Joel Webber

"At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy." - Joel Webber

Wow, I did not know this, and it's great. - Tudor Bosman

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does." - other countries take note. - Brian Sullivan

There's a bit at the end where a naysayer says something to the effect of ~"this only proves that drug use failed to *increase* under these policies". I read the report differently, but either way it takes some of the wind out of the sails of the "legalized drug use will turn us all into junkies" camp. - Joel Webber

My guess is that a standard timed pattern can cause more disruption by creating an artificial blockage, and when the local DoT cannot control the timing pattern, it falls on a default which basically lets the people at the intersection work it out amongst them selves. - Robert Konigsberg

When I lived in Los Angeles, I always wanted someone from the DoT to come speak at Google Santa Monica about the massive job that is Los Angeles traffic control. /me sad that I never did. - Robert Konigsberg

Well, I can tell you from my experience with Atlanta drivers (IMHO among the worst in the industrialized world) that a flashing light generates unfathomably bad traffic. Besides, our lights are already badly-timed, so it's hard to imagine them getting much worse :) - Joel Webber

This type of spam might be used to (try to) add noise to spam filters. Spammers rarely waste their time. :-( - Daniel Dulitz

I actually got Fuck You spam 2 days ago. I was going to reply "fuck you too!" but decided to be the bigger man. - Robby Stein

Actually, spammers do waste their time quite a bit. I've gotten plenty of spam from obviously misconfigured spamming systems ("Dear [[NAME]], ..."). I think it's cheap enough that the cost of error is low, and it's not like they have a brand to protect by not being sloppy. - ⓞnor

MUST BUY SOME - Robert Konigsberg

And yes, I know I'm parked to the right of center, but it was physically impossible to get into the space otherwise, and I'll be damned if I'm going to give up a perfectly good space for this reason... - Joel Webber

This can be really frustrating. - Robert Konigsberg

I've seen BMW and other fancy car drivers do this so as to avoid people scratching up "the precious." They make it so that an average sized car can't fit in the space next to them by parking RIGHT on the line (or just barely over) but aren't taking up two entire spaces for all intents and purposes. Easier to claim "oh i just suck at parking!" this way. - EricaJoy

Glad you weren't parked there! - Ruchira S. Datta

Oh Joel, The lengths you'll go to avoid that RTL bug :-) - Kelly Norton