who-nixe - Tumblr blog

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Connected through our sins

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A good man at war

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sending stones but it’s one of those 3 way calls from a 2000s teen movie

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Illustration from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Arthur Rackham (1907)

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I am not unaware of the negatives of Biden's presidency, and I am not trying to elide or forgive them. I'm reblogging posts about the Biden administration because I think it's really important that potential voters in the US realize that there is, in fact, a very big difference between the two parties, and voting for Biden is not just damage control--it actually does good. It's okay, you can actually feel a little excited about making meaningful progress, and not just hold your nose.

He's been very unflashy. He's not a great leader, he's not charismatic and he knows it, but he's an adroit politician and administrator, and he's been getting things done. Letting Trump win at this point would be tantamount to throwing the entire country on the bonfire. It's not a choice between bad and bad, it's a choice between meaningful, if imperfect, progress and fucking doom.

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please make every effort to vote <3

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As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

-via Wired, February 19, 2024

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Whoever invented "open in app" links that redirect you to the app store instead of actually opening the app even when you already have the app installed on your phone should be involuntarily turned into a beanbag chair

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Hey so if you truly think that not voting is neutral or a good form of protest, please take one moment to think about why there are so many bot-written comments and whole misinformation campaigns dedicated to keep you from casting your vote. And why gerrymandering is a thing. Why the right to vote first was only given to the rich and wealthy, why the fight for woman’s suffrage took so long, and why some people are still barred from voting today. Why facists show up at the booth to threaten voters, and why they pass laws that serve no other purpose but voter suppression. Because your vote has power, however little. And if you decide to give that power up, someone else will gladly take it.

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When absolutely 0 of Biden’s accomplishments have made any kind of news, and we’ve been fed a steady diet of fear and panic for 3 years, no one gets to be shocked when he loses the next election to Donald 2.0.

Posting anything positive about the president here will get you called a capitalist bootlicker.

What do we expect to happen?

Anger sells better. Anger feels better, it feels righteous.

It’s easier to protest against a president you don’t like then to actually remain in charge and keep pushing ahead, even if small, consistent accomplishments are all you receive.

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Good morning tumblr.

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Watched Deadloch.

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5 simple exercises to awaken dormant muscles

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in many ways being alive is about getting to have a little coffee every morning