> In Georgia, two seniors at Alpharetta high school created a petition to remove Flock cameras from their campus. Aditya Manchanda and Henry Jones, who are ... and their petition attracted local news coverage.
> After gathering signatures... The principal referred the boys to Fulton county school board members. Their emails have so far gone unanswered, so they’re planning to show up to an upcoming board meeting to relay their concerns.
At least in my part of the U.S., local school board elections are often decided by relatively small numbers of votes. And voters seldom have strong preferences between the candidates.
If you want to get the school board's actual attention, then get out and campaign for candidates who take strong anti-surveillance positions. There's really nothing as convincing as "Chris and Pat supported that, and both of 'em lost the election".
If you want human readers - remember that roughly zero humans will ever read even 0.01% of the world's human-written books. Sticking your head down the "human author vs. AI author" rabbit hole may be a poor use of time.
Or - back when electric typewriters were cutting-edge tech, only a puny percentage of human-written books were accepted for publication. Writing well is difficult. Look at bio's of famous authors - roughly zero mastered the skill after only 18 month and one book draft.
Well im not gonna sell it so im not worried about publishers. It's a libre book, completely free and opensource but i don't like it to be mistaken with AI slop because i know how much effort it took me to write it especially since im not a native speaker. Im wondering now that any book can be written by AI does anyone still appreciate a book that's not perfect but it's written by a human.
Interesting how NPR downplays the systematic elimination of the most-affordable models of the 2010's. (At least in the U.S. They're still widely available in overseas markets.)
Though it otherwise doesn't pull the punch on corporate greed.
Related, the U.S. may soon allow imports of Japanese "Kei" vehicles:
With how horrible American has gotten at building any major infrastructure, high speed rail and cars are not comparable. Because I can reliably get a car in less than 10 years, for less than 10X its supposed complete price, without a long series of political dramas and lawsuits.
And even if America had a world-leading high speed rail network, that could not replace 95% of current car usage.
High speed rail is a distraction. Light rail, bike infra, metros, and infill are what can actually solve car dependency. I don’t own a car but I can still fly places after all (not great for earth, sadly, but still doesn’t require a car)
Boston to NYC to DC to Charlotte, or Seattle to Portland to San Francisco to LA aren't served by ebikes. People aren't going to stop traveling between places that distance apart. HSR solves for that kind of stretch in a way that airplanes don't.
Nobody ever said you'd ride an ebike for those distances, though. My point was that for someone to live car-free, local transit is much more important than high speed rail. And we don't always need to build _more_ transit, building more homes near the transit we already have would make a big difference! BART stations have a lot of pretty low density single family housing around them. Or even parking! Which could make sense at a terminus for park and ride but not for most stations. Sacramento's light rail similarly has a lot of stations where few people live or work.
For what it's worth, improving biking infra improves the catchment for existing rail too. Vacaville Amtrak is in an annoying location but would be easier to get to with proper separated bike infra, and make commuting to the bay easier.
Also, I've taken the train Seattle to Portland and Boston to NYC several times and both are pretty decent. HSR would help but not massively so I suspect. BOS-NYP is 4 hours.
For SF-LA, HSR would be nice but flying is also fine. Just having the coast starlight run _less horribly slow_ would help.
On the other hand, it always amused me that the best way to go from New York to Portland, Maine (I have family there) was to take the train to Boston south, get out and walk 20 minutes, and then get on the train to Portland. There's a lot of other examples of missing links and just plain deficient planning. Why is it you could only get light rail to LAX as of very recently?
At how many $billion of market value should a board just figure that it's a cost of doing business to hire retired spooks to keep track of the CEO's personal life, and ensure that he has a pipeline of well-paid, background-checked, NDA-signed mistresses available to divert his eyes from the employees and spies?
Medical power of att'y, okay. Letting your family know your preferences on "when I'm gone", sure.
But for a Will - these days, what % of American adults are single, living alone, and have a negative net worth? Letting your family know that's the situation, and that they should stand back and let the gov't & banks to fight over your red ink, sound far kinder than leaving any of them stuck slogging through bureaucratic purgatory for nothing. [Add "IANAL..." disclaimer here.]
its not rare to have a creditor harass your family and convince them they have to take on the debt, this is a shaky situation, as you can end up agreeing to culpability depending on what you say or do. usually the debt dies with the person unless there are co signers or joint accounts.
However true the "prices are the same" claim might be at t=0, I'd assume the 99.99% who earn $25K (when I'm earning $50K) will make sure that $25K remains a livable income, long-term.
Vs. the 99.99% earning $200K (when I'm earning $100K) will have no incentive to keep my own, theoretically higher, income livable.
> After gathering signatures... The principal referred the boys to Fulton county school board members. Their emails have so far gone unanswered, so they’re planning to show up to an upcoming board meeting to relay their concerns.
The local school district: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_County_Schools
At least in my part of the U.S., local school board elections are often decided by relatively small numbers of votes. And voters seldom have strong preferences between the candidates.
If you want to get the school board's actual attention, then get out and campaign for candidates who take strong anti-surveillance positions. There's really nothing as convincing as "Chris and Pat supported that, and both of 'em lost the election".
reply