grue

This isn't a "prolonged drought;" this is normal. It's the weirdly wet period a century or so ago that was the outlier!

The real problem here is that all the engineering and legal agreements governing who gets access to how much water was fundamentally built on a fantasy.

It's a device that cuts grooves into wood using cutting bits that come in a variety of different profiles. It's good for making slots (e.g. mortises for mortise-and-tenon construction) as well as decorative details, such as chamfers, roundovers, and ogee profiles. You can also use a pattern bit to copy a cut-out shape with it.

We already have those big specialized highways; that's what freeways are. The trouble is, even if autonomous driving were capable of doubling the lane capacity (and IIRC the theoretical best case is actually less than that, closer to a 50% improvement), induced demand is still a thing. It maybe buys you a reprieve for a decade or so, but after that you're right back to "just one more lane, bro!"

The trouble is, it isn't symmetric that way. MAGA hypocrites would simply gleefully shout it from the rooftops as fact and it would end up being a propaganda coup in their favor, satire be damned.

See also: the bullshit asymmetry principle, The Card Says "Moops", that quote by Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.

MAGAs want her to peg them.

You're right: when traffic is at its critical density, that's often what triggers the shift from the free-flow regime to the congested regime. But just because you make computers drive the cars -- even assuming they did it perfectly without randomly braking, which they don't -- that doesn't mean it eliminates that flipping between regimes. At best, it might get you a little bit more capacity before hitting that critical threshold, but eventually it's still going to, and then something -- a squirrel darting into the road, a sunbeam glinting off something the wrong way and momentarily confusing the AI, a bump that disturbs the car just enough to make it slow down a fraction of a MPH, etc. -- is going to trigger that shift to the congested regime anyway.

No, that's not how traffic works. That's like saying a pipe can flow an infinite amount of fluid when you used a liquid instead of a gas because you got rid of the empty space between particles.

Even with theoretically-perfect timing and control, the road still has a finite capacity because cars take up a certain amount of space, both stationary and moving (following distance is still a thing even with computer control because of the mechanical limitations of brake performance). Moreover, it isn't that much higher than we can manage with humans driving the vehicles already.

The only ways to exceed that limit are to make the vehicles smaller (e.g. bikes) or pack more people into them (e.g. buses or trains).

Hi, traffic engineer here.

That's never going to happen. It's nothing but a tech-bro bullshit fantasy.

Why? Because cyclists and pedestrians exist. In order to make it possible for the kinds of gains you're talking about to happen, every road user has to be an autonomous vehicle, but (aside from freeways) streets simply do not work that way and never will.

(Oh, and also: even at the limit, the best it can ever accomplish is to be an inferior approximation of a train.)

The funny thing about !THE_PACK is that it has both meanings, every single time. The entire point of the community is exploiting double entendres and the ironic dissonance of using AGGRESSIVE tone to express wholesome/supportive messages.

That's great and all, but I'm still waiting for it to be affordable to install my own so that it can also be a whole-house uninterruptible power supply.

So by that logic, when are they coming out with the OXO Good Grips anti-tank missile?

Damn it, I was hoping to comment "INB4 Project Plowshare," but nope!

I should've known better.