602
California police stumped after trying to ticket driverless car for illegal U-turn
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
602 points (99.2% liked)
Not The Onion
18468 readers
525 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well if my choices are
A) live in a tyrannical oligarchy where a few powerful people hold all the power and don’t value me at all
Or
B) live in a tyrannical oligarchy where a few powerful people hold all the power and don’t value me at all but I have money for food…
Man that’s a tough choice. I’ll go with B
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
Really? Because you’re living in that false dilemma and and humans always have lived in that false dilemma.
So it’s not all that false
If you only present 2 options then it is a false dilemma.
The sky is blue. True or false?
Is Chicago in America or not?
Are palm trees a tree , yes or no?
You need to revisit the dictionary. Not every a or b choice is a false dilemma.
Dude, you don't even know the difference between a decision and a question.
And, just for fun.
The sky is transparent
Chicago is in Kwekwe
Palm trees are a grass.
Look buddy, if you want to make an argument that my joke I made is a false dilemma… by all means go ahead, the person before you already pushed that point with logic. I disagreed but at least that’s a conversation.
You dropped a Wikipedia link and bounced.
Then you respond just now with answers to my 2 choice questions ENTIRELY WRONG and the sad part is you looked up answers and still got them wrong while missing I specifically picked 2 that I thought were funny. The sky is translucent not blue. Palm trees aren’t trees.
It’s like every step you take is another pit-fall while you argue against my jokes. Get it together dude.
You started all this with a false binary argument. It is a low hand way of forcing your opinion on someone and I linked to Wikipedia because everyone should be able to spot it.
I'm carrying on the conversation because it's hilarious how bad you are at arguing. You try to give examples of binary decisions and end up asking questions that are ambiguous. I'm dying to see what comes next.
I started this conversation with a sarcastic illustrative point to illuminate my view point. I very directly didn’t not ask anyone else to chose ANYTHING.
I said essentially “I see this, I choose that”
Which is my opinions illustrated thru over simplification.
That’s not me forcing anyone into a bottleneck.
A rhetorical question I asked only myself. I guess you could say I’m entertaining a FD myself, maybe. You can’t say I’m throttling your ability to choose things. I didn’t ask you anything, I didn’t present you with any options.
I’m myself am not “dying to see” what comes next. I replied to you because I’m bored and I’m right. That’s all.
It is funny to me you can’t see how clearly wrong you are on things. Do you want a YouTube video explaining the differences between transparent, translucent, and opaque? There are many available. Just let me know.
You gave only 2 options to chose from which falsely represented the situation.
I succinctly pointed this out. You got angry and are now suffering from Logorrhea.
I gave two options to myself then answered. I never asked you anything.
lol I’m not angry at all just bored. Thank you for the complement though. Yes I’m a salesman and a damn good one. I’ve never had someone describe me as Loquacious, but it’s a rarely used word. I knew it though if that was a test.
Anyway you are clearly balls deep in your histrionics… or maybe you just suffer from HPD in general…
Yes. This is exactly what a false binary is. You presented a situation where more than 2 possibilities exist to put forward a false narrative.
You still haven't. I'm implying you have written Diarrhea.
Want to know something funny?
My last reply I wrote to was from an ambulance. I was being rushed to the er because I was dying. See I’ve been so violently sick that I hadn’t been able to keep water down for 3 days. I actively dying.
I got bored in the 20 min ambulance ride to Brownsville so decided to brows Lemmy.
I can show you the doctors paperwork if you want proof but my point is :
No, I have never been angry or mad at you. I’m just having a conversation about something that interests me. That’s litterly all. I don’t think you’re stupid I just disagree with you. You’re free to disagree with me. That’s perfectly fine.
Don’t take it so personally and buy a dictionary lol
Edit: that would also explain many of my mistakes while we talked. I was half delirious it’s impressive I made coherent speech at all! Lol
Our recent conversation aside, I hope you are back on liquids and are now recovering.
I lived.
As for our conversation: believe me I know I’m a sarcastic asshole but I promise I don’t mean anything by it. That’s just how I talk.
I enjoyed our conversation. I prefer to talk to people who don’t agree with me. It opens the mind. I never much liked circle jerks lol.
Seriously that bug I got… a lot of people in the hospital also had. So make sure to keep washing your hands and keep distance from people. You don’t want to catch it bro. It was very painful lol I’ve been bitten by vipers, leg turned black and couldn’t walk… that was less painful than this lol keep safe bro.
If that’s the way you want to see it. Good luck with those many other options that aren’t really there.
I know you believe “no there’s a third option of riding fluffy unicorns into the sunset!”
No there’s isn’t. That has never been option.
As for the word my loquacious I guess I just mixed that while speed reading. I’m not really paying all that much attention to you. I’m not angry just bored.
The sky isn’t transparent it’s translucent giving it a blue color. Revisit the dictionary.
Chicago is in America. There is also other chicagos in other places but YES Chicago is in America much like Paris is in France and another one is in Texas.
Palm trees aren’t grass. They are closer to grass than a tree. They aren’t trees.
Dictionary. Buy one.
Wait until night. Is the sky blue?
You can be in chicago and not in America.
Apart from their size, palm trees are nothing like trees.
These questions have absolutely no relationship with the topic of false dilemmas.
yes. Now it’s dark blue. The sky isn’t transparent. It isn’t clear. It’s translucent which scatters light and blurs it.
that wasn’t the question. Is Chicago in America? Yes. Are there Chicago’s not in America ? Also yes.
so the answer would be “false” they are not trees. They arent technically grass either just closer to grass. The answer remains the same. Palm trees aren’t trees.
do you really doubt I can give hundreds more direct examples.
You have exactly 2 options. You have a decision to make. You can keep chatting with me or stop chatting with me. Choose. Option a or option b.
Read it. It is not about asking questions with binary answers.
Dude… I buy the new versions of both Websters and Oxford dictionary every time the release a new version lol. I do both in case I’m arguing with someone from London about the word “evening”.
I’m profoundly boring. However like you said I’m very good at talking so it doesn’t sound so bad.
My point is I don’t need to look at Wikipedia or look anything up. I know what it means in America and in the UK. I know the slight deference between the us and uk definitions.
I’m not a bad ass, but if you want to argue semantics… boy you’re going to lose fast. You can’t be. I might be wrong about my opinions but I know the limits of the word.
At best you can say I offered myself a false situation, but again it was illustrative not literal.
For example, one choice you are missing is that you don't have to live in a tyrannical oligarchy.
That technically true but we always kind do live in a tyrannical oligarchy . It’s kinda always been that way.
So to be clear I understand what and why you are saying. I totally get that.
My choice wasn’t suppose to be taken at face value. It was me expressing the simple fact “Is it an option to not be under an oligarchy? Because I can’t find any place here or in the past that wasn’t a tyrannical oligarchy.
That’s why I said what I said. I understand the point you’re making I just don’t agree.
I’d compare it to
Boss: be at work on Saturday or get fired. What’s your choice?
Employee: that’s a false dillima because I could chose instead to be promoted to your boss
Boss: that’s not going to happen.
Of course there is technically a third option. Quit. But quitting because you’re about to get will be written as “fired “ in the paperwork.
Other options? Yes an infinite amount. But those options aren’t really feasible.
I don't think there is any reason to think that those are the choices we will actually end up with. Those are just the choices being presented. I believe there are are other choices available that don't involve me having to trust a band of thieves that have done nothing but show me they can't be trusted at every opportunity, but they don't want to present those choices because they would result in them having a lower concentration of wealth and power.
For example, in the USA where I am from, we once had a hybrid capitalist model with a graduated taxation system that essentially limited the maximum individual wealth by taxing all earnings over a certain amount at near 100%, making it functionally impossible to accumulate much more wealth than that. This resulted in wealthy individuals and businesses reinvesting their excess profits in themselves, their people, and their communities because they would not get to keep those profits anyway. That then created one of the most robust economies and largest per-capita middle classes in the planet's history.
This is something that we already know for a fact will work because we have already tested it, and it is but one of probably thousands of possible economic models not being presented to the public.
Reimplementing that system or many of the other ones that don't involve giving the thieves all the money and trusting them to divvy it up fairly are less likely to go wrong. We then need to make sure they are more resistant to being dismantled than previous systems were, so they don't get destroyed like those were.
And that worked extremely well exclusively for white men in that great society you mentioned. It leaves out “lessers” living in that society. The ones who struggled to scrape by because their homes were redlined and valueless and they just took down your neighborhood to build another toll road.
The fact is that perfect time was only perfect for those in the chosen class. Boo.
I think we can do better than that.
Go read “the power broker” good book.
The people that were societally oppressed in the USA during the middle class boom were in their bad situation due to other societal ills, not the taxation structure.
I'm not saying that the entirety of US policy was good then. Clearly there were many societal ills, including widespread gender and racial discrimination in housing and hiring, terrible literacy rates and targeted violence against ethnic minorities in the rural south that persist to this day, and religious bigotry was widely accepted. The economic structure, though, successfully allowed for personal wealth while limiting it, and created an undeniably huge middle class. The fact that many citizens didn't get to participate in it was due to those other non-economic social problems freezing them out.
Also, mid-20th century USA is a single example of a system that was brought up to illustrate the point that there were more than the false dichotomy of choices presented. Surely there are way more ideas out there than status quo or status quo + UBI.
UBI has no precedent for working, and I, some rando online, have already identified a potentially disastrous problem that undermines it that I've never heard any convincing solutions for.
I love gaming out problems and solutions, but it is important not to fall in love with our ideas. Getting upset when holes are poked in them or ignoring these weaknesses aren't going to prevent our opponents from exploiting them. If a plan has intractable problems, there is no shame in making new plans that may avoid those problems.