I fuck with this energy, let’s get it done!

I don’t know if I can; it’s not, well, in my lane as a bicycle/pedestrian committee member. I still show up and advocate for lane narrowing and traffic calming at the city council meetings.

Edit: disregard. I thought you meant lanes, you clearly mean sweepers

I’m trying to secure wholly separate bike lanes, or at least flexi-posts, anything but a sharrow or a line of paint. Tbh, I dunno how that’ll work with a street sweeper.

Day 30 of being fucking bewildered that I, a non-voting member of my city’s bicycle commission, have stricter ethical laws binding me than those for judges and politicians.

OTOH: Boeing. Had the 737 Max bug been a one-off incredibly bad fuck up, they would have been a good buy. Then it turned out that that bug was just the first sign of many deep seated issues with their production process. Boeing 100% deserves everything they’re getting. Management skipped right over lawful, chaotic, and neutral evil and went into stupid evil, and decided that sacrificing QC/QA on aerospace equipment would be a great way to get returns for shareholders.

[Look inside]

It’s a regex

This is a mixed bag. Where I get lukewarm is that I’m convinced it’s going to come down to a shooting fight with the fascists at some point, and I’d rather that the people who are not fascists be able to educate and arm themselves appropriately. Don’t bring sticks and bricks to a gun fight and all that.

There is no such thing as making “enough” money under the chicago-school dominated business thought. A business should always make as much money as it can for its investors, always. A friend who read Friedman’s works says that the Friedman doctrine makes room to say that a wise business will optimize investor outcomes by investing in its product, workforce, and other smart long-term choices, but in practice, nobody ever reads that deep into the Friedman doctrine. It’s just “philosophical” license to make (and demand, on the part of investors) the shallowest slash-and-burn business decisions possible to make line go up NOW. I will accept arguments about how it’s capitalism, but I’d like to point out that we experienced a very distinct culture shift in business leadership starting around the time that Chicago school thought became all the rage.

Those tech bros are up to something

Oh, I did. I ended up installing Linux mint and used it on my personal machine for about six months before re-installing windows. I would still be using Linux, I liked it a lot, but I found I had a lot of trouble getting multiplayer to work between my daughter and I. Gaming is 98% of the way there, but that 2% is really annoying and it’s most of what I use my personal machine for. I’m sure I could have figured it out if I’d had a solid 12-36 hours to fine tune configs and Google hyper specific issues, but I just don’t have that. I’m confident I will return to Linux in time, but Windows still has the edge in terms of out-of-the-box gaming, sadly.

And an incomplete product; windows 11 was less functional at launch than windows 10. I’ve been a windows user since 98 and that’s the first time I can remember having said that. Sure, there were off editions that were weird and unpleasant, but I wouldn’t say less functional. Windows 11 just flat out was an incomplete product at launch.

And the live service dependencies: windows 11 pooping its diaper and having a fit about every other thing because it doesn’t have an Internet connection even though an Internet connection isn’t strictly necessary is a terrible UX choice. Anyone with half a brain knows it’s because MS has decided that if you won’t let them slurp that tasty, tasty data, then you shouldn’t be able to use the product you paid for.

And the plans to stuff ads into your operating system

And them basically doing the same shit that landed them huge anti-trust lawsuits in the 90s, but we’re doing it again because they figure they can make more money than the lawsuit will cost them, so fuck it.

There’s a lot to not like here.

They do know, but they honestly, sincerely believe that a government of for and by the people isn’t possible for them.

Source: hosted a Russian exchange student. We had this talk, I suggested that Russia could have a state that works for its people and got laughed at and basically told “we don’t do that here.” And honestly, as an American in 2024 watching our democracy implode in real time so that billionaires can have lower taxes, I get it.

My dad was a boomer, he insisted that Phillips heads didn’t used to strip out this bad and it’s just that everyone switched to making shit cheap screws out of shit cheap material. He also lived to see the enshittification of appliances from something you buy once in your life to something you buy every five years (at least, according to the warranty) with a nifty galifty payment plan. Walking into home Depot instantly radicalized him.

I’ve seen that one! I vaguely remember not being blown away, but also thinking it wasn’t as terrible as I was expecting going into it.

I feel like this is one of those things that definitely has to have happened before now; after all, grid-scale solar isn’t something we’ve just started doing in the last two or three years, we’ve been at it for at least 15 that I know of. And hail isn’t exactly a new phenomenon in TX. So I wonder why we’re hearing about it like it’s news. Is this fossil fuel funded bad press? Did they skimp on protection they shouldn’t have?

Ah yes, fission power plants, famously vulnerable to average thunderstorms.

Good point, thanks for holding me accountable to the truth. We can’t set things right if we’re selling people a bill of goods; that’s what got us here in the first place.

Yes

You mean trains, bikes, and good public transit? Because those all mean less wear and tear on the roads overall. Trust an American because we’ve been at this for seventy years. If you guys go all in on car dependency, it’s not only going to break the banks of government from local to national, but it’s going to break your bank and destroy what small businesses you have left.