@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Alon

@Alon@mastodon.social

I write about public transport and do research for NYU's Marron Institute. I've previously lived in Tel Aviv, Singapore, the Riviera, New York, Providence, Vancouver, Stockholm, Paris.

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Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Pedestrian Observations: Bus Stop Consolidation and Blocks https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/05/22/bus-stop-consolidation-and-blocks/

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@elliots If a bus stop has so few passengers a significant fraction of buses skip it, you should just drop it. The reason is that, at such a stop, if it has a nonzero number of passengers, it typically has just one. A stop with a single passenger gives that passenger a shorter walk of 1-3 minutes but delays a lot of other passengers by 25 seconds each.

philipncohen, to random
@philipncohen@mastodon.social avatar

I am pretty sure people started using initials for sexualities -- eg, LGB, eventually LGBTQIA+ -- in the 80s because of conventions in print personal ads. I don't know what year this example is from was but this is how they went. They were everywhere. Maybe can never prove this but it's true.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@philipncohen Wait - GLB/GLBT was more common at one point and then the community switched to LGB/LGBT... https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=LGBT%2CGLBT%2CLGB%2CGLB&year_start=1960&year_end=2010&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Travel plans to the US are getting more solid: flying in shortly before the 15th to visit Boston for a few days, then down to New York until early July. If people in Philly and DC really want I can come down there, but no guarantees.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Will Yes. At the very least, there's going to be an in-person @eta_ny gathering that I'm going to go to. I may do an event at Marron about our high-speed rail project. Philly and DC are up in the air, depending on whether local advocates want to hear me.

gavi, to random

ok so what software do i use to write a novel actually. i know scrivener exists but im absolutely not messing with that

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@gavi Any normal word processor or text editor will do?

F100, to Palestine
@F100@mastodon.social avatar

“What students can’t include in this paper is anything that justifies their actions. Only a limited amount of reflection is allowed. “[B]e advised that your paper cannot serve to justify your actions, evaluate the actions of others, or challenge a conduct regulation,” the Reflection Paper instructions state.”

NYU is really shit.

Why is New York University making protesters watch The Simpsons as punishment? | Arwa Mahdawi #palestine #israel https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/new-york-university-student-protesters

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@F100 Because the alternative to this is expulsion. "Write an essay saying why what you did is wrong" is what is done to the privileged in lieu of real consequences for their actions.

Relatedly, this is why Obama caught so much flak about his association with Bill Ayers. Ayers was from elite background, so he didn't suffer real consequences for his terrorism, and could reinvent himself as a community organizer of note, who other organizers needed to have a relationship with.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

I can't believe I'm saying it, but, Renew Europe is based. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/05/21/renew-europe-will-vote-to-expel-dutch-vvd-party-on-june-10-group-leader-says

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@mortenfrisch I think Liberalerna are throwing themselves out with how they're polling below threshold...

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@kechpaja Has any party emerged to fill in the gap? I'm thinking of how there are some recent mainline-left parties in Eastern Europe that are incredibly pro-EU and pro-NATO, for people who want something social democratic but don't like the Putinism of the ex-communist-now-socdem parties in that part of the world.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Last week, U Vienna rescinded an invitation to Rashid Khalidi to talk about the Nakba and its relationship to Gaza: https://www.newarab.com/news/vienna-university-cancels-talk-palestinian-historian

I've seen discourse on this on Bluesky (not here), and nobody is relating this to Austria's lack of Holocaust guilt. Nobody is connecting Austria's Islamophobia to its anti-Semitism or its Putinist rejection of NATO. But I have seen someone blame this on German Holocaust guilt, which Austria doesn't have (Austrians think they were Germany's first victim).

BenRossTransit, to random
@BenRossTransit@mastodon.social avatar

Ostracizing "Zionist" students is anti-Semitism. Period. Whether or not the anti-Zionist opinion of the ostracizer is itself anti-Semitic.
Discrimination against Jews based on their Jewish opinions is anti-Semitism, even when it's not anti-Semitic to hold the contrary opinion.
Example: A Catholic priest who believes Jesus is the son of God is not thereby anti-Semitic. But burning Jews at the stake for disagreeing is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/style/jewish-college-students-zionism-israel.html?unlocked_article_code=1.t00.M_tX.zYA2gy-TIZwm&smid=url-share

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@BenRossTransit It's a two-step. On the one hand, the claim is that most Zionists are conservative Christians and not Jews and thus it's not anti-Semitic to be anti-Zionist. On the other hand, the same people in question never probe Christians with this question, only Jews, same reason they never protest churches or hospitals named Mercy, only synagogues and hospitals named Mount Sinai.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@bradweed @BenRossTransit Gush Emunim 🤝 anti-Zionist protesters

Hating Rabin

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@BenRossTransit @bradweed It's Khamenei, the man has been responsible for the deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands of Arabs. A rare case of someone who believes in equality between Jews and Arabs in a single state (equally oppressed by Iranian proxies).

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Arianity @BenRossTransit @bradweed Which ones are you thinking of? Because PACBI specifically said they're boycotting Standing Together on the grounds that they're engaging in normalization, SJP celebrated the 7.10 massacres, major speakers brought by the encampment protesters defended the massacres... and note that all of these groups consider two states to be Zionism, as seen in some common chants ("we don't want no two states").

APHClarkson, to random German
@APHClarkson@mastodon.social avatar

This week for World Politics Review, I look at how nostalgia, or perhaps better Westalgia, among centrist and conservative voters in Germany for a supposed golden age during the Helmut Kohl era can help Friedrich Merz and the CDU win the next electionshttps://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/germany-cdu-merz-politics/

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@APHClarkson You posted the link wrong - you forgot a space between "election" and the URL, so it doesn't properly link.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Germany and Poland have sent over a (small) proportion of their modern Leopard 2s to Ukraine. Spain is only starting to do so and only its older tanks; Greece has not done so at all. Why?

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

People are tweeting about LARPs in the context of the flop of a Star Wars immersive experience ($3,000 for meh?), and I'd like to point out the vast majority of both Nordic and American LARPs take place in original settings, not fanfic. The medium's strength is not rolling with a specific setting like Star Wars but combining different things, to the point that it became an Intercon trope by the 2010s that everything was a weird mashup (a LARP called Slash had PCs from like 12 different canons).

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@billiglarper Yeah, so, the main argument I've seen for fanfic LARPs (e.g. by Laura47) is that everyone knows what it means to be a Stark/Lannister/Targaryen, so it's easier to set expectations for players. But then it's similarly easy to set expectations in an original setting. Laura47's own A Single Silver Coin opens with nine people having died and sitting in the boat to the underworld, where they need a coin to be able to enter it. Gritty low fantasy, a bunch of deaths from plague; go.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@billiglarper Or, in my magnum opus, Bad Apples, we took a bunch of gritty settings (the Mos Eisley scenes in A New Hope, Firefly, The Wire; none of us knew about the Expanse in 2013), and made something that dialogued with the genre. You don't need to know what it means to be from the uranium mining planet Shanti before playing to appreciate the combination of elements like "gritty space station" and "murder mystery" or "mafia gender values" and "domestic abuse" and "space piracy."

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

People familiar with the hostage negotiations say that it's Egyptian intelligence that changed the terms of the ceasefire proposal without telling anyone, leading Hamas to announce it was agreeing to a deal that didn't in fact exist (said deal would allow Hamas to return dead bodies instead of live hostages). https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/21/politics/sources-say-they-were-duped-by-egypt-changing-ceasefire-terms-for-hamas/index.html

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@jewishreader The worst thing about this is that while Israeli and pro-Israel advocates are talking about this the most as the reason why there wasn't actually a hostage deal, the State of Israel itself is instead complaining that the proposed deal would require Israel to withdraw from Gaza (at a later stage, representing a significant Hamas concession). The state just doesn't care about the hostages very much.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@asmallteapot I'm just surprised that among all the countries in the region that are fucking things up, Saudi Fucking Arabia, ruled by Mohammed bin Sawbone, somehow is behaving responsibly. What the fuck.

ww3real, to random
@ww3real@mastodon.social avatar

By the end of the day, the Karen Army Group is in control of the entire left bank of the Ayeyarwady bend; only about a third of the strength of the Nakhon Ratchasima Army Group managed to escape. Kashyap tells the troops this is the first time they do this well on the offensive.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@timbray @ww3real To some extent, yes. Something that the narrative only mentions a few times and the maps obscure is that the troop density per kilometer of front is so insanely high that in practice, there are always additional divisions behind the front, which is why tactical progress in both Southeast Asia and Europe is so extremely slow.

DiegoBeghin, to random
@DiegoBeghin@mastodon.social avatar

Thanks to my usual awesome luck, it seems that the Frankfurt-Köln high speed line is not operational precisely at the time my ICE was supposed to take it. We're travelling via the slower Rhine line via Koblenz. Which means I'll miss my connection to the Eurostar in Köln.

Since this is a missed connection between 2 high speed trains, can we just take the next train to Brussels, even if it's an ICE and not a Eurostar?

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@DiegoBeghin @crzwdjk @pony Yes, and also, the connections here aren't even that great at timing. Switzerland, where the trains are designed to just meet their Takt nodes, has 7% pad, not 25%.

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