current-events
Yimbys for Harris $100k
Reblog via StarrWulfe (JLGatewood)
ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR HARRIS/WALZ!!
Support better neighborhoods/affordable housing/sustainable development!!
In honor of Father’s Day, I’m going to engage in one of my favorite past-times: $#!+posting dad jokes. 😏
If you’re a dad (or you have a dad– I guess that’d be everyone here except my immaculate conception, clones, androids and the asexual reproduction homies) please add to the ensuing and possibly annoying thread. Consider yourself warned for irony, cringe and general rando post fun & mayhem.
–Also go wish your dad a Happy Father’s Day before you forget 😜
Let’s get it started:
- I was going to get a brain transplant, but I changed my mind
- Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? ...He's all right now...
- I've been trying to come up with a dad joke about momentum . . . but I just can't seem to get it going.
Of course we picked the only day it’s raining down here to be camping at the JAX beaches. Well we’re gonna still make the most of the time off!
But our campsite is a flooded mess at the moment so I guess it’s a movie day inside the camper for now.
Bluesky takes the velvet rope down 🦋
Bluesky has opened up and requires no waitlist now, so if you were searching for a Twitter alternative, then here you go:
[simpleblogcard url="bsky.social/about/blo…"]
Once registered, find me here:
[simpleblogcard url="bsky.app/profile/s…"]
For reference:
| Feature | Bluesky | ActivityPub/Mastodon | Other SNS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Decentralization | Yes | Yes | No |
| Open-Source | Yes | Yes | No |
| Account Portability | Yes (ATProto was designed with this in mind.) | Yes (but it varies with the app/site you're working with | No |
| Moderation | community based | community based | Centralized |
| Focus | Text, photo (video on roadmap) | Various | Varies |
| Customization | High | Very high | None |
| Access | Just made public | Most instances public but some are not. | Public |
[simpleblogcard url="[techcrunch.com/2024/02/0...](https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/06/bluesky-is-now-open-for-anyone-to-join/)"]
[simpleblogcard url="[www.engadget.com/bluesky-i...](https://www.engadget.com/bluesky-is-ditching-its-waitlist-and-opening-to-everyone-140026198.html)"]
[simpleblogcard url="mashable.com/article/b…"]
My take:
It's basically what Twitter was supposed to become before Elon Musk bought the place and turned it into a festering cesspool. And while I'm more of an ActivityPub/Mastodon/Indieweb enthusiast, there's no reason not to have a Bluesky account since the two will talk to each other in the very near future thanks to folks like @snarfed.org@snarfed.org and Brid.gy.
Besides all that, it's so new, you can still smell the wet paint and fresh drywall over there, so you can move in and create your own space quite easily now... and if it gets enshittified, then no love lost, right? Whatcha got to lose?
…Now they’re just grasping at straws. We asked for something like this back in 2018 complete with a framework to provide AirBNB style housing and helping with Japanese government services like hoken, and the like. I’m sure none of the support part is included here and we all know how hard that is for anyone new to Japan.
Hello COVID my old friend, I hoped we'd never meet again
Here we go again with the bullshit.
This time, my sense of smell is 90% gone. 😩
Paxlovid enroute and no real symptoms other than post-nasal drip from hell and sore back though, so hopefully this'll be over in a few days. 🤞🏾
Me looking hella disheveled after getting a giant qtip up my snout. All I wanted was more powerful meds to dam up the waterfall in my sinuses.
👩🏾⚕️:“We gotta check you for flu and Covid”
🐺: “Y’all didn’t do that so the my wife when she was here a few days ago”
👩🏾⚕️: takes out big ass q-tip from quantum space “look up right quick…”
an entire eternity of poking all my childhood memories into mash later
👩🏾⚕️: “give it 15 minutes and we’ll know…”
🐺: achooooo!!! “I can’t stop sneezi—" aaaaachoooo!!!
Content Creators: Substack's dumpster fire should also be the one lit underneath your @$$
If 2010-2020 was the Great Social Media Consolidation, looks like 2022 and beyond are gonna be the Great Innanet Decentralization, and I’m 1oo% present for it. Thanks to our friends #indieweb and #fediverse, you already know how easy it is to plug into some great communities on the interwebs while keeping your content under your control and being able to keep a record of the dialog around it at your own site.
If you’re reading this on my website, then just look down where on a traditional blog there’d be a “leave a comment” doohickey there for you to fill out a form and say how you feel about what you read. But here you can just comment on any of the syndicated sites where this same content exists and it’ll find its way back here via “a series of tubes” I’ve arranged. And with some hacky tomfoolery, my comments here will flow back to wherever they need to go in most places. To me, this is what real social media is supposed to be like– Your media on in a space you control and interact with the right circle of people you want to see it. And if you want, you can network your site with others, forming a mesh network of sites. That’s the premise (and promise) of decentralized social networking I’ve stressed again and again here.
Today one of my “transit content” friends I’ve followed for years is finding out first had why this is a good idea, thanks to the whole Substack debacle. Reece Martin (@rm_transit@mstdn.social) who runs RMTransit on YouTube experienced this firsthand by having to make the hard decision to move his popular Substack newsblog to Wordpress, but to me that means he just upgraded. By switching he’s able to:
- Immediately take advantage of RSS feeds, newsletters, and the mobile app.
- A whole ass ecosystem of plugins to make your blog do everything except tuck him in at night.
- Implement the ActivityPub plugin and publish content into the fediverse
- Grab the Indieweb plugins and use Webmentions and syndicate comments and content with other blogs
- Use the above with Bridgy and crosspost, backfeed and more with more SNSs
- Use IFTTT, Zapier and more to automate external things like kicking off a job to auto post his video content on his new blog when he comes out with a new video on YouTube.
I’m happy he decided to go this route and I hope others out there do the same. If your message and voice are your livelihood, there’s no excuse for not using all the products available to make sure it stays that way.
When Mastodon Met Threads 🐘➕🧵🟰❓
It has started:
I have been saying for a very long while now that ActivityPub as a protocol and within it Mastodon as the flagship app need to separate themselves from the fringe in order to gain more traction and usage.
Understand that ActivityPub itself is a protocol not unlike IMAP and HTTP under the W3C. Just like email doesn’t rely on any one server to transport mail traffic across the Internet, By using ActivityPub social media can enjoy the same freedom and transparency. I shouldn’t have to join every single social media and existence to get a complete picture of what everyone is up to… we actually had this about 20 something years ago when the then biggest part of the fledgling social media universe decided to use XMPP as a standard to federate their instant messenger networks. What that meant was my ICQ handle was able to contact all my friends on AOL instant messenger and MSN without having to do anything strange. Ironically it was Facebook that broke this paradigm when they took Facebook messenger behind closed doors in order to add all the functionality that it has now.
OK, but you know Meta ain't doin' this outta the kindness of their hearts, right? 😒
It should not be forgotten that the reason why this is probably happening is because of the very strict policies that the European Union has imposed on how companies operate on the open Internet. It’s far easier for Mattar, the company that owns Facebook to create this new net work and design it from the start with open standards and then slowly bring everything over to it, rather than having to bolt on the same functionality to Facebook or Instagram as it stands now. While it may be seen as a self-serving move on their behalf, I personally welcome it because it means suddenly it might be one less thing to have to join and maintain in order to still be a part of the social media landscape.
Imagine a world where people on TikTok can communicate with people on YouTube and people on twitch. It might sound kind of strange at first but the same is already happening here in the #fediverse with Mastodon , PeerTube, and WordPress.
(Obligatory "how it works" link here.)
This integration is happening methodically and with a lot of advice from all stakeholders it appears; Threads users are going to get a window into the fediverse soon; as I type this, some accounts are getting read-only access. Evan Prodromou, one of the founding architects of the very underpinnings of ActivityPub (@evan@cosocial.ca and @evanprodromou@threads.net) has been able to talk to the team over at Meta in charge of this undertaking along with a host of others in the #indieweb realm. Believe me when I say, these discussions got into the weeds and no stone was left untouched according to most of the attendees. This is the part that makes me feel Meta is acting in good faith.
Will everyone be OK with federation though?
It’s very easy to say “I’m not going to federate with Threads” or “I don’t want to associate with those Mastodon loons” (posts I won’t link to here, but use the appropriate search technique and you will find them in short order). The point is being missed insofar as the networks being interoperable if nothing else for the sake of creating a new standard and influencing the wider internet to “de-silo” all this content is a good thing and needs to be encouraged, not shunned.
As of this writing, there are no official timelines on when any of this will go into effect for us, but I have my educated guesses that it will coincide with the opening of Threads.net to EU signups and the move to be a federated network should keep regulators over there from breaking out the ban hammer. That’s supposed to be in a few days so we’ll see.
Stay tuned!
Good news everyone! Georgia has federal passenger train study funding!
In combination with some great news about funding a lot of sorely needed railroad projects and studies at the federal level, Georgia's U.S. Senators Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock announced new grants to explore three new Georgia passenger rail corridors made possible by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The new rail routes would connect major economic centers in Georgia and neighboring states, providing additional public transit options, increased mobility, and a sustainable, clean-energy future.
Proposed rail corridor studies that are being funded include one between Memphis and Savannah and a high-speed route from Charlotte with Atlanta in the center of it all.
Starting from Atlanta, the routes being studied are:
- A route heading northward with stops likely in Marietta, Cartersville, Dalton and points north into Tennessee that would connect with Chattanooga and efforts in that state to create a line from there to Nashville.
- Extending south and eastward, a route that would likely have intermediate stations in McDonough, Macon and end in Savannah with a connection to the Amtrak route linking Florida and DC on the east coast. There's also the potential to create a branch that would go due south out of Macon, through Valdosta and link with Tampa or Orlando. It would be nice to get some two-state talks going with Florida on doing something together since Brightline is already plying the rails down there and its now a known quantity.
- Perhaps the most interesting and likely first to get going is a high-speed line between Atlanta and Charlotte. The in-state routing on this one is not known, but it'd be very strange if Athens was missed. The growing South Carolina towns of Greenville/Spartanburg definitely and perhaps Anderson/Clemson would get stops depending on routing.
Another point of discussion is where exactly in Atlanta would these routes be emanating from; ATL's current train station for Amtrak service on the thrice weekly Crescent service from DC to New Orleans is basically a glorified waiting room with rails and stairs that lead to Peachtree Rd just north of Midtown. There were some efforts to build a new multimodal station Downtown right across from the Five Points MARTA station, right where a bunch of railroad tracks pass through a trench. While we do need a world-class rail terminal for a world-class city like Atlanta (especially to help get a commuter rail service off the ground -- more on that later,) let's not ignore our 900-pound gorilla lying 8 miles south: Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
Remember, the reason Atlanta even exists is because of rail transportation.
Literally the World's Busiest Airport for 20+ years definitely needs to be tied into any long-distance (and commuter!) rail options here. The catchment area of passengers includes not just the entire state but anything that would beat a car ride from an area of about 200 miles in diameter around us. Every time I've been in one of Hartsfield's parking garages, I've seen cars with South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee tags that are definitely not rentals. With frequent enough service, it could be very possible to simply leave the car and take the train to the airport and catch a flight. Most Americans can't realize this convenience right now but take it from me after living in Japan for almost 20 years, being able to just hop a train even in the most remote parts of the area and get to Haneda, Narita, Kansai and Nagoya Centrair airports without worrying about long-term parking or begging for a ride from friends is a great thing.
According to Axios, how much of the $8.2 billion will wind up in Georgia for its rail project — or the timeline for the project's start and completion is a big question mark. One thing I'd like to know is does some of this money help look into a regional rail solution here around Atlanta that's desperately needed. Just like NYC, LA and Chicago, whatever helps the commuter rail network, would ultimately be good for the longer distance trains as well since they could share the tracks. That ATL Trains idea is still the best idea I've ever seen and really, REALLY needs to be formally studied with this money. Check out the 146-page prospectus and the ATL Trains website yourself, it's that good!
My take: Just like the Eisenhower Interstate Highway projects of the 1960s, the US really needs a rail renaissance in order to help face this brave new world of climate change, population and demographic shifts into sunbelt cities that didn't keep up infrastructure-wise (building another lane isn't cutting it Chief!) and the simple paradigm shift of decentralization in our metro areas in general-- How many people do you know BEFORE the pandemic that worked "downtown?" OK, now how many people actually even go to an office every day? Our transportation network needs to be more dynamic and flexible to account for these shifts and overlaying a decent rail network, both nationally and locally, is paramount. This is in addition to dealing with improving road and air travel; those need to be sorted as well.
Seriously? Elon was trying to get a tax break for X here in Atlanta?!
As the [AJC](https://www.ajc.com/news/fulton-board-to-consider-10m-tax-break-to-x-formerly-twitter/4V66VOJ73RCFPA5DI54FAFVLBA/) reported, X (formerly Twitter) appealed to the Development Agency of Fulton County to try and grab over $10 million in property tax breaks on their data center here in Atlanta to upgrade the server farm... But providing no additional jobs... which is why the tax breaks are there in the first place! 🥴
source: Atlanta Journal Constitution dated 3 Dec 2023
Everyone knows that these tax breaks should be going to fund any development that directly enhances the livelihood of Atlanta residents and for no other purpose. Job creation, educational, cultural and infrastructure enhancement are all good reasons to consider giving a company a tax break as an incentive to be here and will soon show up tangibly as residents have easier ways to get around, are better educated, healthier and of course prosperous. This equates to a win-win as it usually shows a bump in tax revenues a few years later.
However since X’s datacenter currently only has 24 full-time staff and no other staff are planned on being hired, there’s really no reason to give away $10 million + of our tax bucks that really need to be spent on the things I outlined above.
I agree with @threadatl@threads.net when he says:
Atlanta needs to reject this ingrained culture of giving away tax inducements to major developments that offer little or no benefit to neighborhood residents (or to neighborhood small businesses for that matter).
https://www.threads.net/@threadatl/post/C0cglEUPAo7
We have to shake this culture of “giveaway to play” when it comes to our civic monies and assets unless they directly, tangibly, OSTENSIBLY provide benefit to ALL within the boundaries of the city/county/state’s taxpayers.
Thankfully, it did not pass, likely due to a lot of councilmembers suddenly hearing about it from their constituents I’ll bet:
Post by @threadatlView on Threads
Atlanta Beltline Loop Saga: The Man with the Original Plan drops big facts/FAQs
Over the past few days, the “Father of the Beltline” himself, Ryan Gravel, created a massive 70-something-odd long FAQ in response to the NIMBYist action group that popped up opposing the transit portion of the Atlanta Beltline.
His post is massively detailed and as pointed as one would expect of having to literally defend their graduate thesis even after half of it has been edified. It’s also a masterclass in how to keep fighting tooth-and-nail without resorting to name-calling and pettiness which seems to be the norm these days.
Anyone who is in favor of a more walkable, pedestrian and bike friendly version of Atlanta (or anywhere really) is encouraged to follow the link as it is very much worth the read in its entirety. Also feel free to comment if you want to ask questions that aren’t covered as the FAQ is happily still open to additions.
ATL is the transit Bizzaro Land we need to fix
Last time in this series, I talked about an organization called Better Atlanta Transit that counter to its name, wants to end all talk of having light rail alongside the Beltline Trail, the very popular, used-to-be-murder-tracks encircling central Atlanta that’s now a multipurpose trail, linear park, and real estate gentrification money printing machine.
Of course in a way only Upside/DownLand Atlanta could do, we somehow got the multipurpose trail part built first, and are behind in the light rail installation. We now seem to be on the precipice of bringing tracks to the trail but of course the NIMBYs aren’t done yet; under the guise of “making transit in Atlanta better,” they ask “should we be building an old-timey streetcar next to our beautiful trail?”
Of course this was a rallying cry to all rail supporters around our beleaguered metro area, a place which hasn’t seen any serious transit expansion since 2000 when MARTA opened the Red Line northern extension and added Sandy Springs and North Springs stations. We’re not gonna talk about how we’ve added over 1.7 million more people to the metro area since then according to the US Census Bureau. That’s bonkers.
Luckily I’m not the only one all worked up; Nathan Davenport also wanted to get his points across as well, and put together a video to really give insight into what the group is actually saying, why rails on the trails is a smarter idea, and how to get involved.
My take: Having the Beltline without tracks is like having a building with no door or airport with no runway and apparently even Ryan Gravel, the urban designer who dreamed up the city-shaping project as a graduate student at Georgia Tech, said rail transit is the "centerpiece of the Beltline's vision and funding” according to Axios. The opposition group says they’re still in favor of transit options along the corridor, then point at share bikes and scooters, autonomous vehicles and other “gadgetbahnery” to add transit there because “streetcars are old tech."
None of those concepts will offer the real throughput to move people around the corridor, don't help take the most cars off the road, but only help the able-bodied and well-heeled living immediately in the formerly-ghetto-now-ritzy areas around the trail itself. Most importantly isn’t the package we were sold 12 years ago when we voted on the measure.
Party like its 1700000000
A rollover event is about to take place and geeks, nerds and neckbeards around the world will be refreshing their datecommands tomorrow evening to check out the counter tick over from 1699999999 to a cool 1700000000 seconds.
Unix date epoch time is a way of measuring time that counts the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 at midnight UTC time, not counting leap seconds. This point in time is called the Unix epoch. It is used by Unix and Linux operating systems, as well as many other applications and programming languages. ¹²³
To get the current Unix date epoch time, you can use different commands or functions depending on the programming language or environment you are using. For example, in Python, you can use import time; time.time() to get the current epoch time in seconds. In C#, you can use DateTimeOffset.Now.ToUnixTimeSeconds() to get the same result. ¹
The Unix date epoch time is useful for storing and comparing dates and times in a simple and efficient way. However, it also has some limitations. For example, it cannot represent dates before the Unix epoch, and it will reach its maximum value on January 19, 2038, which is known as the Year 2038 problem or Y2038. ¹²
- Source: Conversation with Bing, 11/13/2023
(1) Epoch Converter - Unix Timestamp Converter. https://www.epochconverter.com/.
(2) What Is the Unix Epoch, and How Does Unix Time Work? - How-To Geek. https://www.howtogeek.com/759337/what-is-the-unix-epoch-and-how-does-unix-time-work/.
(3) What Is Unix Time and When Was the Unix Epoch? - MUO. https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-unix-time-and-when-was-the-unix-epoch/.
(4) Epoch. https://www.epoch101.com/.
I certainly wasn’t about to retype all that in myself!
Happy Epoch Rollover Watching! ↩
Inconsolable Tangential War Victims
It’s very hard to ignore the amount of suffering going on by people who just a few years ago were living an idyllic life just like me; worried about having enough time/money to simply have a few days off to spend with wife/husband/kids/parents/family/friends… Or just sitting in a cafe and sipping a coffee or tea and enjoying a book or something. Now just endless war and death for what? Someone in a palace far away with some random agenda decided whatever and now their entire vicinity is rubble. People just getting massacred because its Tuesday. I tried to refrain from saying something about this, but my mind won’t rest.
My ancestry commands my fingers to talk about how my mama grabbed my shoulders as we watched the latest horrors coming from both Gaza and Ukraine last week. “Those people were already living in an open prison. Now they have nothing. It’s nothing but kids playing in fucking rubble, and they kill the children. It reminds me that bullshit I grew up in,” my mother ranted. She’s 78 and feisty AF. Anything… The tiniest little shred of a scrap that makes her remember segregation, Jim Crow and the humiliations she, my family and Black folks in general went through in her childhood and before sets her all the way off. And all the imagery coming in from that part of the world is looking like a 2024 “Let’s make Apartheid great again: Genocidal Tendencies” double feature for her.
“See, I remember they didn’t mind you spending up all your money in their big fancy department store downtown, but don’t let you have to go to the bathroom. Even a 6-year-old little black girl still has to pee in the alley behind the store, but oh they take that greenback quick. These people aren’t allowed to go to a hospital on the other side of the wall, but I bet their taxes are paying something for that. I bet their taxes probably funded that wall, those police and bullets that kill them too!” My mama was on a roll, and it might not seem as if her raging actually has a connection to the suffering going on here and now in 2024…
But suffering knows suffering, and that’s the point. Looking at videos of dead kids that were playing foosball in the street a minute ago, looking at sacks of dead bodies being unearthed from mass graves. Seeing 5-year-old boys with soulless eyes dazed because literally their entire household was killed except them… If I had the same memories my mom (and dad) had, I’d be channeling them too. The movie is the same, the characters are just a bit different. It’s even worse for me since I don’t have those memories first-hand, but I have parents, had grandparents, and have felt those aches in the collective memory with every song, prayer and hand-laying in those times we Black folks commune together. I do know what it’s like to see a friend who spent literally the last 6 hours of their life in school with me, ate lunch with me, played basketball with me, and died from a stray bullet 3 blocks from our school because someone just had to shoot at somebody they didn’t like and hit everyone and everything including my friend but totally missed their intended target. Repeat this a few times with some other neighborhood friends, 3 cousins, and so on… So, tangentially I guess I also know a bit of what a war feels like, and the unfair pain and suffering caused by someone else who I’ll never get a reason from let alone an apology. And if I feel this pain, then surely the people causing it must have a hatred so deep that their own sadness is consumes it and makes it do these horrible things.
If we do nothing to stem the outpouring of hatefulness, it won’t stop until it’s consumed all of humanity.