politics

For once MPLS is in the news for something other than scary PoC crime

“So if you want a California-style housing crisis, don’t do anything. But if you want to avoid the fate of states like California, learn some of the lessons of what we’ve been doing over the last few years and allow for more of that infill, mixed-income housing.”

Source: A housing shortage in the U.S. is leading to zoning changes : NPR

We don’t own a car, instead we bike; we bike year round. In Minneapolis this means we’ll bike in sub-zero Fahrenheit weather during winter.

Every time I think about living anywhere else in the continental United States, it is the cost of housing that stops me. Here in Minneapolis I work two jobs so I can afford my lifestyle; anywhere else I would have two jobs just to survive.

Also Strong Boy Mayor Frey Guy did the most to prevent these changes from happening, so fuck him and his coterie of bitchass motherfuckers

For once MPLS is in the news for something other than scary PoC crime Read More »

Of course they knew it was illegal. They just didn’t care.

Schwalb’s DC lawsuit cites a former “high-ranking manager” at Greystar Management Services, one of the RealPage customers named in the suit, as confirming that landlords used rent management software to collude and raise prices. “He responded that of course they did—it’s the entire reason landlords used the software,” according to the complaint.

Source: 14 big landlords used software to collude on rent prices, DC lawsuit says | Ars Technica

Say, what are the chances there are other cartels in other cities that are also artificially inflating prices through the use of software? We get that landbastards want to make it easy for themselves to maximize profits as we all live in a capitalist society, but this is egregious. There is a difference between profiting and profiteering.

There is a high likelihood there’s a cartel here in Minneapolis given how city government feels safe in fucking life up for everyone within city limits.

We hope they all get fucked.

Of course they knew it was illegal. They just didn’t care. Read More »

At least the highway will have no traffic out to the big box store and back

Filling so much empty ground-floor space may require cities to rethink what brings people downtown. It may force officials to change how they regulate buildings, and property owners to shift how they profit from them.

Source: The Ground-Floor Window Into What’s Ailing Downtowns – The New York Times

“May”? The NYT are just hedging hard on this. Cities will have to rethink how downtowns function, officials will have to change how buildings are regulated, property owners will have to shift how they profit from them, businesses will have to adapt to a different customer base.

Case in point, this article in the Minneapolis St. Paul Journal(disable your javascript to read)

Fhima and other community members who make their living downtown see firsthand how the absence of thousands of Target (NYSE:TGT) workers at the retailer’s Nicollet Mall headquarters impacts the city’s overall vibrancy. From shops and restaurants to public transportation and property values, downtown Minneapolis is struggling without a strong, consistent daytime population there to support it.

At the end of the article they actually have a section titled “What Target can do about”. Newsflash: they en’t doing shit. They just held their third auction to clear own office equipment. Even if they wanted to bring everyone back they don’t even have the furniture to put those people in.

Cities at large could make an effort to populate downtowns with small businesses, small/medium size landbastards, and change zoning to allow for living in skyscrapers. But that takes political capital no one wants to spend.

A lot of people would love to live downtown. Hell, a lot of people already do, but if they want basic necessities they need to get them delivered, or worse, drive out to the suburbs to get them.

At least the highway will have no traffic out to the big box store and back Read More »

These people aren’t ready for what’s coming

When some proposed forming their own self-funded water provider, other residents revolted, saying the idea would foist an expensive, freedom-stealing new arm of government on them. The idea collapsed. Other solutions, like allowing a larger water utility to serve the area, could be years off.

Source: Skipped Showers, Paper Plates: An Arizona Suburb’s Water Is Cut Off – The New York Times

Well, those people are free to lose everything cos they decided to willingly entertain the notion they could live without running water. And in their pride everyone else loses.

If the drought in the Southwest continues for a couple more years we will enter water knife territory.

These people aren’t ready for what’s coming Read More »

Garbage

In a single week, the Supreme Court of the United States has gutted gun control, weakened the separation of church and state, gave more fuel to the police state, and to top it off, struck down Roe v. Wade entirely.

The worst week for civil rights in the country in decades.

And the court signals they will take more away. Rights to contraception and same-sex marriage are next.

Garbage Read More »

War is about Money. Simple as that.

The little-publicized helicopter scandal was one of many investigated by John Sopko, who, as the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, has served as the Cassandra of the Afghan war. Since Congress created his office in 2012 he has been diligently relating details of the colossal waste associated with the war in handsome full-color annual reports, but with little effect. ‘It was a disaster ready to happen, and it happened,’ he told me a few years into the job. ‘We wasted a lot of money. It wasn’t that people were stupid, and it wasn’t that people didn’t care; it’s just the system almost guarantees failure.’

Source: How the US military got rich from Afghanistan – The Spectator World

Next up, the price of heroin will go up internationally until the Taliban gets all its ducks in a row. Then the world will be flooded with opium and its price will crash. The entire time other drugs will take its place, including fentanyl.

That’s just on the drug front. There’s also arms sales to training camps that are yet to be established.

War is about Money. Simple as that. Read More »

Vacas flacas

La sequía que azota México es un fenómeno recurrente que con cada visita deja una estela de emergencias y daños. El 84% del territorio sufre sequía en diferentes intensidades, agravada por la falta de lluvias de los últimos meses, según se desprende del Monitor, el organismo de Conagua que la vigila. Pese a que estaba previsto y la evolución histórica del clima en el país lo contemplaba, la sequía sorprendió a Ermenegildo Martínez, un pescador de Veracruz que ha visto como en los últimos ocho meses la laguna donde pescaba se ha secado. “Medía 13 metros de profundidad y ahora apenas le quedan 10 centímetros, en menos de una semana la habremos perdido del todo”, describe. A 1.300 kilómetros de allí, en Sinaloa, el agricultor Gumaro López se contagia del pesar del pescador. Al igual que Martínez tendrá pérdidas en su producción y alerta de que subirán los precios. Ya pasó en 2011 y 1996, los otros dos episodios de sequía extrema que golpearon a México y de los que, ha quedado claro, no se ha aprendido lo suficiente.

Source: La sequía que abrasa México, una tragedia predecible y devastadora | EL PAÍS México

Every Mexican president ignores the lessons learned by their predecessors. This drought will likely drive migration north, which is already a flash point due to the pandemic.

The Water Wars might start much sooner than anyone thought and that is worrying.

Vacas flacas Read More »

Always has been the same lie

No one I’ve talked to in Texas has mentioned the government. They know better than to expect anything from it. Anyone who has lived in Texas for any period of time and experienced any kind of dire need knows that the government is not going to help you. It’s controlled by men who care more about their pockets than their people. It’s one thing to come to terms with that level of neglect when it’s being enacted in the service of denying people individual rights to decisions over their body, or ensuring that everyone can carry a gun at all times. But it’s something else to see the consequences of the government’s callousness borne out in the crashing of a power grid. Even libertarians think that the government should make sure the roads are safe and that people can heat their homes.

Source: It’s Always The Same Lie | Defector

And that’s why it’s usually people high up in Texas government that are the first to pipe up about seceding. For the same reason Texas gave up this bit of land:

Map of Texas pointing to the no-mans-land that became the Oklahoma Panhandle

That bit of land is north of the Missouri Compromise line. Texas gave up this land because it wanted slavery more and secession would certainly give them a way to bring it back.

They won’t call it that outright. They’ll call it something nicer than “indentured servitude” though.

Always has been the same lie Read More »

Sitting in the dark watching the screen, somewhere

Will young people — trained during the pandemic to expect instant access to new movies like “Hamilton” and “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” — get into the habit of going to the movies like their parents and grandparents did? Generation Z forms a crucial audience: About 33 percent of moviegoers in the United States and Canada last year were under the age of 24, according to the Motion Picture Association.

Source: Hollywood’s Obituary, the Sequel. Now Streaming. – The New York Times

Millenials and Zoomers have a little problem though… we haven’t got any money to spend. Even if there is an economic boom we will not benefit from it unless there is systemic change at all levels of government, business and society.

The cost of a single movie at the theatre will get us an entire month of streaming. The math isn’t hard.

Sitting in the dark watching the screen, somewhere Read More »

Oh, you want to setup a neighborhood network? They’ll throw the cops at you for that

Stephen Milton, who helped to design and build the Gigabit Now service in Sea Ranch, California explained that his company had to obtain permission from 23 separate local, county, and federal granting agencies to get the new project up and running. Broadband provider Sacred Wind out of New Mexico wrote in a filing to the FCC that an application involving one landowner and one authorizing jurisdiction commonly takes 2–4 years to complete, while something more complex, that involves more than one piece of land spanning multiple authorizing jurisdictions, can take anywhere from 4–8 years to complete. Slow response times translate into delays and adoption lags.

Source: The curious case of Romanian broadband | by Will Rinehart | The Benchmark | Oct, 2020 | Medium

Here in the US most of these bumps are by design by way of from redlining, NIMBYism, and plain old lack of foresight from local governments. This in turn gave more power to state governments who in turn receive most of their regulatory guidelines from the companies they’re supposed to be regulating. A lot of states now explicily forbid cities, counties, and municipalities from even trying to enact their own regulations when it comes to broadband, specially publicly owned infrastructure.

Wealthy neighborhoods will always see at least two companies deal with the regulatory gauntlet as they know the profits to be made will be worth it, which in turn helps attract more wealthy people to the neighborhood. Poor neighborhoods have not seen that kind of investment in decades, and will likely never see it in the foreseeable future. Here in Minneapolis one company is rolling out fiber throughout the city and North Minneapolis isn’t even in the plan for them. This has been a historical goal of racist and classist local governments.

Should government at any level try to change the rules, companies involved in last-mile telecom duopolies will scream bloody murder and call up their wholly owned GOP subsidiary in Congress to keep the status quo.

Oh, you want to setup a neighborhood network? They’ll throw the cops at you for that Read More »

Hoist the flag

Pirate Care is a research process – primarily based in the transnational European space – that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of “care” and “piracy”, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the ‘crisis of care’ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.

Source: Pirate Care – Pirate Care

This is a worthy goal. Piracy not for the sake of avoiding to pay for things, but rather as a way to learn about the world and its processes when the entities in power would prefer you not to— whether they be people, corporations, or governments. For these entities any form of non-compliance is to be crushed and its practitioners made customers of the carceral industry.

Hoist the flag Read More »

No change, no peace

As the historian Barry A. Crouch recounts in The Dance of Freedom, Ruby warned that the formerly enslaved were beset by the “fiendish lawlessness of the whites who murder and outrage the free people with the same indifference as displayed in the killing of snakes or other venomous reptiles,” and that “terrorism engendered by the brutal and murderous acts of the inhabitants, mostly rebels,” was preventing the freedmen from so much as building schools.

Source: What Black Lives Matter Has Accomplished – The Atlantic

The Orange Maggaot calls people who support BLM “thugs”, “criminals”, “terrorists”, saying he’ll impose Law and Order however necessary.

White people have always been the one to terrorize their communities, and those of people they don’t deem acceptable.

The cold cultural war heats up.

No change, no peace Read More »

Y ora pa’onde?

No policy, though, would be able to stop the forces — climate, increasingly, among them — that are pushing migrants from the south to breach Mexico’s borders, legally or illegally. So what happens when still more people — many millions more — float across the Suchiate River and land in Chiapas? Our model suggests that this is what is coming — that between now and 2050, nearly 9 million migrants will head for Mexico’s southern border, more than 300,000 of them because of climate change alone.

Source: Where Will Everyone Go?

Mientras esto es lo que un modelo computacional prevee el Peje no quiere que le pregunten de nada a menos que sea sobre el avion.

Como emigrante leo esto y siento acongoje por el futuro que nos espera a todos. Mientras tanto, La Bestia sigue su implacable marcha.

Y ora pa’onde? Read More »