Monday, June 1, 2015
Supreme Court: Violent Facebook Posts Not a Crime Unless Intended as Threats
Starbucks Takes Out More Debt (But Not Too Much)
Senior Takes A Dig At School Dress Codes With A Sassy Yearbook Quote
The 17-year-old, who just graduated from San Mateo High School in California, used her quote to fight back against school dress codes that often include unfair guidelines for female students.
The quote reads: "I would just like to apologize to those who were unable to graduate with the class of 2015 because they were too distracted by my midriff and consequently failed all of their classes! xoxo"
Chloe explained that the quote made it into the yearbook because she knew a classmate working with senior quote submissions. She said that the idea for the quote came to her from the notion that female students' clothes are somehow responsible for the "academic failures of others."
"There is no correlation between how much skin you've seen and how well you do in school, it just doesn't make any sense," she said in an email to The Huffington Post. "Sending a girl home to change or forcing her to miss part of class to find other clothes is hurting her education more than her outfit was hurting the education of those around her, and I wanted to point that out in a sarcastic way because that's in character for me."
Chloe posted a photo of her quote on Instagram as well as Tumblr, where it was reblogged by "The Hunger Games" actress Amandla Stenberg. The post has been liked and reblogged more than 68,000 times.
Though the fake apology has a sarcastic tone, Chloe's quote is no joke. She told Yahoo Canada it's a message to her school and others about the sexism demonstrated through dress codes.
"I wanted to leave behind something meaningful and important to me as my senior quote, so that people would remember me as the girl who gave the administration hell until the last possible moment. Why shouldn't I have said something that makes people think about why they blame girls for distracting boys instead of boys for lacking the self-control to remain on task?"
And that's how you make a memorable exit from high school.
H/T Feminist Voice Instagram
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Today in Bad Ideas: “Uberizing” the Public Transit System
A recent guest editorial in the Denver Post argued that “it’s time to Uber our bus system” with privately operated demand-responsive service downtown.
“Demand-responsive” transit along the Uber model isn’t suited for transporting large numbers of people. Photo: Wikipedia
While contracting out some bus operations can work, writes Jarrett Walker at Human Transit, the notion that the “demand responsiveness” of Uber will translate to transit routes carrying thousands of people every day is preposterous:
Uber today is a taxi and (limited) shared ride service using small vehicles to carry small numbers of people at once. Assuming you pay the driver decently (a big assumption in the private sector) the cost-effectiveness of transit is going to lie in passengers per driver, because pending driverless vehicles, the driver is most of the cost. And the only way to get that number high is to run large vehicles in fixed-route services that are so well designed, and optimized over so many purposes, that lots of people ride them. The Uber model does not scale to large-vehicle fixed-route transit, which is also known as cost-effective transit.
Downtowns are big, dense, and need to use street space efficiently, so large vehicles are the key. Compared to big buses with decent ridership, demand-responsive service is a way of carrying very few people at a high cost. There is no way that a demand-responsive solution, in a place where fixed routes could work just as well, makes any sense as a way to make transit affordable to low-income people, one of Ruhnka’s alleged concerns. Affordability is scalability. If a solution doesn’t scale efficiently — in terms of labor cost, energy, and urban space, it will naturally be expensive.
So to the extent that some people think they need a demand-responsive service downtown (apart from paratransit for the disabled) by all means let Uber and Lyft do that. Demand-responsive is such an intrinsically inefficient form of transit that deploying it downtown can only be for the purpose of serving relatively fortunate people at fares much higher than transit fares. That’s a great role for the private sector. There is also a role for demand responsive service in suburban areas where development patterns preclude efficient transit, through contracts between demand responsive providers and transit agencies. But not downtown.
Another way of describing all of the “demand responsive” or “Uberization” fantasies is that they are predicated on moving large amounts of steel and rubber per customer trip, compared to big-vehicle fixed-route transit. Even without considering the economics of labor, this can only be less efficient, in terms of energy and urban space, than what crowded big-vehicle transit achieves.
Elsewhere on the Network today: Greater Greater Washington says a DC gondola might actually be worth studying. ATL Urbanist breaks down Wendell Cox’s arguments in favor of Atlanta sprawl. And Systemic Failure notes one way that California’s cap-and-trade law is subsidizing cars.
Arrival video from house fire in Montgomery County, PA
Thanks to Duane Cornish for send along his early video from a two-alarm house fire Thursday on Patriot Drive in the Collegeville/Trappe section 0f Upper Providence Township, Pennsylvania (Montgomery County).
How George W. Bush Inspired Darrell Hammond's Colonel Sanders Impression
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Sunday, May 31, 2015
Hurricane Andres Strengthens To Category 4 Storm Over Eastern Pacific
The first named storm of the season had maximum sustained winds of 140 mph (220 kph) Sunday night. The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami is forecasting that the storm will slowly weaken over the next 48 hours. Other than strong surf, the storm posed no threats to land. Andres is centered about 800 miles (1,290 kilometers) southwest of the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico, and is moving west at 6 mph (9 kph).
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