Notices by scott f (scott@carfree.city), page 7

Random thought: there was a big dumb backlash to turning on parking meters on evenings and Sundays in SF, what if the compromise could be to turn them on but promise the price won't be above $1 an hour to start? Don't apply demand-responsive pricing. Yeah, that's not great policy, but it's a toe in the door and better than free. Messaging: it's still pretty cheap and you'll have better luck actually finding a space

@kingrat Hmm I guess but when the "attention" is billionaire cash, not sure it's a net positive

@kingrat Except for statewide ballot measures, none of those races are competitive. Haney, Wiener, Pelosi, and Schiff don't have credible competitors, Harris is guaranteed California's electoral votes. I should give Edward Wright more money so he can send you a mailer for BART board though.

@kingrat @sfstandard @sfchronicle so blatant in telling us what to think. Ugh

@aral your replies to this ☠️ thanks for finding me so many obvious troll accounts to block.

The more I travel, the more embarrassed I am for SF’s obscene embrace of anti-homeless architecture on sidewalks. I was afraid the “planter”-blocking-sidewalk trend would spread, but so far, no! Haven’t seen anything like it in Chicago, NY, DC, LA, Santa Cruz, Sacramento, Seattle. No one is leaning into hostile architecture halfway as hard as SF.

@danwentzel I love this quote. May I ask who Gareth Klieber is and where they said it?

@seachanger yeah, after I read it I was reflecting: didn't they just accuse Naomi Klein, Masha Gessen, and Hannah Arendt of rank antisemitism?

@seachanger here's the blog https://miniver.blogspot.com/2024/09/never-compare-jews-to-nazis.html

@mivox @seachanger a few days ago there was a blog making the rounds on here saying that any comparison of any actions of persons or people who are Jewish to any actions of Nazis was inherently antisemitic and was equally offensive to using the N-word. I was surprised that the author acknowledged what is happening in Gaza is genocide. However, they said, it's still more important never to compare it to the most famous example of genocide that we all grew up learning about, than to stop it.

@B_Whitewind That's exactly the point: history shows us it's not inevitable that humans will damage the environment in the way that the world economic order that has reigned for the last 200 years has done.

It's official, "Farrell has also sided with ride-share companies in opposing Proposition L" to fund Muni:

https://missionlocal.org/2024/09/see-how-they-run-what-mark-farrell-would-do-in-his-first-100-days-as-mayor/

He is alone among the 5 major mayoral candidates to actively oppose L, and stands against the Sierra Club, Nancy Pelosi, Scott Wiener, 10 of 11 supervisors, and a whole bunch of other people and orgs: https://fundthebus.com/endorsements

Another reason to rank all 4 other candidates and vote #anyoneButFarrell

"Douglass was trying to figure out what to do as he dismantled his tent. If he accepted temporary shelter, he’d miss an important appointment with his street medicine case manager, who was due to meet him at his tent in the morning to help him secure a low-income housing unit...

'I’m so close to getting housing. I need to be here tomorrow morning so I can try and get inside,' he said, trying to reason with officers as he was handcuffed and arrested for illegal lodging."
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/11/health/homeless-encampments-sweeps-san-francisco-kff-health-news-partner/index.html

the dirty secret of car culture is that without constant implicit threats of violence, cars would be far too inefficient to ever get anywhere in the city.

only a real asshole will say that out loud, but it’s always been true!

@wavdl @kingrat Yeah, there's automatically considered to be a crosswalk (even if unmarked) at any intersection, except of certain narrow alleys, and it's always (afaik) been legal to cross at them unless explicitly banned by a barrier/signage.

@seachanger ok i have ideas about this but curious what you mean by flagship here? and what needs do you anticipate this filling?

@seachanger social problems being:
1) how do we fund this work to improve anti-abuse/moderation?
2) how do we ensure that a critical mass of fedi users have access to software that supports the improvements (be that a Mastodon fork, or a different project like GTS, or just client apps that know what to do when they encounter a non-replyable post)?
3) more generally, bc Mastodon is open source, in theory we shouldn't be blocked by the Mastodon nonprofit's bad priorities; why are we in practice?

@seachanger yeah that's mainly what i want it for

i was telling a friend recently that while part of me wants to use my tech skills to just jump in and start coding, i think it's a social problem first. extending ActivityPub to allow limiting replies is not technically difficult (a Mastodon dev outlined how it might work; GoToSocial is doing it and has documented how their extension works)

@seachanger while you're absolutely right, i think within that there's a lot we can do. a lot of people might donate labor or contribute to crowdfunding campaigns with the right structure.

@seachanger i was envisioning a "small servers council" that like, meets on videoconferencing to discuss what we want to see, and how we might achieve it. maybe north america specific for time zone reasons