An absolutely LOADED week/weekend in Milwaukee. Multiple festivals (6 on the same day!), multiple gallery nights, great installments of weekly music series, big national shows, tons of top-shelf local shows, 17 Milwaukee Record events, more.

Dude every week I ride the MKE Zip Line/River Line/Ozaukee Interurban Trail and see all the signs about the train that used to run on the trail's ROW and it makes me so angry

60 daily trains between milwaukee and chicago, including 15 minute interurban frequency than ran on the chicago loop.

Seeing the news and immediately wondering if it was the explosive diarrhea.

From a "lessons learned" slide on somebody going through the US code/standard development process for the first time. This is very accurate. They love to follow a logical thread and hate to read a study and look at data.

Interesting article! Makes a good point about mathematics resembling more like Go or Chess and it will probably be inevitable that machines do ot better. Has this great insight.

Learning that the west end of Vancouver was mostly a 1945 to 1973 thing has changed my perspective on what was possible for that era.

damn that sounds like a lot more work than what i did when mine had a slow leak, which was build in 10 min to stop by the kwiktrip and top off my tires every time i drove

In a normal world, this is a $170K starter house. In Silicon Valley, most seemingly can't expand on their homes, but they are ungodly rich, so they all blow $100K on landscaping and decorative inlays on their driveway that would never pencil on this home at $170K.

There's a thing where people seem to think that bungalows are a unique housing type and not the most common house of the 1920s, mass manufactured and delivered to sites pre-cut to be nailed together by low skill laborers. And you can find same stuff in Akron as in Palo Alto.

Silicon Valley is insane because it’s a museum of unremarkable postwar sprawl where all the ticky tacky suburban tract homes cost three million dollars and the strip mall parking lots are full of insane sports cars.

Join us

It's funny when you go to Palo Alto and it's the least exceptional place relative to its price tag on earth. Looks like half the inner suburban neighborhoods of Chicago or Milwaukee where homes sell at a 90% discount.

The place is a dump and needs to be replaced. The wildcard is that if there is a trifecta, I would love to see overhauling the entire state court system on the priority list.

I traveled to Montevideo years back, and as I was sipping yerba mate, watching the ocean at low tide, there were soccer games being played on the compressed sand as far as you could see. The pick-up players were running like gazelles, the balls barely touched the sand.

Whole generations people who haven't driven with maps or have experienced getting so hopelessly lost that they needed to ask for help at the fire station.

TIL that orange juice is naturally about 0.5% abv.

you cannot possibly be a functioning adult human if you believe this. can you put on your own underpants? do you eat cereal with your hands?

A Norway fan has gone viral for not taking part in their Row celebration after matches and won't do it if they win the World Cup "It’s factually wrong; they didn’t row, they sailed over the Atlantic”

Today, Illinois has broken another record with its highest-ever ranking in CNBC’s Top States for Business at 12th. We're tied for the largest improvement of any state since 2019, thanks to eight balanced budgets and 10 credit upgrades. And our state will keep building on this.

The thing that's always omitted from the summerfest discourse is that I am pretty sure they & their major stakeholders are fairly happy with where they are at.

My annual appeal to unplug the hot air hand blowers in the un-air conditioned park buildings. The ones in humboldt park are like blasting 4 space heaters continuously. It will be 100 degrees in the bathrooms when the rest of the facility is 70.

It's going to be basically impossible to ever know the counterfactual on traffic violence or violence in general. The only way people are ever going to believe what you're doing is working is when you hit all time lows.

In the 1990s I lived in Watertown, and discovered that if you just showed up to the graduate night classes offered by Harvard Extension, and participated in a non-asshole manner, most of the instructors did not care at all that you were neither registered nor paying tuition.

If my “job” was to read academic non fiction in an academic library for 20 hours a week, I would be pretty happy about it.

Somewhat tangential, but supposedly little fish would sometimes wriggle out of the tap in mid-19th century Chicago. Plumbing was an important invention; sourcing reliably clean water was a distinct and important one.

i remember living in that flat line between 2002 and 2010 thinking we were doomed

There's a certain tragicomedy that what makes urban waterways actually nasty is goose shit and drippings, debris & run off from cars. While what normals fixate on are like sump pumps pouring what's basically filtered rain water from the drain tile system.

It should come with platform doors and a driverless conversion. It is nuts that we opened a brand new, fully grade-separated metro line in 2004 with human drivers.

For me (a guy that every few years goes to San Juan for a beach vacation because I deeply dislike renting cars and most stateside options stink), this would be amazing.

Please go on! This is an amazing list that I want to send people lol

An interesting thread on how Milwaukee was a testing grounds for later new deal policies.

A thing about society is that most high achieving people are hardworking, trustworthy, reliable, type of person you want to work with. But when you look past them to the most elite tranches, whether billionaires, top C-suite, top politicians. All falls apart. Creates an interesting societal bias...

Just normal Wisconsin picnic things.

Banishment to grizzly bear island.

If you ever saw this courtroom in milwaukee, your jaw would drop. The so-called back door she let him out is about 10 paces down the hall from main door and empties into the exact same hallway.

I did a 30 mile walk in Montreal last summer and let me tell you: it’s perfect.* *I have never been there in winter.

Doing my extensive research (google streetview) on montreal and really feeling like i might just stay there.

In milwaukee's most violent year (2022), there were 124 homicides in the first 6 months. A 61% drop. urbanmilwaukee.com/2026/07/08/h...

Back of the envelope: + 65.8B for fuel + 234B for incremental trump tarriffs - 285B debt-funded tax stimulus is OBBBA.

Too complicated. If states want to reduce tax burdens on the elderly (which i would define as like 80+, as an aside) they can simply dip into their own budget and do refundable state tax credits for property taxes paid.

Looks about right.

WOW -- Danish reporter *goes there* with Rutte "You sit next to Trump when he talks about conquering Greenland, lashes out at allies like Spain -- things it doesn't seem like the old Mark Rutte would approve of. Does this have any affect on your self-respect when you sit there and say nothing?"

I think the wh is touching the stove on these Spain comments. It's a huge tourism & study abroad destination. You're going to have 100s of schools and 10s of thousand mostly elite american families going full panic attack with like 4 weeks before the students arrive.

Student 22 doesn't cheat. Just sucks at econ.

lol

Just heard about a developer in the Bay Area getting a massive discount on insurance for building Type I at a height where Type V would be allowed, and choosing it because of that. Is this a thing, or was that an isolated incident?

I'm on the zero net carb wrap bandwagon. Those things were a good idea.