Exactly 💯 this. Whenever I bring up Chinese transit, rail, and urbanism, the small but annoyingly loud whiteness of US urbanism rears its head in the form of “that’s just because it’s an authoritarian country” and “cheap labor” misses so many salient points about civic infrastructure.

I assure you that the laws of physics work equally well outside of China. This particular machine is building track in Indonesia. So yes, it would work in California. This could be us.

And before the inevitable racist and sinophobic comments that China only accomplishes this because they use thousands of low wage workers to build railways... Here's real footage of a crew of ~20 Chinese people laying more miles of high speed track in 8 minutes than California has in 18 years. 🤷🏿‍♂️

My employer pays for ChatGPT Enterprise, and tells us once a month who our top ChatGPT users are. It absolutely terrifies me that it’s consistently “legal” and “HR” at the top.

will never cease to amaze me that china built out it's HSR infra for about a trillion dollars - while the US spends roughly 1.5 trillion a year just on *car ownership*

Imagine it being easier to just pay the 8 billion dollars and it won't affect you in the slightest. Man what have we done lol

Today, I'd like to remember Chairman Fred Hampton. He was 21 years old when he was murdered in his bed by the Chicago Police and FBI. But in his 21 years, he built a blueprint for (Black and working class) liberation that still guides us till this day. This is a thread for him. 🖤🧵

Already hearing about banks stack ranking employees based on “amount of code generated by AI” so this will go great

Going past the J-line repaving and deeply feeling how every Seattle construction site has like THREE visible workers on multiple acres Yes main issue to transit is NIMBYs, but it really doesn’t help when there isn’t personnel and you spend more time staging/de-staging daily than the actual work

Very clear to me as cybertruck cuts through my majority renter neighborhood with low car ownership to get to the freeway 4 seconds faster

Cybertrucks are meant to be run people over machines They offer the threat of running people over visually It makes a very specific group of men very happy to think of running people over That’s it That’s what a Cybertruck is

Anyone: any housing proposal NIMBYs: I am not against housing! but we need more studies Anyone: literally any regulation Cryptocurrency “industry”: we don’t oppose regulation, it’s just unclear! we need clarity Anyone: Medicare for all plan @mcuban.bsky.social: I support but no plan! We need plan

Here are what entitled NIMBYs said in 2013 to help kill the upzone “Not only have we been bombarded by the… expansion of the Children's hospital… lower our property values” “First Children’s Hospital and now Battlelle/Talaris - does anyone wory about traffic and the sense of a neighborhood?”

oooh oooh i have some thoughts on this... 1. abundant social housing 2. space for baugruppen and coops 3. a mixed use car-free ecodistrict w/ abundant open space and high quality public realm demonstrating what climate forward neighborhoods should do www.theurbanist.org/2025/12/24/s...

“Like prime, but with human beings”

This is how much key pollutants are spilling into the sand & ocean annually in Manhattan Beach. 326.6 lbs of Zinc comes from car tires, which are about 1% Zn by weight (UV sunscreen for tires). Implies 32,000 lbs of larger tire crumbs (we breathe smaller ones) on streets, missed by street sweepers

When I say "the US gave up on feeding itself" that's what I mean, it's real bad. At the risk of shameless self-promo, I talked about this a few months ago. It's a part of the food/ag problem that just isn't making it onto the news & it really should. youtu.be/2uypc-c5-aA?...

“It’s about reshaping how the police are perceived, without in any way questioning what the police actually do to produce that perception,” he said.

Another new a16z idea: giving letters of medical necessity to anybody so they can commit tax fraud Between funding social media bot farms, crypto, and prediction markets, this company represents the new era where tech is mostly just for fraud

If you happen to be looking for bad redactions in a large set of data files today for some reason, there's an open source tool for that.

4 immigrants die in 4 days in ICE private prisons

If you're looking for an example of the systemic ways brittleness filters through systems, causing losses and eroding capacities far from the scene of a disaster, this is a good one. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/u...

This is just so freaking fascist. These people are unapologetic irredeemable Nazis.

I'm a rabid genAI hater who HAS tried it. I tend to stress-test bots people recommend to me by asking them simple but technical questions. The results are never very good.

Americans having to bootleg broadcast news about our government’s offshored concentration camp is a level of fascism that immediately precedes democratic societies dropping leaflets on us from weather balloons.

Bro, just one more humanoid robot, bro please, this one will be the true general purpose technology bro, this one will fill any labor shortage bro, our nanas and papas will let them into their homes to help them age in place bro, it’s the future bro, I won’t put guns on them I swear bro, bro

TONIGHT: Coinciding with the winter solstice at 4:21PM, volunteers with SHARE/WHEEL will hold a vigil for the 245 homeless people who died in the Seattle area this year. Since 2022, the group has honored more than 1,100 people who passed away while unhoused or in public due to violence.

here's a list of just some of things in this coop bike garage & workshop bike/car share music room wood workshop play room laundry salon flex room club room petanque box guest room coworking space sauna herb harden water play area club room event room tool librart lobby neighborhood meeting point

No document will protect you. All they have to do is take it from you and "lose" it; take it from you and say you never gave it to them; claim it's fake ⬇️; make a new rule that you need ANOTHER document. Citizenship is a made-up status that governments decide the rules for. No one is free until all.

ONE HUNDRED MILE PER HOUR wind gusts. FYI these are EF-1 tornado and CAT 2 hurricane winds. But in a “regular” windstorm. As @holz-bau.bsky.social says, we are building for a climate that no longer exists.

this is actually kind of a shit argument because many of the most lethal types of firearms are heavily restricted or outright illegal to own while every year we make deadlier cars and sell them to whoever

🚨ALERTA🚨MUNCIE, IN. And Seattle,WA. Area. In Collaboration with @ignitetheright.net it’s our extreme displeasure to introduce you to Craig Rutherford Meyer from Muncie, Indiana. In Seattle, WA. area.

Seattle Councilmember-elect Dionne Foster showing up for baristas at Starbucks HQ! #NoContractNoCoffee

AI "news" is so fucking awful. Seattle Bike Blog has great search engine karma, so we often get "cited" in these slop stories. Here's one that just popped up about the Rad bankruptcy. Nearly all the figures in the piece are just plain wrong, but then the AI attributes the errors to us! Fuck this.

Fuck MGP - the seat's not useful to us if she's not going to use it to vote for Dem values

Our place in society is decided by struggle not language, you're playing word games and they're punching you in the face. Stop arguing about language and start fighting back Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

Rereading this banger today

"The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them"

Don't let any media org tell you they're not influenced by who funds them. In ProPublica's case unfortunately in Oct. 2024 they got "$10 million in support from OpenAI and Microsoft — each awarding $2.5 million in direct funding and $2.5 million in software and enterprise credits."

If you don’t work in climate/water/atmos sciences you might not know how big of a deal NCAR is. The closest is like if particle physics lost CERN. The collider, the staff, the institutions. It’s like if US social science lost census.gov. It’s like if IEEE *and* Digikey disappeared.

This is a dream site for architects. As someone who helped with Affordable Talaris back in the day I strongly urge the city to allow denser housing here.

Oh I actually woke up thinking about this and really thought it was a horrible dream that I hallucinated last night. Can’t be real

mixed use ecoquartier w/ abundant social housing, community amenities and open space when?

Climate change is destroying our snowpack in the PNW. Our usual atmospheric rivers are supercharged with unusual extreme warmth, delaying snowfall and destroying any existing snow. This is disastrous for our salmon as it destroys existing salmon eggs, and dwindles the streams for next summer.

I've had conversations on behalf of Aurora Reimagined Coalition with at least 3 different people on Wilson's transition team in the past couple weeks who reached out to us first. That's more than we had with Mayor Harrell's office in the last 4 years despite our repeated attempts of outreach.

wow. our infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists... we're not even at 1.5C of warming

We worked on this issue since 2017. We held walking tours. We wrote op eds. We worked with UW students. We met with the city. We talked to state legislators. This is one of the most disgusting wastes of land use in Seattle! Laurelhurst obstructionist should be ashamed.

Social Housing at Talaris when?!?!