Roads are expensive for sure, but they're also necessary for last mile transport of good, even in walkable cities. Even bike paths need road maintenance because of environmental factors.

We don't need nearly as many lanes as many highways have, but the amount of car oriented roads isn't as much of a problem as the implicit government subdisies flowing into roads is. Road users don't pay enough to maintain the roads they're using.

This can all be fixed, though. Tax vehicles based on weight (for road damage), torque, and pollution, possibly with exemptions for trucks to make transport viable, and roads can be used and maintained. This has the added benefit of making land yachts less economically viable and making the roads safer for everyone as a consequence.

Good luck convincing car owners to pay twice the amount of tax being spent on roads, though.

The PS3 has a really weird CPU/GPU design that makes it challenging to emulate with any reasonable performance. The same was true for the PS2, which is why a console that old still has to rely on hacks and workarounds to gain any decent performance even on desktop, but the PS3 is a good bit faster and a decent chunk weirder. It also has better copy protection, though I'm sure that has been cracked by now.

If you bought a pager or walkie talkie that was part of a batch of pagers ordered specifically by Hezbollah through a Mossad front, then yes. Be careful if you bought a second device of that kind from Lebanon recently.

Otherwise, probably not.

As for phones, the whole reason the Mossad bugged pagers was because Hezbollah told their members to get rid of their phones because they believed Israel could track them (which, given the many espionage and offensive hacking companies in Israel, is probably true). Unless the terrorists also ordered phones through this Mossad front, I don't expect any phones to explode.

They can triangulate you to within a building, maybe even a specific room, but they won't unless you're with the authorities and have a warrant. There's a small exception to that, some American carriers are known to sell live location data to bounty hunters, but you'd have to pay more than the price of a new phone to get access to that.

Still won't help you find your phone if it's slid under a cupboard, though. But if you can reach your carrier, you can call your phone.

Even with that many cars, these sprawling parking lots are a waste of space. You can cut down the parking area by a huge amount by building a few multi story parking garages.

Last stadium I went to did it pretty simple: train station next to venue, parking cost somewhere between 15 and 25 euros. They still have 2400 parking spaces next to their stadium that seats 55000, but if you put parking at a premium and offer an alternative, many people will just choose not to come by car. There are more parking spaces, but they're basically spread around the city so they can also be used when you're not visiting the stadium and are build next to public transport (or have dedicated buses for large crowds).

Probably for the best too when it comes to sports, half the sports fans I see enter stadiums like these seem to be drunk before they even reach the entrance. I wouldn't want to be on the road after a match with those people going home…

Huh, last time I checked that didn't work. Guess they must've fixed it at some point! Good to know!

That makes a lot of sense.

I first started donating blood when I read about shortages, but it turns out that was mostly other blood types. After the entry testing, they recommended me to switch to plasma donations because my blood type was common enough that they'd probably never need my full blood.

If you have a relatively rare blood type, you may be able to help people even if they have enough blood to help most people.

I think paying for blood or other bodily fluids is bad. It provides incentive for desperate people (addicts etc.) to lie on the safety forms to keep getting paid.

I know a few people who donate blood despite not getting anything in return. I personally stopped donating plasma after a few times for health reasons (nothing dangerous in the plasma itself, luckily). To me, being able to help a hospital or a person by simply sitting back and watching shows on my tablet is probably the easiest, laziest charity you can support. The snacks are nice, too.

Not everyone can donate blood, but everyone who is able to, you should consider it, even if you won't get paid for it. You can doom scroll and browse Lemmy like normal, except you're sitting in a weird chair and get free food.

I suppose in the shittier countries, where all blood donation stuff is run for-profit, you should let them pay you if they're making a profit off of you, but I still think it brings a bad incentive.

You guys get a day off? All we get is time off to donate (also as many cookies and drinks as you want within reason, of course.

Something most accounts will never touch.

Yes. If you want to block this, you either have to edit the source code or, at the load balancer/reverse proxy, block /api/v3/comment/like if the POST body's JSON content contains like with value -1.