OT - Grumpy Old Man Thread

[MrNubbz]

What do sporty cars and cash have to do with vocabulary 🤔???

It was an appropriate adjective, something you may have used when introduced to a tasteless situation

[847badgerfan]

Yup

How can you support liars?

[bayareabadger]

How can you support liars?

Support and am impressed by are different things.

[Riffraft]

The service dog thing is an impressive piece of American ingenuity.

The unintended consequences of the ADA.  This is what happens when the government decides we need a LAW.

[MrNubbz]

So they can individually brag about it when running again that they pushed it thru

[847badgerfan]

Support and am impressed by are different things.

I'm impressed that you don't support the farce.

[SFBadger96]

There comes a time when..."what had happened was all muddied by the way folks wanted it to be--more rich and meaningful the farther back it was. In the books of some memories, it was the best time that ever sloshed over the world--the old time, the gay time, sweet and simple, as though time were young and fearless. Old men who didn't know whether they were going to stagger over the boundary of the [future] looked forward to it with distaste. For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost--good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies any more, and you couldn't trust a gentleman's word."

Steinbeck, writing about the turn of the 19th Century.

[847badgerfan]

The unintended consequences of the ADA.  This is what happens when the government decides we need a LAW.

I don't mind most aspects of the ADA. I think the detectable warning devices could be better. People in wheelchairs hate them.

To have a service dog, a prescription from an MD or DO should be required, the dog be required to wear a tag showing the Rx#, and the owner required to carry the Rx.

[SFBadger96]

Like a great many laws, the ADA runs up against edge cases where it becomes hard to just rely on reason because what is "reasonable" is often harder than one thinks to determine--or at least more debatable. And once the edge case gets set, then a further edge pushes the issue a little further. Fundamentally, it is very difficult to write every issue into a broadly applicable law or regulation. This, fundamentally, is what makes new laws and regulations problematic. Generally they exist to address something that people think should not happen, but inevitably they either restrict things that they weren't intended to, or they allow things that they were intended to stop. Generally on the edge cases, at least in the beginning.

[847badgerfan]

Like a great many laws, the ADA runs up against edge cases where it becomes hard to just rely on reason because what is "reasonable" is often harder than one thinks to determine--or at least more debatable. And once the edge case gets set, then a further edge pushes the issue a little further. Fundamentally, it is very difficult to write every issue into a broadly applicable law or regulation. This, fundamentally, is what makes new laws and regulations problematic. Generally they exist to address something that people think should not happen, but inevitably they either restrict things that they weren't intended to, or they allow things that they were intended to stop. Generally on the edge cases, at least in the beginning.

You're in SF. How in the hell is ANYTHING accessible in that City?

Chicago is very flat.

Some of the suburbs are hilly, with pretty good slopes. I've been made to construct accessible routes from the public ROW to building access, from ROW's that were not themselves accessible due to horizontal and vertical slopes.

Sometimes it's a dumb requirement. I can't imagine putting in accessible routes from public ROW's in a place like SF. It would be pointless.

[SFBadger96]

This is one of the problems we routinely see with the ADA (and it exists in lots of places): forcing accessibility in places where it doesn't make much sense. It's something that is--I think--quite rare outside of the U.S. Go to a great hike, vista, or important landmark in Europe and it is pretty unlikely that they have done anything to it to make it easier for the disabled to access it. Here, we jump through hoops that sometimes seem pretty silly to make things accessible. Honestly, somewhere in between feels like the right answer. I've been to several places outside the U.S. that putting in an easier pathway or a ramp would have been very easy, but they just don't seem to care. And here I've been on hiking paths that a person in a wheelchair or on crutches would never go, and we've forced some kind of accessibility into it--or, just as likely, we've opted not to install something because the cost of making it "accessible" is just too much, even though said people are very unlikely to ever use it.

[847badgerfan]

I've been working with ADA stuff for a very long time and to me about half of the stuff I've been made to do doesn't make sense. When it is applied to the letter of the law without a commonsense approach or by an agency that refuses to apply sound engineering judgement, I have issues with that.

Otherwise, I fully support accessibility when it makes sense.

[MikeDeTiger]

I've often seen braille on doors/walls in places, like bathroom doors indicating men's or women's, for example, and wondered, "If you're blind and read braille, how would you get here and know where to put your hand on the braille in the first place?"

And while my time spent in a place is barely a fraction of its existence, I've never seen anyone using it.  So it makes me wonder if some of that is really useful in ways I don't understand, or is it some compliance thing a place got roped into because regulations got goofy.  

[MikeDeTiger]

I should say, I used to know a girl in Austin who taught life skills for the blind.  I'm probably selling her short here, but I know it had a lot to do with teaching kids to read braille and get around in public with a cane.  I note that because from her I learned that the ways in which blind people can learn to get successfully get around by themselves are a lot more robust than I ever gave them credit for.  

I used to catch her sometimes out downtown in the early morning, blindfolded, walking around the city with a cane, keeping her skills from getting rusty so she'd stay a sharp teacher.  

Admittedly, it was fun to mess with her when that happened.