Michelle

Enshittification 101:

Any service you subscribe to will jack up your prices arbitrarily until you notice a problem.

You will then get a huge discount by switching to a competitor.

Picture of wide, blank, dead downtown street

If your downtown still has many wide and fast one-way streets, then your priority is to move cars as fast as possible thru a weak downtown. It’s NOT to create a vibrant downtown, help downtown retailers, keep people safe, support walkability and accessibility, reduce pollution, etc. #TrafficSewers

Everything that happens with this regime is a hidden for-profit enterprise for someone that made a donation/bribe to the president. We are all getting fleeced.

Only someone who avoided the draft would want to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War.

Republicans are stupid. But let’s use our tax money for George R Brown expansion, NRG upgrades, and other corporate welfare.

The League strongly condemns Texas's harmful new maps, which were designed to silence voters and rig elections. Texans deserve fair maps drawn to reflect their communities — not partisan lines manipulated to entrench power.

www.lwv.org/newsroom/pre...

@douglewin.bsky.social:
"One acre of corn for ethanol = 25,000 miles in a Ford F-150.
One acre of solar = 700,000 miles in an F-150 Lightning.

That’s the scale of possibility Bill McKibben laid out on the Energy Capital Podcast."

#alwaysbecharging
www.douglewin.com/p/here-comes...

If I still taught I would have a current events lesson every day where students find examples of politicians breaking these ‘commandments’ and giving a report to the class about it.

Spend money on aesthetics for guests but yes - leave taxpayers with crap roads, crap sidewalks, less mobility by cutting the trains voters passed and spend money tearing out bike lanes under cover of darkness. This mayor sux! I hope no one comes because why would anyone dare come to USA right now?

Golf Carts Have Taken Over Suburbia. Cue the Resistance. Demand for street legal carts is surging despite complaints from drivers; ‘We all hate you’

"Demand for street legal carts is surging despite complaints from drivers; ‘We all hate you’."

Motorists hate other motorists, golf cart folks, people on bikes, pedestrians, and transit vehicles. Maybe it's time we consider that the problem on our streets are the motorists themselves.

love this new york times clip. they recently did a story about how sesame street's set has changed over the years, along with our urban politics.

IG nytimes

Who needs river warning sirens when we can just get rid of hemp farmers.

The Confederates were still the most unpatriotic Americans who ever lived but contemporary conservatives are giving them a real run for their money. -OS

Proposition A was on the same 2023 Houston ballot as John Whitmire - and even got more votes (83% vs 65%). Yet now as mayor, he continues to throw roadblocks up to keep its simple provision from being a reality. That council members can help shape the city debate agenda.

As a general rule, in every election everywhere, we really might want to consider not supporting the candidates that billionaires like best.

Diagram showing how higher vehicles impact vital organs and push people under the vehicle instead of deflecting them.

Diagram showing how higher vehicles dramatically affect site lines, especially for seeing kids. Plus the weight makes it harder to stop in time.

There’s a TON of evidence that bigger, higher vehicles are far more likely to kill somone they hit, crushing vital organs & pushing victims under.

But never forget, their weight, height & sightlines also make it far more likely that they’ll hit someone in the first place.

HT @transenv.bsky.social

The anti-spandex social club: In praise of slow biking In a world where speed often reigns supreme, there's a quiet revolution happening on the streets worldwide: the rise of slow biking

momentummag.com/the-anti-spa...

When you go out there, don’t march for the Democratic Party, a candidate, not your state, or even your constitution. March for your community, your neighbours, friends, family, yourself. You aren’t marching for political dominance but survival and security for those you love. You are defending.

If your city is destroyed in a hurricane this year, the United States will be too poor to help you rebuild.

But if your city is trying to rebuild a democracy with peaceful protests, we have MILLIONS to deploy men with weapons to destroy you.

I'm being told by eyewitnesses #ICE is waiting in hallways of #Houston immigration courts to arrest individuals when cases are *dismissed* due to a loophole. If you're an attorney (Spanish fluency preferred) and can volunteer time at the courthouse to help families please email info@fielhouston.org

Graphic saying that if your problem is highway lanes choking as they enter the city, adding more of those lanes won’t help.

This is true. And even if you think this ISN’T the particular problem your city has, it’s always a safe bet that adding more car lanes still won’t solve whatever you think your problem is.

“If you design a city for cars, it’s fails for everyone, including drivers. If you design a multi-modal city, it WORKS BETTER FOR EVERYONE INCLUDING DRIVERS.” — Brent Toderian

FACT: The more people choosing to walk, bike & take public transit to get around cities, the better cities work for EVERYONE, including DRIVERS.

Anyone claiming that less car dependency is a “war on cars” doesn’t understand how cities (or geometry) work.

It’s time we tell #TheTruthAboutTraffic.

Pic of Pontevedra from the air

“It's not my duty as Mayor to make sure you have a parking spot. For me it's the same as if you bought a cow, or a refrigerator, and then asked me where you're going to put them.” — Mayor of Pontevedra, Spain (re-elected 6 times)

Allow me to address the elephant in the room: The decades-long outsourcing of domestic manufacturing to China was not an insidious Chinese conspiracy for dominance but the greedy strategy of the American ruling class to explode its profit margins by exploiting global inequality.

People spend a lot of time wondering why the left is worse at using independent media to control the national narrative.

A useful exercise is to ask why the left is also worse at selling snake oil and pyramid schemes, because I think the reasons are basically exactly the same.

the american electoral system is basically 500,000 information-resistant people across a handful of states taking a guess and then going "haha! oops!" every two years. this process takes 18 months and costs four trillion dollars every time

How extreme car dependency is driving Americans to unhappiness A car is often essential in the US but while owning a vehicle is better than not for life satisfaction, a study has found, having to drive too much sends happiness plummeting

“The United States, with its enormous highways, sprawling suburbs and neglected public transport systems, is one of the most car-dependent countries in the world. But this arrangement of obligatory driving is making many Americans actively unhappy, new research has found.” Via @theguardian.com

a picture of the apple logo with the caption "0% tariff" next to a picture of a real apple with the caption "10% tariff"

A helpful guide to the current state of US trade policy:

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.

Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

Man it is really hard to be living in the USA right now and getting news about how South Korea deposed their president for staging a coup and then their Supreme Court just said yup, definitely the right thing to do there.