Favorites August 26th 2024
This is probably the most explicitly YIMBY message I've seen from the Democratic party, although Obama has promoted YIMBY stuff before. It's so over for NIMBYs. Imagine how great it would be if Obama personally showed up (cached) at a city council meeting.
If you're looking for real-world impacts of this, county-to-county migration drops off suddenly at state borders. I'm surprised Seattle and northern Idaho are the same region though, especially considering how much scary stuff is going on in Northern Idaho.
Longer Reads
• Chris Elmendorf has an idea how a developer could probably use California law to demand a single stair design as a 'concession'. (src)(cached)
• Why have progressives gotten on board with Harris' relatively centrist platform? In this thread, Greg Sargent argues that they realized that the limit on progressive legislation was simply the number of democrats in congress, it doesn't really matter how far left any individual non-median democrat is. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– John Fetterman's comms director directly contradicted him to a reporter as soon as he'd left the call. Democratic officeholders are having trouble finding center-left staffers. (src)(cached)
– Leftist complaining that cruise ships are wasteful, goes on to say that it's problematic that people have to work to be able to eat. This is funny because of Lenin's position on the matter. But also, in modern America, even the poorest people mostly don't starve (although we still can't house everyone). "Our capitalist excess has accomplished what no Communist country ever has". (src)(cached)
– Nice montage from the DNC (src)(cached)
– A judge blocked the FTC's new rule against non-compete rules, Tim Lee suggests Harris run on passing that rule as legislation, that'd be great (src)(cached)
– Cruise missile alignment chart. (src)(cached)
– Some crazy person went and wrote up an alternate universe without term limits where Clinton is re-elected 7 times. (src)(cached)
– London Breed is suggesting reforming San Francisco's Charter (src)(cached)
– Sam D'Amico discusses how the temperature sensors on Impulse stove he's building, and the difficulties in getting it to work. (src)(cached)
– A ton of Republicans endorsed Harris, it's quite impressive, they basically disagree with her on every major policy preference besides Democracy. Like me endorsing Paul Ryan. (src)(cached)
– There are real problems with taxes on unrealized gains, but the hedge fund managers complain loudly about the concept absolutely charge performance fees on unrealized gains. (src)(cached)
– The Hewlett foundation is going around paying journalists to say dumb stuff. They should stop that. (src)(cached)
– Tim Lee points out that Waymo is pretty close to their targets for speed of deployment, 10x in the last year. (src)(cached)
– Uber has truly given up on developing their own self driving, their goal is to be a taxi company that owns no cars, so they're happy to integrate with Cruise and Waymo. (src)
– "Kamala’s acceptance speech flipped 6 of 8 undecided voters in a PA focus group." Indeed, it was a very good speech, I watched the entire thing even though I didn’t really mean to. (src)(cached)
– If you want a short thread about how a rumor started that Beyonce would appear at the DNC, this is it. (src)(cached)
– Of the 51 million jobs added since the end of the Cold War, 50 million added under Democratic presidents. Honestly, I'm not sure the president has that much power over this number, although if they try they can probably make things worse. (src)(cached)
– The microplastics in people's brains article has some problems. While we're on the subject, here's a short thread (cached) and a paper about a new method for removing microplastics from water. (src)(cached)
– Amtrak is making up BS to avoid through-running in Penn Station (src)(cached)
– Harris is very much not in favor of Warren's price-gouging bill, which is good, because that bill was bad. (src)(cached)
– China stopped exporting critical minerals, and we can't bring a mine online in the US because environmental review is so cumbersome. (src)(cached)
– It shouldn't be a surprise that boosting police presence reduces crime, but nonetheless, here's another reminder that it's true. (src)(cached)