this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
695 points (99.7% liked)
Microblog Memes
10772 readers
2304 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
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
The entire economy can't just shut down because of some snow. Realisitically the most dangerous part about that weather is the driving, if we just built public transit, their commute wouldn't even be that different from a sunny day. If you dress for the weather you'll be fine.
Yes it can.
Is this a technical argument like, "It absolutely can shut down. It shouldn't, but it can."
Or are you arguing that it should shut down for a day? If so, do mean for holidays or more like a general strike? In either case, would there be exceptions?
The economy will survive if businesses aren't open for a day or two in places the weather is angry
Erm actually, have you considered that line go down?
Okay, I see what you mean, now. I think I was interpreting "shutdown" in a more absolute sense and "economy" in a broader sense. I was concerned more along the lines of utilities, EMS, etc being unavailable.
As long as people don't go driving around in cars unnecessarily, heavy snow and storms aren't that bad to get around in. Buss lanes are usually the first to be plowed and walking in a snow storm is always so cozy. Just wear a lot of layers.
People with mobility issues and even just people with shorter legs can struggle to walk around in a snow storm, especially when budgets vastly prioritize car lanes over sidewalks and pathways.
And if you do have to drive its fine so long as you leave earlier to account for slower speeds and some delays like plows or accidents.
Yes disabled people exist. They shouldn't be out and about in a snow storm. Please don't go driving around in it though. You're in the way of the plows doing their job and you are not as experienced as the buss drivers. You're likely to get stuck and cause an accident. We can let some days be exceptional days, everything doesn't have to work all the time.
I have to drive a van for work, no way I'm convincing my 70 year old french canadian boss that some snow is a good reason to shut down working for the day.
My area experiences snow 2-3 times a week regularly. Thats a bigger issue than a handful of days a year.
And your area probably has the infrastructure to deal with the snow.
In areas where it's a few times a year it doesn't make sense to maintain a fleet of vehicles to make conditions safe.
Given buddy's outfit in the meme, I'd reckon they get snow pretty often. Sure if you get 5 cms of snow in Florida, thats a weather emergency. 5 cms of snow in Minnesota is just business as usual.
They probably just pour salt on everything and then wonder why all the plants and fish are dying.
"Experiences snow" is different from "gets dumped on for hours and hours straight like those once every year or two level storm".
We get a lot of lake effect snow. The bigger storms aren't cleaned up for several days and in major situations like that, sure shut non essential services down, but I've heard people make this same argument about a light rain so I'm always a little skeptical is it actually the weather or do they just want any excuse not to come in.
But why can't the economy shut down for a few days?
In the past the economy had to shut down because of bad weather regularly, now we have all those machines and produce much more efficiently.
There are places that are snowy most of the time and everything works just fine. It really isnt that bad if you are prepared and have appropriate infrastructure.
The economy is tired. It needs to shut down sometimes. :(
Have you hugged your economy today? ;_;
In the past they worked a 6 day work week. They'd only call it off due to weather if they had no infrastructure to handle the current weather.
We could institute not working and shutting things down anytime it snows, it also means your municipality will likely gut their snow clearing budget as they won't justify clearing the streets unless its going to be used for economic activity. They'll instead wait for the snow to stop and only run clearing operations then as it would take less passes with the plow compared to constantly clearing and salting/sanding.
That's one way of saying you haven't commuted by bus, train, or subway in your entire life, I guess.
Yeah, public transit is great for many reasons, but reliability in bad weather is not one of them.
Maybe you've just never got to use good, high quality public transit.
It's a region dependant luxury. Where I live, transit has tons of tweakers and unstable people. Especially during winter. The city doesn't bother cleaning blood off the walls for weeks after a stabbing.
I'd love some proper investment into transit and security on said transit, but I'm not holding my breath
In Hong Kong, after a Category 5-equivalent typhoon hit, the metro system was back up again within two days with apologetic announcements that some trains were slightly delayed due to debris on the track.
Probably not the best in the world, but I would consider my city's public transit network way above the average for what I know. It's lovely most of the time, just not at rush hours when millions of people have to be moved at the same time, and specially in bad weather. I'm not sure what your standard for high quality is but I'd bet that even the best one gets overwhelmed in these situations and it's an absolute hell to ride as well.
It's almost like they're implying it needs expansion and improvements. Maybe if you read past the first sentence without waiting to be immediately outraged, you'd have caught that.
No, I've read the whole comment. And I think it's wrong all of it. Of course we should build good, robust, and reliable public transport networks. But I think those shouldn't be oversized in excess. In this case I consider much more efficient to shut down or downsize the economy, than to prepare busses and trains, and rails and roads for events that doesn't happen that often. 'Sorry boss, the union has put out a message that today we aren't working.' is what it should be.
You still just want to be outraged to be outraged. I DIDNT read past your first sentence because it's clear that's all you want to do. Feel free to reply, but I'll just do the same then too.
Public transit suffers in bad weather just as much as car traffic.
Trains just end up moving slower, trees fall down on tracks. Busses are just big cars and need to drive on the same roads as the cars do.
Subways give zero shits about inclement weather.
In my city there are many stretches that run in the surface. The station I took when I was a kid gets veniced once a year or every other year when it pours and shuts the entire line or maybe just a chunk in the middle of it. It's very much affected by the wether, maybe a bit more than roads since they always set up an auxiliary bus line to cover any shut down.
Yearly flooding is infrastructure neglect and poor design, not a flaw inherent to the subway.
Tell that to the danish public transit system shitting itself because we're getting a bit of snow tonight. In reality, there's a better chance of you being able to drive your car to work, than the train being able to go. Because your car isn't bound by minimum speeds, but if the train can only go 10 mph because of snow and ice on the track, it's just not feasible to run it.
That sounds like an infrastructure specific problem. Many countries have trains that work reliably in snowy conditions or have train cars designed to clear tracks for other trains.
If no one plowed or maintained the roads, your car would struggle too.
The problem is brake length. If you get ice between the steel rails and the steel wheels, you're going to have a very very long brake length, that is already pretty long for a train. It doesn't have to snow a lot for ice buildup to occur, and having a plow to clear everything everywhere becomes less feasible, the better your rail coverage is. If for example you take the railline where I live. It's about 2 hours long at train speeds. If you were to put 1 train on that line, that just continuously cleared the rail, you could clear it once every 2 hours. If it continually snows, that's likely not going to be enough for the trains to safely opperate. Now my line is really not that long compared to the rest of the country. It's roughly 120kms long. Compared to the 2615 km of train tracks we have, you're going to need A LOT of trains that can get rid of the ice buildup. You're also going to need A LOT of people to work those trains, people who wouldn't be needed 98% of the year.
So sure, you could just throw billions and billions at the problem, but it's just not going to happen, and it probably shouldn't either.
You seem to know a lot about trains and snow. Tell me, how is it then that Sweden and Finland continue to have trains in the winter? Or Switzerland or upper Austria for that matter?
I don't know a lot about trains and snow. All I know is what I've been told every time trains are cancelled here in Denmark because there's snow on the tracks, or because a few leafs have landed on them.
But it doesn't take all that much to realize that a very small contact area, with low friction materials, with a slippery surface inbetween makes trains a lot worse at both speeding up, and slowing down.
If train is late its not because of "few leafs". Wet, smushed leafs pack on the rails like film that slows down both acceleration and braking, because there is not friction, but there needs to be shit ton of them.
Ice effects supricingly little to acceleration/braking. Trains are so heavy that the pressure on the tracks melts the ice allmost instantly. Bigger problem is the snow, that starts to pack on parts of the train.
Id imagine big part why trains in Sweden and Finland stay on time is because train companies know trains move slower in certain times so they adjust the schedule accordingly.
Lol, you sound like you've never seen public transit in snowy conditions before. Unless you invest specifically in making that public transit resilient against snow and ice, it'll crumble as soon as it starts snowing. Here in the Netherlands, where we have good public transit but no good snow/ice resistance it all comes to a halt when it's snowing. Recently we've had a couple of days where basically the entire public transit system came to a halt. And not for extreme snow or blizzards, but for a relatively small layer of snow. It's simply not worth it to invest all that money just to drive on those rare snowy days apparently
I get 6-8 months of winter in my area. The system should be designed to handle that snow and ice regularly from day 1.
When there was some ice and snow in my country, the cars and busses didn't work. Trains were still going, so more reliable indeed.
If a job doesn’t pay well enough for snow tires it must not be that important
Snow tires make roads safer in winter but certainly aren't nearly as safe as a train or tram on rails would be. You having snow tires also has no effect on the other motorists, whom may choose not to use snow tires.