npr:

Ryan Pascal, a 17-year-old student at Palos Verdes High School near Los Angeles, says when her school holds active shooter drills, it’s “chaos.” The first time it happened, not long after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in 2018, rumors started flying over Snapchat and text that the school was really under attack.

“We had some students trying to stack up desks to blockade the door. We had some students sort of joking around because they weren’t sure how to handle this. There are other students who are very, very afraid.”

Read or listen to the rest of the story at NPR.org

rejectingrepublicans:

midnightfunk:

This is what I love about candid exchanges of opinion: they’re both right!

itstheartistical:

prismatic-bell:

f1rstperson:

f1rstperson:

THIS IS THE BEST IDEA I WANT THIS SO MUCH

WHY CANT WE HAVE THIS

The best takes on this are all the other Americans going “um planes exist” and “um trains can’t go that fast wtf”

Babes they have this in like every other developed country we are literally the only ones with our fingers up our ass like this.

Lobbyists.

Big Auto and Big Oil are why we can’t have this.

I was irritated at the resolution so I looked for a better quality, idk if tumblr was just deteriorating it tho, so here

Link to full size map | Guardian article | Slate article | Business Insider article

This map was created by Alfred Twu in 2013. Here’s his twitter.

These articles mention some information about the implementation of a high speed rail system in the United States. To sum it up:

• it would connect rural and urban, and regional, societies
• it would improve long-distance relationships and familial relationships
• it’s cost-efficient
• it could prove economically beneficial to smaller cities
• we’d be saving fuel

This is the pre-existing Amtrak route map (and the pdf):

Amtrak travels at an average of 71 mph with maximum speeds of 150 mph. A trip from New York to Los Angeles could range anywhere from $350 - $1300 and it would take roughly 3 days.

The one proposed by Twu would travel at 220 mph and take 18 hours to get from New York to Los Angeles. Bullet trains average at 320 kph, which converts to about 200 mph. Test runs have gone up to a 375 mph.

This isn’t the first proposition for a new national high speed rail either. In 2009, the Obama administration proposed one but it was shot down by Republicans. Here’s the map:

And here’s an explanation by Vox as to why this wasn’t the best plan.

And here are some more route examples:

And yes, Big Auto and Big Oil are exactly why we can’t have this. Here’s a 24 minute breakdown by Hasan Minhaj on Patriot Act.

shinelikethunder:

I find timed sprints of activity useful, but shit like Pomodoro or whatever inherently does not work on me, because the petulant five-year-old in my head looks at the little numbers ticking down and goes, “You’re made up. I can ignore you and nothing will happen.”

You know what measure of time is not made up? “I’m gonna do as many of these dishes as I can in the time it takes my pot of water to boil.”

You know what you can’t ignore without consequences? “OK, I’ve got some downtime until the rice is done cooking, then it’s time to spring back into action.”

“I’ll clean as much of my room as I can in the space of this podcast episode.”

“I’m gonna put this album on in the background to make all this work stuff less tedious to slog through, and brute-force attack it until the music stops.”

No, it doesn’t always work, because the petulant five-year-old in my head is incredibly stubborn. But finding a non-arbitrary measure of time does, in fact, increase the likelihood that I can make my dumb brain play ball.

septictankie:

fog-world:

Don’t you know what’s going on out there? This is no Sunday school picnic!

tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva:

tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva:

The Mormon Church Amassed $100 Billion. It Was the Best-Kept Secret in the Investment World.

A look inside the vast but little-known fund of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: “We’ve tried to be somewhat anonymous.”

WSJ

Time for me to start the Church of Sivi Taxevader69 I guess

Mormon Church to Mormons:

w4rgoddess-deactivated20200825:

asundergrowth:

milest3hr4t:

takethesword:

jooferslannister-deactivated202:

nonbinarhys:

Good

As someone who ran into the glue at 23rd st while trying to commute home during the protest I can tell you that:

1) there was a sign encouraging you not to swipe or get glue on your card and that

2) the emergency exit door was open so you could either walk onto the platform or hop the turnstile to still access the train

The protesters left you with a choice: become a fare evader (supporting the protest) or leave. But they didn’t stop access to the subway as a utility.

I see a lot of outrage in the comments about inconveniencing people on their commute home but consider whose commute under “normal” circumstances – under police surveillance – are inconvenienced by police.

Are you upset because you’re not someone who usually has to think about if you’ll be singled out for doing the same thing as everyone else?

Did the protests make you experience the thing that, oh, they were protesting against?

Hey, then they worked.

And if you don’t like it, well, the next subway stop is 5 blocks away. How convenient for you that this impediment was a one day, one stop friction in your life and not a constant threat.

And before anyone complains about how the protest impacted disability accessibility, 23rd st doesn’t have an elevator or other accessibility options. Let’s start with critiquing the institutional access first, shall we?

Can someone please explain this to me? because all I got out of this was, Protesters vandalized things, causing less money going to fund transit, causing transit prices to rise or causing transit to stop existing, potentially making transit unavailable long-term to people who depend on it, without inconveniencing anyone with a car of their own, meaning this disproportionately fucks over the poor.

Basically what happened is that the Manhattan Transit Authority raised the price of a train ticket by 2.75$. Which doesn’t sound like much, but now a large percentage of poor New Yorkers can’t afford to get to their jobs, and started jumping the turnstiles.

Now you’re right, subways cost money to run, and the fares are there for a reason. But what people are really protesting here is what the MTA did in response to the fare jumpers.

They hired cops to literally just…stand around and watch the stiles, costing the city MORE money than if they just reversed the fare hike. New Yorkers are furious because there’s clearly money to pay for these extra cops, but apparently not for maintaining the trains.

Tl;Dr The MTA basically said “we don’t have enough money to run the trains so we are increasing the price” meaning thousands of people were faced with either hopping the fare or losing their job, but when people started jumping the stiles they apparently the MTA had enough money to hire a small army of cops.

And some of the context here is that the real reason the subway fares have been rising is because NYC, like many cities, has been slowly shifting more and more of the burden of operating expenses from everyone (including the wealthy) onto the backs of the poor alone. So for example, the developers and businesses involved with Madison Square Garden haven’t paid property taxes in almost 40 years, although the tax abatement was only supposed to be for 10 years. That’s $555 million which should have helped to pay for infrastructure – but some of the people involved are big donors to the governor, so they get to keep freeloading. And so that he looks like he’s “doing something,” Cuomo has now hired 500 more cops, at a price tag of $249 million, to catch fare evaders… who cost the city only $200 million. He’s happily collecting his chunk of cheese, but the poor are paying more and getting criminalized for struggling, and meanwhile the subways are literally on fire.

So this isn’t really about how much it costs to pay for public transportation. It’s about who pays, and whether that fare is fair.

frith-inle:

Fox demon by RAE-77