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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • This is an interesting one. The old law allowed ANY challenge to delay building construction, as long as it had a basis in environmental protection. It was primarily used by NIMBYs to block apartment buildings near houses, or by businesses to protect their service area from competition. It would cause builders years of paperwork headaches just to get where they would have been at the beginning. It isn’t even setting rules for what studies need to be done to protect the environment, just that if someone challenges your project based on environmental rules then a judge has to put a hold on it while studies are done to show things are fine.








  • I grew up in the suburbs of a midwestern city, where we could run into the woods to play army or ride bikes in a closed neighborhood (not gated, just no through traffic) or walk from yard to yard with no fences except for houses with pools or walk to the next neighborhood over. We were free to explore as long as we didn’t cross certain streets and came home by dark. We walked to the bus stop to go to school.

    Contrast that to where I live now in a major metropolitan city where kids never see “the woods”, can’t safely ride bikes anywhere but bike paths, have tall privacy fences blocking both socializing but also blocking multi-yard sports areas, have no “neighborhoods,” and have to be driven by parents in a car directly to school (where they have to wait in a line of 100 cars to pick up kids everyday). How can kids ever become self sufficient? They have to be parented every minute of their lives until they are 16. It’s wild.

    But that is in the US. When I visit Europe there are kids by themselves on the subway going wherever a 10 year old needs to go.


  • Congrats on missing the point completely.

    This story is a hit piece to make Iran look bad. You think it’s a human interest piece to make people feel sad for an awful thing that happened to a young girl. It’s not. It’s about making Islamic countries look bad for attacking a poor white girl who was just trying to get healthy. It conveniently ignores where and why Iran attacked and what Israel has been doing to get attacked. It completely ignores all relevant context behind the story. It completely ignores the dozens of kids that are getting killed by Israel on a daily basis. THAT is why people are bringing it up.

    And two things in response to this particular post by you: 1) Nobody is blaming this kid. Do you not understand written English? Not one single person said it was the kid’s fault for dying. 2) Nobody would bring up Gaza in a story about a school bus in China because China isn’t out there murdering dozens of Gazans on a daily basis. This is a story about Israel being attacked, so it is relevant to bring up how Israel is attacking multiple countries.

    We all feel sad that a little girl died. But this story was a political story masquerading as something else. You fell for it.








  • They can’t shut down the satellites over Iran. That’s not how GPS works. They aren’t geostationary with tight beams like comm satellites. Every GPS satellite goes around the earth twice a day and has a beam that covers the entire earth plus something like 10 degrees on the sides out into space (circular, not actually side to side). While the US can turn off broadcasting while directly over very large swaths at a time (like, say, China and Russia), it isn’t actually turned off on the ground because there will still be satellites over Europe or northern Africa that will be on and sending data at a higher angle to that large swath. It will be lower powered in that region because the signal power is lower at the edges, but it isn’t off. Also, Iran is in the same region as US allies and US military bases: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc; so the US would be unlikely to want to lower GPS power in that region.

    Starlink is very different in how it sends signals to the earth, which is why it can shut off services to areas.