melvillean.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

NYC Congestion Pricing Month 1 🚶‍♀️Foot traffic up 4.6% 🚌 Bus ridership up 6% w/ improved bus times 🚇 Subway ridership up 7% 🚗 Vehicle traffic down 9% ⏰ Drive times 20% - 50% faster 👍 60% of NYC voters want it to continue 👍 66% support among those who drive into congestion zone at least once a week

submitted 18 days ago • 8 comments

In light of everything happening, I wrote about how the KKK in the 1920s felt unstoppable, about the people that fought against them anyway, and about how fascism always fails. dansinker.com/posts/202…

submitted 16 hours ago • 507 comments

I don't trust modern technology because the Richard Donner Superman movies taught me technology should rise slowly from the ground. I dislike any form of technology that doesn't require a dramatic minute-long startup that seems vaguely ominous; otherwise you won't use it with respect and caution.

submitted 14 hours ago • 3 comments

A president rapidly sundowning into full-blown dementia ambiguously handed power over the entire government to a delusional billionaire drug addict in a made-up illegal quasi-office and the Cabinet is split over whether their departments have to listen to his mad orders. It's day 34.

submitted 16 hours ago • 104 comments

A judge ordered foreign aid to resume. Aid groups say it’s not happening. Instead, more than 200+ groups had their contracts terminated. Food is now rotting near starving people; some aid warehouses left unguarded. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

Side note. There are eight members of the joint chiefs. the chair is black. the CNO (navy) is a woman. the other six are white guys. chair and the cno got fired tonight.

submitted 2 days ago • 1090 comments

Stop mass deportations with this one simple trick: wapo.st/41apYFB (gift link)

submitted 2 days ago • 101 comments

Medicaid is not for sale. NASA is not for sale. The Post Office is not for sale. America is not for sale. We have an obligation to resist kings. We outnumber them. And they can be overwhelmed.

submitted 2 days ago • 2487 comments

Just a reminder that fascists, authoritarians, dictators of all stripes destroy archives— books, museums, databases, &c— because those things provide windows onto a plurality of other ways we might organize the world. And so preserving, defending, and spreading that knowledge harms those regimes.

submitted 4 days ago • 9 comments

Engaging with the bad news machine after hours on friday

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

Federal workers launch a new site to share inside information about DOGE

submitted 2 days ago • 75 comments

drugs have taken too many beloved celebrities from us over the years but drugs also have a rare chance right now to radically rehabilitate their image

submitted 3 days ago • 143 comments

NEW YORK (AP) — Dow tumbles 748 points, and S&P 500 has worst drop in 2 months after discouraging reports on the US economy.

submitted 2 days ago • 121 comments

I'm gonna keep reposting examples of people not taking shit because it's important for us to see that you can, simply, reject the shit. Say "Uh... no no no, we will not be tolerating that."

submitted 2 days ago • 74 comments

“We had to erase trans people or we couldn’t get our federal funding” Fuck the federal funding. You fight, you sue, you do not become complicit in our mass erasure. We are all in this together, and we all go down together. I will not allow us to be jettisoned or erased.

submitted 2 days ago • 154 comments

Usually when states go to court alleging federal coercion in violation of the 10th Amendment there is not a literal video of the President doing it.

submitted 2 days ago • 129 comments

That is correct We are in Nuremberg Laws territory already

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

So. It has officially happened. I have been officially let go from my position at CDC. I wasn’t a probationary employee. I had stellar performance reviews every year. I’ll be ok. But please understand that many worked HARD to get into these positions and were doing great public health work.

submitted 2 days ago • 1872 comments

BREAKING NEW YORK (AP) — The Associated Press sues three Trump administration officials over access to presidential events, citing First Amendment.

submitted 2 days ago • 29 comments

Cuts to NSF expected to be at 50% reduction in force for an independent agency that fuels discovery and innovation. "The NSF budget was $9B, or 0.13% of the total [budget]." This is not about fiscal prudence. This is about killing universities. nanoscale.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-...

submitted 3 days ago • 123 comments

Who wants spies who look like they could fit into other societies? What's the point of that?

submitted 2 days ago • 70 comments

Your regular reminder that the more often you own your mistakes, the easier it gets. It is like any muscle-- work it more and it gets stronger. All people mess up, and sometimes we do so publicly. It's not the end of the world to acknowledge that we missed the mark; it's how we clean up.

submitted 2 days ago • 41 comments

Oh fuck, what a grift. J6 terrorists sue a DOJ controlled by Trump; Trump orders DOJ lawyers to settle for an undisclosed amount, both sides agree to an NDA. This can happen dozens, hundreds of times. Just an ingenious way to funnel tax dollars to far-right terrorist groups.

submitted 2 days ago • 74 comments

I am concerned that I will have neither adequate amounts of time nor piss for the eventual graves of Trump and Musk. I hope they’re buried near one another or the commute might make it impossible for me to do my job.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

In addition to the gutting of federal research funds for higher education, these are the sorts of rules being imposed on existing research. My new piece at Tusk: smotus.substack.com/p/the-attack...

submitted 3 days ago • 12 comments

Putting a face to what you read in the news. Until last Friday, I served our nation working as a Research Ecologist with the US Geological Survey (USGS). As a federal scientist, I provided robust, defensible information to support good decisions in natural resource management.

submitted 4 days ago • 72 comments

By the way, this is one of the issues where you might be able to make some headway with GOP reps if you live in a rural district. It has always been the heavily red rural districts that stopped them from destroying USPS in the past. Reps know their constituents depend on USPS.

submitted 3 days ago • 11 comments

They cannot withstand four years of this. We gotta get real comfortable with radical annoyance. Get vocal. Get involved. Show up. They will buckle. Doesn’t have to be all of them. Just enough. McCain was enough for one vote. But it’s going to take unprecedented fortitude to salvage our democracy.

submitted 3 days ago • 26 comments

I somebody who didn’t fuck around but who is forced to find out anyway, I can at least enjoy the schadenfreude of seeing an around-fucker be absolutely gobsmacked when they find out. 😙👌

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

submitted 3 days ago • 8 comments

How many federal workers would DOGE need to fire to make up for Musk not paying his fair share of taxes? Answer: 677,000. That's 44% of the entire non-DoD federal workforce. Again, this power grab is not about the budget. It’s about politics.

submitted 3 days ago • 62 comments

Most people probably aren’t tracking this but Senate Republicans just started an all-night voting marathon that will allow them to gut Medicaid and increase child hunger while giving handouts to billionaires like Elon Musk.

submitted 3 days ago • 708 comments

Sorry daddy couldn’t be here for your medical emergency honey but he had to call an astronaut a slur and then do drugs

submitted 3 days ago • 15 comments

I am certain that the majority of federal waste happens in the military. Not only because the budget is enormous (so, bigger #s), but also because the price of everything is grossly overvalued. Because of private suppliers and contractors, subsidies. Further privatizing will only make it worse.

submitted 4 days ago • 5 comments

Why aren't (most) Democrats responding as is required to the hostile takeover of our government? They are presently only hearing from their customers (voters) and not the people who hired them (donors). Corporate America is so far quiet about the coup. Want Dems to step up? Pressure their donors.

submitted 3 days ago • 12 comments

We got a message from the university to remove any use of the "DEI", "diversity", "equity", or "inclusion" from all public-facing documents. They said that even "biodiversity" is being flagged by the federal government. We live in the dumbest timeline.

submitted 13 days ago • 934 comments

These are legal immigrants the Trump administration is fucking over for no reason other than cruelty and racism www.npr.org/2025/01/28/n...

submitted 3 days ago • 13 comments

From a DoD statement released yesterday, about the thing the Pentagon has been calling a threat multiplier for like three decades www.defense.gov/News/Release...

submitted 4 days ago • 53 comments

How stupid and arbitrary are Trump's mass firings at federal agencies? A State Dept employee tells me some colleagues are racing to change their job descriptions so phrases like "transnational crime" don't get caught up in DOGE AI bots scanning for words like "trans" to fire people because "DEI."

submitted 3 days ago • 96 comments

sure, mitch mcconnell cynically masterminded the plot to destroy the US constitution and american democracy, but you have to at least credit him with lifting up his own constituents in Kentucky to make it one of our richest and most prosperous... (touching earpiece) wait I'm getting new information

submitted 3 days ago • 145 comments

How we did it: Texas Won’t Study How Its Abortion Ban Impacts Women, So We Did

submitted 4 days ago • 206 comments

In future generations, when your children and grandchildren look back on this moment, they are not going to ask about the price of eggs. They are going to ask you what you did. Not what you felt. Not what you paid. But what you did. And I want to be able to say I did everything I possibly could.

submitted 3 days ago • 1248 comments

🚨 Scoop: Treasury Dept agrees to block DOGE access to personal taxpayer data at IRS 🚨 IRS was preparing to try to reject this request, but was able to negotiate with the Trump admin to narrow access. Now DOGE will get the same access as academic researchers and some IT professionals, per sources.

submitted 3 days ago • 98 comments

DOGE is ushering in the enshittification of government services.

submitted 3 days ago • 13 comments

"They're putting persecuted Christian refugees in camps in the jungle" sounds like something Glenn Beck would accuse the Obama administration of doing and yet now it's a pillar of the Republican agenda.

submitted 4 days ago • 79 comments

New from Urban: For the more than 1M Americans w/pending decisions for disability benefits, the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the federal workforce will assuredly make it harder to receive approval, meaning even longer wait times to receive their benefits. www.urban.org/urban-wire/d...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments