This guy's writing style and general attitude remind me of Matt Taibbi. And that is not a good thing.

oh, i see www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

I could only get halfway through the piece. That guy has attained an astounding level of douchebaggery.

AHA!

ok maybe this is just because I work in heavy civil construction but Jesus Christ that glazing of Robert Moses is insane, and Solana has no fucking clue how construction works - it is a LOT more complicated to build stuff now than it was when the Empire State Building went up!

Like totally setting aside the problem of permitting, in terms of access/egress, ADA compliance, HVAC and general MEP systems, structural engineering complexity, fire safety, materials regulation, *every single facet of construction is more complicated* now in ways that can’t be rushed that much!

That's an argument for more flexible construction regulations as many European countries have.

The easy one to get rid of is ridiculous trade protectionism like Buy America, beyond that regulation won’t super impact speed of *construction* too much unless you cut safety, which we absolutely should not. Most regulation to evaluate here is things like single stair, which is a design question.

There are lots of regulations we could take a look at changing, like more mixed use buildings or revoking parking minimums, which would improve quality of life significantly but would not reduce construction time at all (mixed use buildings, for example, would take *longer.)

Also what gets omitted from this convo a lot of the time is you just have to have build at scale/have rolling programs to speed construction. Yeah of course it takes 5 years to put up one 20 storey tower if you have to rebuild a team of specialists with every project and cranes constantly have...

...to continually be shuffled across multiple cities instead of going from site to site with the same crew in the same metro area. You can strip NFPA regs completely and it wouldn't do anything to speed up that part of the process.

See also: why the US is so atrocious at building mass transit, from light rail to high speed. Permitting and such, sure, but the cost of so high because we just don't have the crews.

hire french, german, or chinese firms with workers

That doesn't really help build the knowledge base required to do these things at any sort of scale.

And I strongly prefer from a cultural and ethical standpoint to be building with overzealous accessibility requirements and fire codes (which we absolutely do not have right now), regardless of the impact to duration.

as in "assume the entire occupants of a floor are wheelchair users and plan the elevator count and door sizes accordingly"?

Well, we disagree there ... newer non-wood buildings are safer, Big Sprinkler lobby or not. And as far as disability laws, better that 90% of people get access to a resource next year and 10% get it in five years, than 100% not having it for five years IF EVER.

Sprinkler requirements in non-wooden residential buildings ... not a thing in Europe. Be more flexible on disability access ... e.g. allow a metro line to open without elevators, then set target dates for full compliance.

The VAST majority of US residences are wood or light metal frame, which also would need sprinklers. Setting a target date for a feature is functionally an admission that a feature will never happen, but showing a veneer of good faith that an attempt was made which would never, in fact, be made.

Even if it never happens, it's better that the 90% have access to (say) public transit, than the transit line never being built because of zero tolerance ADA rules, thus fucking over 100% of the population.

This is just rationalization for fucking over ten percent.

And yes, I'll probably come across as ableist, but yes, it's better to give 90% of population access to a resource starting next year with the other 10% getting it in 5 years than the resource never being built.

I mean I think the goal of the people who write articles as such is to create a series of favelas for normal people. It’s not about ending homelessness or just lowering prices but to remove the undesirables except for when they’re servants

That’s fine to them they want all the poors and disableds to die so if they factor all that out of the plan it becomes very easy (if you’re stupid, but they’re an abundance guy so it’s implied)

But have you considered that disabled people should just never leave their house, not getting stampeded to death because there weren't enough exits is woke, and we should make asbestos great again

Obviously! We will revitalize rural mining towns by bringing back Big Asbestos, and things like “sprinklers” and “fire rated doors” are just wokery

This has to be the worst writing to be published since Vanity Fair's article on Cormac McCarthy last year

I think the M.O. here is to try and offer up so much condescending neoliberal slop that to debunk it as a whole is a Sisyphean task... while hoping centrist readers come away regurgitating, "Zohran bad!" or "Luigi Lefties" or "DSA doesn't want us to have bullet trains 🙄" over the dinner table.

Couldn't read after a few excerpts, made queasy by the dripping arrogance, nonstop hyperbole & self indulgent punditry of the whole thing. These types are not serious thinkers. They're sm creations driven strictly by a desperate need to show off their own "cleverness." Not a trace of humanity here.

I won’t read things in the Atlantic because it sucks shit 👍

Presumably it does still publish non - dogshit articles. But the ratio ain't great.

And sometimes Fox News reports the weather accurately

God I wish I had that level of self control

isn't Mike Solana just a conservative

I’m expecting the Atlantic to start taking the writings of meth-addled 14-year olds any moment. It’d be an improvement.

I went to CTY with the politics editor, he was an annoying dork.

what the hell are you talking about, man

My brain refused to read that after the first few words.

The Atlantic published this drivel? Makes me wish i still had a subscription so i could cancel it all over again. So embarrassing.

How can you have one group of anti-Trump people who have a sensible policy agenda while there’s also another group of anti-Trump people online who annoy me? How can both these things exist? None of this makes sense, please reconcile this for me!!

Guess the fascist has facets that attracts the ire of different flavours of folks. Some abhor policy, others performance, still others that cat butt of a puckered mouth swimming in a sea of bronzer, etc.

are you currently on crack cocaine

At least he acknowledges Dems need the Left to win elections, lmfao

Reactionary centrist opposition to Abundance? What's even happening here?

he wants the Democrats to basically purge DSA candidates, i think

Just punch left more, bro. I promise I'll love you afterward this time.

Seems tedious.

Everything reactionary centrists are on about is tedious. Talking about Democrats in general is tedious, and especially so if your thesis is that Democrats are scary leftists. Are these people even living on the same planet as the rest of us?

Well, specifically he wants Dems to purge the people running discords where they coordinate reddit downvoting and sockpuppeting regarding lefty political issues. He assumes these people are the same as Mamdani's staffers and also Dems on Bluesky and LGBT people write large

What?

I followed a bit of his arc last year. Basically dude stared into the abyss of culty group chats too long and came out thinking they were representative of something other than culty group chats

Hmm

Perhaps this whole thing isn't in good faith.

Theres a point at which you've cooked your brain so much that it doesn't really matter. He believes it, though. He would have picked a different angle otherwise

he might be, literally

like seriously this is entirely in your brain. Mamdani is not a luigi poster and online is not the actual left-wing movement in America

i think we literally wouldn't be here if pundits understood the latter point at all

The first sentence in that screenshot is a doozy. Trump is making prices of groceries go up! And quite possibly housing too (if he doesn’t drive the US into a recession). And Americans agree, inflation is one of the issues Trump polls worst on!

you can tell the republicans are dedicated to economic populism by how they're annihilating the poor to give tax cuts to their billionaire friends

i think this paragraph is key here because Solana continually views the Democrats as this uber-radicals who destroyed the social fabric while the right is basically treated as reacting to that

One of the strangest stories I’ve ever read. Could not keep track of the number of jumbled-up, unsubstantiated claims. What even was his point?

like the obvious reading of this is that Democrats need to sell out union labour and left economic populism (but right economic populism is justified) in order to build things again

It worked for Robert Maxwell & UK Labour! Hang on, I'm getting handed a story about the Epstein files…

If "Abundance" libs actually meant what Zohran Mamdani is running on then they'd be quiet popular on the left, I'd ally with them on that project. But they seem far too in love with AI and the undercurrent I get from them is all about cutting safety & work regulations and busting unions.

Yeah, Abundance Libs are just repackaging neoliberalism (aka right wing ideas with a slightly more liberal social veneer). It's all "deregulate housing and the free market will take care of all our social problems" (so, you know, just right wingers without the theocracy, basically).

For God's sake, organized labour's been declining since decades before I was born, and I ain't exactly young! But these clowns still think it's too powerful!

Coalition-building is when the left “takes orders from Ezra Klein”

Sometimes you see a framing and INSTANTLY know exactly what a guys groupchats must be like

How many times can these people get paid to write the same article about how an asshole with a waifu PFP is actually the entirety of the DNC & a greater threat of violence than the government currently going full blood & soil?

wow sure would be bad if there was a political party that had adopted the violence inherent in its allegedly crank fringe as the party's central position, but enough about the Democratic Party, let me just go see what the Republicans have been up to the last decade

Just keep voting for Democrats or Republicans so that nothing will fundamentally change. Or, join your state Green Party and work for real paradigm change in voting & elections.

"abundance" will "galvanize the left" yes, The Left is dying to heard falsehoods about how good "we" have it to implement increasing austerity for the wealthiest classes to pay less taxes. glad they've solved the mystery of Abundance politics

I’ve never seen anyone needing to understand “Twitter is not real life” more! If he’s seeing death threats to centrists from “the left” perhaps he should think less about the Abundance agenda, and more about the incentives of the platforms he’s choosing to use.

isn't that the piratewires guy?

yep

yuck

Riley's Law applies to institutions as well as people

And he just doesn't grapple with California which did finally get enough yimby concessions/buy in from enough unions to start moving things. Could go smoother or faster, sure. But impossible it clearly is not

Yeah like what successful left wing democratic politicians have resembled anything like Luigi fan accounts.

10 years ago this was the magazine that published Ta-Nehisi Coates. Now...

This is the pirate wires guy, yeah? His newsletter's gift guide centrally featured Tesla products, real tell that the Atlantic thinks he's the guy to push back on abundance from the right.

Holy shit that was so much worse than I thought it was going to be. This is the kind of shit you write after you get dunked on by twitter and you carry that angry energy into unrelated conversations.

this one is really PROFOUNDLY evil

Solana, even after being edited, still being an incoherent reactionary moron kind of answers the question of why normie libs aren’t all flocking to Abundance

It is fucking *unbelievable* that that guy is being treated like a legitimate commentator by that kind of outlet now.

It's the use of "clown world" that still sticks out to me so much. Using that at all - and then using it in a published essay in a centrist magazine - shows how deep down the right-wing rabbit hole he is.

Genuinely misleading editorial choice on the byline, to only mention his newsletter make it seem like he’s a like a tech-industry-oriented freelancer. The Abundance PR campaign still hasn’t really figured out who they’re trying to convince of what, but they are sure they hate those dang woke libs

it is a genuine lie to omit his actual line of work.

"The Abundance PR campaign still hasn’t really figured out who they’re trying to convince of what" The lack of anything coherent to nail down, yet still suck up all the oxygen in media outlets is a strength of operations like these.

This gave me a headache. Feels like it should be delivered by someone with a locked jaw and swirly eyes