olong

Wait what's the Netanyahu bit, haven't seen that

Bike viaducts are crazy, what are they thinking...

Long Beach City Council votes to mandate more staffing at self-checkout lanes The city will soon require grocery and drug stores to staff a minimum number of employees at self-checkout counters. They say the move will deter theft.

Long Beach, CA, just passed a law requiring food and drug stores to assign one worker to every two self check-out kiosks. This sounds insane – the Brooklyn Navy Yard Wegman’s has over a dozen kiosks with one or two workers lbpost.com/news/self-ch...

Observations Chitons from California, US

Cool find! Yeah it's a gumboot chiton, they're the only species of that size www.inaturalist.org/observations...

substantive questions around the assumptions here I've made in sister threads. Claiming affiliation with experts and voting reform orgs right now makes me think less of them not more of you. If the goal is just to debate sure whatever I get it.

More generally: while it's an admission of defeat to acknowledge annoyance in internet debates, if you have policy goals around voting reform, you would probably like to convince people and talking this way does not much help. If you'd like to make an academic point, then respond to the

But clearly party id U policy statements signals to the voter more than just statements, and there exists a class of voters for whom the comparison is party id U vibes vs vibes. Again I think (can't tell, due to your preferred style of discourse!) you're assuming a voting sys we haven't endorsed

As I noted in my lengthyimagepost, an assumption you seem to be making which no one has stated is that we are advocating for a voting system in which there are strict party lists, you can vote for only one; and not just slapping D-SA, D-YIMBY, D-NIMBY, etc next to names ("slate" more loosely)

(another assumption to make explicit is sth around issue-consistency in candidate party identification)

Response (I will add alt text transcribing the image if this is something you need, but generally take the position that lack of automated labelling in 2025 is a failure on Bluesky's part)

Formal sub-D slates give an indication not currently available. It makes sense to call this "transparency", "legibility", etc.

Perhaps we can both cut out the "proof is trivial"s and the like since we aren't going to agree. My perspective: under the status quo in a D city an ~unengaged voter who cares about issues X1,... has no clear indication of candidates' views. ...

And eg "the party still determines the list order" this doesn't even imply that parties are more opaque in the sense one might care about! ~ uncertainty * magnitude of policy change! The point is to make stuff more legible to the average voter, not to maximize max_pop info about candidates

It's really not, we're on the site for politically engaged neurotic liberals and even so I for one regularly am at a loss in municipal elections. I think all of this thread relies on countering Ian's "parties provide transparency" with "actually they're more opaque" which seems, facially untrue

What's the idea with the at-large seats in terms of timing relative to district elections? I think I'd like at-large seats if they were filled from a party list to meet citywide proportionality, but we won't get a party list in the US and idk how much I like having to run separately for at large

No, new (i.e., do not already have an identified alternative OR RTIP inclusion ≈ funding) transit routes after 20260101 don't get SB 79 benefits UNLESS they were identified in the RTP (Connect Socal for us). K Line North is in the RTP so it's fine.

UCLA’s funds reinstated after yesterday’s court order! Thanks to the brave researchers and their amazing counsel, including Dean Chemerinsky, who brought suit. This is just another turn in the ongoing fight, but a great result for now.

UCLA Housing Voice Podcast A UCLA Lewis Center podcast making sense of housing research to make our cities more affordable, accessible and equitable.

The latest episode of UCLA Housing Voice is out, with the brilliant @stephenjacobsmith.com interviewed by @shanedphillips.bsky.social and Michael Manville talking about elevators! Please listen to it.

www.lewis.ucla.edu/programs/hou...

Juxtastat Test your knowledge of geography and statistics! New quiz every day

Retrostat Week 96 5/5

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

juxtastat.org#mode=retro

Thanks - at last Monday's meeting one of the city consultant (Mark Thomas) engrs did say they were coordinating with the SGVCOG bus consultant (KH) and said the latter would be attending another round of public meeting in Nov. Did sound skeptical that actual bus lanes would be implemented though....

wait you can just do this?

would cost eleventy billion dollars in the US

- "In the UK, they have separate hot and cold bean faucets"

off the top of my head
- yogurt
- kefir
- jelly
- milk, as above. Lots of dairy products I guess
- flavorless caffeine water
- aerosolized random drug du jour
- state ethanol monopoly, metered

I'm always advocating for more varieties of liquids to be delivered via pressurized pipe networks

By lesser divide I meant more along the lines of, I know there's you and Dubler and Grey etc. etc. but of the MURPs I've talked to they either do not voice an opinion on the matter (a majority) or took the left-NIMBY position. Maybe just an unfortunate sample on my part.

The YIMBY-left NIMBY divide in Luskin faculty and to a lesser degree students is always very "funny"

My interpretation of the inclusion pathways for stops that don't yet exist has been:
it counts now if either an alternative has been selected OR if it's in the county RTIP;
it doesn't count now but can count in the future if it's in the MPO RTP, unless it's Tier 1 then it counts even if not in RTP

The first part of the "or" clause is surely separate from the RTIP bit in the second part, though? Like the LA Co RTIP contains only a handful of projects (not that this influences the language of the text)

Models of European metro stations

stations.albertguillaumes.cat

The thing I still have not figured out about LA County is that it *definitely was* land use policy influenced by racism that led the county to develop the way it did (the people doing it even said so) but then the county became 75% non-white & no one changed land use (except to be even more NIMBY).