Galt's Gulch

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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 10 years, 6 months ago
    Way to go for not letting the police in. They are not medical experts.

    I had a man with dementia wonder into my garage. He said he was lost. All he remembered was he lived somewhere with a parking lot and grass. I couldn't be sure he wasn't faking, but he seemed honest. I called 911 and asked for an ambulance. They said they had to send police too. I told them he was harmless and I'd rather they sent an ambulance. The police officer was very kind and understanding. He opened the door to his squad car and offered the old man the chance to sit down and told him it was optional and he was not detained and free to go if he did not want police help. The man accepted and the officer started making calls to locate his home. Eventually someone responsible for caring for the man came and picked him up. Madison police are really good, but we shouldn't be dependent on individual officers or even cities respecting citizens' rights.
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  • Posted by $ Abaco 10 years, 6 months ago
    I find this very interesting. The guy is an anarchist. I think he probably has a right to do this. It reminds me of a recent event at my kid's karate school. A cop, unrelated to any of the kids or staff just decided to come in and eat his donut on one of our benches in the school. The head instructor asked him to please not make a mess in the school and the cop left. It was a strange situation. You can't just wander into somebody's place of business and plop your ass down to eat your donut if you have a badge and a gun. Our head instructor has been harrassed by police several times around town...which probably didn't help.
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  • Posted by $ Your_Name_Goes_Here 10 years, 6 months ago
    Ah, the city I live in... it doesn't get any more liberal than here in Portland. I've never lived in a city where (a) I couldn't have an engaging political conversation with someone and part as friends, and (b) I had to worry about property damage if I display the "wrong" bumper sticker on my car or lawn sign in my yard. <sigh>
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    • Posted by CircuitGuy 10 years, 6 months ago
      Is it more liberal than Ann Arbor, Michigan, Burlington, VT or my hometown of Madison, WI?
      I'm sure you seen Portlandia: http://youtu.be/AVmq9dq6Nsg
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      • Posted by $ Your_Name_Goes_Here 10 years, 6 months ago
        Never lived in any of those cities, but if it helps Portlandia is only a MILD satire. We built a light rail infrastructure to the tune of $100M per mile, and more recently had a gay mayor who preyed on underage boys. We have more layers of government and bureaucracy in this town that it's pathetic. The Interstate Bridge (I-5 at the Oregon / Washington border) is ancient and probably should be replaced (the traffic is bumper to bumper during rush hour in the morning and evening), but our wise city planners and the bridge committee came up with guess what? The same number of lanes for cars, and added light rail and bike lanes! BRILLIANT! Did I mention that the light rail system here runs at a huge deficit (surprise!) and has to be subsidized by the taxpayers - those of us left? Oh, and we just built a "bridge to nowhere" that will only serve bikes and - wait for it - more light rail. No cars allowed. The only reason I'm still here is due to my job. Retirement can't come too soon.
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        • Posted by CircuitGuy 10 years, 6 months ago
          "more recently had a gay mayor who preyed on underage boys"'
          I think of this on this as being on the rightwing side of the spectrum, if we had to put it on the spectrum.

          " The same number of lanes for cars, and added light rail and bike lanes!"
          I've heard we're second only to Portland for being bike friendly. They wanted to add some kind of electric street cars here, but it was unpopular because it would have shared the roads with buses. It's cheaper just to add more buses. I love the bikepaths here, and it's hard to imagine it being any better anywhere else.
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          • Posted by $ Your_Name_Goes_Here 10 years, 6 months ago
            No rightwing spectrum up here... the mayor was a card-carrying liberal of the most extreme flavor.

            Be bike friendly all you want, but when you do it at the expense of the means of transportation that 99.9 percent of the population in this area rely on, then something is broken. One additional Portland'ism... the city of Portland was running out of transportation monies (wonder why?) and had this brilliant idea that they didn't need to perform routine road maintenance such as filling potholes, etc. which would allow them to continue their light rail expansion. Now the city is faced with an almost exponential bill for road repair since simple problems that could have been repaired fairly inexpensively have not metastasized into much more serious and expensive problems to repair.

            Ah, the wisdom of our "leaders".
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        • Posted by Hiraghm 10 years, 6 months ago
          "The Interstate Bridge (I-5 at the Oregon / Washington border) is ancient and probably should be replaced (the traffic is bumper to bumper during rush hour in the morning and evening), but our wise city planners and the bridge committee came up with guess what? The same number of lanes for cars, and added light rail and bike lanes!"

          Crazy Eddie.

          ""Yes. You appeared precisely in the..." Renner's Motie seemed to search for a word. Visibly, she gave up "Renner, I must tell you of a creature of legend."

          "Say on." Renner's image dialed for coffee. Coffee and stories, they went together.

          "We will call him Crazy Eddie, if you like. He is a... he is like me, sometimes, and he is a Brown, an idiot savant tinker, sometimes. Always he does the wrong things for excellent reasons. He does the same things over and over, and they always bring disaster, and he never learns."

          There were small sounds of whispering in MacArthur's wardroom. Renner's image said, "For instance?"

          Renner's Motie's image paused to think. It said, "When a city has grown so overlarge and crowded that it is in immediate danger of collapse... when food and clean water flow into the city at a rate just sufficient to feed every mouth, and every hand must work constantly to keep it that way... when all transportation is involved in moving vital supplies, and none is left over to move people out of the city should the need arise... then it is that Crazy Eddie leads the movers of garbage out on strike for better working conditions." "
          - The Mote in God's Eye
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