Comments

2

I'm looking at that photo of downtown Atlanta. And I'm reading the caption: "Atlanta, Georgia, the capital of the big stimulus package."

And I'm feeling kind of a different caption: "Atlanta, Georgia, the capital of outdated 20th century transportation planning."

3

I give Charles a gold star for writing "wallah" and actually meaning wallah, rather than misspelling voila like everyone else does on the internet.

4

@1:

But as we know all too well, that won't stop the toddlers from having a continuous meltdown for at least the next two years. Can Biden or Pelosi or Schumer (or all three in concert) just put them in a corner and give them a time out until they can settle down and start acting their actual ages?

5

If you dont have a vaccine passport, you should be prevented from accessing any government or business service. Being a brain dead selfish dipshit is not a protected class. Yet.

7

21% of Washington State residents do not have drivers' licences simply because they are under the age of 15, and can not legally obtain one:

https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/washington/demographic-statistics

You are comparing yourself to children, Charles, to people with unfinished, underdeveloped brains. The percentage of people who are really like you -- people old enough to drive who hold Washington ID cards instead of Driver's licences -- is more like 3%.

Oh, and according to his lawyers, the teen murderer isn't missing, he is merely hiding. Lawyers are great comedians.

8

"Buzz off."

Ha, like it. This is The Stranger, so I expected "Fuck off", but instead you wrote something G rated, perhaps as an homage to our president (everyone knows he is thinking "bullshit" when he says "malarkey", but it is still cool).

Biden will also be more effective than Obama because he gets it. He has been around a while. Obama really did want to govern like a centrist. That "There are no red states, blue states ..." bullshit was really heartfelt. Biden wants to get along too -- I'm sure he has friends on the other side. But when push comes to shove, he will just steamroll those mother fuckers because he has seen it all before. It is up to you Republicans to put on your thinking caps and come up with some new ideas; obstructionism is not unity. Elections have consequences. You mother fuckers lost, now get over it, and try to offer something constructive, instead of pretending you are actually fiscally responsible (that is just ... malarkey).

9

@5 I appreciate where you're coming from there, but let's remember that people with severely impaired cognitive function should and do have specific legal protections.

9

So Everett is losing a bunch of well paying union jobs -- what is essentially the heart of this region, and lead to its middle class, left leaning ethos that preceded the tech boom -- and replacing them with non-union low paying warehouse jobs. All the while, a little bit further south, there are billionaires and multi-millionaires roaming the streets. Pretty fucked situation, really. I feel sorry for Everett, and the region as a whole. So much fucking greed.

10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUg8S8_zRR0

13

@9 Everett isn't "losing" jobs. The jobs are being taken away by a corporation that HATES unions so much that they are willing to move their factories to locations where local laws make busting unions easy. Boeing is willing to move to locations where their factories lack skilled workers and are subject to endless delays and quality control issues that will KILL THEIR COMPANY rather than deal with a union. Strangely, the billionaires and millionaires of Seattle have little to do with the situation in Everett. Everett is being screwed over by a caproate office that moved to Chicago years ago - in order to make sure the bosses could screw over Everett without any personal feelings or town loyalty getting in the way.

14

Corporate office. Evidently caproate is "a synthetic steroid hormone that is similar to medroxyprogesterone acetate." A Caproate office would be.... interesting.

15

@2, 11,

You don't know the half of it!

Atlanta and the suburbs have tons of railroad track. Tons. Atlanta was a major hub right around the time trains were becoming a big thing in this country. ALL the infrastructure for railway mass transportation is just sitting there waiting to be used.

And what do the people vote for? Less funding for MARTA (the rail system here) and more funding to build endless extra lanes on highways that will never, ever be uncrowded.

We've got some MARTA lines here, but as I've talked about on other posts in the past, public transportation here is: 1) more expensive than driving, 2) slower than driving, and 3) less convenient than driving.

I would love to take the train downtown more, but I never do because it makes no sense time, money, or convenience wise.

It's fucking ridiculous. I just hope that as more progressive minded people move here, as the state slowly turns from purple to blue, we'll eventually get better public transportation. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

16

@7: You're claiming that the majority of 662,843 WA residents with ID cards are under the age of 15? Yeah, no.

Did you actually look at the page where the percentage was calculated from?

17

@16 You're right, that should have read "old enough but not too old to drive." My bad.

18

Urgutha @15, thanks for that perspective. I forgot you were in the ATL. I just know the history that Seattle couldn't pass its rapid transit balllot measures in 1968 and 1970, and so the federal funding went to MARTA instead. BTW, the 1968 ballot measure was named Forward Thrust. Try using that name today! Also, I think one or both of these measures had to meet a 60% threshold because of the taxes. Kind of the regional equivalent of the Mitch McConnell filibuster. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Link_light_rail#Predecessors

And of course, the Atlanta region had no idea how to do MARTA right, or build around it right. So little good MARTA did.

"I just hope that as more progressive minded people move here, as the state slowly turns from purple to blue, we'll eventually get better public transportation. But I'm not going to hold my breath."

I appreciate the sentiment here. I continue to be pleasantly stunned by what I hear from afar about the new Atlanta and the new Georgia. But building better mass transit is just such an incredibly onerous and protracted political lift that a region can be plenty progressive and still not have a viable path toward getting it done.

P.S. Great comment by sdstarr @13.

19

/ready 2 pay/

"New buyers just starting their searches are joining the race with others who have been shopping for months, said Nicole Bascomb, who is owner and broker at Bascomb Real Estate Group and focuses on South King County. Last January, Bascomb said she had three clients actively looking. This week, she has 12.

'The inventory just can’t keep up,' Bascomb said.

In December, months of inventory, a measure of how long it would take to sell all of the homes on the market at current demand, was at its lowest point in at least four years."

FWD: FWD: UNPOSSIBLE!!!1!!! Don't they know that Seattle IS DYING OMG OMG OMG!!11!! What about the chiiiiiiiiilllllllldreeeeeeennnnnn!!!!!

20

“It will hurt our business.”

yeah. we gotta get those floating covid concentration camps back in Biz Instantly or, according to The SEATTLE Times, seattle's gonna go Bust. oh and Adios Boeing. your corporate board of misdirectors is gonna 737MAX your little Corporation. didja Know that? thnx, Times!

21

@18,

Yeah, MARTA's a great example of half-assed measures. Way back before I was here, they built lots of stations and got everything ready to go... and then just stopped funding it. So it really does feel half completed.

And yeah, like most major metropolitan areas (Seattle included probably) it's deep blue liberal in Atlanta itself and slowly gets more and more conservative the further from the city center you go. You guys have your redneck Eastern Washington. We have our redneck Northern Georgia.

22

This made my Friday.

23

"I think all of us would like unity. I think President Biden has said all the right things in his inauguration. The question is, are we going to do more than talk about unity?" --Lindsley Graham alleged Senator from . . . somewhere below the Bible Belt?

yeah let's do More, Senator:
let's do JUSTICE thefuck
BEFORE we even think
about "moving On" &
letting you NeoCon
Insurrectionists
simply Avoid
Culpability.

Insurrection has
CONSEQUENCES.

24

Missing cows? Black holes? Coincidence? I think not.

Cowincidence possibly.

25

@5 - not sure that I'd block them from ALL commercial services. But your mangy unvaccinated virus-spewing ass surely does not belong on a plane, bus, or train.

And NO ONE belongs on a cruise ship.

26

well 'we' may not be IN the Superbowl
but that doesn’t mean we don’t ROCK
from today’s NYT:

The N.F.L. Had Over 700 Coronavirus Positives. The Seahawks Had None.

The only team to play the entire season without any confirmed positive cases did so with innovative thinking, vigilance to protocols and some Pete Carroll-style competition.

“They invented a playbook for a safe practice environment at a time when the future was deeply uncertain and people were questioning the wisdom of pro sports starting up,” said Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist who has helped organizations respond to the coronavirus and informally advised the Seahawks. “You have to be willing to absorb some costs, and you need leaders who can communicate in a crisis.”

By Ken Belson

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/sports/football/seahawks-coronavirus-nfl.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

'Leaders in a Crisis'?
gawd what must that Look like?
just going about my Business, I've
noticed people seem a little less Uptight lately

as trumpf's Nightmare Slowly recedes

27

Meanwhile "Amazon Is Forcing Its Warehouse Workers Into Brutal ‘Megacycle’ Shifts." Which, having done a stint at Amazon myself, sounds like absolute hell.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gk3w/amazon-is-forcing-its-warehouse-workers-into-brutal-megacycle-shifts

28

@24 - some alphabetical prestidigitation and... wallah! Bravo.

29

@27: Ugh. I'll aim to just use Amazon for Prime Video and Whole Foods.

30

I don't know anyone who would get on a cruise right now but if by Aug/Sept we've vaccinated 70% of the population I don't see any reason why someone who can prove they have been vaccinated can not board a ship. If we are going to allow for other forms of large gatherings by then it seems odd to preclude cruises categorically through 2022. You all make fun of it but the economic pain downtown is real and rather than writing off another summer in Feb we should wait and see if the new administration can accelerate the vaccination schedule (the J&J submittal for FDA approval will help immensely). In this case, Canada seems to have made the decision for us. I wonder if the portends keeping the border itself closed for the remainder of this year.

31

pointing out the absurd
isn't (necessarily) making
fun of another's economic pain
D-13r although schadenfreude happens

32

oh and the cautious approach seems more like the Opposite of the trumpf "organization" -- promise little and Deliver a lot. if it's Safe to open up they'll likely do so. or perhaps sooner.

those floating petri dishes need Dynomite HVAC systems with micro filters or whatever -- they seem remarkably susceptible to mini-epidemics (and recently year-long Lockdowns) -- why Risk it?

33

Not so fast on the vaccine passports. The health authorities up to now do not have a firm handle on how long the vaccines provide immunity from covid-19. I'll be easier to establish some sort of guidelines for how long the passports are good for once they establish duration of immunity from the vaccines. Also, there are new and more lethal mutations of covid-19 coming down the pike - The UK mutation, and the South African one - which have shown the ability to evade the neutralizing antibodies of the vaccines. The South African one, in particular, is a much tougher one that totally evades the neutralizing antibodies. While the pharma companies are working on booster shots for the mRNA vaccines to fight the tougher mutations, we will likely spend the bulk of this year fighting a reheated pandemic come April that will probably force us into severe lockdowns similar to March of last year.

34

@33 Current vaccines are 40-50% less effective against the South African variant-- it does not "totally evade" antibodies generated by these vaccines. And there is some preliminary research which suggests current vaccines are still highly effective (~85%) at protecting a patient infected with the South African variant from hospitalization or death.

The fact that we don't know much yet about how the vaccines work over time and across mutations not only means that we don't know how long protection will last, as you say, but also that we can't predict current vaccines will be overwhelmed by the ordinary process of genetic variation in SARS-COV-2 within the next few months, either.

If we do get another wave in the spring, I'm betting it will not be due to a new strain overwhelming vaccines, but because once again, we open things up and relax countermeasures exactly when we shouldn't (because nobody in authority has internalized the decades upon decades of modelling and hard data that predict successive waves of infection. Epidemiologists have known how this works since the 1930s, ffs).

We won't even have enough people vaccinated by April for a (partial) reduction in efficacy (for some strains) to make much difference-- we'll be ~30% vaxed by then at current rates, and we need to be somewhere north of 70% to get R below 1.

35

@ 30

Well, if you're keen on joining the floating norovirus incubators- that's one thing. The trouble is- as we've seen, these polluting behemoths spread disease to every port they visit.

36

Don't other countries require vaccinations before travel? I thought that was routine.

As for the Eastern WA missing cattle and black holes, isn't that around the area where the guy claims to have a bottomless pit in his backyard that he threw dead cows into? Maybe that's where they went.


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