#National Highway Accidents

[townpostin]

Three Dead, Five Injured In Highway Collision Near Dhanbad

Speeding Bolero Hits Roadside Bike On NH-2, Mother And Daughter Among Victims Accident occurred near Madaidih under Topchachi police station on Saturday morning. DHANBAD – A tragic accident on National Highway-2 near Madaidih claimed three lives and left five injured when a Bolero collided with a stationary motorcycle on Saturday morning. "The incident occurred around 10 am, with two victims…

[rightnewshindi]

कालका-शिमला नेशनल हाईवे पर सड़क से बाहर निकली हरियाणा रोडवेज की बस, ड्राइवर की सूझ बूझ से टला बड़ा हादसा

Shimla News: कालका-शिमला नेशनल हाईवे पर चक्कीमोड़ के समीप तंबू मोड़ में हरियाणा रोडवेज की बस अनियंत्रित होकर सड़क से बाहर निकल गई। हादसे में किसी को चोट नहीं आई है। चालक की सूझबूझ से बड़ा हादसा होने से टल गया। सभी सवारियां सुरक्षित बताई जा रही हैं। हादसे के बाद कई यात्री दूसरी बसों में अपने गंतव्य की ओर निकल गए। जानकारी के अनुसार शनिवार सुबह हरियाणा रोडवेज की बस शिमला से चंडीगढ़-हिसार जा रही…

[best24news]

National Highway 48 पर ट्रक व बस में भिंडत, दो की मौत , आधा दर्जन

National Highway 48 पर ट्रक व बस में भिंडत, दो की मौत , आधा दर्जन

धारूहेडा: दिल्ली जयपुर हाईवे पर खरखडा के पास एक होटल पर सवारियो से भरी निजी बस को तेज गति से आ रहे ट्रक ने टक्कर मार दी, जिससे दो युवको की मौत हो गई, जबकि 7 घायल हो गए। सूचना पाकर रात को मौके पर पहुंची टीम ने घायल को रेवाडी अस्पताल में भर्ती करवाया। ट्रक चालक हादसे के बाद फरार हो गया। थाना धारूहेडा पुलिस ने बताया कि दिल्ली से जयपुर सवारिया लेकर एक निजी बस खरकडा के पास रूकी हुई थी। रात को सर्विस…

[probablyasocialecologist]

Tesla has made Autopilot a standard feature in its cars, and more recently, rolled out a more ambitious “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) systems to hundreds of thousands of its vehicles. Now we learn from an analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data conducted by The Washington Post that those systems, particularly FSD, are associated with dramatically more crashes than previously thought. Thanks to a 2021 regulation, automakers must disclose data about crashes involving self-driving or driver assistance technology. Since that time, Tesla has racked up at least 736 such crashes, causing 17 fatalities. This technology never should have been allowed on the road, and regulators should be taking a much harder look at driver assistance features in general, requiring manufacturers to prove that they actually improve safety, rather than trusting the word of a duplicitous oligarch. The primary defense of FSD is the tech utopian assumption that whatever its problems, it cannot possibly be worse than human drivers. Tesla has claimed that the FSD crash rate is one-fifth that of human drivers, and Musk has argued that it’s therefore morally obligatory to use it: “At the point of which you believe that adding autonomy reduces injury and death, I think you have a moral obligation to deploy it even though you’re going to get sued and blamed by a lot of people.” Yet if Musk’s own data about the usage of FSD are at all accurate, this cannot possibly be true. Back in April, he claimed that there have been 150 million miles driven with FSD on an investor call, a reasonable figure given that would be just 375 miles for each of the 400,000 cars with the technology. Assuming that all these crashes involved FSD—a plausible guess given that FSD has been dramatically expanded over the last year, and two-thirds of the crashes in the data have happened during that time—that implies a fatal accident rate of 11.3 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The overall fatal accident rate for auto travel, according to NHTSA, was 1.35 deaths per 100 million miles traveled in 2022. In other words, Tesla’s FSD system is likely on the order of ten times more dangerous at driving than humans.

[coffeeman777]

This is for all of my follwers/mutuals who are Christians:

I want to preface this by saying that what I'm about to share with you is only to ask you for prayer. I don't want favors, and I'm not looking for a handout. We need God to open a door for us, and so I beg you, please pray for us.

We moved to Florida coming on three years ago. We came here primarily because we believed God was leading us here. In various ways, we believed God confirmed His will for us, and so I left a great job and we sold a great house to move here. We have been opposed in every way imaginable since.

Days after moving down, Lisa and I were in a terrible car accident that we only walked away from by God's grace. We were rear-ended by an Edible Arrangements delivery truck on the highway, and Lisa sustained significant injuries that are still causing us major problems. The franchise owner was operating their delivery vehicle without insurance, and I've learned since that they shut down their Edible Arrangements franchise and took off, leaving us holding the bag.

I've been in armed security since I got out of the Marines, and in New Hampshire, that was enough to take care of myself and my family. But it isn't in Florida. The pay for most armed security gigs here is super low, and I haven't been able to find work comparable to what I had in New Hampshire. So I tried to change courses.

I earned my personal trainer certification through the National Academy of Sports Medicine, but couldn't make it as a trainer. I made the attempt to go back to college and get a degree and certification as a paramedic, but after months of jumping through hoops, that fell through. I went back to New Hampshire by myself and spent six months away from my family to try to earn enough money working both my old job and a second job, but that plan didn't work because hours were limited with both gigs, and each job wanted me to work overlapping hours; I couldn't make the schedules line up.

My incredibly generous parents-in-law offered to pay our bills so that I could come back to Florida and try a new plan. I went to a CDL training course to get into trucking. After the very long and very expensive process, I finally got my CDL-A. While I was working on that, a random disagreement between my health insurance company and the medical supplier that issued me my cpap (I have sleep apnea) resulted in the supplier demanding that I give them the machine back. It took from middle February to early June for me to get another cpap. The end result is that, as of today, I have just under two months of cpap usage data. I discovered only after getting my CDL that no trucking company will hire me with less than 90 days of cpap usage data.

I've been pre-hired and subsequently turned away from three different trucking companies since I got my CDL over the cpap nonsense (one of which told me that what I had for cpap usage was fine, only to tell me on the first day of orientation that it actually wasn't fine, and they had to let me go). It's going to be another month before I can get started with any trucking company, and I'm concerned that I'll have to go to refresher training, which will only increase the months of time I'll have to spend as a trainee with whatever company hires me, which means it will be a long time before I make enough money to survive.

My in-laws can't continue paying our bills, and although I've had a half dozen low paying jobs in this time just to be bringing in something, now I'm struggling to get anything. I've applied to more jobs than I can remember, and I can't get any traction. Not even Domino's will call me back. Our backs are up against a wall.

My first payment for the money I borrowed to pay for CDL school was due almost a month ago, and I haven't been able to pay it (I had to get financing because my GI Bill expired and the VA ignored my request for an extension). Rent is almost 2k a month. We can't afford groceries (we've been living off of food pantries).

I don't know what to do. I've been crying out to God for an open door, but so far nothing has happened. My in-laws are just about tapped out, and in my mind, the only thing worse than wrecking my own family financially is dragging them down with me.

Please pray for us. Please pray for God to give us an open door, or some understanding of what to do next. I know God didn't bring us here to let us die. God is good, and God keeps His promises. God is perfect, and righteous, and just in all His ways. God has promised that He will turn about all things for the good of them that love Him. I know God has not abandoned us, and that when the time is right, God will make a way.

I say again, I am not looking for favors or begging for money. I know all of us are really going through it right now. All I want from you is prayer. Please pray intensely for us.

Thanks, I love you all.

[halorvic]

The danger is clear and present: COVID isn’t merely a respiratory illness; it’s a multi-dimensional threat impacting brain function, attacking almost all of the body’s organs, producing elevated risks of all kinds, and weakening our ability to fight off other diseases. Reinfections are thought to produce cumulative risks, and Long COVID is on the rise. Unfortunately, Long COVID is now being considered a long-term chronic illness — something many people will never fully recover from. Dr. Phillip Alvelda, a former program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office that pioneered the synthetic biology industry and the development of mRNA vaccine technology, is the founder of Medio Labs, a COVID diagnostic testing company. He has stepped forward as a strong critic of government COVID management, accusing health agencies of inadequacy and even deception. Alvelda is pushing for accountability and immediate action to tackle Long COVID and fend off future pandemics with stronger public health strategies. Contrary to public belief, he warns, COVID is not like the flu. New variants evolve much faster, making annual shots inadequate. He believes that if things continue as they are, with new COVID variants emerging and reinfections happening rapidly, the majority of Americans may eventually grapple with some form of Long COVID. Let’s repeat that: At the current rate of infection, most Americans may get Long COVID.

[...]

LP: A recent JAMA study found that US adults with Long COVID are more prone to depression and anxiety – and they’re struggling to afford treatment. Given the virus’s impact on the brain, I guess the link to mental health issues isn’t surprising. PA: There are all kinds of weird things going on that could be related to COVID’s cognitive effects. I’ll give you an example. We’ve noticed since the start of the pandemic that accidents are increasing. A report published by TRIP, a transportation research nonprofit, found that traffic fatalities in California increased by 22% from 2019 to 2022. They also found the likelihood of being killed in a traffic crash increased by 28% over that period. Other data, like studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, came to similar conclusions, reporting that traffic fatalities hit a 16-year high across the country in 2021. The TRIP report also looked at traffic fatalities on a national level and found that traffic fatalities increased by 19%. LP: What role might COVID play? PA: Research points to the various ways COVID attacks the brain. Some people who have been infected have suffered motor control damage, and that could be a factor in car crashes. News is beginning to emerge about other ways COVID impacts driving. For example, in Ireland, a driver’s COVID-related brain fog was linked to a crash that killed an elderly couple. Damage from COVID could be affecting people who are flying our planes, too. We’ve had pilots that had to quit because they couldn’t control the airplanes anymore. We know that medical events among U.S. military pilots were shown to have risen over 1,700% from 2019 to 2022, which the Pentagon attributes to the virus.

[...]

LP: You’ve criticized the track record of the CDC and the WHO – particularly their stubborn denial that COVID is airborne. PA: They knew the dangers of airborne transmission but refused to admit it for too long. They were warned repeatedly by scientists who studied aerosols. They instituted protections for themselves and for their kids against airborne transmission, but they didn’t tell the rest of us to do that.

[...]

LP: How would you grade Biden on how he’s handled the pandemic? PA: I’d give him an F. In some ways, he fails worse than Trump because more people have actually died from COVID on his watch than on Trump’s, though blame has to be shared with Republican governors and legislators who picked ideological fights opposing things like responsible masking, testing, vaccination, and ventilation improvements for partisan reasons. Biden’s administration has continued to promote the false idea that the vaccine is all that is needed, perpetuating the notion that the pandemic is over and you don’t need to do anything about it. Biden stopped the funding for surveillance and he stopped the funding for renewing vaccine advancement research. Trump allowed 400,000 people to die unnecessarily. The Biden administration policies have allowed more than 800,000 to 900,000 and counting.

[...]

LP: The situation with bird flu is certainly getting more concerning with the CDC confirming that a third person in the U.S. has tested positive after being exposed to infected cows. PA: Unfortunately, we’re repeating many of the same mistakes because we now know that the bird flu has made the jump to several species. The most important one now, of course, is the dairy cows. The dairy farmers have been refusing to let the government come in and inspect and test the cows. A team from Ohio State tested milk from a supermarket and found that 50% of the milk they tested was positive for bird flu viral particles.

[...]

PA: There’s a serious risk now in allowing the virus to freely evolve within the cow population. Each cow acts as a breeding ground for countless genetic mutations, potentially leading to strains capable of jumping to other species. If any of those countless genetic experiments within each cow prove successful in developing a strain transmissible to humans, we could face another pandemic – only this one could have a 58% death rate. Did you see the movie “Contagion?” It was remarkably accurate in its apocalyptic nature. And that virus only had a 20% death rate. If the bird flu makes the jump to human-to-human transition with even half of its current lethality, that would be disastrous.

[useless-catalanfacts]

Are cats important in Catalunya? Barcelona's mascot (they sadly never use) is a cat, and the mascot for the Olympic games in Barna was a cat too. Or is it just coincidence? :eyesemoji:

Hello!

First of all, I'm very glad to see someone getting the city's shortened named right (Barna). I had almost accepted that it's a lost battle to get foreigners to stop calling it Barça! (Barça means the football team, not the city).

Cats are used as a symbol of Catalonia sometimes, because Catalonia is shortened to "Cat": think for example how the internet domain for sites in the Catalan language is ".cat", how the government of Catalonia is named Generalitat de Catalunya but gets shortened to "GenCat", or how some people cover the E of Spain in the driving plate with a sticker saying "CAT" (this last one used to be very popular in the 2000s and until the early 2010s but stopped because the police got serious in fining the people who had it).

Example of what a Spanish licence plate looks like (all EU countries have the blue band with 1, 2 or 3 letters that identify what EU country it's from) and an example of a plate with the CAT (Catalunya) sticker over the E (España) band.

For this reason, a cat was used for years as a symbol of Catalonia:

It was created by a Catalan independentist organization Lliga Anticolonial (Anti-colonial League) in the late 1990s or early 2000s as a response to the symbolic occupation of the Toro de Osborne (Osborne Bull). For context, the Osborne Bull is this:

The bull is a symbol of Spain. These gigantic (14 metres tall!) billboards in the shape of the bull species used in bullfighting (a Spanish tradition of torturing and slowly killing a bull in public while people cheer, seen as a national symbol of Spain and Spanish manhood) were set up by an alcohol brand since the 1950s. There were dozens of them, next to the highways and roads everywhere in the state of Spain, and this silhouette quickly became a symbol of Spain just as much as the Spanish flag. In fact, you'll find many Spanish flags used by fascists include this bull silhouette at the centre. There are also all types of merch with it and Spanish nationalists often put a sticker in their cars with this silhouette (used to be very popular in the early 2000s, the stickers in cars in general have stopped being so popular nowadays).

In the 1990s, there were new laws in Spain against billboards on roads/highways, because adverts distract drivers and result in accidents. However, this bull had become such a symbol of Spanish nationalism that they made an exception for it. All the billboards in certain places were taken down except for the Osborne bulls.

Meanwhile, as you can imagine many people in the nations occupied by Spain were not happy to have these giant symbols of Spanish nationalism around our land, it feels like a symbol of occupation. Like a "remember we own you". For this reason, independentist groups in the Catalan Countries and the Basque Country often cut down the bulls or sprayed murals and political slogans of liberation on them. When the new laws against billboards came, everyone was expecting to finally have to stop seeing our land branded with these symbols of occupation, but as I said before the Spanish courts did an exception. Then, more people than ever before decided to get organized to cut down the bulls, but they kept putting them back up and persecuting the "vandals", and the Spanish Justice System even gave the Osborne Bull billboard in El Bruc the legal condition of national heritage to legally protect it and be able to persecute activists who protested against it more! (El Bruc is a town in Catalonia that is very symbolic for Catalan people because of the folk tale of the Catalan resistance against French invasion that is one of the most widespread folk tales in Catalonia, but in this town the Spanish Army has had its biggest army headquarters in Catalonia so it has become a place of occupation and stronghold of the Spanish army).

During all of this battle of symbols, the occupied nations came up with their own symbol to symbolize their resistance: the cat and donkey in Catalonia, the cow in Galiza, and the ardi latxa sheep in the Basque Country. Organizations sold stickers of these symbols to raise money for good causes related to our cultures.

(I explained why this autochthonous species of donkey is a symbol of Catalonia in this previous post).

But, in the end, cutting down the bull billboards was successful and many weren't put back up. The last bull billboards in Catalonia was cut down by activists in 2002. Nowadays, you can still find about 100 bull billboards around Spain, but not in Catalonia.

The cat and donkey kept being popular for some more years, but eventually they lost popularity once the bulls were out of our daily lives. For some reason though, the donkey has remained popular as a symbol of Catalan-ness in Northern Catalonia (the part of Catalonia annexed by France, so the one that never had the Osborne Bull in the first place!). If you visit Northern Catalonia, you'll still find many cars with the donkey sticker and many souvenirs with the donkey.

There's the reason why the cat is a symbol of Catalonia, it used to be a very popular one but it has lost popularity nowadays. I must say that it's with this ask that I've seen Barça's mascot for the first time. I didn't even know they had one, but yes, it's a cat. But the mascot for the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona (called Cobi) was supposed to be a dog drawn in cubist style. But you're right that it looks like a cat 😅

[sparrowofthedawnsworld]

For everyone’s entertainment (because according to my friend, it’s hilarious that I’ve fucked to nearly every gvf song) -

Greta Songs that I have done the deed to and how I rank them:

Age Of Machine, 10/10 - this one hit. I can’t even begin to explain it. If you haven’t put this song on your filthy playlist, it should be on there. Go do it.

The Archer, 10/10 - Gah damn. That’s all I can even say about this one.

The Barbarians, 10/10 - Obviously. I mean, come on. Good shit.

Frozen Light, 10/10 - That bass line? She’s sexy, so therefore… it fits a sexy environment.

Fate Of The Faithful, 9.5/10 - This one is down right NASTY. Like holy fuck I’d let this song put a baby in me. DAYUM when I tell y’all this one just hits different. Jesus christ.

Stardust Chords, 9/10 - I know what y’all are probably thinking… but it’s so good.

The Falling Sky, 9/10 - Was definitely adding to the intensity. In the right situation, this shit will get you railed.

Built By Nations, 9/10 - Once again… if the vibes are right, shit will get you railed. It’s heavenly, really.

The Weight Of Dreams, 9/10 - This shit was almost like an otherworldly experience. The guitar solo??? Yeah. Mhm. Orgasmic.

Meeting The Master, 8.5/10 - The change in intensity throughout this song is really what makes it so good to me.

Sacred The Thread, 8/10 - This shit… whew. The drums sell it. The rhythm is immaculate, tbh.

Brave New World, 8/10 - would have NEVER truly expected this one to hit as hard as it did. Good god.

My Way Soon, 8/10 - This one is solid. If it played again while I was doing it, I wouldn’t be mad at all.

Watching Over, 7.5/10 - I can’t say it let me down. It didn’t. It doesn’t always fit the vibes, though.

Lover, Leaver (Taker, Believer), 7/10 - Again, could absolutely dig it in the right situation, otherwise I would deem it a little much.

The Indigo Streak, 6.5/10 - While the solo is sooo fuckinggg sexy, the song overall would not be my first choice, but I don’t dislike it, either.

Safari Song, 6.5/10 - this one was pretty fun after you get beyond Josh’s scream at the beginning 💀

Age Of Man, 6.5/10 - This one would genuinely be sooo much higher on the list, if it didn’t make me so damn emotional.

The Cold Wind, 6/10 - this one’s crazy but… on the occasion I like it.

Light My Love, 6/10 - Unless you’re trying to be all sweet and sappy, I’d stay away from this one… but it was lovely. I won’t lie. I liked it.

Trip The Light Fantastic, 5.5/10 - I loved it and also felt weird about it all at once???

Caravel, 5/10 - I… As sexy as the bass line is, for some reason it just didn’t quite scratch the itch in my brain all the way.

Talk On The Street, 5/10 - Before actually fucking to it, I would have said, “hell yeah, I bet this one would be great!” But it’s just mid.

Heat Above, 5/10 - So sweet… but i’d rather not have flashbacks to my greta show and suddenly be on the verge of tears.

Highway Tune, 4.5/10 - I tried it simply because Jake said it was in a sex scene…

Tears Of Rain, 4/10 - Lowkey… could have put this higher, but also I have to mentally prepare for this song or I will cry. Sooo… idk.

Broken Bells, 3/10 - Great if you like choking on sobs while having sex.

Flower Power 2/10 - This one played on accident… And i did lay there contemplating leaning over and skipping it.

You’re The One, 1/10 - I just… I can’t. It’s TOO sweet, like in a little highschool crush kind of way.

Farewell For Now, 0/10 - This one couldn’t have played at a worse time and I hated every second of it. Love the song, but not for THAT.

[nuri148]

Distances in AoT

Or: Yams has no idea of geography and the relationship between distance and travel times in AOT makes no sense.

After a long time in the works, I present to you this 3-part, long af essay about the above statement. Grab your copy of Aot and your calculator and buckle up!

Disclaimer: I’m not a numbers girl. I always struggled with math at school and cannot determine how much each party needs to chip in for a group outing without an excel spreadsheet. And yet the numbers in AoT are so out of proportion that even with my limited math talent I realised what a train wreck they were.

PART ONE: SCALE

The manga, and later the anime, inform us that there are 250 km from the center of the walls to Wall Sina; 130 km from wall Sina to Wall Rose; and 100 km from Wall Rose to Wall Maria.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to ignore a few facts that should be painfully obvious in a real-life setting:

1) The walls could never be perfectly circular. Because...

2) Terrain, even in super duper flat places like the Argentine Pampas or the Netherlands1, is never completely flat and never completely uniform. So, even in the Great Plains, the 230 km (equivalent to the distance from Ehrmich to Shiganshina) between Wichita and Oklahoma City, as the crow flies, become 238 km when made in a car – or 256 km on a bike (since bikes can’t take the highway). Likewise, the rougher the terrain, the higher the difference. Salzburg and Linz, in Austria, are merely 100 km away in a straight line, but the shortest route is 124 km.

And bear in mind this distances are on modern roads in modern countries, built with technology that allow us to circumvent geographical accidents such as rivers, canyons or mountains with cool bridges and tunnels. The world in which AoT is set doesn’t have those. If a river is down a canyon, first they’ll need to zig-zag down the canyon, then cross the river (via bridge or ferry at best, fording it at worst), then zig-zag all the way up again. This happens still today, even in our modern whitebread world, in places where the traffic doesn’t justify building a big-ass bridge over the canyon. When I lived in Germany, it was like that to go to the next town.

But, as I said, for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to pretend the walls are perfectly round, the terrain is perfectly flat, and that there is a straigh-ass road, as straight as Argentina’s 22 National Road between Río Colorado and Choele Choel, between each of the Wall Districts. For simplicity reasons too, I won’t be using decimals or taking the thickness of the walls into consideration.

I’m also going to assume (though this is pretty much confirmed by canon), that the only passage between walls is through the Districts.

You’ve likely seen the basic layout plenty of times over the internet.

Well, Let’s start by saying I have a huge problem with this layout. If you bother to separate walls S-R-M to scale with their informed size, the sizes used to depict the Districts are always wildly out of all proportion².

From the several panoramic views of Sigansina, Trost, etc. that are shown in the manga³, and considering the usual sizes of German-style 17th-19th century houses, which is what’s shown from down in the streets (and I’m familiar with from my time living there), the districts seem to be, at the very most, 5 km from the main wall to the district outer wall⁴, with a bridge over the river every 500 m or so. (The walls are usually visible whenever they are in the districts, so you know it’s a small area.) Yet as you’ve seen, most maps show the districts ridiculously large, going to even half the distance between walls. This not only contradicts canon, but defeats the in-canon purpose of building a concentrated, out-jutting urban area to concentrate possible titan attacks there and eliminate the threat more easily.

So in my map, I’ve adjusted the size of the districts to roughly 5 × 5 km. They look almost like dots. That’s another problem of the disproportionate maps that populate the web: it makes you lose sense of just how big the walls are.

Districts of Paradis: Mitras (center); to the East: Stohess, Karanes, Holst (from AotBTF); To the West: Yarkell, Krolva, Quinta (from AotHMOTC); to the South: Ehrmich, Trost, Shiganshina; To the North: Orvud, Utopia, [unknown].

Now, geometry is a wonderful thing. If you know the radius of a circumference, you can calculate all other possible measurements in that circumference. And in this day and age, with computers, you don’t even need to learn formulas or crunch numbers. Yay Math.

So, if radius Mt-S (Mitras-Sina) is 250 km, and wall Rose is 130 km further, and wall Maria 100 km further still, the radius Mt-R is 380 km and the radius Mt-M is 480 km.

The Districts are lined up with the cardinal points. Therefore, to go from a district on the N-S axis (e.g. Ehrmich) to the corresponding one on the W-E axis (e.g. Stohess), you have basically three options:

Route 1) Take roads we know nothing about. The most likely, logical option in a realistic scenario, unfortunately un-checkable. Also slower than the following two hipothetical routes.

Route 2) Ride atop or along the wall. For numbers, I’m assuming a flat wall top. Because we know the radius of the walls, we can calculate the arc length between any two districts (blue in map).

Route 3) Use an imaginary, straigh-ass road between two adjacent districts on a given wall (e.g. Ehrmich-Stohess, Trost-Krolva). Again, because we know the radius of the walls, and the angle of separation of the districts (90°) we can calculate the length of this chord line (brown in map). Note that this solution doesn’t work for districts in Wall Maria, as the resulting chord would intersect wall Rose, and there is no passage there (red in map).

So, how long are these distances? EXTREMELY.

The Arc distance (riding along the wall) between adjacent wall districts is:

Wall Sina (e.g. Ermich-Stohess): 393 km (more or less equivalent to a straight line from Mar del Plata to Buenos Aires).

Wall Rose (e.g. Trost-Karanes): 597 km (Paris-Montpellier).

Wall Maria (e.g. Shiganshina to Quinta): a whooping 754 km (San Diego-Sacramento)

The Chord line distance (straight line between two adjacent wall districts) is shorter, but not by that much (about 10 % less):

Wall Sina: 352 km (Mar del Plata-La Plata)

Wall Rose: 537 km (Paris-Orange)

Wall Maria: 679 km in theory (San Diego-San José) but, as explained, the chord line between Wall Maria districts is interrupted by Wall Rose, so that route is out. The shortest alternative would be to ride in a very slight curve approximating Rose; I couldn’t find a suitable calculator to let my mathematically challenged self get the exact number but I reckon it’s around 700-720 km (San Diego-San Francisco).

The takeout from this is that distances in AoT are HUGE.

Moreover: We know the island of Paradis is based on the island of Madagascar. The diameter of Wall Maria is 960 km (480 × 2), but the island of Madagascar has a maximum width of roughly 590 km.

So we have two scenarios here:

1) The world of AoT happens in a very big planet

2) Yams (and his editors) suck at maths and spacial awareness big time.

Guess which one I’m betting on.

Part 2 Part 3

Notes:

¹ Having grown up in Argentina and living in Europe, but also mindful that many reading this are from the US, I’ve mixed cities from all those locations as real-life examples.

² There is one and one map only, in chapter 5 of the manga, that depicts the walls more or less realistically, but it also shows the geography within the walls as pretty non-flat, non uniform, no straight-roads, so I’m being very generous with my calculations here, borderline delulu.

 ³ I was going to illustrate this with a few shots of the districts, but as I started gathering said shots from the manga I found myself opening yet another can of worms, for the differences in size of a given city between chapters are enough to merit their own post I’m afraid. Not that I can commit to one atm.

⁴ Though, realistically, European medieval walled towns were no larger than 1 km across. Nördlingen, in which Shiganshina is inspired, as well as Rothenburg o.d. Tauber and other partially preserved walled towns are 500 m in diameter.

[townpostin]

Youth Killed in Accident Near Pitki Railway Gate in Seraikela-Kharsawan

Ravindra Gope, an electrician from Chilgu, dies after colliding with a trip trailer on National Highway. A tragic accident near the Pitki Railway Gate in the Nimdih police station area of Seraikela-Kharsawan claimed the life of a young man on Monday night. CHANDIL – Ravindra Gope, a resident of Chilgu in Chandil, died in a road accident near the Pitki Railway Gate. The incident occurred around 8…

[mapsontheweb]

The Most Dangerous Time to Drive in Each State

Driving is inherently dangerous.   But your chances of being in an accident are greater if you drive at certain times of the day, week, and year - and these factors, in turn, differ from state to state.   Using data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, this new study from The Clunker Junker reveals

 the most dangerous times to drive in each state.

Source: 

https://theclunkerjunker.com/blog/the-most-dangerous-times-to-drive-in-america/

[builtlikeastickofcelery]

so i have made zero progress on drawing the comic, but do you want my animal poetry? here. take it. I hope this sates your hunger.

I am a white deer in a green haze of leaves

the pond is milky blue and the light

is the color of a dark ocean,

though I've never seen one.

the only salt i will ever taste is my own blood.

i am the ordinary,

dirt colored coyote that will kill me.

i won't be the only one I kill,

but maybe the only one

that will leave me thinking as much

as my small canine brain

can think. i have seen fresh blood

on fresh snow

before.

i am the stag

that kills a boy who is trying to feed me

by accident

at the national park.

i am the dead raccoon on the highway out,

through the woods.

my guts spill out of my mouth,

but later someone will find my skull,

still intact. they will polish it

and set it on their dresser

when they get home.

i am the mourning dove, the

sick mourning dove that perches

on my bedroom windowsill

and looks at me sideways

and lets me press a finger

to my beak

through the screen

like a small comfort.

i am a stray cat on your lap

carefully, i pull in my claws all the way

i resist my instincts

i resist what i've known, for you.

i am a dirty thing, i am a wild thing,

but i am not, in the end, an evil thing.

or, at least, i am some sort of smart.

i am the loose donkey

that killed your German shepherd.

i only half understand why you shoot me.

in the end, it wasn't really my fault.

i can't help what i was trained to do.

and i am the gun.

and i am the bullet.

but you are always the one that shoots me.

and i am an animal.

i am an animal.

i am an animal.

i am an animal.

i am an animal.

i am an animal.

[workersolidarity]

I was hoping in this article The Grayzone would be able to highlight more individual instances of direct and indirect spending in Ukraine, but unfortunately most of that information remains secret.

But The Grayzone was able to audit some detail out of the documented spending by the US Government and it sure doesn't fail to shock with its absurdity.

So US Government debt, as always, is only an problem when the money is being spent on American Workers.

Though Joe Biden likes to pretend to be a big defender of Social Security and Medicare, his history is one of someone waiting eagerly for the opportunity to gut and privatize Social Security, and along with his Republican counterparts, has largely succeeded in Privatizing Medicare. Which is, of course, turning into one big scam where Insurance companies charge the Govt whatever they feel like and being largely reimbursed for it.

At every opportunity, Joe Biden quietly reaffirms to his donors his commitment to cutting Social Security and uses the usual coded language of "adjustments" and "saving" the program, in other words, cutting it.

But when it comes to money for Ukraine, no "adjustments", "changes" or "saving" of the program is necessary, even a year and a half and at least $100 Billion dollars into it.

This is also important to keep in mind. The CIA's "Black Budget" allows the Agency to spend nearly unlimited amounts of money, ammunition, equipment and weaponry with little to no oversight whatsoever.

Even as the infrastructure of the United States falls apart from disrepair, we send billions to Ukraine for their own infrastructure needs.

Just as with Social Security and Medicare, it's okay for Americans to die in large numbers due to accidents related to failing infrastructure.

As a NY Times article from November 2015 describes:

"The Federal Department of Transportation estimates that obsolete road designs and poor road conditions are a factor in about 14'000 highway deaths each year. Research by Ted Miller, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, which receives financing from the Transportation Department, put the medical cost of highway injuries from poor road conditions at $11.4 billion for 2013 according to the latest data available."

"The problem extends beyond roads. Research by the National Transportation Safety Board shows that since 2004, about 77 deaths and 1'400 injuries could have been prevented if railroads had installed a safety system known as Positive Train Control. That includes an Amtrak derailment in May that killed eight people and injured hundreds more in Philadelphia."

But that's okay, we're preventing road deaths in Ukraine. We can always feel good about that!

But we're also suspiciously sending money designated for Ukraine to companies and governments completely unrelated to Ukraine, because literally anything can be tied to this war for Govt Lawyers and bureaucrats

Vast sums are also being spent on various psy-op programs and propaganda efforts through various media organizations, NGOs and think-tanks.

"The funds were earmarked 'to strengthen the International Center for Ukrainian Victory (ICUV) initiative in implementing international advocacy campaigns to keep high levels of International solidarity with Ukraine' "

AKA Propaganda and psy-ops

Interestingly, much of the funds spent by USAID earmarked for Ukraine seems to have gone to various programs completely unrelated to Ukraine.

It shows us that these organizations are NOT in fact humanitarian organizations, and they have little interest in actually helping real Ukrainians.

Rather, the point of all these "Humanitarian" organizations, NGOs, etc. is wash public funds and put them into the pockets of Western Oligarchs through a web of programs and organizations that always conveniently hire all the well known Washington DC Law Firms and Consulting Firms, big Wall Street investors, Silicon Valley Tech Giants, and huge Western Corporations to get involved in these regime change wars and "Humanitarian" Interventions, as well the "rebuilding" after war.

Wall Street gets to collect public funds in the run-up to wars, during wars, and after the wars they funded are over.

Rinse and repeat in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iraq, and now Ukraine.

And then there are some expenditures that will raise eyebrows for another reason, because it very suspiciously looks like the funding for the Nordstream Pipeline terrorist attack and the supplies needed for the operation.

The Pentagon sponsors diving contractor with “history of fraud” to send mysterious explosives to Ukraine

The Department of Homeland Security sent $5.48 million to Gravois Aluminum Boats LLC on June 8, 2021 for the following purpose: “PROCUREMENT OF TWO 38-FOOT FULL CABIN RESPONSE BOATS, FOUR 38-FOOT CENTER CONSOLE RESPONSE BOATS, TRAILERS, SPARE PARTS, AND TRAINING AS REQUIRED UNDER FMS LOA DB-P-LCL FOR THE COUNTRY OF UKRAINE.”

The Department of Defense transferred $4.75 Million to Atlantic Diving Supply Inc. as of February 3rd, 2023 for "PRO SAPPER AND EOD EQUIPMENT [CONTRACTING SQUADRON] UKRAINE" and "Marine lifesaving and diving equipment.

Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) and Sapper equipment is exclusively used to blow things up or clear up explosives. And Atlantic Diving Supply is a military contractor originally founded to provide tactical gear to Navy Seal divers.

When a company like this is tasked with a highly specific delivery of explosives gear to any foreign nation, including Ukraine, it should prompt questions about the mission, particularly when US Intelligence is blaming Ukraine's Military for attacking the Nordstream pipelines without the knowledge of President Zelensky. (The payment does not necessarily correlate with the date of delivery from the vendor; in other words the equipment could have been provided at an earlier date.)

Luke Hillier, the founder of Atlantic Diving Supply paid a $20 Million dollar settlement in 2019 to resolve charges that he defrauded the Pentagon by falsely claiming his company was a small business. Atlantic Diving is consistently listed as one of the top 25 largest military contractors in the country.

In 2021, Hillier raked in a massive $33 Billion dollar contract under the same program, prompting fresh accusations of fraud. The pattern of malfeasance prompted a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to bluntly denounce Atlantic Diving as a "fraudulent company."

Hillier currently owns $13 Million dollar Mega-Yacht in the Cayman Islands, $24 Million worth of beachfront property in Hawaii, and two Bahamas-based companies with murky operations, according to the Project on Government Oversight.

This goes on and on and on and on.

I mean, I'm literally out of room to put more of these expenditures into this post, so instead I will just write out some more egregious examples I haven't yet included:

The Department of Defense has paid $4.9 Million to BAE Systems GCS International as of September 12th, 2022 for "UKRAINE LCS LW 155 SPARES" and "Guns over 155mm to 200mm." In Navy terminology, LCS means "Littoral Combat Ship" while "LW" refers to the Lightweight Gun. And "155mm SPARES" refers to the Gun mounted on the ship's main battery off the bow.

USAID sent $3 million to the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2022 “to improve health outcomes in drought affected areas in Ethiopia.” The description stated, “partially funded with response funds and Ukraine Supplemental Funds.”

USAID sent 30.9 million to Chemonics International, Inc. for the “Ukraine confidence building initiative (UCBI) 4. A private, for-profit aid contractor, Chemonics’ founder said he launched the company to “have my own CIA.” The Grayzone has documented Chemonics’ role in delivering US government funding and supplies to the Syrian White Helmets, which served as the propaganda wing of the Al Qaeda-tied armed opposition. Chemonics previously reaped a massive windfall from the US occupation of Afghanistan, raking in as much as $600 million from USAID.

USAID sent $20.7 million to PACT, INC. for “USAID Ukraine’s public health system recovery and resilience activity and will strengthen the Government of Ukraine (GOU) capacity to address COVID-19 and other public health threats, sustain health services during a crisis, and protect the health of all Ukrainians including vulnerable and marginalized populations. According to its 2022 impact statement [PDF], “In Ukraine, Pact’s work empowers citizens to push for transparent and democratic governance, advances gender equality and human rights for women and girls, and accelerates efforts to achieve HIV epidemic control.” The contractor’s work contributed to “172 people increas[ing] their net income,” according to Pact.

USAID sent 7.6 million to UNICEF IDA for emergency nutrition response in ASALs (Arid and Semi-Arid Lands) in Kenya. The description stated, “partially funded with response funds and Ukraine Supplemental Funds”

USAID sent $1.2 million to University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc. located in Atlanta, GA to “support humanitarian information management through geographic information systems, data analytics and visualizations”. Ukraine was listed as the place of performance.

Washington funnels cash to a private equity firm, Georgian finance corporation, a ‘private entrepreneur’ via Ukraine aid

US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) sent $25 million to Horizon Capital Growth Fund IV, a “leading private equity firm in emerging Europe, “to back high-growth tech and export-oriented [Small and Medium Sized Enterprises] succeeding globally, based on platforms in Ukraine and Moldova.”

US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) sent $1.5 million to the Gazelle Fund LP, another private equity firm, to relocate Ukrainian businesses to Georgia. Georgia does not border Ukraine, nor is it a primary location for Ukrainian refugee resettlement.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sent $882'291 to a single individual described as an “private entrepreneur” in exchange for “overseas technical assistance program support services.” The private entrepreneur listed, Igor Lavreniuk, serves as the Program Coordinator for USAID’s Competitive Markets Program according to his LinkedIn.

The National Science Foundation sent 1.3 million to University of Illinois for faculty and curricular development in remote sensing. The place of performance is listed as Ukraine.

The Department of State has paid 8.3 million to Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to help “refugees from Ukraine meet their essential needs during initial displacement.” According to SpendingUS.gov, Catholic Relief Services is listed as having received a total of 657 million from the State Department in 2021, 5.7 billion since 2008 and 670 million during the last 12 months.

As the war drags on, lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham have marketed military aid to Ukraine in increasingly grim terms. As the senator boasted during a recent trip to Kiev, “The Russians are dying…it’s the best money we’ve ever spent.” Meanwhile, Congress has rejected any mechanism that would guarantee transparency on the billions sent to Kiev, and shunned a war powers debate over the US military’s presence on the Ukrainian battlefield.

President Joseph Biden, for his part, has pledged that official Washington will support Kiev “as long as it takes.” As the potential for blowback grows from Western pressure to push Ukraine into NATO, and a nuclear-armed Moscow is backed into an existential fight for its survival, while economic powers including China gradually decouple from the Western financial system, Americans can only wonder how much will this war cost them when it is finally over.

Of course this is nowhere near a full accounting of Washington's Proxy-war in Ukraine which is surely costing in the hundreds of Billions by now between the direct financial aid listed above, to weapons systems and ammunition deliveries, to the training of Kiev's Forces taking place in secret locations across Europe and the US.

And for all we can see, our Country's oligarchs and politicians seem satisfied to continue on the gravy train until they can no longer suck one more penny of wealth out of US public coffers.

[sparrowsarus]

🔥 🔥 🔥 >:3 (is there a rant up and loaded?)

Oh boy, do I! So, lets talk about the horrific mismanagement of Canada's rail network. The national railway companies (CN, CPKC) should be crown corporations the way our passenger rail is. Our passenger rail should be better funded, so fares can be cheaper, so more people can use it. Instead of ripping out tracks and building highways, we should be reestablishing freight and passenger rail as a more eco-friendly, safer way to ship things. Have there been devastating rail accidents? Absolutely. But there are far more road accidents in this country than train accidents. I also think, in the long run, they are cheaper. There are northern communities utterly inaccessible by road here. The only options were the train and flying; and now, in many of those places you can only fly in. Why don't they deserve multiple options? They are citizens too! Bring back trains to Canada!!!!!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

This political cartoon by Louis Dalrymple appeared in Judge magazine in 1903. It depicts European immigrants as rats. Nativism and anti-immigration have a long and sordid history in the United States.

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 28, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 29, 2024

Yesterday the National Economic Council called a meeting of the Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force, which the Biden-Harris administration launched in 2021, to discuss the impact of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and the partial closure of the Port of Baltimore on regional and national supply chains. The task force draws members from the White House and the departments of Transportation, Commerce, Agriculture, Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Energy, and Homeland Security. It is focused on coordinating efforts to divert ships to other ports and to minimize impacts to employers and workers, making sure, for example, that dock workers stay on payrolls. 

Today, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg convened a meeting of port, labor, and industry partners—ocean carriers, truckers, local business owners, unions, railroads, and so on—to mitigate disruption from the bridge collapse. Representatives came from 40 organizations including American Roll-on Roll-off Carrier; the Georgia Ports Authority; the International Longshoremen’s Association, the International Organization of Masters, Mates and Pilots; John Deere; Maersk; Mercedes-Benz North America Operations; Seabulk Tankers; Under Armour; and the World Shipping Council.  

Today the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration announced it would make $60 million available immediately to be used as a down payment toward initial costs. Already, though, some Republicans are balking at the idea of using new federal money to rebuild the bridge, saying that lawmakers should simply take the money that has been appropriated for things like electric vehicles, or wait until insurance money comes in from the shipping companies. 

In 2007, when a bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis suddenly collapsed, Congress passed funding to rebuild it in days and then-president George W. Bush signed the measure into law within a week of the accident. 

In the past days, we have learned that the six maintenance workers killed when the bridge collapsed were all immigrants, natives of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Around 39% of the workforce in the construction industry around Baltimore and Washington, D.C., about 130,000 people, are immigrants, Scott Dance and María Luisa Paúl reported in the Washington Post yesterday. 

Some of the men were undocumented, and all of them were family men who sent money back to their home countries, as well. From Honduras, the nephew of one of the men killed told the Associated Press, “The kind of work he did is what people born in the U.S. won’t do. People like him travel there with a dream. They don’t want to break anything or take anything.”  

In the Philadelphia Inquirer today, journalist Will Bunch castigated the right-wing lawmakers and pundits who have whipped up native-born Americans over immigration, calling immigrants sex traffickers and fentanyl dealers, and even “animals.” Bunch illustrated that the reality of what was happening on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when it collapsed creates an opportunity to reframe the immigration debate in the United States.

Last month, Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post noted that immigration is a key reason that the United States experienced greater economic growth than any other nation in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The surge of immigration that began in 2022 brought to the U.S. working-age people who, Director Phill Swagel of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office wrote, are expected to make the U.S. gross domestic product about $7 trillion larger over the ten years from 2023 to 2034 than it would have been otherwise. Those workers will account for about $1 trillion dollars in revenues. 

Curiously, while Republican leaders today are working to outdo each other in their harsh opposition to immigration, it was actually the leaders of the original Republican Party who recognized the power of immigrants to build the country and articulated an economic justification for increased immigration during the nation’s first major anti-immigrant period. 

The United States had always been a nation of immigrants, but in the 1840s the failure of the potato crop in Ireland sent at least half a million Irish immigrants to the United States. As they moved into urban ports on the East Coast, especially in Massachusetts and New York, native-born Americans turned against them as competitors for jobs.

The 1850s saw a similar anti-immigrant fury in the new state of California. After the discovery of gold there in 1848, native-born Americans—the so-called Forty Niners—moved to the West Coast. They had no intention of sharing the riches they expected to find. The Indigenous people who lived there had no right to the land under which gold lay, native-born men thought; nor did the Mexicans whose government had sold the land to the U.S. in 1848; nor did the Chileans, who came with mining skills that made them powerful competitors. Above all, native-born Americans resented the Chinese miners who came to work in order to send money home to a land devastated by the first Opium War.

Democrats and the new anti-immigrant American Party (more popularly known as the “Know Nothings” because members claimed to know nothing about the party) turned against the new immigrants, seeing them as competition that would drive down wages. In the 1850s, Know Nothing officials in Massachusetts persecuted Catholics and deported Irish immigrants they believed were paupers. In California the state legislature placed a monthly tax on Mexican and Chinese miners, made unemployment a crime, took from Chinese men the right to testify in court, and finally tried to stop Chinese immigration altogether by taxing shipmasters $50 for each Chinese immigrant they brought.   

When the Republicans organized in the 1850s, they saw society differently than the Democrats and the Know Nothings. They argued that society was not made up of a struggle over a limited economic pie, but rather that hardworking individuals would create more than they could consume, thus producing capital that would make the economy grow. The more people a nation had, the stronger it would be.

In 1860 the new party took a stand against the new laws that discriminated against immigrants. Immigrants’ rights should not be “abridged or impaired,” the delegates to its convention declared, adding that they were “in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”

Republicans’ support for immigration only increased during the Civil War. In contrast to the southern enslavers, they wanted to fill the land with people who supported freedom. As one poorly educated man wrote to his senator, “Protect Emegration and that will protect the Territories to Freedom.”

Republicans also wanted to bring as many workers to the country as possible to increase economic development. The war created a huge demand for agricultural products to feed the troops. At the same time, a terrible drought in Europe meant there was money to be made exporting grain. But the war was draining men to the battlefields of Stones River and Gettysburg and to the growing U.S. Navy, leaving farmers with fewer and fewer hands to work the land. 

By 1864, Republicans were so strongly in favor of immigration that Congress passed “an Act to Encourage Immigration.” The law permitted immigrants to borrow against future homesteads to fund their voyage to the U.S., appropriated money to provide for impoverished immigrants upon their arrival, and, to undercut Democrats’ accusations that they were simply trying to find men to throw into the grinding war, guaranteed that no immigrant could be drafted until he announced his intention of becoming a citizen. 

Support for immigration has waxed and waned repeatedly since then, but as recently as 1989, Republican president Ronald Reagan said: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation…. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

The workers who died in the bridge collapse on Tuesday “were not ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’” Will Bunch wrote, quoting Trump; “they were replenishing it…. They may have been born all over the continent, but when these men plunged into our waters on Tuesday, they died as Americans.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[hasufin]

The Buck Stops...

Something I was thinking about.

Now, Angela Chao, the sister-in-law of Mitch McConnell, died basically because she was driving a Tesla. The gist of it is that due to the completely ridiculous interface, she managed to drive into a pond. Because the vehicle does not have viable manual exits, she was not able to escape. Because it was reinforced in unnecessary ways, they were not able to rescue her.

She would not have accidentally driven a more normal vehicle into a pond. If she somehow did drive one into a pond, she would have been able to escape from it on her own (yes, underwater vehicle escapes are dangerous, but they're possible; this was not). In a more normal vehicle rescuers would have been able to force the vehicle open in a timely fashion.

Now, I think we can generally agree that cars on the road, or cars sold in the USA which are intended for use on public roads should be designed such that they can be driven safely: that it should be possible to tell what gear you're in, that it shouldn't be easy to accidentally go into reverse, right? And we can agree it should be possible to exit a vehicle even when it has lost power (e.g., in an accident)? that it shouldn't be a death trap that locks you in when you're in a dangerous situation, right? And it ought to be possible for emergency personnel to extract someone from a damaged vehicle in a timely fashion?

These seem, at least to me, valid issues upon which the government ought to regulate vehicles. Up there with "If it says it gets 34mpg, it should actually get something like 34mpg" or "if it gets rear-ended at low speeds it should not turn into a fireball".

And, well, there's a part of the Federal Government which handles that sort of thing. It's called the National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration. They're the ones who ostensibly determine if automobiles are safe to drive. The NHTSA is part of the Department of Transportation.

It has taken a little digging to find that Angela Chao's vehicle was a Tesla Model X. I do not know when she bought it, but the last engineering change to the Model X was in October of 2020, and the majority of updates to it were done between 2018 and 2020. Which means that was likely when the model she was driving was reviewed by the NHTSA.

Who was the Secretary of Transportation, the head of the DoT (and thus in charge of the NHTSA) in those years? Well, this is awkward. And who was the Senate Majority Leader when she was approved as Transportation Secretary? Oh. Um. Well, that's not great, is it? Kinda a bad look. Especially considering he has worked very hard to defang regulatory agencies.

Look, the Tesla Model X is an inherently bad design. It discards a large amount of important institutional knowledge in favor of being "disruptive" and flashy, and the result is an unsafe vehicle. A huge amount of the blame for that falls on the executive culture of Tesla, which is to say the whims of Elon Musk.

But we ostensibly have a government which exists to in part protect us from predatory and immoral businesses who would kill us for a quick buck. That vehicle should not have been sold, much less on the road. The person in charge of the agency which allowed such an unsafe vehicle into public use is the sister of the woman who died. And the person who shepherded her into that role is the brother-in-law of the deceased.

At the end, Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chao bear responsibility for Angela Chao's death.

If they were decent human beings, they would be consumed with guilt. (I do not operate under the belief that they are actually capable of feeling such emotions, but they should.)