Jolson Olson > Recent Status Updates

I love Italian City-States Magitek Steampunk Slavery World but the friend who recommended this has done me a grievous injury by leaving out that this book is *dripping* in "YA Voice." Illiterate thieves and inanimate objects should not sound like MCU characters! Fight me!

Description of how the LAPD dropped dynamite on the Black Panther office during their December 1969 raid on the latter's headquarters. When you google this, the AI confidently and incorrectly asserts that the only police bombing of a city was the Philly MOVE bombings.

Thrilled to add this book to the elite cadre of texts written by liberals who not only identify a problem correctly but also offer plausible and actionable solutions in a concise manner. Marshall calls for a breaking down of the silos around traffic engineering and pleas for more environmental science, public health, and sociology courses to be added to civil engineering degree programs.

The hardest part of the book so far concerns the assignment of blame in traffic fatalities. A motorist can be found liable for hitting a cow; but most times in most places in America, a pedestrian will be found liable for a driver hitting them.

There are some eye-watering case studies in this section, but they exist with a purpose. Those with the power to *assign* blame have the actual power to improve road safety.

An examination of how "human error" is constructed in measurements of collisions, morbidly and mortality. We're setting drivers up for failure with some of our design choices and then pin all the blame on them when those design choices kill someone. Example given: "permissive signaling," where pedestrians and drivers are both given the green light, promotes driver on pedestrian collision

Some exploration into the flawed methodologies that shape our roadways. The mythology of the safety of "vehicular cycling," i.e. riding your bike in car traffic, was borne from a single anecdotal study conducted on a single bike ride. The failure to differentiate fender-benders from fatal accidents when seeking to reduce collisions sometimes has bad outcomes.

In the introduction, the author promises to ruin driving for readers. Notable statistic cited: an estimated 13 million hospitalizations and 40 million years of life lost annually, globally, from traffic collisions.

A lot of surveillance technology is field tested on Palestinians in occupied territory. Countries (including USA, Western European states, Mexico, and Gulf States) and private companies buy Israeli spyware, HUMINT, and SIGINT software. It's a lot easier for Israel to sell surveillance to adversaries or pariah states than it is to sell weapons because use of the former is often undetected.

How does the saying go? 'When one person dies, it's a tragedy; when a thousand die, it's a statistic?' We already have the means of predicting the average longevity of large groups of people (with error bars, as the scientists in the book use). Is the difference between this fiction and our reality just the immediacy?

My favorite essay so far is "Democratizing American Philanthropy."

Interesting exploration of the history of power generation in the developing world. IMF and World Bank impose market logic on power generation as a condition of development loans in the third world, which will cause the countries with the fastest-growing electricity demand to disproportionately invest in fossil fuels over renewables.