blog 2, old joke about electric something

Pennsylvania is currently working on its budget, and one of if not THE main sticking point is funding for public transit—all transit in the state, but mainly for SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, which serves Philadelphia and its surrounding counties and is facing a $213 million budget deficit. The PRT, which serves Pittsburgh, is also in danger.

As of this morning, SEPTA has to start the process of cutting services by 45%—canceling some train and bus lines entirely, implementing a 9pm curfew on subway lines, reducing frequency, and canceling sporting event services (all of our professional league stadiums are accessible by one subway line and a significant number of fans take it)—all because politicians in rural counties have been demonizing SEPTA as a “chauffeur service for city residents” that doesn’t benefit the rest of the commonwealth. I am not joking. A state rep literally sent a letter to constituents describing buses that way.

But what is so fucking infuriating to me is that at one of the rallies, I learned ONE SIMPLE FACT that, in my mind, should have ended the entire debate: Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties are the only revenue-positive counties in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The money to fix roads and bridges in every other county comes from Philadelphia’s economy, which is supported by the fact that people take the train in from collar counties to work here, and people go to sporting events here and spend money, and residents who are paying significantly higher rents than anywhere else in the state but still living in poverty can get to their jobs without having a car. (Not to mention the fact that our cash-strapped education department saves money by having kids take SEPTA instead of school buses.)

If no agreement is reached and these cuts fully go into effect—some of them are starting by the end of the month and a second round in January—it very well may cost thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue, which will have reverberating effects on every county in the commonwealth, including the poorest who are most reliant on state funding.

This isn't unidirectional.

A lot of people need to face the truth that rural and suburban areas are legitimately privileged in American society, and the bigotry agaisnt cities is inherently tied to anti immigration sentiment, racism, queerphobia, and Christian supremacy.

How convenient that every opinion you dislike is held by people with every other opinion or trait you dislike, so you can just ignore everything they actually say.

Tell some poor rando living in a shack on a mountain and surviving on roadkill and food stamps that they're privileged, and they're going to laugh at you.

Even living in a suburb doesn't make you privileged. Take a gander at Detroit.

One of the world's largest industrial mines is in the California desert

“Roughly 4 million tons of borate ore are mined here every year, worth on the order of $600 to $800 million. All just a few hours from Los Angeles”

It’s foreign owned. The mine is called The Rio Tinto Boron Mine, it’s in Boron, California. It’s 100% owned and operated by Rio Tinto, a dual-listed Anglo-Australian mining company

- Rio Tinto plc, registered in England and

Wales

- Rio Tinto Limited, registered in Australia

Why are foreign companies pulling hundreds of millions of dollars of minerals from America

A US mine that produces 1/3 of the world supply of boron isn't owned by an American company. It's owned by Australia and England

That's between $700 million to $800 million leaving the US every year minus operating expenses and payroll

current university students, assuming they went to university at 18 (which would be most of the first years) were maybe 4 when smartphones got popular? the world they have grown up with is one where apps are the only way one interacts with technology, where social media increasingly demands personal information, where someone who refuses to go along with those norms automatically has something to hide, which means everyone polices themselves as if their every fashion choice or sentence structure is subject to judge and jury, because it is

we live in an age which discourages asking questions, where every question is met with offense and "just google it", while google itself fills its entire first page with ads and misinformation

and tumblr is the only place i've seen critique chatgpt. i've had windows 11 (which every laptop comes with these days) advertise chatgpt to me as a search engine

it's not a search engine. frankly, google hardly counts as one either these days. but if you're not surrounded by people telling you chatgpt is bad and fake, how are you supposed to know? when your computer and your phone and your relatives who don't know much more about technology than you all think it's a search engine with a voice, it wouldn't occur to you that all of them are wrong

and they're clearly not stupid! that's the point of this as an exercise - their teacher is telling them for the first time that chatgpt might be wrong. your job is to find out if chatgpt is wrong. and they did the assignment! they had a reason for the first time to question chatgpt, and all of them came to the conclusion that yeah, it is lying to us, and so is everyone else who said it was always right

and they'll go forward now not only knowing they can't blindly trust what computers tell them, but they'll spread that message around, which will decrease misinformation on a bunch of levels

"This shit ain't nothin' to me, man!"