Alex Wenzel

@alexwenzel

Postdoc studying cancer. Academic unionist and transit enthusiast. Trying to make buses less invisible. TF2 Medic main. This account does not represent the positions or opinions of my employer or of my union. he/him

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Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· 29d

POV: standing on an elevated train platform with a partially cloudy blue sky and soft golden sunlight.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· 29d

Sunset train from last week.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· 29d

Do these people deserve to have their hospital taken away? capitalbnews.org/georgia-rail...

In 2015, the county's majority-white Board of Elections and Registration systematically challenged the registrations of 174 Sparta voters, almost all of whom were Black, ahead of local elections.
Sheriff's deputies delivered summonses to Black residents' homes, ordering them to appear before the board to prove their residency or lose their voting rights. Many Black voters stayed home in the next election, intimidated by the situation, according to residents.
Civil rights groups sued, and in 2018, Hancock County agreed to a federal consent decree.
The county eventually restored eligible voters to the rolls. But the damage lingered.
With a diminished Black vote, a white candidate, Allen Haywood, won the mayoral race for the first time in 32 years. Several

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· 29d

This is a far less important point, but determining layoffs based on who used the least resources to do their job makes sense only in the context that Silicon Valley is now 100% about the appearance of utility and nothing else. Execs see their only job as making AI look useful.

The lawsuit, filed in Oakland, California, federal court late Monday, says that the company relied on factors such as productivity and Al token usage when it slashed thousands of jobs earlier this year, disadvantaging people who missed work because of medical conditions or to care for family members.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 12

This is a very bad idea and will probably lead to a lot of random (though mostly minority) voters being harassed for no reason, likely to serve as a chilling effect on voting in general.

One person familiar with the matter said analysts in one FBI field office were given a spreadsheet with 175,000 names — along with dates of birth —and that they have been tasked to run those names through a commercial database to check whether the individuals are alive and to determine a current address for each of them.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 9

I wish they would honor my unsubscribe requests, I wish they wouldn’t manipulate people into giving them money, and I really wish they weren’t acclimatizing their supporters to respond to language like this. Eventually they’ll be asking for something other than an accidental recurring donation.

Screenshot of a text message that says “President Trump just gave a DIRECT ORDER
from the Oval Office.
You need to see this ASAP:”

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 8

I hadn’t heard this before. Particularly vile.

v. Sanford in a first-year constitutional law course. At the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Centers in Lubbock, faculty were instructed to remove material about effectively serving transgender patients and received guidance to refrain from treating transgender patients, for any medical condition, if a medical student was present. And Plaintiffs' members at Texas Tech Health

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 8

research community's trust in NIH. Many NIH clinical studies are conducted in
collaboration with members of the relevant patient community, who may serve on study advisory boards or act as members of the study team. In these cases, the erosion of trust in NIH may extend to community partners. Indeed, a group of community research partners described their reaction to a termination letter stating that research programs like theirs "are antithetical to scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment and do not enhance or lengthen life or reduce illness." The community partners said: "The majority of the patients on our (community advisoryl board interpreted this message to mean:
'Your life does not matter to us."

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 7

Actually, the language is a bit confusing, they might just mean asthma is reason to observe longer in addition to possibility of biphasic reactions. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Patients should be monitored for four to eight hours in the emergency department
From 11% to 23% of patients may experience biphasic reactions, with symptom relapse typically observed within eight hours after initial management. I Longer surveillance or hospital admission is indicated for comorbidities (e.g., asthma) and characteristics linked to biphasic reaction (e.g., the need for fluid resuscitation or more than 0.3 mg of epinephrine).?

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 7

Context

City pressed to add bus stops that allow high-rise housing
Updated interpretation of new state law boosts plans for new homes by about 100K

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 7

I hope this means that the bus lane is going to be permanent. It was put in to facilitate the temporary transit center relocation since there aren’t bus bays. Traffic isn’t an issue, but it would be nice as a queue jump so peds can keep priority at Library Walk w/out delaying buses.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 6

I went looking for a story I read last year to illustrate why CoreCivic doesn't want Otay Mesa inspected. I found an update from last week. It's good news that he doesn't have cancer, but his health still seems to be deteriorating 18 months later. timesofsandiego.com/immigration/...

In June, he told an immigration judge that he was worried that he was dying. He showed the judge a jar of blood that he had collected that day from his rectum. The judge asked the attorney representing ICE what was causing the delay in his medical care. That attorney said the facility was assessing whether it was able to provide the level of care he needed or whether he needed to be transferred.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 5

A stylized screen shot from the video game Half Life 2 showing a very large tower ("The Citadel"). It has jagged, irregular architecture and ends into what appears to be a storm cloud above it.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 4

Online casinos sponsoring streamers have been doing this for awhile, but they would at least have the streamers be playing with house money or give their accounts privileged odds on the otherwise real site. This is just stupid.

The alleged mechanics are remarkably brazen. According to the Journal, Polymarket and its contractors reportedly built near-identical clone sites — including a domain called poiymarket.com
— where creators could simulate trades
without risking real money.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 3

There were racists attacks in Oceanside, FBI seems to have been sitting on this for a year despite knowing the attackers and their motivations.

$The alleged attacks, which occurred the evening of June 7, 2025, appear to have never been publicly reported before. In a sworn affidavit, an FBI agent asserted the three alleged attackers are being investigated on hate-crime charges, as well as charges of violating the victims' civil rights and conspiring to obstruct an investigation. According to the warrant, the three suspects assaulted a 21-year-old Oceanside man who is Asian-Ameri-can near a beach bathroom, allegedly slamming his head into a concrete wall multiple times. The victim was later hospitalized and diagnosed with a concus-sion, among other injuries. A short time later at the Oceanside Pier Amphithe-ater, the same three men allegedly shouted racial slurs while attacking two Marines - one was Black, the other White - who were off duty and enjoying a night out. Both Marines later sought medical treatment at a hospital on Camp Pendleton, where doctors allegedly diagnosed one with a concussion and multiple facial fractures.$

The three attackers have each been interviewed by the FBI at least once and are aware of the investiga-tion, according to the search-warrant affidavit. The FBI agent who sought the warrant asserted that in addition to the alleged racial slurs, further investigation revealed that at least two of the men are members of a White supremacist street gang in Riverside County, while the third has the word "skinhead" tattooed on his arm.
The Union-Tribune is not naming the men since they had not been charged as of Thursday.
The FBI declined to comment on the investigation, referring questions about potential charges to the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego. The U.S. Attorney's Office also declined to comment.
The search warrant unsealed Thursday seeks location data and other information from cellphone companies about four phones that investigators believe belong to the three suspected attackers. The FBI sought the warrant Tuesday and a San Diego federal magistrate judge approved it that same day.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 2

Should be a career-ending scandal, will be out of the news within hours.

Days after the two children, a boy and a girl, were found dead, Shaw and her husband appeared on a podcast produced by Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization formerly led by current U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jul 1

Every red icon in this picture is a bus that is at least 15 minutes late.

Screenshot of a map showing transit vehicle positions in San Diego. Routes with almost every vehicle colored orange or red include 8, 9, 20, 27, 30, 41, 43, 44, 290

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 28

Transit scavenger hunt: Metro bought around 50 old MTS buses that it’s using for this and Olympics extra service. A friend recently texted me after seeing them in an LAX parking lot, so they may still have some recognizable livery. They’ll look like this, and may still have original 600 or 700 IDs.

A picture of the front and partial side view of a city bus. It has a slightly angled front. Its headsign says “27 KEARNY MESA”.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 28

First trip on one of MTS’s newest 40ft electric buses. They’ve been around for several months, but they live in South Bay so I don’t see them very often.

Side view of the front half of a city bus that says “Metropolitan Transit System” in red letters and “Electric” in green letters. Its ID is 7601. Its headsign says “1 LA MESA”. It is parked under a faded green awning with a viaduct in the background.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 25

This headline isn't an exaggeration. The assembly might do less damage by just repealing CPRA than by passing this. At least that way cities couldn't sue journalists into financial ruin for doing their jobs. (1/2)

Perhaps most troublingly, AB 1821 would allow any state or local agency to sue members of the public for the simple act of filing a public records request. This provision alone, which would essentially overturn decades of case law making clear that government cannot preemptively sue requesters, will have a crippling chilling effect: If you knew that by simply filing a public records request, you could be hauled into court and forced to hire a lawyer, wouldn’t you think twice? The prospect of being sued for merely asking for public records would make government dramatically less transparent.
Under the bill, all an agency would need to do to bring a requester to court is decide their records request was made with “malicious intent.” AB 1821 at present does not define “malicious intent,” but even if it were amended to do so, agencies would have wide latitude to subject disfavored requesters, political opponents or reporters uncovering malfeasance to litigation and all the delays and costs that entails.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 25

Just pathetic.

"And if someone tries to bully me into not asking that question, I'm not going to accept that either," Cassidy said. "I am sticking up for the American people, even if I'm speaking to the president."

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 24

Google AI search result has "sources" that include a webpage with this thing as its thumbnail. I miss when the Internet had humans on it.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 24

“Once it becomes a habit, it’s not an onerous thing, it’s built into the pattern of my behavior,” Ms. Vassallo said. “You’re going into the city, you’re going to take the bus. And I’m finding that it’s so much easier.”

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 23

These three got 50 years each for setting off fireworks, for no other reason than they did so to protest the regime.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 22

Relying on "here's what we know" as meaningless filler to avoid mentioning the uncomfortable truth that the President is continuously inventing an alternate reality is extremely pathetic.

Trump says Reflecting Pool 'vandals' are being arrested. What we know

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 22

These numbers are enormous, well beyond the scale of normal project grants or even major multi-center initiatives. Capital is raiding the NSF. This is not a serious policy proposal, they're just taking money from public-interest research and funneling it to wealthy friends and donors.

The first set of labs will focus on improved, artificial intelligence–driven instrumentation for sensing and imaging and research on quantum systems and photonics, fields that are priorities for the Trump administration. Awardees will receive $1.5 million in startup funding for the first 9 months, followed by anywhere from $10 million to $50 million per year for the next 5 to 6 years. To cover that commitment, NSF had to find more than $1 billion within an overall FY 2026 budget of $8.8 billion that contained zero dollars for X-Labs.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 17

This should've been a Presidential legacy-defining scandal. There's been so much destruction, both in health sciences and otherwise, that I forgot this happened.

Gene therapy company UniQure developed a one-time treatment, AMT-130, that aims to lower brain levels of the mutant protein behind the disease, called huntingtin. Data from a small, early trial suggested the drug could slow the progression of the disease up to 75 percent, and patients and advocates have closely watched the drug’s development in hopeful anticipation.

In 2024, the FDA indicated to UniQure that it could file for accelerated approval of AMT-130 without a placebo control arm in its trial. While having a placebo control offers a high-quality comparator in a trial, it raises unique ethical concerns for UniQure’s gene therapy. Delivery of AMT-30 requires a 10- to 12-hour brain surgery, which means a placebo-control arm of a trial would require patients in a control group to undergo a lengthy sham surgery that could involve drilling a superficial hole in their skulls.

UniQure moved forward without a placebo control, using external, untreated patients as a comparator control group for their trial, believing the FDA backed the plan. But during Prasad’s tenure as the FDA’s head regulator of gene therapies, the agency tossed the agreement and demanded that UniQure conduct sham surgeries as controls.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 17

Remote work wouldn’t be isolating if my neighborhood didn’t look like this.

Google maps screenshot of the area near Balboa Ave and Genesee Ave in San Diego. There is approximately one square mile of parking lots and big box stores.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 16

“One of our gods has a new press release, put it on everyone’s phone right now.” I miss journalism.

AP Exclusive
Nvidia's Jensen Huang tells AP the coming Al revolution will require "new social norms," defending the disruptive technology.

Alex Wenzel@alexwenzel· Jun 14

"Web design is my passion."