Und dann das nächste Feld für mehr Parkplätze!

I’m often impressed with Finland. The attitudes and decision making the nation expresses are often very grounded and data driven.

The trams in Helsinki were also phenomenal. I loved getting around town so easily.

Our family visited Germany this past summer. I really wanted to get the 49€ tickets, but the system to buy them is cumbersome and we weren’t around that long.

Now, we did have a visit in summer 2002. We still have our 9€ tickets from that trip. It was a wonder to be able to get around so cheaply.

woke Marxist liberal critical race theory.

Any more smooth brain buzzwords we can throw in there?

Incel shit.

I didn’t know that Tom Flood was in my city. It’s like he knows exactly how our city council behaves.

Every major US city should have a dense, high frequency grid of trams/subways within 3 miles of the city center. Then, a larger network of light rail/subways out another 3 miles for commuting and events traffic.

3-5 minute intervals is good enough, anything less frequent is meh. Over 15 is a joke.

One of the reasons I loved taking the train to work (yay, Portland MAX!) was that I didn’t have to do the work to drive. I got on the train, snagged a seat (or stood on really busy days) and mentally punched out for 20 minutes. I could read a book, zone out, or make some notes on my thoughts.

At the end of the route, I’d hop off, walk two blocks and I was at a work. Reverse it to go home. It was a dream commute.

Driving Hwy 26 would have taken longer, and the sheer stress it caused was horrible. Always having to watch for someone deciding to dart lanes, merge badly, slow to a stop, shimmy forward, wait for a person to merge into the crawl. Commuting by car on any kind of busy road is horrible for your health.

In-city land owning GenX here: YIMBY through and through. Been fighting for it at the city level for decades now.

I hate how stupid and short sighted so many people are. Selfishness has destroyed our cities, gutted our neighborhoods, and given our cities over to monopolies by driving out small and medium businesses. Cities and neighborhoods cannot be kept in amber. They either grow and adapt or they die.

Let’s start building our city core through dense housing, removing automobiles (they don’t make cities better, and they certainly destroy them), and making places for people instead of asphalt wastelands.

Video games. I used to play 4-6 hours per day (or often more), every day. It was kind of my default activity when I wasn’t forced to do something else. If I ran out of steam trying to focus on work or family I would drift into playing a video game. The result was a MASSIVE sink of time into something that left me with little afterwards. I didn’t learn new things, I drifted away from my kids, and I didn’t take care of my home.

Video games are fine. They’re entertaining, but they’re also potentially life consuming. I watch people who want to do more with their lives, but instead they just put more time into some game or another.

I managed to kick the habit and it’s been a great 10 years since then where I play very little and only in very short, controlled bursts when I can play with my kids for a bit (they usually destroy me these days). With all of that saved time, my career started flying, my home is in better shape, and I actually don’t drift away from family events like I used to.

Aw darn it. Now I’m reading your posts with an Australian accent in my head.

I’ve been accused of being a bot in online games due to my robust vocabulary, resistance to abbreviation and slang, as well as pedantic punctuation use. It has been happening for decades.

Note: rarely have I been accused of a being a bot for my skill at gameplay. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.

Now, if you wish to truly delve the depths of linguistic proclivities, one should peruse the works of Terry Pratchett, especially the Discworld novels. Any and all of his works are wonderful prose and deep storytelling.

You don’t need the voters. You need the states.

We’re about to find out what happens when states refuse to recognize the winner of the Electoral College. Georgia, Arizona, and likely other states are going to fuck the state votes and refuse to certify.

If you can get enough state reps and congressional reps to vote for you each cycle (as VP), then take over from the sham president, you could effectively be president forever.