I guess it doesn't signal anything. Luxury is about signaling, and an expensive phone doesn't signal anything.
What does signalling mean? Signalling means two things. The first order effect is the impact it has on your mind. When a person sees an expensive watch you might think "oh this person must be so important". The second order effect is the impact that knowing the impact it will have on other people's mind, will have on your mind. When a person sees an expensive watch they think "oh other people will think this person is so important". Interestingly in some circles the second order effect actually becomes first order (stronger). Personally I don't even notice watches but if I did I would think "oh, this will have an effect on other people".
Anyway, an expensive phone doesn't signal anything.
And if you wear an expensive watch but the rest doesn't fit, people assumes its a fake, like when you meet someone wearing a 12k$ Rolex buying cheap soap in a dollar general store.
I definitely see a steady stream of Dashers come into the coffee shops I work out of... I'm still sort of shocked at how many people use these services, given how expensive they are: "More than half of adults under 45 use delivery at least once a week, and 13 percent use it once a day. Five percent use it multiple times a day. But the delivery boom isn’t confined to young people or to urbanites: About one in eight Baby Boomers uses delivery once a week, and so does about one in five rural dwellers."
Our cities are so messed up that just leaving the house is stressful and time consuming. I can't walk down the street without seeing at least one car do something monstrously stupid. I've witnessed accidents, screaming, near misses, people driving on sidewalks, blowing through stop signs without looking, and endless drunk/high drivers weaving around.
I can totally understand why people are holed up in their houses. It feels like a war zone out there.
People who actually live in cities aren't afraid of cities. People who live in the Midwest are told by cable news that cities are war zones because they like hearing it for culture war points, and then the sentiment gets further spread in comments sections. But they're not driving down restaurant business. I'm not an exceptionally brave person, but I feel much safer in cities than cable news wants me to feel.
That still sounds much more dramatic than any reality that I've seen. I'd believe that an instance of a car hitting a pedestrian is on average more serious now than in the past, because people are buying such stupidly big cars. But your scenario sounds like dystopian sci-fi.
Much of the internet is highly neurotic people thinking their twisted conceptions of reality are shared by others. I'm not a fan of the bad traffic enforcement in SF, but our family walks everyday, we take bikes to the majority of our things, and only take the car rarely when we need to transport a stroller some distance (our child is not old enough for the bicycle).
Everything is all right but it can be much better. It was even better in the recent past so one could argue it's not at it's best but it's not a warzone.
Traffic violence has become so normalized that you don't even see it anymore. Twice as many people are killed by traffic accidents than are murdered per capita. Your ad hominem attacks do not invalidate the piles of evidence.
Gratuitious is: Unnecessary or unwarranted; unjustified.
If you think that is is unwarranted to describe crashing 2+ ton vehicles into human beings at speed as violence, I would wonder how you would describe it.
https://run-phx.com/ is a guide to trail running in PHX... wrote all the content / reviews, but was happy to let claude handle the NextJS / Firebase backend work. Remarkable what a good job it did, although it was definitely a conversation
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