2026-02-19 03:53:00
A letter I sent to one of my state reps, who is the primary sponsor of a bill that would ban plastic bags and add a 10 cent tax on recycled paper bags.
I'm contacting you because you're the primary sponsor of [bill number] and I have a related proposal, which is simply that retailers cannot require consumers to use a bag.
For context:
I shop at [Cannabis Store] in [redacted]. It's a cannabis dispensary. Every time I shop there, they put the product (which is in a sealed jar, as required by law) into a disposable plastic shopping bag with their brand information on it.
When I've refused the bag in the past, they told me I have to take it. They've told me it's required by law (which is not true), among other things.
They have since added a trashcan at their exit so that on your way out, you can throw away their bag if you so please. After I make my purchase, I remove my product and receipt from the bag and leave the bag on the counter. When I do this, they tell me "I'm going to need you to take the bag with you". I say "No thank you" and I don't take the bag.
While they have not banned me yet for refusing to follow their wasteful policy, this sort of friction is not something anybody should have to deal with. There is an environmental component of the plastic waste, but there is also the consumer-rights issue of a business (a public accommodation) forcing me, a consumer, to engage in behavior that is not required by law, that has no clear social benefit, that also produces waste.
I support [bill number]. I also think a piece of legislation like I'm proposing would be incredibly easy to pass, and would incur zero costs for any consumers or businesses. It also aligns politically with conservatives who would likely support the aspect of empowering individual freedom.
Thanks,
Reed
2026-02-19 03:33:00
I wrote the following Letter to my local paper. (they publish almost every letter I send, and I encourage you to submit letters too!)
The first time I mentioned anxiety to my Dr., she offered me pills and no other options.
I recently read about a meditation study that enrolled participants in an 8 week class where they learned about mindfulness meditation and meditated in class, and this was just as effective as Lexapro at treating anxiety and depression.
The first take-away is that meditation is a real treatment for some mental disorders. Second, and more importantly, is that this was a system of support, not a take-home do-it-yourself assignment.
When you have knee surgery, you may be prescribed physical therapy. You go to a clinic, and a physical therapist tells you what exercises to do, serving as a professional instructor, provider of equipment, and as a social support. The social support and accountability is really important.
Many of you know how hard it is to continue physical therapy at home, on your own. There is no real accountability, and nobody to help you in that setting. It works for some people, but many of us need support. Those of us suffering from mental illness need support too.
Pharmaceuticals are a great option for people who want them, and many people's lives are vastly improved by them. Pharmaceuticals are an option, not the only option.
I'm writing this letter to ask that the medical professional establishment add holistic treatments like meditation to their repertoire and develop systems of support so these treatments are actually effective.
Other holistic approaches should be incorporated as well, such as exercise programs and casual social groups like helping a lonely and depressed, but athletically-inclined patient find a local sports group to play with. Material support can also be incredibly important - helping people get new clothes, or assistance with house-cleaning or going to the grocery store.
2026-02-16 04:47:00
i hate a lot of serious things like animal agriculture and LLMs and ICE.
So here are some silly things I hate, inspired by this blog post:
When a non-plural possessive ends in an apostrophe: "Jesus's robes are dry" is correct and "Jesus' robes are dry" is unspeakable hell and I will become catholic again to condemn you. (You have no idea how much i hate this)
"Attorneys General" is stupid. John Oliver did that stupid episode where he talked about how "Attorneys General" is the actual correct way to pluralize "Attorney General" and he was stupid and wrong and british, but he convinced the entire democratic establishment to follow suit and now we're stuck with it forever, unless I become president, I will end free speech and people will follow my rules about the letter "s" or be hung by their toes.
I hated the number 4 when I was a teenager. I don't know why. It was just a bad number. I don't know that I hate it anymore, but I owe Teen Reed this mention.
Plastic bags - Okay, this one's slightly serious because pollution & climate change blah blah, but my local weed dispensary requires me to carry my bag out of the establishment when I leave and it pisses me tf off so I think my reaction is a little silly, even though I'm right. (Also, I take my drugs out of the bag & set it on the counter then tell them "No thank you" when they tell me I need to take the bag. It's a dumb ass rule.)
Grass lawns - Another mildly serious justifiable one, but like the plastic bags I do PERHAPS feel way too strongly about this one.
fade-in-on-scroll on websites ... it's just such garbage I hate it i hate it i hate it i HAAATE it (example)
The bog-standard marketing landing page where all the "content" is full-screen width, and just frankly takes up too much space. Like I could have learned about the whole product in a singular list that fits on the screen without scrolling, but I have to scroll down a mile-long page and be overwhelmed by a bunch of HUGE sections that tell me almost no information and have giant marketing pictures of often unrelated bullshit. I just don't process anything when I look at these pages. Example. These proliferated probably around 2018, maybe earlier, and I think coincided with a huge proliferation of wordpress as well. (that was my impression at the time, anyway, and I might be misplaced by several years.)
VPNs (the example in the last one was fairly random. I searched for "cybersecurity tools" because I've seen a lot of cybersecurity websites with that bad design, and this was the first tool from a listicle.) ... well moreso, advertising for VPNs. I think VPNs are fine, the ads are just ... liars and embellishers, often times.
Modern Javascript tools and javascript-bloated websites. Like 99% of websites can have their base design in pure HTML + CSS (and download in one or two files) but these days, a huge majority of websites use Javascript all over the place, broken into many different files, and modifying fundamental browser behavior. A lot of the javascript isn't even to make fancy features, it's just like basic page layout using a giant javascript library. STOP IT. (as a result of this, many websites load slower in 2026 than they did in like 2010, which is INSANE considering the technological advancement of both computers and the internet)
This one is not silly. I hate genocide. I hate fascism. I hate pedophilia. The U.S. is complicit in all of these horrors (many other countries are too!) Here's a resource for resistance. I will also reiterate my hatred for animal cruelty
The first 3 are proper silly, I know. The rest are a little less silly lol but I did my best. No i didn't. I put some effort in lol.
2026-02-13 05:26:00
You're familiar with atoms, and likely envision them as little balls. All of the stuffs of the world is made up of these atoms, bonded together. You probably know atoms are composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons - even smaller little balls.
Well even these sub-atomic particles are not actually little balls. They are not stuffs. There is no physical matter, according to (my understanding of) the "field" theories.
So physicists think that all of the universe is this single unified field of energy. It's just energy everywhere. They've also determined that "particles" like electrons can act as "particles" or as waves.
Well, the "particle" representation isn't really a tiny solid ball like I've long imagined. It is actually a concentration of energy in this unified field, and this energy is moving in particular patterns. It is that concentration and movement of energy that manifests as an electron.
You might think about an ocean. Let's say you get a small part of that ocean to spin, having its own current. The water is the unified field. The area that's spinning is a "particle". There is no new "stuff" there, but only a concentration and movement of water.
Because all things are just energy concentrating and moving, "particles" can be spontaneously created and destroyed. In particle accelerators, they make sub-atomic particles move near the speed of light, and they slam them into eachother. The initial particles are typically annihilated, and a slew of other particles are created, and decay, making other particles, and so-on. This is possible because none of the "particles" are actually stuff. They are just energy, and this energy moves into different forms - different concentrations and patterns of movement.
Or even more wild. Electrons are negatively charged. When you move two electrons near eachother, their negative charges cause them to repel eachother. WELL, apparently the mechanism of this repulsion is the exchange of photons. Photons shoot out of the electrons at eachother, which causes them to push apart from another.
Even MORE wild. In "empty" space, a vacuum, sub-atomic particles are constantly created and destroyed. Like a proton and anti-proton will both spontaneously come into existence, then re-combine and destroy eachother. (an anti-proton is like a proton but it has a negative charge).
This spontaneous creation of particles seems impossible when you think of the world as tiny bricks (or balls) stacked together to build bigger and bigger structures. But when everything is a field of energy, you can see that these "particles" are just this energy changing it's concentration and pattern of movement. It's still insane, but slightly less so.
WELL. On to the part I'm perhaps most fascinated by, is the idea that "Spacetime" is a singular unified thing. The idea that without "time" there is no 3 dimensional matter. That matter requires time in order to exist. Time is not some independent thing that just marches on while also a world of objects exist. There is one world of space & time and they are inherently linked.
To help you understand this, imagine you have a string (a couple feet long) with a single light on the end of it. You spin this light around in a circle. You spin it very very fast. Anybody looking at you spinning this light around will see a single solid circle (well, the outside-edge of it is solid, anyway). It is just one light, moving, and yet it is a solid circle.
Now take an "instant" of time. At any given "instant", there is only one light in one specific location. There is never an instant in which a whole circle is present. The presence of that circle requires the passage of time.
Like the light-on-a-string ... all stuffs of the universe are made from movement. Energy concentrates and moves, and it manifests as physical stuffs. Like the light moves and manifests as a circle.
And lastly ... I don't think any of this is proven as a matter of fact. The physicists have maths that work. They have equations they can use to determine what will happen in reality. The explanation of what is really the nature of reality (everything is a unified field of energy) is just an explanation, a theory of what the math means about the world.
For comparison, let's consider a ball being thrown. There's some math that says "If you throw the ball X hard in Y direction, then it will travel Z path". The ball will go up, curve, and come down. The math for this works.
Well, gravity essentially is pulling the ball down toward the center of the earth. But it could also be a different explanation. There could be tiny particles flying toward the center of the earth from space. Those particles could be pushing down on the top of the ball, causing it to move toward the ground. It could be this "push from above" or this "pull from below" and the math saying how the ball will move would be exactly the same. The movement of the ball is not proof that gravity exists as described. Gravity is just a theory here.
It is well-proven that "the ball will move in this way". But not well-proven that "the ball moves this way BECAUSE gravity pulls from below". I actually haven't read in detail about how gravity works, and it is possible that the "pulls from below" idea of gravity is well-proven (or entirely wrong). I don't really know. The point of the ball/gravity proposition was just to show that "the maths work" does not prove "this is the fundamental nature of reality".
Notes: My understanding is derived from the books What is Real? and The Tao of Physics. I haven't quite finished Tao of Physics yet, but I'm getting close. I am a layperson. I could be misunderstanding all of this. The ball/gravity example is my own. The light-on-a-string example is my own. The ocean/spin example is my own.
2026-02-11 04:28:00
A couple years ago, my bestie and I wrote a short book for NanoWrimo (We took 2 months and didn't reach the desired word count but we DID finish the story!).
On one of my writing days, I proposed a new political system into the story's universe and I've been dreaming of it ever since. I really want it to become real.
The basis of it is that everyone has a local representative who they pretty much have direct access to. Any political concerns/wishes for your city, county, state, or federal government should first come to this local representative, though you could skip over them if they're a bad rep or if you just want to go more direct.
So each representative would oversee about 1,000 people.
Let's use my city as an example. There are 70,000 people, so we would have 70 reps across the city. There would be regular community meetings within individual districts (to meet with your neighbors and your individual rep. Good reps might include snacks and entertainment.). Then there would be multi-district regions in the city, let's say 10 of them. Each of these regions would have regular meetings too, where the reps (7 of them) would form a district-council.
Each district council would elect a representative who would then serve on a city-wide council, so the city-council would have ~10 reps. Voters would still directly-elect state reps & federal reps, I think.
So that's the basic structural idea.
And then if you have a political issue at any level, you can go speak to your immediate rep, or raise the issue at the community meeting, or organize politically within your small district. It is then your rep's job to bring this to the region-council, and it is the region-council's job to bring this to the city council and your state representatives. These reps could also serve as sources of news, essentially as curators for their communities. This system could also be used to conduct surveys of residents for a more direct-democracy on some issues.
Additionally, the representatives would be full-time. They would represent their communities politically and also do actual labor to support their neighborhoods. This labor could be things like directly filling potholes, or helping build mutual aid networks within the immediate community (and crossing over to other districts too!). Disabled reps could forgo (most of) their salary, focus their work on the political aspect, and hire someone to do the other labor full-time.
This idea is about its general approach, NOT about the specific details of its implementation. Many of the details could change. The general idea is that everybody has a rep who is super accessible, who represents their immediate community, who serves their immediate community in a practical and political sense, and that the local community can organize and have political positions bubble-up through this bottom-up representation model.
2026-02-11 03:54:00
The majority of this post is about people choosing different diets for health-related reasons and, basically, don't be a dick about what health/food choices other people make.
The part I want to respond to
do what's good for you, and your body, health (including mental health!) and fits your life and circumstances...
Preferably, try to do better, at least to a degree, for the planet and animals. And that's that.
I really appreciate the "try to do better ... for the planet and animals" bit.
And I just want to emphasize that. Our "personal" food choices are communal choices. They are choices that involve complex processes in the larger world. Those choices are not just about you, regardless of the framing in your mind.
Corn is grown primarily as animal feed and ethanol fuel. It requires tons of land and water to grow, far more than AI data centers do. Cows and other animals are kept in captivity, with no freedom, in incredibly tight spaces, and live lives of suffering before they are killed, either because they stop producing milk, or because it is time to harvest their muscles and fat and bones.
I think if people were cannibalizing children, nobody would accept this as a "personal choice" that non-cannibals should shut up about. I think we should be similarly insufferable about advocating against animal suffering. Most (self included) would feel that eating human children is worse than enslaving and torturing cows ... but man, is it really?
One day, perhaps we'll collectively move past being species-ist, move past looking at other species' suffering as insignificant or unimportant. Perhaps one day our collective compassion will expand.
