twblalock

> It isn't realistic to counter a biking accident with claims that people are sacrificing their kids and that they are idiots for biking

Who said that?

Again, people seem to be reacting to something that was not said by anyone in this thread.

> The fact is you don’t know who this parent is. You have made the assumption that they are taking unacceptable risks.

What on earth are you talking about? Who the heck is the parent here? I am merely defending someone who is being dogpiled by trolls for the outrage of pointing out the fact that cycling in SF is dangerous. I am familiar with SF even though I don't live there, and I know that is the case.

> The easiest thing the USA could do to make cycling safer without investing a cent in infrastructure is to adopt the rule that by default if a car hits a cyclist the car is at fault.

That would obviously be an unfair and dumb rule because fault should always be determined on a case-by-case basis. We would also have a massive amount of fraud caused by cyclists intentionally hitting cars, just like the rash of pedestrians running in front of cars in Russia.

I ride bikes and I also drive cars, and I've seen a ton of dumb behavior from both cyclists and drivers. Nobody is immune to being a dumbass in this category. They just shouldn't mix.

The problem is infrastructure. In the places where cycling is safe and normally practiced by normal people, the bicycles and cars are mostly separated. US cycling advocates have been pushing for the wrong things for years, asking for rights on the road as though bikes are the same as cars, when in reality the only thing that works is separate roads.

I don't run the world and neither does the OP. I don't even live in San Francisco. It's not our fault that things are this way, and it's really dumb to blame us for pointing out facts.

Is it now also victim-blaming to tell people to wear seat belts, or to look both ways before crossing the street? Telling people about danger is not a form of blaming.

People seem to be reacting to something the OP didn't actually write. Stop ascribing beliefs and motivations to people you don't know based on a few sentences of written text.

The OP didn't shame anyone. Why are you making this wild accusation?

Read what was written. No shaming is there.

You seem to be reacting to something you ascribe to the OP, but there is simply no logical path from statements in the OP's post that leads one to assume anyone is being shamed or blamed.

Danger is a matter of degree. There are plenty of places where the risk of getting hit by a car is lower than in SF.

Most of San Francisco is not really dense either. Outside of a few well-known areas the entire place is a suburb.

This is not victim blaming. Nobody blamed cyclists here. It is a true and obvious statement from an observer that cycling is dangerous in San Francisco.

It's sad to see this comment being dogpiled by trolls, including the standard and annoying responses like "wrong takeaway" or "bad take" or the sarcastic "how dare people do X", or the standard European city defense, or the most annoying type of response: rephrasing the original post to make a maliciously bad argument.

We don't live in should-land. We live in reality. Parents who live in reality need to protect their children from the dangers that exist in reality.

Parents who live in reality in the city of San Francisco know that it is a dangerous place to ride bikes. It is not ok to tell people to ignore those dangers because they should not exist, or to scold people for making those dangers known. It's also not ok to tell people that they are responsible for solving problems they did not create, and it is really not ok to equate warning people about danger with victim blaming.

sidfthec, you are right and you should not be getting this kind of response.

What I'm saying is that the things the people who work at Internet Archive care about may not be the same as what end users care about. I think the end users care mainly about the Wayback Machine.

I'd bet that most people who care about this issue are primarily worried about losing the Wayback Machine. If that goes away, a lot of internet history will be lost forever. All those copyrighted works that IA was lending out won't disappear in the same fashion -- they will still be available from other sources.

IMO the Wayback Machine has always been the primary product, and most valuable part, of the Internet Archive. If IA wanted to do other things they should have done them via a separate legal entity to protect the Wayback Machine.

Disclaimers are not a guaranteed release from liability.

Especially in the case of libel/defamation law, and especially in the UK and Australia, where even true statements can get you in trouble, putting up a disclaimer may not give you any protection at all.

It's not the Internet Archive's job to be the first one to try to resolve fair use questions like this, and attempting to do so put the organization's orginal core mission at risk.

They should have let someone else take the risk, and continued archiving the internet. That is all that most of their supporters expected of them, for good reason. Their attempt to pivot toward being a generic, universal library was bad scope creep and should have been stopped when it started.

What authority?

It doesn't take much karma to vote or flag. Well under 100 points IIRC. Past that point, having more karma has no effect on what you can do on the site.

What makes you think everyone is mega rich there? VC firms have a lot of employees making normal salaries just like every other company.