Yeah, it blew my mind when I first heard about it too. Gerald Casale even knew two of the students who were killed. He’s said in interviews that he “quit being a hippie” and “got mad” after that. He gave a speech at the 40th anniversary of the shootings, and you can find it on YouTube.

Do you know why they're so anti-establishment?

The founding members of the group were students at Kent State and were witness to the shooting of students engaged in an anti-war protest by the National Guard. That'll make anyone anti-establishment.

I used to work for the Welfare Office in Philadelphia. When you have a high number of people who need help, you need a high number of staff to manage it. It's simple math, but let me give you an illustration.

When I started working at Welfare, caseworkers always used to complain that they'd come into full voicemail inboxes. A few months in, the state decided to double everyone's voicemail inbox capacity. Caseworkers still would come in to full voicemail inboxes, but now they were full with twice the messages.

If you've got a chemical addiction to opiates, and you need that fix, you'll try anything that will make the pain go away. They didn't choose to get addicted, their doctors and the pharmaceutical companies caused that.

Maybe if NYPD would actually do their fucking job...

Nobody becomes a heroin addict by choice. That heroin and fentanyl abuse has become rampant is a result of doctors over-prescribing opiates to people with legit medical needs, getting them addicted. When the prescription runs out, they turn to heroin and fentanyl to deal with the addiction they got from their prescription.

You have much more in common in your economic needs with the striking workers at HarperCollins than you do with their executives and board members. That's what solidarity is about. All workers deserve good, living wages and working conditions, whether they're working a desk job, operating printing presses, or "just" flipping burgers or collecting trash.

Solidarity is for all workers.

Pedestrian bridges are an accessibility nightmare though, and you can't fix it with design.

Consider this: The ADA guidelines for a wheelchair accessible ramp (and your pedestrian bridge damn well better be wheelchair accessible) specify a rise over run of 1:12. In other words, for every inch of height on the ramp, there must be 12 inches, or one foot, of run. This means a 10 foot high pedestrian bridge needs 120 feet worth of ramp. That's a lot of ramp. Where do you put it? Stack it? Sure, but that adds even more distance to travel to get to the top of it. And you need it on both sides.

So now, instead of crossing 120-150 feet of road, you've got someone going up 120 or more feet of ramp, 120-150 feet of bridge, and another 120 or so feet of ramp down to cross the street. How is this better than just having cars stop at lights to let pedestrians cross?

Anti-drag protests are really anti-trans protests. As far as the Proud Boys and their ilk are concerned, there’s no difference between me, a transgender woman living my life, and a drag performer. It’s not as simple as letting people wear a costume to read stories. This is the what they’re using as a thin edge of a wedge against all forms of queerness and gender non-conformity. Hence the talk about “grooming” and other accusations of sexual abuse and pedophilia that get thrown around drag story hour and at trans women.

I’m not doing drag as a trans woman. I am living my life as myself, and these fuckers want to shove me back in the closet.

Cheaper shipping on ACME products

> guess which group of people is massively overrepresented with online pictures labeled 'criminal'.

I'm gonna take a wild guess and say... black men?

Yup. People tend not to believe it, but a lot of facial recognition algorithms are trained on biased data sets, mostly the faces of the young white men who do most of the development of those algorithms. Because of this, they'll often match people of color with the wrong face in the database. People of color have been hauled in by the police under suspicion of having committed a crime because a facial recognition algorithm decided they look too much like a wanted criminal who also happens to be a PoC. It's fucked up.

Same. Fucking same.

It's also worth noting that these assholes draw no distinction between drag performers and transgender women. As far as they're concerned it's all the same.

Now Philly politics is less entertaining but also less annoying.

They're gonna bust some churro ladies and some fare hoppers, and call it a success. Meanwhile, nutjobs threatening people on the platform will be ignored in favor of getting a high score at Candy Crush

If memory serves, they used to use a service called TicketFly which made Ticketbastard look good by comparison.

Okay, maybe not good, but at least half-decent.

This would never have happened if they had a cafeteria. What's the point of going to a physical IKEA if you can't get some damn meatballs?