To (e)X(it), or not to (e)X(it)
That is the question. Also, road miles.
I detest Elon Musk. I don’t say that about too many people. He might be the first. There’s a lot about this turd not to like, but let me start here: Elon has the look of a guy that never turned a wrench, or picked up a tool of any sort for that matter. The look of someone that never changed a dirty diaper. Or that ever washed a dish, fork or article of clothing. Musk is that guy you see wearing skinny jeans and your first thought is whoa dude.
More importantly, he’s also a brazen liar of the worst sort and has used that and his obscene wealth to wield political and cultural power wildly disproportionate to the qualities of his character.
He also, as I’m sure you know, owns the social media platform once called Twitter, now called X, which I have been a part of (can it be??) for 13 years now. His wild October 2022 purchase price now looks like a de facto $44 billion campaign contribution to Donald Trump.
Unimportant to me until these past two years, Twitter/X helped me build a brand of some sort around my work. As the cool kids say, the platform is/was part of an ecosystem that writers and especially journalists use to make the rest of the population aware of their work. Writers promote other writers in back scratching fashion and hopefully in the process everybody gets read a little bit more. In the words of Bob Leonard, the cream doesn’t rise to the top, it gets pushed to the top. But, not a small amount of sour milk somehow gets pushed to the top too, unfortunately, in social media platforms like Twitter/X.
And like me, many scientists have used the platform to communicate their work to general audiences. The platform also attracted many in agriculture including farmers.
The commonly-held idea that Twitter was the public space for liberals was overblown in my view, but it would be hard to deny that the content generators and their audience leaned liberal. Then Donald Trump got ‘Twitter big’ about 10 years ago and the thing has been swirling downward around the toilet bowl ever since.
While thoughtful commingling of political opposites is desperately needed in this country, that is not what happened with Twitter. Instead of reasoned right-leaning content and analysis, we got moronic and bombastic bomb throwing, mainly in the form of criticism and not actual position statement. Tolerating straw man, ad hominem and whataboutism attacks became the norm for anyone generating what they thought was serious content. I must also admit that from time to time, Twitter did not bring out the best in my character. Increasingly it seemed like the toxicity became a very unpleasant price to pay for participation on Twitter. And the fun part—comedians, sports, celebrities, cat jokes, weather and so on that’s readily available on other social media—became just not worth the headache.
And that was before Elon bought it.
Now X is a Perdition of stupidity interspersed with fascism and tasteless ads for bizarre and obscure products that no one on earth needs, in addition to the mindless musings of Lord Musk, who is walking, talking proof that depth of character is not a prerequisite for obtaining wealth in the this country. Musk evidently takes great joy in forcing X users to consume his brain vomit as if it were an elixir from the holy grail. He’s also threatened to charge all X users for access to the app.
There was a mild effort to move away from Twitter and toward the new platform of Mastodon not long after the Musk purchase. I tried Mastodon a little bit but it never caught fire. There have been a few other competing platforms including Facebook’s Threads and Trump’s own Truth Social. Substack also developed its Notes platform for short-form content which Musk evidently feared enough as a potential competitor that he explored buying Substack. Since his Twitter purchase, Substack has chafed Musk like the skinny jeans on his muffin top such that he’s even blocked links to Substack on tweets for a while, and some have always been suspicious that his algorithms throw Substack posts into some cyberspace briar patch accessible only to the lucky or determined. My Substack posts rarely get more than 10 reads from Twitter although I usually post a link to them there. Most of the reads to my university blog actually came from Twitter.
Following the election, many people I know were moving from X to Bluesky, which was developed by ex-Twitter engineers. I began thinking about doing the same, but closing the book on a social media audience that took 13 years to build, especially now when I’m trying to sell words, is not something you want to do hastily. Then I saw a tweet by a knowledgeable M.D. regarding RFK Jr. and his views on vaccines, and how this likely resulted in dozens of measles deaths in Samoa. The responses were so ignorant and downright venomous that I thought this thing (X) is beyond repair. Then when Jess Piper cold turkeyed her 150,000 follower account I felt like the train was indeed departing, leaving Musk and his drooling zombies behind. We will see if these zombies will have as much fun feasting on each other, but I doubt it.
So I set up a Bluesky account (https://bsky.app/profile/theswinerepublic.bsky.social) and will let my X account ride for a few days or weeks just to advertise my Bluesky account; hopefully sane people will continue to do the same. Now it’s time for a shower to see if the stench of Musk can be washed off.
Road miles in Iowa
Iowa has a lot public road miles and this links back to the state’s many farmers needing to get grain to market. During one of my recent programs I repeated something I had heard but not verified: that I thought Iowa had the most road miles per capita of any state. Someone questioned this and as it turns out they were right and I was wrong. We’re 7th. Of the top 10, Iowa is the easternmost and the smallest in area.
Unsurprisingly Texas has the most actual public road miles, and by a lot. Iowa is 14th.
In terms of road miles per square mile of area (i.e. road density), the smallest state of Rhode Island is first; Iowa is 19th. This one surprised me a little; I thought Iowa would rank higher. We think of much of Iowa as being divided into square “sections” of land, which is one square mile, or 640 acres. In the early days, sections were divided up in 40 acre increments and as farming consolidated in Iowa over the decades, farmers often expanded in 40-, or 80-, or 160-acre increments as others sold out. Anyway in my brain I figured a section has four miles of road—one mile on each side, forgetting each section borders another. So one section has 4 miles, two adjacent sections 7 miles, four sections 12 miles, and so on.
No state west of the Mississippi River is in the top 10 for road density.
Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? Unlike me, they actually know something about writing. I just wing it.
Thanks Kevin! Hope you keep reading.
I am just an old geezer who sticks to Facebook and Substack, reading yourself and Matt Labash mostly, though there are a host of readable , intelligent folks on Substack I haven't got to yet. I don't "X" or dabble in the oxymoronic "Truth Social". So, I will just read your stuff wherever you put it, buy a book when you put another out, and use your data to take my farmer-neighbors and family to task about destroying Iowa's waters, and having taxpayers pay for the privilege. Oh, and their "no socialism" delusion as they travel down the 4 miles of gravel road with 3 farms on it, to get to the state highway, weighted by not the slightest irony.
We travelled from Cedar rapids to Mt. Pleasant recently, then heading east to visit an aging relative in Burlington. All along 380 we observed , and smelled, what must be an annual event in several counties south , that of "the spreading of the stink". Large tracked tractors with "honey wagons" behind incorporating liquid manure on just -harvested fields, I assume to get it done before a freeze. It was a chore sitting in a closed car going 70 to tolerate the stench. I don't know why people who live in such areas don't sue, or change county ordinances to stop this. I mean, I grew up on a hog/cow farm so am not new to manure smell, but this literally made your eyes water.
Keep up the good work , and just advise where you are publishing your stuff.