One day a week, at around 6am, Eric Leland drives from his home in Petaluma to a certain gas station on a central corner across town. He and four to eight other volunteers load up a folding table with Spanish-language materials, like cheat sheets about civil rights in interactions with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Alongside these pamphlets are equipment like face masks, gloves, and earplugs for protecting workers at loud worksites. It’s a one-stop shop for the day laborers who congregate here each morning, hoping to be hired for a day’s work.

Those who speak Spanish stick around at the table, chatting with the day laborers who are gathering on the corner. The rest of the volunteers peel off to covertly observe key intersections on the main road, especially near the highway, as “legal observers.” They’re looking for federal government vehicles, whether from ICE or the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

That’s the primary function of the new Adopt a Corner program, which was launched nationwide this summer by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). The organization has asked that anyone not at risk of deportation take action by becoming a consistent presence anywhere that day laborers gather, to build relationships and to offer protection. Here in Petaluma, volunteers usually stay until around 8am, after most of the laborers have either found work or given up for the day.

[...]Since 2022, Odessa had been governed by a group of far-right hard-liners led by Mayor Javier Joven, the owner of a local roofing company who had run for office to help Odessa “publicly repent” for its sins. Political opponents nicknamed the Joven faction “the Squad” and argued that it showed little interest in infrastructure, public safety, or business development, the traditional priorities of municipal government.

The Joven wing of the city council passed an ordinance declaring Odessa a “sanctuary city for the unborn” and banned transgender people from using public restrooms that didn’t match their sex at birth. They fired top city staff, leading to an avalanche of resignations. They packed city commissions with political loyalists and hired a former executive director of the Republican Party of Texas as the city manager. Last year, Odessa lost its bond ratings from Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s after it failed to complete two audits on time—perhaps because the leaders of the finance department had quit.

After two years of chaos, charges of favoritism, and culture wars, Odessa voters had finally had enough. In the November 2024 election, Joven and his allies were trounced by a slate of moderate candidates led by Hendrick, a trial lawyer whose family has lived in Odessa since the 1880s.

Today's screenshot is some more Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I did 2 chapters today (that's how you know it's a special occasion) and finally caught up to where i did when i first borrowed this game from my public library.

I went ahead and gave Barret Cactuar as a summoning Materia. I had the Carbuncle on Cloud originally and just didn't think i could equip a second one, turns out i could though. I gave it to Barret because with his whole earth thing it seemed appropriate. I absolutely love this little guy. I want one on my desk. And he's saved a battle quite a few times since introducing him.

On the subject of Barret, i love having him along for the party too. I like his personality. They make you think he's going to be this big tough guy, and then he's just a big ol' dorkus. I especially like when he does his own version of the Battle Complete theme.

Moving back a bit, When i was on the Catwalk over Sector 5, it really gave me major Wet Dry world vibes. I think it's because the ground down there looks like one solid flat texture, or at least that's my assumption.

Anyways, after cloud got tossed down there was when i stopped. That was 2 chapters worth of content and it was getting late, so i can pick it up some more tomorrow hopefully.

Permitted by the National Park Service to be there through Sunday. It'll be interesting to see if it stays intact for that long.

There’s a new statue on the east end of the National Mall for Washington DC residents and tourists to enjoy. The bronze statue shows two men frolicking, grinning wide and holding hands, each with a foot joyously kicked back.

“We celebrate the long-lasting bond between President Donald J. Trump and his ‘closest friend,’ Jeffrey Epstein,” a plaque at the bottom of the spray-painted bronze installation reads. A permit from the National Park Service will allow the statue to stay on the National Mall grounds through 8pm on Sunday.

The fabricator of the statue remains unknown, but it has artistic and thematic similarities to recent art pieces critical of the president.

Past sculptures on the National Mall that paid side-eyed tribute to Trump include a bronze pile of poop perched on a congressional desk to “honor” January 6th protestors, and a statue titled “Dictator Approved,” featuring a golden thumbs up crushing the Statue of Liberty’s crown and the base featuring approving quotes of Trump from Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Kim Jong-un and Viktor Orbán.

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

One can make an argument that this belongs in technology, but as I'm using the same roads as these cars, it feels like a wider concern.

Austin suddenly has a shedload of Waymos driving about, as of a month or two ago -- to the point that I can bus it to HEB and have two consecutive Waymos beside us at a red light.

It's a trip to watch a car drive past with zero people inside.

No one here -- at least in the circles I run in (which excludes techbros) -- likes that Tesla is running a beta with wildly obvious safety issues on roads our tax dollars pay for.

"Well, we couldn't nail autonomous driving for over a decade, so let's set about making what we do have into a taxi service" may please shareholders, but it's our lives they're putting at risk.

And there's a strong whiff of "demand has fallen off a cliff, so we have to do something with all these cars."

/soapbox

These days, Austin, Texas feels like ground zero for autonomous cars. Although California was the early test bed for autonomous driving tech, the much more permissive regulatory environment in the Lone Star State, plus lots of wide, straight roads and mostly good weather, ticked enough boxes to see companies like Waymo and Zoox set up shop there. And earlier this summer, Tesla added itself to the list. Except things haven't exactly gone well.

According to Tesla's crash reports, spotted by Brad Templeton over at Forbes, the automaker experienced not one but three crashes, all apparently on its first day of testing on July 1. And as we learned from Tesla CEO Elon Musk later in July during the (not-great) quarterly earnings call, by that time, Tesla had logged a mere 7,000 miles in testing.

By contrast, Waymo's crash rate is more than two orders of magnitude lower, with 60 crashes logged over 50 million miles of driving. (Waymo has now logged more than 96 million miles.)

Two of the three Tesla crashes involved another car rear-ending the Model Y, and at least one of these crashes was almost certainly not the Tesla's fault. But the third crash saw a Model Y—with the required safety operator on board—collide with a stationary object at low speed, resulting in a minor injury. Templeton also notes that there was a fourth crash that occurred in a parking lot and therefore wasn't reported. Sadly, most of the details in the crash reports have been redacted by Tesla.

Quelle surprise.

Well, at least it's a systemic issue and not just me. I've been saying awhile now that experience is toxic and the jobs posted aren't real. How can one send out a thousand applications and get a single interview?

It's a terrible time to be midcareer.

When Philip Kowalski lost his job earlier this year as a USAID contractor working on aid to Ukraine due to Doge cuts, he was confident in his credentials: a master’s degree from the University of London and years of hands-on experience managing American foreign aid contracts that he thought would help him land on his feet.

Instead, he found himself adrift in what he calls “a massive pool of unemployed people who are highly qualified all competing for the same tiny pool of available jobs”.

“I’ve put out maybe 400 job applications in the last five months,” Kowalski said. “I’ve only gotten a handful of interviews. I think I’ve interviewed with six different places. It’s a really bleak situation.”

Kowalski, 36, is far from alone. From the tech-centric coasts to the US deep south, job seekers describe a market where even advanced degrees, decades of experience and thousands of applications often yield little more than silence or, often, scam calls.

This was already the case in 2020, but no one was covering it because "unemployment's so low, it's a you problem." Upskill. Go to networking events. Spend a shitton of money and go into debt so you're even more desperate for entry-level work despite decades of experience.

Meanwhile, rent goes up 15% a year, and you're making half what you did when you moved in, after a grueling, monthslong job search that forces you to put rent on a credit card.

As Carlin said: "It's bullshit, and it's bad for you."