the thing about 'left'-nimbys who put forward conservative 'keep X the same' lines is they're never nostalgic for the time when their neighborhood had high-rise apartment buildings, the nostalgia only applies to a period dominated by single-family homes. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ea...

Why aren’t the Russians managing escalation? Don’t they realize NATO has nuclear weapons? They should just accept they’re not getting Crimea and the Donbass and seriously consider ceding parts of Kursk for a peace agreement that doesn’t involve them being in CTSO.

Not a single Chicago residential contractor could satisfy this requirement. illinoisanswers.org/2025/09/25/c...

this is basically it, the American left is not a movement of workers or even trying to be, it is a movement of consumers, whose common class interest is not about exploitation or control of capital, it is about access to consumption. it necessarily becomes zero-sum because demands are infinite.

my perspective as a trans man: I'm currently satisfied with my social life but if I ever felt lonely I would go to the various local meetups of my various hobbies---board games, german conversation, spanish conversation, etc. currently I only have time for one hobby (yimby advocacy)

there is no one in the world saying "we should take over what USAID did." it is considered transparently laughable that anyone else would do it. either we do it or millions of people are going to die. that is the actual debate in the real world, not about whether we are morally pure enough for it.

a good use case for LLMs is detecting when someone is replying to me with some false assertion about urbanism and auto-replying with a link to the relevant book life is too short for me to hand-write replies to every false assertion

The cure to the male loneliness epidemic is YIMBY happy hours

The climate movement's focus on the oil industry has got to be the most misplaced and un-strategic advocacy I've ever seen. Oil demand, drilling, pricing, pipelines, refineries etc. is determined 100% by the car industry. And the car industry has all the political power. Not the oil industry.

I need to try this

The tech reporting we need: exposing how far society subsidizes car and (in the US) especially lethal cars. The tech reporting we have: free parking is a human right, here is a tool to avoid ever paying for the negative externalities of your driving

gotta Love your tech reporters who want to prop up the car industry which contributes way more to global warming than AI does

New research on the impact of British Columbia's e-bike rebates. Encouraging stuff: 🔹 Emissions from travel ⬇️ 17% (equivalent to 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide) 🔹 Travel costs ⬇️ 12% 🔹 Physical activity: ⬆️ 13% 🔹 $6.5M in rebates ➡️ $8.7M in new retailer spending

This is what SB 79 initially did but housing nonprofits could not understand it and killed it. However its inportant because without grocery stores and commercial activities on transit property everyone is going to own cars.

Reducing car dependency is a key tool in defending democracy in a whole lotta ways.

we need to stop this kind of "lattice of exemptions" way of permitting development. progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/the-proper...

Moreover, other countries in fact do not uniformly (or even mostly!) achieve higher rates of non-market housing through direct public ownership—most European countries rely heavily on limited profit "housing associations." The difference is the model (and funding levels) those associations run on

This is a really revealing and rich passage in what is overall a really good piece. The reason nonprofits aren't producing more affordable housing isn't that they "can't operate at the scale of the federal government"—they literally are operating at the scale of the federal government('s subsidies)

Same in pgh

I agree with him. Meritocracy undermined biden's redistributive economic policy b/c people attributed real wage gains to themselves and not to policy, but they blamed inflation on the government.

when you definitely support bike lanes and traffic calming in good faith (context: the city has spent a year engaging businesses and has given them every loading zone they asked for, now those businesses are suing the city---this is what they mean by 'without input from the local businesses')

it's absurd that a walkup single stair building for 96 residents (and no elevator) is legal - but a 4-5 story single stair (with protected stair, shorter travel distance from apt. to stair) serving half that is not.

I'm tired of being told I should want to maintain the jobs of people making lethal weapons that shouldn't exist I'd have the same reaction if you insisted that we need to keep jobs producing coal or asbestos

It's remarkable that people still think of this in terms of large amounts of manual labor, when modern manufacturing is largely automated, with administrative and high-skilled jobs dominating the process to manage machinery. If you want to do the former, build housing.

I don’t wanna get fatalistic and I think we should do everything we can on every front we can, but I also think looking at Biden’s popularity as strictly Biden’s fault, either for age or for Gaza or for messaging or whatever, is fundamentally question-begging.

more and more are saying www.theverge.com/transportati...

I’ve definitely felt the observation here that it shifts the work from creator to receiver, but haven’t articulated it. that’s helpful for describing why it feels so - on top of everything - rude to receive ai-generated work.

Among the many fantasies here is the belief that there was a single, stable currency in medieval Europe.

"The federal government has long helped states with 80% of the cost of highway construction but only 50% of the cost of transit projects"

junji ito-ass shower.

I don't know if you've ever read the fine print on a United plane ticket, but this part is extremely mysterious.

is there a Slack extension that will auto-hide responses that are just copy-and-pasted from chatbots

"The transit funding crises now unfolding in PA, OR and IL are happening because in these states, too much taxing power is in the state instead of in the cities. The same problem bedevils the politics of urban regions, whose suburbs will never support transit the way the inner city does."

the Heinz Family Foundation is yimby? can we get them to fund some pro-housing initiatives in Pgh?

we got a fancy new variable-speed hvac system which only works with its own special thermostat and it is astounding how much uglier the UI is compared to the Nest

is the dried spätzle in [US] Aldi any good?

>be Germans >spend 800 years warring in the Baltics >get your shit together and resolve to be better >it causes you to go to war in the Baltics

I see people referring to this Charlie Kirk crackdown as "right-wing wokeness" or "conservative cancel culture," but that is drastically understating it. This is state censorship. The whole point of "cancel culture" is that it was culture--it was private actors, not the state. This is the state.

I could have told you this 9 years ago when I decided to quit academic philosophy due to among other things dealing with title ix bullshit at 2/2 academic institutions i’d worked at + seeing big names line up to defend harassers

saying aoc should eat hakeem jeffries is the one sentence you cannot post on bsky. its okay for me to say because im letting you know you can't post it

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

A lot of left nimbyism is premised on people being mad about housing built for uncool people

Even as the stakes are raised ever higher there's still a fair number of people who still fundamentally see being on the left as a cool counter culture whose value is partially constituted by exclusivity.

*shocked face*

A single disk CD player, and a visor-folder of 12 CDs, afforded the perfect amount of musical decisions while driving.

it's a good time to no longer be a foreigner on the US academic job market---not that I felt solidarity from anyone when i was

spreadsheets* vs vibes is becoming a culture war facet that I'm increasingly polarized by *my short form for evidence-based, includes humanities and social sciences as well as long as they're not just making stuff up

it's pretty nuts in this day and age that a large bank is willing to (or has no choice but to due to bad technical decisions) take down online banking for 3 days