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Joined vor 3 Jahren
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Cake day: 8. Juni 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.















  • During the last lavender scare, the Russians were just as paranoid that their gay citizens were western inventions and persecuted them quite heavily.

    …while the US did the same, thinking they were also security risks. This culminated in a society so fearful that people used to introduce themselves first by telling people that they had a wife and kids, then their name. A government official even killed themselves at their desk because their son was outed as gay. We even sabotaged our own ICBM program by firing one of the only astronomers we had capable of working on such things, because he was gay.

    He went on to be the father of the gay rights movement as we know it today.

    David K Johnson has a whole book about the whole lavender scare, it’s quite a good read.