thank god for american public transit !!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
You get on the bus and then everyone does the Flintstones thing
I get estimates like this a lot and often check why. Generally speaking, it’s walk an hour in exactly the wrong direction to the bus, then ride for an hour and twenty minutes on a path that’s waaay longer than my walking path would’ve been, then walk another hour back to the path I would’ve taken.
I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole “regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man’s way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems” nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.
I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won’t take out the hospital’s life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.
I’ve done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren’t going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn’t accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn’t leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.
Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.
from what I know of just the general history of building codes and osha rules, I would not be the least surprised if every single one of those healthcare codes exist not just to prevent someone from dying, but because pre-code, someone did.
I once worked on a project that a local architecture critic referred to as a “fancy vinyl toilet seat,” and I have to confess those were the first words that sprang to mind when I saw the top photo.
Fun Fact: Amtrak legally has priority over freight trains, the issue is there is no governing body to enforce this and because freight trains have gotten so long, they can’t fit on the sidings made for Amtrak trains to pass them, leading to many delays on train travel
this is not a fun fact
Fun Fact: Amtrak can not legally charge freight companies a tax for delays as it is technically a private company despite being government owned
With the new structure, customers traveling from Philadelphia to New York can buy tickets starting at $19 if they choose the low-cost Value option or $21 if they want more flexibility. Previously a flexible ticket for the same trip would cost at least $128.A ticket to Boston from Philadelphia in coach could cost customers as low as $35 with thenew flexible option, whereas it used to cost $223.
FUCK YEAH TRAINS
TRAINS
TRAINS
GUYS! Use this! Show your government that it would be smart to invest in rail again.
NOT TO MENTION the fact that the prohibition against direct images in Islam was actually the reason for the development of the incredible advances in higher mathematics of the Islamic Golden Age because they were required to create these structures. The Islamic World basically took the ban on images as a “hold my beer” thing and created an entire artistic culture based on mathematics and architecture where art and science fed into and glorified each other, 700 years before the Italian Renaissance.
In conclusion
i will say that islamic art drove me nuts as a kid because i did not have the math knowledge or capability to create such geometric patterns. it may have been the art of my people but by gOD it was difficult and unnecessarily difficult. however my pride in islamic art is neverending. it was frowned upon to be vain in the house, so artists would deck out the places of worship - but places of worship couldn’t be too garishly decorated, or it might detract from worship! the compromise? calm blues and greens, intricate details hidden into the complex patterns. carefully mapped out and planned patterns that were beyond complex and straight into deliberately confusing and practically impossible to replicate. not only that, but verses from the Quran were hidden along the walls, asking god for blessings and care.
muslim art is stunning and i’ll fight the bitch that says otherwise.
Also something underappreciated about the Islamic art is that not only is it geometrically incredible, but the geometry and structure of it has a purpose. In the niches and ceilings, the cascading ornamentation is used for acoustic purposes. In many of the mosques, they are so well laid out and designed that a single person standing on a specific spot can speak/sing/pray and be heard in every single part of the building.
Also, while this is less important, some Muslim regions still do representational art. In every religion there are people who will interpret prohibition’s differently
Every time you see a train, imagine how much more your drive would suck if every one of those people riding in it were behind the wheel of yet another vehicle.