Speed limit signs are there to keep people going around the same speed. If tons of people are doing 80 in a 55, the drivers going 55 are not the dangerous people.

This is well known to be false, and the cause of more accidents than a group of people going 20 MPH over the number on a black and white sign.

Speed Limit signs are there to try to legislate that people should be forced to travel at a speed that is below the natural speed that they would travel on a particular stretch of roadway. They frequently have only the most tenuous connection to reality. If the speed limit were set at the speed that people ‘want’ (based on roadway geometry, traffic conditions, weather conditions, and many other factors) to travel on a road, then the signs would be redundant and unnecessary. Speed Limit signs as they exist are a tools for revenue generation, for morality compliance, and for bureaucratic meddling.

I recall a book about the solar system in my elementary school library that described a model that began with a beach ball as the sun. Wish there was something similar on the net.”

http://fuse.pha.jhu.edu/~wpb/scale.html

Solar System Scaled to 12-inch Sun

Parameter Real Distance/Size Scaled Distance/Size
—————– ——————- ———————

Sun (diameter) 1,392,000 km 12 inches (basketball) or
Mercury (distance) 0.39 AU 41.5 feet
Mercury (diameter) 4880 km 0.05 inches (grain of sand)
Venus (distance) 0.72 AU 76.6 feet
Venus (diameter) 12112 km 0.11 inches (small pebble)
Earth (distance) 150 million km = 1 AU 106.4 feet
Earth (diameter) 12,756 km 0.12 inches (small pebble)
Mars (distance) 228 million km 163.6 feet
Mars (diameter) 6,800 km 0.06 inches (grain of sand)
Jupiter (distance) 5.20 AU 552 feet
Jupiter (diameter) 142,984 km 1.2 inches (ping pong ball)
Saturn (distance) 9.54 AU 1012 feet (>3 football fields)
Saturn (diameter) 120,536 km 1.04 inches (ping pong ball w/rings!)
Pluto (distance) 39.54 AU 4200 feet (almost 0.8 miles)
Pluto (diameter) 2,300 km 0.02 inches (very small sand grain!)

Next nearest star 4.3 light years = 5680 miles(!) or 9088 km
(Proxima Centauri) 25 trillion miles = (roughly from Baltimore to Hawaii!)
42 trillion km

Home schooling is the answer to the question, “State school or home school?” It is not, however, THE answer for everyone. (I would venture that it isn’t the answer for most.)

Freedom is directly proportional to population density. Think about it.

Detective convicted of murder: I rode the train with her on/off for a few years. She always creeped me out.

But noooooooo, they couldn’t do that.

Jackholes.”

This is exactly the way that red light cameras work in Washington, DC. For a ticket to be issued there has to be two pictures: one showing the car not yet in the intersection with the light red, another showing the car in the intersection with the light red. No tickets for entering on yellow, no tickets for jumping the green, no tickets for right on red.

The cameras are not hidden. Their presence is announced by signs. It is very easy to avoid getting a photo ticket by one simple step: don’t run red lights. And still they write hundreds of thousands of tickets every year, and collect tens of millions of dollars in fines. And then they have the gall to complain…

But noooooooo, they couldn’t do that.

Jackholes.

(Of course, if I turned up to work in an unfit state, I’d be hammered anyway. And rightly so. But that’s entirely different)

I can definitely see where showing what the prevailing speed right now is could be helpful, as long as people realize that’s what it’s showing, not a ‘speed limit’ that’s set arbitrarily like they’re used to.

“Aren’t counselors supposed to work on behalf of the students…”

HAHAHAHA! Oh, God, I haven’t had such a good laugh in a long time. My school counselors as a kid were the most unbelievably authority-friendly, anti-kid, anti-accountability motherfuckers on earth. There’s no professional canon for school counselors; in a lot of cases, they don’t even have training in psychology.

Story time: I had an abusive second grade teacher. I won’t go into detail, except to say that it was so bad that parent volunteers and even other teachers made LOGS of all the horrible things this woman did to me. It was a group of concerned parent volunteers that finally told my parents what was going on (I hadn’t reported the abuse because the teacher had threatened to have me expelled). My parents hit the roof and demanded that I be placed with another teacher.

The school responded by pulling me out of class for two hours EVERY DAY for SIX WEEKS to have the school counselor “evaluate” me. I spent most of the time sitting in her little waiting area while she talked to other kids. Then the counselor used the fact that my grades slipped from “Excellent” to “Satisfactory” (I was missing one-third of the material every day, after all) to write a report saying that I had made the whole thing up because I was frustrated by my “incapacity to understand the material”.

No evidence, no investigation, and she barely even talked to me– and suddenly the whole problem was something that I had made up because I couldn’t understand my schoolwork.

She didn’t even realize that somebody ELSE had reported the abuse, not me. She never bothered to read the letter my parents sent to the school, detailing what other parents had witnessed. She never even looked at the logs that other TEACHERS had sent in with the letter. She just manufactured a reason to call me a liar and tried to cover the school’s ass.

The best part? The school counselor had landed the gig directly from her previous job as a phys ed teacher. She didn’t have any training whatsoever as a psychologist. She hadn’t even passed Florida’s “here’s how to be a school counselor if you’re completely unqualified” course.

So, yeah. School counselors don’t give a damn about the students. They exist to serve the school’s interests and the teachers’ interests, and students are the first ones to be thrown under the bus.

I talk with teens, or recent teens from time to time. Now, maybe I’m inclined by nature to talk with the unruly, but the impression I get is that the high school kids of today, having been systematically lied to all through elementary and middle school, just naturally assume that the administration (counsellors included) are finks and The Enemy. Certainly, that’s the way school admin is structured.

Again, perhaps I’m being too optimistic but this actually seems, if left to run using the device algorithms, to serve a legitimate safetly purpose as opposed to all the rolling-right-turn tix from red light cameras. It essentially aims to get everyone to move at around the same speed, even if that speed is _faster_ than, uh – shall we say, normal.

But, still, I can imagine that some pol or LEO agency in WY is already trying to come up with a way to offset the cost of licensing stamp lickers or something by selctively rigging the system.