If you've followed me for any amount of time (here or previously on Twitter and Facebook before I left those platforms), then it won't surprise you that I'm very happy about yesterday's trial result.
I'm most happy about it not because I hate everything about Donald Trump and everything he stands for (I do) and not because it helps "my team" (that's still unclear) but because it demonstrates that the institution of jury trial still works. An appeals judge can choose to overturn the conviction, that can still happen, and we still have to defeat him at the ballot box, but for today the institution is still functioning as intended.
This ruling demonstrates why strong, robust institutions are more important than ideologies.
A town or neighborhood generally functions as a large village.
But a city does not function like a large town or a large neighborhood. It functions like a collection of competing and cooperating towns and neighborhoods.
I think this is a big reason why capitalism and our car dependent zoning has broken the way cities function. Urban and civil planners and franchise planners, etc. plan out development to optimize cities, not to optimize towns/neighborhoods.
For example, when Walmart plans a new store, they plan to optimize their sales based on service to the larger city, not in service of the town/neighborhood they are opening up in. When city planners plan a new highway, they plan it to optimize transportation in the whole city, not to optimize transportation in the town/neighborhood. Everything is planned to optimize on the city level and the village/town/neighborhood level is sacrificed as a result.
That's why people have to drive 30 minutes to go to a grocery store and 40 minutes to go to church, etc. this is what has killed our communities.
To expand on this, this is also why our "global village" of the #internet fails as a village. Because companies that have taken over the internet didn't treat it like a village, they treat it like city planners treat a city. Optimize everything for the greatest number of users.
Which is part of the interesting thing about #Mastodon and ActivityPub. An individual Mastodon server really does function more like a village than it does a city. It's a small group of people collectively trying to make their little internet community better, and they are more able to police their own users as a result. #ActivityPub is able to function like a more healthy city that supports cooperating and competing towns and villages.
After watching the decidedly poorly thought out #Apple iPad commercial, I kind of suspect it was a set up. It's so bad, it looks intentionally bad.
Like some business guy thought up the idea and told his creative people to do it. His creative people told him it was a bad idea and the guy made them do it anyway, so they said "We are totally going to make that jerk regret this!"
There is another explanation for why the commercial was so bad: It's it's gotten more people talking about it than any other ad I can think of and is probably the most watched, most successful iPad TV ad ever.
2025 represents a very important year in US demographics. 2025 is 18 years from the great recession, and every single year since that date has seen a near continuous decline in US births.
That means, every year going forward, there are going to be fewer students going to colleges, few recruits for the military and fewer workers for employers. This is not a small thing coming very quickly. #demographics#babies#genalpha
Somewhere I have my grandfather's old hand calculator. It is very thin and does basic addition and subtraction in arabic numerals using sliders that you actuate with the tip of a pencil.
"In 2021, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize drug possession. However, the state has recently faced a large rise in overdose deaths and had the second-highest rate of substance abuse disorder in the U.S., according to a 2023 audit report. "
It's not that hard for a public defender to negotiate rehab or something like that in exchange for a guilty plea for first time offenses. Most of the people locked up for drugs are on their second arrest.
Ultimately, I believe neither jail nor rehab does anything good at all because the problem is systemic not individualized. Drug abuse is just one of many many negative consequences of the collapse of social capital.
The best evidence I have for this is Alcoholic's Anonymous. AA is a very successful program for helping people stay sober as long as they are in the program because the program provides a supportive community that rewards positive choices. But, as soon as a person becomes disconnected from the community more often then not the person relapses almost immediately.
The answer to most of our social problems is IRL community.
A feature of the #Episcopal Church I like that wasn't really present in any of my Evangelical churches I grew up in is the acknowledgement that human emotions are complicated and deserve recognition and communal processing. Today is #BlackFriday, for example. A day specifically set aside to recognize human feelings of pain and loss. This is very much at odds with last Sunday's Palm Sunday parade celebration and yesterday's anger and betrayal.