EDIT: since apparently a bunch of people woke up with the wrong foot this morning or forgot to check the group they’re in:
This is a joke. Do not steal or vandalize speed enforcement cameras (or anything else for that matter). That’s against the law and you will likely get arrested.
If you’re addicted to crack or any other drugs, please seek professional help.
deleted by creator
Literally
19842024Or maybe some people just need more coffee 🤷🏻♂️
People get too embarrassed about publicly being wrong. I went in on someone recently in a comment thread, typed up like a whole paragraph tearing down what I thought was an indefensible point.
Homeboy replied like “hey you misread my comment”
Rather than edit everything away to hide my shame, I just replied with “you’re right, I’m drunk on a cruise!” and it was honestly a highlight of the voyage. Maybe some randys can get the same enjoyment out of rereading the interaction, and that’s way more than anyone would get out of “edit: whoops”
The amount of times I’ve seen the “oops, you’re right, sorry/thanks!” equivalent on Lemmy makes me think this place really has attracted some good people.
Disclaimer: yes we have trolls, shit posts, hot takes, etc.
Enjoying messing around doesn’t mean people aren’t good. Shit posts in particular show a level of awareness, otherwise it’s just a post.
True. In fact, I just came here from a shitpost community!
That was the wrong term for sure. I quickly added that part at the end after I envisioned the first reply being “if you don’t think the Reddit trolls came over then I don’t know where you’re looking” or similar.
it was honestly a highlight of the voyage
Bruh if getting politely corrected on social media is the highlight of your holiday, you gotta find a better type of holiday.
replies like this are why it was a highlight 💖
I mean it sincerely. It sounds like the cruise itself wasn’t super enjoyable to you. Which is totally fine. Maybe you’d enjoy going on a guided tour, or self-guiding yourself around another country or region. Or maybe you’d get maximal enjoyment out of just spending a week at the beach. Different people have different sorts of ideal holidays, but if a mediocre social media interaction was the highlight of your cruise, I’d be inclined to think cruises might not be yours.
Lemmy will learn about hyperbole one day.
One day a million years from now.
I had a great time, but thank you very much for all the unsolicited advice. The suggestions that I had a bad time are kinda weird though, maybe reapproach the way you talk to strangers!
go easy he’s on the spectrum
That’s honestly a really great approach. I’m going to do that next time I fuck up at work. Boss: “The production server is down and the database is hosed!”
Me: Omg I’m so sorry! I’m drunk on a cruise!
If I was embarrassed I would have deleted the post.
What’s the copper to crack exchange rate currently?
5.5lbs of copper is apparently about 20$ worth
What is that? Like 1 crack?
Like 4.
I should make a website that shows crack prices across the usa on a map. I could open it up to submissions and build a dataset of what people charge for crack. Then get a perfect business plan. Corner the crack market. Oh wow I know what im gonna do with the rest of my life!
Crack is cheap unless you are in the nice suburbs. Not much variation in price otherwise.
Your competition would not take kindly to your business. See inner city violence.
then I won’t sell in the neighborhood. I’ll start a website, getgoodcrack4me.biz
Even ignoring the likelihood of being murdered, illegal drug arbitrage is going to be low margin for the amount of risk involved. Most of the profit is with the manufacturers and distributors.
You can only get cocaine from the South American cartels. No local production with vertical integration is impossible. You can only cut into street level as a producer and direct customer interface is the only viable business model. That competition would be a direct with likewise retailers. Yes, buying from the producers of raw material and locally producing the finished good has a considerable profit margin, but your direct competition is established brands that have no problem capping a fool stepping on their block. Distancing yourself from the customer-facing business only decreases profit margin and risk, but unavoidable turnover would mandate a more direct customer interface in order to maximize profit margins by absorbing considerable risk.
“1 crack please, Mr. Dealer, sir.”
But that doesn’t mean that you’d get the full $20 if you take it to a scrapyard. Still pretty good though. A relative of mine searches dumpsters for metal stuff and gets good money selling it to scrapyards. They have a job and good money. I think they just do it as a sidehustle and for fun
Wait I can buy 5 lbs of copper for 20 dollars? Making ingots sounds like a blast. Or coinage!
Edit: this is high quality copper, right?
No, it’s a melted down speed camera.
Dude is about to write a complaint letter to crackhead-nasir
That can’t be true, that seems incredibly cheap.
Don’t know how there would be that much copper in there.
Perhaps you’re not the intended target audience, then.
Yes, the intended target audience is desperate addicts who can be tricked into committing a crime that doesn’t actually benefit them at all.
Yes, the intended target audience is desperate addicts who can be tricked into committing a crime that
doesn’t actually benefit them at all.benefits society.FTFY
Speed cameras work and make roads safer, removing them isn’t a benefit to society.
are you sure? There’s only 1 way to find out
Hey it me, ur mayor. I give u permission do it do it
And what would it be doing in there?
Conducting electricity would be my guess?
It’s a camera in a box, pretty sure it doesn’t use that amount of power
You’ll never find out just sitting here talking about it. Whatever it is, it’s gotta be exciting!
Guys, guys. Hear me out. What if (tokes) yeah…what if like if we like yeah. Oh? Sorry. What if we train pigeons to shit on traffic camera lens. It could be done. The military had trained pigeons to guide bombs against warships. Let’s train and breed pigeons to do this and release them in the wild.
Birds aren’t real
So we are replacing pigeons with crackhead?
That doesn’t sound quite right, but I’m sure there’s some platinum in there to make up for anything short of 5 lbs.
deleted by creator
Or a Balrog.
Some of them used to contain bog standard DSLRs, so they were worth stealing.
Someone actually stole a bunch of cameras but couldn’t offload it and ended up getting caught when he tried to sell it on craigslist. Lol. Apparently the camera units are proprietary in the office shelf.
let the intrusive thoughts win
Roughly 2.5 kg.
8.17$ per kg equals 20.43$.
I don’t think dubious scrappers taking obviously stolen copper are paying fair market value. You’d have to throw in a vcr or two amd haggle a bit to get enough for a dub.
I know. I never traded scrap, but I guess many or most won’t trade in so low numbers, I’d assume professional scrap traders have a minimum amount to not waste their time.
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A pile of speed camera guts, 10 meters of 900-pair phone line, a grounding grid from a substation, and some coils from an orphanage’s air conditioner, probably.
Buy chilean copper instead.
This one is in a school zone. People really shouldn’t be speeding through them unless they’re a “fuck them kids” kinda person, and if you are you’re a piece of shit.
sir this is a shitpost
Yeah, but how many people are seeing this post thinking “obviously it’s a shitpost, but also based?”
I for one was until someone said it was a school zone
Even better solution though: (re-) build the street at a school zone so that no driver more sane than the most insane Florida Man would not fathom driving any faster than 20 km/h, no speed cameras required.
Even better solution though: the street at a school zone that no driver more sane than the most insane Florida Man would not fathom driving any faster than 20 km/h, no speed cameras required.
What?
It’s simple. If you design the road to be wide, straight, with wide, clearly marked lanes, clear sides and a smooth surface, people will naturally be inclined to drive faster. This is based on experiences with forgiving design. For motorways, this is fine. But for residential neighbourhoods and school zones, it’s a bloodbath waiting to happen.
So out there, you do the exact opposite. Make the street so narrow that anything bigger than an average pickup truck barely fits in a lane. Make it out of brick and don’t mark the centre of the road. Surround the street with shrubs and other obstacles, and stick it full of sharp chicanes.
This is the deliberate inverse of forgiving design, called traffic calming.
Make the street so narrow that anything bigger than an average pickup truck barely fits. Make it out of brick and don’t mark the centre of the road.
School buses are a thing.
They used to be. Now everyone drives their kids to school for reasons.
The urban planning in many cities is so absurd and not meant for buses. This means school bus routes are absolute madness and can take hours to get everyone home
School busses do nothing to solve the problem of speeding in school zones.
I specifically quoted the part about making the road in front of a school so narrow a pickup truck would have trouble.
If it’s too narrow for a pickup truck, how are school busses supposed to function?
Then let me specify:
Wide enough for one pickup and no opposing traffic, but so narrow that two pickups are going to really have to negotiate to move around each other.
No, not here.
Firetrucks? Ambulance?
My city has exactly one road designed like this. Fire trucks have no problem
I really want to see these cities. They have a dedicated grid of streets for cyclists, a different grid for fire trucks, a different grid for pedestrians, and a Kafkaesque nightmare of curves for cars. Cars that presumably often break down and the drivers are found later fleshless with teeth marks on their bones. Somehow 4 seperate roadway structures are imposed on a single city.
I wish my suburb’s streets were rebuilt to pedestrian/cyclist friendly style. It would be easy as every street has very easy access to the 80km/h square of main roads that surround it
You could block every street in the suburb in its middle and force all drivers to take the shortest path to a fast road, and let bikes and walkers take the short paths within the suburbs.
My street has about 2000 cars a day, with over 90% of them using it as a short path between two fast roads, or accessing or leaving a destination in a different part of the same suburb.
A friend lives in a suburb that’s a tree structure, that’s about a third best as there are no destinations from the “trunk” roads to anything but destinations within the suburbs. I’d hate to see that suburb needing to be evacuated quickly, but they’re deep in suburbia and on a hill, so safe from fire and flood
Not an issue in Europe. Though granted the US would probably need to replace their fire trucks with sanely-sized ones. You also don’t need to haul a big-ass ladder in a low-density area what’s your plan use it to do a header into a suburban pool.
Regarding response time absence of gridlock will be more important than the last hundred metres on a residential street, consider investing in public transportation, walkable cities, and generally everything that abolishes owning and using a car being mandatory.
Hey, I live on a road like that. It’s not even bricks, but good ol’ cobblestone. The cars also share it with a tram.
There’s a lot of pedestrians crossing. It’s a residential area with shops in the ground floor of all the buildings.
There’s multiple schools and kindergartens around, so they set the speed limit to 30km/h. Does that matter? No. People go 50-60 during the day and 70-80 at night. The only times that doesn’t happen is when the cops set up a mobile speed camera.
The road is fairly straight, I’ll give you that, but I guess they can’t just demolish a few kilometres of 100yrs old houses to make to road a bit winding.
I mean, if the
roadstreet takes up only part of the width of the right of way, you can do a lot with blocking off half theroadstreet and alternating which side every few dozen metres. No demolition required.Upon closer inspection, what you just described is a street, not a road.
Also, even with a narrower street, with strategically placed obstacles, you can convince drivers to zig-zag and reduce their speed that way.
I didn’t know there was a difference, I’ve been using them synonymously.
With the proposed changes traffic would have to wait constantly to let the other side pass. You would not only limit speed, but als throughput. If you just go slower because of speed cameras, the amount of traffic can stay the same.
There’s a lot of cars and lorries going through here. Sometimes a road/street that has a lot of traffic just goes through a fairly residential area and we kind of have to live with the fact.
And if you think that’s bad city planning call the eighteen hundreds and complain to these people.
There’s a difference. A road is meant to be a fast connection between points at the ends. This calls for forgiving design and higher speeds.
Meanwhile, a street is meant to be for allowing access to the nearby land. That warrants lower speeds, and the expectation that anyone can be on any of the sides as they see necessary. A street should function less like a vehicle artery, and more like an outdoor room.Notice that these are incompatible uses. North American traffic engineers clearly didn’t, allowing main streets to become the main thoroughfare, i.e. the main roads through an area as well. This produces the most dangerous type of transportation infrastructure: the stroad. Which is both meant to be a fast connection AND access to the nearby land, and in doing so fails at both.
If this stretch of car infrastructure you were discussing is supposed to be a street, vehicle throughput should probably be one of the last priorities, and vehicles are better off on a road a few blocks over.
nah fuck brick roads. the rest sure. not brick. dangerous for panick braking (less traction), wears iunt tires and suspension prematurely
Problems that are all reduced, eliminated or rendered irrelevant altogether if traffic moves slowly, which it probably does, thanks to all the other modifications.
Plus, they add a ton of road noise inside the vehicle, further increasing the level of discomfort at higher speeds, contributing to a lower design speed.
Do you work for IBM on Lotus Notes?
Panic braking from 20 km/h isn’t going to be impeded by a brick surface, even wet brick.
Main roads shouldn’t be brick, but local residential streets certainly should. The speed limit should be 30 km/h or less anyway, and in a well-designed road network they should only make up a tiny portion of your overall drive, so wearing tyres and suspension isn’t an issue.
Wrong. Making winding roads slows down traffic but increases the amount of time it takes to cover a given distance. Which leads to less people walking and cycling plus more local air pollution. You want nice grids. People walk in NYC they don’t walk in burbs. This is what city planners refuse to grasp. You don’t make driving more difficult, you make alternatives easier.
I agree with that last point, but the rest ignores the fact that this refers especially, specifically to school zones, where, as stated previously, fast traffic is a bloodbath about to happen.
Define school zone. Like real school zone or town that zoned everything a school zone so they could get rid of sex offenders?
We’re talking the area just around a school where it’s safe to assume there are likely to be a lot of children outside of vehicles.
The road can have unnecessary curves that the sidewalks and bike lanes do not.
There are other ways to slow vehicles as well such as chicanes that narrow the street at certain points such that only 1 vehicle can pass fit through it at once, raised crosswalks, etc. There are a lot of ways to design the street to force drivers to slow down and pay attention.
Unfortunately, if drivers have room to speed then it comes at the expense of the well being and safety of everyone else (even other drivers).
I agree that winding culdesacs suck btw, but a street grid doesn’t solve the problem if safety in front of a school. If designed poorly it can make it worse since long straight streets can easily be turned into drag strips of speeding vehicles. Street grids are fine and good, but they should not allow drivers to go faster than is compatible with a pleasant and safe environment for people outside of the vehicles.
I want to see a road that curves with a bike lane that doesn’t that isn’t so bizarre that no one would ever use it.
Hard to find exactly that with a Google search but here’s an example of roughly what I was talking about
https://djelr4m41m2tz.cloudfront.net/br/t/brisbane-dec-06-kf_164.jpg
Not hard to imagine doing the same but with bike lanes and sidewalks
Making winding roads slows down traffic but increases the amount of time it takes to cover a given distance
You don’t do this everywhere. You do it where you want traffic speeds to be low. Residential streets, school zones, shopping precincts, and the like.
Plus, you further aid pedestrians and cyclists by having these residential streets not be through-traffic, except to pedestrians and cyclists. Use “modal filters”.
The pedestrians and cyclists get good straight paths. The curves on the road are made by consuming its excess width
Cool show me an example of your fictional city. I want to see one that is a grid for cyclists+people and a burb for cars.
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Another relevant Not Just Bikes
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
“Take this road that’s in good condition and spend public money rebuilding it over months instead of installing a camera today to push drivers to be responsible.”
Essentially, yes.
Besides, speed cameras, especially in NA, enforce by punishment. Punishment that some people are unable to afford, because for some reason they coddle billionaires while letting a fifth of their citizens rot in the gutter.
Meanwhile, a traffic calmed school zone enforces proactively. Are you sure you’d like to risk scratching your brand new $50k truck’s pristine paintjob? A properly traffic calmed street will force drivers to face that question, and in many cases, they’ll answer the question with “no”, and slow down. Mission accomplished.
Punishment that your don’t need to pay if your just respect the legal speed. We’re not talking about someone stealing food because they can’t afford to eat, we’re talking about someone driving a car and being unable to get their foot off the gas pedal for a bit. Your reaction to that is “People shouldn’t take their responsibility to respect the law, it’s the state that should spend money to make it so they don’t want to drive like morons!” while ignoring the fact that speed cameras are proven to be effective at keeping people under the sites limit and cost way less than just rebuilding roads. Add to that the fact that your solution means years or even decades of people driving too fast for safety while roads are getting rebuilt based on their speed limit and there’s nothing to enforce the speed limit in the meantime because “speed cameras aren’t the solution”.
If you’re unable to slow down just because the road is wide enough that you feel safe driving fast then you’ve got no business owning a car.
Counterpoint:
How often do you think most people watch their speed gauges?
You and I might do so regularly, but you sure as hell cannot say that for sure about every other person on the road.Furthermore, how obvious is the speed limit?
I can tell you with certainty that, outside of a few, mostly European, places, this may be unclear. North American traffic engineers happily design roads with speed limits anywhere between 40 and 80 km/h, with no changes to the cross-sectional geometry of the (st-) road.Systemic speeding because of misguided road design is more common than you’d like to admit. And a few cameras probably only do so much to fix that.
The speed limit needs to be indicated in order to be valid so that’s a completely ridiculous point you’re trying to make.
If people don’t pay attention to their driving they need to be penalized for it because no matter the road design, they’ll commit infractions and no matter the road design, speed limits need to be enforced otherwise they become suggestions.
See another of my comments with sources proving that speed cameras do reduce speeding by a wide margin, proving that drivers pay enough attention to their speed that when they fear they might be penalized for speeding, they slow down.
And putting up signs and cameras literally only does so much to convince people to slow down on wide, straight roads. How likely is the average driver in your area to speed? I can assure you, half of the road users are worse than that.
If we’re going to start pointing to other discussions, make it as easy to find your point as you can. Case in point, what I’m talking about.
What’s a “photo enforcement camera”? Speed camera? CCTV? Detects you then just drops on your head?
They take your picture and then you get a mostly automated letter with the picture saying you have to pay a fine, but mostly you can ignore them. I lived near an intersection with one, every time the left turn light turned red (which happened way faster than normal) the picture flash went off for the last three or so people going through the intersection, presumably all of them getting tickets. I assume they are also recording the license plate numbers of everyone going through the intersection regardless of perceived violations.
Why do you think those letters in the mail can be ignored? They are tied to your license plate and that is serious business. If you don’t pay traffic fines, the fines go up and up and Then they involve the criminal justice system and you have to show up in court and it’s all just very ugly. Oh yeah they can suspend your driver’s license over it too, There’s no way to get out of paying traffic citations.
I know in Arizona, but possibly other states too, you have to be served for the violation. So people just ignore them without consequences until they get caught for something else more serious.
It will depend on where you are. My area has a law that almost word for word says, “This law cannot be used to deny X,” where X is renewal of a driver’s license, withholding of any services, etc. It also can’t be sent to collections or be a mandatory fine from the state. The company is basically fucked.
Why do you think those letters in the mail can be ignored?
I forget the exact reason, I researched it at the time and don’t remember well now, but the other comments are probably right. Anyway I know they can be ignored because I ignored them and nothing ever happened. Was more than a decade ago so I think I’m good. They were clearly sending them out to a large portion of everyone going through the intersection for no good reason, it was basically just a grift, so it would have been ridiculous to actually enforce all of them with police and courts.
Speed traps or stop light cameras, generally.
CCTV is considered surveillance, not enforcement.
Using vehicle velocity as risk assessment method is fucking dumb. Might as well put that copper to better use.
No it’s not. Speed is a very significant element of road safety. At lower speeds, you can stop in a much shorter distance, and if you hit someone their chance of death or serious injury goes way down. Braking distance is proportional to the square of velocity, and reaction distance is directly proportional. If hit at 50 km/h, a pedestrian has a 90% chance of death. At 30 km/h, they have a 90% chance of survival.
At lower speeds, you’re also far more likely to notice something that might require you to stop or slow. Your cone of vision at 60 km/h is 40°. At 80 it’s 30°, and at 100 km/h it’s 20°. A different source I found says under 50 km/h it’s 104° and at 65 it’s 70°. Whatever the specifics, lower speeds are much safer.
This isn’t to say that speed cameras are the best or should be the only method used to ensure road safety. Narrowing roads, adding furniture by the roadside, and increasing the complexity of the route, are all good ways to reinforce a lower speed limit by reducing how safe drivers feel driving at high speed. But speed cameras are a useful supplement to that, for those drivers determined to be irresponsible.
Why is high speed highway driving safer per km if vehicle velocity is a ‘very significant element of road safety’?
The problem, as ever, is retards driving fast on slow roads and slow on fast roads. The camera doesn’t discriminate, it triggers no matter the context. It will trigger the same way for a racing driver with lightening fast reflexes in perfect conditions as it will for tired grandma with cold treacle reaction time driving on snow.
Don’t believe their lies.
Because highways don’t have stop signs or lights or people in slower means of transportation sharing the road with cars.
When accidents happen on highways they tend to involve more cars and to be more destructive too because of the speeds involved.
Both risk of collision as well as risk of injury / death if a collision occurs correlate heavily with speed, there’s literally no better factor than speed to consider. Of course, it’s not the only factor, that’s why we have safety and license requirements for vehicles and drivers as well.
OP sais this " … steal or vandalize speed enforcement cameras …"
“Specifically this one outside of an elementary school”
They didn’t say that, but they definitely implied it. If OP said that, they would be getting a little visit from the police or FBI.
I’m sure that the US navy seals has already infiltrated OP’s house and neutralized the threat. Merely joking about destroying traffic cams definitely warrants this type of action. /s
I mean, historically if you are black or a socialist or something else considered inherently dangerous by US conservatives than yes, something like this is unfortunately as absurd as it sounds, enough to trigger that kind of action. You have to be someone they already find suspicious though, not some rando on the internet.
Police are the dumbest and most violent demographic in the US.
In Finland we steal dynamite from construction sites and do some sudden nightly dismantling. No crackheads needed.