"The president will be a secret cyborg bisexual from New York" honestly sounded a lot cooler than it ended up being.

I thought having race cars in a city was an awful idea, but I'm won over. Every city should do a race, short and sweet, and if any professional driver in a race car manages to get over 25 mph then add more traffic calming at that point in the track.

It is a good thing that I've rarely had the chance to use it, so in that sense I don't wish I got to use it more. But. It's so good.

BeijingPalmer@beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 2d ago

decent people who have to encounter the kind of wankers who signed the pro-racism letter in social or professional settings should learn to exercise the cut direct, a really tremendous way of shaming someone that has sadly fallen out of the social lexicon but remains highly effective

When you need to read a good, wholesome story to wash away some of the ick of hard news.

Owl Stranded in Open Water 70 Miles from Shore Finds ‘Nothing Short of a Miracle’ While Stuck at Sea

A barn owl stranded 70 miles from shore managed to collapse on a boat taking part in the ‌RORC Round Britain and Ireland Race

people.com

the actual tech is a separate thing but i am 1000% on board for this as far as discourse goes

Joseph Galbo@josephgalbo.bsky.social · 5d ago

Pretty over AI. We need to invent a new thing that sucks.

And here's the best part: "Tehee but at least agriculture uses the water to make food!" Uh, you'd be surprised! Farmers are INCENTIVIZED TO WASTE WATER. To use more than we need, to grow thirsty crops in deserts, etc. A whole lot of that massive ag water use DOES NOT MEANINGFULLY GROW FOOD.

Approximately 74% - 80% of drivers ticketed by New York City's speed camera ticket do not receive a second one. Speeding dropped by 94 percent reduction in locations where cameras were installed. www.nyc.gov/html/dot/htm...

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper.com · last wk.

every speed camera has a big ass sign before and next to it, and they're punched into Google maps. they do not want you paying that ticket, they want you driving in a safe and sensible manner

14 hours later and my mentions are still full of angry treatises about badly behaved cyclists. Bike lanes are not a reward for good cyclist behavior! They are infrastructure proven to make cities safer for ALL ROAD USERS. Whatever way cyclists have wronged you is irrelevant to the discussion!

Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · last wk.

Every conversation about bike lanes is like: "Car crashes kill a huge number of people every day, including pedestrians, cyclists, & car occupants. Good bike infrastructure has been shown to make everyone safer (& doesn't increase congestion)." "But sometimes cyclists break rules & hit people!"

Philosophers often bring up the "principle of charity": a willingness to assume good faith in an interlocutor and treat them accordingly. It's good to do in many circumstances. But it is worth formulating a principle of not being a fucking mark. If not during the rise of fascism, then when? 12/

"Her whole existence was a tragedy, every actor was an executioner, the curtain rose amidst shrieks and fell upon corpses, and the only shifting of the scenes was from blood to blood." American abolitionists two centuries ago weren't impressed with the level of civilization achieved in ancient Rome.

Objections Considered: Objection I.—Such Cruelties Are Incredible

To deny that cruelty is the spontaneous and uniform product of arbitrary power is to set at nought the combined experience of the human race.

liberalcurrents.com

likewise not a dunk on QP (who is pointing out a metadiscourse) or QP-squared: this flavor of discourse is a good illustration of why Occupy-flavored flat class reductionism is wrong and doomed; people quite correctly realize they are in coalition rather than in a meaningful shared socio-econ class

HR @ Weyland-Yutani@professormusgrave.bsky.social · last wk.

Can I engage with this seriously? I am not dunking on QP, a mutual. We live in a far more unequal society than when we were young (everyone on Bluesky is 38) and the hierarchy of wealth has expanded to reflect this

Forgiving infrastructure assumes people make mistakes. A person on a bike who loses their balance and falls shouldn't pay for it with their life just because there was no buffer between them and a vehicle 100 times their weight.

Yes yes it's overexposure and longterm over-rating during my formative years... Get Italian food AWAY from me ffs. And take French with it.

Walter Mondial@dabenner.bsky.social · 2w ago

Name an ethnic cuisine you dislike

I drank my coffee too fast and now I believe in love

now this is a hell of sentence: "A recommender that’s a mediocre predictor of what you’d love in a rich, diverse world becomes an excellent predictor of what you’ll click in the impoverished one it creates." laurenleek.substack.com/p/temperatur...

Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same

What 640 London shopping streets, 4,000 Billboard hits, a million films and synthetic AI personas tell us about why everything is flattening into sameness and how to regulate the algorithms behind it.

laurenleek.substack.com

Wrt the woke reckoning, the internet mobs were bad and had serious psychological and sometimes material consequences, but the problem was the mobbing and not the woke, and mobs formed with a number of justifications, and if we relate the mobs to pronouns but not gamergate, we won't solve the problem

my suspicion is that historically it's been categorized that way because the question was 'should gay people (men) have the same access to surrogacy that straight couples do', which is a far worse question than 'should surrogacy be a thing' (no).

this was fine

If the first woman president is also a SMBC that would be cool

And they're building out an east-west train line 😭

Citizen.Coping@propcazhpm.bsky.social · 2w ago

Massachusettes "Millionaires Tax", which was targeted to fund transportation and education, has been a resounding success. It has funded FREE school lunch for ALL students, FREE buses in lowest income communities (people can get to work, etc.), and FREE community college. And "exodus" was minimal.

The ideas that self-knowledge (or, in fact, knowledge-by-another) and productivity, together or not, are what is most (or... at all) lacking in people's lives... I do not have nice things to say about those ideas

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2w ago

Really!

there's a kind of horniness that's utterly unerotic, if that makes sense. people talking about sex the same way they do about funkos. like they're in the sex fandom

Ditto. Sex scene per se, whatever. Good reasons perhaps exist for their absence. Glaring difference in just run of the mill intercharacter horniness without even particular plot relevance necessarily, just because the character... is? Weird as all get up.

Padraig@gullimont.bsky.social · 2w ago

Dunno if that would explain the collapse in scenes with obvious sexual chemistry but nothing overt actually happening. That's the stuff that's really glaring to me. The clooney/lopez sexual tension in out of sight for example, it's become as rare as hens teeth.

"Both sides" always favors the worse side. Worse, "both sides" collapses humanity into two sides, and those two sides are almost always 1) exclusionary supremacists and 2) every other kind of person. It's a shirking of responsibility, framed as above-it-all moral superiority.

I'm so clever. My friend asked me to bartend at her Halloween party, and I'm SO clever

"Video games compete more directly with male-coded mass market books" seems very plausible and I wonder if we'll see a romantasy equivalent phenomenon anytime

There's a community member here who afaik isn't a designer per se but has some time and cares, so they volunteer, the first time EVERY business/event that posts an AI flyer gets shouted down in the comments, to design one for them for $20. This...

GOLIKEHELLMACHINE@golikehellmachine.com · 3w ago

using generative AI to create an ad for your small business tells me several things about you as a small business owner, all of which leave me much more disinclined to patronize your business than i would've been if i didn't see the ad.

waaaait a second do we have lesbian aliens on this station??

Driving a car is incredibly dangerous, it should be one of the most regulated experiences on earth, and it is very upsetting to watch people who correctly don’t trust the cops turn against automated enforcement because the alternative is relying on a cop’s judgement to enforce the laws.

One way to make a city safer is to put these up everywhere.

David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · 2y ago

I will never get tired of my favorite traffic-calming device.