I created an animated GIF out of this sequence by Dan Shive. Pretty pleased with how it turned out. If you’re into seeing more of these types of transformations, El Goonish Shive is recommended.
…I think I’m kind of required to reblog this.
I swear I forgot this was your avatar until after I made it.
I’m v passionate about public transportation and honestly idk why any major us city doesn’t have a light rail system
*azealia banks megaphone gif* PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IS A HUGE EQUALIZER THAT GIVES DISENFRANCHISED PEOPLE ACESS TO GREATER RESOURCES CREATES LASTING STABLE JOBS AND PRODUCES CAPITAL FOR METRO GOVERNMENTS TO INVEST IN PROJECTS THAT IMPROVE QUALITY OF LIFE
because *republican voice* that’s socialism
Because they did have light rail systems, extensive ones. And then it started hurting car sales and the automotive companies got mad:
So, with pressure from those guys it was effectively replaced by the Interstate system even within cities, and from then on urban planning was done specifically with every family owning a car in mind, which resulted in the vast urban sprawl of the suburbs built from the 1940s onwards, and why it’s now impossible to get anywhere without a car in most of the US. Which is basically unheard of elsewhere in the world unless you’re in the middle of nowhere.
Of course the cost of owning a vehicle has gone way the hell up since 70 years ago, resulting in a horrible situation for anybody living on minimum/near-minimum wage!
Remember in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when they dismantle the red car to make way for a big fat freeway with personal automobiles? Yeah, that was a lot more historical retelling than just a jokey cartoon movie thing.
Which, ironically, is usually the point of jokey cartoon movie things.
As someone who worked in light rail for 18 months (with emphasis on streetcars), I can tell you the following reasons it is a fucking pain in the ass to get light rail built anywhere it doesn’t already exist:
First, you have to get people to VOTE for a light rail.
Then, you have to bid out the light rail, and this can take–at minimum–18 months to two years.
Then, after choosing the proper bidding, you have to ARRANGE to even get materials where you need it.
While you are also getting materials, you have to be certain the people supplying you the trains are worth a good goddamn in terms of delivering reliable trains. There are a number of companies whom are COMPLETELY reliable, but if you are selling your trains as USA manufacturing, it’s a goddamn crapshoot. I’m pretty sure, with the demolition of my former employer, no one makes trains in the US anymore.
I wanna be clear on this: The US was not making fucking stellar trains that everyone should want. We legit bought plans from a company that’s been making trains for DECADES and pretended like we knew what we were doing. WE DID NOT KNOW WHAT WE WERE DOING.
For every two years it takes to prove you can pull off the thing, you’re going up against new elections, either from the state/federal level or from the local level, and it is hard as shit to keep up the momentum for light rail when you can’t even get a goddamn track laid before there’s a new election and someone halts construction.
Also there are people who are against transit SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE it helps poor people. The piss-poor excuse for a rail line in St. Louis can’t expand into St. Charles County, even though that would give people in the exurbs a much easier way to get to the airport/downtown, because–and I quote–“it might draw a bad element” out to the fortress of White Suburbia. It goes beyond NIMBYism to outright hatred of the (racialized) poor.
Adding on to the St. Louis rail line: I know there was a lot of controversy about expanding it into Clayton and Ladue (which are the very richy richy white districts if you couldn’t already tell by the names) because *gasp* that would mean poor people could access the area. Hell, Ladue didn’t even want sidewalks that connected to any neighboring neighbors because they’re exclusionary as fuck.
In The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies (PDF), by Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor, the authors calculate that the average Internet user would have to spend one full working month per year in order to skim all the Internet privacy policies she encounters in a year. Mike Masnick reports on Techdirt:
In fact, a new report notes that if you actually bothered to read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis, it would take you 250 working hours per year – or about 30 workdays. The full study (pdf) by Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor is quite interesting. They measure the length of privacy policies, ranging from just 144 words up to 7,669 words (median is around 2,500 words) and recognize that at a standard reading pace of 250 words per minute, most privacy policies take about eight to ten minutes to read. They also ran some tests to figure out how long it actually takes people to read and/or skim privacy policies.
They put all of this together and estimated that it would normally take a person about 244 hours per year to read every new privacy policy they encountered… and even 154 hours just to skim them.
Here’s the key takeaway from the abstract: “Studies show privacy policies are hard to read, read infrequently, and do not support rational decision making.”
Of course, that’s just the privacy policies. Throw in the EULAs and other fine print and you’ve got yourself a full-time job.
Naomi Wolf wrote an essay about the ten steps a corrupt government takes to create a fascist state, and provides examples of what the Bush administration is doing to fulfill the requirements of each step. Some of Wolf’s examples are quite a stretch, but others are spot on.
Full time work should entitle someone to enough pay for rent, food, bills, and leisure activities. Full time work for a full life wage. You put in your 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? You should be able to afford the basic shit you need in life, no matter where you work.
pisses me off that this is considered a radical statement.
I do agree with this but from economic standpoint if you are working at a job like McDonalds as someone flipping burgers and making fries you are getting paid for the amount of skill needed for the job. But if its any other job that requires you to have an actual skill that you can make a career out of then yeah you should be getting paid enough to live a standard life.
If you work FULL TIME you should be able to afford to fucking live. No, it doesn’t matter if it’s flipping burgers, these people contribute to our fucking economy and they MATTER. They should be allowed to be alive.
Jesus fucking Christ do you people hear yourselves?
People like this are why we can’t move on to issues like reducing how many hours is full time, or working out UBI.
We’re going to need to do that. Most people just don’t know what’s coming down the pipeline, without a major change to the structure of the economy, we’re looking at large scale permanent unemployment, even in the “skilled” labor force.
Also? Making food is a fucking skill. Running a fast food kitchen is a fucking skill. Operating a drive-thru is a goddamn fucking skill.
I do not know how to do these things. I have a masters degree and I have no fucking clue how to operate a deep fryer or make coffee drinks. I’d probably not be very good at it, because that kind of hands-on, fast-paced work is very hard for me.
But thankfully, there are people who are good at it, so I can do my job, and they can do theirs, and we can benefit one another by putting our skills to use in different areas. People who work in fast food are not less deserving of comfort and security in their lives just because their skills aren’t valued like they should be. That is a myth developed to deprive people of rights.
My friend works as a medical assistant and I’ve worked at McDonald’s and Starbucks. You know there’s a lot of things you gotta learn in this typa job?
Like in addition to it being physically demanding (standing up for 4-6 hours straight, carrying heavy ice/coffee, constantly getting burned by boiling water and an oven, a lot of reaching and squatting (like a lot a lot I lost 40 FUCKING pounds in a year okay this job demands a lot from the body)), there are actual skills required. Also your skin splits from using so much antibacterial soap.
Do you know what temperature different foods have to be to prevent contamination? If it’s a “cold” or “hot” plate?? Do You know how long food can be out before bacterial contamination can happen?? Do you know the difference between say 1% and heavy whipping cream? Can you teach a chemistry class using milk????? That’s p much what you gotta learn to be able to do. My friend who works as a medic was surprised, because I do more in my day than they do, and THEY told me that. They were shocked how much I actually do; I am on my feet more, talking to more people, I have a working knowledge of food germs food born illnesses and chemistry, I gotta do the same shit with sterilizing my tools the same exact way a doctor sterilizes theirs. Etc etc.
There’s no such thing as an unskilled job. There are only undervalued skills.
“There’s no such thing as an unskilled job. There are only undervalued skills.”
A hidden camera show where people who think they’re too good to work in a fast food kitchen, or register, or drive through. They have to work full time for one week, and they can only spend what they earn from that job. If they don’t perform up to the same standard as people already doing the job, they pay one week of their current salary to the employee they couldn’t replace.
Media outlets large and small have consistently misreported key details of the story, following spin from United corporate communications. Yves Smith does us all the service of summing up some of the major areas of bullshit. Here’s a few highlights:
* This was not an oversold plane. The plane was full, but it only became overfull when United decided that some of its crew needed to board, despite there being another flight an hour later they could have traveled on.
* Dao’s bloody nose is the least alarming thing about his injuries. The guy was beaten unconscious. That carries a high risk of concussion and worse.
* Dao wasn’t beaten up by Chicago Police, but by airport cops, who are not part of CPD; what’s more, the airport cops’ rolls include Richard Zuley, a dirty Chicago homicide detective who quit after a series of wrongful convictions, then worked as an “interrogator” at Guantanamo Bay, before boarding a plane in Chicago and beating a passenger unconscious.
You know what I like, and feel is so important? That he doesn’t say “Men thinks those are THEIR positions”. He says “We think those are OUR positions.”
As a male feminist, he still doesn’t exclude himself from the group of men.
Betsy DeVos is cutting Obama’s student loan protections. She also owns a student loan debt collection agency. This is why conservatism is a sham: small, starved government sounds fiscally responsible until you realize that the people doing the gutting are simply looking for the government’s market share.
