apas-95:

The thing about car-dependency is that… it sucks for people without a car. Big news, right. But, it’s not like that incentive curve is something we can just ignore. When our desire or ability to leave our house at all is conditional on being in a car, that affects all of our behaviour on every level.

Kids are the prototypical ‘person without a car’, and in a car-dependent area, they become dependent on their parents. In a normal, walkable city or suburb, children walk on their own to school, they cycle, they take the bus. Instead of needing to get parental approval - and enough enthusiasm to dedicate the time - to be shuttled around to any given activity, children walk to the park, or to a friend’s house. Even in rural areas, with the infrastructure, children will cycle to school. In a car-dependent suburb, a child is trapped in a single-family McMansion on the edge of town, forced to beg their parents to be able to go anywhere, always under supervision - is it any wonder they’d rather stay inside?

Even in a city, if it’s car-dependent, this is still an issue. When the roads are 100-decibel, 6-lane monstrosities, with cyclists expected to intermingle with traffic, and the busses stuck in the exact same jam, kids aren’t going to be able to get anywhere, assuming their parents even let them cross the street. This isn’t just about proximity, it’s fundamentally related to safety. Car-dependent places are a lot more dangerous to be in, on account of all the cars, so parents feel it’s safer for their kid to be in one of those cars. To boot, when everyone’s in a car, there are less people around, less people who can notice someone in trouble, less people who can help. When places are built with the assumption that everyone will have a car, they become places for cars, which humans can stupidly venture into.

This doesn’t just apply to children. We are all, at some point or another, a ‘person without a car’ - in fact, we’re a ‘person without a car’ most of the time, until we get into one. A lot of people would prefer to remain that way; driving a car is stressful, it takes a lot of effort and concentration, and not everyone likes it at 6AM. But, when your environment is built with the assumption you’re inside a soundproof, crash-proof metal box, that becomes a requirement. The second you’re outside of those conditions, scurrying across deafening, hot tarmac, and dodging heavy-duty pickup trucks (carrying solely one guy and his starbucks order), of course you’d decide that not being in a car sucks. But, the thing is, it’s designing for cars that made it suck, even for the car-drivers.

A place designed for cars, a place that people cannot walk, or cycle, or take public transit through, is a place full of cars - you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. Studies have shown that the average speed of car traffic, over sufficient time, is completely unrelated to the thoroughfare of roads. Eventually, because of induced demand, the new seven-lane arterial road will have exactly the same congestion as the two-lane it replaced. The one factor that sharply determines how slow road traffic gets is, listen to this, the speed of non-car travel. It is solely when alternatives become faster that people stop driving and free up traffic. Shutting down main street, only allowing buses through, would drastically increase the speed of the rest of the road network - because each of those buses is 40 cars not in traffic. If you like driving, you should want as many people as possible who don’t want to drive to stop doing it - and whoever you are, you should want to be able to travel without depending on cars.

When I was in the biggest depressive slump of my life, and I could barely get out of bed, I still went shopping for food nearly every day, and even traveled to visit my partner. The supermarket was 10 meters out the door of my apartment, and I could walk five minutes to either train station if I had to. It was peaceful and quiet outside. My disabled mother doesn’t like living in cities, but she loves public transit, and will always take a train ride over a long, tiring car journey - and when every store doesn’t need a parking lot twice as big as itself, whatever walking she does have to do is over a much shorter distance. When I’ve had to call an ambulance in a ‘car-hostile’ place, it has arrived inconceivably faster, on those clear roads, than when sitting in the traffic of the highway-lined carpark that makes up so many cities.

Car dependency sucks for everyone, including car drivers, but it sucks the worst for people already suffering. It strips you of independence, and forces you into a box you might not fit in - and I haven’t even touched on pollution. Car-dependency makes cities and suburbs into dangerous, stressful places, devoid of everyone except the most desperate. The only people it benefits are, really, the CEOs of car companies.

kibumkim:

😭😭😭😭

brucespringsteendotcom:

Public transit be like your bus is due …..now! ……..now! …..any second now…….okay now! Just kidding uhh…………..now! Okay itll be 17 minutes ☺️ hope that helps. Aw shit we sent the invisible bus again

astraldemise:

one time in my last job a woman came up to the register explaining that when she bought stuff a day prior the clerk forgot to scan a pair of socks worth less than €2 and it was only right for her to bring it back to the store and pay for it proper. unfortunately my manager was directly next to me at the time and took over the register to handle this serious issue. the receipt she had brought with her said which register performed the previous transaction that forgot the socks and the manager could find out who was running that till on that day. poor dude had a manager yell at him for a half hour about how much of an incompetent fuck up he was, he left the job immediately after but i couldnt tell you if he quit or was fired

i think about this moment a lot. the customer seemed like a sweet woman with only good intentions and when she paid for the socks she had a look on her face that said “i feel good because i did the right thing”. and a guy lost his job because of a pair of socks. if shit like this ever happens to you and a clerk forgets to scan an item just think of it as a small blessing or that you had good luck or something. keep it.

fans4wga:

“The studios thought they could handle a strike. They might end up sparking a revolution”

The studios thought they could handle a strike. They might end up sparking a revolution

With writers and actors on strike, the studios have a full-blown labor revolt on their hands — and they have no one but themselves to blame.

Los Angeles Times

by Mary McNamara

“If you want to start a revolution, tell your workers you’d rather see them lose their homes than offer them fair wages. Then lecture them about how their “unrealistic” demands are “disruptive” to the industry, not to mention disturbing your revels at Versailles, er, Sun Valley.

Honestly, watching the studios turn one strike into two makes you wonder whether any of their executives have ever seen a movie or watched a television show. Scenes of rich overlords sipping Champagne and acting irritated while the crowd howls for bread rarely end well for the Champagne sippers.

This spring, it sometimes seemed like the Hollywood studios represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers were actively itching for a writers’ strike. Speculations about why, exactly, ran the gamut: Perhaps it would save a little money in the short run and show the Writers Guild of America (perceived as cocky after its recent ability to force agents out of the packaging business) who’s boss.

More obviously, it might secure the least costly compromise on issues like residuals payments and transparency about viewership.

But the 20,000 members of the WGA are not the only people who, having had their lives and livelihoods upended by the streaming model, want fair pay and assurances about the use of artificial intelligence, among other sticking points. The 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists share many of the writers’ concerns. And recent unforced errors by studio executives, named and anonymous, have suddenly transformed a fight the studios were spoiling for into a public relations war they cannot win.

Even as SAG-AFTRA representatives were seeing a majority of their demands rejected despite a nearly unanimous strike vote, a Deadline story quoted unnamed executives detailing a strategy to bleed striking writers until they come crawling back.

Days later, when an actors’ strike seemed imminent, Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger took time away from the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho not to offer compromise but to lecture. He told CNBC’s David Faber that the unions’ refusal to help out the studios by taking a lesser deal is “very disturbing to me.”

“There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic,” Iger said. “And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.”

If Iger thought his attempt to exec-splain the situation would make actors think twice about walking out, he was very much mistaken. Instead, he handed SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher the perfect opportunity for the kind of speech usually shouted atop the barricades.

“We are the victims here,” she said Thursday, marking the start of the actors’ strike. “We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us. I cannot believe it, quite frankly: How far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right, when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history at this very moment.”

Cue the cascading strings of “Les Mis,” bolstered by images of the most famous people on the planet walking out in solidarity: the cast of “Oppenheimer” leaving the film’s London premiere; the writers and cast of “The X-Files” reuniting on the picket line.

A few days later, Barry Diller, chairman and senior executive of IAC and Expedia Group and a former Hollywood studio chief, suggested that studio executives and top-earning actors take a 25% pay cut to bring a quick end to the strikes and help prevent “the collapse of the entire industry.”

When Diller is telling executives to take a pay cut to avoid destroying their industry, it is no longer a strike, or even two strikes. It is a last-ditch attempt to prevent le déluge.

Yes, during the 2007-08 writers’ strike, picketers yelled noncomplimentary things at executives as they entered their respective lots. (“What you earnin’, Chernin?” was popular at Fox, where Peter Chernin was chairman and chief executive.) But that was before social media made everything more immediate, incendiary and personal. (Even if they have never seen a movie or TV show, one would think that people heading up media companies would understand how media actually work.)

Even at the most heated moments of the last writers’ strike, executives like Chernin and Iger were seen as people who could be reasoned with — in part because most of the executives were running studios, not conglomerations, but mostly because the pay gap between executives and workers, in Hollywood and across the country, had not yet widened to the reprehensible chasm it has since.

Now, the massive eight- and nine-figure salaries of studio heads alongside photos of pitiably small residual checks are paraded across legacy and social media like historical illustrations of monarchs growing fat as their people starve. Proof that, no matter how loudly the studios claim otherwise, there is plenty of money to go around.

Topping that list is Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive Davd Zaslav. Having re-named HBO Max just Max and made cuts to the beloved Turner Classic Movies, among other unpopular moves, Zaslav has become a symbol of the cold-hearted, highly compensated executive that the writers and actors are railing against.

The ferocious criticism of individual executives’ salaries has placed Hollywood’s labor conflict at the center of the conversation about growing wealth disparities in the U.S., which stokes, if not causes, much of this country’s political divisions. It also strengthens the solidarity among the WGA and SAG-AFTRA and with other groups, from hotel workers to UPS employees, in the midst of disputes during what’s been called a “hot labor summer.”

Unfortunately, the heightened antagonism between studio executives and union members also appears to leave little room for the kind of one-on-one negotiation that helped end the 2007-08 writers’ strike. Iger’s provocative statement, and the backlash it provoked, would seem to eliminate him as a potential elder statesman who could work with both sides to help broker a deal.

Absent Diller and his “cut your damn salaries” plan, there are few Hollywood figures with the kind of experience, reputation and relationships to fill the vacuum.

At this point, the only real solution has been offered by actor Mark Ruffalo, who recently suggested that workers seize the means of production by getting back into the indie business, which is difficult to imagine and not much help for those working in television.

It’s the AMPTP that needs to heed Iger’s admonishment. At a time when the entertainment industry is going through so much disruption, two strikes is the last thing anyone needs, especially when the solution is so simple. If the studios don’t want a full-blown revolution on their hands, they’d be smart to give members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts they can live with.”

fans4wga:

What it means when an indie film gets a SAG-AFTRA waiver:

ALT

[id: tweet from Alex O'Keefe @/AlexOKeefe1994 that says “People keep saying SAG-AFTRA is handing out "waivers” for indie productions to keep filming. These are NOT WAIVERS they are INTERIM AGREEMENTS. That means the employers have agreed to all the demands actors are making of AMPTP. If indies can afford it, why cant billionaires?“ end id.]

everythingeverywhereallatonce:

Grindr Staff Launch Union Drive, Fueled by Tech Layoffs and Anti-LGBTQ Threats

Employees at the LGBTQ dating company Grindr Inc. are petitioning to unionize, extending a wave of organizing among tech workers.

Bloomberg.com

OMG GRINDR UNIONIZING TOO????????

(link to bypass paywall)

eggboob:

i-wear-the-cheese:

shesnake:

Let me tell you, there’s a queer club night in the UK called Gal Pals that caters exclusively to queer women and NBs and only plays music by women and when It’s Raining Men came on last time you’d have thought the crowd was full of middle aged housewives. A banger is a banger is a banger, you just gotta let the music go innit

alwaysbewoke:

Exactly.

blinkpen:

shortmexicangirl:

‘can i copy your homework?’

'yeah just don’t make it obvious’

all i can imagine is this