Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 18/02/2025This attitude is one of the reasons we've been losing elections recently. The US's big tech companies are now the biggest, fastest-growing, and most profitable companies in the world, and have immensely enriched Americans at large. 250
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 30/01/2025It's seeming like this will have been the deadliest US air disaster since November 2001. 010
Reposted by Ben McIlwainjamelle @jamellebouie.net · 28/01/2025www.nytimes.com/2024/12/18/o... 1179343387900
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 27/01/2025If Trump actually wants to end Russia's war on Ukraine, then relieving the pressure on Russia by pausing all aid to Ukraine makes no damn sense. The way to get Russia to back off is by making it clear that our support for Ukraine will only grow, not end. Russia can handle an isolatedUkraine. 020
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 21/01/2025Imagine being so carbrained that you, a Democratic politician, bend the knee to Trump over *congestion pricing*. New Jersey, can you please elect better politicians? You're a solidly blue state, get someone who won't brown nose Trump this badly. 060
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 20/01/2025I don't think the ostrich approach is the way to go. 020
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 20/01/2025Welp, exciting the Paris climate accords is an unmitigated disaster. We're just going to watch the whole world burn because selfish 80-year-olds don't care how bad it'll get after they die, huh. 330
Reposted by Ben McIlwainRiver_Tam @rivertam.bsky.social · 19/01/2025You could convince zoomers to read text posts if you pretended they were subtitles to a TV show 0243
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 15/01/2025Such a good point. The Oscars will raise so much money if they properly monetize it for aid. 010
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 12/01/2025DEI and idpol generally are dead. Zuckerberg sees which way the winds have blown on this and is simply getting ahead of it. In my little neck of the woods, the death knell for DEI seems to have been summer 2022, when tech hiring abruptly reversed into tech layoffs. 000
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 10/01/2025"Ready Player One is despicable for many reasons ..." You really don't have to be outraged about everything. It was a fun book and a fun movie, nothing more. 000
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 10/01/2025$23M more for the LA Fire Department wouldn't have done a damn thing. This is a structural issue, with root causes going back decades: global warming, building too far into the wilderness, and setting aside land as a nature preserve instead of rigorously clearing it of brush as they used to. 010
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 09/01/2025Home insurance in wildfire-prone areas of California is done. All insurers will leave the state entirely if necessary, but the existing CA policy of forcing insurers to keep money-losing contracts on the books simply won't continue. And the fair market premium for fire insurance there will be HIGH. 010
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 09/01/2025I'm starting to think large swaths of California might need a non-flammable requirement for new construction in their building codes, like NYC and Chicago have had for over a century. You can't just be having all these houses made of wood that will go up in flames in wildfires. 010
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 08/01/2025This is funny, because Ireland is a completely insignificant force militarily. They aren't even part of NATO! They have zero ability to enforce anything an entire continent away, plus Israel isn't a signatory to the Rome Statute anyway. www.cnn.com/2025/01/07/m...cnn.comIreland joins genocide case against Israel at International Court of Justice | CNNIreland has joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, the International Court of Justice announced Tuesday morning. 020
Reposted by Ben McIlwainSam @samd.bsky.social · 07/01/2025Day 3 of congestion pricing update: it’s 8:30AM, the peak of morning rush hour and basically zero traffic getting into Manhattan. Incredible. 1138846
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 07/01/2025Yeah so the original framing reads as more factually accurate to me than the proposed rewrite. 000
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 07/01/2025We (the Democrats) really fucked up by constantly attacking big tech and pushing them into the arms of the right. They have so much money that can be used to buy elections, I don't see how we can recover from this. 000
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 07/01/2025Bluesky needs a way to disable follow notifications. I don't care that some random bot has followed me, and it happens dozens of times per day. The only follow notification I ever want to see is if someone follows me *back*, because then I know they're not a bot. 000
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 07/01/2025Will never understand how "disabled" overtook "handicapped" on the euphemism treadmill. "Disabled" sounds way more like an old-timey slur to me, probably because I can't help but think of dictionary definition #2: "rendered inoperative (as by being damaged or deliberately altered)". 000
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 06/01/2025"People that consume the most meat are the poorest among us, doing so by necessity". What planet is she from?? 000
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 06/01/2025A take so hot it's wrong. Of course surcharges on environmentally harmful goods and services, that reduce overall consumption of said goods and services, is good for the environment, full stop. 000
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 06/01/2025I don't have any way to put numbers to it, but I walked to and from work today and it sure FELT like there were fewer cars on the roads! Curious to see what tomorrow looks like (Monday generally is the lightest traffic day). 000
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 06/01/2025Every day that goes by, I regret even more how restrained the police on January 6th were in the face of a violent, deadly insurrection. Trump is gonna pardon everyone who was involved in it, but that won't do any good to the dead. Too few on Jan 6th experienced immediate consequences. 120
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 06/01/2025January 6th is increasingly looking like the Beer Hall Putsch: A serious event that wasn't taken seriously enough, with horrible ramifications to come after the second more determined attempt. 000
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 06/01/2025I don't for one second believe that this man is going to give up a parking space to make a short trip that he could simply walk. People who own cars in the city are psychotic about their spaces (because it takes so much time to find one); they'd never give one up to actually use the car! 100
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 06/01/2025The solution for this is restaurants, which is where an increasingly large percentage of my meals have come from over time as my income has increased, as spending the time buying groceries and cooking meals is a less necessary use of my limited time. 100
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 05/01/2025What is with all the fake OF-shilling accounts on this site? The majority of my notifications are follows from clearly fake accounts. It's not a good experience as it's teaching me to ignore notifications, so then I'll less likely to respond when they're actually someone engaging with me. 000
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 05/01/2025Excited to see how much less congestion there is on my commute tomorrow now that NYC finally has congestion pricing in effect (thanks for nothing Hochul). 110
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 03/01/2025"They also said that they had no way of anticipating that the attacker would jump up onto the Bourbon Street sidewalk." Are you kidding me?! It's super obvious that vehicles can drive onto sidewalks and security plans must install bollards on them too. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/u...nytimes.comCould Better Security Have Stopped the New Orleans Terror Attack?City officials were warned in 2019 that the bollards designed to block vehicles did “not appear to work.” They were being fixed when a truck rammed through Bourbon Street on Wednesday. 100
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 01/01/2025Oh hey, more Islamist terrorism killing people in the US. Great. Meanwhile, all the protest marches I see coming through my neighborhood are against Israel, who isn't our enemy in the way that the Islamists are. But yes let's cozy up to terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah 🙄 000
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 30/12/2024People love to hate on the health insurance companies, but frankly I'm impressed by how much mine pays out on absurdly high claims. The issue IMO is how much the providers are charging in the first place. These numbers are clearly made up, which is the fault of the hospitals/doctors, not insurance. 110
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 30/12/2024I still don't understand what Hamas was thinking kidnapping all those civilians (incl babies and elderly) on October 7th. It clearly didn't prevent Israel from retaliating, indeed it probably aggravated it and means that it will continue indefinitely, so what was the thought process there? 100
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 27/12/2024The leading cause of aircraft fatalities is now anti-aircraft weaponry. (See the Russian shoot-down of an Azerbaijani civilian airliner as the most recent example.) Don't book flights that go anywhere near Russia, apparently. 110
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 25/12/2024Getting serious pro-murder echo chamber vibes from this website. (Referring to Luigi.) People, supporting murder for political ends is literally fascism. And when you get fascism, you know who actually ends up on top: The fascists, not the poor, weak, disenfranchised, minorities, etc. 740
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 24/12/2024Twitter is making it hard to post these days. There's so many false positives on the automated posting detection, a lot of which seems to be driven by very basic and flawed keyword detection. Think I'll be moving here primarily going forward. 240
Ben McIlwain @cydeweys.bsky.social · 20/12/2024Saudi Arabia clearly hasn't solved their terrorism export problem yet. And this massacre further proves the point that the most successful terrorists are the smart, educated ones. 130
