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I'll kill you tonight....

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“A world without trans people has never existed and never will”

Poster spotted in Olympia, WA

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I like the idea of high speed rail, but I think given how bad our current rail network is, it is better for us to first push for functional passenger rail that goes at modest speeds (up to 90mph, which is NOT "high speed", and is much, much cheaper to build and maintain tracks for.)

Like the problem here is that on the east coast corridor, there are many places where the service is simply inadequate. Like I lived right next to a train station on the east coast corridor for 8 years and I almost never took it because there was no service on nights and weekends, the two times when I most needed to take it.

Off the east coast, the problem is the AMTRAK doesn't own the tracks, so often freight is given priority over passengers which makes literally no sense. Like the trip from Philadelphia, PA to Cleveland, OH, which takes just under 7 hours by car, takes close to 14 hours. That is totally crazy, for a trip that is only about 430 miles.

This could be improved hugely without the high cost of high speed rail. If the train were able to average 80mph, it could make a few short stops and still take only about 6 hours.

In flatter parts of the country, it would be easier and cheaper to make trains that went 90mph much of the time, and that wouldn't be high speed rail and wouldn't have the higher costs associated with it, but it could be a huge improvement to quality of life and people's abilities to live car-free.

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Insane to me that the UK government is slowly trying to legislate trans people out of existence and I have not seen a single person talk about it

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Don't forget all the dysfunction caused in society when there are families that are stressed and not making ends meet, and children who are neglected, malnourished, and mistreated. When you have more neglected and mistreated kids and stressed parents, you get a whole generation with higher rates of crime, domestic violence, and mental disorder. Those who don't fall into those more severe problems, still end up with greater rates of trauma and more baggage that they have to work to process and bad habits they have to work to unlearn. These people become more likely to impose or be a burden on society in a long list of ways, and less likely to be able to be productive and functioning members of society, and when they are, they often accomplish less and contribute less because of all that extra work they had to do just pulling themselves together.

We humans don't exist in isolation, we are social animals and we depend on each other. Our society is often held back by the weakest and most broken among us. If we cannot protect the weakest, those most in need, we all suffer.

You might not see the cause-and-effect, but it's there. Things like increased prices, things like the goods and services that have unreliable quality. Local governments that struggle with their budgets and end up raising taxes and/or cutting services.

It all will come around to bite you many times over, even if you never have kids.

We need to provide for everyone in order for us to all have stability and prosperity.

Biden’s 2025 would raise the child tax credits back to the levels they were at during the pandemic, an objectively good thing for literally everyone. Those benefits were slashed by Trump after the pandemic “ended”. Biden is going to pay for it by undoing Trump’s tax cuts on wealthy corporations, aka by taxing them more.

You can bet your pants Trump won’t enact this budget if he wins the election.

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This thread omg

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I find perspectives like the original one here to be super disturbing. They are so alien to me and are a sort of weirdly creepy authoritarian/facist attitude, like there is so much wrapped up in this narrative:

there's a depersonalization / dehumanization of teens and of younger people in general (I've seen people apply this logic to people in the 18-21 age range, and even older sometimes)

it's hyper-fearful, like there's a paranoia about predatory relationships

it completely ignores any positive things that can come of friendships across age differences

it hugely exaggerates differences and the size of age gaps for people who are relatively close in age (like 16-to-18, or 18-to-21 for instance)

it creates unnecessary weirdness around groups of people who generally have to interact in the course of their daily lives (i.e. people in different years of high school, or college, who are often mixed in in the same classes and activities, or siblings and friends of siblings in a family or home environment)

there is no discussion at all of how to identify or protect yourself from actual predatory behavior, which can happen among people of any age, so it leaves people just as vulnerable or perhaps even more vulnerable if they wrongly assume people close to their age are necessarily "safe" to interact with, or also if they assume younger people cannot harm or act in predatory ways towards older people.

it completely ignores the way society needs to have friendships across age gaps in order to keep certain knowledge alive and keep certain institutions functioning, like student organizations that need to recruit a next generation of leadership, or insights in political issues that may need to move either up or down in age cohorts in order for those issues to get resolved in society.

this attitude is scary and dangerous.

i think it would be especially valuable too if we could identify where it comes from. it is puzzling to me, like i'm so old now that i feel totally disconnected from this, like when i was in college and right out of college, no one was voicing extreme views like this, but now i see a lot of people in the 16-30 demographic voicing these views. where did they originate? what prominent people have advocated for them? what social factors lead people to think they are reasonable in the first place?

it's hard to argue with something or protect yourself from something when you don't understand it and don't know where it is coming from, and this is how i feel about this attitude. it's scary, it's dangerous, but where does it come from? i have no clue, and it's not like i'm likely to get any feedback on it because who is going to interact with me now that i'm in my 40's, when it's only much younger people holding these views and these people evidently don't believe it's safe to even interact with me?

i think some of you guys are insane 👍 it's actually possible for a 16 year old to be online friends with someone in their 20s. source: teenagers are actually people who can talk to other people about shared interests.

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one of my favorite things about our house is the frogs

we get to listen to this from now on, all summer long!

#tree frogs #night sounds #gray tree frog #frogs #frog song

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