収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

I bought something for my second bike trailer build on Saturday.

The trailer’s basically been done for weeks already. I’m adding details and accessories now, like, I want to sew a cover, and I want to add reflectors. So I took it for another little shakedown ride, this time to a hardware store I found out had DOT-grade adhesive reflectors in stock for… more money than I’d like, but not unreasonable money.

Here’s what I’ve done with those stickers so far. I think it’s pretty good. The rear view is my biggest concern, given that my bike is well-lit, and this… frankly ugly flash photo… makes the reflectors pop well, showing how they’d reflect headlights. It’ll help:

But it occurred to me as I was doing all this that…

This is the first time I’ve bought something for this project.

The trailer frame was salvaged from a semi-wrecked kiddo hauler abandoned outdoors for over a year. The platform is made from a cargo pallet someone illegally dumped and I salvaged; the metal clamps holding it in place I shaped out of old building strapping. I literally found the warning flag pole on the street, and it inserts into a metal tube salvaged from a housemate’s broken laundry rack. I made a flag for it from scrap fabric. The cage is made from Buy Nothing-listed DIY cube shelving, the kind that never really works right, but there’s nothing wrong with the wire squares that a whole bunch of zip ties can’t fix. Other parts are 3D-printed, designed by me, printed by me, at home.

Everything else was just ordinary supplies I already had.

But when it came to the reflectors… I looked around a little, but then… I just went and bought something. And I have kind of mixed feelings about that!

I mean, it’s fine. Really. At some point, I’m going to want to replace these tyres, too, and that’s a purchase – they were also in the outdoors for at least a year and as a result are semi-rotted. They’re only still usable because I used a lot of silicone glue to make a reinforcement coat on the walls. (Hey, it’s not stupid if it works, and it works.) So sooner or later, money was going to be spent.

But even so, just buying something – even if it’s something you legitimately can’t make at home, like DOT-spec reflective material – feels like cheating. I kinda don’t like it.

Part of it is that I started making these cargo carriers around the time Anna got laid off, and even after she finally got a new job earlier this year, I kept the same approach. Sure, it helped that I already had basically everything I needed by that time, but also, we’re trying to make up for a lot of lost money and time, so I kept doing things the same way.

Until today, when I didn’t. I did it the normal way instead. It’s a very normal thing. You need an item, a part, whatever – you can just buy it.

And… maybe… maybe it’s just how extremely abnormal everything else is right now, in this endless emergency… but…

I just don’t know how I feel about that.

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Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 2.0.7 – 23 November 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 2.0.7.

This release contains two major corrections to the 2 Line Bike Connector Map, as well as notice of a December 1-5 closure of the EastRail Trail in Renton near the Seahawks Training Centre.

Here’s the complete changes list:

• WARNING: EastRail Trail South in Renton near the Seahawks Training Centre will be CLOSED from December 1-5 for regravelling. (MEGAMAP only)
• CORRECTION: 132nd/134th from NE 24th to NE 60th in Bellevue along Bridal Trails Park is currently INCORRECTLY labelled as having bike lanes. IT DOES NOT. This will be corrected locally (ala Seattle corrections) and I will relay the error to the maintainers of the 2 Line Bike Connector Map. Thanks to @astruder for the correction. (MEGAMAP only)
• CORRECTION: NE 40th in Bellevue between 140th and 148th Ave NE is currently INCORRECTLY labelled as having bike lanes. IT DOES NOT. This will be corrected local (ala Seattle corrections) and I will relay the error to the maintainers of the 2 Line Bike Connector Map. Thanks to @astruder for the correction. (MEGAMAP only)
• REMOVED: Work on Sammamish River Trail in Woodinville between 175th and 178th is functionally complete, and no more closures are listed. (Both maps)

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because honestly it doesn’t.

Enjoy biking!

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

We saw what happened last night. If you didn’t: eight fuckheads went over (7 Democrats, 1 Republican) to end the shutdown. They got absolutely fucking nothing for it. NOTHING.

The Democrats and one independant siding with Republicans on the vote Sunday night were Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., John Fetterman, D-Pa., Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., Tim Kaine, D-Va., Angus King, I-Maine, Jackie Rosen, D-Nev., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.

However. There’s one last long shot, but you have to go from zero to 100 on this right the fuck now. You may not have until the afternoon, you almost certainly don’t have until tomorrow. You’ve got to go RIGHT NOW.

There’s going to be a series of steps before this is over. As I understand it, IT IS NOT YET OVER, THERE IS ONE MORE 60-PERSON VOTE. We have to get at least one of these fuckheads to go “oh shit, what was I doing?” and change their mind.

They need to see an absolute eruption of fury.

I don’t want to link to Threads, so I’m posting text from a post there, telling you to WRITE, CALL, BOMBARD ON SOCIAL MEDIA, SCREAM, most particularly at these four:

TIM KAINE (VA)
MAGGIE HASSAN (NH)
JEANNE SHAHEEN (NH)
JACKY ROSEN (NV)

Quoting OP:

“Is the shutdown over? Not yet. Tonight’s vote was only step 1 of 5. There’s still another 60-vote hurdle, amendments, and then the House. Nothing has reopened. Pressure matters right now—especially on (Tim Kaine, VA), (Maggie Hassan, NH), (Jeanne Shaheen, NH), and (Jacky Rosen, NV).”

Here’s what I wrote variations of tonight, just after the betrayal vote:

How DARE you cave?

HOW. DARE. YOU. CAVE.

The Republicans are toxic, the election gave Democrats their first hope in a year, Trump is the most unpopular he’s ever been and you’re SURRENDERING?! You’re giving up the ONLY piece of leverage we have in exchange for… a fucking SHOW VOTE? A show vote that means NOTHING?! From a party who LIES like they BREATHE?

I am repulsed. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!

Frankly it’d serve you right if they didn’t even have the show vote. I hope they don’t. I hope they rub your face in it.

I want my goddamn contributions back. I need to send them to whoever primaries you, and the rest of your little pack of coward turncoats. Seriously, if there was a way after all this time to yank back every dollar I gave you, I would.

Yeah, I know, I’m not a constituent but this fascist MAGA Republican Party budget affects me just as much as everyone else and you’re the one yanking them from the jaws of defeat to hand them a victory.

Clear the goddamn seat and make room for someone who might actually vote like a Democrat.

Frankly – you should just resign.

Get loud. Right now.

And primary every single one of these motherfuckers. They’ve all got to go.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

POLLS ARE CLOSED, thank you for voting! Original post below.

You can still drop off your ballot at a ballot dropoff box until 8pm. Not later! But until 8pm Cascadian/Pacific.

California, I don’t know how your elections work but I do know that your voting also goes until 8pm your time.

There’s important questions on this ballot, even in an off year, both up here and in California. You probably know the ones. And you’ve got time.

Get going. RIGHT now. You can still make it!

Go!

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

As we head into the SNAP shutdown – however long it may last, and while I’d love be surprised and see it end tomorrow with the Republicans giving in on their whole refusal-to-negotiate shutdown bullshit, I’m leaning towards it lasting a while – I want to hand out a couple of critically important items, one short and easy, one long and difficult.

First, the easy one: food banks need your money right now. If you have spare money, now’s a great time to give them some. They’re going to bear the immediate brunt of the hunger, and will need every dime they can manage. Some states are stepping in – Washington State just advanced a couple million a week to local food banks – but not all. Particularly not red states.

No judgement if you can’t, obviously. Everything is terrible. But if you can, now’s a great time.

Secondly, the difficult one: I want to talk about the context in which this is happening, and why the money matters so much, and why it’s really quite important to give now if you can.

Topline inflation numbers – which we don’t even have right now, I remind you, thanks to the Republican MAGA shutdown – are not representative of a fixed basket of goods. They representing a shifting basket of goods, a price basket that is intended to meet the same needs, but does not always have the same contents.

Remember that term: price basket, both fixed and shifting. It’s important.

That’s because the topline inflation numbers are less about mechanical cost and more about how much are people spending within a category. While those two numbers may look similar at first glance, they are in fact very different.

Let me show you how different, simplifying by only using… beef.

If beef prices go up – as they have, through the roof, under Trump – then the bureau assumes that people will move to cheaper cuts of beef.

(Really, they assume that they’ll likely move to cheaper types of meat outright – that people will forego beef sometimes, and instead eat more chicken or fish, just for example. But again, we’re sticking with beef for this example.)

Let’s say people had been buying a lot of porterhouse cut beef last year. That’s not the most expensive cut of beef, but it’s on the higher end.

Let’s say porterhouse has gone from $10/pound to $15/pound over the last year. That’s a lot, obviously; I’m picking that big a jump because I want clearer maths, not just because that’s about the kind of price change we’ve seen in beef since Trump took over. Even though we have.

Let’s say that as a result, people who were buying porterhouse last year have shifted this year to buying T-bone stakes. Still a very good cut, nutritionally equal, but cheaper. This is the sort of rational decision the Federal government assumes people will make, and which they look for in sales.

Now we’re talking T-bone steaks. Let’s say that over the same period of time, T-bone cuts went from $9 a pound to $13 a pound. Still a big jump! Less of one, but still big, and still a cheaper cut.

Still with me? Let’s recap:

• Porterhouse went from $10/pound to $15/pound over a year.
• T-bone went from $9 to $13 a pound over the same year.
• People bought less porterhouse and more T-bone as a result, shifting their purchase pattern to save money in the face of higher prices.
• We’re about to calculate the inflation rate.

How do you think this year-over-year inflation rate would be calculated?

$15/$10, producing a 50% annual inflation rate? No.

$13/$9, producing a 44% inflation rate? Also no.

Remember above, I said “price basket” would be important? This is why. They’d use the current price basket against the year ago price basket, even though the basket no longer contains the same item.

Which means that they’d calculate the price increase as such:

$13/$10, producing a 30% inflation rate.

Now something I want to make clear is that if you are talking about cost of living, this is reasonable. It does reflect real-life behaviour. They aren’t “cheating” by doing this if the goal is to measure cost of living, which it mostly is. (If prices go down, which happens regularly in food, they do adjust back the other way too. Just to get that on the record.)

So where a fixed goods price basket would show a 50% or 44% inflation rate, depending upon which kind of stake was in it, the shifting price basket – the cost of living adjusted basket – would show a 30% inflation rate, because that’s how much people are actually spending.

How happy you are about that change in your basket doesn’t really factor in so much.

Now that we’ve made it through all that noise – why is this relevant?

Because people already buying on the very low end don’t have as much manoeuvring room to change their purchase choices. And in that context, the fixed price basket becomes more important than the shifting price basket, not less.

Anna and I have extremely good budgeting. And even during all we’ve been through over the last couple of years, we’ve remained fairly price-insensitive over what foods we choose to eat.

As a result, I know a few important things:

• I know what we spent on a monthly basis a year ago, what that averaged out to over five months as of each month.
• I know what we’re spending now, and how that’s averaged out over the last five months.
• I know that where groceries are concerned, what we buy really hasn’t changed much, due to that price insensitivity. It’s changed some, but it hasn’t changed a lot.

And knowing all that, I know that our average grocery spending per month has gone up 61% from September 2024 to September 2025. Sixty. One. Percent. I have every number and calculation to prove it.

Does that mean all fixed-price baskets would show that kind of spike? Absolutely not. I’m sure I eat more imported and/or speciality foods than typical – Bonne Maison preserves from France, instead of Smucker’s. Maple syrup from Canada on Sunday pancakes, not Mrs. Butterworth’s table syrup, a mix of HFCS and flavourings. Stuff like that. Having been “food insecure” more than once in my life, if there’s one place I am spectacularly resistant to cutting back on quality, it’s food. As a result, we’ve been hit harder by food tariffs than most, and my fixed-basket inflation number is not going to be typical.

But while I’m confident that grocery costs at the lowest-income levels haven’t gone up 61% – they may have less opportunity for cost reduction via purchase changes than people higher up the income scale, but they do have some, and they’re also not getting hit as hard directly by the tariffs – I am just as confident of this:

Food costs for low income Americans have gone up a lot more than the official inflation rate will ever say. 3%? 4%? That’s fart noises. I don’t know what it is, but I’m confident it’s a lot more than that.

It is, after all, always a lot more expensive to be poor.

And that’s where we are as Trump and MAGA decide to cut off SNAP. There’s $6 billion in contingency funds that are supposed to be used in situations like this, and Trump is refusing to use it, just like he unconstitutionally refused to spend other Congressionally-ordered spending. His puppets in the FDA are saying that American hunger isn’t an emergency, so it won’t be spent.

And why that, in turn? Well, maybe it’s for just political pressure. Using hunger to force Democrats to let through insane doubling to tripling of health insurance costs is entirely his kind of shitheel manoeuvrer.

Maybe that’s all it is.

Or maybe it’s because he and Miller and Vance and all those goddamn ghouls want his fucking street riots so he can invoke the Insurrection Act, and if starving American citizens is what it takes to get his riots, starving American citizens is exactly what he’ll do to get his street riots.

You know I’m right about that.

So.

Let’s not give the fascist any goddamn food riots. No matter how much he might want them.

Give generously.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 2.0.5 – 17 October 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 2.0.5.

This release is very small, containing two major upgrades, and some additional notes on the Central Kirkland Connector’s south-end closure.

Here’s the complete changes list:

• ADDED: Two-way bike lane opened on E. Marginal Way S on 9 October 2025 from Edgar Martinez/Atlantic down to Horton St., at which point you cross over at a new bike crossing to the existing ped/bike mixed-use trail which connects to Spokane Street Trail. This creates a no-car-interaction connection. These bike lanes will be extended from Horton directly to Spokane Street in early 2026. (MEGAMAP)
• ADDED/UPGRADED: Bike lanes on northern 100th Ave NE in Juanita upgraded and extended to cover NE 139th St. through NE 145th St. (Both maps)
• UPDATED WARNING: The south leg of the Central Kirkland Connector is BRIEFLY reopening this weekend (October 18 and 19) for a marathon event before CLOSING again until late October for continuing emergency sewer repair work. Once it does re-open, it will be closing again intermittently for additional work. On the maps proper, this is mostly be an alert box change. (MEGAMAP)

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because honestly it doesn’t.

Enjoy biking!

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Pamela Bondi went before Senate Oversight on Tuesday determined not to testify to Democrats, and to help Republicans deflect and defend the Trump regime’s fascism. That’s obvious; it happens fairly regularly.

But usually, people doing this routine at least pretend to answer the questions. They don’t provide answers, no, of course not. But they pretend and follow forms.

Bondi wasn’t even pretending. Her responses were unrelated, spurious – and as Senator Schiff put it, “pre-canned” – attacks on and insults of Democratic questioners, over and over again. We couldn’t be entirely sure of it at the moment, but Reuters managed to photograph her notes during her “testimony”, and now we absolutely know for sure they were prewritten.

Later, she started launching these prewritten lie clusters during questions, while Democratic senators were speaking. Here’s an example of her interrupting Senator Schiff over and over again with literal unrelated whatabouts and insults.

Eventually, I guess she ran out of pre-installed lie clusters, because she ran out during a response to a question from Senator Whitehouse and froze up. She literally couldn’t seem to talk.

It’s quite the clip. Watch her, she just shuts down. Here’s the moment she realised she didn’t have anything left so couldn’t come up with another lie cluster attack and just sits there, stalled out:

(I swear to you – I swear to you – I did not add that caption over the video. It was a player issue. But I couldn’t not keep it, now could I?)

But I do think there was a point here, and it wasn’t just not answering questions while giving Republican Senators time to lie and deflect on behalf of the regime. That’s all too normal.

No, I think the intent was to show their utter contempt for the legislature. I think this a stupid version of Caligula’s expression of contempt for the Senate, when he said he was going to appoint his favourite horse as a member.

(He didn’t actually do it, legend aside. The record is reasonably clear on that. He just mocked them with the idea.)

At least Caligula’s version was funny. This, by contrast, is just sad. But sad or not, I do think there was a point, and that point was to display contempt for representative government and to metaphorically blow a horse’s fart in the faces of elected representatives.

And I think that’s something people should understand.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

If anyone’s wondering whether US farmers exporting to China just need a little “temporary help” to get over Trump’s trade war, read this thread from farmer Sarah Taber on Mastodon. She’s a farmer from North Carolina and deeply involved in farming issues. Read all of the thread.

If you won’t, though – if know your US Civil War history, you might know about how the Confederacy self-embargoed cotton exports, withholding “King Cotton” from the market.

They thought it would grind textiles production in the UK to a halt and force the UK to come in on their side of the war.

What happened instead was Egyptian cotton.

Trump pulled his bullshit thinking China would bow to him over soybeans; what happened instead was Brazil and Argentina. They haven’t bought a single goddamn US soybean since last spring, as South America ramped production right the fuck up.

Soybeans were the US’s largest agricultural export.

Emphasis on were.

And arguably, it gets worse from there.

So seriously, go read the thread. It’s good, knowledgable shit.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Before things get a lot worse, which it looks like they’re about to do given Trump’s “full force” order and his “anti-fascism is terrorism” executive memo, I need to reiterate:

It’s lies. This shit about Portland? It’s all lies.

The lies about Seattle were lies too. Particularly reviving the old lie that “they” “took over a significant percentage of the city” back in 2020. Remember when I posted a map showing the three blocks and a park that were the entire protest zone? And how it was 0.0something percent of the city? How it was basically the equivalent of a guy and a yappy dog on the corner of a Walmart parking lot, and how on a full map of the city the red rectangle was literally too small to see?

Remember that?

It’s lies about Portland now. I know people in Portland. I know people who are in Portland RIGHT NOW, for the weekend.

It. Is. All. Lies.

If you don’t believe me, believe Tess Vigeland, a Wall Street Journal senior producer who lives in Portland. The Wall Street Journal is not exactly a “left” publication and doesn’t exactly employ “radical leftists.” I quote her here in entirety:

“He is lying. They are lying. They are literally making this shit up. I live four blocks from the ICE facility they say is a “war zone.” I pass it every single day on my way home. There are, on average, maybe 30 protesters who’ve camped out (they have a small grill) and set up tents. Sometimes more show up on the weekend. They use bullhorns to shout invective at the building and it’s been awful for the residents who live across the street and noise laws should be enforced. But the notion that this city of 600,000 people is a war zone is completely laughable. CNN has a photo from September 1st on its story about this that makes it seem like the city is, indeed, under siege (and that’s part of the problem, images that don’t tell a complete story). But the idea that they needed that kind of show of force is insane. Would I like the protesters to go away? As a neighbor, yup. Do they have the right to set up a tent city outside the facility? Probably — but again, it’s annoying. Does Portland have myriad problems that a maddeningly ineffective local government seems unable to solve no matter how much tax money we throw at it? Yup. But does any of it call for federal troops fanning out across the city? Absolutely not. It’s stupid. This is all for show by an authoritarian administration that knows its base will applaud because oooooh lookie a liberal city getting its due. (I have relatives who will applaud this, by the way.) But they’re lying. They’re all LYING.”

Tess Vigeland, The Wall Street Journal

If you don’t believe her? There are plenty of webcams. Here’s Pioneer Square in downtown Portland as I write this right now:

I won’t even point you to more webcams. Use DuckDuckGo or something. Find them on your own. It’s easy.

Find any cam you want. Look at them for yourself. Tell any Trumpy relatives you have to do the same thing. Look. See.

They. Are. All. Lying.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

WRITE DISNEY A LETTER TODAY.

Not email, don’t @ them on social media – or do that, that’s fine, but it’s not a substitute. It’s not as good. Do that too, but mostly…

WRITE DISNEY A LETTER. On PAPER. Put it in an ENVELOPE and MAIL IT.

Yeah, they’ll think you’re old. They’ll also think you have 1) money and 2) probably have children, more likely grandkids.

Now, grandparents love to spend money on grandkids, and if you say Disney’s not getting one goddamn dime until and unless they walk this back, they will care.

Particularly if enough of us do it.

See, paper letters are scary. They mean you aren’t momentarily angry, you’re determinedly angry. Paper letters mean you care enough to write this shit down by hand or get a printer working and print something. You’re so mad you got ahold of printer paper or stationery. You even care enough to get an envelope and a stamp and take something to a post office, or at least a post box.

You’re mad, and it’s not just a momentary twitch of reactive anger. You mean it.

And all that above means that paper letters are effective. So.

WRITE DISNEY A LETTER. ON PAPER. And send it HERE:

Disney-ABC Home Entertainment and Television Distribution
500 S. Buena Vista St.
Burbank, CA 91521-3515

That’s what I did today.

Your turn.

Oh, and, use your own words, not mine. Duplicates are bad. And at least one upon a time, they would watch for that. You can hit the same beats, just … write your own. It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, it just has to make sense.

Go.

Do.

Write Disney a letter.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.