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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • I used to be hard-core into cars. I loved driving. Traffic, staggeringly bad insurance, and idiotic driving have largely soured me on driving. Yes, I will always have a car so I can get out to the great outdoors, but I have largely stopped driving in urban environments. The bike, bus, and train are faster, cheaper, or straight up easier than fighting an hour+ through traffic to go to a fun venue nine miles away.

    Nowadays, I vote gleefully for everything that improves mass transit, bike infrastructure, and third places. There’s an incredible knock-on effect with traffic reduction. The more bus rapid transit lanes, the more comprehensive the rail network, and the larger and safer the bike lanes become, the faster it is to get around the city- even if one or more options is out of commission due to highway construction or tunnel repairs. A decade ago, I sat in gridlock traffic for three hours to go two city blocks. These days, I can get across town on bike in 26 minutes. Traffic is down- it only takes about an hour to cross the city.


  • And the wholesale destruction of USAID and PEPFAR means people are simultaneously starving to death in chunks of the world, not getting vaccines, and also not getting HIV prevention meds, which means long term, HIV infection is going to increase worldwide over time. That is going to be a massive, silent genocide that will be orders of magnitude worse, but largely undocumented.

    That was a serious, serious fuckup on voters parts. Not to mention massive cuts to everyday things like critical medical R&D, science R&D, disaster preparedness, NASA, department of education, PBS and Corp for public broadcasting, department of health, FDA + food safety programs, and many other programs that people take for granted without thinking (housing grants for home buying, federal student loans, food stamps, weather prediction for natural disasters, Medicare/ACA/Medicaid, etc)

    His cuts to the IRS are going to result in less money for shit like bridges, roads, and electrical grids too.




  • Yep, I’m not a big caver, but my friend is into it, and showed us beautiful crystal caverns that are in the process of getting gated because of people wandering in (and spraypainting the crystals 400+ feet down). It was a fun and reasonably safe experience. Just sad that other people feel the need to desecrate the natural world. These places take hundreds of thousands of years to form. Don’t destroy the overnight.