The OP didn't shame anyone. Why are you making this wild accusation?
Read what was written. No shaming is there.
You seem to be reacting to something you ascribe to the OP, but there is simply no logical path from statements in the OP's post that leads one to assume anyone is being shamed or blamed.
This is not victim blaming. Nobody blamed cyclists here. It is a true and obvious statement from an observer that cycling is dangerous in San Francisco.
Of course, there are also places where the risk is higher. SF is just an example used because someone prominent died in SF whilst on a bicycle. The easiest thing the USA could do to make cycling safer without investing a cent in infrastructure is to adopt the rule that by default if a car hits a cyclist the car is at fault. The effect of that would be instantaneous, every bike would have an invisible force field of liability around it. Sure, some might abuse it, but nobody in their right mind is going to play chicken with a car.
> The easiest thing the USA could do to make cycling safer without investing a cent in infrastructure is to adopt the rule that by default if a car hits a cyclist the car is at fault.
That would obviously be an unfair and dumb rule because fault should always be determined on a case-by-case basis. We would also have a massive amount of fraud caused by cyclists intentionally hitting cars, just like the rash of pedestrians running in front of cars in Russia.
I ride bikes and I also drive cars, and I've seen a ton of dumb behavior from both cyclists and drivers. Nobody is immune to being a dumbass in this category. They just shouldn't mix.
The problem is infrastructure. In the places where cycling is safe and normally practiced by normal people, the bicycles and cars are mostly separated. US cycling advocates have been pushing for the wrong things for years, asking for rights on the road as though bikes are the same as cars, when in reality the only thing that works is separate roads.
> Nobody is immune to being a dumbass in this category. They just shouldn't mix.
Even in countries with the best bike infrastructure they still mix. It's the cyclists that come off second best (to put it mildly) in any confrontation so they need extra protection and a default 'car is in the wrong' rule made a huge difference in those places where it was enacted. To categorically dismiss it without further research is a bit silly assuming you actually want to make progress. The enemy of the good is the perfect and this is no different. Obviously there are problems with such a rule, but that's the wrong way of looking at it. The question should be does it have more advantages than disadvantages and that seems to be solidly proven by now.
People that believe that cyclists would en masse run in front of cars like in Russia either have a very negative idea of society or want to dismiss the idea without further consideration because they in fact do not want things to change at all whilst pretending they are looking for progress.
This is a profoundly bad idea whose negative implications and undesired second order effects would be intuitively obvious even to the most casual observer.
It's sad to see this comment being dogpiled by trolls, including the standard and annoying responses like "wrong takeaway" or "bad take" or the sarcastic "how dare people do X", or the standard European city defense, or the most annoying type of response: rephrasing the original post to make a maliciously bad argument.
We don't live in should-land. We live in reality. Parents who live in reality need to protect their children from the dangers that exist in reality.
Parents who live in reality in the city of San Francisco know that it is a dangerous place to ride bikes. It is not ok to tell people to ignore those dangers because they should not exist, or to scold people for making those dangers known. It's also not ok to tell people that they are responsible for solving problems they did not create, and it is really not ok to equate warning people about danger with victim blaming.
sidfthec, you are right and you should not be getting this kind of response.
What would you propose they do instead? Stay at home? Use public transport? Also drive a car?
It isn't realistic to counter a biking accident with claims that people are sacrificing their kids and that they are idiots for biking, for some people there simply are no viable alternatives that they can afford, and so they take the risk. The blame should go to the drunk drivers and the idiots, not the cyclists.
Every time you take your kids to school by car, you risk killing other kids by hitting them with your car. Especially if you drive an SUV or a truck with small windows that makes it hard to see children close to your car.
Every parent who takes their kids to school by bike makes the city safer. The more people who leave their car at home, the fewer people in cars who kill pedestrians.
You are choosing to frame a reality where transiting by car is the only acceptable way to live. Many don’t bike by choice, they bike because of economic reality—especially as parents.
San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities on earth, and you must cover rent for cars in addition to yourself. If you want to discourage family formation then go ahead, make it prohibitively expensive to exist as a family in our cities.
I don't run the world and neither does the OP. I don't even live in San Francisco. It's not our fault that things are this way, and it's really dumb to blame us for pointing out facts.
Is it now also victim-blaming to tell people to wear seat belts, or to look both ways before crossing the street? Telling people about danger is not a form of blaming.
People seem to be reacting to something the OP didn't actually write. Stop ascribing beliefs and motivations to people you don't know based on a few sentences of written text.
Thank you for admitting that you don’t live in San Francisco. The fact is you don’t know who this parent is. You have made the assumption that they are taking unacceptable risks. I don’t know your motivation, but your criticisms aren’t constructive.
> The fact is you don’t know who this parent is. You have made the assumption that they are taking unacceptable risks.
What on earth are you talking about? Who the heck is the parent here? I am merely defending someone who is being dogpiled by trolls for the outrage of pointing out the fact that cycling in SF is dangerous. I am familiar with SF even though I don't live there, and I know that is the case.
Could you please not perpetuate flamewars on HN, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are? I understand the strong feelings on this topic—but posting like this is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
p.s. Re "pointing out the fact" — I'm really not sure how many facts have been pointed out about cycling in SF in this discussion (is there even data on this relative to other places?) as opposed to feelings and perceptions. But let's assume that you and sidfthec are 100% right on the facts, and the people arguing the other side are 0% right. That's still not sufficient for a good HN conversation. Being right is excellent, but not enough; it also matters how you interact with the people who are wrong, or who you feel are wrong.
Disclaimers are not a guaranteed release from liability.
Especially in the case of libel/defamation law, and especially in the UK and Australia, where even true statements can get you in trouble, putting up a disclaimer may not give you any protection at all.
It's not the Internet Archive's job to be the first one to try to resolve fair use questions like this, and attempting to do so put the organization's orginal core mission at risk.
They should have let someone else take the risk, and continued archiving the internet. That is all that most of their supporters expected of them, for good reason. Their attempt to pivot toward being a generic, universal library was bad scope creep and should have been stopped when it started.
I'd bet that most people who care about this issue are primarily worried about losing the Wayback Machine. If that goes away, a lot of internet history will be lost forever. All those copyrighted works that IA was lending out won't disappear in the same fashion -- they will still be available from other sources.
IMO the Wayback Machine has always been the primary product, and most valuable part, of the Internet Archive. If IA wanted to do other things they should have done them via a separate legal entity to protect the Wayback Machine.
You'd be betting wrong. Even a casual skim of the Archive's blog will show that the Wayback Machine isn't their primary focus, and hasn't been for ~20 years. It may be their most important aspect to you, but the Archive is comprised of a large network of people working together to make all kinds of information available on the internet that wouldn't otherwise be accessible. To those people, those repositories are far, far more valuable than the Wayback Machine (and I promise they care a lot about this issue -- possibly more than HN does, given the timbre this topic has received here).
What I'm saying is that the things the people who work at Internet Archive care about may not be the same as what end users care about. I think the end users care mainly about the Wayback Machine.
Seems to me like the Internet Archive can determine for itself what it's job is, and they've determined that this is in fact part of their core mission.
Your perception that their purpose is solely to archive the Internet is at odds with their actual demonstrated activities for many years (the home page says: "Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more"), as well as their public mission statement: "Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."
I've talked to the founder of the IA who told me he doesn't believe the lawsuit puts the IA at risk of having to shut down.
They can, but that doesn't mean they are right. Controlled Digital Lending is not an "obvious" mistake, and contrary to what people on HN keep saying, the emergency library program is not what this case is about. It also does it seem to be the situation that their entire mission is at risk.
They're an archive on the internet, not an archive of the internet. I disagree with your gradualist approach, because while you complain about scope creep private capital subjects itself to no such restraints. The IA is an institution, not a tool.
It doesn't take much karma to vote or flag. Well under 100 points IIRC. Past that point, having more karma has no effect on what you can do on the site.
That link doesn't really have any data and it's not from a credible source. It's also an 19-year-old article.
An entire generation of San Franciscans have been born and become adults since that article was published. Even if you accept the premise that there was significant displacement in San Francisco in 2004 that doesn't say anything about whether there is today.
I do not believe there is a large amount of displacement happening in San Francisco today because I have not yet seen any evidence.
People leaving is not the same as displacement. Many people chose to leave during the pandemic for a variety of reasons, including tech workers moving away to work remotely.
After all, why stay in a city when everything is closed when you can get the same experience cheaper somewhere else?
Any time window that includes 2020 is going to include very strong pandemic-related effects.
All you provided is evidence that people moved away from San Francisco during the pandemic. We all know that. Many of the people who left could have afforded to stay and chose not to. That is not displacement.
Proof of displacement requires demonstration that people left SF because they could not afford to live there anymore. It's really that simple.
Techies with six-figure incomes leaving town to move back in with their parents during the pandemic doesn't count as displacement.
Read what was written. No shaming is there.
You seem to be reacting to something you ascribe to the OP, but there is simply no logical path from statements in the OP's post that leads one to assume anyone is being shamed or blamed.