but these are not the best pick for everything.

Why not? Seriously, you’ve got canvas sneakers for running or casual wear, canvas boots (waxed if need be) for hiking and wet conditions, even moderately dressy canvas shoes for business casual.

I feel like, counterintuitively, fake leather encourages the idea that your shoes have to look like leather to be “dressy” or “professional”, and if you need shoes that look like leather only vegans will buy the (objectively inferior) fake leather plastic shoes. We save more animals by making the default something that doesn’t involve animals in the first place then we do by coming up with alternatives that look/taste just like animals. Normalize sneakers in the workplace! Hell, normalize tire tread sandals!

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The fact that Kissinger outlived Bourdain proves there is no God.

Though I almost wish Kissinger had lived long enough to see Trump piss away the American power and influence Kissinger sold his soul for. Kissinger should have lay on his deathbed knowing his successors squandered every advantage he won for America, that he steeped his hands in blood and made himself the greatest war criminal in history for nothing.

There are more comments in this thread alone than this MAGA site will probably ever host. (Trolls and spammers motivated by this thread don’t count 😆 )

And honestly? The biggest takeaway from these comments is how many users don’t understand the difference between a protocol and a platform.

I get why they want it. But you can’t just let a few stand in the way of progress. Single family no business housing shouldn’t have a place in urban environments.

I’m sympathetic with that argument. But I also remember that’s what they said when they ran highways through thriving Black neighborhoods and gentrified Katrina climate refugees out of New Orleans. The likelihood that this bill will replace struggling minority neighborhoods with empty storefronts and investment condos for the ultra rich deserves some consideration.

That kind of logic is how you get less taxes on the rich.

I’d argue that the real impact of a higher marginal tax rate on someone who already has more money than he could ever spend is far less than the real impact of putting in an apartment complex down the street from someone. If anything, the poor should have a greater voice in government tax policy and welfare policy than the rich, since they’re much more strongly impacted by both.

“pro-housing city like Los Angeles”.

Fucking lol.

That being said, it is, at the very least, unfortunate, how this is turning out. Yet again, the state is imposing a policy overwhelmingly opposed by the people most directly affected by it - in this case, the people actually living in the locations that will be open to high density housing.

(I get that California needs more high density housing and the logical place to put high density housing is near public transit hubs. I also get that people living in single family neighborhoods don’t want their neighborhoods turned into high density housing. And I’m torn between the genuine need for housing in California and my belief that letting a majority of voters who aren’t impacted by a policy impose it on a minority of voters who are is a shitty way to run a government.)

Unless this very small number of voters wants to foot those costs all on their own, then I see no reason to give them veto power.

It’s not about veto power. It’s about consensus building. Or the lack thereof.

The community around that stretch of the Great Highway felt unheard and disrespected. They felt the rest of SF had imposed a decision on them without their consent. And they used the power they did have to punish one of the people they blamed for it.

You’re absolutely right about the highway - it was routinely closed for sand and flooding and climate change was just going to make it worse. It’s on its way out.

And yet the city failed to convince the people who live around the highway of that, and went ahead by force, imposing the will of the majority on the minority, creating anger and hard feelings that could have been avoided had they put in the work to convince the community they were right.

I don’t think the city or its voters had bad intentions. I just think it exemplifies one of the worst flaws of democracy.

Update: voters recalled Joel Engardio, the supervisor who championed the highway closure, with 65% in support of the recall.

I’m not surprised. The whole city got to vote on the highway closure, which passed with majority approval, but with very strong opposition from Engardio’s district, where that closed stretch of road actually was. The recall election was limited to Engardio’s district. The result was pretty much inevitable.

You could complain about car brains, but I think it’s a lesson in the importance of putting in the work and getting community support for road closures - or for any other change that directly impacts a specific community, no matter how well intentioned - instead of imposing them from the top down.

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An attempt at censorship failed because the censors didn’t understand the system they were trying to censor. I think that’s both funny and satisfying.

* If you wanted to summarise this letter on a t-shirt, it would be “People > Protocols > Platforms”. *

Can I get this under Calvin pissing on a Disney logo?

Seriously, this is now my favorite summary of the fediverse.

But someday after that, we’ll reach a point when the phrase “social media is all fake robo-crap” will be as common of knowledge as “cigarettes cause cancer” or “slot machines are a poor investment”. Adults can still smoke and slot, sure. But nobody in the developed world can say they weren’t warned of the risks.

Prescient.

Bluesky is a small indie company. It can’t afford to fight the law or implement the extensive age verification the law requires. So it chose to pull the plug and leave.

FB, X, etc, have a lot more resources to implement the extensive, invasive age verification Mississippi requires and keep fighting it in court until the decision upholding it is final.

Wow, look at all those corporate buzzwords. The focus on big generic ideas and the lack of implementation discussion or specific examples. And those perfectly spaced em dashes. Chef’s kiss. Premium chum right there 😆

But AI generation aside, this article is counterintuitive in a bad way. Save a Fediverse instance by building a real life community of “handmade goods and creative projects” based around that instance? If users cared about your instance enough to have real in person events your instance wouldn’t need saving.

If anything, it should be the other way around. Real life communities can incorporate a Fediverse instance for online socializing and building community. And those instances will thrive as long as they fill a need for the community. But creating the instance first and building a community - which is several orders of magnitude harder to do - to support the instance? Sheesh.

Sorry, but unless you are disabled…nobody is obligated to drive.

Now hold up.

I’ve had jobs I literally could not get to without driving. As in, public transit did not go from walking distance of where I was to walking distance of where my job was. At all.

I’ve lived in places without grocery stores within walking distance. Without hospitals, dentists, without pretty much anything but a shitty strip mall within walking distance because suburbia sucks.

Look, there are whole suburbs in the United States that open directly into highways. If you try to walk to or from those suburbs you will be arrested because it is illegal to walk on highways. Let me emphasize that one more time: in some places in the US you cannot legally leave your neighborhood without a car.

You can say these aren’t obligations - people can just move or quit their job. But then you’re circling back to the regressive policy issue, because it’s a lot harder to do that when you’re poor.

And “unless you’re disabled”? One in four adults in the US is disabled. And that will inevitably include you if you live long enough to experience the side effects of old age. Yeah, not all disabilities impact one’s ability to walk or take public transit, bet’s not write off disability with an “unless”.

Warning: may lead to overpopulation, hierarchy, authoritarian forms of government, malnutrition, slavery, and war. Use at your own risk.

I get where you’re coming from, and also, being a politician in the United States means being a public figure, and if you ride public transit you expect people to recognize you and talk to you. It’s part of outreach. It’s a populist thing.

Joe Biden rode Amtrak to work for 40 years - and from what I understand, now that he’s not president, he’s riding Amtrak to his office again (albeit guarded by his handlers in case he sundowns). People stop to talk to him, take selfies with him, whatever. It’s not (necessarily) rude.

The thing about the United States is, unfortunately, no politician is so poor they have to take public transit. So any pol on the bus expects people to recognize them and start a conversation. If they didn’t want that, they wouldn’t take the bus.

There should be multiple independent steps of verifying if someone should get banned and in what way. And probably integrate a good test for joining the community so that it’s more likely for people to be rational from the start (that way you don’t even have to look at so many potential flags).

How much would you pay to join a community with that level of protection for user rights? Like the old subscription based forums, some of which are still floating around the internet?

Because “multiple independent steps of verifying” is, frankly, going to be a lot of frustrating, thankless, and redundant work for moderators. I mean, we know how to safeguard people’s rights through legalistic processes. Courts do it all the time. It’s called due process. And due process is frequently a slow, complicated, and expensive pain in the ass for everyone involved. And I think very few people would want to do that work for free.

(Conveniently, this would also serve as a good test for joining such a community - people are more likely to follow the rules and act like decent human beings if a subscription they paid for is riding on it, and it would price out AI and spambots in the process.)

When you start with compromises like that, the failure is guaranteed, there is no “attempt”.

That’s like saying tapering off a drug addiction is a compromise compared to going cold turkey.

I agree that food is addictive. Habits we develop around food are some of the strongest habits we have. Which is why a lot of people make radical changes in their diet - think New Year’s resolutions - and then give them up entirely because they find their new diet too hard and go back to their old comfortable habits.

If a “revolution in your kitchen” worked for you, good for you! Congratulations!

For other people, changing their dietary habits in a way that lasts a lifetime means building better habits through slow and gradual change.

Especially for people who aren’t cooking and eating alone and have to take other people’s preferences into account - that is, making changes is necessarily a compromise with the other people in their household. And it’s much easier to get your household to agree on smaller, gradual dietary changes then a food revolution.

You know, this is a systemic issue, not a “stupid politicians being stupid” issue.

You’ve got a population of seniors, people who are getting older and losing their physical mobility, who are less able to walk or bicycle or take public transit than younger and healthier people are - many of whom live in car-dependent subdivisions or in areas with poor public transit, like, say, rural Illinois.

These are people who rely on their cars for grocery shopping and medical appointments and socializing.

These are people, often on fixed incomes, often close to the poverty line, who struggle to afford the fees for rideshares or grocery deliveries.

And you can say “if they can’t pass the test they’re not safe to be on the road” - but from the article:

According to the Illinois Department of Transportation, in 2023 the crash rate for drivers 75 years and older in Illinois was lower than any other age group of legal drivers.

This bill is not about leaving unsafe drivers on the road - it’s about not adding unwarranted scrutiny and not making it harder for an especially car-dependent group of people to continue driving.

And it adds a provision that lets a senior’s family members report them if they believe the senior is no longer safe to drive.

This bill is a response to seniors who are genuinely frightened of losing their right to drive and becoming unable to meet their basic needs - and they have a right to be frightened of that, because we’ve built a system where a lot of people can’t meet their basic needs without driving.

In other words, if you build a system that makes driving necessary, you can’t really blame people for not wanting to lose the right to drive.