“I do understand.” No, you are not capable of understanding. This is like if someone who you told about losing a dog was like, “I haven’t gone through that, but I watched Marley and Me so I understand,” and that someone is also a Roomba.

The current regime took a week to abolish USAID, which is three times as old and was not in the news every day for brutalizing children

“We cannot just abolish ICE!”

Bestie, you are older than ICE.

One of the things I’m really struggling with about what’s going on in Minnesota is that if you describe what’s going on in plain, factual ways to someone who’s not paying close attention you sound completely, bugfuck crazy

cold weather is so stupid. why did i ever leave my beloved sonoran desert (remembering other seasons exist) oh right

the new york times interviewed the parasite living in your small intestine and it expressed resentment that you're not eating enough junk food

Yes, immigration agents not only took Arnoldo's phone, the 10th grader had to use Find My Phone to locate it — in a vending machine for used electronics, close to an ICE detention center.

Read the full story here:
www.propublica.org/article/vide...

trolley problem drawing with a white tesla model y parked on top of the switch separating the two groups of victims

a variant of the trolley problem known as the “obama streetcar” problem in which it is not known when the trolley will be able to strike the victims because there’s a car parked on the tracks

It is always a hypothetical "what if I need to drive 200mph to rush my child to the hospital??? if the government limited my speed they'd kill my child!" and so we must simply accept 40k+ annual road deaths a year in the US.

“It is, frankly, demonstrative of the way that too many local and state governments treat their transit systems, which is a mechanism to move poor people around,” Freemark said. “Board members don’t see themselves as users of the system.”

Most members of the board that manages transit in the Twin Cities—the Met Council—rarely actually use transit, a story that’s all too familiar around the nation.

8 of 17 members never rode over the last year. 2 others took just 1 trip each.

www.msn.com/en-us/autos/...

DDOT continues to publish before/after analyses of safety projects. The numbers for the 9th street NW bike lanes suggest that we should be doing these projects everywhere we can. Crashes plummeted, pedestrian and bike traffic skyrocketed, and vehicle travel times dropped.

Me on a candlelit vigil for AIDS in 1987.

Me last week. Looking pretty healthy for 58 (28 years living with HIV).

I was diagnosed with #HIV in 1998, when I was 30.
Many of my friends had died of AIDS. I did not expect to live to 50.
I’m 58 now.
HIV treatment works.
Treatment also makes it impossible for me to pass HIV on during sex.
Ensure HIV treatment for all.
End HIV stigma.
#WorldAIDSDay

Nothing like a proposal for a modest amount of lower-income housing nearby to find out who your neighbors are.

Finally, a beer that is not woke

How much more could ACA Marketplaces enrollees pay if the enhanced premium tax credits expire at the end of the year?

KFF’s @cynthiaccox.bsky.social walks through three real-life examples of how people would be affected by the expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits.

Being denied a high office of public trust is not a criminal punishment. There is only 1 president and 500-odd Congressmembers in a nation of 330 million. 99.99% of Americans do not occupy an office of public trust at any given time and do just fine as private citizens.

We can and should be picky.

"Cities should remain museum pieces for incumbents and any newcomer is strictly a burden" is the most loser mindset that powers the most loser politics in America today.

Zoning rules? Tradition, change aversion, + vibes

Parking requirements? Egregiously bad science + vibes

Traffic engineering? Morally abhorrent value judgments about the level of injury and death we’ll accept in exchange for motorist speed and convenience (vibes)

Building codes? Tradition + vibes

If I have learned anything from my time in urban planning, it’s this:

More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days. The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. Our tally — almost certainly incomplete — includes people who were held for days without a lawyer. And near...

Justice Brett Kavanaugh: “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen...they promptly let the individual go."

The reality: Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents.

A must read from the very talented @nicolefoy.bsky.social:

Barring the development of a vaccine with sterilizing immunity, or a global 2-3 week shutdown with 100% compliance, eradication is impossible. It’s not remotely feasible to expect a second quarantine, let alone one with perfect adherence.

"Every day at 6 am, Bilma boards a bus that shuttles her to downtown Los Angeles’s Fashion District. When she reaches the garment factory an hour later, she starts working immediately, without punching in. Like thousands of other garment workers in the United States, Bilma’s wages aren’t tethered to the clock but rather to the quantity of operations she executes. Three cents for a zipper or sleeve, five cents for a collar, and seven cents to prepare the top part of a skirt before she passes it onto the next sewing operator in line. Assembling an entire dress earns her a mere 15 cents. Bilma toils away on garments primarily for fast-fashion labels such as Fashion Nova, Lulus, and Lucy in the Sky, who prioritize quickly stocking on-trend items over the quality of materials. These companies peddle things like $80 maxi dresses, $25 poplin dress shirts, and $5 crop tops, all modeled by beautiful people and bedecked with the tantalizing promise of low-cost glamor."

"This worker payment system, known as “piecework” in the garment industry, is how US-based manufacturers can sidestep labor laws that require companies to pay at least the minimum wage. Rather than compensating Bilma for the exhausting 12-hour shifts—a regimen that, according to LA County’s minimum wage requirement, should yield $202.80—her pay is determined by the individual tasks she performs, which can fluctuate daily. Despite her adept handling of hundreds of garments a day, Bilma’s earnings typically linger around $50 per day. That’s $300 weekly for the standard six-day grind and $350 if she opts for Sunday labor. Doing what she can with this modest income, Bilma spends $400 a month to live in a two-bedroom apartment with six other people, some of whom are day laborers. In this crowded arrangement, two occupants squeeze into each bedroom, while two more lay claim to the living room. Bilma sleeps in the corner of the bustling kitchen."

I interviewed one of these factory workers in Los Angeles. She gets paid three cents to sew a zipper, five cents for a collar, and seven cents to prepare the top part of a skirt.

This is how fast fashion brands like Fashion Nova can put "Made in USA" tags on dress shirts that retail for only $25

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

i desperately want everyone involved in the destruction of USAID to have to, st the very least, answer to the american people for the suffering and misery they have caused apnews.com/article/myan...

An unmarked crosswalk across five lanes of a road with a posted 40 mph speed limit.

The other unmarked crosswalk across five lanes of a road with a posted 40 mph speed limit.

An unmarked crosswalk across five lanes of a road with a posted 40 mph speed limit, from the other side.

The other unmarked crosswalk across five lanes of a road with a posted 40 mph speed limit, from the other side.

Good morning to everyone who knows how many crosswalks there are at this intersection, according to Maryland law.

adjusted to reflect the shorter point spacing, though with the mid day drive time we discussed

i think one thing people have a hard time grasping is that the central figures of the trump administration are not bad as in "the worst republican blowhard you know," but bad as in "the worst people you have ever heard of." donald trump is a serial rapist whose best friend was a pedophile.

The Pentagon City Costco is the only one I’ve seen that breaks this trend, one block from the metro.

driver staring at a phone They came out of nowhere

Maybe we should stop worrying so much about the screens our kids are on and start worrying about the screens the adults are on.

This was the perfect ideal of development - US dollars supporting US farmers to make a cheap product that literally saves starving children's lives. You couldn't get a better story. And that didn't matter. It didn't save it from the cuts. It's gone and children are dying of starvation