Notices by Shawn Medero (soypunk@friend.camp)

US Masto-friends I have a huge ask - tomorrow I would love for you to call your senators on behalf of trans folks, including my own trans teen.

Senator Thune has announced he plans to bring S.9 "Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025” to a vote. This bill will prohibit school athletic programs from allowing individuals whose biological sex at birth was male to participate in programs that are for women or girls.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/9

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/27/senate-transgender-womens-sports

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Having been on Bluesky for a while now, I still don't fully understand what to post there vs. here (my little corner of Mastodon which is not the same as your little corner of Mastodon unless we are both friend.camp-ers in which case they might be similar.) Ultimately I'd prefer to post stuff to my blog and then syndicate it out to both but that's not nearly as straightforward as it sounds.

There are technical things like the simple fact Bluesky and Mastodon have different character limits which would influence what a "micro" version of post might look like on either. Then there are the "norms" differences... there's a certain ethos to what gets a “content warning" on friend.camp vs. Bluesky (vs. the norms of whatever Mastodon you are currently on which probably aren't the same as mine.)

@eaton what’s sad is there were several at the time and I’m like scratching my head going “oh yeah… was that experts exchange or w3schools?”

The other useful thing for a Facebook account has been access to the local “buy nothing” group so I can freecycle things that are perfectly useful but not a good fit for our family.

Likewise it was an excellent tool for local non-profit outreach… but like read this GLAAD press release about Meta’s changes to their moderation policy today: https://glaad.org/releases/meta-removes-anti-lgbtq-hate-speech-policies-ends-fact-checking/

How the hell can you stay active on a place like that?

I’ve held on to my Facebook account so I could access Instagram so I could follow my favorite local restaurant’s menu and hour updates because that’s their “website” but I cannot stomach having a Meta presence anymore.

Here’s hoping I can convince my favorite restaurant to post updates in some other way but I’m guessing I’m just going to have to get used to calling them on the phone a lot.

If you've not been to the US in the last five years, the overall size, and particularly the height of the average vehicle here, has grown dramatically. Meanwhile our infrastructure and road design policy has barely changed from fifty years ago.

“IIHS researchers analyzed pedestrian crashes to develop injury risk curves showing how speed affects crash outcomes. They found that the effect of crash speed on injury risk was magnified for vehicles with taller front ends. Compared with risk curves developed using crash data from Europe, where tall passenger vehicles are less common, risk curves for the U.S. show pedestrians here begin to suffer more serious injuries at lower speeds.“ https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicle-height-compounds-dangers-of-speed-for-pedestrians

New NSF-funded research on “children's gender stereotypes about STEM and verbal abilities” demonstrates that as early as six years old kids are forming gendered stereotypes: https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000456

@eaton @danhon jeff, you are magnificent.

Our youngest kiddo was upset about digging styrofoam trays out of the compost at her elementary school, where she serves on the school's "green team.” With a small bit of encouragement from her parents she reached out to the school’s principal to gather data on how many trays were used every week. She looked at surrounding school districts and found some had stopped using styrofoam before she was even born. (continued...)

She wrote her talking points and last night she read them in front of the school board’s public comment section. The board responded that they would seek quotes on replacing the styrofoam.

Very proud parent this morning and thankful for a school board that fostered a welcoming environment for a student to speak up. Also thankful for a dozen folks in my kid's life who nurtured these abilities from school teachers to theatre directors who have given her all the tools to speak in public.

Fun fact: Columbia University will announce the Pulitzer Prize winner next week just shortly after having NYPD inform Columbia University student journalists that they were not allowed to leave the Journalism School building to cover the news. (Source: WKCR radio coverage of tonight’s events.)

New blog post about... blog posts! when the heck did we start assuming every post should have a title? https://shawn.medero.net/2024/1/why-do-blog-posts-need-titles

@fraying If a city wants to build a bike lane it has to go through like twelve stages of review (including the infamous “environmental impact study”) - want to have unlicensed machine learning enabled cars driving around town? sure, no problem.