Rented a moving van to take us back to Ohio. Supposed to pick it up at 11 am today. @Budget lets us know at 9:30 a.m. that it's not available, none are available, too bad about your luck 😡😂🤬
"We can get you the van you reserved for today sometime next week," @Budget says
Um, we have to move out of our apartment TODAY. That's why we rented a truck for TODAY.
And because it's Saturday morning of a holiday weekend when @Budget canceled our moving truck reservation, we have about an hour to try and find a (now ridiculously overpriced last minute) reservation elsewhere before all the rental places close until Tuesday. We're screwed
@Budget No other one-way moving vans are available for rent today in the DC area, p.s. @swin24 & I have checked. Trying to figure out if we can fit everything in a mini-van... but not seeing many of those available for rent on an hour's notice either...
In conclusion, @Enterprise remains the ONLY good place to rent vehicles from.
The customer service rep for @Budget tells me they canceled our moving van last minute because all of them are going to @amazon in Northern Virginia now. So this is what @Budget does: cancels individual rentals to give them to Amazon
(A followup tweet just to say the man at the Edsall Rd @Budget location we’ve been talking to, and not budget corporate, has been nothing but patient and sweet and trying to help, though his hands are tied)
Sorry about all the complaint tweets, y’all. We’re just... agjfhdghgdhff.
Annnnnnd... we found a mini-van available for rent! Phew. Guess we'll take what we can fit in it & leave what we can't w/friends for now. But: crisis averted. Thank you all for coming along with me on this journey
Me & my loved ones are healthy & employed so that's all that matters & I'm not complaining. But there've been petty problems involved in just about everything we've tried to do lately, & I'm pretty sure that one of you hexed me(Or @swin24. Which of us is more likely to be hexed?)
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It's hard to overstate just how bad the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is
The Senate is likely to vote on it today, so let's take a look...
KOSA requires online businesses to "prevent or mitigate" minors from being exposed to anything that could cause basically any sort of "harm"
There are two ways to do this, and neither is good: Censor massive amounts of free speech, or age verify everyone reason.com/2024/07/24/sen…
KOSA would be cataclysmic for the internet when enforced in the most neutral of ways (think FOSTA but instead of just applying to sexuality, it's applied to just about everything).
But the real kicker is that it's going to be enforced *by political appointees*
It seems like every literary or journalistic depiction of motherhood these days is dark af and somehow always elicits ample praise for being brave and truth-telling. It's... bizarre nytimes.com/2023/03/18/boo…
I'm all for society sugarcoating motherhood & parenthood less but... it feels like we've slipped into a weird pathology in certain circles where all people do is warn about how miserable it is & the only accounts accepted as truths are litanies of neverending hate & terror & pain
Related to this, people love to tell expecting or new parents that their lives are going to be miserable. @swin24 & I got sooooo much of this — often from internet strangers, but also friends & acquaintances — when I was pregnant.
Here's a roundup of various state bills seeking to make changes — some good and some bad — to prostitution laws reason.com/2023/03/17/sta…
In 3 states — New York, Vermont, & Hawaii — lawmakers have introduced measures to decriminalize prostitution between consenting adults reason.com/2023/03/17/sta…
The Hawaii decrim bill (SB 1204) was introduced in January & comes from Sen. Carol Fukunaga, who's also proposed a bill to "study the effects of New Zealand's model of decriminalizing prostitution on sex workers, their clients, and the broader community" capitol.hawaii.gov/session/measur…
Today's #ReasonRoundup highlights a few new findings on abortion.
First: The number of legal abortions in the US dropped significantly after SCOTUS overturned Roe. There were 6% fewer abortions in August 2022 than April—though more from virtual clinics reason.com/2022/10/31/nea…
Support for total bans on abortion is down! PRRI poll finds it dropped from 13% in 2020 to 8% this year, with steepest drop among Republicans
48% of voters in a new ABC-Ipsos poll prefer pro-choice candidates, while just 33% prefer candidates who support strict abortion restrictions (18% don't care)
This is why it’s odd that Musk said he aims to make Twitter more open to free speech AND "the most respected advertising platform in the world" … the two goals are fundamentally at odds
I love people suggesting this will just lead to Twitter keeping the right kind of advertisers. The number of advertisers — esp big ones with deep pockets—who don’t care what kind of content their ads run beside is small to nonexistent…
Corporate advertisers & people who want less content moderation are 2 groups with no overlap