The FPEs did it the way I thought it should be done for the MN study, and came to the conclusion that seven stories and 6,000 sq. ft. per floor puts fewer people at risk in case of catastrophic failures than a big double-loaded corridor building www.dli.mn.gov/sites/defaul...

new from me: a story about VACANCY CHAINS, the idea that underlies the argument that more housing is good even if you can't afford it www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

easy slogan for the next democratic presidential candidate is “i will reform the corrupt supreme court and repeal citizens united”

“When Citizens United was decided in 2010, billionaires had spent $18 million on the 2000 election, $13M 2004 and $16M in 2008. Then came the deluge. In 2012 it was $231M, and nearly doubled again in next three election cycles —to $682M in 2016, $1.2 billion in 2020 and $2.6 billion in 2024.” Gift:

I genuinely cannot believe the degree to which we are pissing away this generational breakthrough, even given the fuckmuppets who are involved www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

We saw this pattern in infrastructure cuts during the shutdown, cuts alleging social services fraud, cuts to contractors under DOGE: all targeted to blue states. It is an obviously partisan abuse of power, brazen and on a scale we simply have not seen before. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-year-on-...

“It does not get much more textbook-example racist than gleefully depicting two Black people – one of whom is a former US president who Trump routinely says he wants to jail for fake reasons – as apes or monkeys.” Anyone w pulse in media/politics should be questioning his health/mental capacity.

Also in Playbook: Council Speaker Julie Menin will announce at today's ABNY breakfast that the Council will make the Big Apple's outdoor dining program year-round again. Menin's team says the most likely path is passing @cmrestler.bsky.social's 2025 bill. www.politico.com/newsletters/...

A perfectly ordinary idea in urban planning — being able to walk to everyday places — has been twisted into something that sounds dystopian. This isn’t about conspiracies. It’s about how we talk about cities, trust, and freedom. jwp.news/the-most-bor...

Why do people agree to on the record interviews with Isaac Chotiner? He’s very good, and his subjects alway (always) look horrible. Either he has some mysterious distortion fields or people think they can win here. BREAKING: You aren’t better than @ichotiner.bsky.social

ICE was granted $75 Billion in last year’s Big Bullshit Bill. Yes, billion, with a B! The current funding bill would provide ADDITIONAL discretionary funding for this agency that they don’t need. How are Republicans not being pinned down and forced to answer what these funds would actually fund? 🤷‍♂️

The City’s Budget is our future. And you deserve to know how it works.

this is a straightforward impeachable offense for trump, vance, rubio and every other person down the line who enabled it and the framers would have thought impeachment for it did not go nearly far enough

It is wild to me that a military incursion to steal another country’s resources so the president can have a personal slush fund in Qatar is like the 5th most scandalous thing currently happening.

An entire community of thousands, here legally, having been demonized with deranged lies about eating pets, is about to be arbitrarily DECLARED illegal so they can be forcibly ethnically cleansed. I don’t want to hear one more fucking word about comparisons to Nazi Germany being overwrought.

I will simply never recover from reading this sentence: "Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people."

🚧 WHAT IS A BOLLARD, REALLY? Is it a planter? A post? A blunt urban force field? Welcome to the world of Protectus bolus—NYC’s most quietly aggressive street furniture. 🧱Concrete, 🪨granite, 🧯metal, or 🌿planted, these fixtures do more than mark space—they defend it.

Community boards aren’t glamorous and they aren’t as powerful as people assume. Apply to join a community board to show up where the leverage is, understanding how decisions actually get shaped, and use your position to push for more homes, safer streets, and a city that works for more people.

“We Are Witnessing the Self-Immolation of a Superpower.” “With Donald Trump’s actions in Greenland, Minneapolis, and Venezuela, a foreign enemy could not invent a better chain of events to wreck the standing of the United States.” Via @wired.com and @vermontgmg.bsky.social

Police mistakes happen, and they're big news. But if you think about a scenario in which US Government is proven to be lying about killing its own people, that would be one of the biggest news stories of the century. And it's happening. And it's not being reported as what it is.

I’m old enough to remember when the right wing in the United States insisted that gun rights “trumped” everything else, so having an unused legal gun wasn’t a reason for immigration officers to murder you. Also, that the reason for those gun rights was to protect from an out-of-control government.

I have spent my entire adult life being lectured by Republican politicians and conservative legal movement types about how important it is to preserve the sacred constitutional right to self-defense of *specifically this person* and then secret police murdered him in the street

Lately, more neighborhood debates blame “transplants” for everything that feels different or worse. The word sounds descriptive. It isn’t. It quietly assigns blame and treats time lived as legitimacy.

All the evidence one would need to impeach both Rubio and Noem was just posted to the AAUP v. Rubio docket. @hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social

Tell me what’s false about this statement?

When we restore democracy and swiftly prosecute every member of this fascist administration, which we have to or tyranny is just on hold again, I hope other countries can help us catch and detain the cockroaches as they attempt to flee prosecution by leaving the US.

This guy went to work today, put a mask on, kidnapped a 5 year old child, and then used him as bait so both he and his father could be sent behind bars

If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this: America's problems are solved problems. Just not here. What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵

Pew Research Institute (2023): • Red State Texas has about 2.1 million undocumented immigrants • Red State Florida has 1.6 M undocumented immigrants • Blue State Minnesota has 130,000. And yet only Minnesota is being occupied by masked thugs over "immigration." It's *not* about immigration.

Deutsche Bank here with the good stuff. Game on.

This is due to Republicans and Brett Kavanaugh.

The thing that really makes Minneapolis different, other than the fact that they straight up murdered someone, is that they've dropped all pretense that this is just about immigration. The state has declared war on its own people, or at least those people who live in cities.

Perennial reminder of this excellent paper about how secret police forces are swamped with underachievers “We don’t want clever people. We want mediocrities.” (Ungated summary here ajps.org/2019/10/08/w...)

The Supreme Court only cleared the way for Kavanaugh Stops four months ago and ICE now openly engages in violent racial profiling, snatching anyone who looks non-white and treating them as presumptively guilty of a crime. Remarkable how quickly our liberties can be crushed when courts go along.

There is a crisis of impunity. The Musk/Grok stuff is just one f many examples of people who are counting on there never being any consequences. And it all makes me just incandescently mad.

Frost: For so long, the right wing has held up patriotism as a vibe, as an aesthetic. But patriotism is more than bald eagles and flags and beer. Patriotism is about loving the people who live in the damn country — every single one of them.

Murphy: The United States Congress should not fund a Department of Homeland Security that is not obeying the laws of the United States of America

People who aren't in Minnesota might not know that if you drive or walk past pretty much any school, there's going to be a group of people, parents and childless, standing guard to make sure the kids are safe from feds. It's pretty remarkable. And very disturbing. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Trump yells “fuck you” and flips off an auto worker in Michigan who yelled “pedophile protector” www.tmz.com/2026/01/13/t...

This is a military crackdown on the president’s perceived enemies.

Dear North American station designers, this (first two pics) is not how you deal effectively with vertical circulation on a 120-130 ft (35-40 meters) deep station. It's either the Moscow way (long inclined escalators) or the Barcelona/E-M REM way (elevators-only).

A planned example in Vienna of a deep-ish station in a space constrained environment: platform and tunnel far apart under buildings (built with NATM), three vestibules (yellow) connecting them to three separate vertical circulations: two shafts with elevators and an inclined tunnel for escalators

Eric Adams, former NYC mayor, launched a memecoin (cryptocurrency) today. He marketed it as an “NYC Token” and used media appearances and his social media to promote it. Within hours, Adams then drained its liquidity, apparently having scammed investors out of $3.4 million—a move called a rug pull.

“A diplomatic source said: 'The generals think Trump's Greenland plan is crazy and illegal. So they are trying to deflect him with other major military operations. They say it's like dealing with a five-year-old'.” That’s an insult to 5-year olds. A dangerous and corrupt moron.

Breaking NYT: The Pentagon used a secret aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane in its first boat attack, according to officials briefed on the matter. The laws of armed conflict forbid combatants from feigning civilian status. That is a war crime called "perfidy."

AOC: I want everybody to understand that the cuts to your health care are what’s paying for this. You get screwed over to pay a bunch of thugs in the street that are shooting mothers in the face.

STREETSBLOG INVESTIGATES “Unlicensed Drivers Comprise One-Quarter Of Street Fatalities: Data Unlicensed drivers are now responsible for one-quarter of road fatalities — and are linked to fatal crashes much more often now than pre-pandemic, Streetsblog analysis” nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/01/12/u...

We’re well past any academic discussion that Republicans have unleashed the military on US residents. Anything else is just semantics.

Trump is clearly not well. At a meeting with oil industry CEO’s Trump suddenly interrupts his introductory remarks, gets up and looks out the window and starts talking about his ballroom. Trump then realizes his mistake and says “unusual time to look”, and sits back down to continue.

The “prosecute the former regime at every level” candidate has my vote in 2028.