Tara Goddard

camera and blacklight

So weird how the same people who relentlessly mocked the idea of giving kids participation medals sure like to give and receive participation medals to their own circle. 🤔

If we don't have a serious reckoning about toxic masculinity, and soon, we are for sure going to end up nuking the planet.

The problem with building a system that not only supports but incentivizes and glorifies large vehicles is that your constituency is extremely sensitive to large/rapid fuel price increases.

Even white nationalism as a voter base only holds up so long when it gets tested daily at the pump.

ooh, that is a very likely scenario! Today I paid $5.05/gallon to refuel my rental, which was bad enough, but their refuel charge if I turned it in without refueling was $9.99/gallon!

I honestly think/wonder if much of these "upgrades" are actually just fleet management for them.

oh that too, no doubt.

I also think we can learn what features are safety critical or at least helpful by what tech they opt for, even on lowest trim vehicles. My rental cars might have cloth seats and manual locks, but they also have adaptive cruise control and blind spot warnings. They want to protect their assets.

Right? It isn't unreasonable to think that rental car and gas companies have a deal where getting people into bigger vehicles is incentivized ...

I've waxed at length before about rental cars and what they can tell us about our larger system of automobility, but I learn new things every time I have to rent a car. I have never checked - surely safety folks have written about rental cars and safety (behavior, vehicle design, policy, etc)?

don’t forget to destroy your clocks tonight, walk away from your mortgage, just start driving, you’re free

when I'm back at my computer, I have a comic and a graphic I show students to make this point.

It's almost like it is one of our species' deepest, most long-standing debates ...

It’s not as if scholars and writers and artists have been grappling with understanding and explaining and expressing human consciousness for centuries is it

If gas goes up to $6/gallon in CA and $4.50/gallon in Texas, poor people will suffer and affluent people will absorb that, buy EVs, and walk in their nicer neighborhoods. But if it jumps more quickly and severely, I think even that latter group demands change.

"why are people so mad at genAI companies and evangelists for those tools?"

well, i might have some theories

Texas, wildfires, 2024

When we were interviewing agency folks in the Panhandle, someone we interviewed said "emergency management is always the first line item people want to cut - until there is an emergency. Then they want to know why we didn't spend more."

If you think I want anyone to suffer because of high fuel prices, you must be new here. But I don't know many situations that make people with political power demand change faster than when gas is expensive or parking difficult.

ooh, saving that for class!

If you have a suggestion for getting the American public to care very quickly (like, within days) about this current war, I'm all for better options.

Calvin & Hobbes radicalized me as a kid in ways I didn't even realize 😉

Letting people freeze to death when fuel prices spike is a policy choice, not a binary outcome.

Not sure if this is a hot take or a frigid one, but I hope gas goes to $10/gallon. If that's what it takes to get Americans to demand we stop this war in Iran, so be it.

Of course I hope it leads us to talk about ways to get off fossil fuel entirely, but for now, we need triage.

I don't care what mental or physical health challenges I face in the future, I will live out of spite and the desire to see him prosecuted in The Hague.

Gender Studies is the most vindicated academic field of all time

Middle age is wild, yo 😄

well crap, now I better check. maybe that's why the dishwasher in my rental isn't cleaning dishes well. I bet no one ever cleaned the filters.

ooh, need a co-author? 😄

right?? I really want to know more.