I’m not insulting anybody. I’m simply stating the fact that it’s smart to wear a helmet, because if you hit your head on the ground, you could die. That’s all.

Walking down the stairs is less dangerous than biking and you know it.

You make some good points.

I still wear one, but I don’t judge people who choose not to.

I don’t wear one and I judge myself for not doing so 🤷

Complicated issue.

Could be even lower if they wore helmets though. I don’t even wear a helmet myself, but it’s objectively smart to do so.

My friend got something caught in his front wheel and went over the handlebars at 20mph. Could have been turned into a vegetable if he wasn’t wearing a helmet.

Not really. Lemmy is filled with skeptics, rebels, and independent thinkers, and there are only like 50,000 monthly active users.

You know what’s a much better target for propaganda? Reddit or any corporate social media site. The users are simpleminded and easily manipulated and you don’t even have to worry about moderators, you can just pay to run ads.

Lemm.ee is actually bigger in terms of userbase now. And SJW is about the same size. But .ml still hosts a lot more communities so I guess that also counts for something

What a time to be alive

If you ran afoul of a moderator, sure, you could create another subreddit with a name like r/xyz_2 or r/xyzAnarchy. But it would only ever be an alternative, it could never replace the original community, partially because the name was already reserved.

More importantly, if you ran afoul if an admin, there was nowhere to go. The reddit admins exercise absolute control over the content that is allowed on that site. On Lemmy, people will just leave the server if the admins pull a spez.

You just have to choose the right instance. Federation does address those problems.

Right now our options remain limited because its still early days and the platform isn’t large enough yet. But in the long run, whichever servers do a good job of limiting extremism without being overly authoritarian in moderation will continue to thrive and grow, and servers where the admins are petty and/or politically biased will slowly die.

NYC is a bad example because it’s an extreme outlier in terms of size and density. But the metropolitan area is actually much larger than the urban area; here’s a map of all the counties within the NYC metropolitan area.

It covers 8,200 square miles, just slightly less than the area of New Jersey.

Metropolitan areas are quite large and typically include the core city along with the entire surrounding area that is economically and culturally heavily linked with the core city.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area

Here is a map of all the metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the US. Micropolitan areas are essentially defined the same way, except the core urban area of a micropolitan area is <50,000 population, while a metropolitan area has a core city of >50,000 population.

You can see that metropolitan areas include vast areas that are not even remotely urban. Beyond that, there is also a category called the Combined Statistical Area, which often combine multiple metropolitan areas.

Here is a map of LA where the red areas are urban areas, the beige counties are part of the Metropolitan Area, and the yellow counties are part of the CSA.

Greater LA

The CSA for LA is a whopping 34,000 square miles, or slightly larger than the island of Ireland or the state of South Carolina. However, it only contains about 2,300 square miles of urban area. Estimating the urban area is even more of an imperfect science than the metropolitan area, so I’m not sure how they calculated that number.

When people say Greater Boston or Greater Toronto, they are usually referring to the MSA, but might also be referring to the CSA. So the short answer to OP’s question is that “Greater” and “Metropolitan” are roughly synonymous. FWIW, I think that metropolitan areas used to be significantly smaller and more urbanized, but they had to modify the definition over time due to trends of suburbanization and decentralization in American city development.

I see your point, but I would argue that in a world with nuclear weapons, climate change, and all sorts of shit that seems to be an existential risk, plus the media barrage, people today aren’t exactly feeling safe or comfortable. Hence the desperate hoarding of resources and brutal competition.

Agreed. It just seems more absurd now because of the contrast between our advanced technology and our primitive sociopolitical structures.

Primitive metallurgy was used to create weapons for millennia before it became commonly used for cookware. Technology has always been primarily used as vector for human beings to control and dominate one another, rather than to assist/improve society.

Nobody said the US doesn’t have a class system? Also the person you’re responding to appears to be a kiwi, not an American.

Non-Americans making fools out of themselves while trying to casually denigrate the US is one of my favorite internet traditions. It’s especially entertaining because there are plenty of valid criticisms, but people often seem to go for the most lazy, inaccurate generalizations and reveal their ignorance.

If you have any Lain/Lain-adjacent content feel free to post it over at !lain@sh.itjust.works

This website is very helpful for finding communities and instances

I’m pretty sure it actually is significantly more dangerous. The front end of traditional pickups will still crumple and absorb a great deal of force. If the cybertruck is more rigid and the sharp edges have a potential to gash pedestrians on impact, that’s two factors that don’t apply to current pickups.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they were found eating kaviar off each others nibbles.

I did not ask for this mental image today

I think Lemmy is going through some growing pains right now. Many of the integral members of the platform, the developers and admins, are overwhelmed with work, because the platform is still in an early stage of development and it’s not as functional as it could be.

Additionally, the original servers are clashing with the new servers as they attempt to find common ground. A month or two ago, things were much more chill because people were just starting to explore. But now people have strong feelings about other instances and those feelings need to be hashed out. I am confident that we have enough reasonable people on all sides to reach a pragmatic compromise.

I feel the vast majority of interactions I’ve had with people on Lemmy have been positive. I hope that Lemmy can be a space that transcends the toxicity of the discourse on other social media platforms. But it will probably take some time to achieve that goal.

I wish they’d have done a full NYC analysis. Just doing Manhattan has an obvious outcome, but including Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx would yield a more interesting result.

I see. Thanks for the explanation