Favorites August 30th 2022

Balboa Park, San Diego, June 2022

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Nordic countries are deliberately shifting over time to adopt less effective Anglophone practices for civil engineering contracts and project costs are rising as a result.

pedestrianobservations.comNordic Costs and Institutional KnowledgeInstitutional knowledge at agencies that build infrastructure shapes up to be an important factor behind how well they handle projects. Good agencies build up a knowledge base over time that lets t…

The article is relatively short (although quite dense) and is by the amazing transit researcher Alon Levy. Before reading this, I was aware procurement processes have a huge impact on project cost (see: California High Speed Rail troubles), but I had no idea that the countries that keep costs down don't make the contractors assume project risks!

Science Is Strategic @scienceisstrat1

Few realize how explosive the growth of EVs has been in China in the last 24 months. EVs now account for 26% of all car sales, up from just 3.5% in Q1 2020. Below is a short 🧵 on this highly consequential revolution. (1/8) Cc: @Noahpinion @ramez @JesseJenkins @paulg @erikbryn

If you click through to the thread there's more charts, as many electric cars are sold in China as in the rest of the world combined.

Taras Grescoe 🚇 @grescoe

1: #Tokyo metro map in 2D. 2: The same map in 3D.

I don't think the depth of these are to scale...

John Beck @JM_Beck

“When the UAVs see the battery, it’s like a VIP target” Ukraine made a fleet of wooden HIMARS decoys & Russian forces wasted valuable cruise missiles from their dwindling stocks to blow them up. Great insight into Ukrainian tactics from @John_Hudson

washingtonpost.comUkraine lures Russian missiles with decoys of U.S. rocket systemUkraine’s military has fooled Russia into firing expensive missiles at decoy HIMARs, the long-range artillery systems supplied by the United States.

I'm sad to report that if you click through to the article, they don't actually have any pictures of the wooden HIMARS.

Threads

• Technical thread explaining how the new California Housing law AB 2011 will interact with HCD and RHNA allocations.

• Thread discussing recent developments in the Trump classified documents saga. The most interesting part is that collecting the passports was definitely not an accident, it was to prove that the classified documents were stored intermingled with Trump's personal possessions, as evidence that he was personally responsible.