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.

Thanks for this feedback, it’s caused me to re-evaluate some positions!

My understanding is that most passenger rail in Europe and Asia runs on dedicated tracks. I misspoke, I should have said tracks, not alignments. It would be much less of an issue if Amtrak had its own tracks on a given freight alignment. Instead, they share tracks, and regularly get delayed, speed capped at lower speeds than they could safely operate at otherwise, and generally jerked around by the freight operators.

I already commented here, but I think this deserves its own comment. I’d like to see how this stacks up against Japan and China. I can already tell you how the US stacks up. On top of fifty-to-seventy years of rail underinvestment, the freight rail companies have been deliberately fucking with Amtrak for years now by making their trains too long to fulfill their legal obligation to pull off onto side tracks and yield to passenger traffic. And yes, you read that right, the vast majority of Amtrak’s alignments are shared with freight rail.

America is much the same in that regard. We have probably the most laughably terrible train network, both in terms of freight and passenger, for any western country, especially relative to any meaningful metric like GDP. It’s down to a noxious mix of car lobby, racism, and stupid policy choices (single family housing exclusive zoning, parking minimums, etc) all applied consistently over 70 years. In spite of all that, and in spite of increasingly enormous re-investment packages, our roads never really seem to get much better. I hope it’s the same in Germany, but I’ve noticed that having better mobility solutions than cars and planes only is quickly becoming a pretty mainstream position in the US.

What’s funny to me is that the Dutch people I know complain about their trains as much as the Germans I know.

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.

[Look inside]

It’s a regex

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.

I really think it could make sense to pass the torch to Kamala. It’s not perfect, but she can talk in complete sentences. Her debate performances were bad, but I remember she completely ragdolled Biden in the first '20 primary debate. She doesn’t have a lot to her that’s good, but she also doesn’t have a lot of baggage. So, she’s kind of a nothingburger, which could be good depending on your angle. She’s still a really conservative left choice who should be able to appeal to the apparently very large auth center segment of the party and to undecided voters. It also makes sense because she’s Biden’s VP. It would be a very easy sell to say “I’ve reviewed everything with friends, family, and peers, and we’ve decided that it’s the right thing for both me and the country to step back and concede leadership to the Vice President.” Then, they just have to pick a VP, which is much more of a triviality.

Do I wish the democrats had used even like two seconds of foresight and spent the last four years prepping Kamala for this moment? Yes, of course, but we’ve got to work with what we’ve got, and as it was, Biden went up on stage with a shotgun, said “heads up, chucklefuck”, and blew his own leg off in front of the whole country. I firmly believe Kamala can do better than that.

He knows, but the thing is that the Democrats are about as afraid of fascism as you are gasoline in your car. They use the threat of fascism to help scare people to the polls and to donate money, which is partly why they never seem to be in a big hurry to squash it. Problem being, of course, that people eventually get fear fatigue and stop paying attention. Kinda like how in the wake of 9/11, the government would announce terror threat levels, and they were always orange or red, indicating super double plus serious danger, and eventually people stopped caring because life must go on. Well, people get fatigued of it and then the fascists win again, which provides another big, though temporary, shot of support to the democrats. Meanwhile, the democrats don’t have to make any real, serious campaign or policy commitments besides “don’t be fascist”. Everything else they do (and don’t get me wrong, they do some good stuff sometimes) is just running up the score. So, for the centrist democrats that run the DNC and Biden campaign, this feels like a pretty good Wednesday for fundraising, even though we all see it as the literal end of the Republic. They’ve been walking on the ice so long, they’re convinced that while it is thin, they couldn’t possibly fall through.

The dark Brandon stuff is 98% fluff, talk, and meme. Biden has already said that they’re going to take the high road on the presidential immunity matter. So, we’re going to high road all the way to fascism while waiting for Biden to do the meme.

That’s fair. I’m more addressing a narrative that emerged within 48hrs of the debate that the debate prep team irresponsibly overworked Biden

I think that it isn’t unrealistic for the Biden campaign to transition to the Kamala campaign, or Whitmer campaign, or Newsom campaign etc etc. and recycle much of extent infrastructure there. It just requires Biden to do what’s right for the country and hand over the keys.

From the article:

Biden did make several trips in the weeks leading up to the debate. On June 13, the president joined other leaders for the Group of Seven summit in Apulia, Italy. Two days later, he flew to Los Angeles for a celebrity-filled fundraiser alongside former President Barack Obama, where his campaign said he raised at least $28 million, per a report from Politico.

Reuters reported that Biden headed to Camp David on June 21 to begin debate prep six days before he took the stage. White House aides who traveled with the president told Reuters that Biden was “in a good mood” on his way to prepare.

So, let me get this straight. Two-ish weeks before the debate, he travelled to Europe to visit our allies for two days. Then he visits LA for a day. Then, a week before the debate, he goes to Camp David to prepare. And that’s the strenuous schedule that made him almost fall asleep on stage? And that’s supposed to make me feel better? I read another article where it went into a little more detail and said that they didn’t even start debate prep until 11 am each day at Camp David, and included scheduled time for an afternoon nap, so it’s not exactly like they were working him like a rented mule. This makes it seem so much worse, imo. The president has to do a lot more strenuous stuff than debates, and if he’s worthless for weeks after two days of travel, that doesn’t bode well for the coming campaign season.

Holy shit, did we just establish a connection to the mirror universe?