Favorites: Ornament for Height, Housing for All
April 25th 2025: New AI text-to-speech sounds human, Samwise’s “real” name, and LA port traffic sinks.
Sometimes people want to show superheros pulling ships to show how strong they are, Fantastic 4 did most recently. But either you've gotta show them at the bottom of the ocean (doesn't look cool) or they've gotta have Godzilla legs.
![Post See new posts Conversation Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias Housing affordability has deteriorated in all kinds of American communities, including small and rural counties. [I want to register an objection to the authors' use of the "superstars cities" concept which makes them the expensive ones by definition] https://nber.org/papers/w33694](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3f22e8b7-8c85-4289-9ff0-fc83adcbfc8e_1044x1364.png "Post See new posts Conversation Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias Housing affordability has deteriorated in all kinds of American communities, including small and rural counties. [I want to register an objection to the authors' use of the \"superstars cities\" concept which makes them the expensive ones by definition] https://nber.org/papers/w33694")
When people say “it’s not so bad” if people leave the Bay Area, don’t let them get away with that argument. The entire country got more expensive, this isn’t making their lives better. The cause is straightforward, we stopped building homes (cached).
Plus Paris has accomplished a ton (cached) in terms of bike infrastructure!
“Negativity bias rules all around me”, as they say (cached). And it's not a secret why, people really like reading negative stories (cached)!
Flotsam and Jetsam
– 1) Immigration officials tell Japanese college student they’re deporting him. He has a fishing violation. 2) Media covers story 3) Immigration officials say never mind" Sadly the media can't cover literally every horrible thing federal officials do. (src)(cached)
– It seems that the Biden admin took so long to change border control policies because his staffers wouldn't follow his instructions, per NYTimes. Biden won the primary by being a moderate, but was unable to find enough moderate staffers, so had trouble running (cached) a moderate administration. (src)(cached)
– Federal agents kidnapping people aren’t identifying themselves as ICE because they aren’t. Some are deputized far right militias. (src)(cached)
– The Houthis in Yemen are absolutely being supplied with live satellite targeting imagery of US warships from Chinese satellites. The US asked China to stop, and they said no (cached), since their ships aren't being targeted. (src)(cached)
– Yglesias suggests trying to more explicitly trade exterior ornamentation for allowing taller buildings with less setbacks. (src)(cached)
– Ars Technica summarizes highlights from Google’s Ads Safety report. (src)
– Trump explicitly ordered the IRS to audit specific people, that's a federal crime. Seems bad. (src)(cached)
– Trump rolled back tariffs because the Treasury secretary tricked Trump's trade guy, Navarro, into going to a meeting at the other side of the building and then convinced Trump to tweet out an update. (src)(cached)
– China and Japan got high speed rail done with less eminent domain powers than are available in the US. It's all our other dumb policies that stand in the way. (src)(cached)
– NYC congestion pricing has been active for 100 days and continues to go quite well by any relevant metric. (src)
– Don’t let folks tell you that only China makes things anymore, Ukraine spun up military drone manufacturing, there’s a single factory there building 4000 drones a day. (src)(cached)
– I already knew that LoTR is itself a book within the world of middle earth, and it’s written by Samwise. And I guess I knew that in-world, the book isn’t written in English, we’re reading a “translation”. But I didn’t realize Samwise’s name is even a translation. His actual name is “Banazir Galbase”. There's a whole etymology (cached) for why his name is "translated" into English as Samwise. (src)(cached)
– Josh Barro is worried that the remaining Republican congresspeople are both too stupid and not ideological enough to realize how bad Trump’s tariffs are. Rand Paul is the only one left. (src)(cached)
– China has five new invasion barges in latest satellite photos. (src)(cached)
– Shipping volume through the port of LA is near COVID era lows (src)(cached)
– DHS secretary’s bad was stolen, and it reportedly contained $3000 in cash. If you’re wondering why here’s the current top guess. TL;DR, Trump admin thinks she’s having an affair and wants to keep expenses off her credit card. (src)(cached)
– The market recovered a bit today because the treasury secretary leaked to a JPMorgan Chase summit that the administration recognizes the situation is unsustainable. He also said some unhinged stuff (cached) though. (src)(cached)
– New AI Text to Speech engine with open weights, probably the best I’ve ever heard. (src)(cached)