The freight industry is a huge source of the problems in the US rail system. It should not be able to run trains longer than the passing sections, but it does it anyway because “it reduces labor costs”. Running longer trains is terrible from an engineering perspective.
Ways of Seeing is a 1972 television series of (four) 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb.
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Cake day: December 29th, 2021
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This passing problem was solved a long time ago, it’s just that the freight rail corps in the US have “optimized” for trains that are longer than the passing rail sections. It’s extremely bad for the entire rail industry and the cause of many of the derailments and accidents, but because capital always gets its way in the US, nothing significantly has changed to resolve the issue.
It’s very frustrating how often there are perfectly workable solutions to making the world better, but if it doesn’t have a fat profit margin, it just gets strangled to death by capital interests in this country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Donald_Duck
1971 book-length essay by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart that critiques Disney comics from a Marxist point of view as capitalist propaganda for American corporate and cultural imperialism. It was first published in Chile in 1971, became a bestseller throughout Latin America and is still considered a seminal work in cultural studies. It was reissued in August 2018 to a general audience in the United States
The book’s thesis is that Disney comics are not only a reflection of the prevailing ideology at the time (capitalism), but that the comics’ authors are also aware of this, and are active agents in spreading the ideology. To that end, Disney comics use images of the everyday world:
“Here lies Disney’s inventive (product of his era), rejecting the crude and explicit scheme of adventure strips, that came up at the same time. The ideological background is without any doubt the same: but Disney, not showing any open repressive force, is much more dangerous. The division between Bruce Wayne and Batman is the projection of fantasy outside the ordinary world to save it. Disney colonizes the everyday world, at hand of ordinary man and his common problems, with the analgesic of a child’s imagination.”
— Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck, p. 148
This closeness to everyday life is so only in appearance, because the world shown in the comics, according to the thesis, is based on ideological concepts, resulting in a set of natural rules that lead to the acceptance of particular ideas about capital, the developed countries’ relationship with the Third World, gender roles, etc.
As an example, the book considers the lack of descendants of the characters. Everybody has an uncle or nephew, everybody is a cousin of someone, but nobody has fathers or sons. This non-parental reality creates horizontal levels in society, where there is no hierarchic order, except the one given by the amount of money and wealth possessed by each, and where there is almost no solidarity among those of the same level, creating a situation where the only thing left is crude competition.
6·25 days agoCities Aren’t Loud: Cars Are Loud
Urban noise is a common problem, and the vast majority of it is created by motor vehicles. Noise is far too often dismissed as a minor nuisance, rather than the legitimate health issue that it is.
The book “Curbing Traffic” has a chapter about the health impacts of noise pollution. I explore the research in the book, and visit Delft, the city that is highlighted in the book as being a shining example of what can happen when noise pollution is taken seriously.
This video explores the problem that farting cars, farting motorcycles, and farting mopeds create in our cities.
A few lentils can be used under the valve caps to cause a slow liberation of air from the tires. No property damage, but quite an inconvenience to get refilled.
village that was razed to the ground
By the US military or CIA funded death squads in the vast majority of cases.
1·2 months agoIt’s a great mechanism for “peer review” especially in the sense that ethics and legality are often entirely different things.
Basically a jury can legally decide to nullify by declaring “not guilty” regardless of the facts or the judge’s instructions, etc. This is why even mentioning jury nullification during a trial can really upset the judge and the prosecution. It is supposed to be something every jury is aware of, but that is usually not actually the case.
Jury Nullification is like the secret code of the US justice system.That’s why most of the people that work for the system absolutely despised the whole idea.
The technical term often used is “recuperation”. Any innovation in radical evolution of culture is seen as a threat to the status quo, so recuperation comes in to co-opt the radical impulse and funnel it back into the status quo in a manner that is not destabilizing to exist structural power.
The classic example is media piracy like napster, bit-torrent, etc being co-opted into streaming services, itunes, etc. Service the desire that animated the radical impulse while reinforcing the existing power structures, foreclosing the potential threat. Enshittification often follows shortly after the enclosure has been successful.
Quorum sensing is an important factor in processes of quantitative change reaching a point where qualitative change is possible. This is just how social dynamics work. You’re welcome to encourage more people to join the push for a general strike or other local organizing groups and parties, but a mass of people will be necessary to bring about qualitative changes.
We need a general strike to start. It has to be big enough that is disrupts the ongoing social order, then revolution. Unfortunately many people are appeased by their treats and unwilling to commit to opposing the status quo in any effective way.
Put a racist misogynist in US justice system for a few days, and they suddenly care about the treatment of those they gleefully disparaged for years. How the turntables. Give him a few weeks and maybe he’ll reconsider his perspective a tiny bit (probably not, but it’s worth a try).
Ya, I’m bi(cyclist). I’m also down with multi-modal trans(portation).
Palantir is the profit-driven offshoot of this program. It’s mostly infrastructure for privatized mass surveillance services. Also why the push for age verification and ID is happen alongside this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
The funny part is that the USA doesn’t have enough electric generation infrastructure to power more than a small sliver of all the planned AI data centers.
4·5 months agoThe owl appears to have a subtle expression of “Can you believe this shit?”.
NJB on why driving in the Netherlands is better than driving anywhere else is such a good analysis. When you design your transportation infrastructure to reduce conflicts between different travel modes, all the modes benefit.
181·5 months agoSo pf is literally bad for the threadiverse at a technical level. It doesn’t really matter if this came from malicious intent or just rushed vibe coding or anything else because the result is a threat to the entire activity pub federation model regardless.
Definitely seems like defederation is warranted until there’s a competent code audit and fixes.
A superposition crossword answer is what I was thinking. It’s a good analogy in that there are only two working choices across, but the 8 working choices down. I guess you could also use “star tres” for a 3rd solution too, that’s an extra nifty crossword hidden joke.