People seem to have gone “feral”.

Animals in the store?

No shoes/shirt?

Waiting your turn?

Treating other people (especially service workers)?

Nope. Just a feral return to “mine mine mine, me me me”

And I swear SOOOO many fucking people on their phones. Bitch, you aren't that important. Put it the fuck down and drive.

Yes! A TON of people have brain damage from COVID and have no idea they have brain damage from COVID.
https://twitter.com/yash25571056/status/1745048307335119358

A lot of people only go the speed limit because there are cars in the way

Yes. Covid unleashed a lot of people’s inner narcissism. Bunch of fucking me-mes.

same, why? i didnt see any cops during xmas new year, then this morning i see 3 highway patrols, probably on their way to an accident

Same in mine, in Canberra, Australia. Maybe I'm just not driving at the times they're doing drink driving enforcement. I recall when I was a youth the breathalyzers were set up randomly midnight to 4am

We do have camera enforcement of speed, red lights, and mobile phones

And because the roads are not designed to keep traffic at safe speeds, and don't separate traffic from pedestrians and cyclists sufficiently, when those morons do something moronic they kill someone

Infrastructure can fix a lot of this problem - Australia is like mini-America in so many ways, but we allow speed cameras and red light cameras which reduce speeding marvelously, though I have been tailgated by someone offended I was only going 80km/h* in the 80 zone. They passed me illegally and unsafely

Even the fixed cameras do good work, even when everyone knows where they are as it's hard to speed right after them as slow cars move into the fast lane to pass glacial traffic

I point at the bike I ride as a reason cars give me space, it's a carbon fibre recumbent. Since it looks odd, people see it. But the bike lane is protected by paint on the route I mostly ride, and one driver was so busy looking at my odd bike that they went out of their lane into the bike lane. Luckily there was no cyclist just that distance in front of me - that's a pretty regular person, driving mostly safely, but screwing up. If the bike lane was protected by a kerb the car would've been deflected.

*I calibrate my speedometer to GPS speed, so it's accurate

You don't need to make the cars bigger to meet fuel economy requirements; it's a decision by vehicle makers to make them bigger rather than take advantage of the more efficient engine designs available to produce a vehicle which uses less fuel.

People just went batshit over the pandemic for some reason. I don't know if it was a nihilistic embrace of the void in the face of plague and death, or what, but in addition to garden-variety street racing and dangerous driving ballooning while the roads were lightly used, there's been a huge increase in sideshows shutting down intersections, people just deciding not to pay for license plates or annual inspections, and generally making the roads more dangerous for everybody else.

I suspect that the anomaly in the US might be reflective of the way that social cohesion has corroded in the last decade or so. The pandemic broke us, but adhesion to the social contract has been getting weaker for a long time. People suddenly driving like maniacs is, in a sense, just a symptom of that breakdown.

But also much safer and way more stopping power. But the best car is useless when the driver is browsing tiktok

I'm no linguistics expert but these are the definitions from Webster

lethal applies to something that is bound to cause death or exists for the destruction of life. lethal gas

deadly applies to an established or very likely cause of death. a deadly disease

They are synonyms and most people would probably use them interchangeably. I guess the biggest difference is lethal applies to something that is about to cause death, whereas deadly applies to death that has moreso already happened.

lethal weapons, deadly accident, etc ...

Hmm, they're pretty synonymous, but I think you're noticing this slight, occasional difference in use: Lethal is active, deadly is passive. A thing can actively be lethal when used by you, but when it's something that happens to you, it's deadly. An accident is something that's considered to have happened to you, despite the fact that it's typically your fault to some extent.