From our heroic first responders to the neighbors who are helping each other, Californians are stepping up and showing the best of the American spirit in a moment of crisis.
Our Administration will continue to do everything we can to support state and local response efforts. pic.twitter.com/0NSLMfW7eA
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) January 11, 2025
Who is the digital director or staffer responsible for this pitch?! Please come forward and receive your flowers. Great video! pic.twitter.com/pZ9zmTdaGv
— Symone D. Sanders Townsend (@SymoneDSanders) January 9, 2025
I'm confident that a century from now, future Americans will look back on the work we’ve done—much as we look at the Hoover Dam—and see how the Biden-Harris Administration's "Big Deal" for infrastructure made big things possible. pic.twitter.com/SQEjzm8Mi6
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) December 31, 2024
President Biden is doing what every President in history has done. Using the last months of his Presidency to lock in policy he supports. Fake never-Trump Conservative "intellectuals" (aka the dumbest sons of bitches on the planet) want you to believe this is somehow an "abuse of… https://t.co/eV5fZMWyN7
— You Should've Said Nicer Things About Joe Biden (@What46HasDone) January 3, 2025
President Biden is doing what every President in history has done. Using the last months of his Presidency to lock in policy he supports. Fake never-Trump Conservative “intellectuals” (aka the dumbest sons of bitches on the planet) want you to believe this is somehow an “abuse of power” because he’s doing things like making it harder for their parent’s Country Club buddies from destroying the environment.
Just because these people find Trump gauche doesn’t mean they’re any less evil.
******
I discovered Tami Neilson through The Brokenwood Mysteries; she’s a Nashville artist, born in Canada, now a citizen of New Zealand. This particular concert was recorded in 2021, as New Zealand was beginning to come out of a pandemic lockdown that made ours look like the pathetic sham it was. Thought some of y’all might enjoy her versions of songs like ‘Stay Outta My Business’, ‘Work A Little Harder’, and ‘Big Boss Mama’. She also does a fine duet on ‘Be Still My Soul’, one of the hymns sung at Jimmy Carter’s funeral.
Nukular Biskits
Good Left Coast mornin’, y’all
lowtechcyclist
Good morning, and apologizing in advance for my pessimistic tone:
For the next eight days.
I’d be more confident about that if I was sure we’d keep the effects of global warming sufficiently limited that any remaining historians in 2125 weren’t looking back and cursing this entire era. But that one’s still up in the air. At least, I hope it is.
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
Good morning.
NotMax
Weekend watch.
Calling all oldsters. Bet you recognize at least one of these names from households of yore.
;)
zhena gogolia
@lowtechcyclist: I’ve also been refraining from giving my response to Sens. Bennet and Schiff in the video above.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
China still has an opportunity to exercise leadership.
TBone
https://www.msn.com/en-us/crime/general/men-detained-outside-kamala-harris-brentwood-home-after-burglary-call/ar-BB1riU6K
Kay
So I’ve told you people about my guilty pleasure – following MAGA accounts on TikTok and leaving comments. The comments get a lot of engagement because the MAGAs all immediately start screaming at me.
So one of the MAGA accounts endorsed getting rid of sign language interpreters- a new obsession of the far Right and US media. So I commented “ next they’ll get rid of handicapped parking spaces” and a MAGA reader responded “really? Are they going to do that?” (because of course I know this, right?) and I struggled, I really did, but I wrote “yes, they are” and now they’re freaking out about losing their handicapped parking.
Baud
@Kay:
MAGA plot twist: They’re not handicapped, they just like to use the space.
TBone
@NotMax: we had Sears Kenmore (Dad’s first name was Ken).
dww44
Jamie Dimon is being interviewed by Leslie Stahl on CBS Sunday Morning . He’s not surprised Trump won because the country was down on the economy. He talked to people. He’s looking forward to pro growth policies and fewer regulations. And less focus on social policy . People don’t like being made to feel inferior he says. He doesn’t think there’s too many billionaires. He refuses to weigh in on inequality. Except the bottom 25 per cent needs to do better(?) Calling Musk an oligarch is name calling he says.
Fair weather friend to Democracy and not one at all to the Democratic Party,
Baud
@dww44:
He says what the majority thinks.
Kay
TikTok is FULL of lies about the California fires. Every MAGA in media is spreading them. A blizzard of lies. It just feels good to start a counter rumor- like throwing a little gravel in the big lie machine.
TBone
The reply by Etch A Sketch is *chef’s kiss
https://bsky.app/profile/siretchasketch.bsky.social/post/3lfjww23c3k2x
Nukular Biskits
@TBone:
Odd there’s no handwringing on the political right about that, like there was when people were publicly protesting SCOTUS justices, for example.
Nukular Biskits
@dww44:
Fuck Jamie Dimon.
And, obligatory: Eat the rich.
TBone
@Nukular Biskits: odd is a good word for 2025.
Kay
@dww44:
When Jamie Dimon was asked about the Wells Fargo scandal, where the CEO of Wells Fargo robbed two million Wells Fargo customers, Dimon said the CEO couldn’t be responsible because Dimon socializes with him and he’s a “quality human being”
Hes an advocate for multimillionaires. That’s his real job.
TBone
@Kay: what are the odds, with a last name like diamond.
“Billionaire” is not a qualification, it is slang for cave dragon sitting on his pile of gold and gems.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
True dat. But it just bugs the hell out of me when genuinely smart people (and Pete is definitely such a person) talk about how people will see this era 50 or 100 or 200 years down the road in a way that assumes that the world as a whole will still be going along like usual, just a century (or however) more technologically advanced.
Hopefully that will be the case, but it’s far from a safe assumption, to say the least.
Kay
@dww44:
I love how media give a platform to the advocates for billionaires. Christ. Do they really need MORE fucking influence? They bought the country! CBS will also hand them a free platform to defend their fellow billionaires?
Junk. They feed us cheap, sloppy junk.
Nukular Biskits
@TBone:
Given the context, “odd” is a great synonym for “outrageously and tone deaf hypocritical” or “ironic had it not outright killed Irony”.
TBone
@Kay: they own the media.
TBone
@Nukular Biskits: bingo!
lowtechcyclist
@dww44:
Was there a reason we thought that Jamie Dimon was on our side? I missed that.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I know a lot of people on the right regard wheelchair ramps and Braille signage as a personal offense, and I’m actually kind of surprised that you didn’t get a lot of cheering about the elimination of the parking spaces. I guess the plot twist is that almost everyone ages into being disabled in some way eventually.
Matt McIrvin
@dww44: Everyone’s an out-of-touch elite except for the actual elites.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Nominated!
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: First-class trolling!
My tiktok feed is full of people freaking out over the platform shutting down.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
They practice an updated version of Social Darwinism.
TBone
Seen elsewhere re: Getty Villa and the old notion of wealthy noblesse oblige:
“Rich-fuck culture used to include…culture. Now they’re just fucking lampreys…”
NotMax
@TBone
No effort required to recall Norge’s jaunty jingle.
;)
Glory b
@NotMax: i live near the Westinghouse facility, it’s in Pittsburgh. The building is now being used as a startup incubator.
There’s Westinghouse High School nearby too.
Kay
Ken Vogel at the NYTimes spread the lies the FBI informant told about Biden. The FBI informant has confessed to making it all up. Putting aside what this says about the reliability of FBI informants, is the NYTimes going to do anything about this?
How many fucking times are they going to miss a Judith Miller in their newsroom?
sab
@Baud: Yep. Cheating with grandma’s handicap plaque.
TBone
@NotMax: takes a licking and keeps on ticking!
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: They like to crow about the cases where, if you don’t think about it for more than two seconds, the requirements seem absurd, like Braille signs on a drive-up ATM. I recall Paul Harvey getting incensed about seeing a wheelchair ramp at a roller rink
And they’ll frame it as being about the government oppressing small business through onerous regulations, but there really often does seem to be something deeper, a horror at disability being made visible to them in public. But then they get old.
sab
@lowtechcyclist: He has two tiny children. For his own mental well-being he needs to be hopeful.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
The discussion is still going but I’m not checking back – this is not a dialogue with MAGAs. I talk, they yell back, I leave.
You get TikTok notifications with numbers for your engagement. Yesterday they “congratulated” me for my number.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
That does seem silly although I suspect they don’t make special non-Braille ATMs just to accommodate right wing sensibilities.
Because everyone who visits a roller rink is forced to skate and can’t just attend a party or gathering?
Anywho, obsessing over small imperfections is a tell tale sign of a natural serf who is easily owned by elites.
Nukular Biskits
@Matt McIrvin:
THIS:
NotMax
@Glory b
Particularly good documentary on George Westinghouse currently on Freevee and the Roku Channel. Also available on YouTube.
eclare
Love today’s photo.
TBone
Ohio Congressman Davidson out in front of the pack of flaming clowns today regarding disaster relief. I’m not signal boosting that rat bastard, you’ll see it somewhere.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Baud:
That’s run that thru the official CCP Translator and see what comes out:
“Invading Taiwan.”
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: The person using the ATM could be a non-driver in the rear seat. But, yes, I suspect the story there is more that it’s easier to standardize regulations and hardware designs than to go out of your way to omit the accommodations in some cases.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud @Matt McIrvin:
I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that the folks who make ATMs aren’t making separate “drive-up-only” and “walk-up-only” versions of the machines.
They probably make one-size-fits-all versions. And someone should point that out to the guano cabezas (very poor Spanish there) who keep claiming this is somehow “woke”, “over-regulation”, etc.
ETA: What Matt just said.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: you are eeeviiillll.
And I mean that in a good way. The way we like. >:>
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I didn’t know you spoke Mandarin.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
I noticed the lack of handicapped accommodations in Europe coupled with how so many of them smoke. My daughter is a PA and I said “where are all the people with oxygen tanks and such?”
She said “they’re home because they can’t go anywhere”
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Baud
@Kay:
Yeah, the ADA is really something we can take some pride in.
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
If a rumor that Republicans want to overturn the ADA …were to start you’ll know I’m sliding down the ol slippery slope. But they deserved it.
JML
One of the most right-wing jackass classmates of mine in law school created a practice where they recruited disabled people to sue small businesses under the ADA over access issues (usually bringing in someone who never used the business before) in an attempt to get a quick settlement and move on to the next one. No morals no scruples.
(This was also one of the guys who was involved in the scheme to buy porn titles, make them available for illegal download, then sue people for illegally downloading the porn, presuming they would rather settle then be accused in public of downloading porn. All of them ended up in prison for wire fraud on that one, but it took forever, and one of them had time to run the fraudulent ADA suing firm scheme for a while too)
NotMax
@Baud
“Be grateful it’s just in the leg.”
//
sab
@TBone: That figures. He represents JD Vance’s hometown district.
Jackie
@Kay: I applaud your masterful trolling!
Baud
@Kay:
You’re doing yeoman’s work, Kay.
Starfish (she/her)
@Kay: Some of the usual miscreants were “right-wing philosophizing,” which is akin to dog licking its own balls, about getting rid of sign language interpreters because things that are not for able-bodied white bros are just offensive. These jokers are going to ban dresses eventually.
TBone
Hubby has been accosted many times for using his disabled status in parking lots. Because he can walk most days without his cane. When they start screaming, he retrieves his cane from the vehicle and wields it up over his head, waving it around frantically while they back away and STFU.
Matt McIrvin
@Nukular Biskits: You can see it in Donald Trump’s weird disgusted/eugenic reactions to disabled or ill people. Not wanting to be photographed with wounded soldiers. “Just let him die.”
I think it’s telling that a “germophobe” went out of his way to disparage wearing masks during the COVID pandemic–he has this exaggerated disgust reaction to any suggestion of germs or illness, but part of that is refusal to wear a publicly visible indication that he’s vulnerable to germs. Because he’s strong, he has a mighty immune system. After he got COVID and nearly died of it, he wanted to make an appearance where he ripped open his jacket to show a Superman emblem. If you’re the right kind of person you should just be able to pretend these things don’t exist.
Starfish (she/her)
@Baud: They are handicapped. They live in a state that did not do Medicaid expansion, and eventually that leg is going to get amputated because they can’t afford to keep their diabetes under control
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
TikTokers aren’t the people you read. These are the Trump voters who have a cross and an American flag by their names. This is not Christoper Rufo or NYTimes columnists. Instead they are the intended target audience of Christoper Rufo and NYTimes columnists. Cheap seats. The rabble.
dww44
@Kay: it was really a bit of a fawning interview. No real pushback on his pro oligarch views. No matter that they showed the middle class building in one of the borough he grew up in. Not really poor.He’s not gonna buck the system that made him a billionaire even though his bank has given lots of loans to the bottom tier. Full of good works he is .
It was a very light weight interview. We need a stronger not for profit media.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
More like Antisocial Darwinism, if you ask me.
Nukular Biskits
@Matt McIrvin:
If only. But, that damned reality has a liberal bias.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: They are offended– MIGHTILY offended– at the existence of people who are not them.
Who don’t look like them, worship like them, love like them.
dww44
@lowtechcyclist: I recollect that he was more Democratic friendly in 2016.
narya
@Matt McIrvin: I once saw someone describe all of us “temporarily able” or something like that; even if that’s my inelegant memory at work, the notion stuck with me.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
Very true. Very Taliban like.
Professor Bigfoot
@Kay: That begs the question of whether the FTFNYT leadership wasn’t well aware of the lies but spread them anyway.
Starfish (she/her)
Two people were arrested near Harris’s house in California while curfew was in place, but there was no evidence to hold people wandering around at 4:40 AM in a place that had curfew due to fire?
Nukular Biskits
@Professor Bigfoot:
AKA The Othering …
Juju
@NotMax: I have Hotpoint self cleaning double ovens in the kitchen. They were part of the original kitchen. The house was built in 1981. They still work, and I know how to replace the heating element, which is still manufactured. When the kitchen was redone in 1993, the new cooktop was, and still is an Amana. I won’t get rid of that until I have to. I have an Amana Radar Range from 1978 in the garage. It was the first touch pad microwave made. It still works and is made beautifully, but it has a door that opens top down, rather than from the side, and no turntable. I don’t know what to do with it, but it seems too nice to toss. The RCA dog is Nipper.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Well, I historically have read them, but they’re less in the “professional right-wing blowhard” category and more in the “elderly relatives on Facebook” category.
Belafon
@Baud: the same model of ATM you drive up to is used where you can walk to, where a blind person can use it.
different-church-lady
@Kay: I mean, do we even have lies anymore? I thought everyone just believed anything they want to, and who are we to disagree?
different-church-lady
@TBone: The fuckin’ robot’s eyes are more alive than Zuck’s.
Juju
@NotMax: I have never heard of Norge, or Brown Stove.
Kay
Younger families do this nice thing where they invite kids, parents and siblings to (young) children’s birthday parties. The parents thus meet one another which is really important for parents and happy parents = happy kids. My daughter had one of these yesterday and some people brought GRAND parents. She had 43 people. Her husband had to go get more food.
I love this and think we should have all done it.
different-church-lady
@Nukular Biskits: I don’t want to eat Jamie Dimon, but I would be perfectly happy to let him rot in the back of my refrigerator.
JMG
A straw in the wind? Last Thursday Alice and I had our monthly call with our wealth manager/investment adviser, who works for one of the big Wall St. banks (not Dimon’s). We inherited a significant amount of money over a decade ago and he’s done an excellent job protecting and growing it as well as teaching us the basics of high finance. He’s got very standard old-fashioned monied Republican views, even worries about the budget deficit. His tone was very different than in past calls, freely acknowledging the uncertainty and risk element that is Trump. I wonder if this is becoming a fear among the many many people in finance who’re well-off to say the least, but well below the Dimon plutocrat level.
p.a.
I’ve noted to some right-wing schlubs that whacking Medicaid could mean their family will have to take in ma or grandma, since Medicaid is the nursing home funder. “Looking forward to when ma needs 24/7 care? Looking forward to giving ma a bath, asshole?”
Kay
@different-church-lady:
Oh no. Don’t give me any more rope! This all started with me watching fragrance influencers on TikTok. It started with “this starts with a blast of magnolia but dries down as a woody amber”
Innocently. I swear.
Princess
@Kay: You’re doing the Lord’s work over there on TikTok, Kay.
(And frankly I do think they’ll go after the ADA so it’s true anyway.)
different-church-lady
@Kay: Kay, Kay, Kay… they’re not missing the Judith Millers…
different-church-lady
@Kay: I’m perfectly okay with you becoming the Ken M. of TikTok.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: This is an area where the US genuinely does seem more progressive than European social democracies. We’re pretty extreme on disability accommodations, by global standards.
Though maybe that is to some degree connected to our kind of pathological car culture and the way we therefore don’t assume people will walk or bike everywhere. (As an advocate of transit, safer cycling and walkable neighborhoods, I’ve noticed a nasty strain of ableism in this sort of urbanism, usually revolving around the connection between car culture and obesity.)
TBone
@JMG: my financial advisor (not bank affiliated) was almost giddy when we met recently. I’d scheduled an appointment after telling him “I smell chaos in the water” back in early December. I think he thinks we’re gonna buy during the dip and come out ahead in the long run. Luckily (by my design), he’s only got a small portion of my portfolio, and I can track his performance against my other investment orgs which are on autopilot.
Juju
@different-church-lady: Or leave him in the trunk by “accident “ while unloading the groceries.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin: I suppose it never occurs to these galaxy-brains that they just make one model of ATM and install it in both walk-up lobbies and drive thru kiosks.
Princess
@dww44: I swear I read an almost identical description of a Dimon TV interview on here a month or so ago. It makes sense — they have him in because they know he’s going to say the things, and he says the things. He’s their friendly billionaire.
eclare
@Kay:
I still remember a couple struggling to get a stroller up the stairs at a Tube stop. Go see the world while you’re young, there is no ADA most places.
Fingers crossed we keep it.
different-church-lady
@eclare: My memories of The Tube were something akin to, “My god, this stairway goes to the center of the earth!”
Melancholy Jaques
@Kay:
People keep saying those are mistakes. The NYT does not believe they or Vogel did anything wrong.
p.a.
@TBone: Tangental: have you folks been getting “Summary Prospectus” from your investments? Right on p1, p2 there’s info on admin costs. I think this summary is kinda new, and having the admin costs right out front is 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
This has to be something the Biden admin and or Congressional Dems have brought about.
SFAW
@Kay:
Sorry, I’ve been a bit out of touch — what/which lies are you talking about?
ETA: Is this the Ukraine/Burisma/whatever stuff, where the informant was (I think) eventually indicted?
Another Scott
@Kay:
Yup. People who think there should be no government social programs of any kind of course want to repeal the ADA. How could they not want that??
COLUMN: The ADA is a terrible law and should be repealed (from 2019).
“Independence Institute” is a “libertarian” outfit, apparently.
Something something eat my face.
I starting to become a fan of “You won, good luck with that!” type of responses. Something to make them maybe, step back a 1/4 second and wonder “what does that mean??”… People have to change their own minds, and frontal assaults don’t work.
[ sigh ]
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
eclare
@different-church-lady:
Hahaha…and in the summer, it is hot. I switched to the double decker buses then when I lived there.
different-church-lady
@Melancholy Jaques: “Look, someone told me something, and I published it. What the hell more do you want from us?”
Starfish (she/her)
@JMG: Your person seems good at his job. A lot of the financial folks who are good at their jobs seem concerned about the financial risk of Trump doing crazy thing.
Before the Trump election, we expected that interest rates would be brought down slowly. Now, Trump might do something crazy inflationary (like tariffs.)
There was a stock market bump just after the election, and that bump is almost completely wiped out by Trump running his mouth and saying crazy things. The press may be trying to sane-wash his nonsense, but the finance bros are looking at the numbers.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
Danes have a little roofed vehicle they push with the bikes to transport kids but you also see elder!y adults in there. Their bikes are big and heavy – my son calls his a “cargo bike”. You’ll see as many as four kids riding up front and mom pushing the whole group. They really do get super strong. I ride in Copenhagen and they just fly by me.
I renovated a building we bought for the law office. I thought the ADA requirements were efficient and made my life easy – all builders know them – I didnt have to put any time or energy into that aspect. Our clients are often elderly, many with wheelchairs or walkers, and ADA works very well for them – its good for business.
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: I follow some British transit fans on YouTube and one of the things they chronicle is the ongoing effort to make the Tube accessible. It is happening, but it’s been behind similar efforts in the US.
Many Underground stations have warning signs on the really deep stairwells telling you that you really don’t want to use them unless you have to. Geoff Marshall likes to gently mock the way that most of them have a completely fictitious figure for how deep the stairwell is, because they printed up a lot of copies of a standard sign and of course the stairwells are really all different. I guess that’s another example of economies of scale.
TBone
Donation totals 2025
Trump LA Fires
Amazon $1mil. 0
Google $1mil. 0
Meta $1mil. 0
Microsoft $1mil. 0
Apple. $1mil. 0
Uber. $1mil. 0
Tay Swift 0 $10mil.
Spacing will not cooperate but you get the idea.
different-church-lady
@Another Scott: “…is senior fellow at the…” is a synonym for “HORSESHIT AHEAD.”
Kay
@SFAW:
Yes. He went on cable tv and said there was “too much there” or some shit. I actually saw it, back when I watched NYTimes people on cable.
Starfish (she/her)
@Matt McIrvin: There is a lot of able-ism in some of our local bicycle advocacy. They just can’t imagine an adult human being a parent that has to get a child who recently broke a limb to school (in an area where we have a lot of people who need a knee scooter because of some skiing accident.)
Some of our sidewalks are too narrow to accommodate baby strollers or wheel chairs, but what we really need is more miles of bike lanes.
JMG
Here’s a plank in the wind. A chap named Michael Cembelist, who works for J.P. Morgan Asset Management, sent out a memo to customers about the incoming Trump administration. Key line: “They’re going to break something. I just don’t know what.”
different-church-lady
@Starfish (she/her): I love cycling, but dayum, in Boston a lot of them are bigger assholes towards pedestrians than the drivers are to cyclists.
different-church-lady
@JMG: Everything, Mike. Everything.
Starfish (she/her)
@SFAW: Yes, there has been a lot about the Burisma stuff lately. An ex-FBI informant is getting six years.
different-church-lady
@Starfish (she/her): Wow, that’s exactly infinity more than Trump is getting.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
But they are bad. There was a city bus that my daughter in law used to get to work when she was pregnant. The city of Copenhagen changed the route with no warning, so the bus no longer serviced her (city) street, which is all apartment buildings. She joined handicapped folks to petition the city to get their bus back although she no longer needed the bus and they won but it took months. So for months handicapped people were just trapped. Taxis are insane!y expensive in Denmark.
Matt McIrvin
@eclare: One of the things that makes the deep Tube stations so hot is kind of surprising: the waste heat emitted by brakes. There’s apparently a project/plan to replace a lot of the rolling stock with cars that have regenerative brakes like a hybrid car, which will feed power back into the grid–that will greatly reduce this effect. But I think a lot of the heat energy ends up simply stored in the earth surrounding the tunnel with its immense thermal inertia, so that might take a while.
p.a.
@Starfish (she/her): Some bikers are part of the “This One Amazing Trick” culture, to live forever, fix cities, etc… (#notallbikers)
TBone
The founder of Promise Keepers is dead!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promise_Keepers
Say hello to Henry Kissinger and Rush Limpballs for me hahaha!
Ohio Mom
@narya: Yes, the phrase is temporarily abled.
Though we disguise many disabilities with language. My 93 y.o. MIL is very frail. And she has a hearing aid. Or you could say she is almost completely crippled by arthritis, needs a wheelchair, is going deaf.
We have lots of ways to divide up disability so we are prevented from seeing how prevalent it is. He wears glasses. She’s mentally ill — and we have scads of ways to divide up that group. He’s an amputee. She has (fill in the blank) chronic illness. He is ADD, she has Alzheimer’s.
Yes, it can be useful to be specific, we wouldn’t have modern medicine without making distinctions among symptoms and conditions and etiologies (causes). But the downside is we end up with a very narrow idea of exactly what disability is. We protect ourselves from being grouped with “them” by using other terms.
Another Scott
@Baud:
(Not picking on you; taking your comment as an opportunity to think out loud.)
I think we humans have parts of our brains that are at a terribly maladaptive for modern life.
When we were worried about Smilodon eating us and we had to make life-or-death decisions several times a day, we had to be able to quickly evaluate a situation and decide. We developed short-hand mappings – “Shadows are dangerous! Might get eaten like Blort did!” That same part of our brain, apparently, makes us want to be a “reply-guy” who can instantly and plainly see that experts who spent months or years designing equipment in response to legal requirements and regulations that resulted from months and years of research, public hearings, debates, prototypes, economic analysis, test runs, and all the rest, are all wrong and are idiots. Division of labor, development of expertise, the ability to slow down and think, are all things that we created in spite of that part of our brain that makes us want to jump to conclusions to keep from being eaten.
I was one of those reply-guys too often in too many threads in my past. It’s a hard habit to break. I wish there was a universal counter to it…
Best wishes,
Scott.
sixthdoctor
@Kay: You may think you’re trolling, but you can say any ridiculous petty evil thing about the right wing and there is a significant nonzero chance they’ll make it happen down the line.
narya
Speaking of the ADA, those fking rent-a-scooters get left in the middle of the sidewalk, which makes it impassable for someone using a wheelchair. Drives me crazy.
Starfish (she/her)
@Kay: Some of those heavy bikes are electric now. And a lot of the electric incentives in Colorado went to people getting electric e-bikes. Radpower was popular for being on the affordable end of things.
But a lot of fancy people had Urban Arrow, and I think someone I know was pregnant and riding in the cargo area of that bike while her husband peddled.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott:
A thing I’ve noticed about conservatives for a long time is that they’re sore winners. They cannot just take a W and enjoy it for a while–there’s some bullying gloating, but they’ve always got another outrage they have to be mad or frightened about.
Part of it is that their favorite media stokes it. I’ve said it before, but I think that was the motivation behind the “War on Christmas” bullshit really kicking into high gear–it was the new outrage stoked after Bush won reelection in 2004. And the mystery drone scare of November 2024 was another one.
Ksmiami
@JMG: they’re all figuring out chaos and volatility isn’t really good for the economy. Too bad prices of eggs were covered ad nauseum, but our status as the world financial back stop wasn’t.
p.a.
@Matt McIrvin: Was in NYC in August, using subway. Geez those stations were hot. Think daytime highs were barely scraping into the 90s. GF & I just find it easier to figure the subway system than the bus system, and of course the busses have to deal w Manhattan traffic. Last day &1/2 mostly used busses.
different-church-lady
Okay, here’s where I play Devil’s Advocate…
Does anyone know why ADA compliant doors have to be nearly impossible to open without using the button? It ridiculous that I have to use nearly my full body weight just to open one of these things in a normal fashion.
I’m sighting a very rare example of where accessibility efforts lead to actual deterioration (albeit extremely minor) for the rest.
TBone
@p.a.: I don’t think it’s a new thing, the language is always weasely when I try to read them though.
https://fastercapital.com/content/Prospectus-Requirements–Decoding-Prospectus-Requirements-Under-the-Investment-Company-Act-of-1940.html
As always, I could be wrong! Section 9 doesn’t say for sure. Lotsa weasel wording.
different-church-lady
@sixthdoctor: Variation of Poe’s Law.
Ksmiami
@JMG: everything. They’re going to break everything
Ohio Mom
@Kay: Reminds me of a conversation I once had with a friend’s mother who insisted there weren’t disabled kinds when she was young, now they are everywhere, what is causing this increaee?
When she was young, disabled children were put in institutions or hidden at home. They weren’t allowed to go to school. Some of them died early because the medical technology to treat them didn’t exist.
different-church-lady
@Another Scott: As always, there’s an xkcd for everything.
different-church-lady
@Ohio Mom: ”You didn’t see them because they couldn’t fucking go anywhere you dipshit!“
Starfish (she/her)
@different-church-lady: Boston bicycle culture had layers to it. Do not mess with the bicycle messengers. They are tough people who will kick your butt for being in their way. The cyclists lived in a reality where they could be clotheslined by pedestrians for being jerks and are just hypervigilliant. Then there was stuff like SCUL. They are making art sculpture bicycles and spending their late Friday evenings or Saturday evenings biking their weird bikes around the city. I only know about this because my housemate was in their “bicycle gang” twenty-five years ago.
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Takes more than a minute and a half to ride up (or down) the escalators in the new Madison Concourse in Grand Central Terminal.
Stairs? Fuhggedaboutit.
;)
different-church-lady
@Starfish (she/her): I don’t mean to take sides: if you want to understand what “A war of all against all” means, just look at any person locomoting in any fashion whatsoever in Boston. I’m surprised we’re not all dead.
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: Cycling advocates are also volcanically touchy online to the point that I hesitate even to bring these sorts of criticisms up here.
(I understood that better once I realized that history has a lot to do with that–things like false-flag efforts by automobile companies to push them off the roads in the guise of grassroots cycling-safety advocacy. Their default assumption is that any criticism is bad-faith because, historically, that’s been the case maybe more often than not. “Aren’t cyclists supposed to obey traffic laws like a motor vehicle?” is a berzerk button because one of the worst and longest-running astroturf efforts was centered around that.)
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: I remember a BJ convo about bicycle helmets being that way!
Another Scott
@different-church-lady: 👍
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
TBone
@NotMax: that made me dizzy and wonder why they don’t use elevators!
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Standard operating procedure for corporations and right wingers.
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: DC Metro riders have known taller escalators than those for decades! Especially on the Red Line.
TBone
@TBone: TCM was trolling last night – after Born Yesterday, they showed The Solid Gold Cadillac.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solid_Gold_Cadillac
Kay
@Starfish (she/her):
Some are electric in Denmark. My husband and I ride non electric bikes on rails to trails in OH and MI and there’s definitely a division – the manual riders feel superior :)
I love Denmark but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to think Danish policy would scale well here – it’s half the population of Ohio. The US is enormous. It’s harder to do anything public here.
eclare
@TBone:
Hell, Paris Hilton donated 100k and said she would match the next 100k.
TBone
@eclare: yep, maybe she could offer some hotel rooms too.
trollhattan
@Kay:
@Baud:
Have you even tried to fit your Cybertruck in a regular space? That’s the real crime.
TBone
@trollhattan: bwahaha!
eclare
@Matt McIrvin:
Interesting! Thanks for the info. I just figured it was lack of any breeze.
Kay
@Starfish (she/her):
My son worked at a huge refinery and the tradespeople had to travel the whole plant so used bicycles. They would leave the bike for the next person when they moved on to the next job. So the bikes got older and they started switching out parts to repair and then started customizing the bikes – adding storage, painting them. Then they competed on best bike customization.
trollhattan
@Starfish (she/her):
I remember bicycle messengers. Whatever happened to those? Been years since I last saw one.
Ohio Mom
@Baud: ‘“We” can take pride in the ADA for certain values of “We.” Spoiler: the Democratic Party did not take the lead.
Jimmy Carter’s administration was a big, fat roadblock to the ADA’s prototype, Section 504, and was finally cowed into signing and enforcing the law by protests around the country, particularly the crawl-in/sit-ins in California and D.C.
Here is a good and short summary if anyone is interested in the details: https://disabilityrightsflorida.org/blog/entry/504-sit-in-history
The ADA was signed into law by Bush Sr. It was the world’s first comprehensive civil rights law for disabled people so if you want to use “We” to mean the American people, I’m down with that.
eclare
@narya:
I hate those scooters with the heat of a thousand suns. For a while you’d see half a dozen or so abandoned at popular intersections. I don’t see that as much anymore, at least in my neighborhood.
TBone
@TBone: is no one gonna celebrate? Does anyone remember these fucks?
Ohio Mom
@trollhattan: Faxes and email, also bigger services like FedEx that supply in-time tracing.
i grew up in New York and knew a fair number of people who were/had been bike messengers. In the pre-Google maps days, they were invaluable sources for advice on how to find addresses and directions.
ArchTeryx
@Kay: Don’t think they DON’T want to. It’s part of Project 2025, after all. They just aren’t making it their tip-top priority.
Another Scott
@TBone: I’m sure all of those organizations were “non-profits” and obeyed all the laws and rules for 501(c)(3)s.
Being good citizens that they are…
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@p.a.: I was just there last weekend–our least worst way to get in and out of NYC is a coach bus that goes to the Port Authority terminal, but those last few miles through Manhattan are rough and are a significant fraction of the whole journey.
The train eliminates that trouble at the cost of an arduous journey getting to the station where we are (and because of historical absurdities of the MBTA, the least worst way to do *that* is… another coach bus), so the bus ends up being slightly better overall.
But once we’re there, the subway is tremendous–it just goes wherever you want to go, if you can figure it out. This time, I used contactless payment with the OMNY readers for the first time, which eliminates a whole other level of complexity; now, for me, paying for the New York subway is exactly like paying for the Boston subway, and there’s no system-specific farecard or whatever to keep track of.
Chief Oshkosh
@dww44: I couldn’t get through the whole thing. I wonder if Diamond left an extra hefty tip for Stahl as he walked out the door. My take-home is that they should be tossed in a bag together and airdropped onto an LA fire. Won’t put out the fire, but the sound of the sizzling flesh of the wicked might provide some succor.
Miss Bianca
@Matt McIrvin: And yet, they *are* supposed to observe traffic laws.
*ducking and running*.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Baud
@Ohio Mom:
Except for 5 house Dems, all of the nays were Republican.
ETA: it was bipartisan, and I agree “we” here means Americans.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
ArchTeryx
@different-church-lady: I’ve done a miniature version of that in the original Cities:Skylines game. One of its many mods is a traffic controller, allowing you to set up coordinated, timed, and pattern traffic lights. As its traffic simulation is where it put most of its firepower, it always is an interesting experiment to see how changing light patterns over blocks changes how traffic flows in a heavy-traffic area.
TL;DR: You really appreciate those traffic engineers. It helps that two MAJOR C:S content creators specialize in it – one is a real life bona fide city planner!
Starfish (she/her)
@trollhattan: I have not been in downtown Boston during business hours to know if they still exist or not. I would imagine the ability to electronically send stuff would cut it down, but I bet there are RULES somewhere that require actual papers to be carried from place to place.
lowtechcyclist
@Miss Bianca:
I’ve been known to coast through a 4-way stop if nobody’s around and I have good visibility down the cross street.
But other than that, hell yeah, I obey the traffic laws. One thing I deeply appreciate about the area I do my cycling (northern Calvert County and southern Anne Arundel County, MD) is that it’s a rare driver around here that doesn’t respect cyclists. And I don’t want to undermine that respect by being seen running red lights or crap like that.
Matt McIrvin
@Miss Bianca: There are exceptions. E.g. lane-splitting is legal for bicycles in some places (not all, but when it is legal, motorists are usually not aware of this, if they are aware that bikes can be on the street at all).
The “bicycles should act just like motor vehicles” emphasis historically was aimed at preventing bike lanes from being constructed. If the bikes would just share the road everything would be OK; no need for separate bike lanes! (spoiler: it was not OK).
Starfish (she/her)
@Miss Bianca: Let’s argue about Idaho stops
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin:
Absolutely.
kalakal
@ArchTeryx: Cities:Skylines is a tremendous sim. I’ve yet to try version 2
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: we lost a lot of tourism money in Colorado over that thing. Gay America rose up to boycott Colorado, ski elsewhere, etc, and that shit got reversed. So we can have anti-discrimination laws again.
they worded it in a tricky way, so a yes vote didn’t mean yes for gay rights, it meant yes, pass this law that undoes any legal protections in cities that have them.
Kay
@lowtechcyclist:
My husband rides a bike in this 75% Trump town and drivers act like it’s a personal affront. I had a JUDGE ask me “why” he rides his bike on the street. He actually asked why “we” ride on the street but I don’t so I guess “husband” to him = “whole family”.
I wish he would stop. They’re going to kill him.
Kay
@lowtechcyclist:
So bicyclists being demanding or fanatics is just foreign to me. We have 1. my husband and 2. the older students who ride to school and motorists resent even that.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: In many redder parts of the country, you’re opening yourself up to outraged harassment from passing motorists by walking on the sidewalk, even where there is a sidewalk. Nobody is supposed to be there! There goes the neighborhood!
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I figure it’s a little bit like HIV/AIDS activism in the 1980s-90s: in the places where they act that way, they’ve discovered that in-your-face fanatical behavior is the only way any progress ever happens.
Matt McIrvin
(Transit/urbanist/cycling YouTube has a lot of interesting infighting going on: one very prominent advocate stirred up controversy a little while ago by basically saying the United States is lost forever and people should just give up on it, get out to somewhere better instead of trying to improve anything. And a lot of people took issue with that but, I don’t know, maybe he has a point.)
TBone
@Gloria DryGarden: see, that’s been a blueprint for them everywhere, the weasel words. Not new, but gave new energy to the strategery gambit used on women’s rights, voting, etc. (long list)
Glad to have you celebrate with me. Time waits for no one!
Quote from Robert Fulghum’s latest journal entry “What I Want”
Kayla Rudbek
@Baud: to expand on what I said over on Bluesky, this is how I know that all the forced-birthers are full of bullshit about being “pro-life”, as they won’t spend a thin dime on accommodations so that disabled people can actually have a good life. And if you have a genetic disability, they won’t say a single word to encourage you to have children who might inherit the disability. They’re all selfish Nazi eugenicist scumbags who would be more than happy to have mandatory sterilization of anyone they deem genetically unfit, just like their Jim Crow ancestors.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
My oldest son walked everywhere with headphones in high school- he loves classical music. People would ask me about it like he was walking around smoking meth. He went to college and never looked back – now he lives in Denmark and doesn’t own a car.
After college he moved to Chicago – that’s where the ambitious kids in this town go – and nice polite liberals who grew up in ultra blue areas would tell him we needed outreach to rural areas. He would get mad – he thought they were naive. He thinks they romanticize white working class because they dont know any.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
Marriage equality! Marriage equality advocates during Obama were controversial with some on this very blog because they were pushing Obama, interrupting Dem speakers, etc.
Then they won.
Glory b
@NotMax: Thanks! I’ll watch.
p.a.
@Kay: Was it FDR who said something like “That’s a good idea, now make me do it.”
Glory b
@Matt McIrvin: Thats only for white people. It’s not how the Civil rights movement went.
Matt McIrvin
@TBone: There probably are elevators, for ADA compliance and to haul larger objects–but escalators have a far higher capacity in passengers per minute, so if you can build them in a transit station, they’re a good idea even when they are quite extreme.
There are several stations on the DC Metro Red Line with deeper escalators than the Grand Central ones, and there are a few in Europe that are even deeper. They can present issues for people with fear of heights.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
IMHO there’s a big gulf between “can work” and “will work.”
Kay
Now they’re sending me TikTok “messages”. I don’t even know what that means. I dont read angry messages anyway and I’m surely not reading any from MAGAs.
TBone
@Another Scott:
Robert Green Ingersoll
Cheryl from Maryland
@Matt McIrvin: I used contactless OMNY for the first time this weekend, and I also found it tremendous. It’s so simple to have my OMNY account be the credit card on my phone to which I assigned the OMNY account, so no extra card like for the DC metro (although DC has an official senior card, so rides are cheaper). I also found that Apple Maps will give you directions for not only the train and/or bus to get from place to place, but also the number of stops and when the train/bus will get to your stop.
Kayla Rudbek
@trollhattan: fax machines and email (particularly e-sign on documents) took a lot of that business away
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: I rode in Hitler’s elevator to the top of his Eagles Nest in Berchtesgaden. When Lyme worsened, I developed vertigo, so would rather be in an elevator where I can’t see great height till I arrive.
I found out about the vertigo on a rockslide on the side of a mountain here in PA. Getting back down was not fun.
Matt McIrvin
@Cheryl from Maryland: I’m sure there are privacy/data-security issues here that we’re ignoring in the name of convenience. (A chip card with contactless capability will actually work as well as a phone with Google Pay, but that requires getting out your credit card in a place where maybe you don’t want to.)
sab
@Kayla Rudbek: I hate hate hate e-sign. I haven’t figured out how to print out a paper copy to read before signing. These seems nuts to me, to fake sign something and then not have a copy, and yet it is somehow binding. Convenient but not very sensible.
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: was macartney the same football coach at cu who had to resign over sexual shenanigans? Can’t remember the details, was appalled and blocked it out. Filed it under “ as American as apple pie” a catch word for garden variety pro rapist types of men.
not going to look it up….
Robert Fulgum’s quote is so nicely worded…
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@TBone:
McCartney used to come into Puddle Car Wash on 28th in Boulder back in the day. I worked there while in grad school. The owner was a typical big fish, CU alum, bidness owner heavily into the football program, hence why McCartney was a regular.
McCartney was a certified, god-bothering loon. People outside of Boulder forget that he was almost fired before he had a couple of successful years because while the team sucked, that “on-the-fence” season he beat Nebraska. And back then, the Puffs could go 1-10 in any given year and the head coach would be bailed as the greatest if that one win was against Nebraska.
Gloria: It’s not an icky read:
https://grantland.com/features/bill-mccartney-colorado-buffaloes-20-years-after-resigning/
He didn’t leave because of that, the article goes into great detail about his “revelations” that prompted him to leave. What you might be remembering is that his star quarterback got his 19-year-old daughter pregnant.
Gloria DryGarden
@sab: I usually request an emailed or printed copy of the things I sign.
p.a.
@Matt McIrvin: We used credit cards last time, OmnyPay didn’t seem to want to load, maybe because my phone is old- my google wallet accepts tickets but also wouldn’t take my c c. I’m impatient, 2 tries then I’m out.
I’ve only lost one phone but I’m not real thrilled thinking about putting that kind of info in them.
Matt McIrvin
@TBone: I have some mild issues along these lines but it’s in the zone where I kind of like playing with them as a mild thrill ride.
The Lake Compounce amusement park in Connecticut used to have a sky ride like a ski-resort chair lift that went hundreds of feet up Compounce Mountain and just turned around and went down again. (They eventually tore it down in part because it was too hard to evacuate in a breakdown.) The only restraint on the seat was a non-locking lap bar, like ski lifts have. It was a great ride, but I remember riding it with my daughter and being mildly freaked out by *her* fidgeting and clowning around in the seat–she noticed it on my face. And I’m the one who will ride big roller coasters, not her. The fear is kind of fun as long as you intellectually know nothing is going to go really bad.
Gloria DryGarden
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: thanks. That makes sense.
events from past decades are longer ago than one perceives… only yesterday….
WendyBinFL
@NotMax: Mr. B and I bought our first microwave back in the 1980s, an Amana Radarange. I remember the first thing we tried to cook was a package of breakfast sausage. Not believing that they could possibly be safe to eat in a matter of seconds, I kept nuking them, basically for as long as it would have taken me to fry them up in a skillet. Voila! Breakfast twigs!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Starfish (she/her):
We see it in spades here in Denver (which you’ve encapsulated perfectly) and the Bike Nazis make it into a zero-sum game, one that alienates a lot of casual cyclists and a massive amount of everybody else who isn’t a white professional of a certain demographic that have moved here in the last 10 years from some lily-white burb for their Gentrified, White, Urban-Living Theme Park experience.
Bike lanes and all of the really shitty designed “traffic calming” that’s been shat down over the last year here in the name of “neighborhood bikeways” (Boulder’s are at least better designed both from a safety, biking and car perspective) don’t really have anything to do with safety, climate or transit. Instead, they’re political markers to clearly demonstrate which demographics have control.
Bike bros/Nazis are a lot like Canada geese: loud, nasty, and territorial while contributing virtually nothing to society. If anybody doubts that, try jogging in a bike lane or just observe bike bros in their native habitat.
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: I was an adrenaline junkie in my younger years too hahaha! The gondolas in Switzerland were so much fun. But ski lifts always freaked me out, how easy they are to fall out of. Because as a child, I went on the Salt & Pepper Shaker ride at Wonderland Pier in Ocean City, NJ and was so small, I almost fell out of the cage between the widely spaced safety bars. My uncle grabbed me in the nick of time! All the candy in the bag I was clutching but had to let go of rained down scattered below, causing a melee hahaha!
This ride etched in memory forever
https://www.myswitzerland.com/en-ch/experiences/gondola-to-lake-oeschinen/
p.a.
@Matt McIrvin: 6 Flags NJ years ago, rode an old woody roller coaster. 3 people per car, and it HAD to be 3 because otherwise there was too much chance of flying out. Had light rain earlier in the day so on the downhills there was no rattle, little friction, almost felt like a freefall.
Few years later watched, I think NOVA, on PBS, show on coaster design & build. Job 1 on woodframe roller coasters was to walk the tracks in the a.m and hammer back in the nails that shook loose the previous day😱
Matt McIrvin
@p.a.: Rolling Thunder? I’ve never actually been there and now it’s gone.
El Toro, a wooden coaster monstrous enough that a lot of enthusiasts rated it as one of the greatest in the world, is still running, though I understand it’s not what it used to be.
Starfish (she/her)
@p.a.: This discussion is reminding me of the Class Action Park documentary.
Chief Oshkosh
@Matt McIrvin: Having spent a modest chunk of my professional life in western Europe, and working with people from there even when I’m back in the States, I’ve come to conclude that working in the States up to about 2016 but retiring to any of several European countries may be ideal. My wife and I have put in over 40 years trying to make the US a better place. We’re tired. Unfortunately for any plans for moving, she’s terrible with languages and I’m terrible with people, so…we’ll continue to slog along here. It’s still great on any given day.
TBone
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
thank you!
p.a.
@Matt McIrvin: Can’t remember the name of the woody, but the new high tech claimed-to-be-maybe-the-fastest-or-highest there at the time was The Great American Scream Machine. Had to remove earrings because (they claimed) the g-force could tear them from your ears.
My eyeglasses were on a loose lanyard, and I caught them as they were flying off over my shoulder.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh:
You’re behind schedule.
Matt McIrvin
@Starfish (she/her): The truth is, big rides at reputable amusement parks today are for the most part extremely safe, even when they appear not to be. (And the apparently scariest rides aren’t necessarily the ones least likely to be safe.)
Action Park was one of the notable exceptions, but it’s long gone. It’s a bit like air travel–the drive to the park is the most dangerous aspect of going there. When major accidents happen, they’re big news that result in investigations, people getting fired and policies changing.
Old-school roller coasters where you just have a non-ratcheting, single-position “buzz bar” holding you in, with a yawning space above your lap into which you can go flying on the hills, and without being supplemented by a seat belt, are increasingly rare, but enthusiasts treasure the instances that still exist. Remarkably, many have run for decades without incident.
Ruckus
@Nukular Biskits:
Eat the rich.
NO THANKS!!!
Matt McIrvin
@Chief Oshkosh:
Good luck being able to do that, anyway. Immigrating isn’t easy, is it? Especially in dodgy political times.
There seems to be a pattern of emigrating to Scotland among friends and family of mine. Scotland seems politically congenial but it’s part of the UK which isn’t. Politically, going to Europe feels right now like it might be jumping from the frying pan to the fire.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
As the world’s populations grow there will be more and more issues around humans. Because as you get more and more humans in any one space there will ALWAYS be those that think they are better and will do many things to prove they AREN’T. It’s called humanity and it is often about what humans think about other humans, individually or in large groups. And it almost always boils down to I/we are better than __________. I believe it’s been this way since day one and surprise, surprise, actually has gotten better in some ways. And worse in others. Better, if for no other reason – better, wider communications. Worse, if for no other reason – humanity.
prostratedragon
Good call on Tami Neilsen. She’s one reason to check out that excellent show.
Citizen Alan
@Kay: creatures like jamie dimon are why so many americans are cheering for Luigi Mangione.
Citizen Alan
@lowtechcyclist: it was a big complaint of mine about Obama. That he spent way too much time listening to dimon, who was one of the last people who should have been consulted about the proper response to the 2008 economic collapse.
Citizen Alan
@Baud: the ADA is literally the only thing I can point to in my adult lifetime that republicans are responsible for and which actually helped more americans than it hurt. And so naturally, they’ve been trying to get rid of it ever since they passed it.
Citizen Alan
No they won’t, quite the opposite. They want to force women to only wear dresses and never pants. Like jesus intended.
Citizen Alan
@different-church-lady: it really is amazing to contemplate how badly The Social Network underplayed how awful a human being mark zuckerberg really is.
Citizen Alan
@different-church-lady: it’s not even that! I feel confident in stating the thing that there is a factory somewhere just for producing the number pads, which are then installed as needed when the atms are assembled elsewhere.
The Lodger
@Another Scott: Fagin, huh? Following an old family tradition, that one.
Matt McIrvin
@p.a.: Those Arrow Development mega-loopers were usually pretty janky rides, designed in the days when you couldn’t tell a computer to keep the G-forces and jerk in a narrow comfort range.
Busch Gardens Williamsburg’s Loch Ness Monster (still running, recently massively renovated!) avoided the worst of it by not being too ambitious with its maneuvers, but the same park’s notorious Drachen Fire was not so fortunate. Arrow actually did use computers to design that one… but with the same design principles they’d used by hand, so it still beat the hell out of you. It was torn down after only a few years of pain. It actually put me off riding coasters for a long time, because while I thought it was tremendously exciting, I thought the abuse it delivered was just how all new coasters were. Only decades later did I find out it had a reputation.
different-church-lady
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I’m generally in favor of bike infrastructure, but I think you have a point about bad design in certain places. There’s a rotary in a near-by town where they have created such a blizzard of white sticks and paint and signs that I really believe I’m more likely to hit a cyclist than I was before, because I can’t even figure out where the car is supposed to go.
prostratedragon
@trollhattan:
Meet Mess Kollective of NYC.
evodevo
@Matt McIrvin:
The handicap parking spots outside Walmarts are NEVER vacant lol – this hits MAGA right where they live…