Hundreds all crushed and bagged up versus 6 or 12 cans individually rolling around in the truck bed and still wet with beer inside them? 
Of course, in a 280Z there is no “trunk” and it’s all one cabin, so the vodka bottle can roll towards the seats on any downhill incline so one can take a swig or two before it rolls back! 
Let me be clear again that there’s nothing funny about drunk driving. It has cost many innocent lives. I’m just discussing the follies of youth.
Yes they must be bagged. And not 4 or 5 thrown with finesse in your truck bed or picked up at my gate from litterers. Or tossed in at the camp to keep from trashing up the joint.
No excuse worked with this deputy.
Son-of-a-wrek got a ticket for open container(s).
Altho’ the judge believed him and dismissed, it was an ugly scene.
Someone didn’t understand the law and couldn’t be convinced.
Well, i usually drive a hatchback, and from time to time, someone has given me leftover bottles. (Typically, bottles of hard liquor that no one has had a drink from in months.) And i put then in the back, and put something on top of them so they wouldn’t be immediately visible. Also, it’s only that one time that i was stopped. That cop was so relieved when he realized i owned the car, and it wasn’t going to be anything messy, that he didn’t ask about anything except the registration.
I actually think what i did is legal in my jurisdiction – the bottles were not within my reach, and i was driving alone, so there was no one to pass them to me. But i didn’t want to have to explain it.
As long as we’re in the midst of this digression, another tale of dumb luck occurs to me. Back in my youth and motorcycling days I had dinner and many drinks at a friend’s house. Returning home on the motorcycle I noticed a car in the left lane keeping pace with me, so I sped up. The car sped up, too, so I sped up some more. This continued for some time until the car in question blossomed a bright set of flashing lights on its roof.
As it turned out, the cop was a motorcycle fan and was more interested in my Honda CX500 water-cooled shaft drive than in my speeding or my state of inebriation. We had a nice discussion about it in which I highly recommended the bike, and then we went our separate ways on the most pleasant terms. 
Jesus, people bitch about mentioning trolls in this thread rather than the troll one, but then will continue an utterly irrelevant and boring convo about driving, drunk or not, for post after fucking post like it’s no thing. Take it to another thread, I keep seeing this one refreshed and wonder which poster has done dumb shit this time, and it’s just more of this same crap.
My second bike!
I’m honestly not sure what this thread spun off of, but “Driving Thread” piques my interest so here I am. I am a car guy – I can list my credentials but I’m quite certain any other car guy driving past my house would instantly agree. I’ve been an HPDE instructor for 10 years, I’ve done amateur auto racing for the same amount of time, I did my first engine swap 25 years ago and I still do at least 1 engine-out chore annually in one of the many vehicles that cycle through my garage and annoy my wife.
I’m also generally accepting of the various flavors of enthusiasts, with a few exceptions (bro-dozers being one of them). That said, I get frustrated to no end when I meet another “car guy” and he starts talking about his SQ7 or something. Like, I get that that’s a vehicle, but we have nothing in common. Enthusiast or “fun” cars are an endangered species, and most of the “enthusiast” cars that are left are $80,000 2+ ton behemoths that I just can’t get excited about.
I don’t think cars should be banned, naturally, but I don’t see why we can’t encourage someone taking their Miata out on country roads and discourage someone from buying a 6500 square foot house in the 3rd ring of suburbs around a city just so they can commute 30 miles each way in some $100,000 SUV. Cars are bad for the environment, they are a massive safety concern, and they have ruined the way we design cities.
It’s been said that EVs are not here to save the planet, but to save the automobile industry, and that remains as true today as when I first heard it. I feel the same way about self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles are a good thing, and they’re inevitable, but like EVs, they’re being pushed as an alternative to public transport projects and sensible urban planning. They should be pushed as a complement, while being given much less public support (tax breaks or whatnot) than things that will benefit society in much better “bang for the buck” ways. Things like high-speed rail, public transport, and other changes that promote urban density.
As an afterthought, other than hating Tesla because Elon is a fascist fuck, I hate that predictions about autonomous vehicles are pushing unrealistic timelines, because those predictions are based on nothing. For the last 10 years or so, or whenever machine learning completely took over the approach to autonomous vehicles, we’re really at the mercy of the singularity. Engineers feed training data into systems and then see what happens on the road. Clearly it does amazing things, but since we have no idea how any of it works, we don’t know if we’re 3 months away from cracking the problem, or 3 years, or 30. People can justify their predictions with trend lines and whatnot, but they’re still just guessing. Our children may look back in 20 years and wonder how anyone was gullible enough to believe the self-driving Teslas were 6 months away for 30 years.
Or maybe they’ll hit the showrooms next week. Who knows. But I’d be more excited about private companies testing unproven tech on public roads if there was a parallel effort to unfuck our cities from the damage that auto lobbyists have done for the last 100 years.
I get it, but part of the problem is the utterly useless title of that thread. It’s much easier to innocently hijack (or, more often, contribute to a digression) when the title of the thread seemingly can allow for just about anything.
Mostly true, I think, but Americans as individuals wanting their own plot of land is a factor, too. Some environmental historians and cultural geographers trace this to how the European settlers in North America were by definition okay with traveling long distances, who proceeded to settle a vast continent very quickly (1810 to 1880), and later created the world’s largest human construction (arguably), the interstate highway system.
This title was a catch-all for the hijack of the What were you thinking thread.
Which thread do you think has a title issue?
I’m open to suggestions for this one, I created the first post so no one needed to be the OP of a hijack removal thread. I have no attachment to the title.
@ParallelLines would probably be willing to listen to good suggestions for changes to his thread that he started before he was a Moderator.
I was referring to “what were you thinking?” – the one whose digression Mr. Dibble was complaining about.*
Heck, I was just thinking about what I want for breakfast!
(*Again, I agree with their complaint, but I wouldn’t have stated the complaint so angrily, because digressions are more understandable with such a general thread title).
True, but by “Americans” in this context, to be clear, we’re talking about “Americans who could afford suburban houses and cars.” It was a wealthy lobby catering to the wants of a subset of Americans at the expense of everyone else. (Yes, thanks to strong social policies and a booming economy, the post-war car boom benefited a broad middle class as well as the wealthy. As long as you were white. If you weren’t white, there’s a chance your house was torn down to build a freeway.)
Over half of Americans live in the suburbs now. It looks like 52 to 60%.
The highways in cities like NYC, devastated communities and helped push people out.
Also the highways made it easier, though the same could be said to a lesser degree for trains, especially in England.
Environmentally, suburbs are bad in many ways, though dense cities have been very bad for public health.
While oil and car companies successfully pushed hard for the highway system, Ike legitimately saw it a public defense and safety issue. Continuing to subsidize oil company and preventing fuel economy standards from going higher is borderline insane.
A lot of people living in suburbs are there because that’s where the houses happen to be (because that’s what’s profitable to build), not because it’s in their best interests. Most Americans are struggling financially. I also think a lot of people don’t realize there’s a better way.
The IHS benefits everyone, including people in cities, who need trucking for the economy to work. There’s probably not the right balance between rail freight and truck freight, but the need for truck freight isn’t gonna go away regardless. All to say, highways aren’t really the problem with poor urban planning. They should probably just go around cities instead of cutting through them for the convenience of a few.
What is/are “Open Container laws” ?
NM… I’ve read a bit and sussed it out.
You may continue.
Partially consumed bottle of alcohol like wine or such. Often includes empties also.
I updated the Op with the Wiki-link.
Thanks.
I won’t disagree with that but one American in five lives in a rural area somewhere in 97% of the land. For the 80% of the people that who live the in other 3% public transportation is practical. For a large minority it is not, even discounting those actually ranching or farming and thus truly need a pickup truck in their lives.
It’s going to be an uphill battle convincing the 80% though. Look what happened in New York City(!) when the mayor dared to try charging private autos extra for tootling around Manhattan.
For what it’s worth, I live in a medium-sized city and bought an EV at age 74. Since I tend to own a car until it no longer works – the Boly replaced an Accord that was 23 years old – barring a wreck it will be my last one and I’m hoping by the time I am too decrepit to drive robotaxis will be viable.
So, I’m being mindful that I’m probably defensive over my title choice - I think I’m balancing for bias, but I’m also probably going to give all benefit of the doubt. So feel free to consider my position partisan in all this!
First, you’re not the first to take me to task on this!
So the title was a compromise, and was initially with the assumption (which for many of us should be a big WARNING sign) that most of the posters would be posters who were frequent users of the Trolls thread and know the context. The biggest issue was trying to find a way to address dissatisfaction with an individual poster in a non-Pit thread without falling afoul of our Pit title rules. NOTE - not as a back way around said insult issues, but to express disbelief in what a otherwise normal poster has posted.
And I laid that out pretty clearly in the OP of the THINKING thread. Though I did put in a few posts to further discuss the intent.
So, yeah, it’s a compromise. And for people that only read the title, without reading the OP, it’s going to be confusing, which is probably inevitable when it Pops to the top of the recent threads and it’s this long already.
If someone has a good idea that preserves the intent, while making it more clear, that would be fine. We could even do a modification that preserves the title like “{ for questionable one-off posts}” but I do think it would start to head into an insulting title issue again.
Really and truly, I wanted a thread where we could call someone out on one-off moments, discuss what the hell was going on without dragging the Trolls thread, or the originating thread off topic. Thus my comment moved to this thread and similar in the THINKING thread:
Calling someone out in the Trolls thread is an insult, duh. Calling someone out in a dedicated Pit thread may or may not be an insult, though it almost always is. Calling someone out in THINKING is meant to be a place to call someone out and figure out WTH was up with that poster in that moment without derailing other threads.
So yeah. Feel free to bring up new or amended title in the THINKING thread and I’ll absolutely consider it, though I’ll still ask @Miller to weigh in on the appropriateness.
[ I’ll put a link to this post in the THINKING thread so I’m not hijacking the hijack 
]