For Texas, a state with that kind of traffic death problem, to ban this tech and for everyone to be celebrating it is just an enormous breakdown/failure on so many levels.

The media, government, pop culture — everyone is just out to lunch on this. Very sad. Big moral failure.

— Angie Schmitt 🚶‍♀️🚴‍♀️ 🚌 (@schmangee) June 3, 2019

Yes, they work, but people push back against them because red light cameras shovel money into the pockets of unaccountable corporations that are incentivized to penalize people with no recourse. Poor people suffer the most and cities make very little revenue from them.

Ignoring these facts is extreme ignorance in service of ideology. I prefer not to solve problems by giving corporations more power over me and everyone.

People on the left are clueless. Just that the right is even more clueless, which is astounding given how clueless the left is.

Most young women today are skinny fat, worse off than even men

No muscle mass, excess bodyfat

Being young and having good genetics might protect you for a bit

But high carb, low protein diets, no exercise

I see young women In their early 20s and they’re already aging

— Alexander J.A Cortes (@AJA_Cortes) June 2, 2019

Indeed. I am having more trouble telling people’s ages these days, and not just because I am getting older myself. Most of it is that everyone is increasingly unhealthy, so many 22-year-olds look 40+. It’s really disconcerting to realize someone is only 25 when they are so obese and unhealthy that they appear to be 45.

When I got to other countries, everyone tends to look really young to me because in general they are healthier.

I think we lucked out only because the cost of entry dropped so incredibly fast in the late 70s to mid 80s. $100 and a TV and you could learn BASIC. By the time people who are inclined to form guilds got in, it was already too late.

— Paul Bort (@catzoup) May 22, 2019

I am not a programmer, but I do work in IT (infrastructure and design), and if it were guild-based and education-based, as some people wish it to be, I would’ve never been permitted past the first step as I am not capable of getting a CS degree (due to not having adequate math skills and no ability to obtain them).

So, despite being pretty darn good IT person, I never would’ve made it in my current field if many people had or have their way — and many of those people with all the right credentials but not much in the way of brains are much worse at their jobs than I am at mine.

Some of the very best infrastructure designers and system admins I’ve ever met had no degree at all, and one of them dropped out in eighth grade. Credentialism hurts more than it helps.

Some people are fueled by greed. Others by spite or love. My sole career motivation is to someday control the temperature of the place I work

— Adrienne Porter Felt (@__apf__) May 24, 2019

Good luck! I am the fucking CTO of my company and I can’t control the temperature of where I work. And, consequently, I freeze every day, even in high summer. The company is contemplating moving completely to a virtual office so when that day arrives, I might become not an ice cube.

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, one of the main reasons I am hoping for the office to go remote-only soon is the above ever-present frostbite reason.

I am glad movies and TV shows have mostly stopped using that “BRAMMMMM” sound. That was annoying except the very first time it was done (Inception, I think).

About the below, my main objection I think is that modern liberalism, progressivism, whatever you wish to call it, has been completely captured by neoliberal thought. It does not and cannot now exist apart from that, and it is utterly impossible for most people to cogitate outside these boundaries. I try, every day, and I have extreme difficulty doing so. Most people don’t try and don’t even realize they should try (even academics).

Trapped inside this labyrinth that looks like the world, all thoughts lead back to the Minotaur of neoliberalistic thought structures.

That is my larger and longstanding objection.

I think there are more areas where this is true than ever before, but where I firmly and fully part ways with the current mainstream of liberal wishful thinking is that we should allow someone’s subjective and historically-baseless feelings about their identity to completely define them (unless it is about race, then they are of course terrible and evil).

Society is always a negotiation between one’s felt identity, ones’s culture and history and other contingent attributes that identity originates from and orbits around. Identity, of course, comprises all these factors and more, but allowing the full neoliberal “I choose my choice” version of identity negates the very possibility of a common body politic and is designed to be divisive and alienating.

No, I am not going alt-right. I cannot stand those racist and tediously pseudo-intellectual losers. But much of the left’s current belief structure is unsupported by anything that hews close to any sort of reality of psychology or sociology — or sense.

Here’s some of that stuff that people who’ve never been in dangerous situations claim never happens:

A female Kurdish sniper comes inches away from an Isil bullet.

Bullet almost killed her. Then she laughed about it. pic.twitter.com/3JouFK7fni

— Ashraf اشراف अशरफ🏳 (@ASJBaloch) May 26, 2019

I wasn’t in combat, but when I had bullets whizzing by my head (in an army live-fire exercise) I made a joke immediately afterwards, just as that sniper does. Incredibly common.

Modern Liberals:

It’s not cool to date someone significantly younger than you.
Or older
Or the same age
Dating’s not cool

— Randall Otis (@RandallOtisTV) May 30, 2019

If your partner is not algorithmically chosen, and precisely matched to you in every approved way, it’s morally wrong! Loving what “liberalism” has become.

(Yes, I know the tweet is satire. However, it’s satire that strikes very close to the truth as people care incredibly much about proper assortative mating. And couch it in terms of protection from harm, while mostly removing women’s agency.)