#be responding to a million (maybe like 2-300) messages from you per day + 20 minute voice notes when i was legit rotting and dying and i

[alluralater]

super long rant incoming:

the joegoldbergification is super weird. like please please if you’re obsessed with me to an unhealthy and dangerous degree, just keep it to yourself. just don’t tell me, please. the amount of times someone has gotten like this with me and escalated things when i’ve told them to stop is seriously wild. and like wtf is this about saying how you didn’t want to have parasocial interactions like hello?? is my existence a performance to you? am i content created to be fed and consumed by you? and why WHY would you ever think it’s alright to take my kindness as an avenue to then start talking shit about femmes you had falling outs with?? what do you gain from that? certainly not respect from me and that’s why i called you out repeatedly on that shit. so so fucking weird. do you think you gain my pity or my sympathy?? you’re not a beaten dog so please stop. like oh my god the dog metaphor makes me wanna slam my head into a wall. like as someone who has literally been forced to watch animal cruelty take place, shut the fuck up. shut the hell up. your relationship ended and now you wanna demonize people and rewrite history thinking that if certain people don’t know the full story that they’ll just believe you. legitimately how the fuck and why the fuck would i do that when you position yourself as a blameless victim?? it’s so weird and odd. and on top of aaaaaall of that, to obsessively text me and try to like corral me into a corner and say all of this weird stuff like as if you’re spiraling about me when we’d only texted for three days (two of which i wasn’t even responding to you for) is seriously bonkers. like seriously thank fuck something told me not to sext you because i just know things would have gotten awful. it’s not normal and it’s not okay and it’s not healthy. please stop idolizing me. i’m just a person and i am no more interesting than the next person. your obsession is not my responsibility! to try and manipulate me with the way you talk about your ex is super super weird. like extremely weird. i have a mind of my own?? hello?? i make my own judgments myself and i use intuition for a great deal of that. took me all of five seconds after blocking you to check the femme discord and see that i should have already done so but i haven’t because i’ve been busy with family emergencies for like two months. very uncool. very weird, very strange behavior. not my job, not my problem. i am not all of these weird deified titles you like to call me. i don’t have to be ‘omnipotent’ to know that you are trying to bury her and scream your lungs out into the fucking grave as if she deserves it. god i fucking hate when people do this shit. like can toxic mutuals maybe just instead leave me alone?? ‘why are you mutuals with them if they’re toxic” BECAUSE I DIDNT KNOW AND I HAVENT BEEN ABLE TO BE SOCIAL AND FIND OUT UNTIL NOW. like fuck dude i hate it here sometimes. if you’re just haha obsessed with me, GREAT. but please don’t start dumping all this weird shit about how i *make* you feel when im not doing anything and i’ve stated that im not encouraging anything and ive communicated that’s a you thing. i literally told you to focus on yourself and stop talking shit about her and you just kept doing it. the whole obsessed with me thing can be what it is, at this point it’s so normal irl and on here that i’m too exhausted to try and do it all, but the decision to keep going and keep talking shit about her and demonizing them and making yourself a blameless victim is fucking gross and no i actually won’t just sit there and listen to it in exchange for your attention or some weird shit like that. i find it super super weird your constant asking of me to tell you what i think about you and what i think about ANYTHING and everything about you. what the actual fuck?? and then to be like ‘i want to take accountability’ after i’ve already told you everything you’re doing wrong and locked my boundaries and said how uncomfortable i am?? that’s hilarious. anyways ugh okay that’s it bye

[deniscollins]

Florida Keys Deliver a Hard Message: As Seas Rise, Some Places Can’t Be Saved

Sugarloaf Key, part of the Florida Keys, has a population of 6,600, small businesses, campgrounds, schools and wildlife refuges. Due to rising sea levels associated with climate change, to keep three miles of road on Sugarloaf Key dry from flooding year-round in 2025 would require raising it by 1.3 feet, at a cost to taxpayers of $75 million, or $25 million per mile. Keeping the road dry in 2045 would mean elevating it 2.2 feet, at a cost of $128 million. If you were advising government, would you recommend that these expenditures be made to protect the current and future population: (1) yes, (2) no? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Officials in the Florida Keys announced what many coastal governments nationwide have long feared, but few have been willing to admit: As seas rise and flooding gets worse, not everyone can be saved.

And in some places, it doesn’t even make sense to try.

On Wednesday morning, Rhonda Haag, the county’s sustainability director, released the first results of the county’s years long effort to calculate how high its 300 miles of roads must be elevated to stay dry, and at what cost. Those costs were far higher than her team expected — and those numbers, she said, show that some places can’t be protected, at least at a price that taxpayers can be expected to pay.

“I never would have dreamed we would say ‘no,’” Ms. Haag said in an interview. “But now, with the real estimates coming in, it’s a different story. And it’s not all doable.”

The results released Wednesday focus on a single three-mile stretch of road at the southern tip of Sugarloaf Key, a small island 15 miles up Highway 1 from Key West. To keep those three miles of road dry year-round in 2025 would require raising it by 1.3 feet, at a cost of $75 million, or $25 million per mile. Keeping the road dry in 2045 would mean elevating it 2.2 feet, at a cost of $128 million. To protect against expected flooding levels in 2060, the cost would jump to $181 million.

And all that to protect about two dozen homes.

“I can’t see staff recommending to raise this road,” Ms. Haag said. “Those are taxpayer dollars, and as much as we love the Keys, there’s going to be a time when it’s going to be less population.”

The people who live on that three-mile stretch of road were less understanding. If the county feels that other parts of the Keys ought to be saved, said Leon Mense, a 63-year-old office manager at a medical clinic, then at least don’t make him pay for it.

“So somebody in the city thinks they deserve more of my tax money than I do?” Mr. Mense asked. “Then don’t charge us taxes, how does that sound?”

She suggested the county could offer residents a ferry, water taxis, or some other kind of boat during the expanding window during which the road is expected to go underwater during the fall high tides.

“If that’s three months a year for the next 20 years, and that gets them a decade or two, that’s perhaps worth it,” Ms. Haag said. “We can do a lot. But we can’t do it all.”

At a climate change conference in Key West on Wednesday, Roman Gastesi, the Monroe County manager, said elected leaders will have to figure out how to make those difficult calls.

“How do you tell somebody, ‘We’re not going to build the road to get to your home’? And what do we do?” Mr. Gastesi asked. “Do we buy them out? And how do we buy them out — is it voluntary? Is it eminent domain? How do we do that?”

Administrators and elected officials are going to have to start to rely on a “word nobody likes to use,” Mr. Gastesi said, “and that’s ‘retreat.’”

The county’s elected officials must now decide whether to accept that recommendation. The mayor of Monroe County, Heather Carruthers, said she hopes the cost of raising the roads turns out to be lower than what her staff have found, as the need for adaptation leads to better technology.

Still, Mayor Carruthers said, “We can’t protect every single house.”

Asked how she expected residents would respond, Mayor Carruthers said she expects pushback. “I’m sure that some of them will be very irate, and we’ll probably face some lawsuits,” she said. “But we can’t completely keep the water away.”

The odds of the county winning future possible lawsuits over the policy are unclear. The novelty of what the Keys’ officials are proposing is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that nobody can say for certain whether it’s legally defensible.

The law generally requires local governments to maintain roads and other infrastructure, because failure to do so will reduce the property value of surrounding homes, according to Erin Deady, a lawyer who specializes in climate and land-use law and is a consultant to the county on adapting to rising seas. But local officials retain the right to decide whether or not to upgrade or enhance that infrastructure.

What’s unclear, Ms. Deady said, is whether raising a road to prevent it from going underwater is more akin to maintaining or upgrading. That’s because no court has yet ruled on the issue.

“The law hasn’t caught up with that,” Ms. Deady said.

She said she thinks the county is within its rights to refuse to elevate the road at the end of Sugarloaf Key, so long as it’s transparent about the rationale for that decision. “At some point, there’s an economic consideration,” she said. “We can’t manage every condition.”

The debates over county spending and legal precedents will determine the future of Old State Road 4A, two lanes of asphalt tucked between mangroves that mostly obscure the water threatening it from all around. On a recent afternoon, the only signs of life on this road were the occasional passing car, along with the gates many of the road’s few residents have erected to keep unwanted visitors out of their driveways.

Henry Silverman, a retired teacher from Long Island in New York, bought a house on the southern edge of Sugarloaf Key 10 years ago. The building’s first floor is 18 feet off the ground; a boardwalk cuts through a forest of mangroves to his boat launch. His wife, Melissa, said that when farmers burn sugar cane in Cuba, 90 miles to the south, they can see the plumes of smoke from their roof and even smell the sugar.

Still, climate change is encroaching on their treehouse paradise. Hurricane Irma in 2017 blew out their screens and pushed water through the windows. Each high tide brings the saltwater a little bit closer, killing the palm trees under the deck and popping the wooden slats off the boardwalk. The couple used to fly down from Long Island in a Cessna, until one day the runway at the island’s airport was underwater.

“What’s government for? They’re supposed to protect your property,” Mr. Silverman said from behind the wheel of his shallow skiff boat on a recent afternoon.

The couple listed the variety of jobs that depend on the people who live on this street: Landscapers, construction workers, caterers, carpenters, the restaurants up the road. “There’s a lot of trickle-down,” Mr. Silverman said.

Still, he conceded that it might be difficult to generate sympathy among the broader public for the plight of this neighborhood. “Nobody feels sorry for anybody living down here,” Mr. Silverman said, gesturing across the water to the gated mansions that line the shore.

Mr. Mense, who lives in the last house on the road, suggested that officials focus instead on slowing global warming, without which no amount of adaptation will be enough for these islands.

“Maybe we should think about stopping, or trying to stop, the cause of the water rising,” Mr. Mense said. “At what point will the road be high enough?”

Others seemed resigned. Georgia Siegel, a 73-year-old yoga teacher who grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., and moved here 20 years ago, said that if the government decided this area can’t be sustained, she would simply leave.

“What am I going to do?” Ms. Seigel asked, standing on the narrow beach in front of the home that she and her husband built. “It’s a problem that’s bigger than me.”

Not everyone was so sanguine about the prospect. A woman who lives in one of the more modest homes along this road, who asked not to be identified for fear that discussing flooding would hurt her property value, said she worried what the county’s plans mean for her future.

“This is all I have,” she said, gesturing to her house next to the water. “If that road goes under, I go under.”