my current hindrance is righteous fury at cars parking in the bike lanes

A little context: the route I usually use to get to work, Valencia St, has bike lanes. It's also full of cars parking in the bike lanes; reliably 3 or 4 on an average ride down the street.

I am pretty good at navigating traffic on a bike. I haven't been hit by a car because someone parked in the bike lane. It probably raises my relative risk of getting hit. Not by a ton. It probably raises some other people's relative risk by a ton.

Some things I have tried when I see people parked in bike lanes:

1. ignoring it

2. just ringing my bike bell a bunch

3. yelling at them "don't park in the bike lanes!" as I ride past

4. taking a photo and reporting it to SF 311

5. stopping in front of them until they come out of the store and then confronting them. (this I save for particularly egregious offenders and/or luxury cars.)

6. sending notes to my local representatives/etc asking for more protected bike lanes (with like a barrier so cars physically can't park there)

7. waiting in front of the car until a parking cop comes by and waving at them to give them a ticket

(Some of them are a bit harsh, so I balance it based on the situation: if it's a harried uber eats driver making $4/hr, I don't take out my frustration on them. I try to save the angrier ones for the people who are Plain Old Bein' an Entitled Ass.)

Some things I have thought about doing:

8. printing out bumper stickers that say "I parked in a bike lane"

9. calmly lecturing them that, by getting their coffee twelve seconds faster, they are increasing my risk of actually dying

10. same as 9, but instead of lecture, I actually really try to connect with them and understand their needs

Effects on the driver:

1 (ignore) does nothing, of course.

2 (bell) does nothing too, although maybe it lowers the chance of dooring me.

3 (yell) maybe makes them feel bad, maybe makes them feel like "bikers are jerks."

4 (report) does almost nothing. It means it gets included in SF's bike lane stats, but they explicitly say they will not give a ticket for this.

5 (confront) seems the only one that actually does anything - I tell them off, they go "eh ok whatever" and drive off. Maybe their day is a little less pleasant. It also takes the most of my time and raises my blood pressure.

6 (legislate) maaaybe causes change, slowly slowly slowly. also, it's hard to say "we should focus more on this" when there are homeless people dying in the streets and apartments cost $3000/month.

7 (wait for cop) does nothing; I had a cop literally drive past me and a car-parked-in-bike-lane today.

8 (bumper sticker) would piss them off and maybe give them consequences not to park in bike lanes! it feels somewhat disproportionate. I'm fine with that; traffic tickets are also disproportionate to account for the fact that we usually won't catch you. but knowing my luck and current laws though, I'd probably end up getting a ticket for vandalism.

9 (lecture) won't do anything. they'll say "yeah ok" and then park in the bike lane again.

10 (connect) ... also won't do anything. it's hella hard to connect with a rando on the street. Especially for the kind of length of talk that will lead to connection and actually changing their mind.

So, I mean, nothing is effective! Also, some of these raise my blood pressure and/or waste my time. Also also, maybe I occasionally road-rage at the wrong person, which makes the world worse - there's nonzero fallout here.

Which leads to the difficult question: when you are powerless to a small injustice except to ignore it... is ignoring it the best/wisest/Zennest thing to do?

(this doesn't map nicely onto other stories about injustices that we know about, because it's pretty minor. feels like, I dunno, 2 micromorts/year? - which will lead to nonzero deaths in a city of a million people and therefore should be fixed, but for me personally I could just ignore it.)

(ok, I've left out choice 11. walk into the coffeeshop that they're parked outside of, and say "does anyone have a Black Porsche outside? it's being towed right now" and then wait for them to come out for it and then go "April fool, move your car, you goon." this one I haven't tried yet; just waiting for the opportunity :D

"To Mothman"

David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, not quite Mothmanning but it's the best visual I can come up with

The new Adventure Zone arc, Amnesty, (minimal spoilers) includes The Mothman, a character most famously from The Mothman Prophecies who can sorta tell the future. Griffin McElroy, the DM, explains his powers like he's watching a bunch of TV screens that are all possible futures. He can't tell which of them will happen, but I think he knows that one or more of them will - so if they all converge on one thing happening soon, he knows it will very likely happen. Mostly, I want to focus on the ability to see many future stories.

This seems useful as a conversational meme when you're designing a thing, making a law, whatever. These stories are all happening, or will all happen, with some probability. For example, if you make US immigration more lax, there will likely be more immigrants committing crimes. There will also be more brilliant geniuses creating amazing things in our country. There will be more people speaking other languages. There will be more people who are willing to work in construction or farming. Some current-Americans will lose jobs, some current-Americans will get jobs, or will be able to create jobs.

This makes it frustrating when people use stories to argue points. "We shouldn't allow more immigration, because look at this immigrant who committed a crime." No, that's just one Mothman screen. How big is it? How likely is it, how important is it?

I guess it's useful when you haven't yet decided on the set of all screens. It's worthwhile to say "we should consider x." But once it's been put on a screen, you're not allowed to use stories to increase (or decrease) the importance of any one screen. You can only do that with data (to show probability or magnitude of an event) or philosophy (to suggest why we should care more/less about an event).

Anyway, I'm not going to change how people argue, forever, in one internet post. The best I can hope for here is that people start using "to Mothman" as "to look holistically at all possible futures." (perhaps also "to reverse-Mothman" to mean "to look holistically at all possible causes.")

oh my god vote

ok yes please do it ok thanks

California! San Francisco! What have we got here! Here's how I'm planning to vote so far, but open to change. Change my mind.

State Ballot Props

Prop 1 - Yes. "Issues $4 billion in bonds for housing programs and veterans' home loans."
Prop 2 - Yes. "Authorizes state to use revenue from millionaire's tax for $2 billion in bonds for homelessness prevention housing."
Prop 3 - Weak yes. "Issues $8.877 billion in bonds for water-related infrastructure and environmental projects."
Prop 4 - Weak yes. "Issues $1.5 billion in bonds for children's hospitals." I guess I like hospitals? And children?
Prop 5 - No. "Revises process for homebuyers who are age 55 or older or severely disabled to transfer their tax assessments." Sounds innocuous enough - but this would expand Prop 13, aka the ballot measure that passed once that ensured that we'd never be able to raise property taxes again.
Prop 6 - Hell no. "Repeals 2017's fuel tax and vehicle fee increases and requires public vote on future increases." Speaking of hamstringing our ability to ever raise taxes. And like... if we're going to tax anything, it should be cars.
Prop 7 - Yes. "Authorizes legislature to provide for permanent daylight saving time if federal government allows." Someday we could get out of this stupid charade!
Prop 8 - Weak yes. "Requires dialysis clinics to issue refunds for revenue above a certain amount." But really, beats me. Something something, this is a union dispute that made it onto the ballot somehow.
Prop 10 - Weak no. "Allows local governments to regulate rent on any type of housing." This is the most reasonable-to-disagree IMO. Rent control is a tricky issue, there's good reason to support it here in SF even if I don't like it in general. But as one of my friends said, "It seems like right now rent control is fairly available to tenants who want it and we have a lot of tenant rights, so the current setup has most of the benefit without the distortion." But, this might be worthwhile.
Prop 11 - No. "Allow ambulance providers to require workers to remain on call during breaks paid." Why are we ballot propping this?
Prop 12 - Weak yes. "Bans sale of meat from animals confined in spaces below specific sizes." Sure. The less gross our food supply system, the better. Some concern that this is deceptive and actually rolls back some protections. I'll keep an eye on this.

State Elected Officials

Governor: Gavin Newsom. Duh.
Senator: Kevin De Leon. Feinstein's still living in the good old days of decorum and decency, while Senate Republicans have abandoned those. I wish we were still in the good old days too, but I'd rather fight in the awful new days than just get eaten by them. Plus, I kiiinda don't think you should be allowed to be one of the 120-ish most powerful people in the country at age 85 to 91. (We'll see how this belief ages.)
Attorney General: Xavier Becerra.
Minor statewide offices: Hernandez, Yee, Ma, Padilla, Lara, Thurmond all seemed fine to me before.

SF Ballot Props

Prop A - Yes. $425M to rebuild the seawall.
Prop B - No. "Puts forward guidelines that any city department or the Board of Supervisors could enact to protect privacy in the collection, storage and sharing of personal information of San Francisco residents and visitors." I'm in favor of privacy as much as the next person. But city-level is not the level at which to get Facebook to quit their nonsense. Plus, nonbinding: more fuss without doing anything.
Prop C - Hell yes. "Imposes an additional tax on individuals and businesses that receive more than $50 million in gross income in San Francisco, to fund homelessness services and housing." Of course!
Prop D - Yes. "Levies an additional tax on the gross receipts of cannabis-related businesses in San Francisco and extends local business taxes to companies based elsewhere but doing business in San Francisco." Sure. If you're gonna tax anything, cannabis seems as good a thing as any.
Prop E - No. "Allocates a portion of the city’s hotel tax for arts and culture programs." Let the supervisors do their job, don't tell them where the money goes, and especially don't tell them where the money should go in order to fund unnecessary-but-nice things.

SF Candidates

District 8 supervisor - Mandelman. He seems decent and is the only actual candidate here.
SF Assessor: Carmen Chu. Happy to delegate my thought here to the Yimby guide.
Bart board: Janice Li. Yimby and SF Bike Coalition employee.
School board: Collins and Moliga seem widely recommended, and Parker for the Yimbys.
College board: Davila and Selby also seem widely recommended, and Oliveri for the Yimbys.

Some endorsements and sources:

Yimby Action
SPUR
Cal Bike (in an email; they just said Newsom, Yes on 1, No on 6 and 10.)
SF Chronicle

SF League of Pissed-off Voters

Planned Parenthood
Bay Curious podcast doin' a week about the ballot props.
Jef Poskanzer
Pete Rates the Propositions