abigail-pent - Tumblr blog

[abigail-pent]

I am not usually in the habit of sharing fundraisers because generally the internet is not a place to trust that a fundraiser is legitimate. But for those of you who happen to know and trust me, I can tell you that this is verified, that I know the people involved, and that Maram needs our help.

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According to a recent report published by the Aargauer Zeitung (h/t Golem.de), around three million smart toothbrushes have been infected by hackers and enslaved into botnets.

The most cyberpunk thing on your dash today.

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which is definitely not an omen

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At some point in your life, you were taught that being slightly annoying is an unforgivable sin. Maybe it was by your parents or a teacher or a friend or a bully or an older sibling. But someone taught you that being slightly annoying is a crime punishable by death.

You must unlearn this.

You must accept that all people will be annoying at some point or another in their lives, maybe all of their lives, and that this is okay. It is okay for strangers on the bus, it is okay for children in the grocery store, it is okay for people on social media, and it is okay for you.

If you ever want to truly love your fellow humans, if you ever want to truly love yourself, you must have forgiveness for being annoying.

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— Frank Bidart, from “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016; ‘The Third Hour of the Night’", published c. 2017.

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“Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.”

— Vincent Van Gogh

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Poll: if your mom remarries when you’re 26 years old is that guy still your stepdad or is he just your mom’s husband.

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The elite belief in Uberized, Muskized cities is at odds with fundamental, irrefutable facts of geometry

The appropriately named Jarrett Walker is the author of Human Transit, a seminal text on transportation and cities that draws on his decades of experience in urban planning; he has the distinction of being called “an idiot” by Elon Musk on Twitter, when he pointed out that Musk’s Boring Company tunnel proposals could not possibly work due to their low capacity.

Walker’s overarching thesis is that city transit is undermined by “elite projection,” where rich people pretend that the way they like getting around – in private vehicles that go from door to door – can possibly work at urban scale, despite the fact that simple geometry shows that this is a physical impossibility.

As in, “It doesn’t matter how tightly you pack self-driving Ubers together on our roads. If all the people who make your coffee and empty your wastebin are in private vehicles rather than on buses and trains, the roads will be at 5 or 10 times their physical capacity.”

This emphasis on private vehicles leads people to seize on technological fads to defend the indefensible – hence the vogue for describing the smartphone as the key technology for transportation, or self-driving cars, or data-driven custom shuttle routes that re-route themselves based on demand signals from riders’ phones.

These all share the geometric flaw: even the smallest cars, packed as tightly as possible, multiplied by all the people who rely on buses and trains, will overflow all the roads we have now and all the roads we could ever build.

There is another flaw: when you make it cheaper to ride private vehicles (rather than public transit), you siphon transit riders out of the buses and trains, and put them on the roads, increasing congestion: so adding “efficient rideshares” actually makes transit worse, not better

Walker tried to explain this to Elon Musk on Twitter, discussing how his proposed Boring Machine tunnels’ narrow bores meant that on the one hand, they couldn’t carry enough people to make an appreciable difference in traffic, and on the other, that his proposal for allowing private cars to run through the tunnels is nuts: “The amount of the city that you would have to level to create enough of those elevators to get everybody’s car into the tunnel at 5:30 in the evening, it’s preposterous; it cannot help being. Anything that is that inefficient has to be only for elites.”

Musk called him an idiot.

https://boingboing.net/2018/01/26/elite-focus.html

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not to post spoilers on main but the book is *about* a cat getting adopted when a family opens the door for Elijah at the end of the seder, it made me cry, it WILL result in many cat adoptions, it's a perfect book

In which I bought a children's book despite having no human children in my life to read it to

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In which I bought a children's book despite having no human children in my life to read it to

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I've been ordered by my lord to escort his ladies to Edo. I'm sorry, but without a permit, no lord or his retinue may leave Osaka Castle. It is Lord Ishido's order. You leave me no choice.

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getting a good grade in self conscious! something I specifically did not want!!