There are two different things mentioned here, which I feel I need to clarify:

First, what you said about merging / creating a PR with broken tests. Absolutely you shouldn’t do that, because you should only merge once the feature is finished. If a test doesn’t work, then either it’s testing for the wrong aspect and should be rewritten, or the functionality doesn’t work 100% yet, so the feature isn’t ready to get merged. Even if you’re waiting for some other feature to get ready, because you need to integrate it or something, you’re still waiting, so the feature isn’t ready.

At the same time, the OP’s point about tests being supposed to fail at first isn’t too far off the mark either, because that’s precisely how TDD works. If you’re applying that philosophy (which I personally condone), then that’s exactly what you do: Write the test first, checking for expected behaviour (which is taken from the specification), which will obviously fail, and only then write the code implementing that behaviour.

But, even then, that failing test should be contained to e.g. the feature branch you’re working on, never going in a PR while it’s still failing.

Once that feature has been merged, then yes, the test should never fail again, because that indicates a new change having sabotaged some area of that feature. Even if the new feature is considered “essential” or “high priority” while the old feature is not, ignoring the failure is one of the easiest ways to build up technical debt, so you should damn well fix that now.

If you want the magic explained, here’s a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Welch

Because I didn’t know absurdism, I read the second one differently at first:

[The] nothing matters.

And I immediately had to think of this gem:

“But it doesn’t do anything!” - “No, it does nothing.”

Depending on the stuffing, I might actually rather take the seat, just because it’s got armrests.

That may be true for smaller cities, but in bigger cities it becomes impossible, because there just isn’t enough space to house all the people near areas of interest. Cars don’t factor in there at all. Give me a subway for the major areas, and perhaps a tram or bus system so you don’t need that many subway stations in the residential areas, and you can have car-free city centers.

I don’t really like including pedestrians in there. Like sure, you can fit a bunch of people in a small area, but another point you shouldn’t ignore is the throughput over time, and pedestrians are by their nature rather slow. Obviously if you’re looking at shopping in a street lined by shops left and right, then that street becomes tailor-made for pedestrian traffic (and nothing else except perhaps bicycles). But public transport is much better suited for travelling any further distances, and that should be the main focus when deciding to ditch cars.

That’s something I would disagree with though. “Sticking with plain HTML and CSS” is way more work, and often has significantly less functionality, than building a website with a framework.