Nick Doty @npd@octodon.social

A dangerous precedent: soda companies paid to put an intentionally harmful but potentially popular measure on the California ballot (all local taxes would require 2/3rds ballot initiatives) and then convinced the legislature to block new municipal soda taxes for 13 years in order to withdraw the measure from the ballot.

Now that large companies are aware of this possibility, I fear the extortion will happen every election year.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-cities-banned-from-imposing-new-soda-13035692.php

Henry George wrote _Progress and Poverty_ in San Francisco, pawning all his belongings to cover the cost of the plates because no one would publish it, recognizing exactly the same problems that we see in San Francisco today. And he identifies the remedy (property tax, in particular tax on land valuable by virtue of location), the very remedy that wealthy voters have explicitly excluded from California with Proposition 13.

Oil portrait of Henry George, that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

To those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state, and would strive for its attainment.
-- San Francisco, March, 1879

¡Ya voté!

This weekend is City Nature Challenge!
http://citynaturechallenge.org/

If you haven't used iNaturalist yet, check it out: just take a picture of a plant or animal you see in the wild and get advice on what species it is.

Here are my observations from a short trip to Maui last weekend, including the Haleakalā Silversword (Argyroxiphium sandwicense ssp. macrocephalum) and a Green Sea Turtle:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?d1=2018-04-19&d2=2018-04-22&place_id=any&subview=grid&user_id=npdoty

Cesar Chavez & S. Van Ness: a game, with two players.

The pedestrian runs across the crosswalk and tries to make it to the other side of the street. The other player is the car, who, egged on by a green light, guns the engine and tries to hit the pedestrian or force them back to the sidewalk.

@qubyte this Glitch link you posted in GitHub doesn't work for me:
https://glitch.com/edit/#!/mastodon-webmention-relay?path=README.md

Is it possible you didn't finish publishing the glitch yet? I'm definitely interested in it.

@CobaltVelvet when I just logged in on octodon, the 2fa code page was in Chinese, while the rest of the login was en-us, as I'd expected.

WIP: the IETF's working groups, as seen/connected through mailing list traffic
#ietf #infoviz #gephi

Remember what you are grateful for, and keep that list up to date.

And, if you're a Web nerd like me, put that list online: https://npdoty.name/gratitude.md

"W1A" is unexpectedly amazing, like a self-referential BBC combination of "The Office" and "Yes, Minister".

I feel like there's actually no one I know that I could recommend it to, but meanwhile, I'm laughing, loudly, through every episode.

Want: one of those smart digital assistants, but when you ask it what time it is, it responds with the current reading of the Doomsday Clock.

How would I contact graphic designers interested in commissions to make icon sets?

I want to make a set of icons (for use as Slack/Mastodon custom emoji and other contexts) for plant species. In particular, I would want to start with common California-native trees and flowers, but this could be a wide-ranging project.

:quercus_agrifolia: :sequoia_sempervirens: :eschscholzia_californica:

#icons #art #commissions

May there be shared blocklists, content warnings, notification silencers, readability modes and so much more
http://bcc.npdoty.name/May-there-be-shared-blocklists

A reflection on the media inundation of a family member, and a reminder to myself and others about #privacy, #harassment, filtering and #accessibility.

> "I have something you want," his hand touched the package. "You have something I want ... five minutes here ... an hour someplace else ... two ... four ... eight ... Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself ... Every day die a little ... It takes up The Time...."

He moved back into the kitchen, his voice loud and clear: "Five years a piece. Nobody gives a better deal on the street."

📚 William S. Burroughs, _Naked Lunch_, on the currency (Time) used to purchase heroin

> Because man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extra-natural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.

Free band name: the Ontological Centaurs.

@rowan next PR provides documentation on running smilodon in Heroku (compatible with the free tier).
https://github.com/rowanlupton/smilodon/pull/91

Here's my mini-installation: https://smil-odon.herokuapp.com