there’s some real deadpan gold in this one, such as the immaculate:

How do you feel about becoming a political lightning rod?

People occasionally just flip [me] off or whatever, but nobody’s come up to me and tried to make a statement about anything. Personally, it’s kind of dumb. It’s just a vehicle. So it’s ironic that it would even become a political statement, but nonetheless it is. [Editor’s note: Taylor was arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He was later pardoned by President Trump.]

here’s the website for this initiative:

https://www.eqrdtu.org/eqr-debtors-united

of note: Italian dockworkers are threatening to shut down Europe if this flotilla is not allowed through or if contact is lost with the flotilla:

Speaking at a rally on the docks of Genoa, one of Europe’s largest ports, a dockworker representing the USB union said that if communication with the flotilla were lost “even for just 20 minutes,” port workers would immediately block all shipments to Israel, regardless of their content.

“Around mid-September, these boats will arrive near the coast of Gaza. If we lose contact with our boats, with our comrades, even for just 20 minutes, we will shut down all of Europe,” said the dockworker, a video of whom has circulated widely online and in Italian media but who has not been identified.

“From this region 13 to 14,000 containers leave every year for Israel, not a single nail will leave anymore,” he added.

What about changing the parking requirements to be vehicle agnostic? Require construction projects to have parking for X people, rather than X cars, and consider the requirement met if it’s a mix of bicycle parking, cargo bicycle parking, and car parking.

this is already how most parking mandates work (they’re not for X amount of cars, they’re obliged to have a set ratio of parking spaces to people), and changing it in this manner would almost certainly lead to no change because Los Angeles is extremely car-dependent and sprawling, and bicycling is only useful with actual pro-bike infrastructure which largely doesn’t exist.

It’s not a coincidence this is happening alongside age verification and outright bans. It’s all one big manufactured moral panic to isolate a vulnerable population I won’t give an once because people like you won’t stop taking.

you are the sort of uncritical, single-minded person who is going to help turn us all into digital serfs on a latifundium that can never be overthrown and permanently enriches a class of technolibertarian freaks that want to remake society in their image. the fact of the matter is smart phones as a whole are arguably the most successful corporate mechanism to privatize social life yet devised, and any “liberation” you think can be derived from them by any class of people is illusory without overthrowing capitalism. the phone companies and the apps they host have successfully positioned themselves as middlemen with free ability to hoover up an endless amount of “consensually given” data that can then be used to quantify said social life, commodify our personhood, and preemptively snuff out any real competition to the existing economic oligopoly. if you were to structure a system so incapable of being challenged that we’re doomed to live under it forever, this would be a pretty good way to do that.

children, needless to say, are especially not liberated by this state of affairs–or by the future that people like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg want to build and which you seem to want to enable–and giving them free rein online in this absolutist way because you want to “emancipate them” is, ironically, often the best way to ensure capitalists exploit their labor and data in the current system. Roblox, for example, has made a fucktillion dollars off of your subtextually proposed strategy of just “letting kids be kids”–those children have essentially provided the company with a free, uncompensated, popular series of games for them to exploit the entire value of. totally coincidentally, they don’t even spend any of that money they’ve made protecting children from the actual social harms children could be exposed to on their platform, so Roblox is awash in grooming and cyberbullying and hate speech and sometimes even graphic violence that is never dealt with.

You’re also conflating certain corpo slop apps with literally any use of any mobile device, which is a common slight of hand that doesn’t get called out enough

the “corpo slop apps” have like 95% market penetration among people under-18 and as such are the almost-exclusive mediums through which they interface with digital spaces (because they are explicitly engineered to make us envious and addicted, and to make us all into people who live and die for the fix for attention that such websites give us). let’s not pretend this is a serious “conflation” when all available evidence is this is the overwhelming use-case of mobile devices.

Blanket bans are going to cause lots of issues, and for some kids (generally the ones who are already the most bullied and vulnerable), will cause more harm than good.

name one issue that a blanket ban will cause “more harm than good” on.

Actual LGBT and neurodiverse people disagree with you.

let’s not invoke monoliths here, i am both and i think there are quite a lot of defensible arguments for restricting phones in the specific context of a learning environment–not least of which is that it’s hardly “censorship” or “isolation”^[1] to ask them to just not use a phone for roughly 8 hours of the 24 hours in any given day.

of note, CUPE leadership was willing to go to jail over the strike. for a sense of what they struck over, see these two articles from Spring Magazine, and CUPE’s “Unpaid Work Won’t Fly” page

this is significant because it initially looked like Harrell, the more centrist option, would breeze through this race; now, though, it seems like a very real possibility that Seattle will also elect a progressive mayor this November in Katie Wilson. (her platform is, though not socialist like Zohran Mamdani’s, still pretty good and deserves your support)

also in this edition: Democrats have started to introduce bills to bar federal agents from concealing their identity; there are pushes to also do this in California and New York

long-time Beehaw users might see much of this article as the offline corollary to one of the works that influences our community philosophy, which is “Killing Community”

If you want to absolutely destroy a website that is all about building communities and meeting new people, then aim for the site and all communities to always be growing as much as possible. Make that a design goal of the site. Pump those subscriber numbers up.

What you’ll get is a place where everyone is a stranger, where being a jerk is the norm, where there is no sense of belonging, where civility and arguing in good faith is irrelevant because you’re not talking to someone, you’re performing in front of an audience to make the number next to your comment go up so you can briefly feel something that almost resembles belonging and shared values.

the relevant paper here:

Humpback Whales Blow Poloidal Vortex Bubble Rings.

When we everyday people see patterns, we then make deductions from them that tend to be accurate. […] Let people see evidence and make their own deductions

…no? as humans, our pattern recognition, while well refined, often still causes us to make completely incorrect inferences from nothing. even restricted to the realm of the medical: you need only look at what people think made them sick versus what actually does; most people will blame food poisoning on the last thing they ate, or their sickness on the last person they encountered, even when there are many other possible reasons for their sickness.

also: a pre-print by definition has not been subject to rigorous peer review–it’s roughly analogous to a draft–so i would be exceedingly hesitant to even assert something like it having “good data.” even if you’re the author you wouldn’t definitively know that at this stage.

see also the Detroit Socialist article Airgas Teamsters on Strike in Ferndale: Greed Is in the Air

Duncan is an interesting guy these days. he is one of a number of Republicans who was basically run out of the party for refusing to be fascist and autocratic enough, and he was formally expelled from the party last year after endorsing Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. i doubt he has sufficient distance or credibility to make it through a Democratic primary, but you never know. the Republican-to-Never Trumper-to-Democrat pipeline has been a pretty successful move for other people

because western media–at least on the issue of Palestine–is almost entirely biased toward Israel, Israel’s right to exist without change to its apartheid and oppression of Palestinians, and the legitimacy of Zionism as an ideology; Al Jazeera obviously is not, and is far more willing to cover what Israel is doing without attempting to justify it, explain it away, or downplay it

the “chart” is just the thumbnail for the submission, so yeah; you have to actually click through, since that’s the point of a link aggregator

for more on this, see the New York Times article on the observatory: How Astronomers Will Deal With 60 Million Billion Bytes of Imagery

Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.

As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory’s computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so.

It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade.

The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a “6” followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000.