mastodon 4.7.3
The people who freak out about trans kids in sports are breaking an important bit of kayfabe about sports.
If kids' sports were really about the things we say when we justify them--teamwork, physical health, mental health--welcoming trans kids would be a good thing *even if their ability levels were different.*
The whole complex exists so a handful of parents can watch their kids collect trophies.
For my friends, everything. For my enemies, CEQA.
The way a human system talks to itself is so, so different from the way it talks to the outside world.
I've been researching a government agency to try to make its work more legible to the outside world. While I'm looking for things like the details of work at a particular location, the data is all organized by funding bucket or contract number.
The information needs of the people doing the work are very different from the information needs of the constituency.
Not gonna lie, feeling slightly smug about having bought an ebike last year
Triple the gas tax and use it to get ebikes to working class people.
Anytime someone I know starts talking about how great it would be if we could undo the industrial revolution, I fix them with a steely glare and pull out what I've come to think of as The Chart.
It hasn't gotten a lot of coverage, but Katie Porter is against the California billionaire wealth tax.
That leaves Steyer as the only one who's not opposed, though he doesn't seem to have gotten more enthusiastic about it since this January article.
Sometimes, it does feel like we're lucky it's Trump. Most authoritarians would use a Reichstag Fire moment to expand their control of the government, rather than trying to build a ballroom.
Trump's success can really be laid at the feet of a single failure in US Government: the existence of the Senate.
Every system we have is designed to be hands-off when it comes to Presidential authority. Why? Because imposing limits on the President is supposed to be the Senate's job. The House impeaches, the Senate convicts.
And the Senate is absurdly biased. A few thousand voters in Wyoming are valued over a few million voters in New York.
It was inevitable that the Senate would eventually be captured by minority rule, and that Senators would refuse to hold their guy accountable.
Which leaves the rest of government without a lot of options.
Increased opposition to AIPAC is a good thing.
AND.
There are many, many people who have figured out that if they swap in the word AIPAC or Zionist* where they used to say Soros or Globalist, they can get a lot of progressives to repeat antisemitic conspiracy nonsense.
Don't fall for it.
*Or "Satanic," for some reason.
Education is not about making sure people have jobs. It's about, among other things, making sure parents don't kill their children by swallowing misinformation about vitamin shots.
These are even more striking when you you measure by serving, rather than by kilo. By weight, a serving of beef is a lot bigger than a serving of coffee!
I gotta say, as a piece of design, I am fond of websites just sticking forty links at the bottom of the page.
It means boring or specialized stuff doesn't clutter the main space, and the kind of person who *is* looking for that stuff can easily ctrl+f to find it.
If democracy functioned better, riding the bus wouldn't feel like a loss of independence. It would feel like using something you had a part in making.
Looking more and more like the only non-nightmare scenarios for the next six months involve getting tens of millions of USAmerican drivers into *something* that's not a gas-powered vehicle.
How uh . . . how many golf carts have we manufactured this year?
Did you hear those AI critics are in a SEX cult? Not sure about this AI stuff, but man, if it's just a SEX cult that's worried, whew, what a relief. And did you hear they're all having SEX with each other? I'm a firm believer that people should have whatever SEX life they want, but if there's that much SEX happening, they must be up to something terrible!
-This past week on Bluesky
I've been learning more about the California High-Speed Rail process lately. (Did you know they're about to start laying 119 miles of track? I didn't!)
I'm trying to get a coherent picture of why it's been so delayed, and on one hand the broad strokes are easy: there's not enough gov't support, and our system gives every rich asshole a "delay this project" lever.
On the other hand, going into any detail gets nightmare complicated fast. Because it's thousands of rich assholes, pulling dozens of levers, and there's never any data outright stating, "this lawsuit delayed this segment by 18 months."
But the whole section from SF to LA has survived CEQA now, so I'm looking forward to the next few years of progress.
There's a whole category of issues that I think of as Cheek by Jowl problems. All the stuff that happens when you live near other people, whether it's slightly irritating or deeply distressing: loud noises, someone using the soccer field you wanted to use, urine on the sidewalk, people having freakouts in public.
The thing CBJs all have in common is that most people's first, instinctive response to them is *get rid of the outsiders.*
Including most progressives! Sometimes they'll pick different outsiders, sometimes they'll just use different language. But *get rid of the outsiders* is still the gut-level reaction.
So any time you want to work on actual solutions to CBJs, you have to fight through hordes of people who really just want to send half the population away.
Was there a lost cultural moment for play in the US in the 2000s/2010s?
We had an upswell of big, participatory, playful events--but it was met with intense hostility, centered around a rejection of Millennial "hipsters" living in cities.
In retrospect, it seems like we stunted a move toward more creativity in the public sphere.
https://buttondown.com/thene/archive/charity-and-sylvia-the-extraordinary-claims-of/
Historian assumes graphic novelist must be too dumb to have done her own research, incites a bluesky dogpile on a queer creator.
One thing I've gotten less and less patient with over the years: people hopping on social media to announce that [group they're part of] has politics all figured out.
If being a Marxist allowed you to predict the future, you'd be winning more.