Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
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@boomzilla next week's article:
Drivers could be slapped with £1000 fine if they use common 'manual gearbox' feature
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@boomzilla Since we had a massive disagreement about speed limit signs over at , I have to ask - is it a common gesture in the UK and elsewhere? Not sure I've seen it around here. Instead headlights would be used to signal that yours are not switched on altogether. And a brief flick of hazard lights would be used for thank you (which thou shalt not use in vain, so if anything, I'd find that more contentious).
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I have to ask - is it a common gesture in the UK
Yes - flashing your headlights to either let another driver out/passed, and either waving your hand or flashing your headlights at the other driver to say thanks for letting you out/passed is common.
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
And a brief flick of hazard lights would be used for thank you.
This too if the other driver is behind you.
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@boomzilla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Motorists should also think twice before flashing their headlights to say thanks, with Rule 110 of the Highway Code stating: "Only flash your headlights to let other road users know that you are there…
"I'm here being thankful"
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@loopback0 Ok. Nobody ever lets anyone else pass around here anyway, so that must be the real reason why I haven't seen it
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@Applied-Mediocrity we have a common hand gesture for that too
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@boomzilla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
a £1,000 fine, a discretionary disqualification
This means he has to pull you over. Would they bother with that?
If I got such a fine here in NL, I would say in my politest tone of voice:
"Meneer, ik vind dat u een mierenneuker bent".
This specific insult has been determined by the court to be a compliment.
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@PleegWat Your judges have a weird sense for compliments, but I approve:
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@PleegWat said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@boomzilla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
a £1,000 fine, a discretionary disqualification
This means he has to pull you over. Would they bother with that?
Not for just waving. Unless you were somehow waving in a way that made you unable to control the vehicle, as that's the actual offense.
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@loopback0 How do you even do that? Do people frequently hang halfway outside the driver-side window to make sure the other person has seen them?
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@JBert said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@loopback0 How do you even do that?
I doubt it's ever happened.
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@JBert said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@PleegWat Your judges have a weird sense for compliments, but I approve:
Some searching reveals the approximate translation "nitpicking". It's generally, but (according to the judge) not necessarily an insult.
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@PleegWat said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@boomzilla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
a £1,000 fine, a discretionary disqualification
This means he has to pull you over. Would they bother with that?
If I got such a fine here in NL, I would say in my politest tone of voice:
"Meneer, ik vind dat u een mierenneuker bent".
This specific insult has been determined by the court to be a compliment.
Depending on context, you could get away with that, but I wouldn't count on it.
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Toen kwam de Hoge Raad tot de conclusie dat het niet zozeer gaat om het woord “mierenneuker” op zich, maar om de context waarin de uitlating gedaan is. In die zaak leidde dat tot het oordeel dat er geen sprake was van een strafbare belediging van een ambtenaar in functie.
TLDD The word "mierenneuker" by itself is not an curse word, it depends on the context. If you use it as a proverb like you use 'splitting hairs' in English but if you use it as a degenerative description of a person then it obviously is an insult. So I guess it's safer to stick to kankerhoer, terringlijer or tiffuskop.
Also mierenneuken is related to -try.
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@Luhmann said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Also mierenneuken is related to -try.
So it's really a compliment?
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Instead headlights would be used to signal that yours are not switched on altogether
Or that you're an asshole and you have your high beams on.
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@GOG said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Truthfully, it's not something terribly hard to get right, if your aim is to discourage pranksters, hoaxers, and dumb people. You dispatch a response team, and if you find that the situation did not warrant an emergency response, you charge them for the pleasure, so they know better next time (and if it was a hoax, like a bomb threat - which happens every so often - there are stiffer penalties.)
Bad idea. Because it then discourages people from calling for legitimate reasons. Only charge them if it is crystal-clear that it was a prank.
That is something which has been told to me and other countless times by EMTs, police officers and firemen alike: "Call us if you think you need our help."
Making people afraid that they might be on the hook for the response because it turned out to be nothing is a receipe for disaster.
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@Rhywden Like I said: I am not aware of any case where there would be a legitimate dispute over whether something constituted an emergency or not. This leads me to believe that such fines are levied primarily, if not exclusively, against hoaxers (one thing that has come up multiple times in my memory is bomb threats/tip-offs regrading schools; these inevitably turn out to be pranks or hoaxes, but nevertheless receive a full response, because nobody's taking chances.)
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@GOG I checked yesterday (but didn't bother posting to avoid pointless Wall'O'Text () and because of ) and France does have a similar law, that is being used from time to time.
The few cases I found about it were things like someone calling the emergency number over and over (several tens of times per day!), or one example of someone clearly using the emergency number as a sex phone etc. I didn't find an example of a fake bomb threat or something as serious, apparently that either doesn't happen, or is not serious enough to warrant a fine. Most instances seem to be rather low-level, but repeated, annoyance.
I also found an interesting study (in French) about the calls received by the police emergency number. It found that about half of the calls were "wrong" and linked that to repeated cries from emergency services that people abuse emergency numbers, but immediately noted (backed with some serious analysis) that this might be mostly a perception issue -- people call for what they legitimately believe is an emergency, but it turns out they either panicked (well they're not trained professionals sitting in room waiting for calls from panicked people!), or maybe called the wrong emergency number (we had, and still do but it's slowly going away, different numbers for police, fire service, ambulance), or call several times for the same thing... All of these are seen as "useless" and "wrong" by the emergency service, and don't end up in anyone being dispatched, but from the public side of things, they're actually all perfectly normal calls.
That study also looked at pure prank/hoax calls, and found there was only a tiny number of those (and apparently they're almost always detected before anyone is dispatched). There was some interesting statistical analysis showing that they're mostly done by youngsters, on Sundays (in other words, bored teenagers!). The study was old-enough to consider mobile phones as new, and also to mention that a significant share of prank calls was made from public phones (i.e. perfectly anonymous).
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@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
it turns out they either panicked (well they're not trained professionals sitting in room waiting for calls from panicked people!),
Which reminds me of something when I was skiing last year. I saw someone loose control and smash into a tree (just after a tiny bump so we could not see the crash, just the tree vibrating from it, this was exactly like in a cartoon!), so I went to investigate. The person hadn't any wound but seemed hugely shocked, almost passing out, so I called the emergency number. We talked for a couple of minutes and they basically told me "that doesn't sound like a serious thing but it's your call, we send someone if you want, it's perfectly fine for us." All the while the person was actually getting better and had friends & family around, so I stopped the call there.
So if they have stats on their emergency number, that was one "useless" call and yet I think that both for me and everyone else involved, it was reassuring to have someone telling us... well, not much really, but reassuring us (I guess I was waiting to see if they'd told us "no, after such a shock, don't even try to get them to move, we'll be there in a minute").
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@remi I'm not sure if whether a call results in dispatch is even a useful metric. If it's resolved telephonically like in your case it was still a useful call. Duplicates (within reason) are useful as well - you don't want a big accident happening and everyone assuming someone else will call 112. Prank calls are a problem, but that's even more so if it actually does result in dispatch.
I'm reminded of an ad campaign a decade or two ago which was intended to inform people 112 always had your callback number. One of the spots had a teenager placing a prank call to 112 using the landline, immediately hanging up. The callcenter employee called back, mum answered, and appropriate discipline was implied.
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@PleegWat said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I'm not sure if whether a call results in dispatch is even a useful metric. If it's resolved telephonically like in your case it was still a useful call.
I think all emergency services would agree on that, yes. But at the same time it is an interesting point that was made at length in the study I linked before (again, in French, sorry), namely that the perception of what is a "useful" call varies between parties. Generally speaking emergency services who are deep into handling very serious emergencies have a tendency to consider as "useless" some (not all, but some) cases where, from the height of their professional calmness and training, they can see a call wasn't needed. And they're right, from their point of view, because saying "come on, calm down, you didn't need to call us for that" looks very much like wasting their time. But that might be all that the other side had been waiting to hear, so for the person calling it was useful.
The study even pointed out that this might be used by some as some sort of special social bond between emergency services (as opposed to the rest of the population), i.e. "we're better than you because we know how to judge which of your call is useless or not" (this kind of things happen in all groups, see e.g. the use of jargon, and isn't inherently bad, as long as it helps the group to self-justify and doesn't impair good function).
This all leads to taking with a grain of salt when emergency services complain about people misusing those services, because they have almost by definition a very biased view of what a "useful" use of their service is.
All that has nothing to do with prank calls and the like, so it's really just a tangent on this whole discussion, but I found this was an interesting social point.
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Today in driving: Driver in minibus who was driving in the wrong lane, did not use indicators, could very well have caused a crash with me when turning right without warning while not driving in the lane for people turning right, like I was.
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From the newspaper: What's wrong with this picture?
A smart has a permitted towing weight of zero. The trailer hitch is only intended for bicycle racks.
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@Zerosquare said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@remi said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
my electricity meter broke down (cables eaten by ants apparently).
What kind of genetically-modified ants do you have?!The evolutionarily pranked-up at random kind. This sounds like the habit of the "crazy ant". It likes EM fields, haha fuck us.
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Filed under: CSS jokes.
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@boomzilla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Funnily enough, the thing that makes me go the most is the suicide doors.
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@Carnage I'm not exactly sure what's going on there. It looks like is was originally a sliding minivan door. But would it still open? Doesn't look like the top half of the vehicle would work with that. NFC.
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@boomzilla said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Carnage I'm not exactly sure what's going on there. It looks like is was originally a sliding minivan door. But would it still open? Doesn't look like the top half of the vehicle would work with that. NFC.
Yeah, there's no way those are still sliding. Might very well be welded shut.
:butwhy:
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@Carnage said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
:butwhy:
Judging by what looks like cargo hooks on the bed, they really needed a truck. For reasons.
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I think driving off a cliff into the ocean at 04:00 could be called an anti-pattern, no?
Video from which the screenshot was taken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS7c-2y1KeU
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@Benjamin-Hall Where I'm going is none of your business
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@TimeBandit said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Benjamin-Hall Where I'm going is none of your business
Spoken like a true BMW driver
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Yesterday some clearly mentally ill immigrant from Portugal decided to just go ahead and paint his own bike lane on one of the busiest roads in Prague. In a completely unforeseen turn of events he got stopped by the police, and he's been having a hilarious meltdown on the tweeter ever since. Apparently he'll take it all the way up to the EU or some shit, and then we'll all see!
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All things considered I have to say he's rather calm!
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@Deadfast Well, to start with, the dickhead is driving on the wrong side of the road and from the wrong side of the car.
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@HardwareGeek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@Deadfast Well, to start with, the dickhead is driving on the wrong side of the road and from the wrong side of the car.
Your screen must be mirrored. He’s clearly driving from the right side, and keeping oncoming traffic on the right side too.
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@blek said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Yesterday some clearly mentally ill immigrant from Portugal decided to just go ahead and paint his own bike lane on one of the busiest roads in Prague. In a completely unforeseen turn of events he got stopped by the police, and he's been having a hilarious meltdown on the tweeter ever since. Apparently he'll take it all the way up to the EU or some shit, and then we'll all see!
I don't suppose y'all do the "health walk" any more (if ever)?
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@GOG said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
I don't suppose y'all do the "health walk" any more (if ever)?
Last time they did it here it backfired pretty spectacularly, so the police is understandably careful since then.
It was pretty much the final trigger for fall of the communist regime, so …
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@Rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Making people afraid that they might be on the hook for the response because it turned out to be nothing is a receipe for disaster.
See also: American Healthcare
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@dcon and woman drivers!
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@BernieTheBernie
are you implying the gender of the horse?
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@Luhmann Whoa now!
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