lileks.com/institute/fr...

When I say "looking like a box" I mean the race-to-the-bottom aesthetic of the cheapest geometric forms they can get away with. A look to drive past at 5mph-10mph over the speed limit, not something to engage human beings walking by.

It's what keeps Nextdoor in business.

#AVENGEKITKAT!!!

The first line leads me staight to the doge meme (and I see it did likewise in 2023, so messiah, much holy). But that poor little puppers has been sullied forever by Elon Musk and crypto, which makes me unaccountably sad.

I'll bet TELLIAN@AOL.COM was set up during the first free 100 hours on that floppy drive he got for free.

(TELLMARY@AOL.COM goes straight to scammin' Dudley.)

This role has been handed over to Charlie Kirk.

Not at all. Bernie (who is not crazy) was actually the most trusted politician in the nation and the Democratic frontrunner despite the media attacking him and helping the DNC tear him down. Conversely, Ron Paul's mindless libertoonian tropes and marijuana got him a ton of sympathetic media.

Libertoonians get taken seriously by media and are never dismissed as "spoilers" for being a third party, a bias that spans generations. It's because they don't challenge the conservative/neoliberal economic dogma, they wallow in it.

Their officeholders have a revolving door with the GOP.

Why does the illustration look like the love child of Ben Shapiro and Richard Nixon?

When the future founder of FedEx described hub-based delivery in a college term paper, he got a "C" grade and was told it's infeasible. The market distortion that makes it feasible is the heavy taxpayer subsidy for jet fuel. So here we are.

Mar-a-Thatchero Face

Not long ago, Waymo hit (but did not kill) a bicyclist on Potrero Hill by blindly whipping around the back of a truck, the sparse media coverage just quoted Google public relations. They also almost hit a bicyclist way back when it was called "Google Car" and spun it as the bicyclist's fault. 2/2

In lieu of a human to be held accountable, a self-interested corporation has control of the data. When they hit a cat, a dog, a bicyclist, we have to wait until their public relations department tells us they're not to blame.

Except here we happen to have evidence showing that they lied. 1/2

I guess today's #Caturday photo is this memorial.
www.flickr.com/photos/jym/5...

I actually met KitKat, the bodega cat that Waymo killed, because I go to a moviehouse on that block. We weren't what you call bonded, but I definitely felt affection.

The specifics of what that car did could happen to an errant toddler running to the curb.

This one looks better than most of the botch jobs mentioned in that article. Though typically, the non-hideous renderings aren't what we actually end up with. Corners are cut in the most holy sacrosanct name of "penciling out."

This one, at least, wouldn't end up looking like a box.

I wrote about this at the time (for the Ecology Center magazine, _Terrain_), but the mainstream media never picked up the story and even ridiculed us for our concerns about the plastic recycling sham.

Most people didn't find out until 2017 when China refused to take any more plastic trash. 2/2

This is a great report, though Greenpeace left out a piece. They deserve credit for doing an investigation in Hong Kong/mainland China in the 1990s, where they documented that huge piles of "recycled plastic" form the U.S. was just being dumped in landfill, commingled with hospital waste, etc. 1/2