Favorites June 29 2021

Caleb Watney @calebwatney

Hear me out, we let a lot of new housing be built and then we use it to house the homeless (and lots of other people).

Philipp Heimberger @heimbergecon

Providing homeless people with housing: - reduces crime - increases employment - improves health - does not increase reliance on social benefits. 80% of costs are offset by the benefits in the first 18 months: https://t.co/4Zc4NrxgIG https://t.co/UFdqBFetS3

That 80% number in 18 months is terrific.

Jane Natoli 🥑🚲🍍 @wafoli

Imagine a city where we limited the citywide fleet of cars to 10,000 and defined those metrics of success as rigorously as we do for scooters? sfmta.com/blog/powered-s…

When people complain about the failure mode of scooters, they're blocking the sidewalk. The failure mode for cars is a bit worse than that.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

I told a friend making this choice a couple of weeks ago that I haven’t seen any well-identified studies that establish causal benefits remotely commensurate with the price. 🔥🔥🔥 https://t.co/Tj72xVZwfU

Lifestyle @LifeandStyle

What’s the right response to a friend who says they are sending their child to private school? https://t.co/ocQLyKaSKG

To the extent public school quality makes a difference, it's for children of poorer or less educated parents, who are unlikely to be able to afford private school anyway.

Kim-Mai Cutler @kimmaicutler

When we don’t build housing in the inner Bay Area, it just gets built in the fireprone exurban Bay Area, which doesn’t have the infrastructure or resources to deal with the risk (and it also consumes our wild and agricultural land, contributing to more emissions.)

San Francisco Chronicle @sfchronicle

Fire season is coming for the dry East Bay. One community doesn't have the money to fight it. https://t.co/uT2NDlvzTG https://t.co/TRYXvYN24i

The fire risk out in the areas our anti-development policies have pushed people to are looking extremely dangerous.

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

What the fuck

Bob Hardt @bobhardt

Elections 2.0: Sources tell me the Board of Elections is going back to the drawing board and running corrected ranked-choice numbers tomorrow. About 130,000 “votes” were part of a test-run that were never cleared from a computer.

I don't think this is the kind of excitement folks were looking for in the NYC mayoral race. Here's the official statement if you're interested. When I was reading comparisons of voting systems, I’ll admit that I hadn’t given much thought to the ‘ease of scoring’ stuff, but instant runoff really falls down on tabulation.

And finally:

Toronto, March 2019

Is there more to macro photography than depth of field shots of weird objects? Not sure, further investigation is warranted.