CATSKILL — A 29-year-old Catskill man is in a Syracuse burn unit after he burst into flames when Catskill police officers used a Taser to subdue him after he had doused himself with hand sanitizer, police confirmed on Friday.
Jason Jones, a celebrated athlete at Catskill High School more than a decade ago, is in an intensive care unit at Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse. His condition is grave, according to people briefed on the matter.
Was this a mask thing? Was the hand sanitizer to show he was “safe”? Seems a little weird otherwise.
Who knows?
All I know is you don’t throw a lit cigarette at a guy covered in gasoline.
WTF?!? So, to be clear, if you were drunk and did this, you’d end up in the clink, but if you’re sober, it’s totally fine?
How are these drivers just allowed to drive away?
This is so fucked.
The spice must flow.
I was thinking more about this this morning. It made me think about how Puritanical so many of our laws still are around drugs and alcohol. Like, supposedly we started “cracking down” on drugs because of a correlation between drug use and theft (people stealing to pay for their habits), but why not just crack down on theft?
And with drunk driving- obviously I’m not “pro-drunk driving,” but it seems totally insane to me that you get sent to jail overnight for failure to fully stop at a stop sign on a deserted street and, after being pulled over, blow 0.005 over the legal limit (it has happened within my circles), yet running over and killing someone while speeding is okay as long as you haven’t been drinking. 
Mr.Linkey does bike touring and these stories scare the crap out of me.
And I might have seemed facetious saying the spice must flow but that attitude applies to everything to do with transport economics and society. The car/petrol industry is so heavily embedded in the state that it seems impossible to disentangle them for politicians and media. That report linked was very good in that it didn’t have “a car hit” but rather someone drove into. But the language we have grown up with about car related homicides is not an accident but rather driven by the car and insurance industries. Airplanes don’t have “accidents”, they find out what happens but they needed to invent car accidents as posh people began mowing down children playing on the streets last century.
Here if there is snow (rare enough) the roads are cleared straight away, the snow is piled onto the cycle lanes where they exist, but the pavements are not. Which is more important? Old people going to thee shops? People pushing prams? Wheelchair users? Car drivers. Each and every time. Always.
The timing on cross signals where they allow user intervention (begging buttons- most are set on a timer.but would have the begging button for out of hours pedestrians) grossly favour the car over the pedestrian. The induction loops which change the lights for cars typically start the cycle immediately on a quiet road so five seconds to a green light. It’s about a minute for a pedestrian. This is pretty standard.
Speed limits are too high, they just encourage speeding in built up areas and you get concertinad up the road. We need to slow down for emissions, noise, particulate pollution (brakes and tyres) and safety for other travellers. Electric cars suffer from noise and particulate pollution and don’t reduce killing people so we will still need to slow down. The neoliberal response to the car climate crisis is we need to sell more cars, just new ones, which shows how out of touch with urban design and the environment our leaders are.
Last year during strict lockdown homicides stayed roughly level. All other homicides but car homicides plummeted. The streets empty of other cars enabled drivers to speed. Traffic is the only thing stopping most drivers breaking the law each and every day. Countries are proud of how they have fewer deaths on the road now. Cars are bigger, heavier, and safer for the occupants and they have driven everyone off the road. Kids no longer cycle to school. Who can blame them? They’re not stupid.
Roads are.unsafe by design. They are designed for one thing only. As traffic is the only thing stopping cars running over people willy Billy I avoid cycling outside commuting hours where they are stopped and many bicycles are using the roads. Because I see outrageously crazily illegal dangerous driving every single time I don’t.
This one, at least, has roots in racism…and the “correlations” were often fabricated to support that racism.
Ethiopia is rapidly sliding towards a total civil war, as the division of the country into “ethnic” provinces increasingly fuels communal violence and and the building of regional power bases.
@robertmckenna Kids no longer cycle to school
When I moved from a couple of years in the 
back to 
I stopped cycling.
My city councillor asked me what I thought of the new bike lanes in the center of town. I told him that a bit of paint on the road and a sign saying “Please Don’t Run Over Cyclists” was not a bike lane.
To be fair… since then there are a few main streets now with proper bicycle paths and even bike traffic lights.
We shall see if motorists here ever figure out what they are for; very, very few drivers here learned to drive in the … so the residential streets are still deadly enough…
Don’t get me wrong, there are many wonderful things about 's multiculturalism, but (on balance) internationally acquired driving habits isn’t one of them… I learned the term “Egyptian Brakes” from an Egyptian friend here (they are in the middle of your steering wheel).
you want to really freak the right wing out, bring back governors on cars.
but it’s a really good point that no one is talking about, reducing speed limits would help the climate and level the playing field between public transportation and biking being “slow” - it’s also something simple cities and towns can do without waiting for the new world order
And, at least where I’ve lived when I’ve had kids in school, even allowing them to walk or bike to school requires a form be placed on file with the school. This allows them to leave school at the end of the day without a parent/guardian picking them up.
Wisconsin pioneered low speed limits in the US. Speed limits are generally about 10-15 MPH lower than in Illinois, or about 15-20 MPH lower than Michigan, for similar road types and conditions.
We had a quick mandatory meeting this morning and we found out that one of our coworkers from our production facility had a stroke on Thursday.
He and I worked closely via chats, email and phone calls. I cannot stress how beloved he is by all of us in our small company (<50 employees).
He is 36 years old and on life support. He has a wife and three kids.
He spent weekends and afternoons running his kids to soccer practice and games, and teaching his 12-year-old that sometimes you have a losing season.
Life is really shitty. 
Any time you have different ethnic or religious groups inside a political boundary, things have a tendency to descend into this sort of thing without constant effort to combat it.
Not that Ethiopia was ever completely peaceful and welcoming of diversity, but things got worse after all the Jews were either killed or airlifted to safety in Israel. A new pecking order had to be created. There must always be an underdog.
That would be great if only one could count on people to take the “university” with all the seriousness it actually deserves…but the fact that people keep reporting on think-tanks as if they were anything more than adding footnotes to hot takes from the 1% is not promising. 
This is great:
Why Austin?
“If it’s good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan,” the university’s FAQs say, “it’s good enough for us.”
That’s pretty much the depth of thinking here.
DO NOT WANT
these people are going to be seriously disappointed with the culture in Austin. Unless they are saying Austin but mean certain other nearby cities
It’s a bunch of right wing hacks who are pissed off that the humanities is full of “those people”… the list of supporters tells the tale…
Could be. I’m sure they’ll take all the poor white kids who got pushed out of their “deserved” spot at UT by non-white students who just happened to get better grades then they did…
