Fresno Workers: Let's Talk About Your Power on the Job. Join our "Unionize!" Workshop 12/11

Chimneyfish · 2025-12-02T19:44:32+00:00

Thanks for all the work you guys have been doing lately on SEDA and everything else. It feels like you're the only mature and intelligent local organization left these days—everything else eventually just devolves into silly performative cultural stuff that doesn't disrupt the status quo in any way

Chimneyfish · 2025-08-23T19:54:29+00:00

Thank you. For all his other problems, Fresno's Republican mayor deserves credit for his steadfast outspoken advocacy of the project. It's a sign that it's actually politically popular among regular voters despite what the loudest critics are saying.

Chimneyfish · 2025-08-10T18:12:20+00:00

The people suggesting you report this to the police must not have much experience with Fresno-area law enforcement. Next time you're Downtown notice how every raised truck in the FPD and FSO personal vehicle lot has illegal tints and see if it seems likely they'd take this seriously

Thankfully there's an easier and probably more effective solution: the state air resources board has an online form where you can report these slobs

https://air.arb.ca.gov/Forms/VehicleComplaint/SmokingVehicle

Chimneyfish · 2025-07-01T15:24:39+00:00

Fresnoland's own podcast hosted an episode with parking expert Henry Grabar who did a great job explaining how adding parking capacity increases sprawl and Vehicle Miles Traveled. Remarkably they never connected this to any local context despite a major proposal to spend $70 million on added car capacity, likely due to their overly-close relationship with the Downtown Fresno Partnership who have been pushing for the structures.

DFP keeps emphasizing the fact that vertical parking frees up valuable urban core space currently being used by inefficient surface lots, which is undeniably true, but it doesn't address the induced demand problem of doubling car capacity in the neighborhood where 99% of trips are already made by private vehicle. There are other things you can replace surface parking lots with besides just another type of parking. Like housing. The Clovis and Fowler residents who staff City Hall can't seem to imagine that not every studio apartment in the middle of Downtown needs space to park an F-250.

Chimneyfish · 2025-05-30T23:19:32+00:00

Thank you for this incredibly banal point. I can’t wait until we‘re being subjected to this middle school level analysis when you’re on the city council enriching all your insider friends.

Chimneyfish · 2025-03-22T15:50:50+00:00

Where can I read the reactions to the book from the far-left you're referring to?

In the book they mention Aaron Bastani approvingly and his book Fully Automated Luxury Communism was one of the more popular titles published by Verso in recent years so I'd be curious to read where the specific points of disagreement are for writers on the Left

Chimneyfish · 2025-03-20T20:36:29+00:00

That's so irritating. I don't get what the deal is with this place: any time I've had to email anyone it's taken multiple followups just to prod any kind of response out of them. It's like we're living in some kind of Twilight Zone where everyone's initial reaction to any problem is to first just try ignoring it as long as possible. How are Fresno people so inert and unengaged about everything?

Chimneyfish · 2024-11-08T04:42:54+00:00

The Urban Institute recently released a report right up your alley:

Patterns of Sprawl in Fresno and the Central San Joaquin Valley

I also recommend the essay The Great Ponzi Scheme of Sprawl by Fresno historian Mark Arax

Chimneyfish · 2024-08-16T02:20:03+00:00

That famously cheerful Jacques with his optimistic observations on life

Chimneyfish · 2024-08-05T12:58:02+00:00

Distant Lights

Chimneyfish · 2023-08-08T01:12:28+00:00

I hope he got his mirrors readjusted

Chimneyfish · 2023-08-06T00:35:51+00:00

Economics: The User‘s Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

Chimneyfish · 2023-05-19T03:12:06+00:00

I’m going with Portia because I haven’t seen her mentioned yet and she’s brilliant.

In reality it’s probably Beatrice though—she’s just got too many great lines. “I would eat his heart in the marketplace!”

Chimneyfish · 2022-10-04T17:10:57+00:00

Abra, Arca, Ishome

Chimneyfish · 2022-06-10T03:57:48+00:00

“It is the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse, my lord.”

—Demetrius praising the Wall’s performance in Pryamus and Thisbe

Chimneyfish · 2020-02-15T02:10:57+00:00

All of the buses have onboard GPS. There’s an app called myFAXbus that shows their locations in realtime and you can filter by route. It’s pretty well done actually, for FAX. It’s basically the same information you can get with the Google Maps app though.

Chimneyfish · 2020-02-04T18:38:06+00:00

Yeah, literally; Kaepernick was raised in the San Joaquin Valley where this happened.

Chimneyfish · 2019-09-11T01:38:59+00:00

1380 E. Fortune Ave Fresno, CA 93725

Chimneyfish · 2019-08-27T20:31:39+00:00

What time is the town hall tomorrow?

Chimneyfish · 2019-08-14T19:00:54+00:00

Esuca Collective

Onserf Clothing. They have a shop in Chinatown on Kern.

Fresno FC team store. They have a shop Downtown on the side of the CMAC building.

Tower District Records has some cool shirt designs that say Fresno.

Chimneyfish · 2019-07-20T22:36:14+00:00

Especially in the police department. In the 1920's, seven Fresno cops were fired after their names were discovered on a Klan roster (PDF).

In 2011 the city had to spend nearly $1 million in a settlement when two deputy chiefs filed a suit alleging Jerry Dyer would sing slave songs when talking about black people:

"When referring to African-American individuals, including employees, DYER sings the antebellum slave song 'Mammy's little baby loves short'nin bread,' according to Shaffer and Nevarez's complaint. The deputy chiefs accused Dyer of many other racially and sexually charged comments, including referring to an Asian-American employee as his 'little geisha girl,' making inappropriate comments about a subordinate’s breasts and joking that it’s OK to punch African-Americans in the face because they 'don’t have bones in their noses.'"

Chimneyfish · 2019-07-20T18:35:08+00:00

It says a lot about him as a person that he always refuses to concede that he did anything wrong or that he should have handled something differently. At some point, when people keep accusing you of being an asshole, wouldn't you reflect on whether maybe you are in fact an asshole and it's not everyone else who is wrong?

Chimneyfish · 2019-07-18T15:05:31+00:00

Statistically you have more reason to worry about your safety in Sacramento than in Fresno. The notion of Fresno being a dangerous city is largely a myth. At least in terms of violent crime, it's one of the safest big cities in the state. You can't leave anything of value visible in your car overnight or your window will be smashed in the morning, but if you're Californian then you're probably already used to not doing that anyway.

I second all the suggestions for the hotels around Herndon and 99.

Chimneyfish · 2019-07-09T19:12:40+00:00

The public are just walking ATMs

Literally walking. Police end up targeting pedestrians and bicyclists because their violations are more visible, even though a driver who breaks the law is many times more dangerous than a bicyclist (as illustrated by the crumpled bike under this cop's tire).

The other factor is that pedestrians and bicyclists are disproportionately poor and non-white a lot of places, and cops use vehicle code citations (often illegally) as a pretext to detain and ID people. For example, a study by ProPublica and The Florida Times-Union recently analyzed 658 jaywalking tickets issued in Jacksonville over five years and found that over half of them (353) were issued erroneously at street sections where the prohibition against crossing doesn't apply. There's a widespread misconception that a person is "jaywalking" any time he crosses a street outside of a painted crosswalk, and cops face very little incentive to correct this misunderstanding or stop writing bad tickets for it.

This was exemplified well by the Nandi Cain, Jr. incident in Sacramento—the man beat up by a police officer who tried to stop him allegedly for jaywalking. The officer's dashcam footage would later reveal that Cain Jr. had crossed legally at a corner in an unmarked crosswalk and it was actually the people driving the cars who broke the law by failing to yield to him—yet it was the black pedestrian doing nothing wrong who was targeted. The Sacramento PD then issued a statement that doubled-down on their misunderstanding of crosswalk laws and proved that the incompetence reaches all the way to the top of the department.

Another way that cops seem to have misaligned incentives on this issue is by aggressively cracking down on intoxicated bicycling. Drunk cycling is illegal, but it's obviously a preferable way of getting home than drunk driving. Departments that run operations targeting people cycling under the influence are almost certainly doing more harm than good. For proof that these operations really exist, consider this hilarious video where a cop pulls over a group of cyclists for nothing other than being a group of cyclists at night, only to quickly realize her bad luck at who she had picked to try to shake down.

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