This explains something that has always mystified me about drivers who rail against bike lanes and transit. Why WOULDN'T you want people to have options not to drive? It would make your own driving better! But they don't just want good traffic, they want to reinforce the NORM of driving

If I were to explain opposition to bike lanes, this is where I'd start.

"Strong floor, no ceiling" is very literally the basis of like every Gilded Age political cartoon

Bless this plex.

I spent the past week (Thanksgiving week) with my phone turned off for almost the entire time. A few things I noticed:

Median Voter: The middle class is disappearing. You need to make $150k to get by! Anybody: I’m going to build a 6-plex a half mile from you that is affordable on a $75k income. Median Voter: And ruin the neighborhood?!

We should just call them tooth-straighteners.

If you’re a journalist who’s still on Twitter, from now on in your writing you have to replace “the American people want” with “troll bots in Eastern Europe demand” Being there makes your judgment suspect. I don’t care how savvy you think you are, you’re marinating in a disinformation campaign.

Rural housing affordability erodes faster than cities, report finds | Fox Business share.google/LCJDo26itiom... What's the @kevinerdmann.bsky.social take on this?

I was thinking again about how medical lingo in English is typically rendered in Greco-Latin that the common people does not comprehend. Considering that every single person interacts with the medical system... why the gatekeeping terms?

Sitte ge, sīgewīf, sīgað tō eorðan, næfre ge wilde tō wuda fleogan, beō ge swā gemindige, mīnes gōdes, swā bið manna gehwilc, metes and ēðeles Sit ye, sy-wives, sie to earth, never ye wild to woods fly, be ye so a-mindy of mine goods, so beeth man awhich metes and ethels.

a take i've been cooking up with my friends is that Zohran's success is very illustrative of the reason why leftism in America feels so confused: we're a nation of consumers first, workers second all of his notable socialist-y ideas have basically nothing to do with labor lol

My crazy idea for incorporating public feedback into city planning: You let residents vote for representatives in city government, and those people are empowered to implement the policies they promised while campaigning.

The way I thought I understood the words and then did a double-take...

Most local parties are run by people who've done the job for years because no one stepped up. So step up. Be authentically you. Speak to your community. There is a MASSIVE leadership vacuum at the local level almost everywhere outside major cities. Fill it.

In my old town the GOP had run basically without serious challenge for decades. A bunch of us "millennials" joined the local Dem party and basically asked to help. We were running it in a year. Within 4 years we had a majority of town seats flipped Dem. A FAR more progressive Dem than old party

Lots of folks captioning aurora photos like "for a few minutes we didn't think about politics" guess I'm built different, every time I'm out trying to see night sky stuff I frequently think about how much light pollution is entirely preventable with just a tiny bit of regulation

Why are presidents able to pardon people? That seems like a strange power to have, right? If anyone should be able to pardon people, it should be the legislature, right?

While we're at it, can we get rid of nickels and dimes as well? The quarter is the only coin big enough to be worth carrying around, and that one only just barely.

my hot take is if a building getting landmark status it should be owned by the public and open to the public

Single-Stair Sickos who enjoyed this might also enjoy this collection of floorplans from NYC in 1908: archive.org/details/apar...

I think the correct dimension to categorize Democrats isn't liberal to moderate, but those who think elected office is for the exercise of power and those who think elected office is your just reward after climbing the career ladder and waiting your turn.

Same goes for bureaucrats in senior roles. CEO of the MTA (which moves more people every day than every domestic airline combined) makes only $365K meanwhile, the united airlines CEO made $33 MILLION last year. makes it extremely difficult for the govt to get top talent other than noblesse oblige

people hate hearing this but it's 100% true, creating a huge pay gap between political leaders, their staffs, and other elites is a recipe for corruption. of course the flip side of that is taxes on the rich should be jacked way the hell up

When you look at election returns, nimbyism is almost always a right-wing or elite centrist phenomenon. Left nimbyism functions basically as political cover for right nimbys. When left nimbys win elections, it's by uniting right nimbys with people voting left on other issues.

How does Maryland not have one of these state-supported intercity bus networks?!

love this from @juliaangwin.com

I think the biggest lesson from the Mamdani campaign is that a candidate that is good at social media is better positioned to win than a candidate who has the support of legacy media.

I think it's possible that the Northeast Corridor is the *only* fully integrated megaregion in the US. People notice it and try to group the rest of the metro areas into megaregions, but it's contrived. The Northeast is sui generis.

Lol. Lmao, even

The “residential” building code exists in the first place for very bad reasons. Don’t ever forget that. Lawrence Veiller, addressing the NAHB in 1913:

People make a lot of jokes about voters thinking there's a big dial that controls gas prices in the oval office, but I think "low info voters have no idea what the government actually does" goes a lot deeper than that and they blame whoever is President for anything that annoys them.

Feels like so many of our convos are revolving about how voters respond to what politicians are doing, or what parties’ positions on issues are, without much actual empirical sense of what they actually know about those topics.

This, precisely. D leadership spend their time flip-flopping based on polls rather than choosing policies and CAMPAIGNING for them. This lack of clear policies gives R's the chance to define what Democrats stand for by making up a bunch of positions and forcing the D's to equivocate nervously.

One of the Democrats' major disconnects with the voting public is that they so clearly look at policy questions as matters of strategy rather than matters of principle. My suspicion is that voters care at least as much why you believe in a given position as they do what that position actually is.

My main takeaway on the “moderation” debate is that Democrats would be better served by other debates besides left-right positioning, like how to develop new valence issues (corruption!) as wedge issues, and how to get attention for their policy proposals in the first place

the democratic party’s basic problem is it has almost no control over how its message reaches the ears of voters, especially outside of presidential election years. but rather than devote serious time, attention and cash to that problem its consultants and pundits want to fight factional battles

you will note that the latest report, like all the reports, spend no time dealing with with the media environment or attention economy. (it also weirdly treats political choices as untethered from events)

Once again, the main day of Tea Party protests had about 300,000 nationwide, but saw endless coverage. The No Kings protests had about 7,000,000 nationwide, and many media outlets reacted with a yawn. No Kings was nearly 25x as big as the Tea Party but the Tea Party got 25x the attention.

I hope someday we defeat fascism and in the far future, No Kings Day is celebrated as a federal holiday, and little children leave out dance mixtapes and cookies for the Resistance Frog, who leaves pocket Constitutions in their shoes.

We have historic districts. Why don't we have futuristic districts? I want to live somewhere zoned only for portals.

This is very true and people would be worried to find out we basically outsource all this technical code establishment to random volunteers who are swayed by corporate lobbying efforts from benefactors in the industry.

There's a really dumb and counterproductive tic in American politics that treats polarization and partisan division as a bad thing that must be overcome. Would we bemoan such division between Putinists and non Putinists in Russia? What about between supporters and opponents of Jim Crow in the 50s?

Got no problem with elves. Some of my best friends are elves. And cyborgs are fine too. Hell, I got some augmentations done myself. But the elfborgs…the elfborgs. Look I don’t care what the fashionable bleeding hearts at the university say…no, no, let me speak, the antenna-ears…oh so I can’t say tha

What's going on with the housing supply conversation in Europe? Is there a YIMBY movement? In this article I didn't see any mention of supply side reforms. @alonlevy.bsky.social, would you happen to have input? EU finally takes ownership of housing crisis – POLITICO share.google/umLuIqHc0OPA...

There should be a tunnel through this mountain that's blocking the R4 line in Vallès Oriental. I think it could speed the train up by at least 5 minutes.

Debe de haber un túnel debajo de esta montaña por esta parte del R4 en Vallès Oriental. Definitivamente reduirá el translado por al menos cinco minutos, tal vez mas.