moaning about stroads
12/05/2022
Road math
25/04/2022
What these researchers found is that damage to the roadbed is proportional to the 4th power of the axle load of the vehicle, and they called this “the Generalized Fourth Power Law.” This means that if you double the weight on an axle, your vehicle does sixteen times the damage to the road.
[…]
[So] the owners of large, heavy SUVs pay sixteen times what the owners of economy cars do in registration fees and gas taxes.Oh wait, no they don’t, because we live in Bizarro Land.
Freud and the plague
08/01/2022
But distresses to Freud’s metabolisms, psychic and digestive, aside, one wonders if he might not have found in the US a case study in what would prove to be his most controversial idea, an idea which would also resolve his confusion over why Americans might actually be pretty copacetic, even welcoming, towards plagues of all kinds.
Raymond Zack
20/11/2021
“He uh… had the ability to make a bad decision and did.” “Yeahh-uh.”
Do not pass Go
08/11/2021
Hey, i wrote something for another blog.
Been participating in Lefty Book Club for a few weeks, with weekly assigned readings and group discussions over Zoom. In the subgroup i’ve been attending, we have read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher and are now into Lost Connections by Johann Hari. Good books, good people, recommended for all political shapes and sizes.
Class Kerfuffle: Ideology in Board Games
[…] while board gaming has grown beyond a geek pastime into a booming industry, does it have the potential to be an effective tool for political education? Before answering this, a brief review of the use of ideology in tabletop board gaming may be useful.
shipping experts
30/10/2021
I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End
Nobody is compelling the transportation industries to make the needed changes to their infrastructure. There are no laws compelling them to hire the needed workers, or pay them a living wage, or improve working conditions. And nobody is compelling them to buy more container chassis units, more cranes, or more storage space. This is for an industry that literally every business in the world is reliant on in some way or another.
via Reddit
Evopsych
12/09/2021
What the caves are trying to tell us
Is this writing? Is it language? Clearly it has to mean or do something; these enigmas must have been put there for some kind of a reason. Were our ancestors just playing, with a child’s hesitancy, at the perilous game of turning bits of pigment into an abstract form beyond space and time? Or had they, long before we realized, found a way to make dead objects speak? This is what I’ll ask James Damore, pressing his face into the cold rock, shouting with an increased frenzy that echoes shrilly in the sacred dome, spittle flying in mad rage as I scream. You think you’re smart, do you? Then what does this mean?
As the shore crunches
23/07/2021
Slavoj Žižek: Last Exit to Socialism
When we say that the rise of average temperature has to be kept below 2°C (35.6°F), we talk (and try to act) as general managers of life on Earth, not as a modest species. The regeneration of the earth obviously does not depend upon “our smaller and more mindful role” — it depends on our gigantic role, which is the truth beneath all the talk about our finitude and mortality.
Dread
22/06/2021
What It’s Like To Be Cancelled
But recognizing my experience as trauma helped me find the tools to heal from it. I learned that, when you remove the massive scale and severe implications of my specific situation, lots of people could relate to the experience of having their voice taken away, of being shunned from a community that was dear to them over a misunderstanding. I realized that that trauma is much less unique than it felt.