pawnstorm's blurbloghttps://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/2024-01-09T21:23:23.338000ZpawnstormWith Ranked Choice Voting Coming to Washington State, It’s Time to Coordinate Rollout2024-01-09T21:23:23.338000Zhttps://www.sightline.org/2024/01/09/with-ranked-choice-voting-coming-to-washington-state-its-time-to-coordinate-rollout/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/with-ranked-choice-v/5136553:0061f0">shared this story</a>
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State legislators can support local jurisdictions with streamlined implementation guidelines. |‘Unique in the world’: why does America have such terrible public transit?2023-11-17T14:12:42.172000ZVeronica Espositohttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/14/book-lost-subways-north-america-jake-berman<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/unique-in-the-world-/5352136:40b81f">shared this story</a>
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<p>A new book looks back at the mass transit histories of 23 major cities in both the US and Canada, detailing the routes to where we are today</p><p>“North America really is unique in the world in the lack of good public transit,” the author Jake Berman told me while discussing his new book, The Lost Subways of North America. The oversize, map-laden volume is a slickly designed deep dive into the mass transit stories of 23 major cities in the US and Canada. Packed with fascinating histories and tons of absorbing information – ever wonder why elevated trains went out of style, or why monorails just don’t work? – the book is a lively and compelling examination of how mass transit has succeeded and failed across the continent.</p><p>“European cities never decided to build the kind of copy-and-paste suburbs that we built in North America,” said Berman, explaining why transit has fared so much better across the Atlantic. “The other part of that is, American cities do not make particularly good use of the land near their transit systems. For instance, many stops on [the Bay Area’s Bay Area Rapid Transit] Bart is surrounded mostly by strip malls, or single-family homes or gigantic parking lots.”</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/14/book-lost-subways-north-america-jake-berman">Continue reading...</a>Our House Is a Very Very Very Molly House2023-10-25T14:41:57.221000ZDan Thurothttps://spacebiff.com/2023/10/17/molly-house/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
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<p><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/1.-header-house.jpg"><img alt="Wehrlegig already has two color-coded titles, red and purple. What tone will this one have?" class="aligncenter wp-image-25567 size-large" height="185" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/1.-header-house.jpg?w=604&h=185" title="Wehrlegig already has two color-coded titles, red and purple. What tone will this one have?" width="604" /></a></p>
<p>I often joke that I’m a class-four prude. Like many jokes, this one hides a kernel of truthfulness. For reasons that are far beyond the purposes of today’s discussion, sexuality is not something I discuss easily or often. When I do, it’s often behind a veil of playfulness. In laughter and mirth, the untouchable is momentarily set free.</p>
<p>Although the comparison is an imperfect one, that also seems true of molly houses, gathering places such as coffee houses or taverns where homosexual men in 18th-century England could socialize freely, veiled from the gaze of polite society. In some ways, their idea of queerness was different from ours. Indeed, they lacked terms like “queerness” at all. The laws of the time lumped homosexuality and bestiality together, and those who were arrested could be pilloried or even hanged.</p>
<p>Despite these penalties, men risked shame and death to create places where they could become more fully themselves. That’s the topic of Molly House by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle. Molly House was one of the finalists of the first Zenobia Award. Now it’s nearly here, and I can safely say there’s nothing quite like it.</p>
<p><span id="more-25564"></span></p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_25568" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/2.-strolling-the-garden.jpg"><img alt="I am always the Knight. Because it's yellow. Being a horse is secondary." class="wp-image-25568 size-large" height="264" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/2.-strolling-the-garden.jpg?w=604&h=264" title="I am always the Knight. Because it's yellow. Being a horse is secondary." width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-25568">Strolling the lanes.</p></div>
<p>If Molly House has a single watchword, it would probably be “consent.” In the positive sense, that players adopt the role of homosexual men looking for companionship in a time and place hostile to their existence, and must therefore navigate the gardens and arcades of London carefully and considerately. But also in the negative sense. Because you are a gay man in the 18th century, there is a very real possibility that your agency will someday be stripped away. And, at a more meta level, that question of consent transcends the table and poses itself to the players themselves. What is consent? What does it mean when it’s offered from one person to another? What does it mean when it’s stolen? One doesn’t need to have lived under the radar to grasp the implications of these questions. Anyone who’s tried to make new friends as an adult will know the anxiety well enough.</p>
<p>To allow the game to center that anxiety, it befits Molly House that the turns are straightforward. In nearly every case, you travel to a new space and take an action. There are limitations. You can only travel so far, a terrible imposition when you need to reach the other side of the map but don’t have adequate range to do so. Further, the black pawn denoting the presence of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, self-appointed constables bent on suppressing everything from brothels to profanity, are best avoided.</p>
<p>And then there are the actions themselves. Every single action will call upon you to draw from the deck. For the most part, the deck proffers a jumble of opportunities, full of cards across four suits that represent your budding friendships, items that might be appreciated in the festivities at the nearby molly house, perhaps even a molly for hosting such a good time. But there are perils as well. These appear in the form of constables, eight of the spit-shined bastards, two per suit, ready to spoil your draw.</p>
<p>Expect those draws to be spoiled. Often. There is no such thing as a safe moment. One minute you’re confessing in church, or perusing the Covent Garden Market, or announcing yourself at the Axe Hotel and Coffeehouse. No matter what you do, there’s an element of exposure. Literally: You place certain cards face-up in front of you, showing them to the table. This is the peril of trying to find people like yourself. You must reveal a portion of who you are. It’s an apprehension we all know too well, risked every time we step out of our comfort zone to announce ourselves to the wider world.</p>
<p>Here, though, those apprehensions may have acute consequences. The next minute, when you draw, it’s entirely possible a constable will appear. This halts the draw immediately, no matter how many cards would otherwise be peeled off the deck. And then the constable pores over the things you’ve exposed. Depending on whether this is the first or second constable of their suit — and depending on the version, because Molly House is very much still in development and every one of my four plays has been slightly different from the others — the constable subjects everyone else at the table to scrutiny as well. Then your agency is stripped. Cards are lost. Maybe you’re deemed for the pillory. Chits are drawn from a bag and concealed in front of you. These speak of shames that may one day be made public. In game terms, negative victory points. Even, if you’re bold or terrified or both, another way to win.</p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_25569" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/3.-preparing-for-a-festivity.jpg"><img alt="There are quibbles, but it seems silly to discuss them when they keep disappearing with each iteration of the prototype. This is a problem with nearly every prototype I play, but the problem is especially acute when Wehrle is involved. That kid likes to break his games' bones until they fit the proper shape." class="wp-image-25569 size-large" height="254" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/3.-preparing-for-a-festivity.jpg?w=604&h=254" title="There are quibbles, but it seems silly to discuss them when they keep disappearing with each iteration of the prototype. This is a problem with nearly every prototype I play, but the problem is especially acute when Wehrle is involved. That kid likes to break his games' bones until they fit the proper shape." width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-25569">Preparing for the upcoming festivities.</p></div>
<p>It’s important to first establish the penalty for your search. There is no moment in Molly House when you don’t feel hunted. Whether you’re cruising the arcade in search of a lover or revealing your identity to the local priest under seal of confession, it’s never possible to shrug off the fear entirely. There’s a constant note that runs throughout the game, like the sound of a horn just below the pitch of hearing that nevertheless lays a cold hand on your breastbone. At all times, you risk discovery and punishment.</p>
<p>This draws the game’s objective into stark contrast. Your goal may be abstract, but it’s also more… not <em>tangible</em>, but <em>whole </em>than anything as airy as a “victory point.” Here the points are called “joy,” and they are an objective as solemn as any other. In respectable society, every season the ton convenes in London to find suitable matches for their scions. Their goal, stated frankly, is to arrange the proper mates for themselves and their offspring. Without joy, what a sterile and sorrowful pursuit this might be. Most who sought refuge in molly houses were workingmen, but perhaps your character is one of the few who once took part in that annual ritual. Either way, here they are, searching for joy and companionship despite the dangers such a search presents.</p>
<p>In this search, all roads lead to Mother Clap’s Molly House, the centermost location on the map and the appointed destination for the cards you’ve gathered. Here players may take part in festivities, the game’s most involved but also most rewarding action. These are multi-step affairs. The host must bring a molly, who sets the terms for the engagement. Historically, activities in molly houses were wide-ranging. There was sex, of course, but also feminine-coded rituals such as cross-dressing, cuddling, speaking to one another in women’s voices and with women’s vocabularies, and the conducting of marriages and mock births. I don’t list these rituals in the spirit of gawking; as I noted earlier, 18th-century ideas of queerness were different from ours, and these were but one manifestation of queer identities. Beyond the abstracted suits of the cards, Kelly and Wehrle don’t go into specifics. It’s enough to know that a festivity is when everyone at the table comes together in their shared pursuit of joy. Pun intended? I’ll never tell.</p>
<p>In game terms, the aforementioned molly sets the objective for the festivity via a hand of cards. Aunt England declares a four-card flush; Orange Deb insists on a six-card run; Queen Irons prepares for a full house. Because of the scattershot way that cards are gained — and the very real possibility that they will be confiscated — it’s nearly impossible to fulfill these objectives alone. So everyone pitches in. Everybody has the opportunity to present an item that alters the rules: a dress that makes certain cards more valuable, a fiddle that attunes a shared suit anybody can chase for extra points, gin that provides a wild and joyous night but also risks attracting the local constabulary. Then everyone goes around the table and adds cards, one at a time. If the right cards are played, joy is scored and the contributing cards become part of their character’s reputation, potentially scoring further points later. Otherwise the festivity fails and everybody picks up their cards for a later attempt. Either way, everybody holds their breath while a few cards are drawn to see if the Society for the Reformation of Manners crashes the party.</p>
<p>It’s a little bit wondrous, these festivities. Despite being a contest at heart, the camaraderie is genuine. Everybody may contribute, everybody may benefit. Together, perhaps something worthwhile and vibrant emerges. In one sense, Molly House is not all that far off from the many games about rebels and insurgents who meet under cover of darkness, each bringing their own scrounged equipment and intelligence together in an effort to throw off their shackles. Except in this case, the objective isn’t revolution. It’s living well and honestly.</p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_25570" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/4.-whistle-noise.jpg"><img alt="Lame hats. Buncha dorks." class="wp-image-25570 size-large" height="294" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/4.-whistle-noise.jpg?w=604&h=294" title="Lame hats. Buncha dorks." width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-25570">Here come the constables, all in a row.</p></div>
<p>Like most other rebellions, this is a war its participants would rather not wage at all. Life is hard enough and dangerous enough — love, too — that there’s no need for prowling vigilantes and hanging laws to make the pursuit of joy worthwhile. Nobody wants to be betrayed by their closest confederates.</p>
<p>Because that’s a very real possibility in Molly House. Whenever you’re caught by a constable, you’re forced to draw one or more chips. These mostly slap you with negative points, representing the impugning of your reputation and perhaps dangers to your livelihood and wellbeing. Mixed in with the other chips are informer tokens. In fitting with the game’s engagement with consent, it’s always optional to take these. In fact, drawing informer tokens can be beneficial. You show the table what you’ve drawn and chuck them back into the bag. Somehow you’ve escaped this brush with the law unscathed.</p>
<p>But as the game progresses, the pressures of living on the fringe of society may become too much. You’ve become a target for harassment by the constables. Mother Clap’s is ever closer to being raided and shut down. Maybe even petty jealousy plays its part as rival participants eclipse your own pursuit of happiness. Regardless of the reason, there are sufficient advantages to becoming an informer that the temptation is always close at hand. When it comes to constable checks, informers are permitted to lie. Now you can show any card rather than your highest of that suit — or even withhold playing a card at all. Of course, given this game’s emphasis on revealing your hand to the table, there are some risks. If you pretend that your highest sun-suited card is a four when everybody saw you reveal an eight just last round, well, the world is full of terrible snitches. But if you can pull it off, it’s possible to evade detection. You can bring the best cards to Mother Clap’s festivities without running the risk of having them confiscated.</p>
<p>Further, informers gain some leeway with the law. Near the end of each round, everybody contributes half of their cards to a single gossip pile. This functions much like the skill check in a hidden traitor game like Battlestar Galactica. The gossip deck is shuffled and revealed, at which point its contents will affect the molly house’s notoriety. Harsher penalties may be added to the bag. Worse, if the scrutiny grows too intense, Mother Clap’s will be shut down entirely. When this happens, everybody loses — apart from the table’s informers. Lest you become an informer too cavalierly, however, the inverse is also true. If outed as a rat by a fellow player, an informer may even be barred from future festivities, becoming an outcast among their community of outcasts.</p>
<p>There is a precedent to such a harsh endgame. The historical Mother Clap’s was shut down in part thanks to the efforts of a “thief-taker” and member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners who used his position to blackmail and extort those he caught — and who, it turns out, was pilloried and imprisoned for sodomy. The possibility of betrayal is crucial to what Kelly and Wehrle have crafted. Molly House not only shares in the joys of its protagonists, the relief they feel upon finding people like themselves, the necessity of companionship, even the joys of sexual expression. But it also carries their anxieties, fears, pettinesses, even their potential self-loathing. When one lives in a society that detests them, it’s impossible not to stay up nights thinking about why. After a while, maybe those reasons ring in the ears.</p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_25571" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/5.-traitor-betrayer.jpg"><img alt="I very nearly wrote more about how this game speaks to the transmission of a particular sexual ethic into our own time, but... look, there'll be time for that later." class="wp-image-25571 size-large" height="307" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/5.-traitor-betrayer.jpg?w=604&h=307" title="I very nearly wrote more about how this game speaks to the transmission of a particular sexual ethic into our own time, but... look, there'll be time for that later." width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-25571">Becoming an informant is always a choice.</p></div>
<p>Far from producing a simple lionization, the result is a game that celebrates queer joy while also acknowledging the dangers and tolls posed to those who pursued it in the not-as-distant-as-it-should-be past. It centers people who have traditionally gone overlooked, and does so in a way that demands empathy and consideration. It shares in their apprehensions and terrors, joys and triumphs, loyalties and betrayals. It contemplates a moral question without indulging in petty moralizing, and certainly without the drab policing of its constables.</p>
<p>Even in its incomplete form, it has no parallel. Where so many games place necessary distance between themselves and their subject matter, Molly House bridges the divide. There will doubtless be many ways to discuss it: the visibility of its inhabitants, their victimhood, the systems and morals and individuals that isolated them from one another, the roots of our own modern puritanism. These are all valid, and I can’t wait to see them investigated and discussed.</p>
<p>For my part, however, my gratitude is more immediate. I’m glad to have played a game that makes love and sex as viable a thing to contemplate as war and murder and economic optimization. Not in a pornographic sense. Recall, I’m a class-four prude. Rather, in how it affirms that the hidden portions of ourselves are the bedrock of our tenacity, for they are the parts that must be shared to forge the tightest bonds. In accentuating that sharing — and in permitting its abuse — Molly House speaks to the tenderness that resides in all of us, and does so in the way that games are so uniquely capable of accomplishing within the magical sandbox of play.</p>
<p><em>Molly House is funding on BackerKit right now. You can find it <a href="https://www.backerkit.com/c/wehrlegig-games/wehrlegig-games">here</a>.</em></p>
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<p><em>(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/danthurot">Patreon campaign</a> or <a href="https://ko-fi.com/danthurot">Ko-fi</a>.)</em></p>
<p><em>A prototype copy was provided.</em></p><br><br><img src="https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/811bac0bd2b696bc87121a4ac4bb1cffddaa7ed7bb082f46a790d1ac50b991d1?s=96&d=monsterid&r=G" />To the Waters and the Wild2023-09-26T13:15:45.710000ZDan Thurothttps://spacebiff.com/2023/09/25/defenders-of-the-wild/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/to-the-waters-and-th/1468964:878f64">shared this story</a>
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<p><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/1.-defenders-of-the-headerd.jpg"><img alt="The game's artwork was partially done by Meg Lemieur, who has done work with the Beehive Collective, the agitprop art collective. So that's suitable and cool." class="aligncenter wp-image-25351 size-large" height="222" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/1.-defenders-of-the-headerd.jpg?w=604&h=222" title="The game's artwork was partially done by Meg Lemieur, who has done work with the Beehive Collective, the agitprop art collective. So that's suitable and cool." width="604" /></a></p>
<p>It’s a rare game that saturates itself with a sense of loss. Defenders of the Wild is one such title. Both a lament for the natural wonders we so readily pave over and a defiant yawp in the face of automation and progress, there’s an optimistic romanticism to the whole thing.</p>
<p>Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. T.L. Simons previously designed <a href="https://spacebiff.com/2022/01/29/bloc-by-bloc/">Bloc by Bloc</a>, another supernal game about staring down systemic oppression. Now he’s joined by Henry Audubon to take the fight to the fields. It’s not as great a jump as one might assume. Put them together and the combination produces a rallying cry: Bloc by Bloc for the urban populace, Defenders of the Wild for those who see their way of life being swallowed up by enclosures. The whole thing has the tone of a fable. A fable about slagging robots.</p>
<p><span id="more-25349"></span></p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_25352" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/2.-suspicious-of-that-nearby-murder-factory.jpg"><img alt="These hot lead cylinders poking holes in me are also sus." class="wp-image-25352 size-large" height="296" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/2.-suspicious-of-that-nearby-murder-factory.jpg?w=604&h=296" title="These hot lead cylinders poking holes in me are also sus." width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-25352">I am suspicious of that nearby murder factory.</p></div>
<p>I couldn’t tell you who assembled the robots that are now chewing through the woodland, but the scars they stitch into the landscape will take lifetimes to mend. There’s a stark contrast between this game’s two halves, and it’s the robots who draw it.</p>
<p>The game dawns on a near-pristine woodland. The map is divided into colorful hexes that nonetheless merge into coherent swaths of terrain. These generate paths for your protagonists. While playing as the motley band of animals that constitute the yellow team, for instance, you can glide along and through grasslands like a highway; likewise for purple’s mountains, teal’s wetlands, and orange’s autumnal glades. The feel is naturalistic, sometimes producing wide trackways for your animals to traverse, while at other times tucking away little valleys or lakes in hard-to-reach corners. There are textures to this geography, essential imbalances that define the places you can or cannot easily reach, which regions will be tougher to defend, and the routes that will sting when broken apart.</p>
<p>Because that’s what the robots do. They break. They see this landscape the way a broken serger might see a wrinkled tablecloth. The artificial opponent Simons and Audubon have produced is a horrible wonder, a simple system of only six repeating cards that nevertheless pursues its objectives with impressive violence and a mechanical disinterest in your wellbeing. The first harbingers of that process are two towering engines. You cannot pass through these any more than a squirrel could pass under a running lawnmower. Worse, they deposit steel barricades in their wake, crisscrossing the landscape like a terrible zipper. You also cannot pass through these. Until you blow a hole in them, anyway.</p>
<p>From there, the machines gradually zip up entire hexes. These are transformed into factories. Like the machines’ original starting place in the center of the map, these produce further robots and pollution. The first exist to snipe at your passing wildlife or pursue them to the fringes, while trash piles together until it poisons anybody nearby. Before long, entire segments of this once-bounteous wild have been transformed into a tangle of impassable walls, heaps of toxic slurry, and patrolling drones.</p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_25353" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/3.-all-the-stops.jpg"><img alt="BEAR WITH A FRYING PAN oh you robos are done" class="wp-image-25353 size-large" height="294" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/3.-all-the-stops.jpg?w=604&h=294" title="BEAR WITH A FRYING PAN oh you robos are done" width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-25353">Getting the band together.</p></div>
<p>There are so many ways to lose in Defenders of the Wild. Pollution, factories, injury — all threaten to scuttle your uprising before it can fully organize. This is one element of the game’s fable, a cautionary tale about the many risks posed to activists who face a machine with centuries of practice under its belt.</p>
<p>Much like Bloc by Bloc, however, this fable also contains a step-by-step guide to fighting back. It begins with organization. Each player begins with a single camp on the map, a power base for producing items and to which they can flee in times of need. It will take many more such camps, all pitched in friendly terrain, and only after amassing enough support. This is built by blowing up robots, cutting through walls, sweeping up trash — in effect, matching your talk with walk.</p>
<p>As games go, this is all straightforward stuff. Running the resistance is an exercise in managing risk and resources. Each turn opens with everybody at the table selecting a single card, which spells out how many actions you can take and which special ability you’ll have at your disposal. In one round, you might be immune to sniper attacks, letting you skirt the edges of a factory without putting yourself in harm’s way. The next, maybe you’ll begin by giving everybody at the table an item or claiming the first player token.</p>
<p>Those items, by the way, are this game’s equivalent to mutual aid. Each team offers its own item, which is shared and gifted between factions. The creatures of the wetlands produce healing salves, while the mountain-dwellers assemble rockets for busting robots from afar. Cooperative games have always walked a tightrope between too much collaboration and too little, and Defenders of the Wild strikes a delicate balance. Your cards are your own, preventing any one player from commanding too much authority over everyone else. At the same time, your advantages tend to be mutualistic, doling out bread and maps and other perks to your fellow resistance members.</p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_25354" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/4.-we-are-robots.jpg"><img alt="There are only six cards, with only three unique options. So it's a breeze to learn what the robots will do on any given turn. Outmaneuvering them, on the other hand..." class="wp-image-25354 size-large" height="313" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/4.-we-are-robots.jpg?w=604&h=313" title="There are only six cards, with only three unique options. So it's a breeze to learn what the robots will do on any given turn. Outmaneuvering them, on the other hand..." width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-25354">The A.I. system is elegant and compelling.</p></div>
<p>Either way, collaboration is essential. Your ultimate goal is to deploy all your camps and then smash the enemy’s factories. This is usually a painstaking process, not to mention a painful one. Such an endeavor requires that the factory walls be breached and the robots and pollution within cleared away. All the while, you’ll be taking hits and dodging hunters. So it behooves you to divide duties with your allies. One team moves in and breaches the wall and clears away any nearby hunters. Someone else goes in and ensures the toxic spills are cleared. Finally, a third squad delivers the killing blow, returning the factory to nature and capping the venom leaking into the soil. There’s plenty of wiggle room here, but it’s a process that requires both adaptability and coordination. The alternative is a slow choking death under a mountain of trash or the heel of a hunter-killer.</p>
<p>Sometimes, anyway. If I had one complaint with Defenders of the Wild — or with the prototype version I’ve been playing — it’s that there’s a wide difference between too tough, too easy, and just-hard-enough, and the game’s artificial opponent doesn’t always find that sweet middle spot. T.L. Simons and Greg Loring-Albright previously confronted that problem in the third edition of Bloc by Bloc by positing that one of your allies might be an opportunist looking to capitalize on the city’s unrest to propel their faction to sole power. If the city’s defenders didn’t put up much of a fight, perhaps your so-called friends would.</p>
<p>By contrast, Defenders of the Wild plays its cards straight. This eases the game’s cognitive load and produces a statement that’s more singular, not to mention entirely friendly to outsiders who don’t know (or don’t want to know) anything about the Tragedy/Fallacy of the Commons or how enclosure steals from the public to enrich the few. Here the fable is principally procedural. To succeed, you must politick and pound pavement, both metaphorically and literally. You’re shown point-blank how open terrain can be sewn up, preventing free movement and leading to urban flight. In one sense, both games combine to generate a single argument, demonstrating how one crisis leads to another, the troubles in Defenders of the Wild sparking the troubles in Bloc by Bloc.</p>
<p>You’re also shown that the answer to systemic problems cannot always be systemic. How could it be, when the system is arbitrated by those who benefit from its imbalances? The machine simply will not listen, no matter how eloquently your animals chirp and chitter. Sometimes the only solution is to violate a hedgerow and torch a manor. Pardon me; the solution is to blast a robot and rewild a factory. Although these days, those statements are equivalently political.</p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_25355" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/5.-putting-our-heads-together.jpg"><img alt="EGGSECUTE" class="wp-image-25355 size-large" height="265" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/5.-putting-our-heads-together.jpg?w=604&h=265" title="EGGSECUTE" width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-25355">Putting our heads together.</p></div>
<p>But those are hefty discussion points. Like I noted earlier, Defenders of the Wild is entirely happy to let its messaging operate at the level of fable. The result is a charming but razor-toothed game, one that slaps a sterner face on the anthropomorphic woodland creatures craze that’s been going around. Its highs are considerable, letting players revel in the vicious comeuppance of woodland creatures against their mechanical oppressors. Whether playing with my nine-year-old or a group of adults, I’ve been having a heck of a time smashing the machine.</p>
<p><em>Defenders of the Wild will be on Kickstarter tomorrow. <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1069022676/defenders-of-the-wild">Here it is.</a><br />
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<p><em>(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/danthurot">Patreon campaign</a> or <a href="https://ko-fi.com/danthurot">Ko-fi</a>.)</em></p>
<p><em>A prototype copy was provided.</em></p><br><br><img src="https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/811bac0bd2b696bc87121a4ac4bb1cffddaa7ed7bb082f46a790d1ac50b991d1?s=96&d=monsterid&r=G" />Urban Planning Opinion Progression2023-09-25T13:41:54.930000Zhttps://xkcd.com/2832/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/urban-planning-opini/8268588:be0890">shared this story</a>
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<img alt="If they're going to make people ride bikes and scooters in traffic, then it should at LEAST be legal to do the Snow Crash thing where you use a hook-shot-style harpoon to catch free rides from cars." src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/urban_planning_opinion_progression.png" title="If they're going to make people ride bikes and scooters in traffic, then it should at LEAST be legal to do the Snow Crash thing where you use a hook-shot-style harpoon to catch free rides from cars." />"Write a Check for $11,000. She Was 26, She Had Limited Value." SPD Officer Jokes with Police Union Leader About Killing of Pedestrian by Fellow Cop - PubliCola2023-09-13T15:21:01.347000Zhttps://publicola.com/2023/09/11/write-a-check-for-11000-she-was-26-she-had-limited-value-spd-officer-jokes-with-police-union-leader-about-killing-of-pedestrian-by-fellow-cop/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/write-a-check-for-11/5908262:23515b">shared this story</a>
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<div class="entry-content"> <p><em><strong>By Erica C. Barnett</strong> </em></p>
<p>In a conversation with Mike Solan, the head of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, Seattle Police Department officer and SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer minimized the killing of 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula by police officer Kevin Dave and joked that she had “limited value” as a “regular person” who was only 26 years old.</p>
<p>In the video, taken in the early morning after Dave hit Kandula in a crosswalk while speeding to respond to a call from a man who believed he had taken too much cocaine, Auderer says he has talked to Dave and he is “good,” adding that ” it does not seem like there’s a criminal investigation going on” because Dave was “going 50 [mph]—that’s not out of control” and because Kandula may not have even been in a crosswalk. Auderer added that Dave had “lights and sirens” on, which video confirmed <a class="external" href="https://publicola.com/2023/07/20/video-confirms-that-officer-was-going-74-mph-was-not-running-siren-when-he-killed-pedestrian/" rel="nofollow">was not true</a>.</p>
<p>In fact, as we reported exclusively, Dave was <a class="external" href="https://publicola.com/2023/06/16/seattle-police-officer-was-driving-74-mph-when-he-hit-and-killed-23-year-old-pedestrian/" rel="nofollow">driving 74 miles an hour</a> in a 25 mile per hour zone and struck Kandula while she was attempting to cross the street in a marked and well-lighted crosswalk.</p>
<div class="perfect-pullquote vcard pullquote-align-full pullquote-border-placement-left"><blockquote><p>“I think she went up on the hood, hit the windshield, then when he hit the brakes, she flew off the car. But she is dead. No, it’s a regular person. Yeah, just write a check. Yeah, $11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value.”—Seattle police officer Daniel Auderer, joking with police union president Mike Solan about the death of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula earlier that night.</p></blockquote></div>
<p>“I don’t think she was thrown 40 feet either,” Auderer told Solan. “I think she went up on the hood, hit the windshield, then when he hit the brakes, she flew off the car. But she is dead.” Then Auderer laughed loudly at something Solan said. “No, it’s a regular person. Yeah.”</p>
<p>We have asked SPOG via email what Solan asked that made Auderer clarify that Kandula was a “regular” person, as opposed to another type of person Dave might have hit.</p>
<p>“Yeah, just write a check,” Auderer continued. Then he laughed again for several seconds. “Yeah, $11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value.” At this point, Auderer turned off his body camera and the recording stops.</p>
<p>Joel Merkel, the co-chair of Seattle’s Community Police Commission, called the video “shockingly insensitive.</p>
<p>“I was just really struck by the casual laughter and attitude—this was moments after she was killed,” Merkel said. “You have the vice president of SPOG on the telephone with the president of SPOG essentially laughing and joking about the pedestrian’s death and putting a dollar value on her head, and that alone is just disgusting and inhumane,” Merkel said.</p>
<p>Right-wing commentator Jason Rantz attempted to<a class="external" href="https://mynorthwest.com/3926287/rantz-seattle-cop-reports-his-own-conversation-fears-out-context-smears/" rel="nofollow"> pre-spin</a> the video as an empathetic response that included a bit of “gallows humor,” saying the comment was “being described as a ‘leak’ of the content to media members who are hypercritical of police.”</p>
<p>Rantz also claimed the two police union officials’ comments were meant to “mock city lawyers” who work on cases in which police officers kill or harm civilians, which, Merkel says, “doesn’t make it any better and possibly even makes it worse! Because [in that case] you have SPOG complaining or mocking or joking about police accountability, which is really at the heart of the consent decree.”</p>
<p>Last week, US District Judge James Robart lifted the majority of a federal consent degree over SPD that has been in place since 2012, finding the department in full compliance with the portions of the agreement that dealt with use of force and bias-free policing, while maintaining federal oversight of the departments crowd-control and accountability policies. The city is currently locked in contract negotiations with SPOG. The city’s most recent contract with SPOG erased or neutralized reforms the city council, which included now-Mayor Bruce Harrell, passed in 2017.</p>
<p>Although Robart has said he has no authority to get involved in SPOG negotiations, Merkel said he was encouraged that he also said he “felt he had the jurisdiction to impact the contract to the extent that it affects accountability” during last week’s court hearing in which the judge largely terminated the agreement.</p> <p>PubliCola requested videos and documents related to the collision through the ordinary public disclosure process several months ago and has been receiving installments through the regular public disclosure process.</p>
<p>SPD did not respond to a request for comment. Half an hour after this post went up, the department posted the video on its website, along with a statement. According to the post, an SPD employee “identified” the video “in the routine course of business” and alerted their supervisor; when the video made its way to Police Chief Adrian Diaz’s office, <a class="external" href="https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2023/09/11/body-worn-video-from-officer-involved-collision-january-2023/" rel="nofollow">the post</a> says, his office sent it to the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) for investigation.</p>
<p>This suggests a different sequence of events than the one Rantz outlined in his piece attempting to exonerate Auderer before the video became public today. We have reached out to OPA and will update this post when we hear back.</p>
<p>“As others in the accountability system proceed with their work, we again extend our deepest sympathy for this tragic collision,” SPD’s blog post says.</p>
<p>Auderer has been on the police force for 12 years and has been investigated by OPA for dozens of incidents, including several that involved violence against members of the public. In many cases, OPA has sustained, or upheld, the complaints.</p>
<p>In one incident, Auderer and his brother—a police officer for another jurisdiction—pulled a person out of their apartment without identifying himself as a police officer, failed to inform him of his Miranda rights, and did not report the incident to his bosses. Auderer was suspended for four days for that incident. In another, he chased down someone who was urinating in public and tackled him onto the concrete, injuring him. (Auderer later claimed he was trying to keep the man from running into traffic, which the investigator called “a logical stretch.”</p>
<div class="perfect-pullquote vcard pullquote-align-full pullquote-border-placement-left"><blockquote><p>“Indeed, this is not the first time that OPA has had such concerns. [Auderer] had numerous cases over the last two years in which it was alleged that he was unprofessional.”—Office of Police Accountability investigator</p></blockquote></div>
<p>Many other complaints about Auderer involved alleged lack of professionalism. In one case, he threatened to break a person’s arm if he reached for his keys, asked if he was mentally ill, and failed to put a seat belt on him while he was handcuffed in the back of Auderer’s patrol car. Although OPA effectively dismissed the complaints in that case by giving Auderer a training referral, the investigator expressed concern with Auderer’s “general approach to this incident, his demeanor, and the way he interacted with the Complainant. Indeed, this is not the first time that OPA has had such concerns. [Auderer] had numerous cases over the last two years in which it was alleged that he was unprofessional.”</p>
<p>In another case, which was sustained, Auderer appeared to mock a woman who said she was developmentally disabled and had cognitive challenges that made it difficult for her to remember specific instructions during a DUI test. He then accused her of lying about being a veterinary nurse, suggesting she wasn’t capable of holding such a complicated job. “I know you usually get a reaction out of people, but you’re not going to get a reaction out of me,” Auderer told the woman, who appeared to be responding calmly and reasonably. He then informed another officer that she was “220,” code for mentally ill, in her presence, and said, “You also need to go see your mental health professional and I think you know that.”</p>
<p>Several other complaints against Auderer involved what appeared to be overzealous investigations of driving under the influence, such as a case in which he “effectuated an arrest” by another officer of a dead-sober man who briefly swerved his car because he was eating a hot dog. “I very much empathize with the subject who suffered through a Kafkaesque experience,” the OPA investigator wrote.</p>
<p>The King County Prosecutor’s Office has not yet decided whether to <a class="external" href="https://publicola.com/2023/06/15/case-of-cop-who-killed-pedestrian-in-crosswalk-referred-to-king-county-prosecutor/" rel="nofollow">prosecute</a> Dave in the case, which is under criminal investigation.</p>
<p>This is a developing story and will be updated.</p> </div>Tree Keepers: Where Sustaining the Forest Is a Tribal Tradition2023-09-01T05:11:11.436000Zhttps://e360.yale.edu/features/menominee-forest-management-logging<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/tree-keepers-where-s/7031288:cfc4e6">shared this story</a>
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<p>The Menominee tribe of Wisconsin has sustainably harvested its woods for nearly 170 years, providing a model for foresters worldwide. Amid climate change and other threats to the forest, the tribe continues to follow a traditional code: Let the healthy trees keep growing.</p><p><a href="https://e360.yale.edu/features/menominee-forest-management-logging">Read more on E360 →</a></p>I Blame the W3C's HTML Standard for Ordered Lists [tech, soc, Patreon]2023-08-31T16:07:30.143000Zhttps://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1819759.html<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
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<i>Canonical link: <a href="https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1819759.html">https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1819759.html</a></i><br /><br />Over on Mastodon, I had made the comment "CSS will always be hamstrung by HTML's toxic content/appearance paradigm", to which someone else reasonably enough asked me, <blockquote style="font-style: italic;">What do you mean by "toxic content/appearance paradigm"? Do you think the separation of content from appearance is a bad idea, or that HTML/CSS doesn't do it well, or something else?</blockquote> I suspect he never expected quite this much answer. I start with a single HTML tag and end with the downfall of civilization.<br /><br />Not joking.<br /><br />What follows is my reply, edited and a bit further developed.<br /><br /><hr align="center" width="25%" /><br /><br />Several things:<br /><br />1) To a first approximation, I think the separation of content from appearance is a fine idea.<br /><br />2) Which is to say, to a second approximation, I think it's terrible: I have an inchoate intuition that content vs appearance is a bad paradigm because it is an attempt to shoehorn a triad into a false dichotomy, and the real correct solution is separation of content vs appearance vs a third thing, maybe "functionality".<br /><br />3) But that aside, and for the moment CSS aside as well, HTML's separation of content and appearance is catastrophically bad. It is predicated on fundamentally mistaken ideas as to what is content and what is not.<br /><br />I have one particular favorite hobby horse example of this, which really captures how apparently trivial errors can have far-reaching consequences.<br /><br />That example is the Ordered List (<ol>).<br /><br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span class="cuttag" id="span-cuttag___1" style="display: none;"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1819759.html#cutid1">Read more... [2,670 Words]</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div id="div-cuttag___1" style="display: none;"></div><br /><br /><i>This post brought to you by the 161 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at <a href="http://www.patreon.com/siderea?ty=p">my Patreon page</a>. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.</i><br /><br />Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!<br /><br /><img alt="comment count unavailable" height="12" src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=siderea&ditemid=1819759" style="vertical-align: middle;" width="30" /> commentsAmerica Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow2023-08-30T21:28:06.641000Zhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/28/climate/groundwater-drying-climate-change.html<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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This is definitely a crisis, but it’s weird that the article doesn’t mention how much groundwater is being used to grow animal feed (a quick search makes it sound like about a billion gallons a day in 2015 per the USGS). Future generations are going to be confused and upset about our unquestioning need for cheap meat. It will likely seem even stranger than our use of potable water to flush our toilets.
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<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37306841">Comments</a>Pedestrians Are Dying in Record Numbers. There’s Nothing “Accidental” About It.2023-08-10T18:55:34.523000ZLizzie O’Learyhttps://slate.com/technology/2023/07/pedestrian-deaths-road-safety-traffic-accidents.html?via=rss<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
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A yellow school crossing sign, which features two human figures and an arrow pointing at a crosswalk, is shown in front of a tan building and a blue sky.<br><br><img src="https://compote.slate.com/images/b55ab437-52ab-4407-84b7-ade197a0c329.jpeg?crop=3000%2C2000%2Cx0%2Cy0" />‘Big Sugar’ Podcast Exposes How Subsidies in the Farm Bill Harm Us All2023-08-10T13:06:33.470000ZAmy Mayerhttps://civileats.com/2023/08/08/a-new-podcast-takes-on-sugar-subsidies-in-the-farm-bill/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
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</div><div class="post-simple post-capital-letter"><p>The podcast <a href="https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-big-sugar-117233473/">Big Sugar</a> tells the story of sugarcane production on American soil. Over the course of nine episodes, host <a href="https://celesteheadlee.com/">Celeste Headlee</a> speaks to Caribbean sugarcane cutters who worked in Florida and the lawyers who fought for millions of dollars in what they calculated as lost wages. But beyond sugar and labor, as Headlee says in the first episode, the podcast is “really about civil rights, inequity, racism, and backdoor deals.”</p></div><div class="post-simple">
<p>Men from Jamaica tell her how excited and proud they were to board a plane and come to the United States on work visas. And then, they discovered the dangerous, painful, and relentless work of cutting cane. “Cutting sugar cane is like you’re going to a war,” one man told her. These men were housed in shoddy barracks with inadequate food and little freedom to come and go. “It’s just like I was in prison,” another one said.</p>
<p>For contrast, Headlee visits West Palm Beach Island, Florida, where the Fanjul family has docked its yacht, not far from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. Brothers Alfy and Pepe Fanjul left Cuba when their family lost its sugarcane empire to Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959. But with the assets they managed to take out of Cuba, they invested in <a href="https://www.floridacrystals.com/our-story">Florida Crystals</a>, the company that made them billionaires, in part thanks to farm bill sugar programs.</p>
<p>Federal support for sugar production goes <a href="https://ksr.hkspublications.org/2016/03/18/sweet-nothings-the-history-law-and-economics-of-american-sugar-subsidies/">back to the colonial era</a>. In modern history, it’s the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/97th-congress/senate-bill/884">1981 Farm Bill</a> that usually gets referenced as the origin of the current system, which includes loans for both sugar beet and sugarcane production, limits on imports, and a target price system that can make the price of sugar in the U.S. as much as twice the world price.</p>
<p>Unlike other commodity programs, like for corn and soybeans, where the farmers can receive payments directly, with sugar, it’s the processors who get the benefits. University of Nebraska economist John C. Beghin has estimated, in <a href="https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Recapping-the-Effects-of-the-US-Sugar-Program.pdf?x91208">a report for the conservative American Enterprise Institute</a>, that while the burden on the federal budget is low, the overall cost to the American people is between $2.4 and $4 billion. Instead of taxpayer dollars funding a subsidy that the government then doles out, American consumers underwrite this support by paying higher prices for all things sugary.</p>
<p>Beghin also notes the program benefits only about 4,000 sugar producers (both cane and beet) and a “few privately held sugar refining companies,” including the Fanjuls.</p>
<p>Sugarcane is perennial and grows primarily in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, while sugar beets are an annual crop that can be grown in a rotation with other crops. The most productive region for sugar beets is in the Red River Valley on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, but <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/sugar-and-sweeteners/background/">sugar beets grow in 11 states</a>.</p>
<p>During farm bill reauthorization years like this one, congress often makes changes to existing programs or introduces new ones. In 2018, though, almost all the changes to sugar policy simply extended the existing programs through 2023.</p>
<p>In addition to labor concerns, the sugarcane industry is criticized for environmental impacts, especially for the practice of <a href="https://civileats.com/2019/07/15/burning-sugarcane-in-florida-is-making-people-sick-could-green-harvesting-change-the-game/">burning fields</a>, which <a href="https://www.wlrn.org/environment/2023-01-11/theres-no-safe-level-glades-sugarcane-burns-continue-despite-link-to-tenfold-mortality-increase">pollutes the air and causes health problems</a>. Critics also claim that federal supports for sugarcane discourage other uses of the land, including conservation, <a href="https://www.everglades.org/help-us-reform-the-u-s-sugar-program/">and cost local residents even more in environmental cleanup</a>.</p>
<p>The podcast is based on the <em>Vanity Fair</em> article “<a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2001/02/floridas-fanjuls-200102">In the Kingdom of Big Sugar</a>” by Marie Brenner, <a href="https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2001/2/in-the-kingdom-of-big-sugar">originally published</a> in 2001. At that time, she estimated the Fanjul family received about $65 million a year in sugar subsidies. Banner also appears in the podcast.</p>
<p>Civil Eats recently spoke with Headlee, a journalist, author, and the president and CEO of <a href="https://www.headwaytraining.org/">Headway DEI</a>, a nonprofit that works to bring racial justice and equity to journalism and media, about the podcast, the farm bill, and the family <em>TIME</em> magazine dubbed “<a href="https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,989658,00.html">the first family of corporate welfare.</a>”</p>
<p><strong>Why was now the time to do this podcast?</strong></p>
<p>The most immediate peg is that the farm bill only comes up for reconsideration every five years, and it’s up for reconsideration this year. We wanted to make that deadline because most Americans don’t pay much attention to the farm bill, even though it involves billions and billions of dollars in taxpayer money. And we wanted to call attention to <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/sugar-and-sweeteners/policy/">sugar subsidies</a>.</p>
<p>The other thing is that so many of the issues that were involved in Marie Brenner’s <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2001/02/floridas-fanjuls-200102">article</a>—the way [workers are] treated, income inequality, environmental issues—not only have gotten worse, but are now just exponentially more serious than they were in 2001.</p>
<p>She was interviewing people who were saying, “Look, this is why this case is really important.” And here we are 20 years later going, “They were right. That case was really important.” And [the workers] lost, and that’s not great. But some of the issues that were at play there were immigrant visas and how we treat those workers, the disparities between corporate power and wage workers, racism and literal wage slavery, and the rape of the environment by corporations who have found ways to manipulate the political process so they don’t have to be accountable. I mean, does any of this sound familiar?</p>
<p>What was important in 2001 is so much more important now. And we have come to the point at which it’s no longer a really good story for <em>Vanity Fair</em>, we have to sit up and pay attention. This is the future of our planet. It’s the future of society. So, it’s pretty urgent.</p>
<p><strong>You have this fantastic line in Episode Five: “If the Affordable Care Act is the sexy stiletto of law, the farm bill is a size 14 Croc.” As you say, most taxpayers don’t pay much attention to it. How much did you know about sugar subsidies in the farm bill before you got involved with this project?</strong></p>
<p>I have known quite a bit about the farm bill, and many of the subsidies have bothered me. I know more than I should about corn subsidies and ethanol and corn syrup. There’s a lot of things in public society that people don’t have time to pay attention to. Every once in a while, they bubble up and become important to the point where we, as journalists, have to say, “Okay, now is the time when you have to pay attention.” And when it comes to the sugar industry and the farm bill, this is one of those times.</p>
<p><strong>Do you think there is potentially more appetite for this conversation around subsidies and industries involving immigrants of color as laborers than during other farm bill years?</strong></p>
<p>With this podcast, we’re trying to tell the story in such a way, and in such a comprehensive way, that we can really explain how broad the impact of this industry is. It has been operating under the radar for so long, and it’s had such an incredible impact on so many parts of our lives. The point of this podcast is to bring this to everybody’s attention. It’s basically to make the fish aware of the water.</p>
<p>This has been going on for a very long time. These subsidies were created during World War II. And we have, ever since then, been paying these billionaires to plant sugar. The taxpayers are paying them to plant the sugar, we’re paying more [for sugar] in the grocery store [than other countries].</p>
<div class="post-quote"><p>“I really want to make people aware of what this has cost us, again and again and again. And I hope at that point people will say ‘enough’.”</p>
</div>
<p>We are paying for the environmental impact of that sugar growing when they decide to do it on the cheap and just burn their fields down. We are paying and paying and paying and then we’re paying for the health care costs because they <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2548255">manipulated the research</a> to make it look as though sugar was good for you.</p>
<p>I really want to make people aware of what this has cost us, again and again and again. And I hope at that point people will say “enough.”</p>
<p><strong>Do you have specific suggestions for how the subsidy program could be reduced or amended? Are there proposals out there that might be part of farm bill discussions?</strong></p>
<p>We talked to people who feel that the sugar industry should be held to account in the same way the tobacco industry and the pharmaceuticals industry were. In other words, through civil court cases in which they are sued and forced to pay for the damage they’ve done to the environment, for misleading the public on the health effects of sugar, etc.</p>
<p>We have talked to people who have said that they should no longer incentivize the planting of sugar because the American public will buy sugar no matter what. There’s no national security interest in enticing people to plant sugar, which I think is a strong argument.</p>
<p>I think that the biggest takeaway for me is that this shouldn’t be a rubber stamp. It should not be a foregone conclusion that the sugar program in the farm bill doesn’t even get discussed or debated. The U.S. sugar barons are so savvy when it comes to politics, and so powerful, <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/fanjul-corp/totals?id=D000066714">they donate to both Republicans and Democrats</a>, liberally.</p>
<p>The American people need to demand that if politicians are going to vote for this, if they’re going to hand over billions of dollars in our taxpayer funds to these people who <a href="https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/crili/">own 50-foot yachts</a>, they need to explain themselves, and there needs to be a damn good reason.</p>
<p><strong>Did you have a favorite part of putting together this podcast, something that really stands out for you?</strong></p>
<div class="post-quote"><p>“We just need to stop treating the people that we rely on as though they’re our enemy… They deserve respect, and [proper] treatment, and fair pay.”</p>
</div>
<p>One of my favorite parts was speaking to the Jamaican cutters. Their stories were horrifying—I’m not gonna lie about that—and upsetting, and it was hard to listen to. But at the same time, they’re so honest and plainspoken, and they just tell you the truth. Without embellishing, without saving your feelings, without hesitation. They just tell you what happened to them. These are people who have incredible stories to tell. And they deserve better—so much better.</p>
<p><strong>How do you think the immigrant farmworker visa program could be improved?</strong></p>
<p>We just need to stop treating the people that we rely on as though they’re our enemy. These are people whose work we need and who do incredibly difficult work for us that our citizens don’t want to do. And they are working their hearts out and we treat them horribly. And if we would simply acknowledge the fact that we need their labor and treat them with gratitude and respect, we would all be a lot better off. They deserve respect, [proper] treatment, and fair pay.</p>
<p><em>This interview was edited for length and clarity.<br />
</em></p>
<div class="ctx-module-container ctx_default_placement ctx-clearfix"></div><span class="ctx-article-root"></span><p>The post <a href="https://civileats.com/2023/08/08/a-new-podcast-takes-on-sugar-subsidies-in-the-farm-bill/" rel="nofollow">‘Big Sugar’ Podcast Exposes How Subsidies in the Farm Bill Harm Us All</a> appeared first on <a href="https://civileats.com" rel="nofollow">Civil Eats</a>.</p>Pete Buttigieg, Bent Flyvbjerg, and My Pessimism About American Costs2023-08-08T17:31:53.816000ZAlon Levyhttps://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/08/05/pete-buttigieg-bent-flyvbjerg-and-my-pessimism-about-american-costs/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/pete-buttigieg-bent-/598600:f31279">shared this story</a>
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<p>A few days ago, US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg <a href="https://www.volpe.dot.gov/project-delivery-center-excellence/recap-delivering-benefits-bipartisan-infrastructure-law">appeared together with Bent Flyvbjerg to discuss megaprojects and construction costs</a>. Flyvbjerg’s work on cost overruns is, in the English-speaking world, the starting point for any discussion of infrastructure costs, and I’m glad that it is finally noticed at such a high level.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, everything about the discussion, in context, makes me pessimistic. The appearance was about establishing a <a href="https://www.volpe.dot.gov/project-delivery">Center of Excellence at the Volpe Center</a> to study project delivery and transmit best practices to various agencies; but, in context with what I’ve seen at agencies as well as federal regulators, it will not be able to figure out how to learn good practices the way it is currently set up, and what it can learn, it won’t be able to transmit. It’s sad, really, because Buttigieg clearly wants to be able to build; with his current position and presidential ambitions, his path upward relies on being able to build transportation megaprojects, but the current US Department of Transportation (USDOT) and the political system writ large seem uninterested in reforming in the right direction.</p>
<p><strong>What Flyvbjerg said</strong></p>
<p>Flyvbjerg’s studies are predominantly about cost overruns, rather than absolute costs. The insights required to limit overruns are not the same as those required to reduce costs in general, but they intersect substantially, and in recent years <a href="https://medium.com/geekculture/madridss-modular-metro-733abaaaf429">Flyvbjerg has written more about absolute costs as well</a>. The topics he discussed with Buttigieg are in this intersection.</p>
<p>In latter-day Flyvbjerg, there’s a great emphasis on <a href="https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2101/2101.11104.pdf">standardization and modularity</a>. He speaks favorably of Spain’s standardized construction methods as one reason for its famously low construction costs – <a href="https://www.elmundo.es/madrid/2021/11/15/618e2b9ffc6c83ca3d8b457d.html">costs that remain very low in the 2020s</a>. We found something similar in <a href="https://transitcosts.com/cases/">our own work</a>, seeing an increase of 50% in New York construction costs coming from lack of standardization in track and station systems; in our own organization, we conceive of standardization as a design standard, separate from the issue of project delivery, but fundamentally it’s all about how to deliver infrastructure construction cost-effectively.</p>
<p>To an extent, the American public-sector transportation project managers I know are aware of the issue of modularity, and are trying to apply it at various levels. However, they are hampered both by obstructive senior managers and political appointees and by federal regulations. For example, to build commuter rail stations, modular design requires technology that, due to supply chain issues, is not made in the United States; this requires a waiver from Buy America rules, which should be straightforward since “not made in the US” is a valid legal reason, but the relevant federal regulatory body is swamped with requests and takes too long to process them, and the federal regulators we spoke to were sympathetic but didn’t seem interested in processing requests faster.</p>
<p>But Flyvbjerg goes further than just asking for design modularity. He uses the expression “You’re unique, like everybody else.” He talks about learning from other projects, and Buttigieg seems to get it. This is really useful in the sense that nothing that is done in the United States is globally unique; California High-Speed Rail, among the projects they discussed, was an attempt to import technology that already 15 years ago had a long history in Western Europe and Japan. But that project was still planned without any attempt to learn the successful project delivery mechanisms of those older systems. And the Volpe Center, federal regulators, and federal politicos writ large seem uninterested in foreign learning even now.</p>
<p><strong>What we’ve seen</strong></p>
<p>Eric, Elif, Marco, and I have presented our findings to Americans at various levels – not to Buttigieg himself, but to people who I think may regularly interact with him; I can’t tell the exact level, not being familiar with government insider culture. Some of the people we’ve interacted with seem helpful, interested in adopting some of our findings, and willing to change things; others are not.</p>
<p>But what we’ve persistently seen is an unwillingness to just go ahead and learn from foreigners. The new Center of Excellence is run by <a href="https://www.volpe.dot.gov/project-delivery/about">Cynthia Maloney</a>, who’s worked for Volpe and DOT since 2014 and worked for NASA before; I know nothing of her, but I know what she isn’t, which is an experienced transportation professional who has delivered cost-effective projects before, a type of person who does not exist in the United States and barely exists in the rest of the English-speaking world.</p>
<p>And there’s the rub. We’ve talked to Americans at these levels – regulators, agency heads, political advisors, appointees – and they are often interested in issues of procurement reform, interagency coordination, modular design, and so on. But when we mention the issue of learning from outside the US, they react negatively:</p>
<ul>
<li>They rarely speak foreign languages or respect people who do, and therefore don’t try to read the literature if it’s not written in English, such as the Cour des Comptes report on Grand Paris Express.</li>
<li>They have no interest in hiring foreigners with successful experience in Europe or Asia – the only foreigner whose name comes up is Andy Byford, for his success in New York.</li>
<li>They don’t ever follow up with specifics that we bring up about Milan or Stockholm, let alone Istanbul, which Elif points out they don’t even register as a place that could be potentially worth looking at.</li>
<li>They sometimes even make excuses for why it’s not possible to replicate foreign success, in a way that makes it clear they haven’t engaged with the material; for a non-transportation example, a New York sanitation communications official said, with perfect confidence, that New York cannot learn from Rome, because Rome was leveled during WW2 (in fact, Rome was famously an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_city">open city</a>).</li>
</ul>
<p>Even the choice of which academics to learn from exhibits this bias. Flyvbjerg is very well-known in the English-speaking world as well as in countries that speak perfect nonnative English, including his own native Denmark, the rest of Scandinavia, and the Netherlands. But in Germany, France, and Southern Europe, people generally work in the local language, with much lower levels of globalization, and I think this is also the case in East Asia (except high-cost Hong Kong). And there’s simply no engagement with what people here do from the US; the UK appears somewhat better.</p>
<p>You can’t change the United States from a country that builds subways for $2 billion/km in New York and $1 billion/km elsewhere to a country that does so for $200 million/km if all you ever do is talk to other Americans. But the Volpe Center appears on track to do just that. The American political sphere is an extremely insulated place. One of the staffers we spoke to openly told us that it’s hard to sell foreign learning to the American public; well, it’s even harder to sell infrastructure when it’s said to cost $300 billion to turn the Northeast Corridor into a proper high-speed line, where here it would cost $20 billion. DOT seems to be choosing, unconsciously, not to have public transportation.</p><br><br><img src="https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/8bc9a3eccb95cdb638e0d921f5dda721bdc635b7f19b0b0e6b760cc76ac9bd1a?s=96&d=identicon&r=G" />Amtrak’s Endless Ridership-vs-Coverage Problem2023-07-24T15:48:30.599000ZJarretthttps://humantransit.org/2023/07/amtraks-endless-ridership-coverage-problem.html<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/amtraks-endless-ride/6213776:ba9516">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/6213776.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Human Transit.</b>
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<p>Amtrak is about to see more Federal funding than it’s had in decades, and is finally in the position to talk about major growth. But their <a href="https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/reports/Amtrak-2021-Corridor-Vision-060121.pdf">“Amtrak Connects US” vision document</a> is worth reading to notice two things: They continue to face a <a href="https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership-coverage-tradeoff.html">conflict between ridership goals and coverage goals</a>, and they don’t feel that it’s safe to talk about that openly.</p>
<p><a href="https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership-coverage-tradeoff.html">To review</a>:</p>
<ul>
<li>Ridership goals are served by concentrating good service where there are lots of people to benefit from it.</li>
<li>Coverage goals are served by spreading service out so that you can say everyone got some, regardless of whether people ride.</li>
</ul>
<p>Ever since I did <a href="https://geography.upol.cz/soubory/lide/hercik/SEDOP/Purpose-driven%20public%20transport%20creating%20a%20clear%20conversation%20about%20public%20transport%20goals.pdf">the first scholarly paper on this</a> in 2008, I’ve been helping transit agencies <a href="https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership-coverage-tradeoff.html">face this problem honestly</a> and make clear decisions about it. Pretending that you are doing both just produces confusion and unhappiness, because these goals are mathematically opposite. They tell network designers to do opposite things. Rhetoric can paper over the problem but won’t resolve it.</p>
<p>For years, Congress has berated Amtrak for not being profitable (which would require ridership) while demanding that it run service to every corner of the country (coverage). The high-ridership thing for Amtrak to do, as the report makes clear, is to focus on improved frequency and travel time for trips of under 500 miles, a distance where rail service between city centers can effectively compete with flying between airports, and this in fact is what the plan recommends. But that means the improvements won’t be everywhere.</p>
<p>Yet when it comes to highest-level summary, the report seems pressured to de-emphasize its own recommendations. Here are the seven bullet points that form “Amtrak’s 15 Year Vision” (p9). I’ve labeled each with whether it refers to ridership or coverage.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Add service to 160 new communities, large and small, while retaining the existing Amtrak network serving over 525 locations. [Coverage]</li>
<li>Provide intercity passenger rail service to the 50 largest metropolitan areas (by population). [Ridership]</li>
<li>Serve 47 of the 48 contiguous states, expanding corridor passenger rail service in 20 states and bringing new corridor passenger rail service to 16 states. [Coverage]</li>
<li>Add 39 new routes, and enhance 25 routes. [Coverage]</li>
<li>Introduce new stations in over half of U.S. states. [Coverage]</li>
<li>Expand or improve rail service for 20 million more riders annually—which would double the amount that the state-supported routes carried in fiscal year (FY) 2019. [Ridership]</li>
<li>Provide $800 million in total Amtrak revenue growth versus FY 2019. [Ridership]</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>While ridership is the focus of the actual policy, four of these seven points emphasize coverage instead. Three of the them count states, which has nothing to do with ridership or population but does matter when counting votes in the Senate, the US’s ultimate enforcer of coverage-oriented thinking. Amtrak takes pride in serving 46 of the 48 contiguous states, though most rural states are served only by “land cruises,” trains that take 2-3 days to cross distances of over 1000 miles. These provide useful access to some rural towns but are much too slow for travel between major cities, and their schedules — once a day at best — are almost guaranteed not to be going when you need them. Amtrak recognizes that these trains are not a growth market. The future lies in the shorter more frequent links under 500 miles, but the obsession with state-counting in these high level bullet points shows how Amtrak must dodge the obvious in its rhetoric.</p>
<p>Even more striking, Amtrak does not seem to feel it has permission to draw a map that would show what they’re actually doing. Here’s a bit of the mapping that comes with the document:</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_31652" style="width: 710px; border: 1px solid #dddddd; background-color: #f3f3f3; padding: 4px; margin: 10px; text-align: center;"><a href="https://humantransit.org/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2023-07-23-at-07.55.44.png"><img alt="" class="wp-image-31652 size-medium" height="542" src="https://humantransit.org/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2023-07-23-at-07.55.44-700x542.png" width="700" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-31652" style="padding: 0 4px 5px; margin: 0;">Sample of mapping from Amtrak’s report.</p></div>
<p> </p>
<p>Colors are used here to show where some service is being added, but this map tells you nothing about the actual levels of service on each line. It’s misleading about the pattern of existing service — where frequency is massively concentrated in the Boston-Washington “Northeast Corridor” — and also about the degree to which different corridors are proposed to be improved. In short, it’s a coverage map, designed to emphasize how many places are affected rather than what the benefit is. Meanwhile, a quick internet search turns up <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amtrakfreqmapcolor.png#/media/File:Amtrakfreqmapcolor.png">a map of 2015 Amtrak frequencies</a> that gives you some sense of how unevenly service is actually distributed:</p>
<p> </p>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_31653" style="width: 710px; border: 1px solid #dddddd; background-color: #f3f3f3; padding: 4px; margin: 10px; text-align: center;"><a href="https://humantransit.org/wp-content/uploads/Amtrakfreqmapcolor.png"><img alt="" class="wp-image-31653 size-medium" height="417" src="https://humantransit.org/wp-content/uploads/Amtrakfreqmapcolor-700x417.png" width="700" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-31653" style="padding: 0 4px 5px; margin: 0;">Frequency based map of Amtrak in 2015.</p></div>
<p>Amtrak wouldn’t draw its own map in this style, so somebody else did a put it on the internet. (This, by the way, is how <a href="https://humantransit.org/basics/the-case-for-frequency-mapping">the idea of showing frequency on local transit maps</a> caught on in the US in the 2000s and 2010s: With <a href="https://humantransit.org/2011/05/make-your-own-transit-maps-and-sell-them.html">encouragement</a> and <a href="https://humantransit.org/2012/04/some-questions-on-frequent-network-mapping.html">advice</a> from this blog, impatient advocates <a href="https://humantransit.org/2013/09/frequent-network-maps-baltimore.html">drew</a> <a href="https://humantransit.org/2013/04/frequent-networks-steve-bolands-east-bay-map.html">the</a> <a href="https://humantransit.org/2012/11/toronto-a-frequent-network-map.html">maps</a> <a href="https://humantransit.org/2012/08/washington-dc-a-subway-style-frequent-bus-map.html">when</a> <a href="https://humantransit.org/2011/11/sydney-a-frequent-network-map-guest-post.html">the</a> <a href="https://humantransit.org/2011/11/san-francisco-frequent-network-map-refined.html">transit</a> <a href="https://xingcolumbus.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/cota-frequent-network-map/">authority</a> <a href="https://humantransit.org/2010/09/montreal-the-pleasure-of-maps-by-hand.html">wouldn’t</a> and this helped give the transit authorities the courage to do it themselves. Today, at least in the US, most major agencies show some indication of frequency in their mapping.) Sure enough, Yonah Freemark <a href="https://t.co/rEdjIyk6TV">has already drawn a frequency based map</a> of the Amtrak plan!</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_31668" style="width: 710px; border: 1px solid #dddddd; background-color: #f3f3f3; padding: 4px; margin: 10px; text-align: center;"><a href="https://humantransit.org/wp-content/uploads/F1wNjrlWIAEm5nm.jpeg"><img alt="" class="wp-image-31668 size-medium" height="400" src="https://humantransit.org/wp-content/uploads/F1wNjrlWIAEm5nm-700x400.jpeg" width="700" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-31668" style="padding: 0 4px 5px; margin: 0;">Yonah Freemark’s frequency map of the Amtrak plan.</p></div>
<p>But you won’t find this map in Amtrak’s report, and I can imagine the internal conversation over why. “It will make it look like we hate North Dakota!” Yes, indeed, in the US there are many states with lots of land, two senators, but very few people. Amtrak is planning for ridership, so it doesn’t propose to improve service there. Ignoring North Dakota is the very essence of how Amtrak will build ridership.</p>
<p>So we get a report that lays out a ridership-driven plan — higher frequencies where there are lots of people — but doesn’t dare say that at the highest level of the document: the bullet points and map that everyone will look at even if they don’t read the text.</p>
<p>I’m not criticizing Amtrak here! This is probably exactly the appropriate framing for their political situation. But you should read this document to practice reading for ridership-coverage tension, to help you recognize when this contradiction is hiding inside your own transit authority’s thinking or rhetoric.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://humantransit.org/2023/07/amtraks-endless-ridership-coverage-problem.html" rel="nofollow">Amtrak’s Endless Ridership-vs-Coverage Problem</a> appeared first on <a href="https://humantransit.org" rel="nofollow">Human Transit</a>.</p>Driver in D.C. crash that killed 3 had blood alcohol above limit, police say - The Washington Post2023-05-24T21:57:58.542000Zhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/05/23/rock-creek-parkway-crash-driver-blood-alcohol-level/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
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<div class="grid-body"><div class="wpds-c-jUMcim wpds-c-jUMcim-ibVGacg-css hide-for-print mb-sm"><div class="PJLV PJLV-ieDMgMI-css flex items-center"></div></div><div class="teaser-content grid-center"><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">The woman accused of crashing into a sedan on Rock Creek Parkway — killing a Lyft driver and the two young men he was taking home — told investigators she had been drinking and smoking marijuana before the collision, and she<strong> </strong>had blood alcohol levels registering above the legal limit just afterward, police alleged in newly released court documents.</p></div></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Nakita Marie Walker, 43, of Washington had a blood alcohol level of .10, above the legal limit of .08, police alleged in an arrest warrant. The level in her urine registered at .20, double the legal limit of .10, police alleged, although experts warn that urine tests can be misleading.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Walker was arrested and charged Monday with second-degree murder in the March 15 crash, which police said occurred after she fled a traffic stop in an SUV, crossed the center line at a curve in the road and slammed into the Lyft driver’s vehicle. Walker was driving north between 72 and 100 mph, according to the warrant made public Tuesday. At the time of the collision, the Lyft driver was traveling southbound between 35 and 36 mph, according to the newly released warrant.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Walker had three previous DUI convictions, court records show, and the SUV she drove that night — which she co-owned with her estranged husband, according to the warrant — had 49 outstanding tickets with unpaid fines that totaled $12,300. The deadly crash has spurred outrage that officials are not doing enough to keep drivers with repeated offenses off D.C. roads.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Lucinda M. Babers, deputy mayor for operations and infrastructure, said at a D.C. Council hearing Tuesday that there was a breakdown in communication between the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles and D.C. Superior Court in the case of Walker. She said the court typically notifies the DMV of convictions in DUI cases, which triggers a process inside the department that often results in driver’s license suspensions. But Babers said she learned of Walker’s DUI convictions in news reports Monday.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">“We never heard of her, we didn’t know about her,” Babers said. She said the city will have meetings with the court to try to fix the lapse in communication.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">D.C. Superior Court spokesman Doug Buchanan said that the Department of Motor Vehicles receives daily data feeds from the court and that the DMV’s computer sometimes rejects the data pushes if “certain identifiers” are missing.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">He said late Tuesday that the court is looking into what happened with Walker’s data.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Buchanan added in a statement that the technical errors were made public to DMV representatives at a meeting “years ago” and that the “DMV, in many instances, does not follow up with the court to rectify missing data. And the court has no way to detect when data has been rejected.”</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">In emotional testimony at the council hearing Tuesday, residents and medical professionals urged action from city officials.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">“She had clearly, over and over, over the course of years, shown a track record for using that [driver’s] license in a way that put the public at risk of serious injury or death, without any real evidence that her behavior had changed,” council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) said at the roundtable he convened.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">In an interview with investigators, Walker said she drank alcohol and smoked marijuana that night but blamed a man in the passenger seat of her car for making her drive and pushing her leg to accelerate away from police, according to court documents.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Her public defender echoed that argument in court Tuesday, saying it was the passenger who had an open container of Hennessy and a firearm. The attorney, Jessica Willis, requested Walker be placed on<strong> </strong>home confinement, calling the second-degree murder charge “a very aggressive charging decision.”</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">But Magistrate Judge Judith Pipe ordered her held, citing her past DUI convictions and asserted that, despite being on probation for those cases, she “chose to drink and drive again.”</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Walker appeared in Superior Court in a wheelchair, with what her attorney said was a shattered femur, broken left wrist and fractured sternum. About 20 of the victim’s family members were also in the courtroom.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Her preliminary hearing is scheduled for June 6.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Efforts to reach Walker’s family were not successful. The Department of Motor Vehicles had not responded by Tuesday to questions about whether she had completed required traffic safety programs that came with her criminal cases. It was also unclear whether she had a valid driver’s license.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">In two of her past DUI cases, she was sentenced to 15 days of confinement, court records show. In all of them, she faced probation with conditions, including at one point not being allowed to drive unless the vehicle had an ignition interlock.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">The three people killed in the March crash were Mohamed Kamara, a 42-year-old Lyft driver working extra hours to save up for a trip to see his wife and daughter in Sierra Leone; and 23-year-old friends Olvin Torres Velasquez and Jonathan Cabrera Mendez, who called for a ride after a late dinner in D.C.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">The crash occurred just after 1:30 a.m. In an interview with investigators, Walker offered an account of what happened that night, although she said she had no memories of the actual collision, according to police charging documents.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Walker said that she and a man drove to see “Scream VI” and that the man brought a “big bottle of Hennessey.” He drank during the movie and then drove her to a gas station in Southeast Washington, Walker said, according to court documents. She told investigators that she did not drink during the movie; the man initially claimed to police that she had.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Walker told police that she drank after they stopped in Southeast and that, at one point in the night, she smoked marijuana with the man,<strong> </strong>according to the documents. Walker and the man separated for about 20 minutes, she said, before she picked him up at the gas station to drive back to her place.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">The man drove at one point, Walker told investigators, and they switched “because he was going to roll up the weed.” She said she did not want to drive, but he was adamant that she did, according to the documents.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Walker told investigators that when an officer pulled her over, the man said he was scared of the police because he had a gun.<strong> </strong>She said the man told her to “go, go” and “pushed her leg because she was driving too slowly,” according to the court documents.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">The man, in interviews with police, offered shifting accounts of his relationship with the woman and what happened, according to charging documents. He first told police that the two were romantic partners and later denied being in a relationship with her.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">At one point, the man said that he drank while Walker drove and that he made sure Walker was not drinking inside the car because she was already “lit,” according to the warrant.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">He also said the two got into an argument “about his request to let him drive instead of her.” He said he told Walker to slow down after she sped away from police.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">In a later interview with police, the man said he “dozed off” during their drive and had no memory of being stopped by police. He also claimed he did not remember the crash, according to the warrant.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Police found a half-full bottle of liquor in the SUV, according to the warrant.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Court records show Walker’s history of driving offenses dates back over a decade, when she was charged with driving without a license in a case that was later dropped. She faced DUI charges in 2015, 2018 and 2020, and ultimately pleaded guilty or was convicted in each case. She also settled in two separate civil cases, where she was accused of negligent and careless driving that injured other people, according to court records.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Most of the 49 violations recorded to her vehicle, listed on the DMV website, were for speeding. At least six citations since late October 2022 were for driving at least 25 mph over the speed limit.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">The day of the crash, DMV data shows the SUV was caught on camera driving at least 25 mph over the speed limit in two locations east of the Anacostia River, about 2½ miles apart.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">According to data from the Department of Motor Vehicles, more than 2,100 vehicles in D.C. had at least 40 outstanding tickets, and about 1,200 cars were linked to fines exceeding $20,000 over the past five years. In all, more than 6.2 million traffic tickets totaling nearly $1.3 billion in fines and penalties had not been paid since Jan. 1, 2000.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">D.C. officials have said fines, mostly issued by traffic cameras, are the city’s top enforcement tool. But despite a robust automated traffic enforcement system that issues fines of up to $500 for speeding, a <a class="external" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/05/02/dc-traffic-tickets-driving-penalties/?itid=lk_inline_manual_54" rel="nofollow">Washington Post analysis of DMV data</a> found that thousands of<strong> </strong>drivers simply ignore the tickets.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">At Tuesday’s council hearing, officials and residents recounted stories of loved ones killed or injured in crashes, caused in some cases by drivers with records of driving recklessly.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">They told the story<strong> </strong>of <a class="external" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/allison-hart-bicycle-road-safety/2021/09/18/2253d8a4-1820-11ec-a5e5-ceecb895922f_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_57" rel="nofollow">5-year-old Allison Hart</a>, who was killed while riding a bike in a crosswalk in Northeast Washington’s Brookland neighborhood in September 2021, and the long recovery process for an Alexandria man who was injured when he was pushed off his motorcycle by a driver in an SUV who at the time was due in court for another crash.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">“It is excruciating for me to share what it was like to lose my child in a crash, what it was like to see the crash, to hear her … to see her mangled body,” Bryan Hart wrote in a letter to the council, read by Helaina Roisman, an injury prevention and outreach coordinator at George Washington University Hospital.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Roisman said a third of trauma patients in the hospital are crash victims.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">Tess McEnery, whose husband was severely injured in a collision in 2016 as he was riding his motorcycle on Route 1 in Alexandria, said the driver of the other vehicle<strong> </strong>had been involved in a crash that killed a couple in Prince George’s County and was scheduled to be arraigned on the day of the crash involving her husband. It took her husband, Jeff, a year to sit, stand and walk again, she said, and he lives with chronic pain.</p></div><div class="article-body"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy">“We should remove driving privileges from the most flagrant and repeat reckless drivers and impound the vehicles,” she said.</p></div></div>We’re Stuck on a Wildfire Treadmill2023-05-24T21:42:40.927000Zhttps://www.sightline.org/2023/05/24/were-stuck-on-a-wildfire-treadmill/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/were-stuck-on-a-wild/5136553:b6fee6">shared this story</a>
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And to escape, we need more fire, not less. |This Day in Labor History: May 23, 18612023-05-23T20:05:58.238000ZErik Loomishttps://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/05/this-day-in-labor-history-may-23-1861<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/this-day-in-labor-hi/7935347:4ad214">shared this story</a>
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<p>On May 23, 1861, three slaves named Shepard Mallory, James Baker, and Frank Townsend fled to Fort Monroe, Virginia, to escape their master. <a href="https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/03/erik-visits-an-american-grave-part-1049">Benjamin Butler</a>, the Massachusetts politician turned officer in command of the fort, declared them contraband and refused to return them. This maneuver satisfied the Lincoln administration, which did want to declare an end to slavery and needed to keep slave states in the Union. It also set the terms by which slave laborers themselves would play a critical role in the Civil War by taking themselves and their labor to Union lines, severely hurting the Confederate war effort. </p>
<p>Slaves wanted freedom from the moment they were forced from Africa. There are many slave rebellions early in American history led by slaves newly arrived from Africa, from <a href="https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/05/day-labor-history-may-30-1741">New York</a> to <a href="http://lawyersgunsmon.wpengine.com/2011/09/this-day-in-labor-history-september-9-1739">South Carolina</a>. With the official end of the transatlantic slave trade by the U.S. in 1807, the number of Africans entering the nation declined (though did not disappear as illegal slave trading continued), but slave rebellions still took place, such as that led by <a href="http://lawyersgunsmon.wpengine.com/2012/08/this-day-in-labor-history-august-21-1831">Nat Turner</a> in 1831. Moreover, southern white fears of a <a href="https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/08/this-day-in-labor-history-august-21-1791">Haiti</a>-like <a href="http://lawyersgunsmon.wpengine.com/2014/01/this-day-in-labor-history-january-8-1811">slave</a> rebellion <a href="http://lawyersgunsmon.wpengine.com/2013/07/this-day-in-labor-history-july-2-1822">were extreme</a>. </p>
<p>War provided slaves opportunities to escape. During both the American Revolution and the War of 1812, slaves fled by the thousands to British lines. The British had not really expected this, even the second time, and so did not necessarily have a strategy to deal with it. But in both cases, the slaves offered very real advantages to the British. For obvious reasons, like it would be in May 1861, it was easier for slaves to escape if they had access to water by which they could sneak away. It was also easier for opposing forces, whether British or American, to grab footholds in difficult to defend coastal places. Slaves by the thousands slipped away to British lines. Then they told the British how to attack their masters and served as guides through the swampy waterways to both burn the plantations and free their fellow slaves. The British quickly realized the effectiveness of this strategy and began promising slaves freedom to escape. These promises were followed up with half-hearted results at best, but still, it was a pathway for freedom for thousands of people. </p>
<p>The Civil War was a slightly different type of conflict in these early years, largely because while southern whites, northern African-Americans, and slaves all knew what the war was about, northern whites were highly unsure and thus did not take on the enemy as they should have. This could lead to all sorts of issues–think of <a href="https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/04/erik-visits-an-american-grave-part-456">George McClella</a>n commanding Union forces while thinking Lincoln was just as much a threat to the future of the nation as any Confederate. It also to a lack of clear focus on the slave labor issue. It was slaves themselves who changed that focus. </p>
<p>Remember that slavery existed as a labor system. The labor came first, then the racism. The entire point of slavery was having a permanent labor force that you could control completely forever. When slaves began fleeing to Union lines, they did not have any kind of grander political aim here. They were just trying to free themselves. But when Butler declared them contraband and Republicans in Washington thought this was an acceptable third way between slavery and using the military for abolitionist purposes, it created a scenario that changed the nation forever. </p>
<p>My favorite thing about this incident, other than it existing itself, is that once the three slaves were accepted into Union lines and put to work, other slaves found out in about five minutes and began fleeing themselves and Butler kept accepting them. This led to southern planters going to Butler, accusing him of violating the Fugitive Slave Act, and demanding their return. Yes, that’s right, these planters had committed treason in defense of slavery, declared their independence, started a civil war, and then still demanded to be protected by U.S. law. The temerity! The arrogance! Butler basically told them to do their own damn labor. </p>
<p>As the Union presence in the South expanded, more and more slaves escaped to Union lines. Like the British in previous wars, <a href="https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/11/this-day-in-labor-history-november-7-1861">the American officers had largely not thought this through.</a> Many did not want the slaves at all. Most of the officer corps, especially early in the war, were basically southern sympathizers and were deeply conservative with lots of ties to the Confederate officer elite, who they knew from West Point, the Mexican War, various postings. So when slaves came to Union lines, it was impossible to know how they would be treated. It really depended upon which whites they came across. Union soldiers engaged in mass rapes of self-freeing Black women. This was just ignored by the officers. Slaves had their meager possessions confiscated, were assaulted, sometimes even murdered. If they were women and children, they were often just thrown out of the Union encampments and left to freeze to death,<a href="http://www.kentuckymonthly.com/magazine/kentucky-explorer/tragedy-at-camp-nelson/"> which was a major issue at Camp Nelson in Kentucky</a>. </p>
<p>But this was all worth the shot to the slaves. The chance at freedom beat staying in slavery. Moreover, these self-freeing slaves brought their labor with them. Every time a slave left the plantation, it was a worker walking off the job. That meant less cotton, less salt, fewer weapons, less food. And it meant, even before self-freeing slaves took up guns when Lincoln allowed for Black regiments, that they could do the grunt labor that freed up white soldiers to fight. They could cook, clean, dig latrines, bury the dead. Unpleasant and nasty work, no question, but also better than slavery. And very good for the Union war effort. </p>
<p>It took northern whites a long time to figure all this out, but by 1864, they had and while officers were still, uh, varied on how they treated the slaves arriving in their lines, at the very least, they realized that had an almost endless labor force more than happy to work for them. Meanwhile, with thousands of slaves fleeing every day, the South’s already limited production capacity completely collapsed. Moreover, it was the slaves themselves that forced the question over the future of this work relationship upon a North that tried to avoid thinking about it. By making the issue obvious to the North, it gave space to anti-slavery politicians to do something about it. </p>
<p>This is what W.E.B. DuBois called the Slave General Strike in his legendary 1935 book <em>Black Reconstruction.</em> I have run into some old Marxist types who really don’t like this because it doesn’t fit their view of either labor or strikes, but this seems like ideology getting in the way of common sense. This was not organized, that’s very true. But it had a huge impact on the Civil War and was critically important in ending slavery. </p>
<p>In the end, the slaves themselves had as much to do with ending slavery as Abraham Lincoln or Thaddeus Stevens or William Lloyd Garrison or any other white person. </p>
<p>This is the 483rd post in this series. <a href="https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/07/this-day-in-labor-history-a-years-retrospective">Previous posts are archived here. </a></p>Can Farming with Trees Save the Food System?2023-05-17T21:45:22.808000ZLisa Heldhttps://civileats.com/2023/05/17/can-farming-with-trees-save-the-food-system/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<p><em>This article was produced in partnership with <a href="https://www.ediblecommunities.com">Edible Communities</a>; a version of this article will appear in future issues of local Edible magazines. </em></p>
</div><div class="post-simple post-capital-letter"><p> <a href="https://www.fiddlecreekdairy.com/">Fiddle Creek Dairy</a> sits at the top of one of the endless rolling hills in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. On the first day of spring, farmer Tim Crowhill Sauder looks from his sloped pastures out over the open fields that extend in every direction. A bright red barn interrupts the long horizon. An Amish farmer rides a plow behind a team of horses. It’s a bucolic picture that belies the landscape’s natural state.</p></div><div class="post-simple">
<p>“This was the great Eastern Woodlands,” says Sauder. “It wants to be a forest here.”</p>
<p>Centuries ago, Sauder’s Anabaptist ancestors arrived and, instead of learning from and alongside the Native peoples who had already developed techniques to farm within the forest, took the land and cleared the trees to grow crops and graze livestock. Now, Sauder sees its next chapter as both practical action and penance.</p>
<p>“I do it for the sake of my children’s future and for the sins of my ancestors,” he says, of the 3,500 young hybrid willow, honey locust, mulberry, chestnut, and persimmon trees that are now maturing slowly in neat rows across 30 acres of pastures.</p>
<p>Sauder’s system—where his cows will soon graze among trees instead of in fully open pastures—is called silvopasture. And it’s one of several practices that fall under a broader agricultural approach called agroforestry, or farming with trees.</p>
<div class="post-quote"><p>Agroforestry includes planting trees and bushes in strips to prevent soil erosion and provide habitat for wildlife, along streams to stop nutrient pollution, or between rows of corn. These practices, long part of Indigenous farming, are taking root all across the country.</p>
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<p>Farmers can plant trees and bushes in strips to prevent soil erosion and provide habitat for wildlife (windbreaks and <a href="https://civileats.com/2023/02/14/the-edges-matter-hedgerows-are-bringing-life-back-farms/">hedgerows</a>), along streams to stop nutrient pollution (<a href="https://civileats.com/2021/07/23/agroforestry-is-key-to-cleaning-up-waterways-and-the-chesapeake-bay/">riparian buffers</a>), or between rows of corn (alley cropping). These practices, long part of Indigenous farming, are taking root all across the country.</p>
<p>In California, Rebekka and Nathanael Siemens <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d858f7b729b051148cbb41c/t/63fe73220f6d096bd9093e06/1677620003393/Silvopasture+Case+Study_Gonzalez+Siemens_FINAL_Feb+2023.pdf">graze sheep</a> to their 2,000-tree almond orchard. On 18 acres in Wisconsin, the Midwest’s leading agroforestry nonprofit, the Savanna Institute, <a href="https://www.savannainstitute.org/demonstration-farms/">is growing</a> chestnut, elderberry, black currant, and black walnut trees between rows of organic soybeans.</p>
<p>Whatever the approach, more abundant plant life that stays put year after year—i.e., perennials—lead to healthier ecosystems that support biodiversity and store carbon. Indigenous cultures around the world, <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2018/10/fire-and-agroforestry-revive-california-indigenous-groups-traditions/">including Native American tribes</a>, <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2019/07/agroforestry-an-ancient-indigenous-technology-with-wide-modern-appeal-commentary/">have long practiced</a> various forms of agroforestry. And, as researchers, policymakers, and governments look for effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build climate resilience on farms to secure the food supply, agroforestry is approaching a renaissance.</p>
<h4>Funding Agroforestry as a Climate Solution</h4>
</div><div class="post-simple post-capital-letter"><p> Project Drawdown <a href="https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions">ranks</a> silvopasture and alley cropping among its top 20 climate solutions. In the latest round of reports published by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s top climate experts concluded that practices that store carbon dioxide are now critical to meeting climate goals. They found that scaling up agroforestry could make a meaningful contribution <a href="https://civileats.com/2022/04/04/the-field-report-new-un-climate-report-urges-food-systems-solutions-before-its-too-late/">to carbon removal</a> while also <a href="https://civileats.com/2022/02/28/the-field-report-new-un-climate-report-paints-a-stark-picture-for-food-systems-but-solutions-exist/">helping farms adapt</a> to climate risks.</p></div><div class="post-simple">
<p>“Farmers are stewards of photosynthesis, one of our oldest and best technologies for getting carbon out of the atmosphere,” Keefe Keeley told policymakers, government officials, and CEOs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) biggest <a href="https://www.usda.gov/oce/ag-outlook-forum">annual gathering</a> this year.</p>
<p>Keeley, the executive director of the Savanna Institute, was invited to speak to highlight the USDA’s <a href="https://www.usda.gov/climate-solutions/climate-smart-commodities/projects">Climate-Smart Commodities</a> program. The agency awarded $3.1 billion in two rounds of grants last fall, including $153 million to projects focused specifically on agroforestry. (Additional broader projects also include elements of agroforestry.)</p>
<p>The Savanna Institute is one of many organizations involved in a $60 million effort coordinated by The Nature Conservancy across 29 states. In the Southeast, Tuskegee University is <a href="https://www.tuskegee.edu/news/tuskegee-university-receives-major-usda-funding-for-pilot-projects-through-partnerships-for-climate-smart-commodities">leading two projects</a> intended to help underserved farmers transition to agroforestry practices and to grow markets for their products. The Adirondack North Country Association will help women-owned farms measure the benefits of riparian buffers and cropland reforestation in New York, while Caribbean Regenerative Community Development will work with small coffee farms in Puerto Rico.</p>
<div class="post-image-caption align-right"><a href="https://civileats.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/230517-agroforestry-farming-with-trees-silvopasture-riparian-buffers-climate-soil-health-2-silvopasture-1.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img alt="An illustration of a silvopasture operation, with a cow grazing among trees. The illustration is captioned, " src="https://civileats.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/230517-agroforestry-farming-with-trees-silvopasture-riparian-buffers-climate-soil-health-2-silvopasture-1.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>In recent months, the USDA <a href="https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2023/02/13/biden-harris-administration-announces-availability-inflation">started</a> distributing funds from the Inflation Reduction Act designated for climate-smart agriculture—<a href="https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2023-01/CSAF%20Mitigation%20Activities_2023.pdf">including agroforestry practices</a>. Then, in late March, Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Senator Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) reintroduced the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/5861/text?s=2&r=1#toc-H0745A4FD6D4746EA8DA24DE6FA256C0B">Agriculture Resilience Act</a>. If included in the next farm bill, it would direct the USDA to establish three new regional agroforestry centers. As lawmakers prepare to write <a href="https://civileats.com/2023/03/20/farm-bill-explainer-2023-bill-snap-nutrition-climate-smart-farming-commodities-insurance-congress/">the 2023 Farm Bill</a>, many are looking to continue to expand funding for climate-smart practices.</p>
<p>“When we did a pre-survey of farmers across the region, agroforestry was the No. 1 thing they were interested in doing. And the No. 1 practice they were interested in is silvopasture,” says Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director of <a href="https://pasafarming.org/">Pasa Sustainable Agriculture</a>, an organization that supports Mid-Atlantic farmers.</p>
<p>Pasa received a $50 million Climate-Smart Commodities grant to implement and expand agroforestry and other soil health practices on 2,000 small- and mid-size farms along the Eastern Seaboard, from Maine to South Carolina. Through a network of partner organizations, it will subsidize the cost of tree planting and offer technical support.</p>
<p>The Nature Conservancy’s project will tackle the same two challenges in additional regions. And covering the upfront cost is key, said Joe Fargione, the group’s North America science director. Fargione compared getting started in agroforestry to organic transition. Initially, farmers have to invest money and time into going organic, they often see lower yields as they work out the kinks, and it takes three years before they can charge more for their crops. With agroforestry, trees are expensive, other costs often arise in setting up the system, and farmers won’t see benefits to their bottom line until the trees mature, which takes a minimum of three years—and usually more like six to eight. “But one of the things that’s exciting about agroforestry is that . . . it’s profitable,” Fargione said.</p>
<h4>The Need for Local Agroforestry Expertise</h4>
</div><div class="post-simple post-capital-letter"><p> At Fiddle Creek in Pennsylvania, Sauder is hoping the shade his trees provide will improve grass growth and reduce stress on his cows, which is not only good for their welfare but also for milk production. During the hottest months, when pastures dry up, honey locust trees will drop edible pods; Sauder can also use a technique called pollarding to drop branches from the willows, providing the cows with extra feed at no cost. That will all become even more helpful as temperatures continue to rise.</p></div><div class="post-simple">
<p>Still, on his own, Sauder didn’t have the cash to plant the trees until Austin Unruh made it possible.</p>
<div class="post-quote"><p>“I would love to see every county have someone that can offer these kinds of technical services and consulting. It’s something that needs to be done locally.”</p>
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<p>Unruh is the founder of <a href="https://treesforgraziers.com/">Trees for Graziers</a>, and he and his team have now completed about 20 silvopasture installations in Lancaster County, with more in the works. Key to his success has been access to public and private funds directed at reducing nutrient runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. (Pennsylvania is <a href="https://www.cbf.org/how-we-save-the-bay/chesapeake-clean-water-blueprint/state-of-the-blueprint/pennsylvanias-2022-blueprint-for-clean-water.html">behind on its goals</a> to reduce Chesapeake Bay pollution and is counting on 90 percent of future reductions to come from farms.) Unruh finds the funding for farms like Fiddle Creek and then brings his deep expertise to help farmers develop their systems.</p>
<p>“There’s a lot of experimentation, a lot of farmers comparing notes, but very few agroforestry technical support people out there advising farmers,” said Pasa’s Smith-Brubaker.</p>
<p>Unruh is the exception, and his knowledge of the local climate and landscape is crucial. He knows exactly how much shade is good for cool-weather grasses that thrive in the Mid-Atlantic, but that calculation would be very different if he were helping a farmer plant trees between rows of corn in Illinois. “I would love to see every county have someone that can offer these kinds of technical services and consulting,” he said. “It’s something that needs to be done locally.”</p>
<div class="post-image-caption align-right"><a href="https://civileats.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/230517-agroforestry-farming-with-trees-silvopasture-riparian-buffers-climate-soil-health-3-alley-cropping-2.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img alt="An illustration of an alley cropping operation, with a chicken pecking among rows of crops between trees. The illustration is captioned, " rows="rows" src="https://civileats.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/230517-agroforestry-farming-with-trees-silvopasture-riparian-buffers-climate-soil-health-3-alley-cropping-2.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>And while the Climate-Smart Commodities projects will train more experts and get a lot of farms planting trees, Unruh said agroforestry will only reach its potential if support for the approach is sustained over time. In his state, for example, silvopasture isn’t eligible for funding through existing conservation programs. But demonstrating and measuring the impacts over the next five years should help, he said.</p>
<p>Smith-Brubaker agrees. “Alley cropping wasn’t approved before, but we were able to do these demonstration sites and then have NRCS [PA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service] agents come out, and now NRCS does fund alley cropping. We’re hoping the same will happen with silvopasture,” she said.</p>
<p>On its own, the acreage that will be affected by this new funding won’t be enough to make a huge dent in agricultural emissions, but Fargione says it will provide important data and tools that could spur future investment and growth, allowing it to scale up. The Nature Conservancy project, for example, will be measuring carbon stored in trees and soil on the farms while also working to develop an affordable measurement method. He said giving farms the tools to implement agroforestry practices and document the impacts will then allow food companies with net-zero commitments to buy from them.</p>
<div class="post-image-caption align-right"><a href="https://civileats.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/230517-agroforestry-farming-with-trees-silvopasture-riparian-buffers-climate-soil-health-4-riparian-buffers.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img alt="An illustration of a riparian buffer system, with cows grazing on a field next to a tree-lined stream. The illustration is captioned, " src="https://civileats.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/230517-agroforestry-farming-with-trees-silvopasture-riparian-buffers-climate-soil-health-4-riparian-buffers.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>Either way, says Unruh, “it’s a drop in the bucket compared to how big agroforestry should be and what the opportunities are.” Beyond dairies like Fiddle Creek, there are also pastured poultry and hog farms that Unruh sees as having even more potential. Those have barely been considered.</p>
<p>For now, spring is in full effect. Robins are flitting between grasses and still-thin branches speckled with buds. In about three weeks, Sauder says, the pastures will be ready for the cows. For the first time since planting, a canopy will start to provide shade for the animals. While it will be far from a forest, the farm will inch closer to its roots—and toward a resilient future.</p>
<p><em>Illustrations by Nhatt Nichols.</em></p>
<div class="ctx-module-container ctx_default_placement ctx-clearfix"></div><span class="ctx-article-root"></span><p>The post <a href="https://civileats.com/2023/05/17/can-farming-with-trees-save-the-food-system/" rel="nofollow">Can Farming with Trees Save the Food System?</a> appeared first on <a href="https://civileats.com" rel="nofollow">Civil Eats</a>.</p>The FDA approves a breakthrough vaccine 50 years in the making2023-05-11T18:02:22.158000ZKeren Landmanhttps://www.vox.com/health/2023/5/4/23710959/rsv-vaccine-for-adults-arexvy-fda-approval<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
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<img alt="A rendering of the Paramyxoviridae Virus, looking like a circle with a string and blobs running through it." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/m6jzwyHdkuiTZCsV_8n0ghuQmq0=/202x0:3429x2420/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72249431/151058620.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A rendering of a virus in the paramyxoviridae family, of which respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a member. | BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>And more RSV vaccines are on the way.</p> <p id="9NRbqw"></p>
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<p id="jsiOWb">On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration <a href="https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-respiratory-syncytial-virus-rsv-vaccine">approved</a> the first vaccine that protects against respiratory syncytial virus, otherwise known as RSV. </p>
<p id="FvWKQU">This is a big moment in the fight against a major scourge. Researchers have been working to create an RSV vaccine for more than half a century. And it’s not an exaggeration to say RSV vaccines could save hundreds of thousands of lives each year on a global scale. </p>
<p id="wekySR">RSV generally causes cold symptoms, but can also lead to severe lung inflammation or infection in very young and very old people. Each year, it causes up to <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/rsv/research/index.html">160,000</a> hospitalizations and 10,000 deaths among older Americans, and as many as <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30880339/">55</a><a href="https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/222/Supplement_7/S577/5382266">,000 adult deaths</a> globally. People with heart and lung disease and weakened immune systems are at the highest risk for severe RSV disease.</p>
<p id="5Xzzdt">RSV season usually starts in the autumn and is worst in the winter. The vaccine, known as Arexvy, was approved for adults 60 and over, will likely be recommended by the CDC in June and available in time for people to receive it this fall, according to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/health/rsv-vaccine-fda-adults.html">reporting</a> in the New York Times.</p>
<p id="5NqxxH">Young babies, especially newborns born prematurely, are also at high risk for bad disease due to RSV: Annually, the virus causes up to 80,000 hospitalizations and 300 deaths in American children under 5, and leads to 2 million outpatient visits. The virus also leads to an estimated <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(21)00558-1/fulltext">120,000 infant deaths</a> worldwide each year.</p>
<p id="dSCET5">Right now, this news does not impact pediatric populations. But there’s hope on the horizon: <a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/23424379/rsv-cold-virus-vaccines-monoclonal-antibodies-flu-covid-maternal-babies-infants-older-adults">Several vaccines</a> that would protect babies and children — and a number of other adult vaccines — are currently either under FDA review or at earlier stages of development.</p>
<p id="ZO7git">RSV was a major contributor to the “<a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/10/27/23421344/covid-19-flu-rsv-symptoms-vaccines-2022">tripledemic</a>“ that flooded hospitals last winter. As these vaccines come to market, they could dramatically change the face of cold and flu season for the better.</p>
<p id="CECWWR">For now, here’s what you need to know.</p>
<h3 id="375Vv3">The vaccine is highly effective and has generally mild side effects</h3>
<p id="BZA88k">Arexvy, which is made by drug manufacturer GSK, is one of two adult RSV vaccines the FDA reviewed at a March 1 <a href="https://www.fda.gov/advisory-committees/advisory-committee-calendar/vaccines-and-related-biological-products-advisory-committee-february-28-march-1-2023-meeting#event-materials">meeting</a>. In trials, the vaccine reduced the risk of lower respiratory tract illness in adults over 60 by nearly <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2209604">83 percent</a>, and the risk of severe illness by 94 percent. </p>
<p id="lH0Z4j">The vaccine, which is given as a single injection, is built using the kind of conventional technology that preceded mRNA technology used to create many Covid-19 vaccines. It’s built using a chunk of the RSV virus and a couple of additional molecules.<strong> </strong>The result is called a <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/types/index.html">recombinant vaccine</a> because it combines pieces of a virus with other products that stimulate the immune system. Other vaccines built with this technology include the ones used to prevent whooping cough, meningitis, and shingles. </p>
<p id="FgYiYn">Side effects related to the vaccine were generally mild and resolved within one to two days. The most common side effect was mild to moderate pain at the injection site, and a smaller number of people reported fatigue after the injection.</p>
<h3 id="c3ovJF">The FDA will monitor for severe side effects</h3>
<p id="FlKayz">For the most part, the Arexvy vaccine appears to be safe. However, the FDA has its eye on a few uncommon side effects that it will watch for carefully as more and more people get the vaccine. Although these were very rare among people who took part in the vaccine trials, they’re severe enough to merit close monitoring.</p>
<p id="Us3XVi">In one trial, where each group had 12,500 participants, 10 Arexvy recipients and four people who got a placebo had atrial fibrillation, an irregular and rapid heart rhythm that can lead clots to form in the heart. (The condition is <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2019.00175/full#:~:text=Indeed%2C%20AF%20is%20associated%20with,%E2%80%9317%25%20(6).">extremely common</a> among older adults and sometimes reverses itself; it’s treatable with blood thinners when it does not.) One participant in this trial developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition in which the immune system attacks nerve cells, leading to weakness and sometimes paralysis. </p>
<p id="eOgGL6">In another trial with 2,500 people each in the Arexvy and placebo groups, two people who received the vaccine developed an inflammatory condition affecting the brain and spinal cord, one of whom died. </p>
<p id="2LorDN">The FDA is requiring GSK to monitor for the incidence of all these conditions among people who get the vaccine going forward.</p>
<p id="3OzZNf">As ever, the question for the agency is whether the vaccine’s side effect risks are greater than RSV risks. Time will help answer that question. </p>
<h3 id="PE21ud">This is a huge win!</h3>
<p id="upJba1">People first began trying to develop an RSV vaccine in the 1960s. Why did it take so long to make it work?</p>
<p id="6uLRNf">RSV’s surface proteins are shape-shifters, taking different forms depending on whether they’ve invaded — or fused to — a human cell. To complicate matters, their pre-fusion shape is wildly unstable. That meant that for a long time, researchers’ only option was to use the protein’s post-fusion shapes as targets for new vaccines.</p>
<p id="HCwF2y">As a result, for years, RSV vaccines could only recognize viral particles after<em> </em>they’d invaded cells — too late to make much of a difference. To make a better vaccine, scientists really needed a clear picture of what those surface proteins looked like <em>before </em>cell invasion.</p>
<aside id="JmKSaq"><div></div></aside><p id="VyScy4">In 2013, structural biologist Jason McLellan, now at the University of Texas at Austin, figured out how to get that picture: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03704-y">He worked out a way to stabilize a surface protein in its pre-fusion form</a>, then described it in great detail. That discovery meant researchers could now create vaccines that targeted an earlier stage of RSV infection — and they did. </p>
<p id="vaUs7x">Arexvy is just the first downstream result of this discovery to be approved by the FDA, and more will likely follow soon. Pfizer’s RSV vaccine for adults will probably be approved later this month; Moderna has said it’s expecting its adult vaccine to be authorized in the first half of this year; and multiple companies are working on vaccines to protect babies and toddlers under 2. </p>
<p id="0Zjejt">Overall, we’re in for a lot more good news about RSV vaccines in the near future. </p>Montana’s Big Bipartisan Housing Deal2023-05-10T15:26:03.679000Zhttps://www.sightline.org/2023/05/09/montanas-big-bipartisan-housing-deal/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/montanas-big-biparti/5136553:836c7c">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/5136553.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Sightline Institute | News and Views for a Sustainable Northwest:</b>
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Housing shouldn’t be a partisan issue, this is good to see.
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Amid the US’s second-worst price spikes and shortage of homes, a broad coalition unified to find solutions. |NIGHTBORN: COLDFIRE RISING2023-05-04T22:31:29.772000ZC.S. Friedmanhttps://www.csfriedman.com/nightborn-coldfire-rising/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/nightborn-coldfire-r/2842732:72e160">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/2842732.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Alien Shores.</b>
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<div class="pub-details">DAW Books – 2023<br />
ISBN: 9780756410926<br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nightborn-Coldfire-Rising-C-S-Friedman/dp/0756410924/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1Z9P2F4VBYTNG&keywords=nightborn+friedman&qid=1682882116&sprefix=nightborn+friedman%2Caps%2C105&sr=8-1" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Buy at Amazon</a><br />
<a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/nightborn-c-s-friedman/1142837827?ean=9780756410926" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Buy at Barnes & Noble</a></div>
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<p><b>A prequel to the lauded Coldfire trilogy, Friedman’s latest novel mixes the best of dark fantasy and chilling sci-fi.</b></p>
<p>A ship full of colonists arrive on a seemingly hospitable planet, only to discover that it harbors a terrifying secret. Soon the settlers find themselves caught up in a desperate battle for survival against the fae, a natural force with the power to prey upon the human mind itself, bringing a person’s greatest fears and darkest nightmares to life.</p>
<p>As Colony Commander Leon Case and Chief Medic Lise Perez struggle to find a way to control the fae before more people die, other settlers have ideas of their own…and they may prove more of a threat to colony than the fae itself.</p>
<p><em>Nightborn: Coldfire Rising</em> is a tale that blends sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, suspenseful and emotionally intense, as a handful of humans struggle to survive on an alien world that seems determined to kill them. In the end they will have to draw upon both scientific knowledge and mystical traditions to save themselves.</p>
<p>Whether you’re just discovering the Coldfire universe through this prequel or returning to it as a classic favorite, <em>Nightborn: Coldfire Rising</em> is the perfect entry point to this unique, genre-blending space fantasy epic.</p>
</div>More on Consultants2023-04-28T15:55:23.120000ZAlon Levyhttps://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/04/26/more-on-consultants/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/more-on-consultants/598600:6d0607">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/598600.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Pedestrian Observations.</b>
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<p>We’ve gotten a lot of criticism from various quarters about our analysis and conclusions at the <a href="http://transitcosts.com/">Transit Costs Project</a>. The focus for this post is a criticism that isn’t usually made in public but looks like the biggest one among people in power in the American federal government: the issue of consultants. <a href="https://slate.com/business/2023/02/subway-costs-us-europe-public-transit-funds.html">Writing in Slate about our report</a>, Henry Grabar identified consultants as the ultimate reason the United States can’t build. This should be nuanced in that consultants are one of a few primary reasons, but the broad outline of the complaint is right: the overuse of consultants is a serious problem and must be replaced with large in-house bureaucracies in explicit rejection of the privatization of the state. And yet, there’s pushback. Why, and why is it wrong?</p>
<p><strong>The current situation</strong></p>
<p>In the English-speaking world today, the dominant view of infrastructure is that private companies are inherently more efficient than the state. In service of this ideology, large state organizations were left to rot and then privatized. The historic sequence is generally that as efficiency levels fall, political interest in investing in organizational capacity declines, and in-house organizations take the blame.</p>
<p>American and British societies both believe that specialist experts are inherently suspect and must always lower their gaze in the presence of a generalist who is paid and otherwise treated as a master of the universe, and thus those organizations would receive overclass appointees (US version) or generalist civil servants (UK version) who constantly belittle them and also have little ability to reform them from the inside. It’s remarkable how non-technical the members of the American overclass Eric and I have talked to are; one of them asked us straight out why we didn’t talk to more lawyers in our report where we talked to engineers, planners, procurement experts, and other specialists.</p>
<p>The result of this sequence is that usually at the time of privatization – say, when New York’s MTA let go of its 1,600 strong capital construction department in the early 2000s and downsized by about an order of magnitude – what is left is a hulk, easy pickings for the privatizer. What is left of that is even more of a hulk. The upshot is that in places that rely on consultants in lieu of in-house expertise, the quality of <em>current</em> public-sector leadership (that is, the various state political appointees, most federal political appointees, and even some permanent staff with pure management background) is low. The consultants are <em>individually</em> more competent than them, and this is readily apparent to anyone who’s talked with both sets of people; even the political appointees themselves get it and think their expertise is in managing the consultants.</p>
<p><strong>What the consultants know</strong></p>
<p>When the state doesn’t really like itself and privatizes key functions to consultants, the consultants look more competent. One federal official – not a political appointee, to be clear – told us straight out that the consultants have experience since they work on so many projects, domestically and internationally.</p>
<p>The problem is that what the consultants know is how things work on projects that use consultants. This is how an experienced consultant can say something as obviously wrong as “<a href="https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/12/the-issue-of-curiosity/">The standard approach to construction in most of Europe outside Russia is design-build</a>.” Is this even remotely true? No. Parts of Europe are transitioning to design-build under British influence, universally seeing cost increases as they do so, but even in the Nordic countries and France this process is in its infancy, and in nearly all of the rest of Western Europe it’s not done at all. The upshot is that the US/UK consultant sphere is an expert on how to build public transportation in the failed US/UK way, and its international experience is largely (not entirely) US/UK-style badness.</p>
<p>But Americans are an incurious people. Even the ones who are aware of European and rich-Asian success in infrastructure and urbanism only really interact with it as tourists. So they can’t distinguish a government-built program like the TGV or nearly every European subway system from the few that are more consultant-driven like the Copenhagen Metro (at the time of its construction, Scandinavia’s highest-cost metro – though <a href="https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/08/29/nordic-costs-and-institutional-knowledge/">the rest of the Nordic world is catching up in both privatization and costs</a>).</p>
<p>What’s more, the American preference for generalist knowledge means that what they see of the Copenhagen Metro is much more its use of unconventional financing than its use of driverless trains at very high frequency or its standardization of station components. Thus, looking at a metro that for all its expense by its regional standards was also cheaper than anything in the US going back to the 1970s, they take notes and imitate all the bad and none of the good.</p>
<p><strong>The interaction between consultants</strong></p>
<p>Okay, so in theory, if consultants’ recommendations are followed exactly and a turnkey system is built, in theory it should still be possible to imitate the medium costs of Denmark.</p>
<p>But in practice, the hallmark of consultants is private competition. This means there are different firms, and even though they are all broadly similar, they compete and each has a slightly different way of doing things and may have different recommendations for a specific project. And then each government agency in the United States hires a different consultant and the consultants clash and there is no way to resolve the conflict.</p>
<p>Seattle’s cost explosion in the last 10 years, going from <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/university-link-light-rail-service-starts-march-19/">semi-reasonable costs for U-Link</a> to <a href="https://sdotblog.seattle.gov/2022/05/05/west-seattle-ballard-light-rail-extensions-city-comments-elevate-community-interests/">a world record for a majority-above-ground project for Ballard-West Seattle</a>, comes from a somewhat different place from what we’ve seen in New York and Boston. For example, New York and Boston both have ample surplus extraction by local actors, but the extraction there happened before the plans were finalized and the Full Funding Grant Agreement was made; in the Seattle suburbs, one municipal fire department has demanded changes even after the FFGA and threatened not to certify the project. The issue of consultants there is likewise a new problem: a complex project – I think the Pacific Northwest intercity rail program but I forget – requires intergovernmental coordination and the different agencies hired different consultants, leading to substantial inter-contractor contention. The argument for privatizing state planning to large design-build contracts is that they avoid this contention, but here it’s recreated by the very presence of competition.</p>
<p>Nor is replacing competition with a single private consultant going to solve the situation. The private sector’s norms of how to deliver value depend on competition; all benchmarks used for how to successfully deliver to the customer are honed based on how to beat or at least match other firms that could get the contract if the firm fails. A private monopolist combines the worst aspects of the public sector (no competition) with those of the private sector (fundamentally adversarial relationship with the customer). As soon as a project is large enough that multiple agencies are involved, forcing them to all use the same consultant, even if the initial choice does feature competition between WSP, AECOM, Arup, and other such firms, means that for the duration of the project there’s such lock-in it has the same problems as a literal monopoly.</p>
<p><strong>The way forward</strong></p>
<p>If it’s not possible to successfully deliver infrastructure megaprojects through competition among private consultants or through a private monopoly, it follows that delivery must be done through the public sector. This means a public sector that is staffed up with thousands of permanent professional hires. Small cities can use big cities’ agencies or a federal agency as a public-sector consultant; in all cases, this must be domestic rather than international, since the social mission that makes many public monopolists good vanishes at the border and turns into predatory monopolistic behavior (for example, by SNCF toward other national railways).</p>
<p>Metropolitana Milanese, the infrastructure builder that also provides public-sector consulting services for the rest of Italy, has around 1,300 employees. The Anglo world can imitate that – never literally import the firm, but set up a similar construct, with advice by MM, RATP, and other public-sector engineering firms about how to do so and even some early hires. This needs to be done publicly and ostentatiously, to make it clear what’s going on for the sake of transparency and to lock in good changes. Instead of regulators who nudge, the state needs people who do; there is no alternative.</p><br><br><img src="https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/05aff3c0a7c94529dc138ce87543764a?s=96&d=identicon&r=G" />Fuck the Monarchy2023-04-28T15:46:06.724000ZCharlie Strosshttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/04/fuck-the-monarchy.html<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/fuck-the-monarchy/3064:f9479c">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/3064.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Charlie's Diary.</b>
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<p>I am a Republican[*].</p>
<p>On the occasion of the horrifically expensive and pointless coronation of King Charles III I want to state clearly: I want to live in a nation governed with the consent of the people, rather than by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings">divine right of kings</a>.</p>
<p>We got through seventy-plus years under the reign of Elizabeth II without too much controversy over her role. Credit where credit's due: she managed the duties of head of state with dignity and diligence for decades on end, <em>even if</em> a lot of skeletons were forcibly locked in closets (consider what NDA Prince Andrew's victim much have been required to pay in return for a royal cash pay-out, or what acts of parliament were modified or never brought forward because the monarch didn't want to see them). And even if she and her family came out considerably richer at the end of her reign, even accounting for inflation.</p>
<p>(One thing I'll say about the House of Windsor: they don't engage in vulgar looting of the British state on the same scale as, say, the Putin family in Russia. But the Windsors have reason to be confident they'll be around for generations. A burglar doesn't need to hurry if the police are there to guard their back.)</p>
<p>However.</p>
<p>Elizabeth Windsor is dead. Her successor is a snobbish, reactionary seventy-six year old multi-billionaire. He's so divorced from the ordinary lived experience of his subjects that he reportedly can't even dress himself. </p>
<p>I didn't vote for him.</p>
<p><em>Nobody</em> did. Nobody does. <em>Nobody ever will</em>, because <strong>this is not a democracy</strong>.</p>
<p>There is no democratic accountability in monarchy. As a system of government, in undiluted form it most resembles a hereditary dictatorship — current poster-child: Kim Jong-Il. The form we have in the UK is <em>not</em> undiluted: Parliament asserted its supremacy with extreme prejudice in 1649, and again in 1688, and ever since then the British monarchy has been a constitutional, rather than an absolute one — a situation that leaves odd constitutional echoes, such as the fact that we have a Royal Navy but we a <em>British</em> Army (loyal to Parliament, and <em>not</em> under royal command). </p>
<p>For the Americans reading this blog, let me provide a metaphor: let us postulate the existence in the antebellum Deep South of benevolent, morally righteous slaveowners who did not flog or rape or oppress their slaves. (I know, I know ... it's a thought experiment, okay?) Would that be enough to exculpate the institution of slavery? I'm pretty sure the answer lies somewhere been "no!" and "<strong>hell</strong>, no!" Slavery is an inherently oppressive institution because <em>it deprives a class of victims of their most basic right to autonomy</em>. The failure of a [hypothetical] individual slave-owner to be corrupted does not invalidate the corrupt nature of the system.</p>
<p>Similarly, the existence of benevolent, incorruptible, morally righteous monarchs who do not tyrannise their <s>subjects</s> citizens does not redeem the institution of monarchy. </p>
<p>Both slavery and monarchy are affronts to the principle that all people are equal in law. They may differ in detail of degree or circumstance — after all, is anyone seriously comparing King Charles to Kim Jong-Il, or Henry VIII? — but the very existence of the institution is, in and of itself, dehumanizing. </p>
<p>Now we are being treated to the sight of a billionaire scion of a hereditary dictatorship being feted with a £50M party and national holiday to celebrate his unelected ascent to the highest office in the land. It is, of course, a religious ceremony—the religion in question being a state-mandated Christian church of which maybe 10% of the population are adherents to any extent—but hey, pay no attention to us apostates. This is happening in the middle of a ghastly polycrisis, with inflation running in double digits, the Bank of England advising people to "<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65397276">accept that you are poorer</a>" as a result of the government's ghastly mishandling of brexit and the post-COVID economy, a government <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tories-face-inquiry-demand-after-wrongly-telling-voters-they-dont-need-photo-id_uk_64491f6be4b03c1b88ca7354">actively trying to suppress voter groups who don't support them</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/apr/27/tory-minister-rachel-maclean-mps-voter-id?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other">refusing to track numbers of those turned away at the polls</a>, <a href="https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/04/25/it-is-a-long-time-just-stop-oil-protesters-who-scaled-uk-bridge-jailed-for-five-years">jailing political dissidents</a>, <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/statement-uk-asylum-bill">ignoring their obligations under international law on refugees</a> ... in the middle of this mess our quasi-fascist government is trying to distract us with an appeal to tradition! pomp! ceremony! dignity! and the usual tired bullshit the right roll out whenever they don't have a coherent plan for fixing the damage.</p>
<p>And I just want to say: <em>not in my name</em>.</p>
<p>The system is morally bankrupt and it's past time to tear it down.</p>
<p>[*] I use "Republican" to mean "supporter of a republican form of government"; I <em>despise</em> the USA's Republican Party and everything they stand for this century.</p>Autonomous Self-Burying Seed Carriers for Aerial SeedingAerial...2023-04-06T22:07:52.889000Zhttps://solarpunks.net/post/713609751575003136<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/autonomous-self-bury/7477486:54f2dc">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/7477486.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> SOLARPUNKS.</b>
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<iframe height="225" id="youtube_iframe" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MZC_hXx1_Yc?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque" title="This device corkscrews itself into the ground like a seed" width="400"></iframe><br /><br /><h2>Autonomous Self-Burying Seed Carriers for Aerial Seeding</h2><blockquote><p>Aerial seeding can quickly cover large and physically inaccessible areas to improve soil quality and scavenge residual nitrogen in agriculture, and for post fire reforestation and wildland restoration. However, it suffers from low germination rates, due to the direct exposure of unburied seeds to harsh sunlight, wind and granivorous birds, as well as undesirable air humidity and temperature. </p><p>Here, inspired by Erodium seeds we design and fabricate self-drilling seed carriers, turning wood veneer into highly stiff (about 4.9 GPa when dry, and about 1.3 GPa when wet) and hygromorphic bending or coiling actuators with an extremely large bending curvature (1,854 m−1), 45 times larger than the values in the literature<br /></p></blockquote><p>Read more <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05656-3">here</a> or <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00396-4">here</a> from Nature<br /></p>Klaus Teuber Saved My Life2023-04-06T21:57:47.679000ZDan Thurothttps://spacebiff.com/2023/04/04/klaus-teuber/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/klaus-teuber-saved-m/1468964:aa2b3c">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/1468964.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> SPACE-BIFF!.</b>
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<p><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/1.-klaus-header-1.jpg"><img alt="" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-23986" height="251" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/1.-klaus-header-1.jpg?w=604&h=251" width="604" /></a></p>
<p>By now you’ve likely heard of the passing of Klaus Teuber at 70 from a “brief and severe illness.” Even though his Google return defaults to identifying him as a “German former dental technician,” it isn’t an overstatement to say he may be the figure who’s had the single greatest impact on modern board gaming. His 1995 Spiel des Jahres game of the year win for Settlers of Catan was his fourth and final time bringing home that award.</p>
<p>I never had the pleasure of meeting Teuber, but his designs are written into my gaming DNA. Maybe that’s why the news of his passing has hit me so hard. I can’t recall feeling this saddened by any other celebrity death. Then again, no other creator gave me a relationship with my father or helped me survive the bleakest two years of my life.</p>
<p><span id="more-23970"></span></p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_23974" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/3.-bad.jpg"><img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-23974" height="300" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/3.-bad.jpg?w=604&h=300" width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-23974">This is not Settlers of Catan.</p></div>
<p>Dad didn’t seem to know what to do with me. I wasn’t into sports. He would tell stories about how as a kid he would ride his bicycle to the field and play baseball all day with his friends; how he longed for those rare opportunities to go fishing with his father. Once, he added “play golf or go fishing with dad” to my weekend chores list. When I protested, he was furious. Why didn’t I want to spend time with him? I tried to explain. It wasn’t the time that was the problem. Nor, really, was it that only his hobbies qualified for the list. Of course I wanted to spend time with him. It was the reduction of quality time to an obligation that worried me. He didn’t hear me. He thundered out of the room. We didn’t speak for the next few days. Our relationship was marked by turbulence like that. We orbited each other at a distance, wary of the next big miscommunication.</p>
<p>Eventually, Dad brought home The Settlers of Catan Card Game. I’d never heard of Catan. But it looked nifty, and I was a weirdo who biked to the library every day over the summer, so playing something history-adjacent seemed okay to me.</p>
<p>We powered through the rules. It was the most complicated game we’d ever stumbled into. The rulebook was surprisingly thick. It still is. Today it would probably be four pages. Then it was thirty, walking us through concepts we’d never encountered before. How to rotate cards to indicate our stockpiled resources. What exactly constituted a trade. What an “event” was and how to resolve it. There was even a probability chart to explain why we would roll 7 more often.</p>
<p>Despite being guided by the hand, we made mistakes. Unlike the other five resources, we had no idea what gold was for. It only occurred to us later that gold was a sort of pity prize, a resource that built up until you had enough to trade for something else. This was long before either of us knew about catch-up mechanisms or game balance. We also didn’t know beans about hand management. Many cards existed to offset rough events or rival attacks. Since we didn’t know how often those would happen, holding onto those cards felt like a waste of space. We habitually tossed them out. As you might expect, brigands and black knights tended to have their way with our kingdoms.</p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_23975" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/4.-inciting-event.jpg"><img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-23975" height="298" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/4.-inciting-event.jpg?w=604&h=298" width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-23975">This made me very upset with my father.</p></div>
<p>Our favorite card was the Colossus of Catan, a high-value structure that could swing the game into your favor. It took heaps of resources to build, and could only be erected in a city, which made it doubly precious. In hindsight, chasing the Colossus isn’t the most efficient use of resources, but it dazzled us all the same.</p>
<p>One time, I managed to build the Colossus. On his next turn, Dad threw down the Arsonist card. The Settlers of Catan Card Game — which later earned the better title Rivals for Catan, and was eventually licensed to become Anno 1701: The Card Game — was also a dice game. The Arsonist only burned down a structure on the right roll. Of course, Dad got it. For the first time ever, I was holding the proper counter-card. The Bishop would cancel a Brigand or Arsonist on a roll of 3-6. I rolled the die.</p>
<p>(Looking at the cards now, I have to laugh. They don’t even express those rolls as ranges. The Bishop doesn’t say “The attack is canceled on a roll of 3-6.” It says “The attacker loses on a roll of 3, 4, 5 or 6.” Today the concept would be put across as icons. Back then, the game was a mess of text. User-friendly iconography was still a ways off.)</p>
<p>I rolled a 2. And I lost it.</p>
<p>Dad was shocked. Then he was angry. Why had I shouted over a game? Why had something permitted by the rules reduced me to tears? He shouted back. He threatened to never play Catan with me again. We didn’t finish that session. We played another sullen round or two, then called it quits. I was certain it was the last time we would play a board game together.</p>
<p>But that night, Dad climbed up to my room. “I guess we both have a temper,” he said. We talked about how angry some things made us. How we couldn’t even see straight when something hit us wrong. He asked if I wanted to play Catan again tomorrow. I said yes. And we did. And we did. And we did. We played that game until the cards were smudged yellow. We played until we could handle losing.</p>
<p>More than that, though, I think that was the first time we saw each other. In our tempers, we shared something shameful. Something that made it easier to be patient. Or, when patience wasn’t enough, to forgive one another’s outbursts. We were father and son after all.</p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_23973" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/2.-soz.jpg"><img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-23973" height="272" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/2.-soz.jpg?w=604&h=272" width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-23973">This is also not Settlers of Catan.</p></div>
<p>My next encounter with Klaus Teuber was a sheer accident. I grew up in a Mormon family, complete with the many trappings that went with it. I was much older, in high school, when my cousins invited me over to play the latest and greatest board game for Family Home Evening. FHE was a Mormon tradition at the time, a Monday evening gathering complete with snacks, a game, and an overbearing lesson. My family only bothered with FHE sporadically, so I was a regular guest in my cousins’ home. I don’t remember the lesson or the snack. But the game…</p>
<p>…was <em>not </em>The Settlers of Catan. In fact, I had no idea it bore any connection to the card game I’d played with Dad all those years earlier. This was The Settlers of Zarahemla, named for the center of Nephite civilization in the Book of Mormon. There’s no reason to recount the rules; it’s identical in nearly every respect. Its main difference is a transposition of setting. Instead of knights, your army gains “stripling warriors.” The robber pawn becomes a band of “Gadianton Robbers.” Instead of populating an island, you’re founding a civilization in the jungle, a mirror image of Lehi’s family sailing from Jerusalem to the Americas and dividing into antagonistic clans. Certain cards ask you to read scriptures. Since this was Family Home Evening, of course we complied. That was the cheesy part. Okay, that wasn’t the only cheesy part. You can also build a temple, The Settlers of Zarahemla’s sole contribution to Teuber’s original. Presumably this is the temple where Joseph Smith’s version of Jesus will eventually appear, both as climax to the Book of Mormon and as the crowning act of rewriting indigenous history to appeal to white frontiersmen. Thank goodness the game doesn’t go as far as to award its winner a one-on-one visit with the big guy.</p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_23979" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/6.-king-benjamin.jpg"><img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-23979" height="209" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/6.-king-benjamin.jpg?w=604&h=209" width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-23979">The good old days when board games made you look up scripture references.</p></div>
<p>Two years later, I became a Mormon missionary. A deeply depressed Mormon missionary. I was already struggling with my faith when I was assigned to work on the Crow Reservation. The local branch suffered from significant racial tensions between its white leaders and native membership. The local mission leader, a native, called himself “a good Lamanite” and talked about how Zarahemla had been built in North America rather than somewhere farther south. I was often sick. When my leaders talked about how we’d volunteered for the Lord’s Army, my heart would beat until I could feel it in my throat. Nothing seemed voluntary about it. I kept a tally of the days until I could go home. Until I could read books again.</p>
<p>Relief came in the form of a weekly game of The Settlers of Catan. While the other elders shot hoops, a handful of us gathered into a side room to play board games. The first time I played The Settlers of Catan, I remarked that it was super cool that somebody had adapted a new edition of a Mormon game. Oh, how they laughed at me for that one. An hour later, we added Seafarers. Then Cities & Knights. I hadn’t known board games could have expansions. When we were done, I realized it had been four hours since I’d swallowed vomit or beat a hasty beeline for the restroom. For the first time in months, I felt normal.</p>
<p>Later, our mission president outlawed board games. Sending my copy of Catan home felt like nailing myself into a wooden box. When I returned home a year later, it was the only thing that had gotten lost in the mail. I’ve never owned a copy of Catan since.</p>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_23983" style="width: 614px;"><a href="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/7.-tng.jpg"><img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-23983" height="301" src="https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/7.-tng.jpg?w=604&h=301" width="604" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-23983">The next generation.</p></div>
<p>I understand why Catan has become a punchline. It looms so large in the hobby that there’s really no escaping it. There are board games before Catan, and then there are board games after Catan. That makes it all the more impressive that Teuber’s landmark design is so peerless. It’s the game that launched an entire genre, but none of its successors quite recreated its appeal. The fast turns. The thrill of playing the odds via its dice. The negotiations and trading. For being <em>the </em>Eurogame, it’s so unlike most Eurogames.</p>
<p>This morning, I played Catan for the first time in fifteen years. Okay, it was actually The Settlers of Zarahemla, the only version of classic Catan I own. My nine-year-old joined me. She even won. If you ask whether I lobbed a few softballs, I’ll deny it to my deathbed. My three-year-old soon got in on the action, planting settlements and roads on the map, collecting resource cards, babbling about trades. To Teuber’s infinite credit, they both understood what they were doing. They were playing.</p>
<p>We’re light-years away from the situations that taught me those games. I’m healthier now. Close with Dad. Far from the church. Able for the first time to see these games clearly. How revolutionary they are. How perfect. How flawed. If I critiqued them today, I’d have plenty to say.</p>
<p>But I don’t want to critique them. They’re holy relics. These are the games that saved my life. Rest in peace, Klaus Teuber. And thank you.</p>
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<p><em>(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/danthurot">Patreon campaign</a> or <a href="https://ko-fi.com/danthurot">Ko-fi</a>.)</em></p><br><br><img src="https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/e4aff8bd3ad1bcff006faf9455ea6014?s=96&d=monsterid&r=G" />No one wants to collide with a deer2023-03-28T14:05:09.550000ZDavid Marstonhttps://writersontherange.org/no-one-wants-to-collide-with-a-deer/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pawnstorm
<a href="https://pawnstorm.newsblur.com/story/no-one-wants-to-coll/8831741:b1ce08">shared this story</a>
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I didn’t realize that wildlife overpasses were that effective, cool!
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<p>A deer stands paralyzed in the middle of a mountain highway, stunned by the lights and deafening roar of an 18-wheeler barreling toward it. At the last second, the deer leaps back into the forest.</p> <p>This time, the deer and the trucker avoid a fatal collision, but this stretch of Interstate-5 in southern Oregon is a known killing field for wildlife and dangerous for motorists. The highway cuts through a critical connection for wildlife moving between two mountain ranges and home to the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, which is the only national monument specifically established for the protection of its rich biodiversity.</p> <p>In this country, according to Federal Highway Administration estimates, 1-2 million motor vehicles crash into large animals such as deer each year.</p> <p>“These wildlife-vehicle collisions cause approximately 200 human deaths, 26,000 injuries and at least $8 billion in property damage and other costs.” According to The Pew Trust. </p> <p>In Oregon alone, the Oregon Department of Transportation records approximately 7,000 large-animal vehicle deaths annually. Each one involving deer averages $6,617 for emergency response, towing, repairs and medical expenses.</p> <p>Sometimes, a vehicle hits a deer and the animal disappears, so that many injured animals die unseen. The roadkill deaths of smaller species are also never recorded. Still more animals, from frogs and salamanders to rare species like marten and fisher, to top predators like cougars, are prevented from moving freely by the lights, noise and physical barrier of major highways. This disrupts the lives of wildlife and prevents genetic interchange among their populations. </p> <p>In Oregon in 2021, a group of local environmentalists, hunters, scientists, and state and federal agency staffers came together to do something about the problem: They formed the Southern Oregon Wildlife Crossing Coalition and started gathering data. </p> <p>They learned that more than 17,000 vehicles travel daily on I-5 between the town of Ashland and the California border, and that significant portions of this stretch of highway are in the state’s high-risk “red zones” for wildlife-car collisions. The coalition decided that it would work to reduce collisions and help animals move freely by promoting the construction of crossings both under and over and under the freeway.</p> <p>In recent years, wildlife crossings have gained increasing attention and support, with perhaps the most famous success story in Canada. There, 22 wildlife underpasses and two overpasses in Banff National Park reduced roadkill by 80 percent.</p> <p>In Washington state, an ambitious effort is underway to reconnect habitat in the Cascades by establishing safe wildlife crossings under and over Interstate 90. Eleven large wildlife crossing structures are completed, with a planned total of 26 large ones and many smaller ones to come. The most well known is near Snoqualmie Pass, where a $6 million overpass has been readily accepted by elk and deer, virtually eliminating wildlife-vehicle collisions in the fenced project area. </p> <p>Meanwhile, in southern California, the largest wildlife crossing in the world is scheduled for completion by 2025. The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing will span the 10-lane, 101 Freeway, allowing the reconnection of small, isolated populations of cougars in the Santa Susana Mountains to the north and the Santa Monica Mountains to the south.</p> <p>Other major wildlife crossing projects are underway throughout the West, including Wyoming, Montana and Colorado.</p> <p>Highway projects are always expensive and complex, and to get them done requires collaboration among diverse, often disagreeing groups. In the case of southern Oregon’s coalition, our members include the Bureau of Land Management and activist environmental groups; the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and hunting and fishing organizations; academics from Southern Oregon University and engineers from the Oregon Department of Transportation.</p> <p>Though we may have differing priorities, we all offer our expertise to the shared goal of improving wildlife crossings over “our” stretch of I-5. Together, we have also raised enough money from public and private sources to finance a feasibility study of eight possible over- and under-crossings, and we’re working closely with the state to identify the highest priority sites.</p> <p>It is our hope that our carefully documented proposals will attract the federal highway funds required to make these crossings a reality.</p> <p>In a time of social and political polarization, it is immensely heartening to work on a project that brings together wildly different interests. Wildlife crossings, I have found, bridge not only divisions on the landscape but divisions in our communities as well.</p> <p>Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, <a href="http://writersontherange.org/">writersontherange.org</a>, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a conservationist who writes in Oregon.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersontherange.org/no-one-wants-to-collide-with-a-deer/" rel="nofollow">No one wants to collide with a deer</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersontherange.org" rel="nofollow">Writers On The Range</a>.</p>