I’m reminded of a few projects I’ve seen here and there where a dad with some electronics skills builds a control panel for his kid with a bunch of knobs, buttons, lights, switches, gauges, displays etc. that makes suitably impressive industrial noises as you mess with the controls because what kid doesn’t want that? I want that.

Sandstorm - Darude.

In all other parts of the world it’s not guaranteed to start a riot.

I’m rounding year 15 with a nylon one. I’ve never had a leather wallet last that long.

There is none. These are not made. They should not be made. We will not help you make these.

The reason power plugs/sockets are gendered the way they are is to prevent energized contacts from ever being exposed to touch. A cable that reverses the gender can and almost certainly will expose mains voltage to exposed contacts, which almost certainly will electrocute someone or cause a fire.

Bad stupid wrong reasons people come up with for wanting these:

• Attaching a generator to the circuits in a house. Plug one end into the generator’s outlet, plug the other into a wall socket, and now that circuit in your house, and possibly others, are energized. In addition to the cable being a death hazard if unplugged from the house end, I don’t know how circuit breakers behave when the source is on the load side, and if you don’t throw the main breaker you’re energizing the lines coming out of your house, meaning you’re putting power on the mains. You probably want to do this during a power failure, which means linemen might be working on the lines, they expect them to be cold, but because an idiot bought a generator and some parts from aisle 3 at Lowe’s, it isn’t. If you’re trying to run your generator while attached to the grid to try to reduce your power bill, you deserve the resulting fire. There is a correct way to do this; you can get plugs and sockets designed for this, you’ll often find camper trailers equipped with them, and you need an interlocked switch that prevents both the generator and the power grid from being attached simultaneously.

• You strung your Christmas lights backwards, and now the female end is closest to where you want to plug them in. Okay fine, I’ll just get a male-to-male cable and plug them in backwards, what can go wrong? The male plug at the end of your daisy chain dangling somewhere in a bush, under your eaves etc. in the winter weather getting rained or snowed on is what can go wrong. The correct solution is pay attention to what you’re doing, Clark Griswold.

There’s a lot of "should"s in there that just don’t reflect reality. Because of how so many American towns and cities are built, you’d have to bulldoze entire cities to do things like eliminate small traffic lights from residential neighborhoods. And we’re not gonna do that. We’re not going to tear down the entire fucking nation for some retards on bicycles.

In my area, there are very few cyclists who actually bike to get anywhere. They do it for exercise and/or to be allowed to wear their little padded shorts in public. So get the exercise from peddling away from a stop sign. The reason to choose that route instead of the others? To not get hit by cars.

And what exactly is the pedestrian excuse? Why do people insist on walking on the sidewalkless busy roads when in between them there’s a sidewalkless non-busy road?

He finally got his chores done so he can waste time with his friends!

There’s something about the damn things that makes people think they can do vehicular parkour.

I typed it in his voice.

At that point, you can do things like pedestrian bridges, over/underpasses with roads and streets, or level crossings with signals. Instead of trying to mix traffic everywhere, have the two systems meet at certain well designed controlled spots. Instead of bikers being in a near constant state of “I am in traffic”, have certain points along their journey be “I am crossing a road.” These areas will almost certainly drive both cars and bikes to stop, and then one or the other gets to go at a time, rather than both are in motion failing to predict the other’s movements.

Oh they’re working on bringing that back.

Or you do what I’ve seen some cities do and you close certain roads to car traffic entirely, and then send the bikes down there. Further increase the efficiency of both modes of traffic while eliminating collisions. Create walkable and bikeable sections of town that cars can travel between.

Vibe profits.

Why the fuck would you have right turns on the same signal as straight?

Your parents didn’t even try to educate you, did they?

There are a lot of different kinds of intersections. Simple two-lane meets two lane where each kind has a stop-go light, up to hugely complicated intersections with multiple turn lanes in each direction.

At a small stop-go light, like you might find in a residential neighborhood, there’s one travel lane in all four directions, and each one is a left, straight and right lane. Going left is a yield across oncoming traffic, a green light gives you right of way to go straight or right.

A more medium size intersection might have left and right turn lanes in addition to one or two travel lanes. Let’s say Some Road (N/S) is crossing Another Street (E/W). Some Road is a four-lane divided highway, and at this intersection it has both right and left turn lanes. Another Street is a 2 lane road with much less traffic than Some Road, so it comes out to a left turn lane and a straight/right turn lane.

A typical light cycle will go Some Road gets green circles and green right arrows. Straight lanes bound North and South get to go, as well as those turning right onto Another Street. The through traffic on Some Road blocks any other right of way that could collide with those right turn lanes.

The through lights will turn red, possibly the turn lights will stay green, and the left turn lanes on Another Street will turn green. They can now make a protected left across the intersection, again this blocks any other traffic from colliding with the right turns from Some Road to Another Street, so they retain the right of way.

Finally, those will turn red (or sometimes flashing yellow meaning yield) and Another Street’s straight/right lanes get to go. This cycle will then repeat.

This is for an intersection that doesn’t have sidewalks. You’ll find these out in the middle of nowhere where a state route crosses a federal highway. Interstates and highways built like them will have overpasses and non-blocking intersections.

Where you DO have sidewalks, such as larger intersections inside cities, there are signals for the crosswalks. Those are interlinked with the traffic signals, and depending on the implementation there won’t be any straight and turn signals because “cars go straight” is when the pedestrians cross. When turn lanes are on, all pedestrian traffic is stopped.

Note that these are two different environments; at an intersection in a city center, the speed limits are often 20mph, and frankly, bicycles should not have their own lanes there. By law they’re vehicles, they should be in traffic behaving the same as cars and have the right of way that cars do. Where they get themselves killed is trying to weave in and out of traffic, or insisting on putting in a parallel bike lane pretending it turns off friendly fire. “Just add to every driver’s cognitive load and make them responsible for my safety.” Fuck off.

Meanwhile, back out on Some Road and Another Street, these have 45 and 55 mph speed limits, you’re traveling from town to town here, and these places pretty much should not see bicycle traffic. Here we’re really in the realm of discussing better public transportation and rail service than pedestrian and cycle routes.

The United States isn’t Denmark or the Netherlands; we have been building bike unfriendly roads for a century, and it’s not going to be trivially undone by painting a white line on the side.

It is my assertion that bike lanes, as implemented, are a rock chewing stupid idea.

For about a century now, we’ve had two kinds of travel lane: Sidewalks, and traffic lanes. Sidewalks are for WALKING, traffic lanes are for all vehicles of every description. Every vehicle is supposed to behave the same way following the same rules, regardless of performance. A bicycle, moped, motorcycle, car, truck, all of them are supposed to follow the same rules.

When there are traffic lanes only, no sidewalks, we have rules for how traffic flows. For example, right-turn only lanes at an intersection are right-most, followed by turn-or-straight lanes, then straight only lanes, then straight or left lanes, then left only lanes. Having a lane that goes straight to the right of a right-turning lane is a recipe for collisions.

We do that all the time with sidewalks. Pedestrians are expected to exercise a lot of caution when entering crosswalks to avoid conflict with vehicle traffic. Pedestrians are expected to treat EVERY intersection as if it has a stop sign for them, or they are expected to obey crosswalks with signal devices that are interlocked with traffic lights.

Bike lanes as I have seen them implemented are a lot like sidewalks; slower traffic is placed to the right of traffic lanes…except they do not expect to treat every intersection as a stop sign, and they interpret green lights for straight through as for them, even in conflict with right turning traffic.

So we have a travel lane positioned similarly to how sidewalks are positioned relative to roads, but without the rules that make sidewalks safe. It doesn’t help that, where they do implement lights or whatnot, they increasingly do so in non-standard ways that generations of drivers have not been trained on. There are new kinds of lights at crosswalks, new and weird nomenclature at intersections rather than "No Right On Red 🔴 " signs that have been around for years. It’s not implemented well, and it’s getting people killed.

As for e-bikes: They’re basically not regulated, there’s supposedly a classification system for them, which people ignore. There’s no enforcement, and they do whatever the hell they want, including riding at travel lane speeds on sidewalks, which causes collisions because no other traffic, vehicle or pedestrian, is expecting 20+mph traffic on the sidewalk. They either need to be regulated like mopeds, or they need to go away. “But the motor is electric not gas” fucks with people’s brains. Somehow people aren’t riding Honda Metropolitans or Yamaha Zumas on the sidewalks at 20 or 30mph but that’s happening with e-bikes.

Yeah go die in traffic with all the other zealots.

Having a quasi-religious hatred of automobiles only causes people to demand things like bike lanes right the fuck now, paint the lines on the asphalt, NOW. They don’t put in traffic lights with dedicated bike lane lights that would stop car traffic to let bike lane traffic safely cross, they don’t close some roads to automobile traffic, they paint the lines on the road. And then cyclists think that white line on the pavement somehow keeps them safe when they cross paths with a sedan, when the presence of those lines fundamentally breaks the safety algorithm the roads are built on in the first place.

e-bikes should be outright illegal. We should be imprisoning containership crews for landing with them on board.

There might be a world, after we’ve pulled the last billionaire’s lungs out, when humans are back in control, that we can do research into defecating video that can identify bowel cancer just by letting a computer watch someone take a dump.

We do not yet live in this world though.

Their parents didn’t hit them hard enough.