This is really cool, but it would have been cooler if they’d named their scouting missions Hugin and Mugin, since they’re Odin’s ravens that scour the earth for secrets to give to Odin.

I fuck with this energy, let’s get it done!

I don’t know if I can; it’s not, well, in my lane as a bicycle/pedestrian committee member. I still show up and advocate for lane narrowing and traffic calming at the city council meetings.

Edit: disregard. I thought you meant lanes, you clearly mean sweepers

I’m trying to secure wholly separate bike lanes, or at least flexi-posts, anything but a sharrow or a line of paint. Tbh, I dunno how that’ll work with a street sweeper.

Day 30 of being fucking bewildered that I, a non-voting member of my city’s bicycle commission, have stricter ethical laws binding me than those for judges and politicians.

Yep, that’s me. You could probably find a few more good examples of me stepping in shit on Hexbear, that’s hardly the first.

You’re not really using the fediverse until you’ve been told that you’ll get the bullet, too. Sometimes, it’s exhausting commenting something pretty uncontroversial and then seeing like eight notifications and realizing it was on Hexbear.

So let me get this straight, you want to commit mass murder, but you also don’t want to get hit? Idk, man, seems a little hypocritical.

OTOH: Boeing. Had the 737 Max bug been a one-off incredibly bad fuck up, they would have been a good buy. Then it turned out that that bug was just the first sign of many deep seated issues with their production process. Boeing 100% deserves everything they’re getting. Management skipped right over lawful, chaotic, and neutral evil and went into stupid evil, and decided that sacrificing QC/QA on aerospace equipment would be a great way to get returns for shareholders.

It’s not blocked as much as it’s made more and more difficult, because they can’t hard block it (yet). So, the best advice, if you actually want advice and not just to bitch on the internet (it’s fine if that’s all you want, btw), is to organize. Organization is the single most powerful tool in political efforts, full stop. Examine the problem that affects voters in a given area and organize with the explicit goal of helping voters overcome those barriers. I’m not just talking about getting people to the polls, I’m talking demanding local policy changes, getting after state legislators, yelling at anyone who will (and many who won’t) listen, organize and run local campaigns for city council or county supervisor. Those races can actually be competitive in deep red/blue areas, especially if locals know a particular person on their team is a shithead. Those positions also hold a shocking amount of power, and open up political communication channels that would otherwise be inaccessible. Idk if you’re a communist, and I don’t care, the American communists of the 1800s didn’t just sit back and wait for the US to collapse, they got out there and faced likely being murdered to try and organize slaves to break up an unjust system. Get outside and stomp some grass if you want to see something different, bitching on the internet won’t change anything.

While gerrymandering and voter suppression aren’t nothing, the system is just completely incapable of responding to signals it never receives. If you don’t vote, the system is not incentivized or designed to promote people who have your political interests in mind. There’s a lot of critical reforms that need to happen, none of them as urgent as ranked choice voting, but as little as your vote means for a federal election:

• It means A LOT MORE for local elections, and these people have a shocking amount of power for how much people care about local races.

• It’s still at least some signal to the system that can be interpreted or responded to. It can’t hurt. Throw your vote away on RFK or the Libertarian Party if you want. Hell, I voted for Jorgensen last election. But I’m telling you that not voting when you could is almost always going to lead to the worst possible outcome for people who share your political interests.

[Look inside]

It’s a regex

Good to know our government can still get shit done when it’s something fucking stupid.

There is no such thing as making “enough” money under the chicago-school dominated business thought. A business should always make as much money as it can for its investors, always. A friend who read Friedman’s works says that the Friedman doctrine makes room to say that a wise business will optimize investor outcomes by investing in its product, workforce, and other smart long-term choices, but in practice, nobody ever reads that deep into the Friedman doctrine. It’s just “philosophical” license to make (and demand, on the part of investors) the shallowest slash-and-burn business decisions possible to make line go up NOW. I will accept arguments about how it’s capitalism, but I’d like to point out that we experienced a very distinct culture shift in business leadership starting around the time that Chicago school thought became all the rage.

Those tech bros are up to something

The US government saving big money on fleet expenses by all travelling in the same clown car.

I’ve really been waiting for gas stations to jump in on this. Tying it to vehicle manufacturers just doesn’t make that much sense to me, not nearly as much sense as using the companies whose mission is already to deliver energy to vehicles. You need a tiny fraction of the infra for electric charging that you need to supply gas. Shell or Chevron could EASILY ink deals with, say, Starbucks, to put one or two chargers in every Starbucks parking lot in the country and just sit back and laugh as the money rolls in. And yet, they just keep pushing for exclusively fossil fuels.

AFAICT, the charger network is a huge part of Tesla’s value proposition. Laying off the entire 500 person team like this is going to be a massive, massive disruption no matter what anyone says, you can’t just patch it with [checks notes] an entirely different team. It’s going to take that new team months to get up to date, put out fires, find their bearings, etc. and by that point, issues are already snowballing. The rapport and contacts problem is also going to be enormous; basically shit canning all of the company’s industry/logistics ambassadors is what, in any other light, would be called a disaster. This is going to be a clusterfuck, and that’s before any competitors interested in starting their own charger network start scooping these newly available specialists up.

It’s incredible to see this man still idolized, even by bosses and other execs, as he tanks not just one but two household name businesses AT THE SAME TIME.

Oh, I did. I ended up installing Linux mint and used it on my personal machine for about six months before re-installing windows. I would still be using Linux, I liked it a lot, but I found I had a lot of trouble getting multiplayer to work between my daughter and I. Gaming is 98% of the way there, but that 2% is really annoying and it’s most of what I use my personal machine for. I’m sure I could have figured it out if I’d had a solid 12-36 hours to fine tune configs and Google hyper specific issues, but I just don’t have that. I’m confident I will return to Linux in time, but Windows still has the edge in terms of out-of-the-box gaming, sadly.