Zac

I'm building Fiber, a social network for humans. See link ⤵️

[Zac @zatchmann]

@follis_ This is a serious industry full of serious people doing meaningful things

[Zac @zatchmann]

@Jimmyking35 That stretch of roadway median could be a triumph of a park and those road openings to people on bikes and foot is just the tiniest taste!

[Dunkaccino @DakarAdana]

@Jimmyking35 The street safety arc of Philadelphia is long, but it bends towards being the Amsterdam of America

[Zac @zatchmann]

@jongeeting @YIMBYtown I'm working on https://t.co/nR7V6jxqb6 with a lot of help from Claude. Not advocacy exactly, but its explicitly about enabling a new class of (mostly commercial adjacent) solutions that could benefit from open data

[Zac @zatchmann]

@edels0n @TheOmniZaddy Now do beef

[Zac @zatchmann]

@JacobPritchett @Jimmyking35 @Blizzard_Advsry they can take their anger out on their bicycle, exercising their emotions and improving their heart health, now more safely than ever

[Zac @zatchmann]

@urphillypal Damn.

[Zac @zatchmann]

Most pigs are tortured but it's a choice.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Zac @zatchmann]

Even in these bad bad times, a meat industry that traffics in cruelty like this is too much for most people. Long way before otherwise good people recognize their own participation in the defining moral issue of our time. Still, progress.

[David Coman-Hidy @davidcomanhidy]

I've been working on farm animal protection for a while now, and I haven't seen anything quite like what's happening around the Save Our Bacon Act.

People who have never organized before, including some genuinely prominent voices, are hosting events, calling senators, and fundraising from friends. And those of us who have been here a while, across many ideological divides and every strategic disagreement, are showing up together.

We've always punched above our weight (out of necessity!), but this feels substantively very different. The political and social cost of supporting this barbarism is finally rising.

[Zac @zatchmann]

@sgodofsk @arthur_wright_ A person is an animal unless they're really smart. Then they're a ding dong

[Zac @zatchmann]

@GovernorShapiro faster is the opposite of safer.

more lanes is the opposite of less traffic.

[Zac @zatchmann]

@mr_saltz shapiro is a young face on 20th century "solutions"

[Zac @zatchmann]

@harrisonlcann barf

[Zac @zatchmann]

@PhillyInquirer The sound of people chatting is delightful and musical if you hear it right. Purposefully loud cars tearing through empty late night streets are the actually antisocial thing

[Zac @zatchmann]

@nextphlmayor Got a link?

[Zac @zatchmann]

@Jamison247 @DemzDeliver Real "he only won by winning, which doesn't count" vibes

[Zac @zatchmann]

@coryfromphilly @alanthefisher I think you gotta consider that Instagram has also changed. Their impact on social and civic life is underestimated. It's less obvious than x or YouTube (softened by there being people you know in the mix) but still strongly incents rage baiting etc

[Zac @zatchmann]

@gregisenberg literally made https://t.co/4du9CiHM8v with exactly this idea, kind sorta worked. IG has a stranglehold - people convincingly express their contempt for IG before getting back to the unpaid work of making short form video for zuck to sell ads against

[clara the urbanist @SlopHq]

land value tax. LAND VALUE TAX. you tax the land not the building so there’s no penalty for building up and empty lot downtown stops being a free ride and suddenly everyone wants to build and the city funds itself and it’s elegant and it’s BEAUTIFUL and no one will do it. no one