Dæmon S.

Well, we do have countless accidents involving trucks on a daily basis, and those accidents often do cause the traffic to bunch up. One of the highways I’m somewhat used to drive through, “Rodovia Fernão Dias” (MG-460), is very famous for accidents in this regard. The accidents frequently involve retreaded tires (“pneu remolde”) popping off the truck’s wheels, and the truck is often traveling way beyond 80km/h (if they were traveling below 80km/h, maybe the truck would be slightly more controllable when such a thing happened I guess)…

In practice, the speed limit does nothing (except in cases they’re caught by a speed camera, but people deliberately de-accelerate when getting close to a speed camera before speeding up again). If people were to respect the speed limits all the times, especially the truckers, maybe, just maybe, accidents would be less frequent. The ones hindering safety are often the truckers, however, I don’t really blame them; the transportation companies they’re working to often push surreal demands unto them (e.g. “you must take this cargo from Santos to Belo Horizonte in 12 hours”, a 670km trip that’d take a car 10h non-stop, depending on the conditions of Rodoanel and Fernão Dias); they often use stimulant drugs (“rebite”) to keep awake during insane days-long trips, and sometimes you can spot a truck zig-zagging and veering off to the roadside because the trucker fell asleep.

!onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone

At least in Brazil, the speed limit is different for cars/motorbikes and for trucks/buses, often it’s a 3:2 ratio.

For example, a highway with a maximum speed of 130 km/h (very rare, max speed is often 120km/h) would have a maximum speed of 85 km/h for trucks and buses. This is often informed by the same vertical sign, e.g.:

“Veículos leves
120
Veículos pesados
80”

(translation: "lightweight vehicles: 120km/h / heavy vehicles: 80km/h)

If a truck is traveling at 100km/h in a highway whose speed limit (for cars and motorbikes) is 120km/h, the truck is committing a traffic violation.

Unfortunately, this happens a lot, with trucks often tail-following (is this the correct English terminology? I don’t remember) and threatening to run over a smaller vehicle which is trying to follow the laws and is traveling within the speed limits. People think “speed limit” means “required speed”.

!onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone

If we consider how religion is often part of political views (with conservatives almost always being christian chuds), imagine being someone who’s fond of red candles, someone who as a cisman-presenting person enjoys letting their nails grow while painted with black and red polish, someone who sincerely worships the Mesopotamic Goddess of underworld and uses Her seal as a pendant necklace, someone who sees owls as literally sacred and literal manifestations of the Goddess, all this while having to exist in a mostly-christian country called Brasil (worse, having to biologically exist in a house rented by a bolsonarista, with nowhere else to go other than the public gravedigs of the cemetery, a place I’ve been seriously considering more and more as the days pass).

Imagine being possibly the only one holding this kind of belief in a range of 500km, with everyone around you parroting phrases such as “fica com deus” (a farewell phrase that literally translates to “stay with god”) and “deus abençoe” (“god bless you”).

Imagine attending therapists and mental health “professionals” who are visibly annoyed by your positive and ecstatic recounting of your spiritual experiences before the presence of Lilith during 3AM, to the extent of a psychiatrist diagnosing you as a “schizotypal” due to a perceived “atypical beliefs” and “magical thinking”; to the extent that even mental health care becomes part of the social bullying you face.

Imagine being unable to find employment because you don’t want to let go of the one you’ve become fond of as yourself (how’s compromising one’s own values in order to be “allowed” among society, any different from suicide, when both situations involve letting go of the one who you’ve been?), because the “job market” requires you to be assimilated into yet another physical manifestation of an Agent Smith (don’t even dare attending a job interview while having long painted fingernails because “your body looks like a male so your nails must be trimmed and you likely need to start repenting and going to church because you’re indemoniated”).

Yeah, this is me and this is my existence. And I’ve grown increasingly tired of existing in this shithole of a world.

!asklemmy@lemmy.world