I was watching this video of a live chicken trapped on a moving truck and thought it was strange that it’s not possible to say anything to them even when circumstances might warrant it. All we got is honking and waving. There could be a touchscreen interface with a map of nearby vehicles. It could be voice controllable or the passenger could do it for safety.
I keep a CB radio in my car, and have a few friends with them
It is actually really handy when you’re road tripping together in different cars to be able to just grab the mic and say something to the other vehicle when you need to stop for a bathroom break or you’re having an issue with your car or want to give them a heads-up about whatever.
If you’re fairly close together a set of cheap FRS walkie-talkies from Walmart does the job just as well. Probably worth stepping up to CB if you expect to lose sight of the other vehicle though, range is usually a bit better.
It’s especially handy if, like me, you go camping and such in rural areas with unreliable cell coverage.
You do occasionally also get helpful heads-ups from truckers if you’re listening to channel 19 about road conditions, police activity, traffic, etc. but mostly it’s just idiots babbling about conspiracy theories and immature bullshit.
Why is everyone so quick to recommend Walmart? Corpo advertising shouldn’t have a place on lemmy , intentional or not
Because they’re fucking everywhere, something like 90% of the US population lives within 10 miles of one.
It’s basically shorthand for “this is a common and readily available thing that you can acquire anywhere in the country for cheap even if megacorps have driven all of the local specialty retailers out of business in your areas”
As opposed to something like a HF ham radio which is a specialty item that no big retailers like walmart, to the best of my knowledge, carry, and so you’re probably not going to be able to find it locally.
But I can buy that thing on eBay for 3X more plus shipping!
I get that it’s short hand for that --but I still don’t think it’s good to push people forward to stores with so many moral and economic issues like walmart as the first suggestion.
A simple trucker’s radio is a common item in gas stations and truck stops–not that they’re necessarily better than walmart, but they’re just as common and weren’t put forth as a suggestion
A “truckers” (CB) radio is exactly what I was suggesting FRS radios as an alternative to.
I suggested them because they are much simpler to use. With a mobile base station you need to figure out where to mount it in your car, where to mount an antenna, tune that antenna, how to hard-wire it into your car’s power (or splice an adapter onto it to power it from the cigarette lighter), whereas with a walkie talkie you just need to turn it on, put it on the right channel and push a button.
(Handheld CBs do exist. I’ve very rarely seen them for sale in a brick and mortar store)
Believe it or not. Shopping at unethical companies is unethical . I don’t like people advertising for a terrible corp. Especially a fascist corp.
As evil as Walmart is it’s undeniable they do have everything you could think of under one roof. The idea isn’t awful if it wasn’t so harmful.
Well, not always. Mine apparently doesn’t have any vanilla extract right now. I can only assume that it’s tariff related