The @annarborobserver.bsky.social newsletter had a decent summary of the dynamic at the #a2council Transportation Commission meeting last week (mailchi.mp/aaobserver/a... ). But we need to take some time to talk in detail about why the city's presentation was so damaging and damning... (🧵)

Due to road conditions, all AADL locations will open at noon on Sunday, November 30.

Our cities plan parking around peak usage and plan roads for rush hour, so they certainly believe in judging a transportation system by how well it works at its worst. This is a post about winter sidewalk and bike lane maintenance.

I’ve decided if I have to have Elissa Slotkin as my senator, she can at least make herself useful on national security issues where I might actually agree with her and lead the charge against Pete Hegseth for the murders of fishermen in the Caribbean, so I called and left her a message about it.

"If you look at job growth between January and September ... for the past 15 years, it's only been worse once, and that was during the pandemic ... It is the worst first nine months for the labor market in 15 years."

Studies keep finding this same, unsurprising conclusion and yet many people still deny a housing shortage and the need to build more housing to improve everybody’s options…

Interesting new working paper that studies chains of movers after the construction of a new apartment building in Honolulu. Paper finds that the project resulted in the opening up other, lower cost, housing on the island, benefiting the housing market overall.

TIL Jackie Chan :/

just following orders, huh

Don't think of an Enron

A reminder that cars aren’t a technology problem. They’re a geometry problem.

lol

Wow this is bad.

#A2Council Read this & reflect on Council’s decision to set a low unit-density cap that happens to cover all the neighborhoods previously “protected” by racially restrictive covenants or were otherwise historically exclusive… as an attempt to appease “Pause the Plan” people (who were not appeased).

This is a huge win that you might have missed last week: we successfully pressured airlines to shut down their data broker, which was selling passenger data to the government without a court order. I'm going to keep at it until other industries to follow suit.

It’s blowing my mind that schools, universities, public services would run headlong into this. We spent 15 years documenting black boxes. This is a black box in a black hole!

The fact that the entire US elite class clutched onto this book as a source of deep insight tells you all you need to know about the people running this shitshow.

✨The 2025 Ryan's Community Giving Guide for Southeast Michigan is now live ✨ If you've ever wondered who is doing work that needs your support when #givingtuesday comes around, or you want to find folks doing vital work, the 6th annual guide is here to help. Grab the pdf at henyard.com/giving

Rave Pope? [nods] Rave Pope.

remember kids -

It's wild how "our intellectual elite are a bit morally smug" warrants the same article being pushed out saying as much for a decade, but a global paedophile ring in which many of our richest and most powerful and leading minds all took part is, you know, uncouth to talk about.

There should be a book (podcast, whatever) called “This Is What Life Used To Be Like “, and it should be required reading for everyone.

I’m going to say a potentially annoying thing but d&d liveplay is opera

They lied about it. All of it. A thug cop shot an unarmed woman five times without justification, boasted about it to his colleagues, and then this administration tried cover it all up by arresting her and charging her with felonies.

Yep. Transportation patterns have steep peaks. Car-dominant systems need enough cars to serve that peak, so most of the time, most cars are not needed. If robotaxis reduce costs, Jevons' Paradox also comes into play, where people will use cars even more, increasing that peak usage.

Clankers can't handle poetry, making it an effective attack vector.

/13 Why? For proximity to power. For prestige. For attention. Some tongues were made to praise God. Some tongues were made to sing. Some were made for poetry, some for prose, some to agitate and some to soothe. But some tongues were made for the boot.

God fucking damnit This was one of the greatest teaching resources out there for introducing people to the art of sampling, and a massive database of knowledge and history. www.whosampled.com/news/2025/11...

A reminder: Tariffs are a regressive tax. The anti-Robin Hood. Trump's current tariff settings effectively impose a tax rate on low-income households that's roughly TRIPLE that on high-income folks. That's not the way taxes are supposed to work. [source: budgetlab.yale.edu/research/sta...

So people who want to change the trajectory of where AI is in society today should start by noting that *current approaches to stopping adoption have failed*. That is a factual, measurable statement. I don’t believe repeating them will suddenly start working, maybe some people think so, but I don’t.

If you want larger homes in urban areas to be available and affordable to young families then you need to build a LOT of studio and one-bedroom apartments. Otherwise, groups of adult roommates will outbid them for the 2- and 3-bedroom units in walkable neighborhoods.

I mean jesus christ, it was not that long ago that "papers please" was damn near universally accepted as a 2-word shorthand for the kind of oppressive society that we beat our chests over being better than

news tailored to target the crumbling support for optimism I have

it is almost as if accommodating and conceding to far right ideas legitimizes them and signals to voters that the far right is a legitimate choice for governance

$1900->$2400/mo premium for family of 3

You guys realize that taxing people to pay for services isn't socialism, right? This is just how governments work.

#A2Council concerns about fire safety come up often with new multifamily in Ann Arbor.

Antisemitism is a lot like Qanon child abuse conspiracies in that there’s this real and bad phenomenon and, parallel to that, what can only be described as a large scale mass psychosis about a mostly fictional version of the same phenomenon

New feature is up: The Cameras Tracking You Are A Security Nightmare youtu.be/uB0gr7Fh6lY

"Fewer people" housing policy vs. "more people" housing policy:

Reuters did a in-depth look into this rapid US military buildup, right on the doorstep of Venezuela, and also consulted experts who concluded there was far too much materiel and troops here for mere drug interdiction ops.

Jesus Christ.

This asbestos metaphor is brilliant.

Oh wow @reuters.com got the photo here:

There's a reason the normie response to Luigi wasn't what the elites expected

The thing about cruelty and inhumanity is that the limits of who is affected keep expanding and expanding until we shove it back the other way

An example is that, with the "yes, and..." approach, you start from the position of "We are building a new apartment here - what do we need to make that work?" as opposed to the standard North American approach of "We want to build an apartment here - what is your opinion on that?"

My most woke opinion is that cities should completely ignore suburban commuters and design the city we aspire to be. They’ll either begrudgingly commute in by car, mode shift, or be replaced by others in foot traffic

that's right

Shot bsky.app/profile/gdwe...