memes

My mother has Alzheimer's and I am always with her when she takes that test, so I end up mentally taking the test alongside her. They actually have two different tests, depending on which doctor she sees, a shorter one and a longer one, and my mother mostly gets the shorter one. There's one part where they list four (five? let's go with four) words and have you repeat them back to them. Then, they ask you some other questions, and then they ask you to recall those four words again.

Other than misremembering the exact date, which I'm guessing everybody occasionally has the wrong date in their head, that question remembering the four words after being distracted by a different question is the only part where I could ever have lost points, since I have occasionally forgotten one of the words. It's the only question that I feel a normal person has a chance of missing. It truly is a test specifically for dementia.

The fact that Trump always says the test is difficult and that he got a perfect score on it, given Trump's history lying about things like winning golf tournaments, I think is absolute proof that he does extremely poorly on the test. He very likely fails it. He brings it up all the time because he's as bad at lying as he is at everything else. Good liars know not to bring up the lie a lot. Bad liars keep repeating the lie because they're afraid you might not believe them.

that doesn’t mean we hand drivers licenses to incompetent or irresponsible people.

Judging by the way people drive in my city, that's exactly what it means :(

A vehicle is 3000lb bullet

How fast do you think bullets move?

No one likes picking up body parts on a road or extracting what is basically meat from a vehicle.

You could make the same argument about train derailments or plane crashes.

That's not what is at issue. Virtually nobody is seriously suggesting we de-industrialize transit.

The problem at hand is profit motive. Personal vehicles force people into debt, both directly through purchase and through secondary demands - parking, gasoline, maintenance. That's what generates the economic pressure that keeps them in place.

If we were fixated on safety, we could make cars smaller and slower and we could shield pedestrians from them with infrastructure. You'd save far more lives by lowering the speed limit than raising the DMV licensing standards.

that doesn’t mean we hand drivers licenses to incompetent or irresponsible people

People aren't consistently competent or responsible. So you either install some kind of panopticon for drivers (the private insurance model) and try to price people you suspect are high risk out of your personal risk pool. Or you get people out of cars entirely, knowing anyone can have a day that makes them highly prone to driving mistakes.

The Local Group, which includes the Milky Way galaxy, is over 10 million light years, so you can easily see that I have no choice but to own a car to be able to get around.

The problem is that even in my local area the infrastructure is built for cars so much that walking takes 10x longer than it should.

Following distance is the most common way I see people drive badly. On major roads I'd say 90% or more are driving too close. My car has automatic cruise control which makes keeping a safe distance require zero effort, though I have no idea how close it follows if you decrease the distance setting - I always have it 1 off max.

I feel like I should have paid attention to this comment. Or maybe not...

If the tester at the DMV thinks it’s dangerous for you to drive, it probably is.