most of the council called for the passage of the md data privacy act and should be up in arms about one of the most privacy-destroying techs being floated for use in city government as a cost cutting measure. 😌 looking forward to their brew editorials /j baltimore.legistar.com/LegislationD...

how they arrived at that number is a mystery, no method listed so far (actual footage of the report writers: www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7l0...) but 6.6 mill/yr savings would be in the ballpark of replacing 100 employees with a chatbot; or just magicking 10% of Office of IT yearly spend as savings. sus

prefiled bills aren't available yet obvi (see also: bsky.app/profile/bemo...) but we expect dem inaction to continue and to see refiled versions of a sports ban, trans care ban, and a parental rights bill. 🙄 if only some other form of protection than letting these bills die in committee existed.

it looks similar to the utes, where the team collaborated with the tribe on design choices. collab started in '06, in '14 they worked together to add salish to the uniform. also salmon mascot. news.sportslogos.net/2020/07/19/a...

✨ ai and drones ✨ are claimed to have a potential savings of 92 million over 10 years. source? they just made it up.

should a city that can't even handle WorkDay be trusted to do things with ai? this is left as an exercise for the reader.

MD's dems are a great example of this; multiple democratic reps sit on the committee that regularly sees an anti-trans sports bill. they occasionally make comments about the bill when they vote no, but have not at any point in the last ~4 years drafted legislation to protect trans children.

😩 yeah. we think of it as being in a similar genre to other tech boondoggles throughout the city/state. no state capacity to run things locally so they get contracted out to price gougers w/ expertise. (eg: failed no-bid cntrct for the city website, digital gas meter contract, water treatment, etc)

the traffic cameras aren't revenue positive. fy 25 budgeted 23.4 mill for operation on ~15 mill collected fines; fy26's expected budget notes no expected capital improvements will be funded by fine revenue either. "what they're doing with the revenue" is mostly just paying for the cameras + contract

year old axios data puts the average at 42 daily commute miles; dense areas closer to 12-15, sparse texas places nearish 60-70 miles/day www.axios.com/2024/03/24/a...

right, we're just baffled by the notion that one could assemble a group call of 30-50 people in a neighborhood association and none of them have local politics as one of their special interests 😩

brew reporting keeps featuring someone complaining their neighborhood association didn't know about a legislative action; we forget that not everyone knows what legistar is or religiously checks for mga updates. but... what about of public engagement would be enough if people aren't engaged? :|

again, earnest question: do cis people understand the purple archipelago? do they understand what they are prioritizing and what they are ignoring in this conversation? would they have sided against lbj on the civil rights act of 1964? bsky.app/profile/klei...

would it be possible to place the reported % of skipped stops due to full busses in public reporting of service quality?

(We've had to explain to people new to the MTA that sitting at a bus stop bench is insufficient and that bus drivers will arbitrarily skip stops. As best we can tell, that data isn't reported alongside OTP data on MTA's performance improvement page, but would have included both reported skips)

both that person and the person who was skipped by a driver and not allowed to board after being called a "crazy bitch" claim to have reported their issues. (we look forward to a postmortem) Does MTA have any plan to measure the % of times that bus drivers skip stops?

intrusively riffing: faegpl (the seelie court's sequel to agpl)