"So Moses returned to the Lord and said, “Alas, this people has sinned a great sin; they have made for themselves gods of gold."

I keep thinking of a line a Venezuelan friend said to me many years ago - "el inmigrante is comerciante". Translated, it means "The immigrant is a businessman." It's one of the few constants across a couple centuries of immigration to America.

We occupy a very specific niche when it comes to the public discussion of history, and that niche is serious answers to the question of how bamboozled Hitler would have been by big chungus memes. www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...

The housing figures are brutal but not surprising. @governor.ny.gov has to start moving state legislation to break the logjam. Long Island and Westchester will have to be dragged into the future kicking and screaming. (Her failed housing plan was good, btw.)

every time i see a christmas car commercial i think of this fantastic snl skit

French hotel with prefab bathroom pods, common in Euro hotels and other repetitive typologies. Great example of off-site construction as a spectrum: advanced forms (panelization, volumetric modular) come from all-around regulatory hygiene, not pro-modular policy in an otherwise crap code environment

A touchdown? In this economy?

gotta say the umiami-a&m game is one of the best bad games of football i've ever seen

If your religion encourages traditional marriage and large families, NIMBYism is a great way to discourage that.

Good. Two-man subway crews are an anachronism. Chicago switched to one-person operations decades ago; SF and DC have never used two-man crews.

also, as is tradition, we will be soliciting some unsolicited solicited duck pics on Tues 6 Jan for next year's #InternationalUnsolicitedDuckPicDay. so, see you then. if you give a duck

I bought a copy of SimCity 2000 to see if it still held up, and the game is just as charming and addictive as it was 30 years ago. It really is the Platonic ideal of city simulator as a game.

The state should call the Bears' bluff. If billionaires want a new stadium they should pay for it themselves.

Vital City has just published a massive issue on how best to tackle the homelessness and mental health crises underground with an eye towards getting everyone in the system into housing and treatment. It's well worth a read: www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/wha...

They understood this in 1912 It's taken a concerted effort to get people to un-learn that speed matters

venezuela's major metropolitan areas are all somewhat inland because the spanish were worried about this exact situation: pirates conquering their towns. i'm 100% serious about the pirates part 1/?

"Of course, on some level, my Catholic faith points in the same direction as the ideas of the housing-skeptical pronatalists. [...] But what it isn’t is a sort of Disneyfied American Christianity that cannot distinguish the suburban ideal from the moral life or the Christian life."

While prices for starter homes in San Francisco have surged, Portland has seemingly found the key to produce “missing middle” houses for first-time buyers.

*walking in a winter wonderland* ME: where's bluebird? BIRD: gone ME: w... who are you? *bird looks around shiftily* BIRD: I'm new bird

Thank you so much for having me on, @everybodygetspie.bsky.social - it was a blast! (And one of these years I'll learn to look directly into the camera on a dual-monitor setup.)

In the old days, developers would buy old, worn-out mansions, split the lots, and replace them with rowhouses. On the right you have the old mansion, on the left are the rowhouses built to replace the other mansions.

YEAH NINERS WIN

An old poem comes to mind when I see grand old churches like this fallen into ruin: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Consultants contracted by Minnesota found that an eight-story single-stair building with 6,000 sq. ft. per floor (building 4) has dramatically lower fire risk than a same-height code-compliant two-stair building with a larger floor plate (building 1) www.dli.mn.gov/sites/defaul...

It's kind of crazy how important school districts are to the underlying economy of a series of small towns, and how in doubling down on homeschooling and charters and all that business, rural types have basically put people in power who are ripping away the most important employer where they live.

It's a real bad idea to romanticize small-town life. My grandmother came from a Kansas town of 500. I went back there a few years ago to satisfy my curiosity. It was a depressing place to visit, and I understand why Granny left.

One of the next big steps in the zoning wars has to be re-legalizing neighborhood commercial. I don't agree with Strong Towns on everything, but they nailed it with their concept of "auxiliary commercial units".

They also have my book in stock!

I wanted to compare what I saw on Seattle's Line 1 LRT with Toronto's Finch LRT. In Seattle, you can see left turning cars waiting while fast-moving transit gets priority. Help TTCriders make it happen in Toronto: www.ttcriders.ca/greenlight 📸: @wk1998.bsky.social / @kevinrupasinghe.bsky.social

Seriously good article on how property tax in CA got so messed up.

Is there a good summary the hive mind can recommend on the Live Local Act?

"So, Mr. Pig—you built that fire after you heard my client coming down your chimney? ... Did you know my client is an endangered species, Mr. Pig, while you yourself are nothing more than a walking side of ham?”

Steve Young playing in a Tampa Bay Bucs jersey

I don't know what Strong Towns is talking about. The statewide ADU law in California is a huge success, and it only happened because the state preempted local law. Even my mom is thinking about building one.

Pineapple anchovy tacos?

Copy-pasted ADUs, duplexes and townhouses is how you build houses in bulk, because any general contractor can build one. Towers and even midrise require special expertise.

This morning, the MTA swapped the F/M trains at 8 stations in Manhattan & Queens. This is an example of "deinterlining," a technique which improves the frequency & reliability of subway service. Read ETA on why deinterlining is so valuable & where else it can be used: www.etany.org/statements/d...

didn't know that AI stood for "Actually, Indians"

Drinking with @lostsubways.com: "How DO you say 'it seemed like a good idea at the time ' in Hebrew? Or Yiddish? ...no, Google Translate isn't idiomatic enough. It's being too literal."

$100k is chump change for any large bureaucracy. i can't imagine a fortune 500 ceo micromanaging their company's expenses this way, never mind a cabinet-level official. total amateur hour.

SEPTA is already in deep financial trouble because of the State's unwillingness to cut a deal on transit funding. There's a decent chance that this ends up backfiring, like the '83 Regional Rail strike that destroyed the SEPTA ridership base.

"In a very short timeframe, AI has become the high-fructose corn syrup of the digital realm: It’s now in everything, even if you don’t want it there." www.sfgate.com/tech/article...

Jim Harbaugh has entered the chat

If you want old-time small towns, you have to actually build old-time small towns. Can't do that when local law requires buildings to be 50% parking by square footage.

Architecture "patterns" from NSW Australia: apartment buildings up to 49 units, far larger than the Canadian equivalent. www.planning.nsw.gov.au/government-a...

One of my old bosses liked to say about politics, "Are you trying to get what you want? Or are you trying to prove a point?" Let me tell you a story about my first job out of law school, at a left-leaning nonprofit in LA which shall remain nameless. 1/🧵

Wild to see the defences of this project, which aims to build a city of 400,000 in the middle of nowhere. This has never worked and plainly is not going to work. The site has no economic or spatial logic other than that of a distant suburb.