David Watkins
@djw172
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Political theory @ Univ. of Dayton, alum of WWU+UW. Tweets about political theory, housing/transpo policy, politics generally, Seattle Mariners, and so on.
Dayton, OH
Joined November 2011
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Last Seen Profiles
A classroom moment forever seared into my memory: topic was Rwandan genocide, student is speculating about the role of arms manufacturers/merchants. When it's pointed out that the weapon of choice was machetes, she transitions to musing about the role played by machete industry.
one of the main ways in which cynicism makes you stupider is that you look for hidden vulgar materialist motives like this rather than believe that people may have sincere ideological motives for doing bad things
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@MPAVictoria
Point of clarification: Am I fighting an orangutan who possesses and wields a sword, or fighting an orangutan while I am in possession of a sword? Or do we both have swords?
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This man was 33 years old in November, 2000.
Nothing that I can remember has damaged faith and credibility in US democracy like what happened in the Iowa Democratic Party caucus.
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The implied premise here appears to be "if someone is sufficiently inconsistent and self-contradictory in their stated views, it's not reasonable to criticize any of those views, because for any given statement, at other times they've said something that conflicts with it."
A DNC video showed a 2016 clip of Trump saying "there has to be some form of punishment" for women who have abortions. He walked back the comment the same day. We found no evidence that he currently supports legal penalties for women who have abortions.
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One nice thing about having a job that requires sustained interaction and engagement w 100+ new 18-22 yo people each year: I'm safely inoculated from any risk of falling for the absolutely wild "kids these days" laments that circulate freely and (sometimes) credulously on here.
I have determined that gen z don’t really believe in art criticism of any kind. They can’t produce it and can’t comprehend it. The text says exactly what it says. Nothing has subtext, social meaning, or ideological implications. Criticism itself is considered evil. They are
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There is *exactly* one Democratic politician I want to see booed at the DNC and the attendees nailed.
Kathy Hochul just got loudly booed when the DNC cut to the New York delegation to cast their votes 😂💀
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What's particularly hilarious about this vibesession story is that the delivery markup price is, essentially, the McDonald's consumer hiring a low-wage gig worker so they don't have to leave the house. This complaint boils down to "the economy is bad bc the help costs too much"
Perfect example of the "vibes" theory. Post that fries cost $7 and gets 6k likes. Admits this is the marked up delivery price "for the meme". Deal on the same app is $1.14. Admits he has no idea the issue in the great depression was deflation not inflation.
@whstancil
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"Self-reliant" back-to-the-landism is of course a standard and essentially permanent feature of modernity and the details are always somewhat arbitrary, but the inclusion of "drive manual" on this list is so fascinating.
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I don't know what the rest of the punishment should be, but I really can't wrap my mind around the madness an moral depravity of her getting her license back. Wiping out an entire family standing at a bus stop really feels like it needs to be the end of road, driving-wise.
The fact that this woman is getting her license back is frankly insane.
If you run over and kill someone with your car, you should, at bare-minimum, lose your license and never be allowed behind the wheel ever again.
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One of these tweets is written by a professional political scientist, but which one may surprise you.
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There's a tendency to interpret a slight decline in life expectancy as "so when I'm really old I'll die a month or two earlier" rather than "tragic preventable deaths of non-old people are going up"
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If a tobacco company had invented a cigarette that was less harmful to smokers but caused significantly more harm to others via second-hand smoke, I think it would have been (at minimum) pretty controversial. The equivalent innovation with cars, though? Not even a little bit.
Heavier cars are safer for their drivers, but far deadlier for everyone else.
This paper find that for every 1,000 pounds a car weighs over a Toyota Corolla, the chance of killing another person goes up by 46%! Heavier vehicles lead to 28k more US deaths.
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The regulatory framework that facilitated SUVs replacing hatchbacks and sedans as "the standard normal car" is one of the most spectacular public policy failures of the 21st century.
SUV sales are booming *so fast*, but producing scientific evidence of SUV-road deaths link *takes a lot of time*
This will probably mean that, by the time we have solid evidence of how deadly they are, most vehicles will be SUVs already and there will be no going back
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Lot of people pretending Lee was taking some sort of philosophical Millian/Madisonian position about the tyranny of the majority when what he really means is "Republicans should get to rule even if voters prefer Democrats"
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My view: employers, including universities, should figure out what a parking spot for an employee costs them per annum. If they decide to give them away for free, they should also make a subsidy of equivalent value available to bike/transit commuters in lieu of a parking space.
I pay $857/year for parking.
Faculty should have free parking at their place of employment.
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My official position on Cincinnati is "underrated city with some good bones and lots of potential" but the scale and scope of the damage done by politicians and urban planners over the last century is staggering and tragic.
Someone posted this on FB of Vine Street in 1925 and it's crazy
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People on here going hard with the "10K debt cancellation is irrelevant/an insult" don't seem to realize quite how much they're telling on themselves.
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One of the most obvious flaws of the version of the concept of gentrification in widest circulation: its primary villain and the target of the 'gentrifier' accusation isn't the engineers of the shortage, but "guy who rents an apartment for lease in a different neighborhood."
forget “gentrifiers”, what happens when your kids are priced out of the city you raised them in because not enough housing has been built?
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Hypothesis: "degrowth" is like catnip for people with conservative instincts and dispositions but leftist self-images. It provides an ideological framework that gives them space to embrace their conservative impulses without challenging their political self-image.
That job your great grandparents were trying to avoid doing will give your life meaning according to guy who writes books for a living.
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I haven't seen Glass Onion yet so I have no commentary on the underlying, but it's striking to me how some people just immediately dismiss the obvious Occam's Razor explanation, "My evaluation of X is idiosyncratic," is just too wildly implausible to seriously entertain.
Glass Onion is bad enough that it has convinced me that I can't trust a large number of film critics - this isn't a matter of taste, I'm convinced these people are actively lying when they say it's a great movie.
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A fascinating thing about most EC defenses is that they always end up arguing that people who reside near lots of other people deserve to have their votes count less, and they end up treating this remarkable proposition as common sense that doesn't require explicit justification.
@UrbanAchievr
@jbouie
Also, I like living in a federal system and I prefer not to change to a centralized system where ten cities will always choose the President. The EC is out of whack due to movements of population, but forcing candidates to assemble electoral vote wins is still a good idea.
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California is rapidly approaching the "find out" that follows the "outlaw risk premiums for insurers, then allow municipalities in low risk zones to slam the door on housing growth and force it into high risk areas" exercise in fucking around.
Folks, in 1988 California voters made it illegal for insurance companies to charge premiums based on risk.
There is no one alive in California government who can fix this. We have to repeal Prop 103 — but fair warning:
Sprawl housing is not going to come out on top.
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Morbidly curious just how deep into the climate change era NIMBYs will continue to pretend that "shadows" are negative rather than positive externality.
there is a myth in architecture that shadows are bad and people crave the sun. its 82 degrees today. yeah right. people love shadows. we shouldn’t ban buildings from casting shadows
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Just fascinating to me that there's a whole community of "incremental improvements are useless; we must burn the whole system down and replace it with something entirely new" people on here whose chosen profession is "urban planner."
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One reason I'm fascinated with left-NIMBY as an ideological formation is bc I can't figure out if their opposition to freedom of movement is a corner they accidently rhetorically backed themselves into, or if they have a genuine first-order commitment to "people moving is bad".
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@jdcmedlock
I don't think I've ever seen a sign that would have such an immediate, reflexive reverse psychology effect on me, had I encountered it in the wild.
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Call me a reactionary landlord simp if you must but "you lose your rent control when you move to your country estate" seems pretty reasonable to me.
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Nothing that's occurred since October 7th has compelled me to significantly alter my views about Hamas or the current Israeli government, but one shift to my priors is that I really underestimated the degree of anti-Semitism in the non-rightwing segments of Western societies.
It's the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. But this
#Montreal
student protest -- advertised with shattered glass -- is definitely just pro-Palestine and *not* anti-Semitic, right? 🤔
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You scoff, but ask yourself: Has anyone with a properly tied tie and tailored suit ever committed a financial crime?
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$15 min wage endorsed not just in the abstract but proposed as part of an urgent omnibus bill by incoming D pres. is a major victory for left & labor organizers. Many of this policy's avowed advocates are celebrating by pretending to not understand 1400+600=2000.
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Is consistently amazed at the extent to which smart people will make themselves look stupid in order to pretend there's a principled argument for the electoral college.
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If I were a journalist trying to think about to improve the health of my profession, I'd be pretty fixated on trying to figure out a way to create professional consequences for the writers, editors, and outlets who engage in this kind of grotesque non-journalism.
The New York Post found a tweet with 23 likes calling Adele a transphobe (the only other tweet they cited is from a private account) and used that to start a whole news cycle.
This is a great example of how conservative media manufactures outrage against the trains community.
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@hochalicious
@Bee_Bailey
Trying to bully your way into privatizing a piece of the public commons you have no special claim to because it's a convenient way to meet your car storage needs should not inspire sympathy.
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@_britmonkey
This would seem to suggest it's impossible to hold a non-insane position in 2024?
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Michelle Obama, Laura & Jenna Bush, HRC, Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan all published books when their husband/father was in office. There weren't obviously unethical shenanigans like "RNC buys a ton of copies of Don Jr.'s book" IIRC. Were there ethics complaints about any of these?
Hunter Biden should not be publishing a book and his dad, who is now president, should not be endorsing it.
Don Jr wrote two books while Trump was president (which Trump promoted) and that also should not have happened.
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For a long time I was taken in by a discourse of dire pessimism about water and the American West common in some environmentalist discourse. I've come to see how much of that pessimism is expressed in a way that gives cover to stupid, absurd and venal political choices.
Cotton uses about as much water in Arizona as ALL of the household water consumption.
Arizona can just stop growing cotton IN THE DESERT and the rest of the state will be fine from a water standpoint.
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This is how you do "public response to controversy over extramural speech." Identify the proper limits (no harrassment, threats, etc), don't offer affirmation or renunciation of the content, affirm institutional values. A model too many administrations can't seem to follow.
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This feels like an internet-only kind of person. I know many fellow childless by choice adults, and lots of people who are somewhat uncomfortable around many/most kids, but I have never met anyone remotely in the ballpark of people like this.
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The notion that whether a ceasefire occurs in a war between two non-American political entities with agency is fundamentally about American democracy suggests a refusal to admit the existence of a world beyond our borders. A refusal to see non-Americans as anything but NPCs.
if you're screaming "but if trump gets in he will never leave & we will lose our democracy!" well, you have no democracy *now*. a majority of democrats and republicans want medicare for all. a majority of d and r voters want a ceasefire. we are denied both.
is that "democracy"?
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@dataandpolitics
His first conference. He gives a pretty nice tight 15 minute presentation. I try to offer some feedback to go with my encouragement, but it's well out of my area, so I don't have much to offer. I bought him breakfast after.
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When I see stuff like the first panel, I'm reminded how much I appreciate
@rottenindenmark
's before-times excellent piece on homelessness, for many reasons but esp bc it plainly states this utterly banal truth that almost all homelessness discourse pretends to find baffling.
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That the anti-trans culture warriors currently demonizing Khelif appear to be wholly unmoved by her not actually being trans is, I think, unintentionally pretty revealing about the nature and character of their political project.
The woman’s she’s crying about boxing is a biological woman and has always been a woman. She just has unusually high testosterone levels
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Here's an Ivy league graduate, insinuating an affordable, accessible research university with something like 40% first generation students isn't "real" because he disagrees with a decision to cancel classes for a celebration.
Do the Warren/Sanders "free public college" proposals include LSU, or would it only apply to actual schools?
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Whoa. I had just sort of assumed it was a really weird general celebration of all things associated with babymaking. This is so much worse.
On a serious note, though: the point of these Vance sperm cups is to mock Walz & his wife for needing IVF to have a family.
You know what kind of people mock others for needing IVF?
Horrible people. The worst people our nation has to offer.
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CNN is telling me "Trump's team didn't do a great job, but they probably did just well enough to get Trump acquitted," as if anyone doesn't know they could have thrown water balloons filled with baboon urine at Senators for three hours and it would have "good enough" for that.
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Remember last month, when Alex Lee's meme provoked a massive "it's absurd and deeply offensive to suggest crime is sometimes invoked as a tool to prevent gentrification in anti-gentrification discourse" gaslighting campaign?
Taking pics of random people in public for the sake of mocking them online is so gross and should be broadly condemned
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Anyway, if you want cars for your rural compound that can work after the collapse of modern civilization, EVs seem like a better bet--more likely you can obtain/maintain some solar panels than consistently access a global commodity you can't get "from the land."
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Yang is a walking refutation of the "you need to be outside the warring partisan factions to speak freely/frankly/honestly about politics" belief. What a weaselly bit of obfuscation this is.
I’m no Trump fan. I want him as far away from the White House as possible. But a fundamental part of his appeal has been that it’s him against a corrupt government establishment. This raid strengthens that case for millions of Americans who will see this as unjust persecution.
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Seeing a lot of dubious special pleading for Chappelle happening. "140 expensive single family homes" isn't what Chappelle was fighting against, it's what he was fighting *for*. What he was fighting against was a mix of housing types, some of which would be less expensive.
The story as I now understand it is this: Yellow Springs is a small town of 4,000 people with a quaint, college-town vibe. Locals want to "keep YS weird." A developer with no ties to the area has bought a large plot, 50 acres, and they plan to build 140 very expensive homes...
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I'm a broken record on this, but the complete abandonment of any concern about or thought for freedom of association among anti-woke culture warriors really is remarkable.
@ijbailey
@TheFIREorg
It's not a threat to free speech and expression to demonstrate that a few offended employees can get a sold-out show canceled at the last minute? Yes, Dave Chapelle is famous enough to find another venue in this situation. Most comedians aren't.
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Reasonable people can disagree about the size of the fine/additional penalties, but "cars with clearly, intentionally altered/obscured license plates should be treated as abandoned, ownerless property" is about as morally and practically obvious as can be.
if you’re caught with one of these, your car should be sold at auction, your license suspended indefinitely, and you should have to pay a fine equal to 20% of your income over ten years.
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I'm squarely on team Walz >> Shapiro for a variety of reasons but mostly I'm just in awe at the capacity of so many people to reimagine just about any intra-Democratic contest into yet another crude proxy for the 2016 primary.
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So the theory seems to be that the stock markets are badly crashing because investors *are only just now* figuring out McConnell and co. aren't going to do a COVID relief bill? These are the brain geniuses who hold my meager retirement fund in their clueless hands?
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As of May, the vacancy rate in SF went from under 4% to over 6%, and asking rents were down about 10% year over year, so.....perfect time to dunk of the silly gooses who think those numbers might be related, I guess?
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I see we have now reached the "complaining about the price of steak and lobster" phase of whining about restaurant inflation. Very curious to see where the discourse goes from here.
@KFILE
I have two teenage boys! Two bloomin' onions, a steak salad, lobster tails, a filet, a chicken sandwich and a sirloin + tip + tax = $125 on Doordash right now. It's crazy.
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@blackcatprose
In Ohio, some schools w mostly poor students found they were spending more on determining whose eligible for free lunch than they'd recoup charging the tiny fraction of kids who aren't eligible, so they gave free lunch to all. OH leg outlawed this--rather waste money than...
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Tangentially related: another data point for convergence of left-NIMBY and right-NIMBY politics is the conviction that public transportation is a service for poor people, rather than public transportation infrastructure.
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Watching various Musk fans cheer along his gleefully abusive treatment of workers with vaguely populist "anti-PMC" rhetoric as window-dressing is doing a nice job of revealing the reactionary character of anti-PMC discourse, even when ostensibly from the left.
True concern for workers is when you pit them against each other on the basis of cultural differences.
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@4to15character
After 9 years of "I, and I alone, can see and appreciate the full scope and enormity of the threat Trump poses" posturing, watching Kendzior seemlessly transition to a "Biden annoys me so who cares who wins really" as an audience retention strategy is really something.
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Seriously, this is the best possible outcome, people:
- Paper backups mean we'll get a proper count eventually
- Outsized impact of Iowa reduced by delayed reporting
- Coalition for killing this stupid first in nation caucus once and for all grows stronger
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I can't imagine anyone even passingly familiar with the financial lives of actual working/middle class people honestly claiming 10k of debt vanishing into thin air would be too trivial to even notice or care about, or to 'insulting' to value.
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I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit I didn't know until 10 minutes ago that the "republic not a democracy" talking point was disseminated into the right wing vernacular by the John Birch Society, as part of their fight against the civil rights movement.
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@JoshuaHol
I'm going to deliberately avoid learning anything about the context for this, because this is just perfect as it is.
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I appreciate her honesty here. There are many other pundits in her ideological vicinity who insist on maintaining the absurd pretense that there's something mainstream Democrats could do or have done to "earn" their support.
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Virtue ethics has its place, but "let's beg/hector landlords to a) correctly identify the most virtuous and deserving tenants, and b) forgo significant profit to rent only to them, rather than address the underlying material issue" really drives home the limits of this approach.
Don’t use AirBnB.
Don’t rent from AirBnB.
If you are so lucky as to own rental property, don’t rent on Airbnb. Rent to a worker in your community, at a reasonable price, so ppl can live near where they work and be members of your community
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Because "shadowy ruthless corporation" makes for a more satisfying political villain than "your parents, and probably that nice couple next door"
How did the ‘blackrock buying up the homes’ myth become such a widespread explanation for the housing crisis?
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Houston and Austin DA races not fitting with the backlash narrative at all
NEW: Austin's reform DA José Garza wins tonight, essentially locking in a second term in this blue county.
Meanwhile, over in Houston, DA Kim Ogg, a longtime antagonist of bail reform, was ousted in a huge landslide.
Big criminal justice night in Texas:
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ChatGPT's AI is pretty rough in a lot of ways, but one job I think it could swoop in and take over pretty seemlessly in its current form is "New York Times op-ed writer on the anti-woke beat"
For people who think the Family Circus is too sharp and incisive, there's always the opinion section of the New York Times
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That this policy, which kept many economically marginal people out of homelessness for the first 3/4 of the 20th c before they were zoned/regulated out of existence, isn't under discussion in cities where politicians/voters purport to care about homelessness, is revealing.
Any city that is serious about tackling homelessness and related challenges needs to consider SROs. Even just a door that they can lock can convince many to give up street living and provide an address needed for work, benefits, and more.
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"Get the bad news out of the way first" as a marketing principle
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If you store other stuff in your garage, and your vehicle on public land, it's all free. If you store your car in your garage, you'll have to pay to store other stuff that no longer fits. Of course many people don't use garages for cars under this incentive structure.
I'm curious why the residents don't park in their garages. Is there another car in there? Do they use it for storage? Are the garages too small for their cars?
@NoahBaustin
@davidjacoby
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Not sure the orange circle was entirely necessary here...
The University Bridge is experiencing mechanical issues and is stuck in the upright position. Use alternate routes.
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The whole discourse surrounding single family zoning is so comically Orwellian. Kaplan here describes legalizing up to three homes on land where only one is currently legal as a "taking"; an affront to property rights. It's literally the opposite of that. It's a "giving."
Seattle neighborhoods are facing a triple threat of state and city legislation that would fundamentally erode the quality of the city's single-family neighborhoods, writes architect and former planning commissioner Martin Henry Kaplan in an Op-Ed.
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Seeing a lot of ppl asking what lessons California can take from Oregon/Minneapolis. Sadly one of them might be "you've got to act before you let things get so bad that the idea of market rate housing benefitting the middle class seems wildly implausible to ordinary people."
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Here's a question I probably don't want the answer to, but am nonetheless morbidly curious: What's this guy's deal?
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@asymmetricinfo
This is an incredibly weird claim. I'm hardly alone in preferring to be able to read and/or sleep during my commute. That driving is stressful and annoying activity for a lot of people isn't a controversial claim.
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The whole left-NIMBY apparatus in the Bay area is clarifying how fundamentally reactionary their political project is. Housing for homeless+public university students+an actually usable park vs vacant lot for drug deals+nostalgic vibes for hippies, they go hard to door
#2
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this is officially the dumbest protest ever
1) UC Berkeley is a state school, not a “corporate interest”
2) they are replacing the park with hundreds of apartments for students and homeless people who previously lived in the park, along with a new green space
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@BenjaminCrew1
There's a sign politely asking visitors to refrain from excessive smiling and laughing at the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center (killing fields) outside Phnom Penh. Kind of remarkable this needs to be said at a memorial comprised of the skulls of thousands of genocide victims.
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Watching avowed leftists commit themselves vigorously and unreservedly to this spectacularly self-defeating ideological project because one of their hate objects proposed a different path has not been particularly edifying.
"We must continue to let drivers mow people down because I cannot conceive of a world in which the driving laws will ever be enforced equitably" is really the purest form of left antistatism. Like, if that's your bar how do you expect the government to run a healthcare system.
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As a general rule, "a bunch of big expensive ads for fancy new tulip markets air during the super bowl" is probably a pretty good sign that it's time to stop riding the tulip wave and cash out.
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Ticketmaster's monopoly and many of their practices are indeed quite bad but in terms of problems indicated by the cursed image below, that seems a very distant second to "rich people have too much money"
It's outrageous that millions of Taylor Swift fans couldn't get tickets on Ticketmaster yet scalpers did and are trying to resell them on StubHub for nearly $100,000.
Yeah, this monopoly has gotta end. You shouldn't have to incredibly lucky or incredibly rich to enjoy a concert.
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The cultural stickiness of the view that divorce is increasing, which hasn't been true for nearly a half-century, is pretty remarkable. A lot of my students have still passively absorbed the (not true even at peak divorce rates) "50% of marriages end in divorce" myth.
People get their nostalgia totally mixed up. Someone recently said I didn’t date older men in *2010* because “divorced men weren’t as common back then”
I feel like I’ve become the Will Stancil of marriage, constantly bombarded by people insisting divorce is “skyrocketing”
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One fact about the world I've been slower than I should have been to process: "person who appears to be a professional activist is in fact a soldier in a professional troll army commanded by a Billionaire with Opinions" is not a story limited to Kochs, Mercers and their ilk.
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The primary reason to be skeptical self-driving cars will be a huge improvement for pedestrian safety isn't because of flaws in the tech, but rather flaws in the society developing it. If society doesn't value pedestrian life, there's little reason to think the tech will.
NTSB docs: Uber's radar detected Elaine Herzberg nearly 6 seconds before she was fatally struck, but “the system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians” so it didn't react as if she were a person. via
@mikelaris
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@JordanHedberg
1) Freedom of movement is a fundamental human right
2) Children are owed a quality education
3) If (1) and (2) add up to a negative balance on your municipal budget, consider what it might take to make your location more attractive to young people starting out.
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I know Bernie's worst online fans are attacking Warren for once being a Republican out of convenience not conviction, but I can't get over the sheer self-defeating stupidity of "converts to our cause will be life-long second class members of it, at best."
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So many people, w/o a hint of shame, will pretend to not see any difference between
a) Giving rich people more money and hoping they do socially beneficial things with it
b) Allowing rich people to do a thing with the money they already have that we know is socially beneficial
Am I crazy for thinking this kind of sounds like trickle down economics but for housing?
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One of the odd quirks of (some versions of) anti-gentrification discourse is that it motivates people to pretend to believe that anti-social, dangerous behavior is what makes cities fun/great (which they sometimes forget to pretend to believe when in "being a normal person" mode)
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DEI went from "actual thing-in-the-world, the merits and demerits of which could plausibly be discussed" to "omnipresent folk devil" in about 15 seconds.
this whole “anything bad that ever happens at an airport is because they hired Black people” thing that conservatives have spun up based on literally nothing is one of the most psychotically racist panics I have ever seen
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He thinks this is a dunk. He thinks preferring to have disposable income for things you enjoy rather than paying 40-70% of your income on mortgage/rent is a character flaw.
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There it is. California has many miles to go, but this is an important step worth celebrating. A bunch of people I "know" on this here website have been invested participants in this effort, and it is to all of you I raise my glass.
BREAKING: Bye, single family zoning in California. Governor Gavin Newsom has signed SB9, making duplexes legal on any lot zoned for one house statewide. He also signed SB10 making it easier for cities to approve small apartment buildings in single family neighborhoods.
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@RottenInDenmark
The "balancing a checkbook" answers are the ones that get me. Maybe a few of them will someday have old-fashioned landlords and write one check a month.
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@lilbabygandhi
"Let's deport people for having bad politics" seems like it might not be a great plan in the long run
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@sbuss
Unions are tools for obtaining AND protecting good pay and benefits. The idea that once you cross some unspecified threshold of compensation you should abandon any and all effort to protect your employment rights through collective bargaining is very strange to me.
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Happy birthday to this tweet.
We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores.
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