Alex KG Ellis

That footprint is conservative; there were less dense crowds of people throughout Burnside Park & Kennedy Plaza and an unknown number still arriving from Steeple/Thomas/Angell. This footprint is where it was packed enough you couldn't easily get closer to City Hall.

Screenshot of mapchecking.com where the 4-5-25 crowd in Providence is estimated at 13,000

Photo from Burnside Park in downtown Providence of the Hands Off protest march on 4-5-25 about to approach from Memorial Blvd along Steeple St

I've seen crowd estimates for #HandsOff2025 in #PVD from about 5k-20k. Using mapchecking.com, drone footage from IG, and the footprint of the crowd at 1:15pm when I left (people were still streaming into Burnside Park from Steeple St), I think 13,000 is the minimum actual number. 20k is plausible.

This is how the hostile takeover of our government and armed robbery of our money is going. One month in and they're completed 1/3rd of the Project 2025 agenda.

www.project2025.observer?utm_source=w...

Exactly, what's always bugged me about this discourse is that if you compare the Most Online fringes of the left and the right, the right is far worse! Democrats are adding letters to "LGBT" while Republicans are planning a coup.

Is It a Coup? It is bad, it is illegal, and it is a self-coup.

This needs to be required reading for all democrats and lefties. We need a shared language for our time.

“To that end, I’m going to list the potential resolutions from best to worst:”

www.liberalcurrents.com/is-it-a-coup/

A lot of folks asked why I through this January's record global temperatures were so unexpected.

I think this graph shows it pretty clearly: pretty much every other January with La Nina conditions has been a cooler than the surrounding years.

As an organizer,
1) it’s important to change people’s minds so they agree with you
2) most people don’t follow politics as closely as anyone reading this post
3) Some Trump voters were lied to about his positions by right wing media. If they see the light, welcome it

"Wow, should I worry about New England earthquakes?" you might ask. Probably not? There was a big one in 1755 in Newbury MA & there are small quakes like this every few years apparently & might someday be a bigger one. They've tended to be between Newburyport, Portsmouth, Winnepesaukee, and Concord.

DCA crash puts Trump's appalling unfitness on full display When crisis hits, he makes it worse.

"Govt is important. We need it to regulate a whole range of things. When it fails in those functions, people die. That Trump is indifferent to his responsibilities & incompetent means we can expect more deadly accidents in every aspect of society regulated by the federal govt — which is all of them"

Sen Chris Murphy (D-CT) just now:

“You could literally walk
down the street and the first 100 people you’d find would be less dangerous as the head of HHS than Robert F Kennedy Jr. He will get people killed”

Pritzker: "They are either lying to us or they are critically incompetent. This is what happens when you staff the federal government full of project 2025 contributors that don't have any experience governing and don't think that the laws apply to them."

It's sort of difficult putting in a solid day at the law factory when you get a push alert every 10 minutes that makes you wonder if law is a real thing anymore

ynicism is first of all a style of presenting oneself, and it takes pride more than anything in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both these things. That the attitude that prides itself on world-weary experience is often so naïve says much about the triumph of style over substance, attitude over analysis. Maybe it also says something about the tendency to oversimplify. If simplification means reducing things to their essentials, oversimplification tosses aside the essential as well. It is a relentless pursuit of certainty and clarity in a world that generally offers neither, a desire to shove nuances and complexities into clear-cut binaries. Naïve cynicism concerns me because it flattens out the past and the future, and because it reduces the motivation to participate in public life, public discourse, and even intelligent conversation that distinguishes shades of gray, ambiguities and ambivalences, uncertainties, unknowns, and opportunities. Instead, we conduct our conversations like wars, and the heavy artillery of grim confidence is the weapon many reach for.

I'm exhausted by all the people out there who are trying to prove they're each the most cynical world-weary disillusioned person who's not gonna ever do a fucking thing ever except dump on everything and expect to be admired for that. Wrote about that in 2016:

The climate justice screening tool, saved and online: edgi-govdata-archiving.github.io/j40-cejst-2/...

Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive for an indefinite timeframe gives me an interesting metaphor that helps me deal with things like large-scale corruption in government or commerce.

Bear with me for a second while I try to explain.

I mean, this isn't a mystery, we know it doesn't do that at all. Two year cycles means the endless campaign and constant fundraising, campaign donors are a relatively wealthy slice of the electorate. It's also why we get so many lawyers, who can draw on the resources to afford to campaign.

this is incredible stuff. most state DOTs would spend tens of billions on highway expansions to try and see numbers like this (that wouldn’t even pan out anyway thanks to induced demand lol)

New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States According to new data analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, warming temperatures, rising seas and changing rainfall will profoundly reshape the way people have lived in North…

In 2020, we mapped out the danger zones that will close in on Americans over the next 30 years — combining climate data with wildfire projections by US Forest Service researchers.

See what changes are in store for your county.

By @shaw.al , @abrahm.bsky.social & Jeremy W. Goldsmith

Wow! I just today finished a model very like this for PVD, inspired by @smkothuri.bsky.social 's research trec.pdx.edu/news/nationa... I laboriously combined Strava, MDS, and Replica data onto our street GIS, then normalized to align with ecocounter data. If I knew Python it would've been quicker!

I've also dug down to look for the research underpinning of CMFs and speed management guidance and found studies that focus mostly on suburban contexts with a small sample of urban examples. Could use more applicable studies.

Research from Australia on 30 km/h zones (20 mph)

Findings show decreases in vehicle speeds and decreases in serious injuries

Didn't find that people will actually go the lower speed limit, but that seems okay to me

Safety is the goal, not compliance

I have good news for you about the current availability of turnips and sufficiency of infrastructure.

This is my New Year's Eve.

I forgot my go-to Monopoly expert was on this platform! Credit to @danielbfriedman.bsky.social for telling me the free parking thing too!

I think build in 3s means get all of a color and upgrade it evenly?

An even better strategy is to not play Monopoly. I also heard that it's a less painful experience (b/c it's half as long) if you don't get free money on the "free parking" space, which is not in the rules but many people do anyway.

Hard agree that we need protected bike infrastructure and slower cars everywhere so people riding bikes are not squished onto the sidewalk with pedestrians! Also widespread education about rules of the road so people especially in faster vehicles know to yield to people not able to go as fast.

When the streets are not safe, it's not arrogant to ride on the sidewalk. My principle is "don't scare a pedestrian": if they're startled as you pass them or feel like they need to get out of your way, you're going too fast, but besides that it's legal in RI and the best choice in some conditions.

The history of urban snow removal is really fascinating; the obligation for property owners to shovel predates plowing (and autos) and so until cars snow removal was a civic obligation FOR PEDESTRIANS; now that has flipped and snow gets plowed ON TO sidewalks and sidewalks are impassable