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[madtomedgar]

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.

[madtomedgar]

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

[madtomedgar]

some of my favorite replies to this tweet. happy lesbian visibility week!

[madtomedgar]

Read long way to a small angry planet and, overall, not for me but specifically it is absolutely horrific to me that one character is forcibly given (life saving) medical treatment against his will which violates every single one of their principles, beliefs, and identity, in a way which they've clearly stated they see as worse than death and has stated multiple times they do not want. And this is treated by the narrative as a good thing.

[madtomedgar]

Best Passover lunch I'm calling "your zayde was right": chopped liver with onions, charoset, horseradish (the good stuff) on matzah with kosher dills and some macaroons

[madtomedgar]

Assume they have access to ikea furniture

[madtomedgar]

Hear me out

[madtomedgar]

Got food poisoning again lads

[madtomedgar]

Oh yeah, that's the stuff. The secret Massachusetts sauce. (Bonus points, if you file your marriage license in Boston there are no gender markers on it)

[madtomedgar]

reddit is having a glitch where it puts the wrong captions over photos and it’s the only thing i care about right now

[madtomedgar]

The thing about the r slur is that people who are using it again are indeed using it as a slur. This isn't a word that is being reclaimed. This is a word that is once again being used 100% as a slur. You're being a bigot if you're using it against others. Straight up. There isn't another argument to be made. Knock it tf off.

[madtomedgar]

just encountered a spider so big I very seriously considered downloading tinder exclusively to find a man to come over and move it outside

[madtomedgar]

A series of important facts:

1. Zhu Zanjin has cute tiny dogs

2. He carries them around in unexpected ways

3. Sometimes he puts them in Jin Guangyao’s costume

4. Jin Guangyao was the one who bought Fairy, so he’s canonically not anti-dog (forget the threat to kill her, he was a little stressed that day ok)

5. According to the American Kennel Club, small Pekingese (4-5 pounds) were sometimes called “sleeve dogs” because Chinese nobility would use them as personal guard dogs, hidden in their sleeves

CONCLUSION:

We need a remake of The Untamed that’s exactly the same except for one crucial element

LET JIN GUANGYAO HAVE A PUPPY

[madtomedgar]

Gittel found another coyote yesterday. This time she growled at it and it stared at her. Now she is afraid of the outdoors 🤦‍♂️

[madtomedgar]

People who have never taken public transit before seem to be under the impression that everyone on a bus is ready to stab you meanwhile I have never had that problem and I get to read while I’m stuck in traffic and they don’t.

Also I don’t get stuck in traffic much anyways because the drivers keep going on the freeway even though it gets clogged up with traffic and it’s literally faster to drive on the surface streets where the busses go but whatever I don’t need to pay for a gym membership because I walk to the bus and meanwhile what are you spending your money on? Oil changes so you can keep getting stuck in traffic?