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struthious.bsky.social
Applied scientist working on LLM evaluation and publishing in AI ethics. Formerly: technical writing, philosophy. Urbanism nerd in my spare time. Opinions here my own. he/they 🏳️‍⚧️. https://boltzmann-brain.github.io/
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I dont like Venetian blinds to begin with and the fact that they dont go well with cats cements my opposition

Turns out it’s because the train is operated by ÖBB, going all the way to Vienna. So indeed a remnant of kakania

Good thread on the economics of undocumented labor

‘We've developed a norm that insulates planning staff from direct criticism, with the refrain "don't critique staff, critique politicians" repeated whenever citizens challenge professional recommendations.’

Don’t give them more ideas

The way folks were just spreading an unverified video uncritically was pretty depressing

Gonna be the worst WC ever

“Germans were not antisemitic” is the reductio ad absurdum of an assumption that the only causes are material and ideology has no causal power

I know a lot of people who vote in Massachusetts, and this is me asking you to please call all of Elizabeth Warren's phones, right now, because this is some utter horseshit and deeply disappointing

Puritanism. This includes hippies

Museums in Trieste will uncritically say that the city was “liberated” after WWI, carefully omit to mention the city’s decline after 1919, never mention what happened 1938-45, and then you go downtown and see this

Not to mention the boundaries of this curfew zone is the most LA/carbrained thing ever.

Sometimes I hate being right. In my thesis I ID'd conservative management as one of the pillars of the iron triangle that underlays the political economy that has mostly prevented us from transitioning to a modern regional rail model in North America. itineranturbanist.wordpress.com/masters-pape...

I’ve encountered such IRL

I’m convinced it’s because free fares appeal to the misguided altruism of people who *don’t* ride the bus. “Yes, let’s help the poor by making it free!” (rather than improving the service of something they’d never take)

Another in the ledger of “lack of money is not the only problem”

Went to the Parco della Rimembranza in Trieste and the memorials were almost all of people doing bad things in WWI/WWII with one token memorial to Italians who died in dachau/mauthausen that was obviously added on as an afterthought. They refer to wwi as “liberating” trieste

When I get home, if you hear me referring to “cave people,” I got it from Gil Peñalosa.

I wonder how much of why tourists might enjoy Venice is because it doesn’t have cars. The quiet is noticeable (even the motorized boats are quieter than I expected). The way the city feels fake is not great but now I’m in a “real” city and having cars around again is not great