably corrupt and a revolution will be necessary. Nobody denies that less guns -> less shootings. The logic is that some amount of shootings are tolerable to preserve democracy, and that if our goal is to reduce mass shootings, social reforms intended to improve mental health are the correct choice.
Imagine you are in charge of a monkey enclosure. The monkeys sometimes go crazy and kill each other with rocks. You can:
A: Remove all rocks. Monkeys stay suicidally miserable but can't inflict harm as easily. Problem solved?
B: Mitigate conditions that make them suicidally miserable. Some say its impossible, but then again, just a generation ago the monkeys had rocks without frequent violence.
Why is it that only our country needs to be armed, but none of the others do? Do Germans need to be armed? Do Indians need to be armed? Maybe you could argue that Chinese people need to be armed, but every Chinese person I've met seems to like their government right now and is content with the levels of surveillance. Maybe arming the Uyghurs could have helped but somehow I doubt it.
All populations should be armed. The current democratic, liberal order in Europe is just a side effect of America's dominance, the same America that is the product of the revolution of a well armed population. Your counterpoint might be the U.K., which has arrested 12,000 people for social media posts recently.
The catch is, it only works with an enlightened, well educated population with philia and a sense of civic duty. Arming inner city Chicago has been a disaster.
That's tough to maintain that state, but we have to try, because if a population doesn't fit that description the country turns to shit and you won't want to live there. To disarm is to admit we can't be an enlightened country anymore and we won't try, and after that its just a matter of time until there is nothing special about America and its just another mediocre third world dump.
If a government were run by quakers, should the population require the same level of armament as if it were run by Attila? Perhaps by creating better governments we could reduce the need to arm populations.
I just don't see what arming citizens is going to do against a militaristic government.
Yes, because the idea is to establish an armed populace before society succumbs to tyranny, not in response to it. The central tenet is that even if a society is run by Quakers now, it won't always be, because in the absence of proper inputs societies tend to decay to their stable basal state which is despotism. When that happens, the population must be armed in order to revolt and restore a democratic system. I would even say its better to arm the populace while the government is still Quaker because that would establish the proper cultural mores surrounding gun ownership in an enlightened environment - e.g. knowing that gun ownership is a responsibility and right, connecting it with ideas of liberty and civic duty, viewing them as a last resort, learning about guns from your father and not your homie on the corner.
You need to have the population armed beforehand. Its not practical to try to dynamically adjust how armed the populace is in proportion to perceived governmental Attila-ness.
To your last point, an armed populace makes revolt feasible, and there is a spectrum here. The key is that the oligarchy will need to convince the army to stay on its side and punish the revolting populace. The more sacrifice and violence that is required, the harder it is to keep convincing them. Also, look at the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan: an armed, hostile populace is just much harder to control than an unarmed one. It dramatically increases the cost of every excursion from a military base, the number of soldiers required to subjugate an area, etc, and the grand lesson from those conflicts is that boots on the ground are still needed to control an area, and that technological solutions like drone strikes still don't scale well enough and aren't cleanly targeted enough to change that. Perhaps that will change in the future, but I actually suspect that the prevalence of consumer drones will maintain the power of the public to resist the military. Look at Ukraine and Russia; the dominant weapon system now is the consumer drone, eclipsing even artillery, which has democratizing implications for the future of the tug-of-war between societies and their governments.
Well it's been interesting talking to you. In good faith, I honestly cannot conceive of how arming the population prevents tyranny though. You give the example of Iraq and Afghanistan. Presumably you're saying the tyranny was the US occupation? Weren't these groups armed not before, but as a result of first (I believe) soviet and then American occupations?
Are there examples in modern times of a stable society consisting of a heavily armed population such that as a result of this tyranny has been curbed? Americans are the most heavily armed population in the world and it seems that tyranny is measurably setting in right now. The stability seems like it was higher in the beginning of the 20th century too. The 60-70's and now are the most unstable periods I believe, and the number of guns has only increased. So I don't think the US would be a good example.
In good faith, I cannot see how arming civilians reduces tyranny in modern times, unless your model actually is Afghanistan and Iraq. In those cases it's not that all civilians are armed. There are armed groups. That's not a world I want to live in though, anyways.
Yes, the tyranny in Iraq was the US occupation, though I am merely using it as an example that an armed, civilian populace can resist military control, not commenting on the morality of the occupation.
FWIW, Iraq was already well armed before the occupation, and looting of state arsenals in the chaos of the invasion amplified this. Afghanistan was a similar situation but armed networks were already organized moreso before the US occupation.
I don't think there are examples in very modern times of an enlightened, armed populace revolting against tyranny. The most recent I can think of is the Irish war of independence. They had low gun ownership, but correctly recognized the attainment of arms as of utmost importance, and it was through arms that they obtained liberty. I also still think that the American revolution is a fair example because the fundamental dynamic is still relevant. The Algerian war of independence comes to mind as well, which was more recent, though they were neither enlightened nor well-armed at the outset. Generally an enlightened society will produce a democracy which will take centuries to decay to the point of warranting revolt, and we are still in the first generation of these.
To your point about the US, merely having an armed populace does not gradually move society away from tyranny. The mental model myself and the founding fathers have is that even in the case of an armed populace, democratic institutions eventually decay to the point that the government is corrupt, despotic and intolerable. Its just entropy, as happens to our bodies. The population then revolts, and installs a democratic government, which then starts to decay again, and the cycle repeats. The fact that America is moving in a bad direction is confirmation of this tendency to decay, and not in any way antithetical to my stance. Eventually the decay surpasses a threshold which triggers the guns to come into play and reset the system.
Except they're under pressure to not exercise such wide latitude. A few months ago, many who had already passed the exam and were just awaiting placement found out they would have to retake the exam, a different one more to the liking of the current administration:
I can attest to the fact that minivans are much more comfortable. I picked up my Pacifica hybrid minivan in early 2021 before the price hike and it was a steal compared to SUVs and pickups. When I was doing paperwork for the vehicle at the Chrysler dealership, I was chatting with some sales guys and discovered the shocking fact they had recently sold a luxuriously loaded-down pickup for over $100K. I was fortunate to easily haggle with them over my minivan because they don't make much money on minivans so they focus on pickups, Jeeps, etc.
A couple decades ago, I had started looking to replace an old hand-me-down car from my grandma, and had been mulling over whether I could ever justify spending $30K on an Infiniti at that time. My boss at work got a new pickup, and he was rather proud of it, and I innocently asked if it cost $25K because plenty of my Texan relatives had driven them over the years and I assumed they were a no-frills working man's practical vehicle. After a brief pause, he answered, "It was a little over 40 thousand." That was over 20 years ago.
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