Notices by Donald Ball (donaldball@triangletoot.party)

@inthehands @j_bertolotti @ColinTheMathmo @mothninja I agree, but am curious about your perspective – it seems to me that the path of the… curious bohemian through the academy is less accessible than it once was, as students have shouldered more and more of the financial burden of education. Students have more at risk, so they’re responding rationally to the perverse mismeasures of the academic system.

Is this a thing or am I projecting?

@inthehands @marick @dimsumthinking Totally, and that’s super selfish and… unnecessary? One of the delights of the throttle is that I can and do always slow to a crawl to pass anyone – costs me nothing to regain speed afterwards.

@inthehands @dimsumthinking @marick I have a hip disability and use a class 2 ebike because I need the throttle backup. Keeping me off of bike trails would make my errands sufficiently dangerous that I wouldn’t be able to do them on my bike.

Totally agree there need to be reasonable limits on speed and behavior. Disagree strongly there should be limits on mobility aids.

@inthehands This is exactly the kind of thing I bemoan about the dAtA-dRiVeN fad that's overtaken tech management over the past decade or so.

I've gone to managers with these concerns and been told, how can you prove e.g. these docs are inadequate, that investing more in tech writers will pay off? Come to me with the metrics and we'll talk.

I can't? I don't think it's possible, not in general? Certainly not a priori.

@inthehands Like, maybe I could stroke my chin and posit that you'll get a 35% reduction in support case volume and time, but I don't believe it, not really. I don't think those data are clean enough to support that analysis, or could possibly be disentangled from everything else that's changing.

You also aren't gonna see customer happiness in those metrics. You won't see the potential customers that said nah, this isn't good enough, based on the shitty docs.

@feld @mekkaokereke @Jonricha Eerrrrrmmmmm farming, produce farming in particular, is highly variable with constant risks of catastrophic losses, and utterly necessary for a healthy, stable population. While government food production supports are often a source of graft and corruption, basically every viable state in history has provided it in some form or another for good reason.

@feld @mekkaokereke @Jonricha Corn production in the US is quite a different thing, of course. It’s basically an industrial commodity produced by agricorps.

@inthehands That definitely is the case here. Significant stroads are controlled by the state department of transportation, which exhibits at best contempt and at worst hostility towards the city or any attempt to serve anyone but car operators.

We could do far better within the city though, but our governance is tilted towards cookie-cutter sprawl developments.

@inthehands I guess I'm a little skeptical on how much cities, or at least my city can change housing supply in a way that positively affects the crisis. All developers seem to want to offer are a. luxury condos downtown (but generally no more than 5 stories) or b. suburban sprawl, all but requiring folk to own cars (and I'm convinced by the strong towns analyses that these are a net negative in terms of support costs over 20+ years for infrastructure and utilities).

@inthehands Here in Durham, NC, we apparently hit a home run with our HEART program https://heartforthis.org/about/ for non-violent crisis intervention. Loving it.

And yet, there's a reactionary undercurrent in favor of more policing based, as I see it, on three ongoing problems:

1. gun violence
2. unhoused folk
3. traffic safety

I'm not aware of any *effective* measures the city can bring to bear on these, given state hostility to city governments and, of course, the corrupt Supreme Court.

@inthehands So I fear we're doomed to swing back and forth between tepid progress and reactionary backlash in most cities. Maybe I'm just in a pessimistic mode when it comes to how to ensure public safety — are you aware of any countervailing trends from which I could take inspiration?

@inthehands @StillIRise1963 I said it before, I’ll say it again. If this election gets fucky and these courts try to step in, we strike.

@inthehands Some years back, I recall Sanders getting some guff online from some leftists about being friendly with McCain at some event or another and it’s like, my dudes, literally that is part of his job. It’s awful and exhausting and probably mostly pointless and he has to try anyway — in democratic politics, you win when you get a voting majority for your thing. Of course you have to lobby folks you don’t like, find common ground with them!

@blakereid @inthehands It’s important to recognize, I think, that this is very much a return to how the courts often functioned throughout the bulk of American history; political instruments of the ruling caste. Perhaps not so much a departure as a regression.

@AnthonyJK Careful with all that straw, bud.

@inthehands @mybarkingdogs I subscribed on the strength of that piece, to support Adam and his cohort of diverse, challenging essayists.

I cancelled when they printed Tumulty’s Nancy Reagan AIDS revisionist piece. Their editorial staff is making choices, that’s for sure.

@inthehands @jhv Here in Durham, one of their chief officers was caught red-handed sock puppeting on Twitter, talking up the company and shitting on skeptical residents.

@trochee @inthehands There's a trap I've seen very experienced engineers fall into — I've probably fallen into it myself! — whereby after mastering some morass of complexity, they — we — become endeared to the technical difficulties of the puzzle and resist efforts to reduce or eliminate the incidental complexity, or to seek out simpler solutions to the business problem.

@thecorodon @inthehands In one online community I used to frequent, some liberals were expressing delight on January 6th, 2021 that Trump and his violent, ridiculous paramilitaries had overplayed their hand, that the decent moderate center would be aghast, and that alt-right politics would be toxic for the foreseeable future.

Anyway.

@SallyStrange @currentbias For about fifteen weird and delirious minutes, a majority of *white Amercans* saw a police precinct burning and said, ehhh seems kinda justified in this case.