Alex Williams

In the 1930s, average rent was $18 a month. At $0.25/hour, you could pay rent in 72 hours of work. Today, to pay $1000 rent at the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour, you gotta work 138 hours.

@DrDiGiorgio You’re a prick playing an idiot.

If there are 50 people who want to see the neurosurgeon but he only has 10 appointments available, how does one guarantee that right to healthcare?

Artemis II crew is thousands of miles away from Earth And they’re asking ground crew for help because they have two versions of Microsoft Outlook open and neither is working This scene is now canon 😭

The air traffic controller cleared the fire truck onto the runway. Seconds later, the same controller screamed “stop, stop, stop.” The plane was doing 93 to 105 mph. Both pilots are dead. Everyone will frame this as controller error. One controller was simultaneously managing a United flight that aborted takeoff after an anti-ice warning, dispatching a fire truck across an active runway, and sequencing an inbound Air Canada landing at highway speed. At 11:40 PM. On a mandatory overtime shift at a facility that has been understaffed for years. A system that assigns one person that workload will produce exactly this outcome. The only variable is when. The FAA is short approximately 3,000 controllers. The headcount dropped 13% from 2010 to 2024 while flight volume rose 10%. Over 40% of the FAA’s 290 terminal facilities are understaffed. The New York TRACON, which manages the most congested airspace in America across LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark, has been chronically below target. Newark was operating at 59% of its staffing goal. LaGuardia handles 900 flights a day. The hiring pipeline is broken at every stage. Only 2% of applicants complete the full process. Training takes up to 6 years. The FAA Academy in Oklahoma City is a bottleneck, with roughly 35% of trainees washing out. Congress blocked legislation to build a second academy. In one recent hiring cycle, the FAA brought on 1,512 candidates and lost 1,300 in the same window. Net gain: around 160 controllers for an entire country. Three things need to happen and everyone who can make them happen has known for years. Congress needs to fund and authorize a second FAA training academy. One facility in Oklahoma City cannot produce enough controllers for 900 million annual passengers. Members of Congress from Oklahoma have actively blocked this. That needs to end yesterday. The FAA needs to cut certification time. Six years from application to fully certified controller is absurd. The agency’s own data shows tower simulators reduce certification time by 27%. They’ve installed them at 95 facilities. That should be every facility, and the simulated hours should count toward more of the certification requirement. The FAA needs to stop plugging staffing gaps with mandatory overtime. Controllers at understaffed facilities are working six-day weeks rotating between morning, mid, and night shifts. The NTSB has flagged fatigue repeatedly. The controller last night was managing overlapping emergencies during a nighttime operation. Overtime is not a staffing plan. It’s a countdown to the next runway collision. The controller said “I messed up” to a Frontier pilot who watched the whole thing. The pilot responded “No man, you did the best you could.” One of them is right. The answer determines whether this happens again.

$33.1M opening day with zero green screens. Read that again. Project Hail Mary cost $200 million to make. Lord and Miller built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a practical set. Thousands of physical buttons, hundreds of real screens, a hatch modeled after ISS designs. The alien, Rocky, is a full animatronic puppet designed by Neal Scanlan, the creature shop legend behind the best Star Wars practical work. Ryan Gosling acted against a real puppet in every single scene. The movie has 2,018 VFX shots. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to Avatar: Fire and Ash, which ran over 3,500. The difference: Avatar builds the world digitally and asks the audience to believe it. Project Hail Mary builds the world physically and uses VFX to clean up wires, remove puppeteers, and paint in space backgrounds. One approach creates spectacle. The other creates presence. This is a $200 million bet against the last 15 years of Hollywood production logic. After Avengers: Endgame, the industry standardized around green screen stages and digital environments because it was faster and cheaper per shot. Studios could reshoot entire sequences in post. The tradeoff was invisible until it wasn't: audiences started describing blockbusters as looking like "video games." Snow White's $42M opening. The Marvels at $46M. Quantumania. Ant-Man built on a soundstage that looked like it. Lord and Miller went the opposite direction and spent more money on physical construction than most studios spend on entire VFX pipelines. Greig Fraser, the cinematographer who shot Dune, lit the Hail Mary with practical lights so the camera could move freely through real corridors. When Gosling floats in zero-g, that's wire work, not simulation. When he touches a panel, it's a real panel. Guillermo del Toro saw the film and called the commitment to practical sets and puppets "a goal, an aspiration, and a commitment. Especially now." The "especially now" is doing all the work in that sentence. He's talking about an industry where the default response to a $200M budget is to minimize physical production and maximize digital flexibility. Project Hail Mary did the opposite and just posted the biggest non-franchise opening day in domestic box office history. The audience can tell. They've always been able to tell.

Not opposed to voter ID laws, just stupid voter ID laws. The SAVE Act is insane.

@wayz1550742 @skumWgmi Go to hell

@skumWgmi After 3 years of unemployment, you take whatever they give you and negotiate later. Your friend learned a hard lesson today—don't let pride keep you unemployed

After 3 years of unemployment, my friend finally got a job offer today. He politely asked for a slight pay increase to be paid a competitive market rate..... THEY RESCINDED HIS OFFER...

@finitecrystal @lafaiel This laptop was designed to be the entry point to Apple computer. It’s literally designed for students, or people looking to buy their first important computer. Don’t get mad that you’re not the target market.

@lafaiel I don't give a rat's ass about the student discount. I'm not a student, I'm not eligible for the student discount. Why do Apple fanboys think they can justify a product on a promotional price point that is only available to an incredibly limited subset of the population?

Good thing about Apple is they put pressure Laptop makers are now under pressure to make laptops with Wildcat Lake, 100% sRGB panels, and aluminum enclosures for $599. If they can't handle that, they'll start losing entry market share to Apple

the fact that we witnessed this in real time and yet the world is still so silent is absolutely enraging

@happysmash27 @nazzobetweeting We don’t include New Jersey in the MTA’s NYC map. We’re talking about the city itself.

@nazzobetweeting Does that 502 also include all the surrounding cities connected to Los Angeles – e.g, Santa Monica and San Bernardino? If not, that number is also quite a bit smaller than the full commuting distance size.

i can’t with you guys you compared MANHATTAN, a SINGLE BOROUGH to ALL OF LOS ANGELES the entire area of NEW YORK CITY is 469 square miles compared to LA’s 502 and you can get anywhere in the city across all 5 boroughs on public transport for $3

the way this is actually so easy to understand😭

@GovSherrillNJ Does this mean buses must reach their destination by 6pm, or more depart their origin by 6pm? For example when is the last 190/192/191/195 departure from Port Authority back into New Jersey???

We will be suspending NJ TRANSIT service at 6:00 PM today on all buses, light rail, and Access Link. Currently, we expect trains to run into this evening. We are likely to suspend service some time tonight, and that will be announced.

@NJTRANSIT Does this mean buses must reach their destination by 6pm, or more depart their origin by 6pm? For example when is the last 190/192/191/195 departure from Port Authority back into New Jersey???

Due to anticipated severe storm conditions impacting the region, NJ TRANSIT Bus, Light Rail, and Access Link service will be suspended at 6 PM on Sunday, February 22. Rail service adjustments are expected later in the evening. Stay up to date at bit.ly/4avpP5J

@JeffSBrayAuthor @Nithya_Shrii If you’re handling job promotions and replacements at 9pm, you have a dysfunctional business.

@Nithya_Shrii So the next morning. "Bill resigned last night. We were looking for someone to take his position. You came to mind. But you didn't answer your phone so I went with Janice."

My boss texted me at 9 PM: "Urgent." I didn't reply until 9 AM. He asked why. I said: "Because unless the office is on fire, nothing is urgent at 9 PM. It is an inconvenience." Normalize being unreachable.

a coworker of mine got fired out of nowhere. she was always early, stayed late, covered shifts no one else wanted, brought snacks for everyone, basically went above and beyond. one day management called her in, and ten minutes later she came out with red eyes and a box. they said she had an “attitude problem.” no warning, no write ups, just that. we later found out she’d reported a supervisor for making inappropriate jokes about her body, comments that made her uncomfortable and crossed every line. and i still can’t believe he’s still there. still running meetings, still joking with new hires, still acting like nothing happened. she lost her job, her income, her stability. all in one afternoon. while he got to keep everything

@zacbowden @SnazzyLabs Things most people don’t care about in a laptop: 120hz, a touch screen, 5G, more ports. Things most people do care about: best in class product support, an out of the box experience without bloatware and ads, the best trackpad on the market. The MacBook Air provides that.

@SnazzyLabs Why? 120Hz > 60Hz Touchscreen Longer battery life 5G options More ports Everything else is comparable. Keyboards and track pads are both excellent. Performance is excellent on both. I don't see how the MacBook Air is better? Comparable, yes. But not better.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 is still the best laptop you can buy for $999. Nothing even comes close.

The US spent 70 years building a country optimized for cars instead of people. This is what that looks like at full resolution. MetLife Stadium sits on 2.1 million square feet of parking. 28,000 spaces. The parking lots are larger than the stadium itself. The entire Meadowlands complex was purpose-built so that the only way a human being can reach it is inside a 4,000-pound metal box. The New Jersey State Police printed that sign because pedestrians were never part of the design. And here’s where it gets interesting: the 2026 World Cup Final is being played at this stadium in five months. FIFA’s biggest event on Earth, hosted at a venue where walking is literally illegal. International fans from countries where you stroll to the stadium from a pub three blocks away are about to encounter a place where the nearest hotel requires a car to travel a distance you can see with your eyes. The US has 700 million to 2 billion parking spaces. Eight parking spots for every car in the country. Parking lots cover more than 5% of all developed land, an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Minimum parking requirements forced every building, every stadium, every shopping center to dedicate more square footage to storing empty vehicles than to serving the humans inside. American cities didn’t accidentally become unwalkable. They were zoned that way. During the recent Club World Cup at MetLife, only 12.5% of fans used public transit to reach the stadium. The other 87.5% drove. Now imagine that ratio flipping for the World Cup, when the majority of attendees will be international visitors without cars. NJ Transit is spending $100 million to try to move 20,000 people per hour through a single transfer point at Secaucus Junction, a system that already had door malfunctions and 13-minute delays during games with 29,000 fans. Scale that to 82,500. The sign in this hotel lobby is American car culture in a single frame: we built the richest country on Earth, then made it illegal to walk across it.

Fuck @JeffBezos

More people live in Brooklyn than North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming combined. New York State has 2 senators, those states have 6.

@amrezy It’s lighting. Everything is shot so flat these days.

Modern color grading has genuinely ruined the look of movies and tv shows