At the heavy end, SUVs weigh about 3 tonnes, while at the light end buses weigh about 12, a 4x difference. 4^4 = 256. So if the claim about the fourth power is true, you'd need to replace 256 SUVs to break even on wear, which is obviously impossible.
(I don't really understand how the fourth power of axel weight thing can possibly be true, though. Why would joining two vehicles together into a mega vehicle with double the weight and double the wheel count suddenly cause the combined vehicle to inflict 16x more wear than before you joined the two together? It makes no sense.)
The classic British Routemaster double decker weighs 7.5 tonne and can be configured with 72 seats. Newer double deckers weigh 12.5 tonne and have a capacity of 60 seated and 20 standing.
Doubling the weight and doubling the wheel count leaves the axle weight unchanged.
Plus the SUV is usually point-to-point, leave home, go to work, come back. Whereas the bus is going back and forth ten times per day.
In Europe, the numbers differ even more. Lighter weight cars typically 1.5-2 tons, a new London bus can be upto 18 tons when loaded - that's ~5-16 units of wear for the car to 104,976 units for the bus...
But this is all supposing we're optimising for road wear, which isn't really the point of a bus system.
A Ford F-150 weighs about 2 tons and has two axles, for an axle weight of 1 ton. 1^4=1.
A garbage truck weighs maybe 30 tons and has three axles, for an axle weight of 10 tons. 10^4=10,000.
So if you drive an F-150, you’re doing as much road damage driving down the street 10,000 times as the garbage truck does once. Rural areas that don’t have garbage trucks and just expect everyone to haul their garbage to the dump in the back of their pickups are onto something.
I certainly claim that almost nobody "commits" that "fallacy" and that it is not a remotely notable viewpoint in the civic discourse of any country I know about.
No doubt in a world of 8 billion people, there exists someone, somewhere, who has for some reason voiced the belief described - i.e. that if institutions really heavily based their selection of applicants on skin color rather than merit, that would be good, but that because in reality institutions have only been convinced to somewhat compromise on merit-based selection in favour of skin-color-based selection, it's bad, and should thus be abandoned completely in favour of total meritocracy. But that belief would really be rather odd, and I have never seen it expressed even once in my entire life.
Nor am I convinced, despite its oddness, that it is properly considered to contain a fallacy! After all, sometimes it really is the case, for various reasons, that some endeavour is only worth doing if total success can be achieved, and not worth the downsides if you can only succeed partially. No doubt if someone really held the allegedly fallacious view described, they would believe affirmative action is exactly such an endeavour and be able to explain why!
You haven't remotely described the alleged critics' belief. Which is that since scholarship recipients still drop out at a higher rate, the scholarships don't work.
How many people actually hold such beliefs is a debate between you and the author.
I assume someone typed it in (possibly on a mobile device with autocorrect) rather than copy & pasting it (which you would have to do twice, for the URL and for the title).
Well, actually, no, not everyone is free to use alternatives. Anyone using CI for "Trusted Publishing" of packages to PyPI or npm needs to use GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD. CircleCI and Travis CI are not supported. So many big open source projects for the two most popular languages in the world are now locked out of the alternatives you propose.
(I find it extremely sketchy from a competition law perspective that Microsoft, as the owner of npm, has implemented a policy banning npm publishers from publishing via competitors to GitHub Actions - a product that Microsoft also owns. But they have; that is the reality right now, whether it's legal or not.)
I was never convinced that trusted publishing solves any security problem, other than letting pypi eventually solve the problem of banning russian/iranian/whatever people just by relying on github doing it for them.
Trusted Publishing on PyPI supports Google Cloud and ActiveState as well. It’s not tied to GitHub or GitLab. To my recollection I looked at CircleCI support a while back, and ran into limitations on the claims they exposed.
(It can also be extended to arbitrary third party IdPs, although the benefit of that is dependent on usage. But if you have another CI/CD provider that you’d like to integrate into PyPI, you should definitely flag it on the issue tracker.)
The 30% figure is "correct" if you look at the absolute number of deaths instead of deaths per VMT. But I basically agree with you; that clearly the wrong stat to cite if you are attributing the change to vehicle safety regulations.
Even that is still wrong because you'd have to use the high water mark during COVID and not the more recent numbers which are starting to come back down.
2020 wasn't just the start of Covid, but also the start of BLM. The narrative I always see from the American right is that BLM caused many police forces across the US to radically reduce traffic enforcement, since:
1. traffic offenders are disproportionately black,
2. stops for minor traffic offences can sometimes spiral into violence in various ways, and some viral ones have involved absurdly bad use of force decisions by officers involved, and
3. no force wants to take the blame for another George Floyd
Per this narrative, a significant antisocial tranche of the public has responded to the effective suspension of traffic law in the way that you would expect them to, and that is why road deaths are up.
The timing lines up but that's more of a vibes argument.
The majority of traffic stops in the US are, cop parks on the side of the highway somewhere the speed limit is lower than the speed people drive there, every car on the highway is doing 70 in a 55, whoever drives past gets a ticket and the government fills their coffers but the speed everybody actually drives on that stretch of highway remains 70.
Now suppose the cops stop doing that for the stated reason. If you then drive past them at 110 instead of 70, are they still going to not pull you over? Good luck with that. Even if they're actually trying to minimize traffic stops, that one's the one that makes the cut.
So then what happens if they stop doing the usual ones? People are then going to drive 70 in a 55 because they can get away with it, but that's what they were doing to begin with. You could argue that the fatality rate would be higher at 70 than 55, but then why would that change relative to the baseline where that was what was already happening?
So the argument would have to be that idiots had the impression that they could do 110 without getting pulled over, even if that wasn't true, and then did that and managed to make contact with an overpass before driving past a cop. Which doesn't seem as plausible, because speeds like that on empty desert highways shouldn't have raised the fatality rate that much (e.g. it's not that high on the autobahn in Germany), and speeds like that in traffic where there are other cars traveling significantly slower will trigger a visceral feeling of danger in nearly all humans unless they're on drugs or have significant mental health issues, and in those cases they wouldn't have been deterred by the prospect of traffic enforcement anyway. Which is why people drive somewhat over the speed limit even when that could get them a ticket -- because it doesn't feel dangerous -- but also why they don't drive a lot faster than the other cars -- because that does. Traffic enforcement or not.
Moreover, regardless of how much of a contribution was made by that vs. COVID, the numbers still don't line up with it being vehicle safety regulations.
I would guess that what matters most is stops for driving disqualified/uninsured/unregistered, DUI, running lights, and failing to yield (especially at crosswalks), and perhaps for speeding on non-highway roads where it has more of a safety impact. As you say, in the USA as in virtually every culture, almost everyone speeds in some contexts, and especially on big, multilane, motor-vehicle-only roads; enforcement of speed limits in that context is likely one of the lowest impact things police can do, but I think it's a massive error to treat "traffic stops" as a category as equivalent to that sort of enforcement specifically.
I assume you're an American? As a Brit, your comment confuses me. Why would anyone ever have high beams on at all in anything reasonably described as a "neighbourhood"? Do built-up areas in the US not reliably have street lighting?
Here in the UK, it is pretty much universally the case that if there are buildings, there are street lights. (Maybe there are occasional exceptions where there's a single building in the middle of nowhere on a rural road; I'm not sure. And I suppose there must be occasional outages of street lighting even in e.g. dense city centres. But such things are rare.) Having high beams on in almost any context where there are buildings around is therefore unnecessary, against the Highway Code, and quite possibly criminal under RVLR reg 27.
I'm not the one you asked, but I think a lot of 'wealthy' neighborhoods in the US mean suburbia with larger single-family-home lots, and roads often feel a bit more rural. In my area in California, these are often unincorporated (county) lands just outside larger towns.
You sometimes see a very clear boundary. The more middle-class housing is subdivisions built all at once somewhere in the 1960s-2000s, with underground utilities and street lights. This infrastructure was mandated by the city, when the developers were looking to get their newly built neighborhood annexed into it. Around the next corner, darker streets with overhead utilities and more spread out lots with oversized "McMansion" houses. These are following the more relaxed county building codes and had the space available for such construction.
These roads are also more likely to have expensive new cars with all the computerized functions. Walking in this limbo world at the edge of our town, I've also noticed being blinded by cars as a pedestrian with more dynamic effects. I suspect are the car's system actively painting me with more light. It is a little bit like the "fringing" you see when the cutoff of older HID projection lamps sweeps over you due to road undulation. But it happens too quickly and both vertically and horizontally. It feels like being hit with a targeted spot light.
I wish the engineers spent the same care to put a dark halo on a pedestrian face as they do for oncoming drivers. Even when carrying my own flashlight, such encounters can be dazzling enough to basically go blind and not be able to see the dark paving in front of me for a minute. My light is more to make me visible to the cars than to really illuminate my path for myself. It doesn't stand a chance against the huge dynamic range of these car lighting systems.
A point made deep in a comment thread by user "rck" below deserves to be a top-level comment - the clawback clause explicitly applies ONLY to violations of existing law:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
So there's no plausible way that agreeing to these terms would have contractually bound PSF in any way that they were not already bound by statute. Completely silly ideological posturing to turn down the money.
And if someone at the NSF decides to terminate the grant & 'recover all funds', does the dispute over the contract involve the same burden of proof and rights to appeal as a federal discrimation case?
Someone wrote it into the grant agreement. It's a fair bet that they think that has some effect beyond what the law already achieves.
The burden of proof is "on the balance of probabilities" in both cases as far as I know, and there's no limit in principle on how high a breach of contract case can be appealed.
Of course it has an effect, but that effect is giving the NSF the ability to sue over a grantee's alleged breaches of discrimination law, instead of that being limited to parties discriminated against and the EEOCs.
Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant? PSF's decision is based on the government's demonstrated track record of what they consider to be "illegal DEI", not what the law actually says. Grant cancellations have been primarily based on a list of banned words (https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...), and of course nobody involved with any of the thousands of cancelled grants has been charged with breaking a law, because they haven't broken any.
- CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge
- Remote homology detection with evolutionary profile HMMs
- SBIR Phase II: Real-time Community-in-the-Loop Platform for Improved Urban Flood Forecasting and Management
- RCN: Augmenting Intelligence Through Collective Learning
- Mechanisms for the establishment of polarity during whole-body regeneration
- CAREER: Ecological turnover at the dawn of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event - quantifying the Cambro-Ordovician transition through the lens of exceptional preservation
When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal, knowing in your heart that they're wrong is not very helpful.
> Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant?
It's not and I didn't suggest it was. It gives the NSF itself the ability to litigate discrimination by grantees (in order to claw back its funds) instead of only the people discriminated against and the EEOC being able to do that. That's a real effect! But it doesn't impose any new obligations whatsoever on PSF - just changes the recourse mechanism if PSF violates legal obligations they already had.
> When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal
As far as I know this has not happened in any of the cases you mention and _could_ not happen. Yes, grants have been cancelled for dumb reasons, but nothing has been clawed back. Right? What would the mechanism for clawing back the money without a lawsuit even be?
I don't know if they've attempted to claw back any NSF grants yet, but they have done this with EPA grants. There was no lawsuit, they just ordered banks to freeze the funds and the banks complied: https://www.eenews.net/articles/epa-green-bank-recipients-lo...
Hmm. That'd be pretty nasty to be on the receiving end of (and may well have been an outrageous abuse of executive power), but still, an administrative freeze is temporary and is not in itself a clawback. Even if it was a certainty this would happen to PSF, it would still be worth it for $1.5 million!
How is there not a contradiction between 1 and 2? If 1 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are undeserving. If 2 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are deserving.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. It's obviously possible for the extremely weak claim made by statement 2 to be true (i.e. for some non-zero number of "deserving" nonwhites to exist and for existing hiring to not be a perfect meritocracy) in the same universe where the sort of programs typically labelled "DEI" tend to have anti-meritocratic effects. You seem to be suggesting that if competent nonwhites exist, then anything labelled DEI will automatically have the effect of causing orgs to hire more competent people, but... why? There's zero reason that should logically follow.
Well, not necessarily, on your last sentence. It might also be theft, depending on the precise nefarious purpose and on the jurisdiction. If you take somebody else's property without their consent, that's typically theft, even if the "property" is money in a bank account and no tangible physical object changed hands, and even if the method of taking involved deception. Fraud and theft overlap.
(I don't really understand how the fourth power of axel weight thing can possibly be true, though. Why would joining two vehicles together into a mega vehicle with double the weight and double the wheel count suddenly cause the combined vehicle to inflict 16x more wear than before you joined the two together? It makes no sense.)
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