ped_xing

ped_xing, 9 days ago

Sorry, do you mean Madison or Milwaukee? All of Madison is within range and none of Milwaukee is. It absolutely sucks that she moved HQ even beyond Madison’s boring and sleepy west side where there was plenty of room. It doubly sucks that she was sending 20%+ of her employees on flights every Monday pre-covid and thought putting up some solar panels would make a dent in the environmental impact of that.

ped_xing, 15 days ago

Money? Is he out of horses?

ped_xing, 24 days ago

Was it officer down?

ped_xing, 25 days ago

I find np a worse message when taken literally. If I even have to write an email, it’s at least a little problem. yw allows for a problem you solved for somebody without suggesting that it doesn’t come at the expense of other priorities. Both will be interpreted the same way by almost everyone, of course.

ped_xing, 25 days ago

You’re welcome to ask things like that of me. This is within the realm of stuff I will gladly do for you.

ped_xing, 27 days ago

“Locally made” makes it sounds like they’re bringing them home from the farmer’s market in a canvas bag.

ped_xing, 27 days ago

smuglord

ped_xing, 28 days ago

They did the meme. https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/18f8261e-bf19-4219-b594-9e890033a5b2.png

ped_xing, 1 month ago

PIGPOOPBALLS

ped_xing, 2 months ago

Nobody’s proposing banning ambulances. You should be able to take the metro to the club. You should also be able to take it outside of the city and you can figure out the remainder of your journey from there. Reclaiming land from cars would also allow more space within cities for parks and such and decrease the need to get out of the city to escape dickheads leaning on their horns.

ped_xing, 2 months ago

The roads are huge because of multiple lanes in two directions with street parking on the side. An ambulance only needs one lane.

ped_xing, 2 months ago

Fine, two. Two-lane, no parking roads are still only a third of the size of four-lane roads with parking on both sides.

ped_xing, 2 months ago

What happens more often where you live – ambulances reach capacity or somebody gets run over and dies?

ped_xing, 3 months ago

It seems like a company that would require employee-purchased headsets would already require employee-purchased laptops. Do you know of any? Honest question; I don’t, but my bubble is pretty small.

ped_xing, 4 months ago

The number of times I walked out of the shower without using soap plus i times the number of times I soaped at least twice to avoid that scenario.

ped_xing, 6 months ago

So the saving sentence is how far below where your average executive stopped reading?

ped_xing, 7 months ago

Car-free Manhattan is just the 78% of households without cars winning out over the 22% with and the daily invaders from out of town. Those percentages are way beyond pro-weed vs. anti-weed and weed has won in a lot of places even without overthrowing capitalism. It’s long overdue there and even the late mayor Koch considered it before I was born.

ped_xing, 7 months ago

Stop lines farther back from the intersection.

People don’t stop for the stop lines, nor the crosswalk, nor the red light. We haven’t even solved stop-on-red. Solutions that will only be implemented in the occasional rich neighborhood are a joke. The problem is that we never had a proper conversation of whether the general public can be trusted to operate heavy machinery. Some dickheads got rich selling the heavy machinery and that was enough to quash any discussion about people being squashed. We need car-free places where people can truly live their lives not only without cars, but without other people zipping by on their cars. Not just 14th Street but all of Manhattan. Make that the go-to move for rich parents who prioritize their childrens’ safety above all else. Make other cities get jealous of the money flowing into car-free Manhattan and implement their own car-free zones.

Tinkering around the edges is Vision Maybe-Marginally-Less.

ped_xing, 7 months ago

Getting mad you’re allowed to go over 20mph?

I’m a pedestrian. A car going over 20 mph isn’t getting me to my destination any faster, it’s putting my life at risk to get its driver somewhere faster.

ped_xing, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

because otherwise the shareholders eat you alive for not chasing infinite profits.

I think that while the threat is real, the threat being a major motivator for upper management is largely illusory. It’s absolutely there, but it’s not making them do stuff they’re not already keen on doing. Nobody weasels their way up the ladder to do non-profit-maximizing things, occasionally getting reprimanded for not maximizing profit and always one stray “the old phone’s fine” tweet away from getting canned. They’re willing and enthusiastic profit-maximizers.

ped_xing, 8 months ago

Banning their culture

Where? I’m not seeing it. Here’s what @KiaKaha wrote:

Approximately 50% of what you hear is outright propaganda, as we know the CIA’s affiliates churn out. We also see CIA assets pushing narratives on Reddit. The next 25% is poorly researched speculation by an evangelical end-timer, and the final 25% is an accurate description of the PRC’s response to far right, religious terrorism and separatism.

First, let’s just establish using safe, American sources that a bunch of Uyghur people went to fight with ISIS in Syria, then returned. Let’s also establish that there have been consistent terrorist attacks with significant casualties and that the CIA and CIA front-groups have funded and stoked Islamic extremism across the world for geopolitical gain.

Now, we need to consider potential responses.

The CPC could give up and surrender Xinjiang to ISIS. This option condemns millions of people to living under a fundamentalist Islamic State, including many non-Muslims and non-extreme Muslims. This option creates a CIA-aligned state on the border, and jeopardises a key part of the Belt and Road initiative, which is designed to connect landlocked countries for development and geopolitical positioning. This option also threatens the CPC’s legitimacy, as keeping China together is a historical signifier of the Mandate of Heaven.

The next option is the American option. Drone strike, black-site, or otherwise liquidate anyone who could be associated with Islamic extremism. Be liberal in doing so. Make children fear blue skies because of drones. When the orphaned young children grow up, do it all again. You can also throw a literal man-made famine in there if you want.

The final option is the Chinese option. Mass surveillance. Use AI to liberally target anyone who may be at risk of radicalisation for re-education. Teach them the lingua franca of China, Mandarin. Pump money into the region for development. When people finish their time in re-education, set them up with state jobs. Keep the surveillance up. Allow and even celebrate local religious customs, but make sure the leaders are on-side with the party.

Let’s take a moment to distinguish that last approach from that of Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany wanted to exterminate the undesirables. Initially it was internment in concentration camps with the outcome up in the air, with a vague hope of shipping them to Madagascar or palestine, but it later morphed into full extermination. All throughout, Nazi Germany was pushing strong rhetoric of antisemitism and stoking ethnic hatred in the public sphere.

There’s no evidence, including from leaked papers, that the goal of the deradicalisation programme is permanent internment or annihilation of Islam. In fact, the leaked papers have Xi explicitly saying Islam should not be annihilated from China:

Mr. Xi also told officials to not discriminate against Uighurs and to respect their right to worship. He warned against overreacting to natural friction between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group, and rejected proposals to try to eliminate Islam entirely in China.

“In light of separatist and terrorist forces under the banner of Islam, some people have argued that Islam should be restricted or even eradicated,” he said during the Beijing conference. He called that view “biased, even wrong.”

As for permanent internment, we know from leaks that the minimum duration of detention is one year — though accounts from ex-detainees suggest that some are released sooner.

Unlike Nazi Germany, there’s no stoking of inter-ethnic hatred or elimination of a specific culture; the CPC actively censors footage from terrorist attacks in China to avoid such an outcome. Xi doesn’t go on TV calling any ethnicity rapists or murderers. Uighur culture is actively celebrated in the media and via tourism. Xinjiang has 24,400 mosques, one per 530 Muslims. That’s three mosques per capita more than their western peers.

Could China’s approach be done better? Almost certainly. Is it the most humane response to extremism we’ve seen so far? That’s for you to decide.

(Reposted from here )

ped_xing, 8 months ago

If a pilot repeatedly ignored their equipment and flew too low over populated areas, they’d lose their license in a hurry. When you pilot large, deadly equipment out in public, that comes with the burden of complying with all regulations, whether they feel necessary or not. If the general public thumbs their nose at this idea, that just underscores that it was a mistake to let pretty much anyone drive whatever they can afford however they want unless a cop is looking. We have to reverse that mistake instead of tinkering around the edges to occasionally slow people down by a tiny bit until they get used to handling even your traffic-calmed section of roadway at high speeds.

ped_xing, 9 months ago

If I had a nickel for every time my boss fired somebody so humiliatingly that they forgot to take their jackets with them on the way out the door, I’d have two nickels.

I didn’t observe this myself – she e-mailed everyone she didn’t fire asking if any of us wanted a jacket and went on to describe the ones her victims were wearing just last week.