Had to go to NYC briefly and randomly encountered their "making Park Avenue free of cars" day. I'd guess more cyclists and pedestrians traveled on it than people to do normally in cars (I'd guess a lot more, actually, but don't know if I am good at estimating such things) and the city didn't grind to a halt.
You don't have to close all the streets to cars all the time, but pretty sure you could randomly close 5% of them and improve life immensely. Give it a bit more thought and even better.
Saturday, August 10, 2019
Never Gonna Know
I said all along we'll never get the full accounting of Epstein-related criminal activities.
Of course I have no idea what happened but "nothing to see here move along" is ridiculous.
Of course I have no idea what happened but "nothing to see here move along" is ridiculous.
Friday, August 09, 2019
Being President Is Hard
Obviously Trump puts in the minimum possible hours but even then the poor man has to work now and again.
Not one for Bush nostalgia, as you, dear readers, should know, but the man did show up for work early (and knocked off early, too, but not that early).
Not one for Bush nostalgia, as you, dear readers, should know, but the man did show up for work early (and knocked off early, too, but not that early).
The Greatest Deliberative Body In The World
I don't even know what that is supposed to mean, really. But senators - older ones, at least - really believe it. It's especially weird given that the rules of the Senate seem to preclude actual meaningful deliberation. But their club is the best club of all and don't you suggest otherwise.
Thursday, August 08, 2019
Uber'd
The Uber business model was something like
1) become monopoly
2) profit
then when that didn't work it was:
1) become monopoly with self-driving cars
2) profit
and now it's "oh wow weird how people don't make that much money in the taxi business who knew."
1) become monopoly
2) profit
then when that didn't work it was:
1) become monopoly with self-driving cars
2) profit
and now it's "oh wow weird how people don't make that much money in the taxi business who knew."
NEW YORK — Uber lost $5.24 billion in the second quarter — its largest quarterly loss ever — after making huge stock-based payouts in the months following its initial public offering.
The ride-hailing giant said Wednesday it paid $3.9 billion in stock-based compensation and expenses during the quarter. It also paid $298 million in stock and cash to drivers to show appreciation in connection with the IPO.
Aggressive Urban Driving
It is almost entirely pointless from the perspective of "getting to your destination faster." Depending on my perspective at the time I laugh at or want to smash in the windows of people who gun their cars for half a block and then slam on the brakes for the other half. And higher speed limits in that context don't help, either.
The time benefits one gets from boosting speeds in urban areas can end up being surprisingly modest: In downtown streets, the difference between a 25 mph commute and 45 mph commute is roughly an addition 48 seconds for every three-quarters of a mile traveled, according to Nelson\Nygaard. It’s also worth remembering that even urban “rapid transit” often isn’t really all that fast. (The New York City subway averages 17 miles per hour.)If you're traveling 5 miles within Philly, for example, you're traveling *a long way* in Philly, and even if that's on a road without stops or congestion, that's 12 minutes versus 6.5ish minutes. Add in the realities of most urban streets and a higher speed limit barely helps at all.
Angels and Demons
The flip side of monstering - perhaps the more important part - is who they don't monster.
Monstered
It's a term the British press has for when they do the full "destroy this person" 24/7 coverage of someone over some often minor scandal. To monster someone. It isn't good, but they're self-aware enough to know they're doing it. It's very wrong to have high opinions of the British press generally - including the BBC (domestic) these days - but they are at least not as full of shit about the role they actually play, which is not merely as objectitudinal impartial observers just presenting the facts and occasionally calling balls and strikes.
Wednesday, August 07, 2019
Insulin
One reason I am very pessimistic about the possibilities for the current dominant democrats is that if they can't even take on insulin...
A month of naming and shaming would do it. I don't think this is true of all health care issues, but this is the ultimate low hanging fruit and the "oh people want to talk about kitchen table issues"* crowd can't even fix this.
*I do think people want politicians to talk about kitchen table issues, but more than that they want them to solve them, and the "people want to talk about ktichen table issues" crowd just uses it as an excuse to not impeach the motherfucker (or do strong oversight, whatever that means) while not actually doing anything about kitchen table issues.
Diabetic groom-to-be dies after taking cheaper insulin to pay for wedding https://t.co/kg3HqvKIGI pic.twitter.com/NE1PRRXb0j
— New York Post (@nypost) August 6, 2019
A month of naming and shaming would do it. I don't think this is true of all health care issues, but this is the ultimate low hanging fruit and the "oh people want to talk about kitchen table issues"* crowd can't even fix this.
*I do think people want politicians to talk about kitchen table issues, but more than that they want them to solve them, and the "people want to talk about ktichen table issues" crowd just uses it as an excuse to not impeach the motherfucker (or do strong oversight, whatever that means) while not actually doing anything about kitchen table issues.
I Always Have Security
Is that the explanation? Do rich weirdos like Sean Hannity advocate for a police state because they don't leave the house without bodyguards and it just seems normal to them? If I thought I had to live like that and I had money like these guys I wouldn't want to live like that and I'd just put on some sunglasses and retire to Italy where nobody knew or cared who I was.
Squirrel
The only explanation I could think of for Maggie's stupider than usual freakout over Castro's daring to highlight publicly available information about maxed out Trump donors was that the group text went out from the usual GOP suspects and Maggie and a few other reporters (simultaneously!) went "SQUIRREL!"
Buy This Book
One more pitch since Amazon actually has copies in stock now (you can buy from Amazon or not, or think they are good or bad or not, but a lot of people do buy from Amazon for various convenience reasons and this might apply to you). As I wrote before:
You can also buy directly from the publisher here.
Enter RLFANDF at the checkout page for the promo code for a 30% discount.
Somebody I know rather well (20+ years!) wrote a book. It is a good book. It isn't a travel guide or a recipe book, but a history, though it does have significant discussion of the contemporary food situation and some representative (including historic) recipes.Buy the book!
You can also buy directly from the publisher here.
Enter RLFANDF at the checkout page for the promo code for a 30% discount.
Seriously, What The Fuck
Beutler.
The answers to these questions are no more reassuring or elusive than the answer to the question that bedevils the political establishment most of all: Why does Trump constantly stoke hatred of immigrants and Muslims and minorities? They are all easy to answer if you can acknowledge that Trump is engaged in a fundamentally malevolent project. The inability to do that, and the attendant unwillingness to connect the dots around it, has given rise to a media failure that in some ways exceeds the 2002 and 2003 coverage of the build up to war in Iraq. The consequences of this more recent failure have not been as catastrophic, not so far anyhow, but at least back then the fact that the Bush administration was building a case for war with Iraq didn’t escape the notice even of the reporters who most eagerly laundered its lies and propaganda.
Today, before our eyes, Trump and his allies seek to crush the foundations of multiracial democracy and replace them with a white ethnostate where the ruling class directs violence at scapegoat communities to create the climate it needs to get away with looting the country and dismantling all checks on its power. If you can see that, and articulate it, you don’t ask what Trump might do to make things better, or say he “urges unity vs. racism.” If you can’t see it, or your job requires you to blind yourself to it, you must treat his ultimate purposes as an impenetrable mystery. You might explain away his efforts to end an investigation of an attack on the United States, and his coziness with the perpetrator, as impulses of a man who merely worries the Russia matter undermines his legitimacy. You might marvel at his occasional, scripted, disingenuous condemnations of all the forces he has fostered, and chase down Democrats to ask them if they think Trump is racist. But seriously: What the fuck?
Priorities
Our Maggie of the New York Times got upset last night because a presidential candidate brother of a presidential candidate pointed out who some of Trump's maxed out donors were, using easily searchable publicly available data. This was very bad, according to Maggie, she of the newspaper which teamed up with Bannon's "Clinton Cash" to write story after story, including a database of donors, about how the Clintons were probably just accepting bribes, and the main person who covers the president who loves to point out whenever any of his critics or their family members gave money to his political opponents.
Tuesday, August 06, 2019
Land of the Free
I don't understand these people. I really don't.
Gotta have a police state to we can all own guns to protect us from a police state. True freedom is when a bunch of minimum wage Paul Blarts with twitchy trigger fingers are everywhere.
Presidential adviser Sean Hannity: "I'd like to see the perimeter of every school in America surrounded, secured by retired police ... have one armed guard on every floor of every school, all over every mall, the perimeter and inside every hall of every mall." pic.twitter.com/Renh47IiBY
— Brendan Karet 🚮 (@bad_takes) August 6, 2019
Gotta have a police state to we can all own guns to protect us from a police state. True freedom is when a bunch of minimum wage Paul Blarts with twitchy trigger fingers are everywhere.
Give Us All Your Money
For a long time newspapers really didn't rely on single copy/subscription revenue. They wanted to sell copies, sure, but almost entirely so that they could sell your eyeballs to advertisers. The price of the newspaper covered distribution costs, basically, and they would have been quite happy to give them away for free if they could convince advertisers that people were actually looking at those free copies. It always bothered reporters that their product was "free" after the internet came along, though whether or not that was smart business strategy long term it wasn't an alien concept to the business side, especially as "now" they could prove to advertisers that people were actually reading their free product. Metrics!
Another way of putting this is that their "customers" were mostly Ford and Macy's, not you, and reporters didn't really have to give a shit about their readers, leaving the business to the business side of the paper.
I don't entirely know why the New York Times is the way it is. Twitter provides a window into the souls of some of their reporters and they are not pretty things. Shitting on your core customers and then yelling at them for not wanting to buy more shit is a strange business model. Twitter's New York Times defense force, both Times people and other reporters kissing up, is always hilarious.
Another way of putting this is that their "customers" were mostly Ford and Macy's, not you, and reporters didn't really have to give a shit about their readers, leaving the business to the business side of the paper.
I don't entirely know why the New York Times is the way it is. Twitter provides a window into the souls of some of their reporters and they are not pretty things. Shitting on your core customers and then yelling at them for not wanting to buy more shit is a strange business model. Twitter's New York Times defense force, both Times people and other reporters kissing up, is always hilarious.
Monday, August 05, 2019
Trade Wars Are Easy To Win
One can think our approach to China generally is a problem, that free trade as a pure good that cannot be questioned is ridiculous, and that Trump's tariff policies are at best stupid. Things are complicated!
But, generally, as the UK is discovering with the EU, and the US is discovering with the whole world, it is best not to bet on the idea that they need us more than we need them.
But, generally, as the UK is discovering with the EU, and the US is discovering with the whole world, it is best not to bet on the idea that they need us more than we need them.
Calling All Good Nazis
Something is deeply wrong with the New York Times.
Those who sympathize with the white nationalist ideology but who deplore the violence should work closely with law enforcement to see that fellow travelers who may be prone to violence do not have access to firearms like semiautomatic assault-style weapons that are massively destructive.This is like an echo of all the "good Muslims need to turn in all the bad Muslims" pieces but there are no good Nazis!!!
Midwestern Americans
Pareene:
These Minnesota refugee communities exist in a strange kind of quantum superposition: Invisible to the Beltway journalists who imagine (and frequently give voice to the imagined needs and desires of) a monolithically white Midwest, they also exist as a terrifying caricature in the minds of the people who consume conservative media. Your average Meet the Press panel member could probably tell you next to nothing about the country’s largest Somali community, in the heart of the much-venerated heartland. The average American consumer of right-wing media could probably tell you a thousand false things about it. Republican politicians know precisely how to exploit this selective ignorance. When a senator rails against “elite cosmopolitans,” he knows the longtime political reporter will think, Upper East Side snobs, while another audience thinks of George Soros conspiring with the United Nations to turn Minnesota brown. As the intensity of anti-Muslim and anti-refugee rhetoric has increased on the right, the nonpartisan press has mainly concerned itself with how that rhetoric affects white turnout, not how it affects communities like Omar’s. And when the next worst thing happens, they’ll all ask How We Got Here in the manner of a tipsy student awakening on the last stop of an unfamiliar subway line.
Shut The Fuck You Stupid Assholes
Yesterday we got Better Beto.
There's this lingering fantasy (a bit Jimmy Stewart, a bit Cronkite of legend, sprinkled with some West Wing Fairy dust), that a politician comes along and Tells The Truth, and there's some cathartic moment where people See the Light and everything Gets Better. This is bullshit, and the truth would be a bit more Bullworth/Network than this particular fantasy, but one reason it's bullshit is that the people capable of endorsing and magnifying that moment are largely part of the system that needs to critiqued. The political press (Not All Journalists) are mostly just players in this particular bit of theater known as politics, and the great truthtelling moment requires an indictment of them as much as anything. So, yes, fuck you and your stupid ass questions you stupid fucking fucks. The president has been the leader of a racist terrorist movement since the campaign and you've all ignored it and invented increasingly ridiculous euphemisms for it so, like members of the press, what the fuck?
Beto O’Rourke on his way to his car was asked if there’s anything Trump can do now to make this better.
— Eric Bradner (@ericbradner) August 5, 2019
“What do you think? You know the shit he’s been saying. He’s been calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. I don’t know, like, members of the press, what the fuck?” pic.twitter.com/zjLYf4mzBr
There's this lingering fantasy (a bit Jimmy Stewart, a bit Cronkite of legend, sprinkled with some West Wing Fairy dust), that a politician comes along and Tells The Truth, and there's some cathartic moment where people See the Light and everything Gets Better. This is bullshit, and the truth would be a bit more Bullworth/Network than this particular fantasy, but one reason it's bullshit is that the people capable of endorsing and magnifying that moment are largely part of the system that needs to critiqued. The political press (Not All Journalists) are mostly just players in this particular bit of theater known as politics, and the great truthtelling moment requires an indictment of them as much as anything. So, yes, fuck you and your stupid ass questions you stupid fucking fucks. The president has been the leader of a racist terrorist movement since the campaign and you've all ignored it and invented increasingly ridiculous euphemisms for it so, like members of the press, what the fuck?
Today is the Day Donald Trump Became President
Every prominent media person or institution that communicates the premise that maybe, just maybe, Trump could do the right thing, is just contributing to all of this.
Sunday, August 04, 2019
Thoughts and Prayers
Team D is not all good, but the ones who mostly are need to realize that their Republican gym buddies are monsters and if they can't see that they are, themselves, no good.
And Aftter Sandy Hook
A bunch of Republican members of Congress almost got killed by a shooter and even that wasn't enough.
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