This is, without question, a Los Angeles Urban Planning Moment™

Again: young people might not realize that this kind of repugnant racism was unacceptable to express publicly, *not that long ago*.

Conservatives think the state should protect them from the traumatizing experience of encountering people unlike them. For some reason this never came up in the heyday of “snowflake,” “trigger warning” or “safe space” discourse bsky.app/profile/kiss...

Nothing has killed more soldiers in the history of humanity than disease. While worst is a more complicated question Hegseth is absolutely the dumbest secretary of defense the United States has ever had. bsky.app/profile/ones...

‘Simply stop giving millionaires water for literally free’ is one of the most insane sounding but actually serious policy solutions out there

a man in a blue shirt and tie is pointing at a bulletin board with papers taped to it . ALT: a man in a blue shirt and tie is pointing at a bulletin board with papers taped to it .

My nutso conspiracy is that lawyers have a stranglehold on policy creation on the United States even in areas where they are vastly below median contributors, and this is responsible for like 95% of USA policy underperformance.

Joe Biden threw unprecedented amounts of money at police. More than TWICE what Obama gave them in the wake of the GFC.

Every major police union endorsed Donald Trump.

Cursed, completely cursed.

many americans demonstrated repeatedly that the thing that would get them to participate in politics was to be told by a television celebrity that they could be rich and it was good to abuse the weak

COVID kind of struck away the social pressure to be active and do things - and for a time, the economic pressure as well - and there was something a little narcotizing about having that vast block of empty, alone time. Couch rot as a permitted choice - encouraged, even.

To be honest I don’t think this is true either. I think the actual social disruption of COVID came from something more disturbing.

I think a lot of people kind of liked it.

Not having to go outside, not having to do anything, getting paid the superdole. It increased our appetite for isolation.

New euphemism for "pure, unadulterated horseshit" just dropped

Instagram is the NIMBYest platform on the internet besides, like, NextDoor and it’s not even close. no development of any kind (buildings, bike lanes, trash infrastructure, etc. etc.) is ever safe from a flood of the dumbest, most provincial pearl-clutching imaginable

these are immensely self absorbed men who pine for nazi germany and apartheid south africa — stagnant, backwards regimes btw — because they imagine themselves the masters of the universe.

the tech fascists think they are so clever and smart but their entire worldview is just a bunch of stale apologetics for race hatred and fascism

this is just a warmed over david duke speech from 1990

Just like self driving cars, the discourse has been so throughly poisoned by Musk’s slapdash efforts that people are talking past each other. Other data centers do not power themselves exclusively via onsite gas turbines! Musk isn’t even allowed to do this, it’s illegal but he does it anyways!

Its not a hot take but man the way the word "content" is used these days. A vile bit of late stage capitalist propaganda, lumping all forms of human creativity and expression into a single wastebin teaching the public to treat all art as disposable.

Back in Washington, some members of Congress, including Mr. Mast, remain worried that Syria has not lived up to expectations after the sanctions were lifted. "I don't believe that any of us thought transitions from the dictator Bashar al-Assad to now Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa would be without incident," Mr. Mast said in February at a House hearing examining recent progress in Syria. "But we've already seen too many incidents, in my opinion - too many incidents of sectarian violence against religious and ethnic minorities." But the leverage the United States had - the power to snap back the sanctions — is now gone, and getting Congress to reimpose them would be politically complicated. Foreign money from investors like the Khayyats, meanwhile, continues to pour into Syria. It is on display at the Damascus airport, where even as a war is now being waged elsewhere across the Middle East, a fleet of earth-moving machines are busy ripping apart what remains of a 1960s-era airport terminal for the Khayyats' project.

The part in particular is written like sanctions relief is something untoward, and the United States deserves the right to freeze the entire nation of Syria out of the global economic system on the president’s whim

This framing is wrong. It wasn’t these guys, who were already rich, warm, and well fed, who most stood to benefit from sanctions relief. It was the Syrian people. And Republicans held their future hostage until congressmen got free dinners and vacations and dangled a golf course in front of Trump.

Salute to an all-time tweet

To harp on this a little bc it’s worth harping on: the B/D Line from Wilshire/Vermont to 7th/Metro is 4 minutes. The A Line from Washington to 7th/Metro is 14 minutes- if everything goes well which it often doesn’t. Not often you can propose a transit project that would save your riders 10 minutes.

The Plot to Enslave America

It's weird how often the European Green Parties' core policy committments happen to line up with policies that keep Europe reliant on Russian fossil fuel exports! Just a strange coincidence that keeps happening for some reason.

Trump, IRS In Talks To Settle U.S. President's $10 Billion Lawsuit Trump's adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization are also plaintiffs.

Trump is reported close to a "deal" with himself under which US taxpayers would pay him $10 billion.

I served in multiple communist and authoritarian dictatorships, but I never witnessed corruption on this scale or this blatant.

Imagine saying this in a universe where we spent all the political capital to enact the ACA, then 15 years later we again spent it all to farm out clean energy jobs to rural areas.

Just to list two examples.

Steel bollards filled with concrete for transformers, plastic bollards filled with air for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Imagine if the government spent $1 billion per day on stuff like this rather than losing wars.

there are two kinds of popularists - shameless poll chasers and closet reactionaries and i think indicates the NYT editorial board is the latter.

an absolutely gigantic piece of this is that “house” and “car” keep getting bigger and better while still counting in our heads as “one house” or “one car”