As a Twin Cities resident, I’m definitely disappointed to hear this news. Everyone I talked to about this was excited about the possible conversion to a Boulevard. People have a lot of feelings about this stretch of 94 because there was a strong historically Black neighborhood (Rondo Saint Paul) that was demolished in the 50s and 60s to make way for this stretch of highway, and the city’s Black community never really recovered from that devastation. Of course, the people that would prefer to keep it a freeway are also the type of people that wouldn’t really pay attention to the news until it was imminently happening.

This was interesting:

MnDOT rejected designs to replace the highway with an at-grade roadway because the agency believes it would negatively impact mobility and create more safety issues by putting more cars on local roadways where crashes are more common. Barnes said MnDOT’s analysis projects that the design would bring more vehicle pollution to residential areas. The Star Tribune first reported that MnDOT ruled out those designs in December.

“We also know this alternative would make air quality worse for more people,” Barnes said.

“where crashes are more common” is interesting to me. Even if crashes are more common on city roads, I would suspect that the crashes that do occur on the freeway are far more deadly. So the boulevard redesign would have probably reduced traffic deaths overall.

However: I94 is the main highway connecting Minneapolis and Saint Paul, particularly in this stretch that was being studied. Currently, if you drive around the cities a lot due to work or whatever, you are almost always including 94 on your route. There are beltway freeways in the north and south of the metro, but those don’t make sense to take unless you’re headed north or south already. When they say that this would have increased travel times for many drivers, they are telling the truth.

Alternatively, we do have a light rail train and multiple bus routes that follow a similar route. But Minnesota is cold and it is hard to convince habitual drivers to wait out in the cold for public transit.

So: I can understand why MNDOT blinked. If they went through with the at-grade option, they would probably face more backlash than appreciation, even if the people that were excited about this were REALLY excited about it. backlash is a very dangerous thing these days. But I still feel pretty strongly that the at-grade option would have been better for the metro overall in the long term.

Omg I’m so glad to have contributed this

I’m debating keeping a stack in my car to put under Tesla wipers I see in the wild

I’m a little lost. Pixelfed is already a decentralized photosharing service, and they already run Pixelfed.social. So what is Loops? An app?

Same reason porn actors do anything, I’d guess. At some point, someone tried it, and that video sold well, so all the porn actors started copying that. Same reason why every other porn video is about stepsiblings and stepparents these days 😑

I would love to know who the originating actor is, though. I’m sure they said lots about why they did that.

Edit: okay I have a hypothesis. It’s usually the receiving partner that makes the “it hurts” face. It’s probably to appease the male audience, who craves validation that they have a big hog that is so big it hurts people.

[length: 37:11, channel: Commons Economy Roadmap]

we only make fun of it because Musk is evil. if you’re out there and your body sort of looks like this and you aren’t Elon Musk, know that your body is valid and normal and hot! I went from skinny twink to dad bod over the course of the past few years, and I have no shame. Just do what you can to take care of your meat suit - as long as you’re doing that, the shape doesn’t matter.

it’s as much of a journey writing them as it is reading them. lol

I’m aware of that - I think the famous story about the hot dog price is the CEO talking to the board members. I’m just saying that the Costco CEO is the exception, not the rule, and that’s because the incentives of the publicly traded model reward doing literally anything to make line go up, even if it means literally killing people.

You’re 100% right.

At this point it wouldn’t surprise me. But it WOULD warrant a fifth frame of Vince exploding

The way all CEOs should be. Publicly-traded companies are a mistake.

i’m partial to campbell’s myself. their tone is out of this world.

This was a recent post on her Facebook, I haven’t seen anything recently that makes me dubious of her politics.

we should invite hatman to beehaw

sorry i don’t know star trek, so i do not know who this woman is (fake nerd, i know). reverse image search only narrowed it down to star trek, and there are too were too many different star trek shows to figure it out without extensive research. please feel free to impress the class below with your star trek knowledge.

It doesn’t load in my Lemmy app, but confirmed it does work in a browser.

This ain’t a photo of my own chonks. your beanbag is probably the better choice. my own cats prefer a papasan chair and a window ledge, respectively. lol

here’s a link if you want to see the comic in full-size: https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGcMV-uEWsAAKKN8.jpg

For the chonks, of course