Jules @afewbugs@librem.one

The Dutch invest €595 million annually on urban biking, resulting in €19 BILLION saved in public health care costs alone. That’s how smart governments do the right math on investing in better mobility.

Let’s be clear — it wastes public money to NOT do it.

#CityMakingMath, hat tip to @modacitylife for their excellent books!

#UK folks, there's a petition to keep protection of transgender people in the equality act.

It's pretty scary being trans in this country at the moment, and we could use your help to protect our rights.

Feel free to share broadly/openly with others. Steal, boost, whatever. Let's get 100k signatures, please.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/627984

Pay attention when strikes happen. Because the rhetoric quickly becomes "the nurses should sacrifice themselves for the greater good", "the railroad workers should sacrifice themselves", "the teachers should sacrifice themselves", "essential workers should sacrifice themselves".

Listen for how few and who says "Profits should be sacrificed for the greater good". Listen to how those asked to wear a mask or get a vaccine SCREAMED about how unfair that sacrifice for the greater good was.

"If you suffered in life and want other people to suffer as you did because 'you turned out fine', you did not in fact turn out fine."

Daniel Swensen

We are all living through what is likely to be the most profound crisis modern civilization has seen: a combination of climate breakdown, ecological collapse, an out-of-control pandemic, and ongoing war.

All of it is happening while our 'leaders' pretend it is not, nothing needs to be done about it and everything is "normal".

It's OK to feel angry/overwhelmed/stressed/scared.
It's OK to not be OK.

You are not out of your mind, this society is.

France will abolish flights between cities that are linked by a train journey of less than 2.5 hours.
#ClimateCrisis #nofly

https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/12/02/is-france-banning-private-jets-everything-we-know-from-a-week-of-green-transport-proposals

Your daily reminder that there is no war on free speech going on.

What we’re seeing is the people with immense power and wealth demonstrating how they hate being talked back to.

The only things on this map are railroads!
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/lj4wqt/the_railroads_of_the_world_oc/

"London tattoo studio offers to remove Kanye West tattoos for free"

https://www.nme.com/news/music/london-tattoo-studio-offers-to-remove-kanye-west-tattoos-for-free-3349551

Reading a magazine *in print* and realizing how nice it is to not have the publisher know every bit of data on how I consumed it—how long it sat on my coffee table, time spent on each article, which products I research because I saw it on the pages…

In a constantly connected world, analog feels like an escape.

#RandomThought

It isn’t the hills.
It isn’t the wind or weather.
It isn’t the size, or legal powers, or budget.
It isn’t any of the usual excuses people in your city have been using for years.

Remember this picture every time you hear someone in your city say "we're not Amsterdam." This was #Amsterdam in the 1970's via @fietsprofessor.

The cities we admire made better choices regarding cars, and are still making them today.

Better choices instead of excuses.

#Dutch #cities #urbanism #transportation

I recently found this picture, taken in the 1930s at Le Monocle, one of the lesbian nightclubs in Paris at the time.

It's a great picture, with a lot of different people, absorbed in their own merriment, and at the center, my new reference for the concept of badass.

I don't know who she is, but she deserves a long, adventurous backstory -- maybe involving mutiny aboard an airship, spies, and broken hearts.

She's the only one looking at the camera, so the story is definitely about her.

Microbiologists are larger than one might expect.

Not gonna lie, this report is impressive, and every Mastodon instance should publish something like this every month. I have an account on mstdn.ca, and this is the kind of thing that would encourage me to move my main account from mastodon.social to mstdn.ca (although I would still support Eugen’s Patreon for his work on Mastodon, which benefits all instances). Staying put for now, though.

https://news.mstdn.ca/state-of-the-instance-nov-2022/

Mastodon which is incredibly hot, supports RSS beautifully.

Just add .rss to any account to get the feed. Amazing!

https://mastodon.social/@davew.rss

Open that in your favorite feed reader. It’ll work.

Post a screenshot, say what the reader app is.

And pass this on to everyone who uses a feed reader.

Spread the word!

This is a huge deal for the open web.

Students respond better to feedback when it's depersonalized.

Personal: Your wording here is unclear
Impersonal: The wording here is unclear.

Personal: Your organization is confusing.
Impersonal: The organization is confusing.

Personal: You made the opposite claim in the previous paragraph.
Impersonal: The previous paragraph made the opposite claim.

I've found that this makes a massive difference, giving students the detachment they need to focus on their writing.

#AcademicMastodon

Expensive Taste.

Another amazing encounter with an otter, from a couple of years ago on Mull.

I had been watching two otters fishing in the loch for over an hour when one of them caught something large, and started swimming towards the shore.

I got into a location to watch from, and saw her splash through the waves and out on to the shore with a huge lobster in her jaws.

She spent half an hour eating almost all of it.

#otter #Mull #lobster #WildlifePhotography #wildlife

Whenever I post digital security or privacy advice, there is always one reply boasting that they assume everything is being watched at all times and nothing is secure. Cool. Good for you. Do you want a fucking medal? Because in the meantime, I'm trying to give actionable advice to people in vulnerable situations trying to live their lives.

the great thing about the fediverse is instead of being stuck with someone else’s petard you can hoist your own

If we do this right, our grandchildren will think that “having an oligopoly” is on a par with being diagnosed with a case of the vapors by somebody in a bird costume who writes you a prescription for leeches.

"People used to _do_ that!?"