Pax Romana at home: cc @marbleliberal.bsky.social
Transit researcher in Berlin. Lived in Tel Aviv, Singapore, the Riviera, New York, Providence, Vancouver, Stockholm, Paris. https://pedestrianobservations.com/ http://patreon.com/alonlevy alon@pedestrianobservations.com @alon@mastodon.social
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Pax Romana at home: cc @marbleliberal.bsky.social
He's in San Francisco.
I wouldn't mind if Axel-Springer didn't publish pro-AfD op-eds.
It always was included; the Kingdom of Naples was not considered any less Italian than the Duchy of Milan.
Italy did not exist as a state until the mid-19c, but it existed as a nation going back to Petrarch. There's literally a chapter at the end of the Prince wishcasting that someone could unify Italy.
What I'm seeing in the immigration graph is that around 13% of the UK voted Labour while answering 0-3, 15% did while answering 4-6, and 6% did while answering 7-10 - and the dropoff in Labour support in the first group is especially steep.
It literally exists, is literally transformational, and literally cannot be repeated despite demand for many more such lines because London construction costs are too high.
Politico's owners are mainstreaming pro-Trump, anti-Europe extremists at home, but sure, they're going to report on Europe's challenge.
>Britain can still build transformational infrastructure projects It really can't, not at $1 billion/km.
there used to be a saying: "there are two careers available to Trans women: programmer or prostitute."
I built a web tool so anyone can design and evaluate ridership and costs of high speed rail networks anywhere in the world: railmapper.net
No, only ridership per station in Taiwan, not city pair.
Whose framing, Khanna's? It's less cringe than the median take the Americans post here about their history when there's a foreigner in the room. "America is an idea" is a take I have heard from multiple people here, and not just randos.
I can't tell at that resolution, since all of the differences are second-order and I don't trust the model enough for that.
Probably; they certainly believe it is existential, to the point that one of their cope demands is "ensure the draftee comes out of the IDF as Haredi as he was when he entered" (the draft people are talking about is male-only, as for national-Orthodox people).
Short version: aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh Long version: in theory this can be done using the model - take a reference average speed, apply model with the minimum distance and not minimum time, and then adjust for actual average speed using an elasticity of 2. This may or may not be correct, YMMV.
The 2 core reasons being implementing the same austerity as the Eurozone but independently, and being able to tell every immigrant regardless of origin "watch it or I'll call the Home Office"?
Best case vs. best case is 32 minutes; if you want I can send you the second-by-second spreadsheets on the existing ROW (with curve radii cribbed from an Amtrak map) vs. the ROW I've drawn (similar to but not the same as NEC Future's; it answers 2/3 of Old Lyme's complaints).
The Lebanese government must be under no illusions as to the dangerous path it is now treading. But the status quo cannot hold, Oz Katerji writes.
She just published a piece in Wired that the subjects of the article are saying is fraudulenr, so no, I don't believe her.
She's a beat reporter on social media; if she doesn't know that 4chan would say "Jews" or worse and that people trying to sanitize it would black out that specific word, it's because she chooses not to know.
There's almost no chance. Her beat is reporting on social media; she knows how much anti-Semitism there is on 4chan, and "this means 'Jews' or a racial slur" should have been her first thought and she should have confirmed it. People don't black out words at random.
It's "punch Nazis," not "form a regular army based on the British Army model to defeat Nazis." The disorganization is right there in the phrase.
The 4chan post did. That's what the blacked out word refers to (technically the word is "kikes").
St. George's Cross, is what people here are turning into a controversy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of...
Like fuck is he letting Melania choose anything except what to wear.
Are you coming to Germany at all?
Budapest: I'll be speaking Thursday evening on public transport planning! The event is in English, even though the registration form is in Hungarian. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Yeah, and then Musk started unbanning them, including ones that are banned on TikTok and YouTube, like Quds News Network.
LARPs don't meet that criterion - they have very few lesbians, and instead all women and many men are expected to be bi.
Did you ever read Hahem in its heyday? Because that screencap would absolutely go in Slippery Slope, under "closed society."
What did you teach? Asking because this is not at all true for math psets - math psets in advanced classes require the student to think a lot to solve the problem. (Some Googling is permitted as long as you write in a way that makes it clear you understood the proof and can explain it yourself.)
Relatedly to what the screencap points out: anticlericalism is a powerful force on the Israeli center and center-left, and in the 2000s, there was much interest in New Atheism on websites like Hofesh (and conversely, tshuva peddlers imitated American televangelists, just without the New Testament).
No, that's not at all what leads to backsliding. There was no failure of the civil service leading to Orbán's supermajority in 2010 - MSZP was just unpopular. Same thing with Bibi's deals with the Haredis. *The US* has a civil service failure but part of it is that the politicos treat it like dirt.
No, it is pointless; unpredictable business trips don't make people stop getting monthlies when the monthlies are properly priced, and wfh tends to be bifurcated between drivers and people who ride a lot for non-work trips.
I don't think it's that funny? Spencer is an ideological white supremacist, he's not going to sell out to a party for some tax cuts. Ditto Hanania. It's like how all the alt-left people whose passion is hating Obama and the Clintons and supporting Putin are sympathetic to Trump.
you can have abundant free parking everywhere, or you can have a livable environment. you cannot have both; it is mathematically impossible. www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/01...
after approving their salary/benefit increases, one member of parliament basically told the press "I live an hour away and traffic is horrible, I need a place closer to [house of parliament]"... turns out a city with 265sq km of car parking is very livable itdp-indonesia.org/wp-content/u...
a little over a year ago I was stuck in Jakarta traffic for an hour or two during large protests in the city center over many of the same issues as today: inflation, public sector austerity, free speech, etc... the big difference this year is parliament giving themselves $3k/mo housing allowances
A thriving civil service is part of the democratic package everywhere undergoing backsliding. The issue is that American subnational governance is so hopelessly authoritarian that Americans can't really conceive of alternatives to mayoral and gubernatorial autocrats (hence Newsom, Hochul, etc.).
Yes, because the reason London invented fare capping wasn't for the indigent, it was because the Tube's zone system is so complex that passengers would otherwise not know in advance whether to get a pass or not. In New York, with its simple flat fare, it's pointless.
Okay, the election happened, and the winner now wants to cancel grants that say "trauma," which are handed over by an executive agency. The courts said that this cancellation is legal. Perfectly democratic.
CTDOT didn't center the bypass either - its priority is the bridge replacements.
Yeah, this. I don't how the (Pop_A_1)(Pop_A_2)/(\Sum Pop_A_i) model interacts with multimodalism at all, and suspect that in practice it reduces to the usual gravity model until you start covering the entire world in vactrains.
Turn the Overseas Highway back into the Overseas Railroad?
There are already enough networks, what I lack is detailed enough city pair or corridor ridership for most of them.
Singapore and HK are contenders for second worst construction costs in the world (the US is worst), together with Canada, Australia, the UK, NZ, the Gulf states, Egypt, and Bangladesh. Taiwan is somewhat better but is a strong contender for worst for a non-English-speaking democracy.
This is really bad. The East Asian developmental states generally got the knowledge domestically. But HK, Singapore, and Taiwan privatized the planning process, essentially because the first two were Thatcherite early and the last only started building the MRT when privatization was more in vogue.
Yes, of course.
Okay, but then there is no legislative mandate that says "the agency shall be more aggressive against NIMBYs." This isn't even something one can really legislative; it emerges out of open political debate, in which the civil servants get a voice.
Put another way: what mandate, exactly, did the federal US government get to cancel grants that have the word "trauma" in them on the grounds that that is woke?
The political mandates via election are too noisy a signal. Not for nothing, thriving democracies let civil servants speak out freely whereas a common consolidation tactic in backsliding states (Israel, India, Hungary, Turkey, etc.) is to gag the civil servants, interpreted broadly (e.g. academics).
It's been a criticism of my model in blog comments for years. One commenter, I forget who, linked to a paper suggesting that the gravity model be replaced with (Pop_A_1)*(Pop_A_2)/\Sum_i(Pop_A_i), which locally behaves like a gravity model but globally has the exponent 1 rather than 1.6 or 2.
I specifically do not mean "warn council about the NIMBY public." They're not soldiers under orders. I mean "express opinions in opposition to what the politicos decided the strategy is." These people are hired for their professional expertise on the topic; a good government does not gag them.
Yes, in your country, free speech is interpreted narrowly; scientists who speak out in opposition to the apparatchiks are infamously put through kangaroo courts, or these days have their grants cut for having the word "trauma" in them. Your country doesn't govern itself very well.
Yeah, *promises* that bind the agency are more problematic (but should still in some cases be allowed), but speaking out is not at all problematic. If the civil servants think the agency needs to be NIMBY-friendlier, they should be allowed to say this to the press or in public.
Yeah, and that's the problem - Hanoi outsourced building the metro to China, and HCMC to Japan, and in both cases costs have been very high, much higher (in PPP terms) than the costs in China and Japan themselves. Vietnam's a big country, it should be able to build things on its own like Korea.
The American flag is a good variant of the EIC flag that it is based on don't @ me. 13 stripes representing the EIC and its ability to abuse the natives without interference from the crown, stars representing the states.
Free speech also covers bad ideas; we're not putting Chancellor Merz under a gag order.
Wait, I thought the admissions to these lycées were insanely competitive? But maybe I'm thinking of just the French Gymnasium in Berlin, which is atypically snooty. Anyway, @ctillier.bsky.social, what do you think, as someone who did go through that system?
It was included in one of the NEC Future alternatives (I forget if 1 or just 2) but was never in focus despite being by far the biggest time saving per dollar project; Amtrak's priority was always Gateway. The only people who made it into a big deal were the Connecticut NIMBYs.
No, it is not at all a problem, and I was stricken by how forthright Swedish civil servants were in voicing opposition to procurement reforms when I interviewed them. It's actually good that civil servants are not put under gag orders by propagandists and political apparatchiks.
Amtrak did not have a plan 15 years ago, or any time this century. 15 years ago Amtrak was still centering SOGR, and shortly thereafter it began centering Gateway.
Low-end tech and high-end tech, but yes.
It also won 52-48 but is 20 points underwater now.
In the US, +6 is a landslide these days, leading to the assumption that in the medium run everything is 50-50 and so it's important to look into the subgroups. Even for that it's stupid, there are a bunch of 75-25 issues. But at least in elections it's vaguely right. Over here, nope.
In a country where elections routinely are decided by 10-point margins, the Shorist impulse to look at relative demographic subgroups and chase +2 medians doesn't work.
Keir Starmer's crimes against human rights are so many: * Hostile environment against immigrants * Transphobia * Flying the flag of England (?)
The India-Israel military and economic ties go back to the 1990s, years before the BJP first won. It's not Islamophobia, it's economic complementarity.
Yes, the only country to abolish slavery twice, just as I know people who quit smoking every day.
Yeah, it's notable that the new Corbynite party recruited a TERF MP before it even decided on a name for itself.
Oh? What happened? :(
Yes! I'm reevaluating not having blocked you already, on which point I've just changed my mind.
Yeah, but these are more about informed consent than real rent regulation. (I forget if the US has this, but in Canada even absent rent control the rule is that month-to-month rentals can only raise the rent once per year.)
Are you leaving Brussels? Or is this more of a long-term possibility?
No, that's market, alright. Berlin has the same problem, for entirely market-rate apartments. Landlords don't want to keep the apartment vacant, so they are happy showing it to a ton of people at once and picking the one whose application looks the most legit (inc. racial discrimination).
Or states with navies can start enforcing maritime law, under which pirates are enemies of all humanity and subject to summary execution.
Each one is unique. I think down to about -100 m, the technology is routine, but please don't quote me on this.
I don't know, the only one I can even begin to estimate is Tokyo-Sapporo. Seoul-Jeju requires making assumptions on underwater tunneling costs.
The model doesn't know what a flight is. I'd be wary of trying to estimate air traffic this way. The way the applet handles mountains is to assume that the distance by rail is 10% more than the great circle distance regardless of topography.
Yeah, I was (and still am) writing a lot about construction costs and New York is the worst in the world.
Israel and the expat ghetto of Singapore. I lived in New York 2006-11, people just associate me with New York because a) I visit a lot, and b) I mostly write about its inability to build rail infrastructure.
Oh yeah, the "America is an idea, therefore Italy/Israel/Ireland/Mexico/Poland/Germany/w/e exists only as a mirror showing the timeless but benighted traditions we came from" bit is an American special. Even the Canadians aren't as obnoxious about it.
The Americans are like this to every group of foreigners here, not just Brits. It's just going viral now because the target happens to be British. (And, honestly, Brits aren't much better than Americans when it comes to not putting your feet in your mouths about France or Germany.)
Yes, but then the adversary can't be Chinese because the films want Chinese export revenues, so the Spy Nonsense would have Bond fighting... Houthis?
They are individually smart and collectively stupid. They don't learn foreign languages to working fluency, or read foreign media (except British). They only treat other countries as mirrors for American diasporas; their takes on Israel are unrecognizable regardless of their geopolitical views.
Americans' preferred fast food is the hamburger, reflecting how they're a monocultural society without our immigrant-driven fast food like döner kebab.
The point is specifically *not* to do straight critiques of American monolingualism, it's to write things like "New York has terrible food as seen in [tourist deli]." I can *maybe* see something like "Americans lack our values of free speech as seen in the Amber Heard trial."
I'm trying to sketch which ideas to put in this post. The problem is that I know the US too well to quite fake the required level of ignorance; it's like dropping into an Israeli accent. (Scroll up and click quotes to see which American idiot with stupid takes on British food we're dunking on.)
Döner kebab was invented in West Berlin. The Bavarians don't get to claim it from us, damn it.
It's the same with New York and people who inflict deli restaurants on unsuspecting tourists. I need at some point to write about the US with the same level of fake news-ness of American media writing about France and Germany, covering politics, culture, food, and points of interest...
Is it really treason if the final phaseout after Fukushima passes the Bundestag by a 5-to-1 margin?
> בנות 25 עכזותיות כמו שאוהבים במחולקיה נו, כאן במחולקיה כל בני ה-25 נראים בני 35 מרוב שהם מעשנים, מנפסים, ולוקחים גלולות. כולם פה חושבים שאני וסיד בני איזה 28 ולא בומערים.
Not only is chicken tikka masala British, but also the British street foods Americans love to mock, fish and chips, was invented by Jewish immigrants in the 1860s and was viewed as thoroughly British within 50 years.
The thing to understand about Americans is, other countries aren't real places to them. America is an idea, and the rest of the world exists purely as words to contrast America with, symbolizing a timeless tradition. Italy, for example, is a place of timeless food, not model anti-corruption laws.
Well, some blogs. Only reason I know about Nock is from a Web 1.0 site predating blogs (Zompist, the ur-place for Web 1.0 conlangers). Rickover I know from a thesis.
I just blog on Wordpress like it's still 2007. Bush lied, people died, etc.
Honestly, I had to copy-paste the article into LibreOffice just to finish it, because Tumblr otherwise cut me off around the line where Peter Hitchens is mentioned and prompted me to log in to read further.
(In other words: it's not that he finds the racists insightful for their critique of expansion of American higher education, because when those critiques are made by people who worship late-20c Germany or by back-to-basics advocates like Rickover, he doesn't read them. He just likes racists.)
If I were beta reading, I'd recommend putting a line or two right after Nock is introduced as a critic of brutalist architecture at universities. (More to the point, it's notable that the email doesn't cite any of the non-racist critiques of expansion of US higher education, like Hyman Rickover's.)