teuast

Good call. Yeah, as far as I know, FSA doesn't have that problem right now, but still, any way somebody might hear about it.

Wait, did I misunderstand you the whole time? Are you actually saying that the problem with puberty blockers is that they block puberty? Did you somehow miss where that's literally the entire point of them?

Also, repeating the same claim you just made again while ignoring the authoritative source I just provided that contradicts it is some shit I see creationists doing. Not a good look. If you support trans people, like you say in your next comment, then why are you arguing this in the same way someone who doesn't support trans people would?

They're more reversible than suicide.

But sure, I hear you, that doesn't actually answer the question. So here's an authoritative source on the matter. To drastically hyper-over-simplify, they basically are.

Well, I'm no medical professional, but medical professionals have been prescribing puberty blockers for other things for decades, and if they were as dangerous as all that, then you'd think the FDA would have banned that by now.

Besides which, access to treatments like those ones are documented to reduce rates of self-harm, including suicide, among kids with gender dysphoria. And if your metric is the body turning out like it would have without these treatments, well, I hope I don't need to fill in the blank for you.

I can find no sources on this that aren't just Elon tweeting about it, and Elon's tweets are about as reliable as a gingerbread space station. If his tweets are enough for you to believe it, then no wonder you're also wrong about everything else you've said.

Fuckin do it, Elon. Double dog dare ya.

It's not Chrome, and it does everything I want.

If their jobs were that easy to automate, do you really think the automakers would just be threatening it? Do you know literally a single thing about economics?

polyjuice potion does change your voice though, when harry and ron turn into crabbe and goyle in book 2 they specifically speak in their voices

Then don't start shit you can't finish.

I have up to 4 kids at a time in my vehicle along with an often substantial amount of their stuff ( school backpacks / sports equipment ). It is not uncommon to stop for groceries already loaded with passengers and gear. What model of eBike should I get?

That's a valid question, and it's one that anybody who advocates for better urbanism, like I do, needs to be able to address. Fortunately, there are multiple answers.

The most direct answer to your question on its face is that you could get a bakfiets, or what the English-speaking world calls a cargo bike/cargo ebike. These are available from brands like Orbea, Aventon, Tern, Co-Op, Specialized (that's Specialized with a big S), and more, they have been showcased as potential car replacements capable of carrying people and large amounts of stuff on Youtube channels like GCN, Not Just Bikes, Oh The Urbanity, Propel, Shifter, and others, and some specialized (that's specialized with a small S) models have even been deployed as low-footprint urban delivery vehicles in so far highly successful trials by companies like UPS and FedEx.

However, to address the frankly incredibly frustrating assumption underlying your question, neither I nor the vast majority of other urbanism advocates will actually try to take away your car, even if we were given dictator-like control, because I for one am not interested in controlling people, I'm interested in having multiple viable choices for how to get around. You would still be able to have your car. Driving it in the city center would be inconvenient and expensive enough that you wouldn't want to do it, but it'd be trivially easy to get there by transit or cargo bike instead. Plus, while the drive to your work would be largely unaffected, that road wouldn't be the only way to get there, either. Speaking of which,

Also, I work 50 km from home and commute on a road that was made primarily to provide large trucks faster access to the port. It is a road along the river. In addition to the huge, fast moving vehicles, it has no artificial lighting and is away from building that might help with that ( so pitch black at times and also prone to significant fog ). Please recommend something safe.

This is a systemic problem, not a you problem. As such, you shouldn't be expected to take responsibility for solving it, least of all by just protecting yourself. You mention a port: most ports have existed for longer than cars have been the dominant urban species, and as such, that road you describe might have either replaced or run parallel to a railway that would have also gotten you there. The fact that that railway is no longer a viable option for you means that an option has been taken away from you, and that's what you should actually be angry about. That, and the lack of artificial lighting on said road. Allow me to refer you to the second half of my earlier comment:

Of course, this does also require development patterns to support it, i.e. roads that aren’t fucking death traps for anyone outside a car and stuff being close enough together that you can actually get to it in a reasonable amount of time, but hey, there are also non-car-related reasons we should be doing those things too.

Emphasis added. Anyway:

Now, not everyone has my situation.

Yes. Hi, it's me.

That said, I am sure MANY people ( in North America at least ) have needs that require cars today. Our culture and infrastructure has been designed around it and changing that is a bigger problem than migrating to electric vehicles.

That is exactly the problem I'm talking about. They have those needs because our infrastructure has been built to create them, and that causes far more harm than just switching to EVs will ever solve. EVs are like trying to wallpaper over the hole in the Titanic: better than doing literally nothing, but won't actually fix anything.

Shared ownership or shared fleets is one middle ground.

Sounds like communism to me.

Autonomous cars would help but that timeline is uncertain.

Adam Something has a thing he does where he takes some kind of pie-in-the-sky techbro gadgetbahn idea, like AVs, and gradually addresses all the design flaws with it until he's invented trains again, then ends with his catchphrase "just build a regular fucking train." And I think that's where I'm going to leave off.

You know that song "Think About It" by Flight Of The Conchords? "They're turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers, but what's the real cause? 'Cause the sneakers don't seem that much cheaper. Why are we still paying so much for sneakers when you got 'em made by little slave kids? What are your overheads?"

Funnily enough, I used to work in a running shoe store, and Jemaine is actually 100% right. Nike, Asics, Brooks, Adidas, most of them mostly manufacture in southeast Asia, or at least did at the time and probably still do. Nike has famously had their name attached to the word "sweatshop" on multiple occasions. Meanwhile, New Balance manufactures in the US. Prices are similar, quality is basically the same, personally I don't get on with either of them as well as I get on with Altra but that's beside the point. Nike's CEO makes like 100x what NB's does, which means NB manages to match Nike on price and quality with a much more equitable pay structure and manufacturing in the US.

If your metric for the economy is anything other than how much money the CEO makes, then New Balance is the clear winner. And I just want to note how fucked it is that I'm looking at a CEO making almost 300k a year, who also happens to be kind of a right wing dipshit, and saying "yeah, he seems equitable" just because I have to compare him to one making 32 mil.

Another example is that Orbea bicycles, which are literally made by a worker-owned co-op in Mondragon in Spain, with a lot (though admittedly not all) of their manufacturing either in house or just over the border in Portugal, compete and win in top-level racing, so the quality is obviously there, with prices that match or beat ones set by giants like Trek, Specialized, Cannondale, or, well, Giant, all of whom do most of their manufacturing in Taiwan (to be fair, Giant is a Taiwanese company, but Trek, Spesh, and 'Dale are all American and, weirdly, Giant handles a lot of their manufacturing).

If you can't show me that I'm wrong, then sure, pivot to something else again. But the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting something to change. Vaas from Far Cry 3 taught me that.