Favorites October 30th 2022
Imagine if the SF-Oakland-Berkeley Metro Area had the Jobs/square mile even half of NYC. Noah Smith says: "Imagine if America was willing to build more than one (1) dense walkable mixed-use city." Speaking of YIMBY, check out Portland Maine, where they're having a ballot prop over 500 units because they aren't willing to just legalize apartments.
Yea, this seems like a dumb idea. High profile Twitter users do not care at all about the blue checkmark. The only people in favor of this change are folks who want Twitter to go out of business. Popehat admits that if he had 45 billion, he can't exclude the possibility he'd use it to fly Twitter into the ground.
Threads
• Musk posted a crazy conspiracy theory about the attempted assassination of Nancy Pelosi. This thread gets into details of why it's ridiculous. My favorite tidbit: Musk was replying to Hillary Clinton while citing the Santa Monica Observer, which is funny because the Santa Monica Observer says she died 6 years ago.
• While we're on the subject of non-credible news sources, here's an article about Russian news outlets citing Belgian news websites that publish nonsense.
• I mentioned a ProPublica article about origins of COVID-19, today Yglesias is annoyed that they haven't responded to criticism that their Chinese translations are bad. And yea, that's probably something they should respond to.