Expenditure

To be an adjunct right now is to be exhorted to expend ever greater efforts while one’s efforts are treated as ever more expendable.

The Car People

I know I'm a grumpy old man now, but I cannot resist the anecdotal report that drivers seem to me to be getting altogether more reckless lately, at least around here. I am seeing near collisions with pedestrians almost daily now, and my own vigilance is ramping up considerably lately... Is it that people are relying on all this faux-smart vaporware "navigation" software now? Is it that everybody's on their phones now and letting things slide? Is it that general norms about waiting for lights, watching for pedestrians, and so on are evaporating or just changing in ways I haven't picked up on yet? There is a quality of reckless impatience I am discerning in drivers lately. I could easily be wrong, I cannot entirely trust my impressions because I have disdained car culture all my life and am always happy to assume the worst of people (after half a century of knowing them), but it's starting to feel sometimes like the ones with the cars sometimes act like getting where they want in their big cars matters more than the lives of the little people without cars, it's starting to feel sometimes like people without cars aren't quite as real to people in cars as we should...