maybe Day 2 of 2025 will be better.

all the happiness in the world can't buy money.

(they definitely have the skyscrapers. but have they reproduced — i hope not! — the ghost-town-at-night, commuter only financial districts that skyscrapers in the US mostly inhabit?)

in Quito at one end of the touristy old city, there were police stationed basically to tell clueless tourists like us not to take the cool looking stairs down into what I guess would be some very different, more dangerous area. i still kind of wanted to take the stairs, but we didn't.

are they lively and walkable?

I'd like to get a better sense of urbanism in China. They obviously have some amazing trains. How are they doing on lively, walkable, transit-accessible mixed-use neighborhoods? I know there have some car-centric, towers-in-the-park-on-arterials style development. What direction are they going?

gonna be hard to hit fundraising or to make things expensive for this one.

so, who defends the Jones Act?

(thanks btw!)

the thing about art is that it was never about the artifact, but about how people choose to relate and organize themselves around the artifact. provenance, or at least perceived provenance, will not be irrelevant to those choices.

gack. deleting fixing reposting.

the behavior of the most prominent and financially successful businessman in America is maybe putting some pressure on the moderate sensible pro-business liberal niche.

📌

happy new year west coast friends

it’s alive! how our superannuated Congress continues to function. ht @mmasnick.bsky.social

explosives to delight us rather than to exterminate us. i suppose that it is a good start. happy new year.

nope!

turning “the right” and “the left” into tribes into which you sort people, rather than just a really simplified, pretty weak, way of classifying ideas and positions, is just another way minoritarian interests divide and conquer.

our lives with it my friend.

i guess that makes him Kekimus Minoris.