Condos are the dog that doesn’t bark in California housing. My article on how enabling middle-class homeownership requires fixing the multifamily for-sale market: housesac.substack.com/p/sacramento... @sacyimby.bsky.social @cayimby.bsky.social @muhammadspeaks.bsky.social

they said it couldn't be done, folks, big strong men with tears in their eyes, they came up to me and said "no president could completely wreck an entire united states economy twice", they said "no one's ever put more people out of work than you"

the children yearn for calculus

the degree to which we let early facility in one thing, arithmetic, be the gating function for exposure to a whole vast array of other things with essentially nothing whatsoever to do with early facility in arithmetic is wild to me, like this 19th century throwback idea hiding in plain sight

the rollout of the mRNA vaccines was one of the greatest public health triumphs in history and the end result has been the all-around triumph of the antivax movement and I will never get over it

Never ask, A woman: her age A man: his salary Mollie Hemingway: Who funds The Federalist

😬

this is one of the big problems with a too-online campaign - they were utterly convinced they'd memed their way to victory rather than riding the global anti-incumbent backlash wave (where they did worse than most) people the world over just wanted to throw the bums out, that's all it really was

The California state fire marshal was legally obliged to release the single-stair report on January 1. A month later, it's nowhere in sight, and I'm hearing the draft recommends doing the bare minumum. State legislators should just pass the code update themselves. calmatters.org/housing/2026...

BAAAAAAABE BABE BABE BABE WAKE UP THEY’RE RECREATING THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES

" We need more housing, and housing follows the laws of supply and demand. If you don't have more supply and you still have a lot of demand, the cost of housing is going to go up."

I swear to God, Bluesky is a text based social media app where a significant portion of the userbase functionally cannot read

Marked Safe by EU IV

Anthropic gave me a free $50 credit to test Opus 4.6 and Claude Code burned through it all in less than 15 minutes when I asked it to address some trivial linting errors introduced by a new checkstyle rule. I ended up fixing the checkstyle violations by hand in less time 🙃

the thing about dementia as a diagnosis is that it's an attempt to draw a line across a continuous process that probably starts sometime in midlife and can progress for many decades in fits and starts. So, you know, lotta things that could happen from here.

“you might lose your job and have to find another one” right as new job openings are sinking to their lowest numbers since covid started shutting everything down is a hell of a midterm year message

If you point out this self-evident dynamic at a public meeting you'll get accused of ageism

One thing that I do think is kind of key to unfucking everything is finding a way to reorient the media ecosystem such that people that are kind of latently prejudiced but wouldn’t otherwise have it impact their worldview so much are not constantly exposed to culture war rage bait.

preventing changes to the built environment is the last gasp of death denial

correct take, with very predictable replies that are a microcosm of this site's broader issues

I read this in Kai Lentit's voice

Personally, I think it's troubling that LA has reached a cross-ideological consensus that middle and upper-middle class families struggling with housing costs are told to pound sand. They don't go away; they end up outbidding lower classes for scarce housing supply.

One thing I don't get are the academics who would praise Epstein's intellect, even now. I honestly didn't see it. Even on just two minutes acquaintance, he seemed like a standard fast-talking charlatan, someone who trotted out lots of big words with no real understanding. A very common type.

Anthropic and Google now seem to get that the primary value people get out of AI is doing annoying work they don't want to do (coding, basic research, drafting emails, etc), OpenAI/XAI/Meta seem to still think image/video slop and search replacement are the future

I told a former mayor of Santa Monica that SB79's predecessor is what got me involved in politics because it gave me hope, and the only thing he could come up with after angry stammering was "you think that because you think it will give you more opportunity" yeah, no shit!

briefly reactivating this account to say: LFG Nithya!!!

Wake Up Dead Man is great, 10/10. Went in completely blind

there's a parallel between nonprofit world and academia, where there's a constant tide of idealistic, hopeful people coming in the door, and the people on top are able to lever that commitment to The Cause to extract from them in a way that's harder when everyone's just there to make a buck

not to put too fine a point on it but every guy doing the “we need to reboot masculinity!!!” schtick has fewer masculine virtues than I do and I’m nonbinary

The 2025 TN-07 Special Election, a contest between commissioner of the TN Department of General Services Matt Van Epps, and DSA State Rep. Aftyn Behn saw Behn turn in a significant 13% overperformance, losing by a brisk R+9% in this Trump+22% Seat

Dr. Bill Cassidy’s legacy as a hepatologist, will be that he brought about more liver disease. Put that in his obit.

People don’t like neighborhood change.

Look, I think we should do both but gotta say Dean is 100% right here. Folks definitely should not shirk at putting more homes in the Marina of all places

Yeah dude, we kicked your asses and changed the constitution to make you cut out your bullshit. Get over it. Sucks to suck

"Longstanding principle" implies it's an informal arrangement rather than the totally unambiguous text of the constitution. Don't print lies in the newspaper

Making it legal to open businesses in single-family houses on small lots, even with the front yard converted to a storefront, isn’t likely to directly attract businesses that usually want a larger floor plate on a single story (hardware stores, pharmacies, etc.).

A 25 unit apartment building will house hundreds, maybe even thousands of people over its 50-100 year lifespan, which is why it’s insane that we let a small contingent of change-averse busybodies block new housing.

See, I think so many of our problems in North America re transit come down to ignoring that speed is REALLY important. I *don't* think its hard to believe that *getting places quickly* is peoples top priority! This is especially true because most people have access to a car!

i think to understand the meaning of the birthright citizenship clause to the framers of the 14th amendment, you have to understand significance of dred scott to the civil war republican party. dred scott wasn't just a bad ruling, it was understood as a rejection of the declaration itself.

Lots to blame Biden for, but I think it is deeply sad we no longer have a president who expresses basic kindness and respect towards his fellow Americans. I think we are a much worse nation for not demanding this from our leaders, even superficially

this is the first time I have seen a journalist say this, which is plainly correct.

Trump's dementia has grown so extreme that a select group of advisors are now running the country without his input. To find who those advisors are and what their plans are, buy my new book, which will appear in March 2029.

#1 hemisphere stays winning

there is a problem with datacenters. they have a huge footprint. they use a huge amount of electricity. much of the electricity they use is eating up renewable capacity and forcing us to keep natgas plants alive. agricultural water usage in the county is 3.5 orders of magnitude larger.

shortly after 10/7, a cousin of mine posted (and shortly thereafter deleted) "there are no innocent Palestinian children in gaza"

Zero tolerance for doomerism. Stop lazily accepting that everything is screwed forever. Stop normalising low expectations. That’s part of the problem & it’s what the bastards want. It’s also a product of privilege. People in more desperate situations don’t have the option to just sit back & shrug.

An EU5 play through finally inspired me to pick up 1493 off the shelf. Colombian Exchange goes brrrr

Also, local politicians exercising sway over individual projects is precisely how you end up turning real estate development into an arena for political corruption.