This was a good read, it was nice how they put the contested signature top right and prominent and also clearly reiterated the story the mayor tried to squash.

It's as if the city council decided to drive right into their own bridge[1] and now we get to watch the chaos unfolding all the same.

[1] http://11foot8.com/

My current favorite. Feel resistance? Keep going! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LK5RzZDJoQ

I mean 99%+ of the vehicle got through fine! That's perfectly within the SLA.

* * *

It always amazes me that truck rentals like we see in a few videos on that site are legal, like with a normal license. Every time I’ve rented one all I can think of “I can’t believe they trusted me with this thing that I drive once every few years at best”. I guess they don’t care, they have insurance but still.

Whenever I see someone else diving one of these I give them a very wide berth and assume they have no idea what they are doing since they normally don’t.

I once reserved a 20 footer, and at the last minute they called me and asked me if I would take a 26 footer instead. Man, I didn't know what I was getting into. That is a whole different beast than the standard 20 footer. Never again - what a pain in the ass that was - every aspect of it was a hassle. The whole time I was wondering how the hell it was legal for me to be driving that thing around.

26 footers are terrible. I’ll gladly tow a massive trailer and it’s much easier to position a trailer. In fact it’s easier with longer trailers over something like a jet ski trailer.

A roommate in college worked for Lowe’s installing appliances off a 26 footer. He crashed into things and cars once a month. After 9 times they said don’t get a 10th, luckily he changed jobs.

Same, I got the Big One when I was moving out of SF. Driving that monster around town (and parking right on lower Haight where my apartment was) is not something I would ever willingly do again.

is that the one with "grandma's attic"? I have never driven a truck with a (manual) transmission that was older than me until I drove one. I manage to parallel park it near the panhandle in a two-car space. I was proud (still am!)

See also: Hilariously outsized RV's that any person can hop behind the wheel of with no extra training or license requirements. I swear some are the size of Greyhound busses now.

Paramedic here, being a bit agist: and often it's a senior citizen that I'd be nervous seeing drive a Corolla, let alone this.

I was afraid to venture there, but yeah..

You can also just rent heavy construction equipment as well in alot of places, and they'll deliver it to your door.

They have insurance, and they're not liable for something you do with it, you are.

> I guess they don’t care, they have insurance but still.

Of course they care; even big companies have to fight with their insurance companies and often don't get fully compensated.

As a general statement, the overwhelming majority of renters pay their money and return the truck without any issue. The rare accident is costly, but it's paid for mostly through rental fees rather than insurance.

I was once offered a job and asked, "Can you drive a truck?" Sure, no problem. I show up for the _cross-country_ drive and it's a 28' box truck with a manual transmission. Thankfully, I had driven a manual car before and there was a primary (I was the 2nd) driver to help me through the particulars of the box truck.

Thousands of miles back and forth across the country over 3 months, never a driving incident.

> Whenever I see someone else diving one of these I give them a very wide berth and assume they have no idea what they are doing since they normally don’t.

I think you over-estimate the skill of the drivers of sedans and SUVs and everything else. Most drivers are pretty awful, even in cars they drive every day.

> Of course they care; even big companies have to fight with their insurance companies and often don't get fully compensated.

A friend of mine is a small business attorney and representing trucking companies in insurance disputes is a big part of his business.

Basically:

- truck is involved in some kind of accident

- insurance is dragging their feet or trying to say it shouldn't be covered

- small trucking business doesn't have the manpower nor expertise to hire a dedicated "deal with insurance department"

- they outsource it to a local lawyer who specializes in this kind of thing and is probably doing it for multiple small businesses in the area

Once I got stranded and the only rental vehicle option for me was a U-Haul because I was too young to rent a car. Let that sink in.

Whenever there's a potential rental crunch (cancelled flights, etc) skip the fight at the car rental desk and head to a truck rental place ASAP.

My dad did this once. We drove from Chicago to NYC in a 20’ box truck in a snowstorm. The truck was shockingly comfortable.

Even better, we bought a couple of big coolers and took a few hundred Vienna Beef hotdogs home!

There's a lot going on in that story.

Completely unrelated to the parent topic: oh my god, they added warning signs on top of 11"8+8, and people are still messing up?

EDIT: Nope, my memory is bad, the "OVERHEIGHT MUST TURN" sign was always there.

They've put up extra height bars and they've added a blinking light using a sensor for warning overheight trucks (OVERHEIGHT MUST TURN) which shows to an extra long red light. I also believe they've lowered the road a little bit, but there's only so much they can do.

People still crash into it, somehow.

It's called inattentional blindness.

People not only see with their eyes, but with their mind. That's why you might see cyclists with blinking taillight, or even lights in the daytime.

Yeah. I think that sign would be more effective if both lines were swapped: "Must Turn, Overheight" rather than Overheight Must Turn". It sounds like a generic warning, I bet these truck drivers don't think it's specifically about them.

Pays to be imperative: TURN NOW. Needs more bright red blinkenlight, too.

The sign that warns driver does actually blink though, for this exact reason. I believe there's a separate electronic sign further up the road as well that flicks on when a vehicle triggers the sensor. Even without all that, an educated driver should just see the sign on the tunnel and determine their truck doesn't fit...

Funnily enough, blinking taillights are actually banned here because it's very difficult to guage distance and speed from a blinking tail light.

That's why you have a blinking taillight and a continuous light.

> I also believe they've lowered the road a little bit

I don't remember that, but I do remember that they raised the height of the railroad bridge, to the greatest degree that was possible.

That may have been it, I know they added a little bit of height at some point but I don't remember exactly how they accomplished that.

The bridge is fucking world-famous and they still manage to mess up.

Haven’t the warning signs always been there, even when it really was 11’ 8”?

You're right, woops. Memory is a fickle mistress.

Yes the warnings have been there all along not a surprise its happening

"OVERHEIGHT MUST TURN" is almost comical in it's dangerous ambiguity. My first parse is "if you were over height, you would have to turn", not "you, yes, you stop! Now!".

I'd take a bet that there person who choose that wording wanted the accidents to continue but also have plausible deniability because they did do "something".

That is exactly what it means though, they don't want everyone to stop just overheight vehicles. What do you want the sign to do? Encourage everyone to stop?

It has a sensor and only goes off for overheight vehicles. If you see it come up, you will hit the bridge if you continue straight, but it's worded to like a generic warning to all vehicles: which is the parse you have also apparently made.

Better wording would be "Overheight! Do not proceed under bridge!". If you have space: "you are overheight!" or "overheight vehicle detected!"

Add the number plate with an ANPR camera for bonus "this means you" (it also triggers a red light phase whenever it sees an over-height vehicle, so you will have time to read it). And yes, this is possible, I've seen supermarkets flash your number plate at you as you enter to warn you the parking times are being recorded.

I see what you mean, you're probably right that it would help, but honestly I just don't think the people hitting it are reading it in the first place. It doesn't light up until they're at the intersection, at which point they're either very focused on the light or the traffic, and definitely not looking way above even the yellow bar. Most people seem to be driving rentals, and in their case they're just not thinking about the size of their vehicle, and the rest have gone under a thousand bridges that look to the unfocused eye just as tall, so they're not worried about it at all. What they really need is probably just something that hangs at that height in front of it so you can hear it bang off of your car with minimal damage before you actually hit the bridge, and push the intersection further away from the bridge so there's more time to look at the signs.

So fkn funny. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7pO39Sh6THg

At some point, you would think they would lower the road beneath the bridge.

The road there is stuck. Raising the railway, which has been done once already, is very expensive. Lowering the road would require moving a sewer main, which is a fairly delicate and also expensive job. Both railway and sewer are very old and substantially pre-date the modern assumption that you can just drive trucks wherever you want as if that's some basic element of civilisation rather than a weird temporary glitch.

Apparently there is a gravity-flow sewer underneath the road, making it very difficult to go any lower.

At some point it becomes cheaper to install a lift pump and a pressurized section for the sewage than to constantly have crashes to clean up and disrupt service.

That point is very far away as long as you can bill the costs of the cleanup/fixing to someone else (of their insurances).

The people that pay for new sewers (the utilities) are not the same people that pay for crashes and closures (driver's insurance companies).

Reminds me of one of my favorite headlines: "Teacher says every time a truck storrows, an overpass gets a trophy"

(storrowed = putting a 12'6" truck under a 10'6" bridge)

[1] https://www.universalhub.com/2019/teacher-says-every-time-tr...

[2] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=storrowed

Ah, yes. September is coming, and with it the "DON'T TAKE TRUCKS ONTO STORROW DRIVE" signs land on every major road entering BOSTON.

Hell yeah, nice local reference

Australia has their own - Montague Street Bridge ("Monty").

It's 9'11 (3.0m)

https://howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com/

It has dozens of warning signs, an overhead gantry with rubber paddles that hit a high vehicle's roof, flashing lights and still gets hit approximately once a month.

Is there a way to get an RSS feed for just "The Signpost"? Really interesting read.

Go up to project page -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost -> Subscribe link in footer -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost...

Looks like you can get any category on any MediaWiki website as RSS. Neat!

https://mediawiki-feeds.toolforge.org/

Wonderful, thanks!

There's a link at the bottom labelled "Wikipedia Signpost RSS feed", I haven't double checked it but I suspect that's what you want.

I wonder if havig a name and shame website, with a copy of the material they want removed, would be valuable and not just cathartic.

Props on Wikimedia Foundation for doing it right.

Actually, the Wikimedia Foundation was not involved. The Signpost is written by unpaid volunteers (like the rest of Wikipedia), not by Wikimedia Foundation staff.

The lawyer who sent the letter has the wikipedia username "kimlynn69".

You'd think that a lawyer, engaging in actions on behalf of a client, would use a more professional username.

To be fair, a glance at her LinkedIn profile (top google search result for her name) suggests that 1969 could well be her birth year.

A friend of mine was born on 6/9/69 and she made sure to tell everyone.

Totally unprofessional to be born in that year, IMO. She should have considered the long-term ramifications when deciding to emerge from the womb.

It's like the apocryphal 13th floor in hotels, people should be born in either 1968 or 1970. Otherwise I might make a fool of myself by mocking their username.

Same as anyone born on April 20th.

Don't be too hard on yourself. I know someone who was born in 1988 who quickly realized it's a bad idea to have a username that ends in '88'.

If they can avoid it, then these GenXers born in 1969 can :)

In fairness, if I was born in 1969 I would be deeply torn between using it in every single username I had for the sake of comedy, or avoiding it precisely because people tend to make assumptions and actually being born then is never going to be anyone's first thought.

I'm looking forward to the Y2k69 hysteria.

Where every username containing 69 has already been registered before anyone born in 2069 can use one?

Ah, well not the first time I've made a fool of myself jumping to the wrong conclusion. I'll change the comment.

I mean, nobody forced them to use their birth year in their username

Our of pure boredom, I can confirm records show this.

> The WMF told Indy Week that they had not received the letter and that the letter that had been made public contained an incorrect postal address for the WMF's headquarters

I wonder if the lawyer did it on purpose. They've probably had enough dealing with an unreasonable client so they made a few "mistakes" to blow the case up so the city can get a new official and they won't have to deal with them any longer.

If you listen to the linked video of the official yelling obscenities and acting unprofessionally, imagine working for them. On one hand, they'll do what they are told, on the other, mistakes "just happen". And look at that, they are not seeking re-election any longer, sounds like a "win" for the attorney.

Do they have to send those with Certified Mail?

> An eyewitness interviewed by Indy Week alleged that Durham council member DeDreana Freeman had attempted to strike Durham Mayor-pro tempore and council member Mark-Anthony Middleton during the shouting session, but instead struck O'Neal once and punched the head of fellow Durham council member Leonardo Williams twice before Williams subdued her. In the aftermath of these incidents, O'Neal announced that she would not seek re-election as Mayor and a state investigation was opened into the extortion allegation (Holsey-Hyman denies the alleged extortion attempt and a separate allegation that she ordered city employees to perform campaign work on her behalf).

Wtf. That alone is wild, open brawls in parliament are usually something associated with dysfunctional democracies. Attempting to censor that and invite the Streisand effect? That's new. If you decide to throw fists in politics, at least don't attempt to contradict the evidence. JFC.

The US House has a ceremonial mace that represents the legislature's authority. A few members have invoked mentions of it in heated debate, and it's been walked about the floor to maintain order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mace_of_the_United_States_Hous...

There’s actually a long history of personal violence in U.S. legislative bodies, especially leading up to the Civil War: https://www.history.com/news/charles-sumner-caning-cilley-du...

Fascinating. I'm German, we're largely peaceful as well - the most notable violence incident in parliament was all back in 1950, when MP Herbert Wehner beat up a vile Nazi apologist and threw him through a glass door [1].

[1] https://vorwaerts.de/artikel/10-maerz-1950-wehner-nazi-bunde...

Or just violence in general in the US. Let's not try and mask it.

looks like a pretty lousy mace to be honest

I think it looks pretty awesome, unless you are referring to it's effectiveness as a weapon...?

Itself another aspect of the Founders' Roman Republic fetishism. The mace was inspired by the symbol of state authority, the fasces, composed of twigs that when bundled together were stronger than a single pole of similar girth. It was also a common architectural embellishment during the Deco era and is still on the wall of the US House behind the dais. The State of the Union cameras always zoom in exactly enough to keep them out of view, because the symbol became controversial around 1934 for some reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasces

Another significant appearance of the mace is in academic settings. Even my community college had one. I only saw it in the display case in the library, but I am sure that it was lovingly carried in procession, or at least on display during commencement ceremonies.

The mace looks more like an imperial era legionary standard (Aquila) than a fasces to me.

Also it doesn’t really look like a mace used by British authorities, which is presumably where the name comes from.

eh, Taiwan is a functional democracy and yet it has had parliamentary brawls too

Didn't know that, had a quick Google and stumbled over a ton of reports spanning many years - including a bunch of legislators throwing pig guts around [1].

Wild.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/11/legislato...

Nothing says loyalty and patriotism more than a good old fist fight in the name of democracy

It is said that during the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325), St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra became so angry with Arius the heresiarch that Nicholas punched him in the face. True or not, this certainly imparts some significance to the Sacred Council's condemnation of Arian propositions and their proclamation of the divinity, and eternal Godhood, of Christ.

Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas!

Elementary school me was introduced to the physicality of Taiwanese parliamentary politics from the Cat in the Hat movie (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rtXccR1h_Ak).

It's an underrated movie tbh, especially given that Barbie got an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes

  open brawls in parliament are usually something associated with
  dysfunctional democracies

Yeah, tell that to Australia, England, Japan, the EU, Israel, Italy. Hell in South Korea one legislator threw shit… shit happens.

The topic after Durham was about RuWiki. Apparently the director of "Wikimedia Russia" was banned from making edits due to "Long-term abuse: creating a Wikipedia fork which includes stolen content from Commons as well".

I get that pushing a state-sponsored, censored clone of Wikipedia is bad for free information, but it seems out of scope of the real Wikipedia. Stealing information from Wikipedia is a bad thing, by itself?

Probably because of attribution. I assume that most Wikipedia articles are licensed under a version of CC with attribution requirements.

TIL that Рейму Хакурей (Reimu Hakurei) is a bot that removes possible vandalism on Russian Wikipedia, and that its creator's page rains touhou powerups.

This is an interesting read of some of the politics around editing of Wikipedia, but the problem is much bigger. This show interviewing the founder dropped last night and covers many of the problems as well as some potential solutions to decentralize the knowledge and search capabilities such as encycloreader.org. https://rumble.com/v33wemb-wikipedia-co-founder-condemns-it-...