Linkage

In May, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and LA Metro launched the biggest Universal Basic Mobility experiment ever attempted in the U.S., giving 1,000 South Los Angeles residents a “mobility wallet” — a debit card with $150 per month to spend on transportation.

The catch? Funds can be used to take the bus, ride the train, rent a shared e-scooter, take micro-transit, rent a car-share, take an Uber or Lyft, or even purchase an e-bike — but they can’t be spent on the cost of owning or operating a car.

The year-long pilot, ending in April, has the dual goals of increasing mobility for low-income residents and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s a radical experiment based on a simple idea: People know what they need. Give them the money to go where they want to go, and they will improve the quality of their lives.

It’s the biggest experiment in Universal Basic Mobility in the U.S., but it is not the first. 

“I’m scared to death” about the level of voter distrust heading into 2024, said Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida, which includes the capital of Tallahassee.

Earley’s comments were echoed by dozens of others among a crowd of nearly 100 local election workers who gathered in Crystal City, Virginia, last week for an annual confab hosted by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

[…]

The two-day event was supposed to be a forum for local officials to review and rehearse often mundane election administration practices, like handling mail safely or responding to severe weather events.

But concerns about voter distrust and conspiracies cropped up repeatedly even though they claimed no formal place on the agenda. During group breakout sessions, hallway conversations and coffee breaks, attendees expressed both alarm and exasperation about how difficult it was to convince some Americans that the vote could be trusted.

“It doesn’t matter what you do, what we say or how much we educate the skeptics,” Kellie Harris Hopkins, the director of elections in Beaufort County, North Carolina, said during a roundtable. Roughly a dozen other officials nodded their heads, snapped their fingers or murmured in agreement.

While federal officials and state leaders often act as the face of election integrity at the national level, it is local election workers who actually run U.S. elections, doing everything from processing ballots to checking in voters.

That also means they’re the ones who most directly confront election conspiracy theories — and the violence and intimidation they increasingly fuel.

One in six election workers have experienced threats because of their job, and 77 percent said those threats had increased in recent years, according to a March 2022 study from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, capturing the impact of false election fraud claims by Donald Trump and his allies since 2020.

The Japanese parking model essentially prohibits all on-street parking with some exceptions for daytime and evening parking, where permitted. There is also a rule that forbids overnight street parking after 3am in the whole country. The larger and more important part of the law requires everyone to demonstrate that they have a legal off-street parking spot before they can purchase a car, those spots can be owned or rented, but they will not register your vehicle without this proof. This requirement means that if you don’t have access to an off-street parking spot for your car, you cannot get a car.

South Africa is determined not only to be on the right side of history, but to change the course of it — and if the International Court of Justice was true to its name, it would give due consideration to South Africa’s case. It would find that the bombardment is wrong, the bombardment is illegal, and the bombardment represents the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. And it would rule that acts of genocide have been committed by the Israeli government.

In the meantime, the South African case asked for interim relief, which would require a rapid call for an immediate cease-fire. It is a call that should be made by any political representative anywhere in the world committed to the protection of civilian life. It is to the great shame of the British and American political systems that relatively few elected representatives in either country have supported this call for an end to the loss of human life.

There is no way forward other than a cease-fire observed by all sides, which would present the opportunity then to map out a just and peaceful future. This is a decision to be made by the Palestinian people, not by those of us who support them. Acts of solidarity cannot entail telling others what to do.

Australia has supported the US and UK militaries as they launched more than a dozen airstrikes against sites used by Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.

The US president, Joe Biden, confirmed the strikes, which are the most significant military response to the Houthis’ campaign of drone and missile attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

The Australian defence minister, Richard Marles, said the decision to launch the strikes “was not taken lightly”.

[…]

Asked if the US-led attacks risked escalating tensions in the region, Marles said defending freedom of navigation and global trade routes was “utterly central to Australia’s national interest”.

Tory Brown’s debut game, published by Fort Circle Games, catapulted both designer and publisher into the board gaming limelight following its release in 2022, picking up widespread praise from reviewers including Polygon’s Charlie Hall, who named it one of the year’s best board games, and game design luminaries including Undaunted series co-designer David Thompson.

[…] 

But Fort Circle founder Kevin Bertram told BoardGameWire the Facebook ads for the campaign he has been submitting since the start of the New Year are all being rejected after a very short amount of time on the site.

The automated response Bertram is receiving from Facebook says the ads are being rejected because they either mention a politician or are about “sensitive social issues”, which “could influence how people vote and may impact the outcome of an election or pending legislation”.

His requests for review have also all been rejected.

The achievement is a rare one. Chess.com reports that there are only 846 active WIMs globally, a small fraction of the millions of chess players worldwide. Established in 1950, this title recognizes the accomplishments of women in the game. While women are equally capable as men in intellectual and skill-based pursuits like chess, the women’s category aims to encourage female participation in a sport where women are significantly underrepresented. Women often face challenges due to sexism, differences in monetary support, training, and participation in a predominantly male-dominated field.

The achievement also comes after a significant controversy in FIDE. In August of 2023, FIDE announced that under new rules, transgender women had “no right to participate” in women’s chess. Instead, the organization would evaluate trans participation in a process that could take up to 2 years, and all transgender players would have a “transgender” mark in their files. Likewise, trans players could only compete with updated legal identification documents - a major problem given that many political bodies have removed the ability of transgender people to update their identification. It was later revealed that the change was pushed, in part, by anti-trans conservative influencer Riley Gaines in the United States.

A master class in framing:

The project needs enough density (which, remember, are homes we badly need) to make financially viable all the expensive public costs and aspirations, including heritage restoration. It also needs the kind of population that will attract retailers to give a vibrant second life to those heritage buildings. And let’s be clear — retailers won’t provide those local, walkable shops and services without that population density.

Preserving community heritage and character isn’t about preventing badly needed and responsible change, or claiming to be OK with a different proposal that actually isn’t viable at all. It’s about doing change well, with smart design, while understanding the real-life requirements and balancing acts that achieve many important public goals.

The heritage buildings aren’t threatened by the proposal. The proposal is how they will be preserved and rehabilitated, remaining the defining features in this new urban place, with exciting new purposes.

There’s a reason why the site has seen little activity since the previous 2008 zoning was put in place — that zoning wasn’t viable or buildable.

Plenty of arch invective here worthy of a Taibbi Vampire Squid Award:

It would be foolish and exhausting to speculate on the role that Times editor-in-chief Joseph Kahn (Harvard '87, Harvard M.A. '90) played in pushing this story; there is nothing to do but speculate, there. Power works in different ways, and if Ackman–style public meltdowns are the loudest and most overt expression of that work, and Rufo's store-brand Rasputin act are the most obviously motivated, they are not the only ones. There is also the Times' understanding of itself as the author of the discourse, and all that ostentatious invisibility—the decisions about what is and is not a story, or what is and is not up for debate, that only show up in the negative.

You already know how that works; we are soaking in it. Someone at the institution decides that there is or ought to be, say, a debate about the safety or advisability of trans health care where no such debate actually exists, and then the debate is manufactured to suit that sense—in and through stories about that debate. And then, at some point down the line, some laws are promulgated that reflect that debate's terms. 

When Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine banned trans health care in his state last week, he did not do it by signing a heavy-handed law passed through his state's legislature. He vetoed that, and then effectively did the same thing in a way that reflected all the deep and vexing complexities and risks that the Times has repeatedly insisted exist. He mandated a process that would force people seeking that care to navigate a series of onerous administrative requirements, and to compel the services of an endocrinologist, and a bioethicist, and a mental health specialist—to make sure that care is not given too fast. "It needs to be lengthy," DeWine said of the counseling component, "and it needs to be comprehensive."

So what begins as irresponsible, ideological, but plausibly deniable discourse shows up down the line as policy. It's rarely quite as easy to see as it is in this instance, when irresponsible, ideological, plausibly deniable discourse is the policy. The debate can only ever continue; the resolution will arrive without any visible fingerprints, as a story about something that just happened.

Public works departments know how to fix a dangerous stroad. We put it in a five-year capital improvement budget. We do a big study of the conditions. We mock up several design alternatives, and we hold public workshops where we ask constituents for their feedback and preferences. We send out (typically useless) surveys. A design is selected by the city council, and over the next couple years, it’s built.

The end result of this approach is typically very pretty. There are curb bulb-outs planted with flowers. There are flashing beacons and refuge islands at newly painted crosswalks. The street is calmer, it’s safer, and it actually feels better to drive on, as well as walk along. It’s hailed as a big step forward, a boon to the neighborhood’s quality of life. Everybody is happy. This example from South Minneapolis, of a nasty stroad rebuilt after a deadly crash and public outcry, is typical of my experience.

Okay. So, we know how to do that. Now do it 1,000 times.

The “1,000 times” problem may actually be the primary reason why we can expect local governments to be resistant to adopting an approach like the Crash Analysis Studio as policy. If you truly acknowledge that a deadly crash is not a fact of life, but an anomaly that shouldn’t have happened, and a condition that should be corrected, then you suddenly have a to-do list a thousand miles long.

Nobody is going to say out loud, “We can’t come close to fixing all of them, so it doesn’t make sense to acknowledge that there’s an urgent imperative to fix any of them.” But I’ll bet a lot of traffic engineers have thought it.