Favorites: Philly Fire Lanes, F1 Wallet Ads, and Fewer Parking Minimums
June 28th 2025: Republicans’ spending bill keeps mutating, CEQA exemptions move ahead, and USPS may scrap its EV fleet.
That last photo is from Philadelphia! There are US fire departments capable of handling thin streets! Don't let yours tell you it's impossible.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time getting into details of the GOP's spending bill since it keeps changing, but it looks real bad! Anyone claiming Republicans are the party of energy abundance should be completely ignored after the most recent updates (cached)
I like making forecasts, but I'm also able to recognize that I'm also not exactly a top 2% forecaster. When participating on Manifold markets I think the main skill I bring to the game is just being faster than others. That’s also the reason that prediction platforms like Metaculus perform so well: they’ve found ways to avoid over-rewarding speed.
Longer Reads
• Short thread with New details by NPR journalist on why the Fordow facility was probably not destroyed by the bunker buster strike (src)(cached)
• A thread with a great summary of the current status of California AB130, which at this point will exempt infill homebuilding from CEQA review. Also interesting: No more CEQA for housing-element rezonings. That will stop one of the main excuses that has blocked rezoning in SF (cached). Some unions are trying to get union labor requirements for exemption from CEQA, and are putting out some wild quotes (cached) about how this will hurt workers. But it's worth noting that there are multiple union groups involved, and they're not all (cached) anti-abundance. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– PSA about what drowning looks like. Drowning is silent and doesn’t involve splashing, waving, or yelling. Look for someone upright, silently bobbing, with their mouth barely surfacing and arms pressing downwards involuntarily. (src)
– Apple Wallet pushed an advertising notification for the F1 movie. Gruber argues that It's annoying, it's violating trust, and it's not even a well written ad! MG Siegler quips, "You either die ranting against inserting ads or live long enough to start inserting ads." (src)
– New details about CEQA exemptions for housing development in California. Looking pretty good! (src)(cached)
– RFK has cut funding for vaccines in foreign countries, Kim-Mai Cutler argues maybe "RFK is actually a psychopathic serial killer who has found a creative way to mass murder the largest number of children possible." (src)(cached)
– Purple heart veteran who has been in the country since he was 7 is being deported. Seems bad! (src)(cached)
– If North Carolina can eliminate all parking minimums with their meager public transit, wishes your city's excuse? (src)(cached)
– Lars Doucet argues that the biggest problem with "rationalism" and "effective altruism" is the names, which say "I'm smarter than you" and "I'm better than you" respectively (src)
– I agree with Sam Deutsch that Mamdani has some very bad policy proposals, and is certainly not the first or second choice for an Urbanist in NYC. But at the end of the day he's a better candidate than Cuomo, a politician we should really not be holding a place for in the Democratic party. Betting markets give him a very good shot of winning the general election, and it seems likely he'll moderate in office (sort of like AoC has), if only because 'politics is the art of the possible'. If so that may provide a model going forward of using social media to test out messaging (cached) that works, but that you tend to pivot away from once in office. (src)
– M Nolan Gray points to a substack post that essentially summarizes his book Arbitrary Lines: we should get rid of Euclidian zoning, and solve the same problems zoning aims to address with performance based standards. (src)
– New reporting indicates OpenAI is beginning to switch from Nvidia GPUs to Google TPUs for some of their AI systems. Once again Google is the modern day Bell Labs (src)(cached)
– China is working on tethered drones for firefighting in highrises. Seems like a cool idea. (src)(cached)
– Interesting thread arguing that discussion of precisely how many years away from having a nuclear weapon was probably not a factor in Israeli decision-making (src)(cached)
– When you put all the public info about bad/weird things Sam Altman has done in one place it sure looks bad! (src)(cached)
– Sen. Mike Lee has deleted all three of his tweets that mocked and promoted conspiracies regarding the assassination of the Minnesota State Representative after a conversations with Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith. (src)(cached)
– In honor of the successful destruction of Hamas, Netanyahu gave Trump a gold plated pager. Trump thought the gift was disturbing. And, yea, I can't disagree! (src)(cached)
– A simple statement: in democratic politics small donors tend to be more left-wing than large donors, who are also more left-wing than primary voters, and that primary voters are more left-wing than the national electorate. This means that Sanders' plan to ban large dollar campaign funding in democratic primaries will lead to more left wing candidates winning, who will in turn be less able to win general elections. (src)(cached)
– The story of why the US doesn't have domestic magnet manufacturing is surprisingly grim: Chinese companies surreptitiously bought the assembly lines and shipped them out of the country. (src)(cached)